Shannon Phillips

Another lovely, lovely vegetable box, even though there weren’t any tomatoes, which is sad. But we did get lots of fruit, and that’s always exciting: there was a bag each of peaches, nectarines, and apricots. I noticed as I was arranging them in our fruit bowl that the apricots were really very ripe: so I cut one up and gave it to Robin. He scarfed it down and instantly transformed into a demanding little monster who could only be satiated with apricots; he ate them all in one sitting and would have gone on to the nectarines if I hadn’t finally cut him off. I was afraid he might be ill but apparently his little tummy has no trouble processing great quantities of apricots.

We also got a bunch of purple basil, three red onions, about two pounds of potatoes, two bunches of carrots, a big head of broccoli, two cucumbers, a nice mix of summer squashes, and a lot of little green peppers. Last night we had burgers garnished with red onion slices; tonight we’ll have steak and pepper stir-fry, and I think Robin and I will eat the squashes for lunch. Tomorrow for dinner we’ll have a salad and chilled cream of carrot soup.

Saturday our friends Wendy and Zach are having a 4th of July BBQ: I can’t go, but I’m going to send the boys with a batch of potato salad made using the potatoes and red onions from our box. Sunday I think I’d like to make seafood paella; Monday, pasta of some description; and Tuesday, leftovers.

Also, inspired by Wendy’s beautiful bentos, I’ve started making Sam a lunch to take to work. I offered to do this a long time ago but he wasn’t very keen on the idea: he didn’t want to worry about food spilling in his backpack, and he liked going to restaurants with his coworkers for lunch.

A while ago, however, Sam got transferred into a different group where apparently people don’t have the same social lunch habits, and it got to the point where if I asked him what he had for lunch, the usual answer was “six cups of coffee and a Pop Tart from the vending machine.”

So I bought him a Mr. Bento lunch set, since for some reason he didn’t like the idea of taking his lunch in my awesome Batman lunch box that Nina gave me. You can tell Mr. Bento is serious and manly because it’s all grey and comes in a military-style canvas bag (although Sam’s came with a stainless steel spork instead of the chopsticks pictured).

It’s a little bit daunting filling the four bowls with four different things, but I bought stuff like cheese and crackers and cold cuts that I can use to fill up the bentos quickly, and then I round it out with leftovers or chopped up fruit. The first day Sam came home saying that he wasn’t going to be hungry for dinner because he had such a big lunch, which nearly nixed the whole enterprise, as I am absolutely not going to spend time fixing his lunch if it means he won’t eat my dinners! However Sam backed down from that position and so far the bento project is going pretty well. I might see about getting a smaller bento set, though.