These are pre-made for tomorrow (well. Really later today): a breakfast bento and a lunch bento. I’m not quite sure if I’ll be able to get in, given the general uncertainty of sleep on an oncall night, especially since my bipolar is still insomniac for both the manic and depressive episodes ((How the latter happens: I start thinking about what the point is of sleeping, given the nightmares that my PTSD can bring down on me. Surely nobody has any use for me, so why bother getting rested? Why not run myself down? Such is the joy of my bipolar. On the other hand, this is probably better than wondering why I should wake up at all.)) and thus a sleeping pill, or even a chill pill, is out of the question.

But anyways, here’s hoping.

Lock & Lock: Random Containers for Breakfast

While Lock & Lock does make lovely bento-purpose containers, their normal containers are also quite handy for lunch in a box. Water-tightness is the Lock & Lock mark, and it’s no different here.

Here we have:

• 3/4 a cup of EnviroKidz’s Gorilla Munch ((A GF/DF/WF version of Captain Crunch. (For those avoiding HFCS, it’s also free of that.))
• One medium-sized kiwi fruit, peeled ((Vegetable peelers work well for peeling just about everything. Even eggplant.)), halved, and sliced. Pretty without fussing with vegetable cutters.
• Grapes.
• About a cup of sweetened vanilla almond milk, which actually still manages to be relatively low calorie.

The divided container actually contains two small sub-containers, which is quite useful for weighing out ingredients to determine portion sizing.

Laptop Lunch with Bento Buddies

I love my Laptop Lunch boxes, particularly in combination with their Bento Buddies’ large container, useful for salads and larger items. I’ve decided to forgo my usual donburi-style main dish for a salad. I’m still quite new to the world of salad making, but as I understand it, just about anything goes in a salad. And while meat is considered verboten for a “true” salad, a little bit of flavorful protein goes a long way.

Here we have:

• Salad: mixed baby greens (supposedly), one chopped boiled egg, sunflower seeds. The two small containers tucked in with the salad are around two tablespoons each, useful for adding tiny toppings or salad dressing without additional measuring in the morning. I usually like one tablespoon of a vinaigrette (in this case, Annie’s Tuscany Italian). For the first time as well, I’m attempting to use Hickory Bits from The Nutritional Yeast Cookbook.
• Blue Diamond Almond Nut-Thins, which I like rather better than rice crackers, despite their having a similar texture and feel. They’re addicting, and thus a bit dangerous…
• Amazingly solid Colby Cheez from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, which appears to have firmed up from a couple days ago. It’s 32 calories per 2 tablespoons. There’s more than 2 tablespoons there, but man, it’s really quite reminiscent of colby in a way I never thought possible without dairy proteins.

Some Blabbering Abut Uncheeses

On The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook: there are recipes for every taste, it seems. For me, of what I’ve tried (which isn’t even nearly 25% of the book), my favorites appear to be

• Tangy Chedda (because it’s simple and good either cold or hot and actually healthy)
• Parmezano Sprinkles (I love this even more than I ever liked regular sprinkly parmesan, though it’s still got nothing on a real hard parmesan. It’s definitely not healthy for you. You will definitely want to dump tablespoons of it on top of anything pasta-sauced-like…)
• All-Season Blend (not a cheez, but a good veggie bouillon that somehow worked for a beef curry slow cooker recipe, and will probably work for others, and heck, it’s DF/GF/WF which is hard to ask for in almost any bouillon product you can buy)
• Cheezy Rice and Broccoli Casserole (incredibly easy and actually cheezy and yet fairly healthy, after a fashion)
• Instant Mini-Pizzas (don’t ask me how pizza sauce mixed with cashew butter or sesame tahini actually mimics the cheese/sauce mix of a very simple cheese pizza)
• Durritas (a spice blend resembling Doritos, which you can mix in a plastic bag with corn tortilla chips, and while the taste isn’t exact, it’s still addicting and a bit dangerous to the waistline…)
• Colby Cheez (mostly because it’s the first solid uncheez I’ve tried. I plan to try most of the others as well. I mean, it melts without containing casein. It’s solid at room temperature. It’s softer than the real thing, but it can still shred if you’re gentle. Good gods, it’s changed my life)
• Whipped Tofu Topping (it works. It seriously weirds me out, but it works. I still want to try the cashew version that roams around the net, though)

While reviews for this book tend to be lukewarm, I guess I just like the option of being able to have anything cheesy in my life. For people seeking an alternative to cheese that’s fewer in calories, many recipes will work for that purpose, though some are just as calorie-laden as the dairy version (not that this is necessarily a bad thing).