Lunch Picnic Bentos

Here are the lunch picnic bentos I made for meeting my hubby during his lunch break.
My hubby works as a delivery man and so sometimes I'll go meet him on his routes and we'll have a little bento picnic at a nearby park together.

He loves getting to see me in the middle of the day and having fresh food.
I made the blue set for him and the green one for me.

We had some left over Tortellini from the night before. It actually tasted even better the second day after a night of letting its flavors develop.

Also we had a salad with a little snowman with ranch dressing (originally a Christmas thing with gum that I took the gum out and found makes a great mayo or dressing holder plus it's cute), Some raspberry jello salad, and a boiled egg. You'll probably see a lot more boiled eggs in the bento's because he told me that they are one of his favorite things to have.

I got both of the rectangle hello kitty bento's at the dollar store.
I found the matching bowls a few months later on sale for 90 cents at big lots.
I find that keeping my eyes open at the dollar store every time I go there I can find some really good containers that are cheap and sturdy for making bento's. I recently found they had some more of the insulated round snack jars and grabbed a bunch since last time I did not and then kicked myself when they stopped carrying them.

I wrapped the round bento's using some ribbon. There are some silverware and napkins in there as well. Grabbed us some slurpees on the way as a treat and then had ourselves a fantastic picnic. I keep a nice picnic blanket in the trunk of my car for whenever we might feel like having one that way we can sit comfortably on the grass.

It all looked so cute packaged in this pink hatbox that my sister gave me for a wedding present.
I have two other ones of different sizes to fit varying types of bento's.

Foodie Bloggers Unite

So as you know I'm a member of the Daring Bakers. We are a pretty close knit group of food bloggers who like to share the fun, passion, and love for baking and cooking. One of our fellow foodies and friends Melissa at Alosha's Kitchen had an interesting experience dealing with a marketing rep with Cook's Country, aka America's Test Kitchen and Cooks Illustrated. After reading her experience and the incredibly stupid and rude stance that they took with her I will definitely never being subscribing or buying anything from CC, ATK or CI. I think the stance they have shown her is against what I and many others stand for in the baking community. Food is something to be enjoyed by many people in many ways. If you aren't modifying your recipes to match the tastes of yourself or your family then you aren't being true to the heart of cooking. Anyone who would try to force others not to make a recipe their own is not really one of us.
Anyways she is much more elequent in her feistyness then I so I'll let you read it from her own words. You can read her post "Illegal or Not?"

I do have to say one of the things I've loved the most is the response to this from our food blog circles. There has been an overwhelming response of support. Much like a clan when one of us gets threatened or stepped on the others band together to support them. Even though we haven't met eachother and we live in all sorts of places all over the world we still are close friends. I love that we all can come together with our love of providing beautiful, tasty meals for our loved ones. This is truly the heart of cooking and being a foodie.