Packing a Lasagna Bento
Earlier in the week I had a breakthrough and either from sheer over excitement or possibly brain damage from over-exertion, completely forgot to blog about it.
I conquered The Deadly Hill of Doom.
Biking to work has been quite the trial for someone with a body like mine that immediately sends all unwanted fat cells to the thigh area, especially since my route starts off with a horrendously steep hill. Mr. Pikko, who used to bike back to the dorms all the time, told me that he simply built up a ton of momentum to get up the hill. However, since I am a Grade A Wuss, this hasn’t been very successful for me. Instead, I tried just biking up the hill so slow that I could have probably walked faster and amazingly enough, after days of stopping a third or halfway up the hill, I finally made it up to the top.
Today I did it again, so double go me!
Since our brand new chest freezer downstairs suffered a meltdown due to some electrical issues, we’ve had to concentrate on eating everything in there so that I can defrost it and get rid of the gross defrosted-but-now-frozen-again chicken juice that came out of a bag of Costco drumettes. I’m pretty pissed about this because I had a lot of food in there and right now, the bag of chicken and box of waffles are frozen into the chicken liquid and I can’t even take it out. A Stouffer’s lasagna is one of the items we have to eat through.
By the way, I’m hosting a giveaway sponsored by Hometown Seeds for a kitchen herb pack. Head on over to enter so that you can have seeds to plant this spring!
Although writing about the points value of my bentos has been a good way to keep me on track, it’s been boring the everloving crap out of me and I’m sure it’s been doing the same for some of you. For that reason, I’ve decided to try to take things in a new direction and offer more packing tips. Let me know what you think about this.
To kick this new (or old, but revisited) direction off, I’ll give some tips on how to pack leftover lasagna in a bento box. My lasagna cuts were long and skinny, as this was just how I cut it to get 12 slices when we ate it for dinner. If you have the more traditional rectangle cut, you would obviously just use a wider bento box.
Now, while lasagna is yummy and gooey and tasty, eating it whole isn’t particularly easy, especially if all you keep at work is a bunch of disposable chopsticks. Trust me, trying to cut lasagna with a pair of chopsticks just plain sucks.
First of all, refrigerate your leftovers and pack this in the morning. The last thing you want to be doing is cutting warm or room temperature lasagna because it’s just too loose and gooey to get any kind of clean cut. So in the morning, take out your piece of cold lasagna and get a serrated knife.
I say serrated because unless your knife is razor sharp, you might end up totally messing up your lasagna when slicing it. With a serrated blade, you can saw through cold lasagna knowing that everything will stay together. Cut the piece into slices. They don’t need to be exactly the same width, as you can see, I wasn’t able to do it and it didn’t matter.
In the end, you should end up with nice slices that you can now lean over onto each other.
Line a bento box with some lettuce leaves and gently place the slices into the box. This is where the lasagna being cold also comes in handy, because you’ll probably need to fiddle around with it a bit to get it to be low enough so that the lid can be placed on top. Since my slice was skinny, I had some space on the side. I added a wild yard tomato and some baby carrots.
Easy and fast to do in the morning! If you’re making this for kids you can cut out little shapes from cheese and top the slices for some added cheer.
I microwaved it at work before I ate it and the slices made for very easy eating with chopsticks!
In the other side, I packed a lady apple, some strawberry halves, and blueberries from Costco which are horrendously sour. So sad. I ate them anyway, but boy did that take effort. 🙁
Lasagna Bento Points Calculation
Total: 7 points
Weight: Exactly the same as yesterday. I blame the Walnut Squares. There’s a reason they’re called “Awesome” Walnut Square Bars!