bento 3: day trip to south-east asia!

so pretty much the book vegan lunchbox changed my life as i knowit and is awesome. the following spring rolls are from that book. so these spring rolls are made with rice paper which comes flat and hard like noodles, but then you put it in water and it turns into a sticky translucent round wrapper of sorts. i just wrapped the ingredients here burrito style and it worked out fine. brett got pretty much the same lunch 2 days in a row so i think it needs not two entries. *the pictures are kind of small today because i used the blogger uploader instead of flickr. in the future i'll try and use flickr i think

seriously, though, they should erect monuments to these spring rolls, and temples and cities and everything. there's this orange glazed baked tofu that is worth fighting for, whomever you have to fight, and then some apple, scallions, and cabbage. oh and cilantro. which i put in a nice little line over the top so when you roll it up you can see it. because i am clever.


i feel like someone who wasn't lazy like i am could make these a lot prettier too, if they had a mind to. the problem is i'm not much of a recipe person. pretty much if there's more than three steps i just free-style it. that's kind of what i did with the tofu actually because it called for marinating for an hour. katie has a lot better things to do than wait around for tofu to marinate. now, i suppose i could have gone off and done other things while it marinated. but logic doesn't play a very large role in my world.

any way, the sauce is a peanut sauce which i can take or leave. its nice but a pain to make. everything splashes everywhere because peanut butter does not like being mixed and it's a general disaster, etc, etc. any way, i mixed vinegar, peanut butter, hot sauce, and a sprinkle of garlic. its good and i like it better over noodles but i gave some to brett. which he liked ok, but on day two of this (today) i packed him the same lunch and he said he could take or leave the peanut sauce. okay good, 'cause i hate making it!!

so here is some mango again (we're rippin' through that mango up in here!) and some kind of grainy watermelon from market basket but hey that's what you get in may in nh. and then: RICE PUDDING. now, rice pudding is delicious. this is a fact that i will not allow to be contested. but it was hard to find a vegan rice pudding that had less than 3 steps (see previous paragraphs) and involved a kind of rice i can actually get in nh (i can't get black jasmine forbidden rice around the corner) and which sounded appetizing to me. some recipes just sounded like coconut milk poured over rice. which might be okay i guess but not for me. and so then i did find a chocolate rice pudding recipe that sounded pretty good, but i wanted a tropical flavor for this dish to go with the nice spring rolls. SO i sort of winged it (wang it?) and put a can of light coconut milk in a pot with a little less than half a cup of sugar and a pinch of cinnamon. i let this get heated up and then i added 3 cups of already cooked brown rice and simmered the crap out of it. at the end i was worried it wouldn't get puddingy enough so i added a tiny bit of cornstarch. it came together pretty well though! next time i might try adding more liquid so there's more pudding, less rice, but it was very delicious! and i think a less-than-three-step recipe. which is key because i'm very important and busy and stuff.