A Good Night's Sleep and a New Type of Lunch Prep!

Good morning (from me and Yamapi)!

For the first time in months, I didn't take any sleeping aid last night.

While it might not have been the deepest night's sleep, I actually woke up right at the time my alarm went off and I feel fairly rested today, which is a bit surprising. I rarely feel rested so it's just possible that the sleep aid doesn't actually help. It might make me more tired than I would be normally, which is crazy.

You know those plans you have to do something useful but never get around to doing it?

I've been intending to pack my lunches for work for (well) years now. I know that laziness is ingrained in me at this point when it comes to certain things (but not everything, thank goodness). Lunch just happens to be one of those things. It's so much easier to buy it than make it.

On my work breaks and in the evening yesterday, I actually made items for a bento. Everyone probably knows what that means, but just in case, bento essentially means lunchbox in Japanese. Only they do it differently than we do, at least, those who prefer more of a traditional bento to a westernized one.

Homemade sandwiches are one of my least favorite things and I love Japanese food so I figured I would drag out my Effortless Bento cookbook and try my hand at making some dishes. The going through the book happened on Monday and the picking up of the groceries and prepping the meals happened yesterday. I already had the bento boxes from years and years ago. I am thinking about buying some slightly bigger ones, but we'll see.

I'm surprised. It didn't take nearly as long to make the meals as I thought it would since I made 3 protein dishes and a couple of veggie sides. So now we have 6 days' worth of lunches prepped for both me and my sister. It's sort of hilarious since my sister wasn't actually anticipating me making her a bento so that surprised her. We'll see how she likes it! She likes Japanese food too since, as you can imagine, we do eat it several times a month. But we'll see how she likes it for lunch. If she wants to try something else next week, we'll absolutely do that. But I'm pretty happy that she took the bento to work today.

I hope your week is going well! What do you pack for lunch usually?