Inpromptu Pot Roast

Will miracles never cease, I happened to have swapped memory cards and to my delight found that my substitute memory card did contain my Pot Roast bento pics! Anyway onto the bento. It's pretty amazing what you can throw together impromptu style given some inspiration. I had intended only to do one bento for the week as I was busy preparing for my trip to Taiwan. It just so happened that with my trip to the grocery store, for buying my goods for the South American bento, I qualified for 2 free pounds of chuck roast. What better way to celebrate my good fortune than to turn it and whatever leftovers I had into a bento! So I yanked out the crockpot and got cooking. Ok you're asking, why pot roast, blah so plain. Well growing up in a Chinese family that owned a Chinese restaurant, you don't get much American food. Things like Hamburger Helper and Luby's were a treat, otherwise it was Happy family this, Kung Pao chicken that. (believe me it gets old).

The Pot roast was pretty plain, simple and straight forward, the question was how do I fill out the rest of the bento box. 3 more slots to fill and all I had was my corner grocery store (as I didn't want to get in the car and fight the crowds at the regular grocery). Time to hit the pantry:

I pulled the leftover vegetables from the Matambre and used it as part of the veggies for the pot roast. I rummaged thru the pantry and found a can of Salsify to add to the veggie mix. One down two to go.




I had to get some blue cheese to make the Jackson salad (a personal decadent favorite) I already had a can of artichokes and hearts of palm on hand. And I put the bacon bits to the side because the wife doesn't like bacon. I love this salad because most of the ingredients are easy to have on hand and the rest can be had very quickly. Ok two down one more to go, desert...

I decided to cut the corners and just pick up some snackwells while I was at the corner store easy way to round it out.

All in all, except for the blue cheese, a pretty healthy lunch relatively low in fat and the one "bad" dish I cut corners on (the Jackson salad: less oil, less cheese, optional bacon) to make it not too fat ladden lunch.

Box Contents
  • Homestyle pot roast with onion gravy
  • Roasted vegetables
  • Jackson Salad (lite)
  • Snackwell cookies

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