Bentos #72, #73, and #74 - a post ONLY about food!

That's not exactly a first, but usually I ramble on about the goings on in my life for the first little bit. I'm doing the exact same thing here, but I intend to only ramble about food.

First off. I have this great desire to show off my Bountiful Basket this week. Ready for this?

- 1 watermelon

- 1 canteloupe

- 8 huge peaches

- 7 apples

- 6 bananas

- 3 pears

- 1 head of Romaine lettuce

- 1 bunch of spinach

- 3 artichokes

- 2 onions

- 4 tomatoes

- 2 yellow peppers

- lots of mini sweet peppers (I didn't count)

All that for $15! One of the reasons I wanted to share is that BB is spreading. They have sites in South Carolina now! I expect at some point they'll make it to every state. Which would be pretty darn awesome.

Second, I am about 2 days away from being able to eat fresh produce out of my container garden! I've got a few strawberries that have turned a light shade of red. I'm so looking forward to eating them!

My tomatoes are blossoming. My peppers have been blossoming but for some reason the baby peppers are just falling off. I'm going to try an epsom salt solution to see if that helps. I've got some sugar snap pea plants that are growing well, but no blossoms yet. A few lemon cucumber plants have come in, but at the moment the biggest only has three leaves. We'll see how they work out... Just Monday I planted a crookneck squash plant and a peter pan squash plant. I almost killed them first. They've come back though, and the peter pan plant looks like it's going to blossom in the next week or two!

I'm really excited about my garden...

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So this bento consists of leftover chicken and rice with paprika cauliflower. Grapes, raspberries, strawberries, canteloupe, a mini sweet pepper, and a bit of cottage cheese fill it out. This one sat for a few days... People kept showing up to work with food. It didn't do good things for the bento, but it was still edible.

The top layer here has more of the leftover steak topped with sauteed mini peppers and onions. The pasta things next to it are Hot Pockets brand baked ravioli. Pretty good. But I likely won't buy them again. They are so not healthy. The bottom has carrots and hummus, strawberries, an apricot, and raspberries.

I made a great chicken salad. I've made it before. Just chicken, apple, celery, and carrot. They're all diced up and then mixed with honey poppy seed dressing. The dressing is acidic enough to keep the apples from turning brown. The other layer has a mini pepper, canteloupe, raspberries and strawberries.

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One more bento until the giveaway!