President’s Choice bento boxes

One problem with working in the middle of nowhere Kanata is that there isn’t a wide variety of lunch options. True, if I were a bit more organized I could actually make lunches at home and bring them in (and I plan on doing so soon!) but as it stands I tend to have a lot of microwave meals. The best ones, I find, are President’s Choice Blue Menu from Loblaws and The Great Canadian Superstore, which are relatively healthy and tasty as microwave meals go (and tend to be relatively low in sodium).

Last time we went shopping at the Westboro Superstore, though, we found something new: microwaveable bento boxes, in salmon teriyaki and chicken yakitori varieties:

I tried the salmon teriyaki one yesterday. It included two pieces of teriyaki salmon, a vegetable gyoza, furikake rice, and edamame and “mixed vegetables” (read: carrots). The actual food looked like so:

While it appears a bit rice-heavy, the proportions were about right. The salmon was tasty if a bit too cloyingly teriyaki-sweet; the gyoza was a little soggy but good; the rice texture was perfect for (included) chopsticks. The edamame was just okay, a bit too salty — and indeed, the nutritional information shows that this contains 880mg of sodium! (The chicken bento contains 1.2g.)

It’s a change from single-bowl Lean Cuisine-style microwave meals, but the packaging makes the whole thing inconveniently large, and the food is pretty unremarkable. And the more I think about it, the more a reheatable, frozen prepackaged bento box seems familar somehow:

So I don’t think I’ll bother with the PC bento boxes much after I finish the chicken one in the freezer at home.

That said, I would like to get a Laptop Lunch or Mr. Bento for school next year. (Especially after seeing the lunches of a friend of Candice’s!)