Feisty Bento #390: Weekend of FAIL

Yeah, that's my bento.  It's a standard secret of bento blogging that Jenn so kindly decided to share with the world last week that if your bento is ugly or less-than-amazingly-cute-and-colorful, just tilt it or the angle of the camera and voila, many problems disappear.  Well, no amount of tilting would help this - I almost slapped the lid on for the pic, because that would DEFINITELY help! - but eh.  It's still going to be bicolored and that's it. 

This was a weekend of FAIL... I made magic soup - well, no, I refuse to call it that in this instance because it wasn't that great, and magic soup is ALWAYS great - that just ... FAILed... mostly cuz I opted to use beef broth instead of chicken, and I realized beef broth and I don't get along when that's the base of the soup.  It's too strong for my palate (I know, shocking, when I salt things to high heaven and back) to drink as soup - for noodles, that's fine, and risotto, awesome, but as the broth I'm drinking straight... not so much. 

Then, I attempted to make stir fried udon (picture will come in a few weeks on Feisty Foodie - since I used a ton of CSA veggies for it), which tasted good - sort of, some of the veggies I added didn't quite go right, but I expected that - and was totally ugly. 

Of course the final FAIL was the above - not the bean sprouts, which I make all the time (well, I kind of overcooked part of it, but whateverrr, stop nitpicking!) - but the rice cakes. 

For those unfamiliar, Taiwanese (or are they Shanghainese?) rice cakes are basically rice noodles, except instead of rolling them thin and slicing them into broad white noodles, they've been rolled and then cut into coin-shaped/sized slices.  (Correct me if I'm wrong, because I could be, but that's what it looks and tastes like to me.)  They're like Korean dduk (I think...) but sliced instead of left in fat tubes. 

Anyway, it tastes mostly fine, though it turned out horrendously ugly because of the dark soy sauce I was using.  Whatever. 

That's today's bento, to cap off a weekend of FAIL.  Tonight, I plan on making something I won't mess up just to make myself feel better.  (Watch me mess it up anyway.)  I eat my failures, because I'm cheap/broke/poor and I really hate wasting.  Which means expect to see this again in a few days' time. 

Think outside the lunchbox!!!