quiet1

This was my thought also, if that changed. Baking can be finicky about recipe sizing. I have some recipes where I just make the whole batch even if I only want part of it, and just freeze the extras or come up with an excuse to give them away, because they just don't work properly doing a partial batch. (I'm sure I could tweak the recipe to make it work in a smaller batch, adjusting the ratios of ingredients and leavening, but that's more work than just making a full batch and giving my mom some to take into work and leave in the break room.)

Ooh, mashed potatoes. They're probably a fall meal in and of themselves, really, since I could totally just sit with a big bowl of good mashed potatoes and a spoon and be quite happy. (Possibly not well-nourished, but quite happy.)

If we're going to let non-pros comment, then I shall add more. As mentioned, I watched a LOT of cooking shows as a kid. In addition, I was allowed to experiment in the kitchen (when I was 4 my parents set up a cabinet in the kitchen to be basically my cabinet, and stored stuff in it so I could make myself a snack, etc. No sharp knives or heat at that age, but I could make some sandwiches, that sort of thing.) At some point along in there my mom took a Chinese cooking class, and while I didn't go to the class with her, often my dad and I would go to pick her up and if they weren't quite done then the teacher was happy for me to come in and sit and watch as they finished up, and then we'd cook the dishes at home as a family later, with everyone having some kind of role in the preparation. (I think some types of cooking particularly lend themselves to being a group effort because there's so much that needs to be prepared ahead of time. You can have one person slicing the meat, another person handling vegetables, when I was young I always got do to any pre-mixing of sauce ingredients, etc.) I think those things really helped get me to a place mentally where food wasn't something scary. Added to that I grew up going out to dinner fairly often to a wide variety of restaurants (including local higher end ones, though nothing as top of the line as what you might find somewhere like NYC) and so ate a wide variety of food, and was encouraged to try things but not forced to eat it all if I didn't like it, and it made me curious about food and adventurous about trying different things. As a result, cooking has always just been a way for me to exercise my creativity. It's quite rewarding to start out with a bunch of ingredients and end up with something that tastes how you imagined it would, or to rescue something from disaster. I also really enjoy the time management aspect that you can get with bigger or more complicated meals - I'm one of the few people I know in real life who actually enjoys hosting big family meals like Thanksgiving or Christmas, because I like the challenge of figuring out what to do and when each step needs to be done and how to make sure everything happens on time. Plus it's satisfying to ultimately end up serving something that people enjoy. My late husband had difficulty swallowing some textures, but really enjoyed food (which is good as he was underweight and constantly being told to try to bulk up) and it was always a good feeling to find a new dish or figure out how to remake an old favorite in a way that he could eat comfortably. (In that respect I don't mind allowing for dietary restrictions even when doing a big meal, as long as I'm informed in advance. My SIL was vegetarian and I quite enjoyed the challenge of making sure there was a dish that was suitable for her to have as a main course, but that also worked for everyone else as a side dish - I dislike the approach of giving one person at the table a special plate of food that has nothing to do with what everyone else is eating. Part of dinner conversation in my house is often talking about the food, and how can you participate if you're not eating any of the same things?) I do wish I could have tried cooking professionally, but as I said earlier, I figured when I was younger that there was just no way my body would be able to handle the type of stress that comes from cooking professionally in most environments. I'd end up with a prescription painkiller problem because I needed so much to function day to day. Occasionally now I consider going to a local place to take some classes for fun as much as anything else. (Well, and some food safety classes so I can make sure I don't make anyone sick. )

I'm moving soon - if I end up implementing this I shall report back.

Hey, they work wonderfully! I just don't use them for baking in. They're very useful for freezing stuff, because you can pop whatever it is out of the cup once it's frozen with no trouble at all, and then put all the little frozen 'pucks' in one bag to keep them together and free up your pan for other things. I sometimes have used them for leftover fruit purees or leftover frosting - then I use those leftovers later to dress up something like a purchased cake or cookies if I feel like a sweet treat but don't want to take the time to bake something myself. I also find the individual ones helpful for holding colored sugars and similar small decorations like you might use for decorating holiday cookies - because they're flexible you can pinch them to make a directed funnel shape for sprinkling stuff, or you can get your fingers in easily to pick things up. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure I've ever actually baked with mine...)

My first guess would be a measurement issue - the amount of flour in a cup, for example, can change a lot depending on how it's put into the measuring cup and how fluffy/compressed the flour is. Likewise, with the brown sugar - what does lightly packed actually mean? Are you always lightly packing the same amount? Try to think back to see if you did anything differently when measuring out the ingredients, or as pointed out if your egg size changed or something.

You can technically do this with all pantry items, though I'd probably go frozen on the pesto for better flavor. Anyway: Pasta with pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, and toasted pine nuts. Serve with a salad if you have fresh vegetables of some kind, and it basically takes as long as the pasta takes to cook - just toast the pine nuts while the pasta is getting going, chop the sun-dried tomatoes, then toss everything together so the heat of the pasta warms the tomatoes and pesto. Also tasty with fresh tomatoes in addition or instead of the sun-dried, if it's the time of year when you can get good tomatoes. I usually serve it with cheese, but it's not strictly necessary unless your pesto is particularly bland. I do prefer the sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil for this - the fully dried ones are quite leathery and don't really get a good chance to rehydrate at all. If you like to bake you could possibly also use the freezer and keep some pizza dough on hand (possibly rolled out and part-baked? I'm not sure the best way to handle that part of it so you wouldn't have to wait a long time for it to defrost, never experimented) and then just throw together some kind of flat bread/pizza type thing. That can be quite flexible in terms of toppings, so you'd be able to make use of whatever great things you have on hand and probably come up with something that was quite nice.

I'm not in the food industry (considered it, but I've had inflammatory arthritis since I was 10 so I decided I wouldn't realistically be able to do it physically) but I had to comment anyway because I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE! I feel marginally less strange now. I learned so much from Jacques Pepin's series where he covered a lot of technique stuff rather than just making recipes. (I forget which one - I had the VHS set of it, too.) There used to be a CIA show, too - I remember learning how to carve a turkey from watching a CIA instructor do it. (Now back to your regularly scheduled discussion of people who actually work in the industry.)

This could potentially solve the problem of limited levels. And the price is far better than the Volraith one. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who ends up with one of these. Nice fine, Shel_B. If something sounds too good to be true..... Check out the reviews on Amazon.com. I cooked on nothing but the Max Burton, the Salton and the Eurodib (all inexpensive cooktops) for years and was very, very satisfied. A small windfall allowed me to fulfill my dreams and get the Kenmore induction range else I would still be happily using the "cheap" cooktops. I've actually used a NuWave (my mom is weak for infomercials, it's an issue) and it's okay. I've never tried to do anything particularly low or controlled on it since it primarily gets used when we go on vacation, but in general I've found it tolerable for stuff like eggs and simmering a large pot of chili. It probably wouldn't be my choice if I wanted induction specifically for control just because it doesn't seem that well made so I'd be suspicious of it holding temp accurately and so on. (I also completely ignore the stated temperatures and just treat them as power settings, since I doubt they're accurate. I've never used a thermometer with it to actually compare.) That said, it is enough that I'm pretty firmly in the 'going to try nicer induction' camp when next I find myself needing to purchase cooking appliances. I'm not 100% set on induction vs gas as a general rule, but performance seems close enough that if I did have safety concerns (children, people with certain types of disability, etc.) then I'd probably opt for induction. At the moment I suspect my ideal would be a combination of induction and gas - induction as the primary cooking surface and then a gas module or 4 burner cooktop for applications where the gas will perform better. ETA: I've never seen the actual infomercial for this thing or read any of the advertising information, so I have no idea what they claim it will do. I don't think I'd want it as my primary cooking surface. (As I said, we mostly use it on vacation, places like cabins where it's basically the NuWave or cook over the fire. I did use it once at a place that had a proper gas stove, but the stove was quite old and seemed prone to blowing out and I decided that I just didn't want to mess with it.)

This may leave an unpleasantly strong flavor on the cheese, but it may be worth a shot - I had one hunk of cheese that was DETERMINED to mold and I successfully made it behave itself by wrapping it in a bit of cheese cloth dampened with vinegar and then wrapping the lot in a plastic bag. I don't recall it making the cheese taste vinegar-y but it was quite a while ago so it's possible I just trimmed off the bits that were right on the outside when I went to use some of it. It definitely helped with the mold issue, though.

Roast potatoes could be a small novel in and of themselves. They should be quite simple and yet there are all kinds of instructions to get them to properly crisp up. But yes, required with a roast of beef, for sure. Chicken sometimes I'd do mash, but beef seems to call for roast potatoes. I always made mine separate from the meat due to often cooking meals where a vegetarian would be present, but my general procedure was to peel and cut into sensibly sized chunks - I hate the ones that are half a large potato, I think the ratio of crispy exterior to soft interior is all wrong - and then parboil just until the edges started looking sort of translucent, maybe 5 minutes? Then drain and leave in a colander over the warm pot to really thoroughly dry off whilst doing other things. To roast, preheat a pan with decent amounts of heat retention (wimpy thin pans loose too much heat when you add the potatoes) and then add oil to the pan (just enough that when it's heated it will cover the bottom) and heat that. While the oil is heating, dump the potatoes back into the pot and cover and give it a good shake to fluff up the edges. Add to pan in the oven, and give a quick but careful stir to get the potatoes nicely coated in the hot oil. Roast until golden brown and crispy. Pretty reliably produced nice crisp roast potatoes using that method. I think the key is the parboil and rest to free some lovely starchy potato to soak up the oil to make the crust, and temperature. It's kind of like frying something - if you have the temperature too low the potatoes just get greasy and soggy.

This is a magic idea which should be revisited. I guess the whole-house vacuums do something like that where you can have the little opening you can sweep stuff into? But a box of some kind seems like it'd be way easier to retrofit and a lot cheaper. How large was the box?

A quick shot with an iPhone can look pretty spiffy, though - just because some people enjoy getting into the photography a bit doesn't mean it's totally necessary in order to get pictures that would be good enough to share. I have a nice camera and some photography experience and honestly the only thing I might mess around with a little to get a really good photo would be some kind of special occasion meal or something I felt was a real accomplishment, and then it'd be as much about preserving it for myself as for sharing. Otherwise I generally just want to get on with eating the food. Just use your phone or whatever you're likely to snap said photo with, and take some test shots (I'd put something on the dishes you use most frequently as the subject for your test shots) in the various types of lighting you have available in places where it'd be easy to snap the photo (kitchen counter, dining room table, by a window, not by a window, etc.) Once you've identified a place where you like the look the available light gives you, all you have to do is put the food there for a moment to take the picture in between plating and serving. Occasionally the photo might not come out, depending on the specific food, but most of the time it probably will be fine. (And if someone complains about an in-focus, well-lit photo of a plate just because they can tell it was taken with a camera phone and doesn't look like it fell out of the pages of a magazine, then they need to adjust their expectations because this is a forum about food, not artistic food photography. Artistic food photography should be a subset of the food related activity, not a requirement for any photos of food shared on the forum. Someone can be an excellent chef and have a lot to share and be a middling to average photographer - should they not share their food knowledge just because their photos showing interesting technique or style aren't going to be pretty enough?)

I think the roast dinner (roasted-to-death meat, vegetables boiled until they just about dissolve into the cooking water, Yorkshire puddings and some thin prepared gravy) is still actually quite popular. Our family sat down to eat it once a week on a Sunday and I know many others around my area and I think all over the country also eat that meal regularly. There was a period of time where shops were popping up that would sell a roast dinner wrap - all the contents of a roast dinner wrapped up in a giant Yorkshire pud. That was quite bizarre. Then again the OP is fighting a losing battle as mentioned further up the thread trying to define one meal as the "national dish". I think either a well executed roast dinner, or fish and chips are probably the strongest contenders for a national dish of England though, not cheese on toast *cough* oh sorry, I mean "rarebit". Just to throw a further spanner into the works, Spaghetti Bolognese is a very popular one over here. Seems like everybody's got their own recipe for it and claims it's the best... ETA: Mad cow certainly hasn't slowed down our beef consumption. There may have been a period of time after the incident where everyone is a bit paranoid, but that attitude (thankfully) hasn't persisted. Beef's one of the more popular meats here and is usually afforded about twice (sometimes even 3-4 times or more depending on the shop) as much shelf space as lamb or pork.This was my experience when I lived in England, too. Mostly the mad cow thing, after the initial fear passed, just meant people were a little more interested in knowing where the beef had come from in terms of being handled properly, etc. Even that it was as much the supermarkets telling you about the beef as it was people bothering to research for themselves. I haven't been back in a few years, but beef always featured quite regularly on the menu in the various places I ate, and the stuff I cooked myself. I'm not sure I'd pick a roast over fish and chips for the national meal - maybe if it's going to be the national meal that people prepare at home, since a lot of people I knew preferred to go to a chippy over dealing with hot oil and all that mess at home.

My point is, you don't need a "setup" to take excellent pictures. My "setup"? a single CFL bulb with a kitchen plastic container, a tripod and a camera. dcarch I understand the simplicity - I'm just thinking the 'setup' pic would help, because in my minds eye I'm imagining your plastic container somehow taped to the ceiling light fixture in your dining room... I assume you're using a tabletop lamp or ? It would also probably be very illustrative for a photographic neophyte to see the results of a pic with & without the diffusor if you'd be so inclined. For anyone interested in improving their photos, in my opinion it's totally worth it to set aside some time one day and pick a fairly plain subject, set the camera up in one spot, and then just take a lot of pictures playing around with different sources of light that you might have handy. Try bouncing light off of and through things, too. Whatever you think might be interesting. Just take notes so you remember what's what. Then sit down and look at the photos. It's often a lot easier to understand what's going on with lighting if you do that, because it's easier to see what the results are of doing X vs Y. Just try to pick a fairly visually simple subject - you don't want to be adding in the visual effects of something like a very busy print on something in the shot when the goal is to be able to see what the changes are from different approaches to lighting. And try not to mess around with camera settings AND the lighting between shots. Often in cinematography class what we'd do is establish a new lighting set up, and then film a short scene (someone walking through the frame, for example) a few times with the same set up, but changing the camera settings. That way you can compare like with like - all the same lighting set up, or all the same camera settings - rather than trying to guess if that effect you liked was from the lighting, the settings, or both. It is somewhat like cooking, actually, from my perspective - there's very specific science involved in what's going on, and understanding the science can help you to get a specific result or solve a problem, but there's a lot to be said for just experimenting to see what you get, too. (If you don't want to spend time writing down notes, and you have a specific idea of what lighting set ups you want to try, just make a sign out of a piece of paper or something for each set up and then take a photo of that before you photograph the subject using the set up. That way when you're looking at the images later you can tell what's what just from the order they come in, and most cameras these days note the exposure and f stop and so on in the image information, so between those two you have the information you need.) For purposes of the thread - does anyone have a specific photo they're thinking of where the photo itself is art even though the subject may also be artistic food? Just to get an idea of the kind of thing people have in mind when looking at photo of food-as-art as opposed to art as a photo-of-food. If you see what I mean.

Before her offices moved the cafeteria that served where my mom worked put cheese in EVERYTHING. She's lactose intolerant. She did a lot of brown bagging it, as it were. For days when she didn't have time to pack something up or didn't have anything appealing in the fridge she'd buy a stash of tolerable microwave meals when they were on sale and keep them in the freezer. (Seriously, everything. Crab cakes, EVERYTHING. My best guess is they were getting cheese cheaply and using it to bump up the protein/fat content of other stuff?)

It's just started feeling like fall in the air where I am, and as soon as that crispness set in I found myself wanting to do something warm and a little rich, with apples. Sweet, maybe apple crisp. Savory, pork tenderlion with some kind of apple pan sauce - I end to improvise but usually it's something with onions and apples and a splash of white wine or even better hard apple cider and some kind of sturdier herb like thyme or rosemary. It got me to wondering if other people have dishes or flavors they specifically associate with certain seasons and that they get impatient to cook as soon as the season changes. (For summer for me the favorite would be the obvious fresh tomatoes. My grandparents used to grow their own so that fresh tomato plant scent is a key part of my summer memories. I'm not as picky about the specific dish, though - anything that shows off fresh tomatoes works for me. When I lived in England I had a cheese and tomato sandwich quite often - nothing fancy, just good white bread, buttered, a good not too strong cheddar, fresh ripe tomatoes, salt and pepper.)

I made super tasty chocolate cookies once using cherry butter and a chocolate ganache for the filling. They were thumbprint style cookies rather than sandwich, but I don't see why it wouldn't work with a sandwich cookie as long as you got the filling textures right. I would layer them, though, rather than mixing the cherry butter into the ganache - part of the enjoyment of the cookies I made was that I layered the two (cherry under the ganache) and as a result you got some mixing of the cherry flavor into everything, but you'd also get more of a taste of the pure cherry butter, which was very bright and fruity against the rich chocolate. I find sometimes when fruit flavors are just mixed in to the chocolate the end result is kind of muddy tasting. I've also used a milk chocolate caramel frosting recipe that would probably be pretty good with chocolate cookies, if you're willing to go chocolate-and-more-chocolate with the flavors. (I've misplaced the recipe, but it was essentially a milk chocolate whipped ganache only before melting the chocolate into the cream, you caramelized some sugar and then combined that with the cream. To prevent it from being over the top sweet I usually tried to use a less sweet milk chocolate or had some spare dark chocolate on hand to mix in if the taste seemed to need a little more of a chocolate hit once the milk chocolate and caramel cream were combined.)

Dairy products encourage the production of phlegm for a lot of people, I think even without any possible intolerances or allergies. I'm always more careful with how much dairy I'm having when I'm sick, like if I'm already having trouble sleeping because of coughing I'll make sure not to have any dairy close to bedtime because that just makes it worse. I feel like there's a fair amount of anti-dairy sentiment these days also, from various 'health' gurus and that kind of thing? That probably isn't encouraging people to drink milk.

I think it's like any other hobby - people can get really annoying about it. Particularly if it's combined with the whole green/organic/home gardening/farmer's market holier-than-thou thing. (I.e. "Of course I only use my own home canned tomatoes that I grew myself using compost that we made at home.") It's generally time consuming and messy and physically demanding since you often don't can unless you have a quantity of something, so it just doesn't fit into everyone's lifestyle, but some people seem to think you should MAKE it fit. (Plus, even if you have the time and the space and the energy to do it, there's the food safety aspect - some people may just not want to deal with making sure they do everything properly so the canned stuff is safe. It's not like most of us are in a situation now where we NEED to can in order to have stuff available during the winter, thanks to supermarkets and commercially available products.) I mean, I quite enjoyed it and I'd do it again, but there are plenty of items that I COULD can where I don't see the point when you can buy something just as good or better, or where canning isn't the preservation method I like. (I don't like canning vegetables in general, for example. I think they're better frozen for preservation, if you have the freezer space. I don't like the canned vegetable texture.) Wait, you mean canning doesn't suck the organic right out of food? I understand not "getting" an interest or even thinking it's kinda stupid and probably symptomatic of moral depravity or something -that's how I feel about RAH RAH HOMETOWN SPORTS TEAM- but, really, canning? If you hate thise annoying granola canning people, you'd presumably avoid them because they're annoying, not because they're into canning. I think. Apparently not? Maybe if you've canned it yourself you know for sure there aren't any Evil Strange Chemicals? I have no idea. Personally, I do not care about such people. If they want to talk about canning, I can talk about canning also, and discuss the best preservation methods and all of that kind of thing. But that's my guess for why some other people dislike it. I personally find 'food safety? Why should I care about food safety? It'll be FINE!' types to be exponentially more annoying and bothersome. I don't mean people who make an educated decision that the food safety guidelines are too conservative in this way or that, I mean people who do not know/understand the risks and have decided wholesale that they can just do whatever they'd like. These types are not restricted to canning, of course, but the subject seems to come up more in the context of canning than in the context of cooking generally. (Also not restricted to granola types.)

Hey, my mom uses the cart wipes. To be fair, she has a compromised immune system and is at risk from people coughing and sneezing all over everything, particularly during cold and flu season. She only usually wipes the handle area, though. Do people wipe the whole cart? (She does other stuff, too, like tries not to touch her face since that's normally how you actually make yourself sick, by touching something with germs and then rubbing your nose/eye/mouth and transferring the germs to a hospitable environment.) Washing chicken has never been a big thing, though - generally something gets rinsed if it seems to need it, and gets left alone otherwise. And imo kitchen sinks and other food prep areas should be materials such that you can scrub them down easily anyway. I had some kind of plastic-y sink in one house I rented and I hated it because it felt like so much more work to get and keep it clean compared to a nice stainless steel sink bowl.

For anecdotal evidence - when I was 6 I probably would've had the milk without stuff added to it as much, if not more, than with. (I was a weird little kid, though - my mom made the mistake of introducing me to high end chocolate and candies when I was young, you know stuff that's sweet but sweet WITH FLAVOR, so I generally disliked most everyday junk food because all I could taste was sweet-sweet-sweet. I did well at Halloween trading everyone else for the few candies I did like, though. ) These days I tend to drink milk not with a meal unless it's a spicy meal and I need something to cut the heat. Like some of the other comments, I tend to find milk and similar drinks with a strong flavor or mouthfeel have too much potential to interfere with the meal itself. Usually I go with water (sometimes with lime or lemon) or iced tea if I want the caffeine. I have to limit my alcohol intake for medical reasons, so if I do have wine or beer with a meal I like to have water available also. Water for drinking/hydration, wine/beer for sipping as a flavor component. Doesn't take a lot of wine or beer with a bite of the meal to get the flavor benefits from the pairing, so that way I get to enjoy the full taste experience without actually consuming that much alcohol. I do occasionally have pop, but I'm pretty picky about what I pair it with - usually something like pizza or a burger. If I really want pop and I'm planning to have a meal that doesn't go with it, I treat it as a before dinner drink like someone else might have a cocktail, and then switch to water for the meal. I used to like a coffee after a meal, with dessert, but my migraines have decided they do not like coffee at all, so now I skip it unless there's a strong tea available that will provide a similar sort of contrast to the dessert.

I think it's like any other hobby - people can get really annoying about it. Particularly if it's combined with the whole green/organic/home gardening/farmer's market holier-than-thou thing. (I.e. "Of course I only use my own home canned tomatoes that I grew myself using compost that we made at home.") It's generally time consuming and messy and physically demanding since you often don't can unless you have a quantity of something, so it just doesn't fit into everyone's lifestyle, but some people seem to think you should MAKE it fit. (Plus, even if you have the time and the space and the energy to do it, there's the food safety aspect - some people may just not want to deal with making sure they do everything properly so the canned stuff is safe. It's not like most of us are in a situation now where we NEED to can in order to have stuff available during the winter, thanks to supermarkets and commercially available products.) I mean, I quite enjoyed it and I'd do it again, but there are plenty of items that I COULD can where I don't see the point when you can buy something just as good or better, or where canning isn't the preservation method I like. (I don't like canning vegetables in general, for example. I think they're better frozen for preservation, if you have the freezer space. I don't like the canned vegetable texture.)

I work at home at the moment, so lunch isn't really an issue, but when I was in college and had a long day on campus I started packing a lunch. I was one of the few people who did, but the on campus and nearby offerings were pretty uninspiring and there's only so much fried-whatever I can convince myself to eat in a week. Oddly, no one seemed to think it was that weird. A few people asked about it but it was more 'what did you bring?' than 'omg, you brought lunch?' Usually it was something involving leftovers from a recent meal - I tended to try not to take leftovers from the night before all the time just because that gets boring ("oh, meatloaf again!") but with a day's break in between or if the leftovers could be easily prepared into something else (like using previously cooked meat on a salad instead of just having it again as is) then that worked out well. I also tried to put away some stuff specifically for taking for lunch, so if I really didn't feel like taking leftovers I had options. Westernized Bento blogs tended to be quite good for ideas along those lines, stuff that freezes well for use in a packed meal and how to freeze it in sensible portion sizes. Reusable silicone cupcake liners come in very handy there - if I made anything at any point that would freeze and defrost well and taste good cold/room temp (no microwave access) then I'd intentionally make a little extra and immediately put it in the freezer in little cupcake cups, then pop it out when it was frozen and keep the little frozen 'pucks' in a freezer bag. When I wanted to take one or two - pull them out, put them in the cupcake liners to pack amongst whatever else I was taking, done. (If it was something that'd defrost quickly, that is - stuff that took longer to defrost I'd put in the fridge in the liners the night before, so I didn't risk ending up with a still frozen lump when I was ready to eat.) For keeping stuff cold I had an insulated bag, but I tried to avoid using reusable ice packs just so I didn't have to lug them around all day and remember to re-freeze them. Mostly I'd use something like a frozen bottle of water - not usually defrosted by meal time, but drinkable a bit later on when it was refreshing to have a cold drink. The Westernized bento blogs had some ideas for other stuff, if I remember right, but the water bottle was the easiest solution for me. (I feel like I should add that I'm not really a sandwich person - I know people who can happily eat a sandwich every day for lunch, but I get bored with them pretty quickly. So that probably made packing my lunch a little more complicated than it might have otherwise been since I was trying to find non-sandwich items that would pack and travel well.)

My ideal would probably be a package deal where you could get the book and an ebook copy for something less than buying them separately, so you'd have the book for when you preferred that, and the ebook to be used as a more portable reference.