For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. The boxes can range from austere lacquered trays to multi-tiered Hello Kitty confections of neon pink plastic. The meals themselves are anything from rice and leftovers to elaborate themed affairs of Pikachu-shaped dumplings with sesame seed eyes and carved radish trees. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.

Today's bento has the color and textural balance of a painting, while appearing to maintain its essential edibility. The creator, Wonder Zdora, notes that this is a bento made for hot weather - lots of juicy fruits and veggies and few heavy proteins. It includes rice noodles with shiso and umeboshi (pickled plum) and tahini dressing, radish flowers, cucumber salad with wakame seaweed, carrots, grapefruit and fresh medlar fruits.

This isn't a vegetable you see every day, and, depending on how well it does in England, you may never get a chance to see it in person. Named the C-thru-cumber, it's a new variety of cucumber that has a very thin skin that doesn't need to be peeled before using it in a salad or sandwich. It's quite pricey compared to the regular cucumbers at grocery stores in the UK.

I am in no way, shape or form a fan of cucumbers, so the question of whether to peel or not to peel is a non-issue for me. I know that they peel the cucumbers for finger sandwiches where I work, but not for salads. Also, as I understand it the nutrients are mostly in the skin, so are these veggies less nutritious?

Judging from some of the comments in the Daily Mail Online article, the C-thru-cumber isn't going to go over well. What do you think?

Is that a cucumber in your market totebag or are you just happy to see me?

I would say that more so than any of the other phallic foods, the straighter, thicker cucumber is probably the most, in my humble opinion of course, accurate. However, shape and size aren't the only things that matter when it comes to turning on a woman with a cucumber. Aside from its phallic shape, the scent of cucumbers is believed to stimulate women by increasing blood flow to the vagina.

That must be why so many of us love those cucumber melon scented bath products!

I just realized, I hardly ever eat pickles. I'll sometimes have them with sandwiches when I'm in a sandwich mood, but beyond that I don't give them much thought. I do like all kinds though: dill, bread & butter crisps, gherkins of all kinds.

Today is National Pickle Day. RecipeSource has a bunch of pickle recipes, from 14 Day Sweet Pickles to Zucchini Pickles (333 recipes in total!). Here's one for Nukazuke, which are Japanese pickles (made with rice bran and cabbage) You can even buy a T-shirt to tell everyone how much you appreciate the pickle.

This is a little too Invasion of the Body Snatchers for my liking, but it's certainly interesting: vegetables shaped like Mickey Mouse.

It's part of what you'll find at the greenhouse exhibit The Land at EPCOT. There are Mickey pumpkins and Mickey cucumbers, all created through special ear-shaped molds that hang throughout the greenhouses. As you know, EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and this is part of the interesting experiments going on there. They're not really doing all of the things promised years ago (a real community, no cars, creating a modern world, etc), but some of the agriculture experiments continue.

[via Boing Boing]

A few weeks ago, my friends and I got together after work to play board games (yes yes I know - how very, um, exciting), and a friend and I were charged with providing food. We were meeting rather late, so there was no need to go with full dinner fare. I decided on a few Mediterranean dips and a salad because really now, is there anything better than ripping a pita loaf into shreds when you're caught up in the excitement of Jenga?!?! Tzatziki is one of my favorites, and though I do believe it's used more as a sauce or condiment in Greek cuisine, I love scooping it up with pita bread. My Sarah-ized version is written out after the jump:

Thanks to some great feedback on how to use up some of my (organic) cucumbers, I managed to work my way through them. I ended up making another batch of cucumber salad, used some thick slices to add crunch to falafel sandwiches and made a big batch of the Cucumber Agua Fresca that Slashfood reader Freyja suggested. It was incredibly refreshing and a very ice contrast to a summer standard, like lemonade. I loved the lime flavor. I used a simple sugar syrup to sweeten the drink, which worked beautifully. Thanks for the recipe, Freyja!

Cucumber Agua Fresca
For the simple syrup, boil equal amounts water and sugar in a saucepan. Let cool. Use it to sweeten any drink you would ordinarily put sugar in. It works beautifully in cold drinks.

Take 3 large cucumbers, peel and cut into chunks. Puree with 1 1/2 cups water, then strain into a large pitcher to remove the pulp. Add 3-4 cups more water (still or sparkling), the juice of two limes (more, if desired) and about 1/4 cup or sugar syrup, or to taste.
Chill until serving.

Fortunately, it appears that the last few were killed off by the 104F+ heat that they were subjected to this week, so I won't have to worry about more cucumbers until the plant manages to revive itself. Judging by how aggressively the thing grew, if shouldn't take long, but I'll take a week or two of reprieve when I can get it.

As Nicole already mentioned, you can get a lot of picnic mileage out of simply prepared fresh vegetables. Another way to get a salad to your picnic without the hassle of bowls, forks and dressings is just to wrap it up in a tortilla or other flat-bread. Lately I'm fond of making wraps with hummus or soft goat cheese topped with peeled carrot, cucumber, tomato, dill, spinach and lemon juice. The main thing to keep in mind is the water content of what you're wrapping. Seed things like tomatoes and cucumbers first, and if you plan on using a dressing, go easy. Bringing along a lemon to squeeze into the wraps at the last minute will help keep the tortillas dry.

I learned long ago that, unless I wanted to be eating zucchini at ever meal for three months, it is best not to plant it at home. Besides, when they are in season they are so inexpensive that you can buy as many as you want for very little money - and if your neighbors decide to plant them, you'll probably have plenty of free ones anyway. But just because I don't plant zucchini doesn't mean that I don't have vegetable problems. While some people have problems with zucchini overrunning their gardens during the summer, I have a problem with cucumbers.

Over the past two days, I have accumulated roughly 30 pounds of cucumbers, both English and Japanese. Though I didn't try to pile them all into one photo, for reference, the cucumber in the center of this picture measures 11"x4" and weighs just over 2.5-pounds. And it's not the biggest that I have at the moment. The one in the fridge looks remarkably similar to a baseball bat.

There are many things I've never really thought of doing for a living. Math teacher, airplane pilot, personal masseuse for Star Jones. And I guess you can add pickle maker to that list, too.

But I love pickles, so this Boston Globe piece about two small, Boston-area pickle companies was rather interesting to me. Sometimes we think that there's no way that anyone could compete - or even thrive - in a world filled with large, well-known food companies, so it's great to see companies like Real Pickles and Moonbrine Pickles actually making it.

Like the article says, I never considered pickles as a job or as a means to social change, but they sure are tasty.