Pietro’s & Mana Bu’s

I had a bento yesterday, but one of my brain farts for the day included that I forgot to upload the picture, so that will come tomorrow. Friday a bunch of the girls in the office went out to eat lunch at Pietro’s. I cannot turn down Pietro’s, so I had to go. We had a couple of novices with us, so we had a blast introducing them to the raw potato salad.

Here is my plate with all four of their dressings lopped on in different areas. (ume, shoyu, ginger, and sesame miso) The shoyu dressing remains my favorite. My hands down favorite dish here is the spicy ground beef and eggplant, so I got it again since I hadn’t been there in a while.

My food didn’t look like this when they brought it. I had to re-arrange it to look acceptable for my picture! Is that a bit much? That I rearrange my food at a restaurant too? Bento habits die hard I guess.

Later, we stopped off at this place on King Street called Mana Bu’s because my co-worker said they had really good strawberry mochi. The shop was adorable, having a shelf full of assorted musubis. Here’s the outside:

The store is sadly only open from 10:30 – 2:30, so there’s no real stopping off before a school field trip or anything. I was so amazed that there was a store that specialized just in musubis. They use the really good rice and have brown rice ones as well.

If you look carefully in this picture, you can see that there’s a roast corn try too. That must be popular as there was only one left. Having just eaten lunch, I didn’t buy anything, but I soooo wanted to. I just know my cousin will flip out when she hears about a musubi shop. Isn’t the wrapping adorable?

They have salads and edamame for sale as well:

My garden is progressing nicely! This picture came out a bit too shiny, but these are my watermelon plants:

I’ve since thinned this pot out, moving one sprout to another pot with smaller plants and then spreading the remaining two apart to give them more room. Hopefully they don’t die to my root meddling.

I planted 6 pots of sugar snap peas and this pot seems to be the champion pot as it’s quite a ways ahead of the other plants. I learned from reading a bit that were these heirloom seeds, the veggies from these plants would be the ones that I gather seeds from to ensure that the next generation sprouts fast too. Or maybe it only matters which one gives pods first, haha. If they’re this far ahead and the others are only poking out of the dirt though, surely they’ll give pods first.

Last, but not least, here is my basil. At least, I think it’s basil. I planted a bunch of herbs and these were the only ones nice enough to sprout. The nerve of the others. I DIDN’T WANT THEM ANYWAY. 🙁

Today we had an office potluck again, so I’m in recovery from overeating again. Ugh. I’ve gained 10 lbs since I started working here. I really have to stop all the eating I do all day.