Inside This Bento Box From Select Shop 215: Your Own Best Version Of Yourself

Do you work in a place where people bring their own lunch? Do their lunches depress you? Do the smells of their regretful lunches, pungent and foul even when they are healthy, make you wonder how you even wound up there, in their same climate of sweaty-onion leftover regret? 

Rhetorical question, of course. Even so, the Takenaka Bento Box is a whole thing for us, Picked up a few months ago at Select Shop 215, this thing has a way of infiltrating your psyche: It inspires you to eat better. There is its primal-level satisfying high gloss elegant design, yes, but there is more than that. It tempts you to put things in it that you ordinarily might not believe you are worth. Wonderful self-actualizing foods like sticky rice and naaaaaaasty kimchi (suck on that, co-workers) and edamame and, honestly, anything else from Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes you might be nerding on. (The book came into our lives at the same time; they are so simpatico one ought to be sold with the other.) This is not a paid endorsement, by the way. It's just one of those your-own-best-version-of-yourself things. And not for nothing, you need this spicy celery in your life. Forget everything you ever knew about celery. 

Spicy Cold Celery (from Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes)

• 1 tablespoon soy sauce

• 1 tablespoon sesame oil

• 1 tablespoon rice vinegar

• 1 teaspoon sugar

• 1 teaspoon spicy chili crisp or chili oil

• 4-5 large celery stalks, sliced thinly on an angle (about 2 1/2 cups)

Stir together the soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, sugar, and chili crisp is a medium bowl until sugar dissolves. Add the celery and toss to coat it in the dressing. Let stand for a few minutes before eating. This will keep in the fridge for a couple of days, so you might as well make a double batch.