The Tiffin Tin

My Dear Reader,

The Tiffin Tin will be on vacation until August 30, which is the first day of school around here. We’re on a brief break now, waiting for fall, the time for packed lunches:and when that time comes around, this site will feature all the lovely things we pack and bring with us for the journey, generally the journey my three children make to school, but my own as well.

Enjoy the rest of your summer. See you August 30.

The Tiffin Tin

Just as the worst time to open an umbrella store is during a drought, the worst time to begin a blog devoted to packed lunches (most of which are meant to accompany children to school) is during summer vacation. What was I thinking?

For a while, I’ve been getting by showing you pictures of my favorite containers. But that’s not what I promised. I promised to show you packed food so delicious that other children would literally offer your child their ipod AND their cell if your child would let them eat a tiny bit of your child’s lunch. Food so remarkable and jewel-like that your co-workers will try to steal it the instant your back is turned.

Alas, it is not lunch-packing season.

What to do? I’m not entirely sure. I’ve noticed some interest in lunch box notes — so perhaps I’ll post some downloadable ones. Maybe I’ll post picnics we have around here. I’m going to take a few days to think about it. If you end up at this site, tell me why you came and what you might like to find here, unless you’re the person who found me by typing in “tiffin sex tonight.” You want somebody else.

Thanks to the Tiffin Tin’s intrepid research editor, IT manager and all around awesome web detective (my sister, of course) I have been alerted to another packed lunch fan site.  Written by a German woman, the site is called The Daily Tiffin. Which, it seems to me, would be a great name for a food newspaper as well as for a fun, informative web site.

One final thing:  The Tiffin Tin sends its most sincere condolences to the unified Germany for the way the World Cup match against Italy turned out.  We were rooting for you — for youth and multiculturalism, for a Germany at its best.  But we don’t think this loss means anything too important.  Sometimes, the team that loses is the one we remember best.

A few weeks ago we went to a great candy store in New England called Chutters. It took a few weeks to figure out where to put all the fruit slice candies we bought there — besides in our mouths, I mean.
And yes, those are Koreana Plaza containers. (23rd & Telegraph, Oakland.)

They too have this on the side (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate:/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May/And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”)

So, here they are, summer in a jar.