Furoshiki Picnic

I like to think that I am a fairly moderate person. So I don't know why my little and seemingly harmless projects always seem to balloon into large undertakings where I feel like I've bitten off slightly more than I can chew. Of course, as a foodie thats not always such a bad thing, but you get the drift.

Recently I've been into the Japanese art of Furoshiki. Furoshiki is basically the art of taking a square piece of cloth —I've made a couple of Furoshiki cloths of my own — and making a few knots, such that it can become a variety of bags, complete with handles!! The above picture shows just two of the ties, and you can pretty much get as creative with it as you want to. You can wrap gifts in scarves, knot it into a grocery bag, make it into a lunch bag...

So I thought, "if you can wrap your lunch in it, why not bring more food? I know, we'll have a picnic!!"

And so we did. I had a nice juicy watermelon in the fridge, so I decided to try a recipe for watermelon salsa.



I kept some watermelon aside just for eating (Tetris anyone?) and put the rest in a bowl with some salt, finely diced red chilli and Spanish onion, balsamic vinegar, and parsley. 

The flavours were left in the fridge to meld for about an hour, and then packed, ready to go for our picnic!!



In the end, I had a larger Furoshiki bag and a little one, and this was what we managed to fit in them.



Between the two of us, we had five mortadella and pickle sandwiches, orange wedges, kiwi halves, Camembert, tomato and cucumber salad, a container each of the watermelon and the watermelon salsa, shaved ham, and a bottle of homemade lemonade.

Needless to say, we couldn't finish all the food, but it was worth the whole day of preparing food for an afternoon in the park.

Gotta love the little projects. :)