Reluctant Bean

Bento at Hanabishi, Koyasan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m not sure how I stumbled on bento lunch making one day recently, but I did!  For those not familiar with bento it is essentially a Japanese-style lunch.  The picture on the left is a traditional bento.  You can pack whatever food you like – spaghetti, sandwiches, rolls – to name a few.  The idea is to arrange the food in a pleasing way and it works best if you can pack it tight so it doesn’t shift when moved.  Bento can be simple or complex depending on how much artistry goes into it.

I decided to give this a try because my daughter’s lunch was a sandwich Monday thru Friday.  Talk about boring!  With Halloween a few days away I dove into my research on how to make a fun, healthy lunch and came up with this:

Halloween bento box for daughter

The jack-o-lantern is made with two types of rice.  Jumping Bean loves Naw Mai Fan, a Cantonese savory sticky rice dish, but it’s dark with soy sauce and would not look right for this.  So I put a layer of Japanese sushi rice over it, painted it with orange food coloring, and added the face accents cut out of nori.  I also tried making tamagoyaki (egg roll) and nori wrapped onigiri (rice ball).  I packed everything in a Rubbermaid lunch container, sneaked it into her lunch box and waited to hear if she like it.  Oh did she ever!  When she popped open the lid one of her friends kept saying “OMG” over and over plus everyone took photos of it and posted to Facebook.  If there is one thing I’ve learned having teens is that anything important to them is posted on FB.

All that praise fueled me to delve further into the world of bento.  There is a dizzying amount of food picks, cutters, sauce containers, egg molds, rice molds, and adorable bento boxes available online.  Oh my…talk about dangerous! Kawaii (meaning cute, adorable) is big in Japan and they extend cuteness to just about every imaginable lunch item.  Jumping Bean and Flexible Bean are amazed too.  Jumping Bean told me that if I had made her cute lunches when she was younger she would have liked me more.  Sigh, the honesty of a teen. I took that as a complement and promptly bought some things.

Face punches make the task of cutting out faces easy and fast.  They are one of the more expensive tools but they seem very heavy and durable. In a flash you can turn any piece of food into a friendly character!

Food punch for nori

Then there are the food cutters.  You can use cookie cutters, but these wrap cutters were so adorable I just had to try them out. The bear and rabbit are out of turkey cotto salami and turkey bologna, respectively, with the chick cut out of cheese.  The animals are wrapped around a small vegetable wrap made with wheat tortilla, spinach, julienned carrots, and spicy mayonnaise.  A small cookie cutter is used to cut out the hearts (two types of cheese) and the rest of the box is filled with broccoli, grape tomatoes, and red grapes.  A small container of ranch dressing completes the lunch.  This lunch too scored being photographed and FB’d by her lunch buddies.

A kawaii lunch!

Just to be clear I do not send every lunch looking like this.  It is way more work than I want to do at 6 in the morning! Plus Jumping Bean is 15, not 5!  This is how her lunch normally looks now:

While I’ve veered off the vegan path for her lunch at least she is getting more variety and plenty of raw fruit and veggies everyday.  She likes it and that’s the most important thing!