This bento is actually by my son. His father and I had to be out of the house yesterday evening, and a simple bento was on the menu for today, so I asked my son if he’d make bento for all of us. He did a great job and it was tasty.

I didn’t used to plan bento particularly. I’d just see what happened when the Spirit moved me at bento making time.

I’ve gotten away from that for several reasons. I do tend to plan dinners. It’s absurd not to plan bento as well. After all, I often make bento revolving around some aspect of leftovers from the night before. I did know that Maki over at Just Bento had put out a Weekly Bento Planner. Hers is pretty detailed, analyzing the use of color, nutritional breakdown and all that. After all, part of the point of bento is to make a healthy, visually-appealing portable meal, so that sort of attention to detail can be important. Like meal planning, it does seem like a lot, but I know from experience that 20 minutes of meal planning for the week, especially when comparing to my calendar and shopping list, saves about two hours of time over the week and about 20% of the grocery bill. So the planning is something that works well for me.

While I didn’t go so far as to specify use of color in the menu plan I made, for my food choices for my own mind, I did think about color. However, I didn’t write what kind of peppers, so my son put green ones in rather than red. Do I care? Are you crazy? I’m delighted to have a lunch that my son made for me! It’s a happy thing to have a bento made for one, I can tell you.

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I’ve been working very hard the past six weeks or so. Now, I’m cool with working hard, but sometimes you need something to lift your spirits. I’m finding that Bento are great to give me a little charge during the day to keep me going for the afternoon.

Now, I don’t make anything all that special. Half the time, my bento are repurposed leftovers. Another quarter of the time, it’s a chicken drumstick, some carb (rice or pasta) and some fruit and veggies. The thing is, when I make them, even though I’m often putting them in some sort of flat plastic container, I’m still paying some attention to color and layout.

Opening one of those babies up in the middle of what you know is going to be a long day? It’s really pretty comforting. It’s just lunch, but by Golly, it’s a pretty lunch and that little capsule of attractiveness does a lot to make my lunch break something restorative.

I begin to understand why my guys are so happy to get them. It’s not that the food is amazing or anything, nor is it that they can’t make their own lunch. They can. But opening up a tasty and attractive box can be very comforting in the middle of a long day.

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My husband just had a medical checkup and the doctor says not only is he in fantastic health, he is healthier than he was ten years ago.  Being a very kindly and appreciative partner, this is being credited to the fact I make bento for his lunches.  Now, you know how I laugh at the whole And It’s GOOD for You, Too! attitude towards hobbies, but I found that cute.

So, today’s magic, immortality-granting bento is pasta, chicken drumstick and some veggies. No fruit, because I’ve been lazy and haven’t been shopping.

But that thing about not having been shopping?  That’s  something that has a  lot to do with how I approach the whole bento aesthetic.

Sure, you can have the perfect containers, and make the perfect recipes and make some perfectly beautiful food art.  I’ve done some cute food art myself — piggie onigiri, seascapes and all kinds of stuff.  It’s fun.

But even non-perfect can be kinda cool, if you put a little thought into presentation.  Again, I used Gladware containers to make these bento.  In addition, a lot of the bento included leftovers.    Yes, I paid attention to color and presentation, but these meals were not planned.  They were put together with what I have on hand.  Yes, I regularly have fresh veggies on hand, but so should anyone if they can swing it.

I’ve been presenting these to show that while yes, the cute Japanese boxes are fun, and making Japanese food for your bento is also fun (Onigiri are awesome), Gladware and Western-style food works just fine.  If you want to make bento, you’re really only limited by your imagination, not your pocketbook.

I’m not the only one who seems to have given up on the cute little boxes without having given up on bento, though.  Many people on the Lunchinabox forums have bemoaned the expense of the well-sealed, sturdy, microwavable bento-specific box and are turning to Rubbermaid, Tupperware and especially Lock-n-lock boxes.  They’re not as pretty, but they’re sturdier and cheaper.

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Now, I do own some cute bento boxes, but I’m finding some serious limitations to the cute little Japanese ones.

1. They’re delicate. The ones you generally find don’t stand up to rough treatment and you can’t really put them in the microwave or the dishwasher.  You can buy bento that can go in the microwave and the dishwasher, but they’re…
2. Expensive. ‘Nuff said.

I could buy a $30 box from Japan (adding in, of course, the price of international shipping.  Or, as my bento collection slowly disappears through breakage, I’m more likely to use plastic ware from the local department store, or even those cheap Gladware babies (which last longer than the bento boxes.  Go figure).

Here’s a step by step bento I did for my husband.  This one is a larger box,  (750 ml) so is more for a larger appetite. (<cough>Teenaged Boy</cough>).

So, we start with fried rice.  I’d had some rice left over, so figured that’d be tasty.  I’ve got this spread all over the bottom of the container so that it will cool.

Then I slide the rice over to save space. The green veggies holding the rice in place is cucumber slices cut in half, then arranged in an alternating pattern to make the structure a little stronger.  Engineering and art!  Who says they’re diametrically opposed?

Remember all that money I was saving cutting up chicken parts?  Drumsticks are great for bento, so that’s exactly what I used here.

One of the things that’s important when you make a bento is to make sure that you stuff the box full enough that the food doesn’t have much room to move.  Veggies are great for this.  Go for color as much as possible, as that means you’re getting a wider range of vitamins and a healthier meal.  Yes, it’s prettier, too.

Speaking of color, just green, brown and red aren’t enough for my own tastes, so I added a bit of yellow.  Since this was suggestive of a flower, I kinda ran with it.

I put some blueberries inside the flower, more because there wasn’t any fruit in the bento and Dear Hoosband likes a bit of sweetness with a meal.

I did cook the fried rice (had half of it for dinner, NOM) and the drumstick, but I could have just as easily used leftovers in the fridge (and often do).

The rice and cooking the drumstick was what made the bento more time-consuming.  Assembling it, even taking the time to take pictures in the process, only took me about five minutes.  All in all, it was still less than half an hour, and I started the drumsticks cooking while I set up a curry for a crock pot dinner tomorrow.  So, it was very little “extra” time that I took to make this.

But notice, this is a cute bento, and it was made with ingredients and materials you’re likely to  have around the house.  I mention this because making your food look nice is often a way to make something inexpensive special.  In these economic times, it’s nice for the brown-bag lunch to seem like a treat rather than a letdown.

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Hey, lookie here! I have a hobby of making pretty, healthy, portion-controlled lunches!  Isn’t that wonderful?  Everyone should do it because it’s Good For You!

I’m not trying to sneer at hobbies, but I do find it amusing that people often attribute some sort of beneficial or character building qualities to what is essentially a hobby.

Sometimes you’ll run across articles about knitting, extolling its stress-reliving qualities.  I’ve seen articles on sewing that remark on the same.  Martial arts is notoriously smug about this one, talking about the character building qualities of getting dressed in what’s essentially underwear and throwing people around a room.

This isn’t a new thing.  At least since early Victorian times, writers often discuss the positive, productive effects of various hobbies.  One was not supposed to read because a story was fun, but one was supposed to read material that would improve one’s mind.

Fast forward to the present and video games are considered a waste of time unless you can claim some educational or character-building qualities to them.

Me?  I think it’s kind of weird.  I mean, yes yes yes, I get a nice sweater for an inexpensive price if I knit.  My family gets some really healthy lunches  because of my bento hobby, absolutely.    But I wonder, why isn’t the simple fun of a hobby given more value?

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Maki over at JustBento has written a great article on ready-made food and how it’s used in bento in Japan.  Basically it blows a hole in the idea that all Japanese mothers get up at five in the morning to craft perfectly healthy and perfectly beautiful lunchboxes for their families, made from scratch and at the peak of nutritional balance. A busy mother scrambling to feed her kids is going to behave like any busy mother scrambling to feed her kids.  This may include pre-packaged food!  If you find Bento interesting, do check out the site, by the way.  She’s not into charaben (character bento), but is more into bento as a way to have healthy meals on the go.

I have used pre-packaged food in a bento once or twice – a prime example being my Bad Mama Bento at the end of school last year for my son.  It’s not something I personally do often, as at least part of my bento motivation is to get away from too many preservatives and go for a better nutritional balance in at least some of the meals we eat.

But it’s hardly like my own bento are the pictures of nutritional perfection.  This bento has two itty bitty hamburger patties (ooohhh!!  Scawwwy evil  fat in ground beef) and a corn muffin.  Corn=Evil in some minds.  I’ll point out that HFCS and CORN are two different products.   (Though the muffin was home-made, so no weird ingredients I can’t pronounce).   You can find something to criticize  in almost anything if you want to.

That’s probably why a lot of people throw up their hands about nutrition and eating well.  You’re constantly bombarded with the message that whatever you’re doing is WRONG WRONG WRONG.

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This is a breakfast bento I did for tomorrow.   I’m opening the gym, so I’ll be up very early.  I also need to get in my weight training before I teach, so I won’t have a lot of time between that and getting to the place where I’m teaching a class.  Sure, the class has pastries and stuff, but I’m No-Sing and I hate teaching on a sugar high.  Hence the bento.

The bento case is actually supposed to be an onigiri case.  Yes, onigiri for breakfast is also pretty tasty, but I wanted eggs.  So the lower case has two hard-boiled eggs and some grape tomatoes.  The other half has some sliced kumquats, a cucumber slice divider, and some sliced strawberries.  All in all, a nice breakfast.

It’s not that one couldn’t pack a meal that pays no attention to aesthetics.  But I’ve always liked food to look kinda nifty.  When I was a Brownie scout, the handbook had a recipe that was basically a fruit salad in the shape of a clown.  I thought it was awesome.   I used to make a fruit salad with an apple base, where the apple was scooped out and the salad served in the hollow of the apple.  (I probably haven’t made that in 30 years, Lord knows why…)

And as goofy as it sounds, an attractive meal is somehow more satisfying.

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I’ve gotten back into making bento after letting the hobby drop for awhile.   I tell myself it’s because I’m worried my guys won’t eat healthy lunches unless I make them.  But when it’s just grabbing a little package out of the fridge, they’ll eat what I make fairly happily.

Partially, it’s selfish.   When I’m busy during the day, if I have a bento made for myself, I’ll eat a proper lunch.  If I don’t, I snack and munch and don’t get a really good nutritional balance.

However, the preference for actually having a bento has gotten pretty strong. When I was ill with a cold earlier in the week, the man of the house actually made a bento for himself and our son for the next day.

I was reading a comment on a bento blog where someone was asking why in the world there was this hype about bento.  Packed lunches aren’t new!  (For that matter, neither are bento, but the person making the comment didn’t mention that).

I responded that it’s a hobby.  Maybe you love knitting.  You can buy a sweater in a store for a lot less trouble than knitting one.  Maybe you like sport fishing.  You can get fish much cheaper in the market. (My brother often jokes about the $100/lb tuna you get from deep sea fishing).   Knitting and fishing are even older practices than bento!

It’s just a hobby.  You put food in a box and make it pretty.  It’s fun.  I’ve noticed a tendency, when one has an obsessive hobby, to talk about how good for you said hobby is.  Being out on the water lowers your blood pressure when you’re fishing.  Knitting is supposed to be as calming as yoga.  A well-designed bento is a healthy meal.  All these things are true, but lets be honest.  These things might have positive benefits, but I think that “because it’s fun” might play a serious part in why we do them.

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I did an experiment with mini chicken pot pies in a muffin tin for bento.  I think they turned out rather well!  I didn’t have enough dough for two of the pot pies out of the dozen, so I used those right away rather than freeze them.

Between this and the shepherd’s pie experiment, I’m pretty happy with the muffin tin dishes I’ve been making for bento.    I just need to think so some more to come up with others.  To be honest, these are a bit work-intensive.  Thing is, they do freeze well, so if you do up a whole muffin tin of them, you’re doing enough for six bento, which means you’ve got plenty extra for another day’s worth of bento.

I was thinking about how to make lasagna in muffin tins, and it occurred to me that homemade noodles would be ideal, because I could cut them into circles pretty easily.

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I did an experiment and made some shepherd’s pies in some muffin tins for bentos.  While I do love onigiri and all, I think a variety of mini-meals is a good idea.  Besides, these suckers freeze and building up the bento stash is a Good Thing.

I’m going to be experimenting in the future with some other meals in muffin tins, since the size is so perfect for bento.  I’ve done mini quiches and they’re wonderful.  I’ve seen it suggested one can do mini lasagnas, pot pies or ‘most anything else you’d make in a casserole dish. The advantage of this is that I can do a whole muffin tin of these babies and freeze them.  Pre-prepped is good.

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