Category: bento

Yeah, I’m on a bento kick. It’s a hobby that ensures a healthy meal.  It’s better than jello shots or collecting used underwear, so get off my back!

This is a breakfast bento. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day for the man of the house and I. He’s got an ungodly early meeting and I have a class to teach. If I skip breakfast before teaching, I’m throwing dry erase pens and those plastic erasers at the students too soon into the day.  I like to hold off until at least noon…

I’d made “oatnigiri” (cooked steel cut oats molded into shape with cinnamon and sugar) that needed to be used up, so I figured a breakfast bento would be good for both of us to start the day off right.    Yes, yes, the term oatnigiri is a complete abomination since nigiri actually means “pressed rice”.  I didn’t name it and can’t think of a better term. If you can, then I’ll mention your linguistic genius in my next blog post and start using the term, crediting your brilliance.

It is interesting to point out that you can mold glutenous grains other than rice into shapes for later consumption.  If you’re not into rice, but wanna try it, there’s always polenta or a dozen other grains that you can cook sticky and thick, then make sure they’re either sweet or savory to eat for later.  Oatnigiri are good if you like steel cut oats in the first place.

Breakfast is usually a fend for yourself meal in my household, but since I was doing a breakfast bento for myself, it’s just as easy to do two as one.   I’ll do it in preparation for the really busy days.

Lunch for the man of the house I did make special, since I have a lunch meeting tomorrow, so wasn’t making one for myself.  I made it sort of special, anyway.  This is actually close to what we had for dinner.  The pork chops weren’t cut into bite-sized bits and I didn’t arrange dinner in a cute box, but while I’m making dinner, it’s just as easy to make a little extra to put in a plastic box for lunch.

I’m going to be taking a train trip to visit a friend sometime next month and need to figure out a couple of good ekiben for myself.  Ideally I’d like one to eat on the way down, then another to eat on the trip back home.   It’s the second one that has me scratching my head.  Of course, he has a fridge, so I suppose all I really have to do is make something that’ll take about 36 hours in a fridge okay, and it’ll be all good.  I’d rather have a bento than train or even train station food.

This everyday bento is made with no special equipment at all.  I didn’t even use the onigiri molds I have, but made those babies by hand.

I have had a couple of people comment they’d like to try bento, but are strapped for cash.  Hence, they can’t get a special box so they can’t do bento.  Nonsense, I say.  You almost certainly have a flat plastic container in your kitchen right now!  The most special thing I used in making it was special short grain rice and my “good” knives to cut up the food

This bento, which didn’t take forever to make, was made using a Rubbermaid^TM sandwich container.  I lined the bottom with lettuce, took sliced beef from the roast we had for dinner, made some onigiri, added some cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and sliced yellow pepper.

While not the coolest looking bento I’ve ever made, it’s a nice, basic bento that’s made from  what I have in the house.  In looking at it, I can see some grace notes I could have added still within the “no special equipment” caveat.  I could have put some sort of sesame seed decoration on the onigiri.  I could have cut the strawberries in special shapes.  But it was a speed bento that I wanted to be attractive and tasty, but not sweating the kawaii aspects.

Basically, if you get a nice 2-3 cup flat container, get a wide variety of food color, arrange it fairly nicely, and be sure to pack it tight, you’ve got a good bento!

The point of bento is, of course, to have a meal on the go.  I made these because the man of the house is going to be taking a very long car trip and I wanted him to have decent food without having to grab crap at a fuel-n-feed.  Yes, it’s a convenient hobby!  I made these bento specifically as finger-food so that he wouldn’t have to worry about a fork or chopsticks if he ate while driving.

When I do my bento class, I’ll probably discuss the convenience of travel bento in general.  If I take a train trip, I almost always take a bento along.  Many bento enthusiasts take them on airplanes (no liquidy food, of course, but what I did here would get by more than fine!) or family outings.  Picnic bento are a tradition in Japan –usually the family meal is packed in a large single box, though, rather than these little individual boxes.  When I took my children out to the pool not too long ago, we’d intended to make a day of it, so of course I made bento for all of us.  I find them fantastic for day trips as well as longer travel.

The real beauty and convenience of a bento won’t hit you until you hold one in your hand.  They’re small.  A bento large enough for my lunch is about as large on top as the palm of my hand and fits in my purse with the greatest of ease.  Those three bento, packed up with their lids on, fit in my backpack with room to spare for sunscreen, towels, a picnic blanket and cans of soda with no problem at all.  For a longer trip, you can make meal bento and snack bento that have great meals, but take up considerably less space than traditional sandwiches and chips.  It’s the compactness that makes them so delightfully convenient for travel.  The boxes I use fit inside each other when they’re done so that after you’ve eaten, they take up even less space.

Even though they’re small, it’s a tasty, satisfying, filling meal.  Part of the satisfaction comes in because a well-made bento has a variety of tastes in it.  Notice even in these completely non-classical bento there are little bits and tastes of lots of different foods.    When you eat a meal with that level of variety, you find your pleasure in the meal is increased as well as your level of satisfaction.

Of course, travel food has plenty of solutions and options, but I find the bento one of the better ones to save time, money and get better food than you’re likely to be able to get on the road.

I was going over some prices trying to decide if bento are really cheaper than bringing a more standard lunch.  It will quickly become obvious that a bento is much cheaper than going out for lunch, even getting fast food!

After talking with a friend of mine and doing some research for a class I want to do, I sat down with some of my old receipts and started pricing out bento I have actually made.  The prices involve the food alone.  I don’t count the cost of plates for dinner and if you’re buying hundreds of dollars in bento equipment, you have no-one but yourself to blame.   My stash cost a LOT less than that. Just sayin’.

So, on to the food.  A really cheap bento might cost me a buck.  I only did that once, and it wasn’t as balanced as I like.  The most expensive one I’ve actually made cost $1.76, and was using some pre-packaged food.  The average amount I usually spend on food for a bento is somewhere around $1.25.  While it’s not at the dollar a meal food stamp level, I’m fortunate enough not to have to go there right now.  I consider spending a buck and a quarter on a meal completely acceptable.  I was not necessarily going for the cheapest meal I could make in making these things, but just buying meat cheaply and not sweating anything otherwise.

It’s cheaper than a school lunch ($2.35 at my son’s school).

So what about the classic fruit and a sandwich?

It depends.   Right now, a bananna and peanut butter sandwhich is pricing out at about $0.73.  More expensive fruit, and a sandwich with lunch meat and veggies is going to run you closer to $1.75.  That’s still hardly bank-breaking, though close to my most expensive bento.  For an  entire working month, that bento is going to come out as ten dollars cheaper, if you’re bringing the apple and lunch meat sandwich with veggies.  Start throwing in chips and the price goes up a little.  I have no idea what chips cost.  I don’t buy them.

Leftovers?

That’s also going to depend on what you usually eat.  For my household, it would be comperable to my usual bento.

If you’re buying lunch, you’re probably spending at least five dollars a day doing it.  So, the takeaway here is that bringing your lunch is astronomically cheaper. Bento is just a fairly frugal hobby if you do it right.

I’m a Bad Mama.  The stuff in the top tier are some sort of pseudo-food pizza pocket thingies you make in the toaster oven.

However, since my son just completed the best school year of his life, topping it off with the best report card he’s ever gotten, I think he can have a pizza pocket lunch for his last day at school, don’t you?

Many of us in the bento maker community do get a bit self-congratulatory about our healthy lunches.  To be honest, a desire to eat healthily is a driving factor for many people who make bento in the US.  It doesn’t have to be.  You can put M&Ms in a bento (and I just realized I’m going to have to repack this lunch, as I’d promised my son a Lindt truffle in his lunch for tomorrow), you can put in fried processed food.  You can put anything into a bento.

But that’s the real beauty of bento making — its flexibility.  Sure, sure, for the most part people who make ’em try to give some attention to making sure that there are lots of colors in the veggies (ensuring a good nutritional variety), and generally don’t use a lot of pre-packaged stuff.  But you really could cut up a twinkie, and arrange it sushi-like in one of the tiers if your heart so desired.

In fact, I would totally make these Twinkie sushi as a snack bento if it were something Really Special, like a long trip, or… say trying to convert my little nephews to the joy of bento so they’ll whine for them and drive my brother crazy.

Though with my luck, and knowing  my seafood-loving little bro, they’re already into the real thing.

To make a point, I wanted to make a bento that:

A)     Did not use a specialty bento box.

B)      Only used what I had on hand in the house and,

C)      Did not use any specialty bento-making equipment.

So, basically, I tried to make a bento based on what one can reasonably find in a kitchen.  Cookie cutters that I’d owned 15 years were arbitrarily deemed okay, but vegetable cutters bought for bento purposes were not.  I decided that I wouldn’t even use an Onigiri mold.

The container is a 2C (550ml to those of you across the Pond) flat Rubbermaid container that I think was meant to be a sandwich container.  This is more or less a standard volume for any Japanese bento you’ll buy.

As it happened, I did not use any sort of cutters.  This was an interesting challenge, because I’m getting low on veggies and fruits, and I wanted to make it out of stuff I ordinarily had in the house.  I decided that for the sake of the experiment, I would not go grocery shopping for anything, but use what I had in the kitchen.  I really frowned over how to make the fishies when I realized that giving the impression of fishie was plenty.  Detail wasn’t important, only impression and contrast.

So, the rice is regular rice only with blue food coloring added to the water while cooking.  It tastes like rice.  The fishies are grape tomatoes.  The seaweed is lettuce, the rocks are stir-fried chicken breast and the orange things that I don’t know what they should represent are carrots.  I added some chopped cucumber for a little more green.

This is also a million times fancier than anything I ordinarily do and was still a bit off-the-cuff.  I’ve seen seascapes that would blow your mind.  It’s just that I didn’t want to spend more than 20 minutes on it, so this is what I did.  But notice that with a small time investment, you can make some incredibly cute bento without spending extra money on all the “cute” stuff.  The container was a flipping 2 cup sandwich style container, for heaven’s sake!

Notice that I didn’t use anything special for the wrap, either.  It’s just a bandana I had lying around, as well as the chopsticks I’ve had since forevah.

I commented I didn’t use any specialty bento gear and my son gave me an odd look and said, “I thought your bento gear was your brain.”

Why yes, I am proud of my son!  Even if he didn’t want this bento for his school lunch.

I was asked how to go about doing bento and wound up writing a reply that was far, far too long for the comments, so I’m posting it. Forgive me if this is something that bores you.

A bento is a portable (usually single serving) meal.  That’s really about it.  The word is Japanese and what I do is, indeed a Japanese Bento. Though, I often put a twist on it and make Western food if the Spirit moves me.  A classical Japanese bento is 4:3:2:1  or four parts rice or noodles, three parts protein, two parts veggies and one part sweet (fruit is dessert in Japan and on par with a cookie, from what I gather).

Japanese bento boxes are very small, but if you pack them according to the formula and pack them tightly then you’ve got about the right size lunch.

A really good basic bento site is Lunch in a Box.  The author likes to look at what she calls “food art”, but when she makes bento, she’s making lunch and isn’t going for more than a simply pleasing arrangement in the box for her son.  If you google Bento and click on the images link, you will see some of the most amazing food art.   I don’t do that, myself, either.  I just like the food to look pleasing, but I don’t do characters or stuff like that.

I also like Cooking Cute, though she’s got a little baby and isn’t updating much.  She’s much more into the food art and makes some cool stuff.

Then there’s Just Bento, which is a perfectly delightful site written by a woman who is actually Japanese, grew up with a working mother who made bento, but certainly didn’t make the fancy character bento!   Her onigiri tutorials are really good as are her cultural discussions about bento and Japanese life.

All of these sites focus more on the meal than the art, which is my personal preference.

The boxes are quite small, as you can see here.  I can cover the top of the average Japanese 2-tier bento box with my hand and I’ve small hands.  The boxes are only about six inches long.

You don’t have to buy the cute Japanese box, though.  Plenty of people just buy a shallow, flat container that has a lid that closes tightly and use that.  (For an adult woman, you want about a 600ml container.  My bento is 580ml, so that’s close).  I get the cute things because I like them and for no other reason.  The cloth came with the bento set you see there, but for other bento, I often use a large bandana as the furishoki (wrapping or tying cloth.  I use the cloth as a napkin, too).

Because they’re so small, they fit in a large purse just fine.  I take them with me as a travel meal, especially on trains, though  hear that if you’re careful what you pack, they’re good for airplanes, too.  This is a nod to the Japanese tradition of the Ekiben, or train station bento.

This is my lunch for today. Brown rice onigiri (rice balls) with a non-traditional filling of Indian mango chutney, red peppers, grape tomatoes, chicken, bits of broccoli, a couple of sliced strawberries and a couple of kumquats.  Ideally, you try to put a lot of different flavors in a bento, but you don’t have to.  This is a hobby for me, but let’s be real. It’s just lunch.    I do it in part to force myself to have at least one really balanced meal each day and make them for my family because it’s just as easy to do an assembly line of them for everyone to have a nice lunch, too.   There’s a lot to be said for a pretty, colorful meal.

Yet another Not an Asian Bento.  The muffin-looking things are mini-quiches made with refrigerator dough and an egg and cheese mixture in muffin cups.  The meat balls are just a couple of regular sausage patties cooked in balls instead.

I made this mostly because I had onigiri today and don’t like rice every single day.

Yeah, it’s weird for someone who is self-employed and working from home to make one of these babies, but I can tell you it’s a great thing to have in the middle of a busy day — this little capsule of specialness and savor.  It’s like tea in the good china, or wearing silk lounging clothes.  I am sure a Japanese person wouldn’t see it this way.  I mean, it’s just lunch, right?  Or maybe it’s such a way standard way of life it’s not thought about.  I don’t know.  Is anyone who reads this Japanese?

While I don’t actually know what the original concept behind it might have been, the interpretation I throw on it — that it’s this little spot in my day to delight all my senses, is one that does a lot of good to me, especially in times of stress or trouble.  I’m extraordinarily busy in my business.  While that is a good thing in terms of my bank account and my pleasure at career success, that’s one aspect of my life.  And Noël-san is a hedonist when all is said and done.  This gives me a sweet little indulgence that is still a positive and healthy one.    It makes something healthy feel decadent and luxurious.  That’s a combination that works well for me!