Bento Blog...

Since the Bentos were sort of taking over this blog, I found a new home for them over at Bento-riffic. You can feel free to follow Ellie's lunch adventures over there, and I'll get back to what I was supposed to be doing over here. =D

I buy bento! =D

A while back I discovered this website from another bento blog. Cheap, cute bento things. When I went to the website, it looked like perhaps they had some cute cheap bento things, but they were sold out of everything I wanted. Sigh. Well, today Jaime emailed me and said she found this website. So I clicked through and drooled and fell in love and then realized that this is the new and improved website I'd checked out before. So guess what?

I bought bento!!!

I'm so excited. It'll take about 10 days for my order to get here, and when it does I'm going to play! Bento boxes for me and Ellie, rice molds, egg molds, sauce containers, food separaters, food picks.... ah, it will be glorious!

My BENTO Wishlist....

At the very top of my bento wishlist is...

... I want a Daiso Japan store in Bozeman, MT!! I don't really think that will happen since the only two states that have them are Washington and California, but it's still at the top of my wishlist. ;D On the plus side, I learned that there's a Daiso in Bellingham, WA and that's right near my friend Tam, so maybe it is time for a trip out that way again after all! =D She hasn't met Ellie yet and we haven't met her kids, so it would be fun to go and hang out with them again! And if I get my bento fix in the same trip... that would be even better!

... but on to what I would want if we had a Daiso locally...


Bento boxes! (A couple "real" bento boxes would be nice =D)



Food dividers! (both the traditional AND the cute. =D)


Rice molds!

Rice boxes! (though rice molds would suffice if I could only have one of the two...)


Food picks! (the cuter the better!)


and last but not least.... sauce containers!!! (aren't these the cutest things you've ever seen???)

Sigh... I really wish we had a Daiso nearby.... This could SO be my new craft.

My first foray into Charaben!

I am a firm believer in food presentation. I believe that food should be cute. =D And so, I love bento. I follow two bento blogs, and have been inspired by them both. Wendolonia makes preschool bentos for her son, which is where I first got the idea for making bentos for Eliana. Healthy variety, cute color... What's not to love for a wee one, right? The other bento blog I've been following is Anna the Red. I've posted one of her bentos here before. She makes beautiful, amazing bentos, and really does charaben quite well. Charaben is the art of making the food in your bento look like characters.

Well, this morning I was reading Anna the Red and Ellie came over to the computer and said, "Oooh! Bento!" when she saw the picture. This particular one was a Calvin and Hobbes charaben and it just warmed my heart to know that Ellie responded so warmly to bento. Strange, I know. But it did, so I decided that we would make a Little Einsteins charaben this morning, just for her.

Now, most of the charaben I have seen is made with traditional rice and seaweed. But one thing I have learned from Wendy of Wendolonia is that you neeed to fill kids' bentos with foods they will eat. Not necessarily unhealthy foods, but foods that they like. Otherwise your bento, no matter how cute, will not get eaten. So today's bento base is macaroni and cheese (with hot dog chunks, chopped up from what was leftover after I made June's body). There is a celery and broccoli tree, and Rocket is made from an apple, with a soy cheese headlight. June's body is cut from a hot dog, and her face is made of ham. Her hair, shoes, and dress are cut from fruit leather, as are her pupils and earings. Her mouth is ketchup, and the whites of her eyes are mayonnaise. I realized after Ellie had already started eating it that I'd forgotten June's headband, and I think that would have made her look a little more like, well, June. But it's too late now, I guess, and I'm not altogether unhappy with how it turned out. After all, it IS only my first foray into charaben!

Bento gone WILD!

This is NOT my bento. But it is too awesome not to share! Seriously... is this the cutest food or what?!



I can only aspire to make lunches this cute for Eliana someday. (Really, in a perfect world, we would read together every afternoon and focus on one book a week and I would make her a cute bento like this to celebrate whatever book we were reading. It would be great! I love the perfect world in my head...)

Bentos!!

I have been taking pictures of bentos when I make them, but I just realized I haven't posted them here. I'm having a lot of fun with them, even though I'm only making one every other week or so. I'm finding that bentos are good not only for going on picnics and such when a packed lunch is sort of requisite, but also a great idea when I'm not sure what we'll be doing for lunch, or where, such as on days I'm running errands. They're really easy to pack up and take with us so that Ellie can eat them in the car as we're driving around or take into the store and munch on while I'm shopping. It keeps her content and keeps us from feeding her a lot of fast food. Granted, the fast food I would buy is from Costco or Target in the form of a soft pretzel or hot dog, but it's still healthier and cheaper to have her filled up on a bento full of turkey hot dogs, apples, craisins, and cheese. Plus, I just like hearing her little excited voice tell me, "Look, Mommy! There are little bears in my bento!" (She did that this week and I decided that it was definitely worth the extra minute it took to cut her cheese tortilla into little bear shapes.) So... here are some bentos from the past couple months...

Sometimes I make bentos for the both of us and package them together in a napkin for easy transportation. Here are the individual bentos...

This is mine. It has Greek salad with dressing, a fruit leather barrier, and mac and cheese with feta.

This is Ellie's. It's has mac and cheese, hot dogs, cucumbers with ranch dip, fruit leather, and something across the bottom (and in the little cup under the fruit leather) that I can't remember.

And like the rest, I tie them up in a napkin and tie in my silverware. I just tucked Ellie's fork into her bento since it fit.

This is mine. Can you tell that I like using individually wrapped fruit leathers as barriers between the food?

This is Ellie's from the same day. These were back in August. When I cut out the little heart shapes from the cheese I used the leftover cheese bits and rolled them into the turkey rolls. That way the "ugly" part of the food was still used and my bento stayed cute! After all, bentos are about both form AND function....

I'm sure I have more bento pictures somewhere, but I suppose I'll share them at a later date. I don't do it every day, and I'm not the most proficient at bento packing, but I am really enjoying it! I'm hoping to prepare bentos at least once a week in the coming months, on days that we have playgroup at the museum. That way I have lunch ready for her to eat at the museum (if she's hungry then) or while I am running errands after playgroup. It made errand running SO MUCH SMOOTHER this week, so I hope I continue to do it!

New Bento Box!

Well, relatively new. Within the last month. Which is newer than my last post on this blog. Sorry about that.... life has been pretty busy since we started everything up again this fall.

But Ellie has a new bento box! Or bento carrier, really, but I love it! Here it is in all its glory....

Tiny. Compact. and PINK!

And it has a place for utensils in the lid! How great is that?? It's not really a bento box, but rather a craft tote from Joanns, but it works perfectly for us. And I got it on sale, for 50% off. Can't beat that, really.

And because no bento post is complete without a picture of, well, actual bentos....

There you go.

Bento Box Size...

Well, after a little searching on Lunch in a Box, I figured out about how big my bento box should be. She has a handy calculator on there, and using that this is what I figured out:

I am in my 20's, so I should start with a 600 ml box for calculation purposes. I am shorter than average, so I should subtract 100 ml, and I have a low activity level, so I subtract another 100 ml. (I think... either way I am trying to lose weight, so a smaller box isn't a bad thing.) So my bento box should be about 400 ml.

So I just went and checked the box I used yesterday to pack my lunch and Ellie's lunch together and... it's like 1600 ml. HUGE. And not huge at the same time. But that explains why we only ate about half the food in it and felt plenty full. Weird. So that must be the family size box. Good to know.

A 400 ml. box is small. Very small, by my normal lunch packing standards. But if I could fit a whole lunch in that teeny tiny box, it would fit in my purse. That would be convenient! So I'll try again sometime soon. Maybe packing my lunch alone this time to see if I can do it. Right now I'm off to sort through the Tupperware and see what containers I already have that will fit the bill. How fun!

My First Bento!!

Today I had the opportunity to make my first bento, so I did!! Ellie and I were going to spend some time at the splash park with friends, so I decided to pack a lunch for us to share. Perfect time to try my hand at this new technique, right? So here it is... my very first bento:

I think my container might be a little big, but I don't really know how big a bento box is supposed to be. And maybe, if I weren't calorie counting and trying to lose weight, this might be the right size box, but it seemed like it was a little deep. Anyway, it worked well, and I'll use it again for bento-ing when Ellie and I need to take lunch somewhere. I'll also let her eat the leftovers for snack this afternoon. Here's what I packed into it...

1. Strawberries. These are actually placed all the way across the box and the silicone cup is sitting on a layer of them. Then I filled in around the silicone cup with more strawberries to finish off that section. We shared the strawberries.

2. Macaroni and Cheese. This is leftover from yesterday, so I just threw it in a silicone cup for Ellie to eat. I made it a smiley face by adding hot dog eyes and a fruit leather mouth. I just cut off pieces of the hot dog and fruit leather that are also in the box.

3. Fruit Leather. I used the fruit leather as a barrier between the strawberries and the proteins. I think the proteins might have been just fine against the strawberries, but it was an easy place to put the leather and I wanted to use it for the smile anyway. =D

4. String Cheese. This is at the bottom of the box, right next to the fruit leather. It's still in its wrapper, so I wasn't worried about it getting contaminated.

5. Turkey Hot Dog. This is right on top of the cheese and under the turkey rolls. It's in once piece, except for the two slices I cut off to make the smiley face eyes. This is Ellie's protein.

6. Turkey Deli Meat Rolls. Instead of rolling each of the slices up individually, I just rolled all 5 together and figured I'd roll them separately when it came time to eat. It was laziness. =D This is my lunch protein, so I figured I'd just make do. It worked pretty well.

7. No Sugar Added Blackberry Jam. This is in the little pink Tupperware container at the top of the picture. It's my dipping sauce for the turkey rolls. Weird, but it's low calorie and good. =D

8. Carrots. We were pretty much out of vegetables that I could take along, but I found a little bag of carrots in the fridge, so they came with us at the last minute. They help form a barrier between the proteins (which are cold and lunchmeaty, so they're sort of wet) and the dry goldfish crackers.

9. Goldfish Crackers. These are sort of a filler for the box and snack food, and the carb portion of the box. I put them on the opposite side of the box from the macaroni to help balance out the colors a little. These are Ellie's snack for this afternoon, too, since she didn't really eat them with lunch.

10. Ranch Dressing. I put the ranch in another Tupperware container (the taller, old style midge containers) for dipping carrots. Ellie loves to dip her carrots, so this was *her* container.

I admit, this was more food than Ellie and I needed for lunch. I was sort of shocked by that, because if I'd packed everything into separate containers like I normally do, it would take a lunch box at least twice the size of the bento box to fit it all in. But this was extremely compact and held plenty of food. And I only had a couple lids to keep track of (the lid for my bento box fits right underneath it, so that is nice) instead of 6 or so! I opened it up and held it on my lap while we were at the park and I didn't have to worry about ziplock bags blowing away or gathering together all the containers every time I wanted to stand up. AND the bento box fit nicely into my bag (which also held a towel, change of clothes, sunscreen, nalgene bottle, sippy cup, and diapers) so I only had to carry one bag and my purse (oh, and my chair) to the park and I was set for a couple hours! Easy to do in one trip!

Something else I added to my bento box was a cloth napkin... I layed it out diagonally, folded in two opposing points, and tied the other two points around the box to create a handle. It was cute in its presentation, functional as a handle, and meant that I had a cloth napkin with me while I was eating - something I was glad to have since I forgot a fork for myself and at strawberry quarters with my fingers! I remembered a fork for Ellie (for the mac and cheese) and just tucked that inside the box on top of the carrots. Here's what the finished, packed up bento box looked like:

So there you have it. My first foray into the land of bento. I like it.

Bento Mania!

I was recently introduced to the idea of bento and immediately fell for them, mostly based on cute-factor. Really, really adorable lunches. And then I started thinking about why I would want to take the time to pack a bento. Are there any real benefits that align with my priorities (other than cuteness, ha ha!) and how I want to spend my time?

Turns out there are. See, one of the things that I hold important is stewardship. Not just of money, though I think we are to be good stewards of money as well. I think it is important to be good stewards of EVERYTHING we are given - our time, our minds, our bodies, our children, our earth... And bento fits right in with at least a couple of those, so I think it's worth a look.

As for being stewards of our bodies and our children, there is a lot to be said for the food we eat and the food we use to nourish our children. Bento encourages a colorful, balanced meal consisting of the 5 food groups. By packing your food in a bento box, you just WANT to incorporate different fruits and vegetables, because, let's face it... a bento box containing a single pbj sandwich just isn't as fun to look at as sandwiches cut into stars surrounded by blueberries and a banana moon. When it comes to adult bento, it's easier to control portion sizes and balanced nutrition when you pack it all into a single box. You can easily see what proportions you have of carbs, fruits, veggies, and protein. Bento encourages balance and moderation.

Because bento boxes are designed to be stuffed full of food (so the food doesn't slosh around and mix with other foods) it is done in a way that uses "neutral" foods (like celery and carrots) to form a barrier between other foods. You might not want your blueberries to juice up your sandwich bread, but place a few carrots as a barrier between them and you've got a problem solved! AND you've got grains, protein (sandwich filling), fruit and vegetables all right there! In a traditional lunch sack, you'd have each item (sandwich, blueberries, carrots) in its own ziplock bag, which just get thrown away. Even if you go for the reusable approach, you'd have 3 separate containers, all in a lunch bag. This way you just have everything in one container, which serves as its own lunch bag. Fewer things to wash (less water used) and fewer things to throw away!

Really it's a great idea. I can't believe I hadn't heard of it until now, but today I picked up a box to use as a bento box, and some silicone baking cups to keep wet foods off of other foods. I still have a few years before I have to send a lunch with Ellie, so maybe I'll have time to perfect the art. In the meantime, I'm excited to give it a try for our weekly picnic lunches after the hikes. It sounds so... fun! =D