Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Bento Box Lunches

I pack myself a lunch daily, so I am familiar with the old "throw a PB&J or some leftovers in the lunch bag and call it a day" routine. But, after looking at some bento lunch websites, I'm inspired to start making cuter and more varied lunches.

There are, of course, the super-cute bento lunches that are more art form than lunch item. See Exhibit A:
Sakurako Kitsa
And Exhibit B:
Sakurako Kitsa
What I'm talking about, however, is something more like this:



There are all kinds of really cute accessories to make eating lunch more fun. If you have kids, I bet they'd get excited about this. If you're a big kid yourself, you'll probably like it too.





































This website has a lot of good tips about how to make speedy bento lunches (say, under 15 minutes of prep time), so it's a reasonable feat to attempt.

This site is also interesting, but the lunches are a little more cutesy, and therefore probably too time consuming for my schedule. But there's lots of cute ideas going on to check out.

I recently visited my favorite Japanese store in LA, Marukai, and found some fun little egg molds.

You take a (still hot) hard-boiled egg, peel it, and plop it in the mold. Then you squish it closed, and pop it in the fridge or into a bowl of ice water to cool. When it's cold, you have an egg shaped like a star or a bear or whatever mold shape you have. I haven't tried mine out yet, but I'm excited to! I'll report back on how it goes! If you want your own set, you can usually find them on Amazon or a Japanese supply website.

Here's an example of what someone made with the bunny egg mold:

There's just something fun about eating a star shaped egg in a cute little bento lunch box with tiny little fruits and veggies tucked around it that a ziploc bag  full of the same food doesn't provide.