Bento making doesn’t have to be an elaborate process. You can make a quick bento with most anything you have in your food cupboard. Here are some things to consider when making bentos:

- Add color: The more variety of colors in your food, the healthier it will be and the more appetizing it will look (food-dyed processed foods don’t count!) Think along the lines of fruit and veggies. Sweet potatoes, tomatoes, grapes, sliced oranges, etc!

- Miniature meals: Bentos don’t always have to consist entirely of miniature Japanese meals.  You can turn your bento in any miniature meal if you combine carbs, vegetables/fruits, protein, and a snack for dessert. When thinking like this, it’s easy to come up with “menus.”

- Play around with the food pyramid: If you’re getting sick of making deli meat sandwiches, boil eggs for protein instead. Or for carbs, make pasta salad ahead of time so that you’ll have it to go when you make your lunch.  You can also refer to this list if you’re stumped.

- Re-arrange the contents of the bento: The cool part about bentos is that the contents are often easy to move around, so that you can allot more room for one food or divide it up equally.  Be creative with it!

- Heat things up:  If you are lucky enough to have access to a microwave for lunch, the possibilities are endless for your bento.  You can pack leftovers, rice, pasta, meat, anything!  Don’t think that just because you are bringing lunch, it has to be cold all the time.  Also, if you carry a thermos, bring soup on occasion during colder weather.

- Sanitize: There’s a reason why everything served on a plane is sealed.  Take extra care when storing foods that will spoil (such as egg-based products) and make sure they are chilled properly before lunch.  If you have a bento with various compartments, use Saran wrap (or my favorite, Glad Press n’ Seal) to avoid contamination between them.

- Fun with condiments: Now you know why you saved all those ketchup and mustard packets from restaurants.  And if you don’t have any seasoning, more than likely you can just grab some salt and pepper packets from the nearest fast food place.

- Be motivated: If you prepare things ahead of time (like boiled eggs, pasta salad, leftovers, etc.) then throwing together a bento is a cinch.  But it’s easy to lose motivation to make your own lunch if you don’t clean out the contents as soon as possible.  Think of an empty, clean bento container as an empty canvas. If you come home and leave cleaning the container for later, you might forget to even pack a lunch at all.  I usually pack my lunch the day before because my mornings are busy.

- Condense: It’s very obvious that food in America is not packaged with an individual meal in mind. To get around this, take note of the serving size of whatever it is that you intend to pack.  For example, Teddy Grahams “2 Go” is still too big for a bento–not to mention it holds 3 servings.  One serving is about 24 pieces, so now you have a better idea of how much to pack, and it will fit into a very small compartment of a bento.  You can pack almost anything if you just condense it so that it will fit into your bento, although it might take some getting used to.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas or inspiration on making bentos.  If you have any tips or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

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Foxes | food, health | Sunday, August 19th, 2007 | Trackback