Brown Bag a Bento Lunch

By Sandy Hu

When Steve and I go on vacation, we love to poke around in local farmers’ markets and explore supermarkets to check out what the locals are eating. Our suitcases on the return home are always bulging with cans and boxes of transportable food, a few new cookbooks and some food magazines . We try to make our vacation last a little longer by replicating some of the dishes we enjoyed.

During our first trip to Japan in May, we fell in love with o-bento lunches (Japanese box lunches, artfully arranged in partitioned containers).We can buy them easily from Japanese markets in San Francisco of course, but in Japan, we could purchase them everywhere and in great variety. Whether from the fabulous food emporia found in the basement of every high-end department store, to train station kiosks and even the 7-11, o-bento lunches were uniformly tasty.

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A “Bento” Mentality

By Marilyn Hunter

Let’s face it, making lunch for two boys five days a week can be pure drudgery, for us and for them. The risk is feeding our kids the same uninspired foods, day after day after day, thus creating uninspired eaters.

So in our house, we’ve adopted a “bento mentality.” We went to a Japanese hardware store and bought reusable bento lunch boxes with snap-on lids. They’re great for portion control, waste reduction and safe eating adventures.

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