Bento & Furoshiki

Our oldest daughter is a vegetarian and her school cafeteria menu is far from vegetarian friendly. To further complicate matters, she dislikes most sandwiches, leftovers, and anything that is too cold, soggy, warm, etc. Carbs are her go to food, and snacking is her preferred way to consume food. After years of uneaten pb&j sandwiches returned home in her lunch, I went searching for an answer. I found it at Lunch In A Box, a blog about the Japanese bento. In a bento, a variety of foods are aesthetically arranged and packaged to be eaten on the go. I realized that lunch doesn't need to contain a sandwich, or even a main dish, but can be made up of many small foods. Better yet, since this is exactly how Faith eats, why not feed her this way. Before school started last fall, I did more reading and research and was happy to find many bento boxes available on Amazon. We found this adorable owl bento there.

All bento boxes, it seems, have multiple compartments and sometimes multiple layers. This box has a bottom compartment, covered by a top compartment that has a sealing lid. The owl cover loosely fits on top. I neglected to take a picture of the open box, so here is the photo from Amazon.

The bottom layer is usually rice, pasta, or couscous; although, I would also like to try quinoa, soba noodles, barley, and rice noodles for variety. The top does not have separate compartments, so I often use muffin papers to separate carrot sticks, nuts, egg slices, dried fruit, cheese cubes, etc. Many bento boxes come with an elastic strap to hold the cover snug on the box (the cover is loose enough that it will easily fall off if not secured), but this box did not. We've used a variety of rubber bands, but none looked very pleasing, so I decided to make a furoshiki. When researching bento, I had stumbled on furoshiki, a Japanese wrapping cloth. The furoshiki serves not only to secure and wrap the box, but creates a handle for carrying as well. I found a scrap of old fabric I'd stashed away, and here is the result.

Off to school with her bento. It usually comes home empty!

I am glad I snapped these photos a couple weeks ago, because sadly the bento with it's furoshiki has gone missing. First it was, "it's in my backpack," then, "I left it in my locker," until she finally admitted, "I don't know where my bento is." If it doesn't turn up soon, she'll be replacing it because we're not going back to pb&j and bento in a Tupperware container just seems wrong!