Day One - My First Try

With school beginning this week, and being determined to have my daughter be the 'girl with the coolest lunches' I decided that I would do a bento box three times per week. Sounds ambitious right? It's good to have goals ;)

Hilary and I sat down and made a list of things she liked. The list went:

Fruit: apples, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, grapes, pears, and melons
Vegetables: carrots, broccoli, celery, cucumbers, and peppers
Meats: Meatballs (how in the world am I going to incorporate this?), chicken fingers (cold??), ham, turkey, and kielbasa
Breads: bagels, muffins, tortillas, pitas, pizza, and sandwiches (the last two of which are not technically just a bread but it needed to go somewhere on the list)
Dairy: hard boiled eggs, cheese and cheese strings, and yogurt
The extras were: smoothies, teddy grahams, granola bars, fruit snacks, cookies, and goldfish

Great. I have a starting point!

After much viewing of other creative mom's bento box pictures (I highly recommend http://bentolunch.blogspot.com/ - it gave me so many ideas), I came up with my first bento box creation. VOILA!



Not too bad for a first try I think! Hilary had a cinnamon-raisin bagel with strawberry cream cheese, a babybel cheese, ham deli meat on a toothpick (time to buy some fancy-shmancy supplies), cut up strawberry and grapes, animal crackers and fruit snacks.

I suppose I could've filled up the spaces a bit more to make it 'prettier' but Hilary has a pretty small appetite to begin with, so I thought I was pushing my luck as it was. But I can happily report that Hilary returned home with everything eaten but a few grapes...which I suspect she doesn't really care for all that much anyway. How stoked was I that my daughter finally ate a lunch that contains all of the major food groups? Really stoked!! And...this is that part that made my day (that's right, I really am a geek)...after school Hilary was raving about the bento box, in particular the cinnamon-raisin bagel with strawberry cream cheese ("mom, I didn't even know you bought that!"), and she said "mom, I really like my bento box. Can you surprise me with stuff in it all the time?"

YAY!! A bento school day lunch success :D

The beginning

I can't even tell you how many mornings I woke up in a panicky state and thought "ugghhh...what am I going to make Hilary for her school lunch today?!" And this wasn't always for lack of planning. I'd try to prep menu plans ahead of time, but kept coming to the same roadblock...this is boring and Hilary is always having the same thing for lunch! I would even try asking my daughter, "so what kinds of things do the other kids bring for lunch?", but, as those of us who have kids know, this was as effective as asking my 3rd grader, "what did you learn at school today?", to which the answer is almost inevitably "Nothing" or "I don't know."

Then one day, just when I was beginning to think it would be ham or turkey sandwiches everyday for the next 9 or so years, the answer came to me in the form of a magazine article in a parenting magazine in my doctor's office.......Bento Boxes!!

It somewhat pains me to think about how geeky I obviously am that I was so excited about this that I sneakily ripped the page out of the magazine to bring home with me later. I called my husband to rave to him how excited I was about this new concept....but he didn't quite share my enthusiasm. Next I tried my 19 year old sister when I got home, and she gave me the look that says "get a life". Finally I called my mom who thought the idea was cool (and wished that she had heard about it when she faced the same lunch time dillema some 10 years ago), and explained that I needed to share this info with other moms, rather than my husband and teenage sister, as they would likely share my enthusiasm. And how right she was (moms really do know everything)! My mom friends all thought it was a great and creative concept too! And didn't I feel cool knowing that I was the first mom in my crew to hear about this!!

Now that I had the idea, I needed the materials. So off I went on a bento box seeking adventure. Seeing as how I live in Vancouver BC, I didn't think it would be all that difficult. After a few google searches, I came up with a store on Robson Street called Konbiniya. I hit up this store only to be disappointed...they did not have bento box supplies, only yummy looking pre-made bento boxes. I had just finished guzzling my Starbucks tall non-fat chai tea latte and wasn't feeling all that hungry, so I continued on my way. I stood outside the store and used my handy lil' blackberry to try another google search. Next stop, was the Korean H-Mart on the corner of Robson and Seymore. After wandering up and down the aisles looking aimlesslessly at products with names that I couldn't even pronounce let alone understand, I found a bento box section. Success!! And so I bought my daughter's first bento box. It even came with a little bag :)