Did I mention that I spent a year in Japan three years ago?

It’s well nigh impossible to live in Japan for any period of time without developing at least a little bit of nostalgia for bento.  Bento is simply a boxed lunch, but is usually arranged in the box to be food for the eye as well as the body.  You can buy them at 7-11s if you are a busy office executive. If you are ★really★ lucky, however, you have a Japanese mom who gets up at 5am every morning to pack you a lunch before school.  7-11 doesn’t do hot dog octopi.

These pictures are NOT of *my* cute little lunches– they are pictures posted on the Bento Challenge community at Live Journal.  Every week the mod posts a new theme and the members make their lunch look like the theme.  This week’s theme is “Under the Sea,” and the lunches people are posting are so cute I HAD to blog about them.  The neat thing about American bento lunches is that they contain food such as chili, bologna sandwiches, or Indian blintz.  They don’t always have a bed of rice, and the ingredients are often creative ways of reusing leftovers from last night’s dinner.  Americans may be starting to care more about making the food look good than even the Japanese do!
When I studied abroad in Tokyo for a year, I was living in a hotel room and couldn’t do any cooking beyond heating water to pour over Cup Noodle. So I mainly lived off of convenience store bento.  Imagine, 7-11 actually sells whole meals that aren’t that bad for you.  They usually consist of a bed of rice, a meat patty, maybe some tiny meatballs, a cup of noodles, a few steamed vegetables, and then a compartment of either pickled vegetables or a seaweed salad.  It’s decent food, but I lost a lot of weight due to the small portions, and the lesser quality of the vegetables and meat as compared to buying fresh ingredients and cooking for myself.  And that wasn’t good, as I’m already underweight.

The above is a typical convenience store bento, found on The Google. I lived off this stuff for a year.

And this is a typical homemade bento I found on someone’s blog.  I think those are probably hardboiled quail eggs in the lower right compartment.  7-11 put those in their bento too.  I definitely ate them, but was never 100 percent sure of exactly what they were.  They were chewy and good though!

There was a small shop near my school that made bento to sell to business people who worked in our neighborhood.  These lunches were superior to the 7-11 ones because they had freshly cooked tenpura and a whole baby octopus.  The tenpura was always good, especially the fried sweet potato slices! YUM!  But the octopus had more variable quality.  One day, my friend Anna said she wasn’t sure she wanted to eat her octopus.  The color was more of a dull puce than the usual high saturation of reddish purple.  I told her, “That is one sad little octopus,” But I was intrigued because I’d never seen a whole one before, just small chunks of larger octopi used in sushi.  I asked if she was going to eat it, and Anna said I could have it if I wanted it.  I can’t believe I ate the whooooole sad little octopus!  Anna asked me how it tasted, and the only response that seemed to do it justice was,
“It tastes sad.”

+

+

= sad little octopus!

(A Googled dramatization of the Sad Little Octopus.)

When I came back to the States, I wanted to try packing my own bento.  I found Cooking Cute to be a great resource for recipes and packing strategies. (Even though the lady who writes it is a Hawaiian mom living in on the West Coast, so she sometimes uses stuff from Trader Joes or Asian groceries that I don’t have access to.)  I tried and love the recipes for Spam musubi and tri-colored donburi.  However, I had to be stealthy with the Spam, because my roommate would flip out if I tried to fry Spam while he was in the house.  But really! Spam tastes good fried with teriyaki sauce! I swear! I wouldn’t eat it any other way.  And it DOES NOT make the kitchen smell bad if you don’t overcook it.

  (This was found on The Google.  It would be easy to make and I really wanna try it sometime.  The rolls on the right are just tuna and egg sandwiches.)

I don’t have much reason to pack my lunch today, but I like looking at and reading about other people’s lunches.  When I have kids someday I want to do the Japanese mom thing at least on special occasions like the first day of school or their birthday.