Everything I know about bento

brightning

could fit in a bento box. But several people asked in a previous post, so I'll give you all that I have! And again, I really know nothing.

In my (rudimentary, American) understanding, bento is making meals that are tightly packed into containers. There's a wide variety of food and textures, colors, etc. Sometimes they're cute. Food is often separated by natural things (lettuce) or put in silicone/paper cupcake liners.

I'm really interested in making this type of lunch for my DD but so far we don't have any bento boxes. Any small container will work - I believe they're better when they're not perfectly square but have more rounded edges, and are about 5" wide and 2" tall.

I haven't seen any bento boxes in stores. They are available online but I haven't coughed up the money for any yet. In a few weeks I'm going OOT to a Japanese store that sells them, so we'll definitely be stocking up.

These are all of my bento bookmarks:

https://www.aibento.net/
https://susanyuen.wordpress.com/where-to-buy-bento-supplies/
https://www.from-japan-with-love.com/kitchen-items.html
https://littlefoodjunction.blogspot.com/
https://www.pcgirl.net/blog/?cat=4
https://www.anotherlunch.com/
https://wendolonia.com/blog/ (this one has a FAQ section, and one on packing bento lunches for preschoolers)
https://apocketfullofbuttons.blogspot.com/
https://susanyuen.wordpress.com/
https://www.annathered.com/ (the first post on this one is 20 easy bentos for kids)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/30578157@N07/sets/72157609275854562/
https://bentolunch.blogspot.com/

.

lite-bright

Thanks for posting this! Some of your posts on here have gotten me curious and I've been googling bento stuff. Sooo cute and yummy looking!

I know PBK sells bento boxes (not sure if it's in-store or just online) but they don't seem to get very good reviews.

I did see that besides natural barriers, some of the boxes I've looked at come with various-sized tupperware-type boxes inside to hold different foods and help keep flavors separate. One things I didn't even think about, but was mentioned in some of the reviews of various bento boxes, was whether a kid (3-5 year olds) could get all the compartments open without help. I'm definitely going to pay attention to that if/when I make purchases. 

Can't wait to check out the links! 

momofolivia

i also spent some time researching BB.  We ended up using just some regular tupperware holders.  The standard BB is just too large - I think for a 2-3 year old, it is only supposed to hold 400ml of food. 

We bought the silicon cupcake holders for the separations, and it worked very well.

The only problem we ran into is that we needed a lunch box for DD's school and the ones we found didn't hold the boxes we bought.  So we are back to the little plastic snack cups (ziploc disposables i think).

teg

I just saw kiddie bento boxes at Whole Foods today--they had the regular size and a smaller set (I'm assuming for younger kids). Prices were $25/$13, I believe.

We got one of these for DS: https://www.goodbyn.com/goodbyn/default.aspx