NEW!
In this entertaining reprint, author Sara Fujimura writes about how her time living in Japan took her from being queen of the plastic baggies to an avid creator of obento box lunches. Includes simple tips, how-tos, and menu suggestions for adding some obento-style "wow" to your family's lunches.
Reprinted from Mothering issue no. 155, May–June 2009. 10 pages
Obento Box Lunches is also included in the School Lunches Toolkit which includes 5 articles and many more resources!
Article Excerpt:
"So you’re sold on the “greenness” of obento lunches for your child, but just can’t see yourself spending hours making them. I asked my friend Minako, whose obento creations are worthy of a magazine spread, how she finds the time to create up to five different components of a lunch, each only about a tablespoon’s worth.
“Simple,” she said. “Leftovers.”
Of course! You can create great lunches without reinventing the wheel. I frequently work on lunch while I’m making dinner. Cutting up carrots for a dinner salad? Place a few to the side, and add a tiny container of ranch dressing for tomorrow’s lunch. Cook an extra chicken breast with dinner and whip up some chicken salad. Before you add sauce to the dinner pasta, scoop out a few spoonfuls, then add a little Italian dressing and some veggies for a quick pasta salad.
And feel free to cheat. For weeks that are crazier than usual, I buy healthy convenience foods: baby carrots, cherry tomatoes, cheese cubes, yogurt-covered raisins, cans of mandarin oranges and pineapple tidbits, etc. Even on superbusy nights, I can still make my “Handful Lunch”—handfuls of pretzels, cheese cubes, and slices of turkey pepperoni thrown into one box, a handful of blueberries into another—faster than I can go through a checkout line at the supermarket with a prepackaged “convenience” lunch."
