What on Earth is a bento?

Lately I've been reading a lot of blogs with healthy recipes, and I kept hearing about bento lunches. I'd never heard of a bento, so I looked it up. A bento lunch is a small, traditional Japanese lunch served in small boxes. When they're for children, some moms go crazy and decorate all of the food to make it fun. I don't have a kid in school, but I thought that it might be neat to get a bento set, just for fun. So I went to ebay and bought a bento kit.

It was smaller than I thought, but very cute, what with the little bananas and all. But the saying printed on the case made me crack up. You can tell it was (badly) translated. I love it!

This translation is perfect for one of my favorite sites, Engrish Funny, which shows examples of bad translations around the world. I think I'm going to send it in. I love showing these examples to my students, especially when they know the language. That way they can tell me why it was mistranslated. It makes them feel really smart.

So here is my very first bento box lunch. I had a spinach salad with a hard boiled egg, red and yellow peppers, and croutons. I didn't want the pieces to get soggy, so I put tomatoes, cucumbers, and blueberries in the other box. I used those silicone baking cups to separate the ingredients. Best of all, my bento set came with chopsticks. I love eating with chopsticks, though I'm probably only as good with them as a Japanese five-year-old. For some reason, they make eating anything more interesting. They certainly make me more conscious of what I'm putting into my mouth.

I brought my bento lunch to summer school with me last week, and all of my students were fascinated with it. They said things like, "Wow, that looks really yummy!" And this from kids who often eat nothing but cheetos and chocolate milk. I thought it was great that they were interested in my healthy food, but I think the special packaging was a part of it.

Nick went crazy for the chopsticks. He walked all over the house with them. I think it might be a few years before he can eat with chopsticks, but I definitely want to try bento boxes for him when he goes to preschool and elementary school. I might even try the more complicated ones and make Nick's eggs into little animals.

Wordless Wednesday

Nick's First Lunch at a Japanese Restaurant

Yesterday Greg and I took Nick to visit his grandma up in Palatine. She treated us to lunch at her favorite sushi restaurant, Sushi Para. Nick has never eaten sushi before. And yes, I know better than to feed my baby raw fish. But there's no reason he can't eat cooked sushi rolls and tempura. So he did. And he liked it. I believe he had about as much sushi as I did, although some of it ended up on the floor. He also liked playing with the chopsticks.

Nick also liked flirting with the cute servers in kimonos. He kept grinning at them and then throwing his bottle, binky, and chopsticks on the floor. They inevitably came to pick things up for him, rinsed them off, and placed them on the table with a smile. Nick would then do it again. He knows just how to get a lady's attention.

At this point, I had been feeding Nick avocado and cucumber chunks with my chopsticks. He was staring at my hand, and then he tried using the chopsticks with one hand. No success yet, but not bad for an 11-month old. Plus, I'm very glad to know he likes sushi. He loved the rice but had trouble with the sticky seaweed holding it together. I had to slice it up very small. But every time I held a piece up to my mouth, he opened his. He was like, "Where's mine, Mommy?"