What is up with this bento thing?
When I was in high school in Portland, OR, the standard lunch was “bento,” which in Portland meant a big container of rice topped with a grilled chicken skewer, teriyaki sauce, and optional sriracha. It was filling and cheap and pretty good.
More recently, bento has come to mean a highly artistic Japanese-inspired lunch box, perhaps something with anime characters constructed from egg and sliced vegetables. If this is a child’s lunch, you slave over it all morning and your kid doesn’t eat it because (a) they don’t want to mess up the design, and (b) it doesn’t actually look *appetizing,* just artistic. This is fine, because your goal was to get it into a [bento Flickr pool](http://www.flickr.com/groups/bentoboxes/pool/) anyway.
The New York Times has [taken note](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/dining/09bento.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all) of the artsy bento phenomenon, which is evidence that the trend peaked a year ago:
> “I have to make her food look like something she recognizes,” said Ms. Chen, 42, a stay-at-home mother in San Leandro, Calif. “If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she’ll eat it.
Fun. And good riddance, because the kind of bento I want to talk about today is an ingenious solution to a very specific problem for a particular type of person.
Here’s the problem: you work in a profession where you must bring lunch from home, and there is no microwave to reheat food. I say “you,” because I don’t have this problem and don’t expect to anytime soon.
Obviously there’s more than one solution to this problem. There are sandwiches. But bento is the only solution that specifically appeals to me, the one where I can imagine myself actually looking forward to lunch under such lunch-hostile conditions.
I realized this while reading Kentaro Kobayashi’s book [Bento Love](http://www.amazon.com/dp/193428758X/?tag=mamstesgrubshack). These lunches are cold and they are fabulous. They’re intensely flavored but take pains to avoid congealed sauce or fat. There is always plenty of rice. I love rice.
There’s sesame beef with a salad of greens and young sardines, plus rice and shredded kelp. Cashew chicken with umeboshi-dressed asparagus. Lots of grilled shishito peppers. As I read through the book, I started fantasizing about working in an office. Better yet, a job site. I don’t know what kind of job, but definitely one with a site.
I showed Iris the photo of Chicken Sukiyaki Bento. It looks simple, but there is a lot of wisdom in this lunchbox. First, Kobayashi reckons that you will have a little of the beefy, reduced sauce left after sukiyaki night, but no meat. This is precisely my experience. So he cooks some dark-meat chicken in the leftover broth, some blanched shirataki noodles, some chrysanthemum greens and shimeji mushrooms. Garnish with pickled ginger, and you’re all set. I asked Iris if she’d like this in her lunch. “Sure! Just leave out the seaweed and the pickled ginger.” (I didn’t bother to explain that it was greens rather than seaweed, because to a five-year-old, same difference.)
I foresee a trip to Daiso for a bento box this week. Maybe two boxes.