What’s For Lunch?

I quickly realized that packed lunches in Japan are completely different from the lunches I remember as a child. The bento弁当 is such a big thing and nothing like the brown bag lunches I used to bring to school. My brown bag often consisted of either a baloney sandwich with one slice of baloney on buttered white bread (I hated mayonnaise back then and only started eating it after tasting Kewpie mayonnaise) or peanut butter and jelly sandwich and juice was usually either Capri Sun or Hi-c. Yeah, kinda sad compared to something like chicken soboro and scrambled egg over rice. Now that I have to start preparing lunches for me and my family (even the husband) I’m like “Ok, where do I begin?”. Seeing all the bento products in the market makes it look so fun to prepare. If only I just had more time to actually make it all cute and fancy like you see in magazines and tv shows. Now, our usual lunch when we go on outings is: onigiri お握りwith wakame 若布(which comes dried in the ready-to-mix-with-rice packets) for myself and Keiji, heated frozen chicken karaage　唐揚げ, hijiki　鹿尾菜 with beans, edamame　枝豆 and pickled cabbage. Apart from the cabbage everything is pretty much pre-made, so I feel like I’m cheating a bit. Sometimes I cook extra from the night before and pack that as bento. That’s what I usually do for my husband’s lunches. But when I see morning talk shows do segments on bento lunches, it appears that the whole bento lunch is prepared in the morning. And they prepare a menu like ginger pork, and two veggie sides all from scratch. Sure, I’d love for my husband and kids to open their bento boxes some day and say “Oooh wow what a nice lunch! Mommy is terrific!” but I think that might remain a dream!

I really wonder what kids’ bento really look like. Is my poor son going to eye his classmates’ panda head onigiri bento box with envy after looking at his own little box of left-overs? I’m all for making a colorful assortment of foods to make a well-rounded meal but I mean I’m not really going to spend every morning making characters out of rice and cutting out nori. Sure it does look fun to make creative bento lunches and so I do want to study the art of obento and find the creative and easy recipes out there to try…but I think it’ll probably be a once in a while thing. Anyhow, my main concern is that my family is well-fed and eating healthy… so I do want to try to cut out the pre-prepared foods as much as possible. What is everyone else eating for lunch?