tiny boxes

Preschool starts on Monday, so I've been thinking about boxed lunches. For both of us, really, since I'll be commuting this year. Although Dr. S will eat a wide variety of foods, we're still struggle on the vegetable front so I've decided to try presenting lunches as bento boxes to see if cute equals edible.

I spent some time on Flickr last night looking at other people's Bento photos for inspiration. Wow, they can get elaborate! LuckySundae is making some adorable bento. Like this one. Or this one:



Do check out her blog and flickr photos to see more.

Bento is all about the little boxes, which we already had. But after looking at all that cuteness I thought we needed a few additional accessories to really make the food fun, so we stopped at the Japanese grocery today for little rice molds and a set of vegetable cutters that make cute flower shapes.



I can't possibly do the three-hour prep time thing for really elaborate bento, but I think I can do small portions of a wide variety of colorful items and just generally make the presentation a little more exciting. Tomorrow's lunch has star-shaped sticky rice, broccoli, apple sauce, flower-shaped beets and cucumbers, and a few other little goodies. I'll try to snap a photo if our first-day-of-school morning isn't too chaotic.

And speaking of tiny boxes, Todd and I spent last weekend watching a marathon three seasons of Weeds. Brilliant, dark humor if you haven't seen it. I love how, for each episode, a different artist sings the theme "Little Boxes" song. And I quickly took note that we're living in a little box, ourselves. It's just stacked on top of lots of other little boxes.

Maybe I'll start thinking of our apartment as a tiny bento box.