Tag Archives: lunches

As moms I think we’re all looking for the easiest and healthiest way to create lunches for our kiddos. One such way that has become my new obsession is Bento boxes.

Have you heard of them?

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According to Wikipedia, “Bento is a  single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento holds rice, fish or meat, with pickled or cooked vegetables, usually in a box-shaped container.”

Now, obviously, if you look at that picture or read the description, you’re going to think I’m crazy and that there is no way Emmett would eat that. I completely agree, however, there is a huge “movement” going on where parents are making kid-friendly bento boxes. It allows the parents to be super creative and offer their children a huge variety of foods, which sets kids up to be good eaters as they get older.

For the past few weeks I’ve been on the hunt for a bento that would work for Emmett and that I could buy locally so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to ship. Well as luck would have it, last weekend Seamus needed to go to Target to get a container to keep his salad dressing in, so we were looking around the container aisle. Lo and behold, there was a display for the Rubbermaid LunchBlox. I knew within a second of looking at them, that they’d be perfect.

The set we purchased came with one large box, that has two separate compartments and then 2 small 3 oz containers and 2 longer containers as well as a “blue ice” ice pack. The best part? They all click in together, like so…

I love this because so often you make soup or maybe a stir-fry with a delicious sauce and if the container it is in tips over, it spills everywhere. Since everything clicks one to another, you just stack them and if carried flat, nothing will spill. One word of warning, they are not airtight, liquids can seep out but despite that, I am absolutely in love with these!

Here’s one of the lunches I made for Emmett this past week:

Grill chicken, golden raisins, mini-graham crackers and a fruit salad with strawberries, blueberries and nectarines

The pink and blue cupcake holders are silicon Wilton Reusable Baking cups, that I purchased off of Amazon. They work great for keeping smaller items away from the bigger things, but they also keep the wet from the dry or the savory away from the sweet. They work really well and if you’re going to get into making bento lunches, I would absolutely recommend getting some of these.

I want to also provide you with another great resource for purchasing bento boxes as well as some fantastic lunch ideas. Laptop Lunches is a site dedicated to the art of bento lunches. On their site you will find a plethora of different types of boxes and believe me, Emmett will be getting one of those soon, but more importantly, they have an entire page dedicated to photos of different bento lunches. Pretty much endless possibilities, because the sky is the limit!

Have you heard of bento boxes? What is the first bento lunch you’re going to make?

**This is not a sponsored post, it was fulled purely by my love of bento**