Balanced Meals Unbalanced

One of the hallmarks of maturity is the capacity to consider future consequences of present actions. Children, by definition, lack maturity. What does this have to do with bento? We all have days when there is not that much in the fridge to pack for lunch. We want every meal to be balanced, but the average school cafeteria is a minefield of bad food choices. If you send food your child doesn't like, there are lots of sympathetic friends who will offer alternatives. Can they resist? The fact that your child ate a thing for dinner last night and it's the only "balanced" food in the house is irrelevant if it ends up in the trash.

My philosophy about "what to pack when there's nothing to pack" is, stick to nutritious food you know they'll eat, and balance it over the course of the day. It's just one meal. Imagine this scenario: "Gee, my mom thoughtfully packed me a nutritious lunch, but Lilly says it looks like vomit. She keeps making retching noises. Lilly has kindly offered me half her peanut butter sandwich. However, the jelly may be manufactured using corn syrup, which will give me a tantrum later in the day, so I'll just thank her politely and stoically eat this vomit." If your child is like mine, she will take the proffered sandwich and you will be dealing with a miserable kid all afternoon.

It may seem like the only "real" food in the house is the bean soup from last night, but apples and peanut butter do make a wonderful meal. Seriously. Sometimes I have sent lunches made up mostly of fruit, or cut up vegetables with fake ranch dressing (see recipe below). Sure, I'll try to get some kind of protein and fat in there to help them feel full, but it can be nuts, or cheese, or a couple homemade cookies--even potato chips! Remember the secret weapon for balancing everything up: The after-school snack.

Most kids come home from school ravenous; it's a great time to have something ready that makes up for whatever was missing in their lunch (and if you're really lucky, you'll have time to shop before they get home). You can put cut up vegetables on the table. You can now heat up that bean soup from last night. The hummus that looks like vomit in the lunchroom becomes ambrosia after school. By packing food that is fun to eat and not getting too tied to the food pyramid, you help your child resist temptation at school and come home in a good mood for the rest of the day.

Fake Ranch Dressing

One blob of mayo
One blob of plain yogurt or kefir
a shake of garlic powder
a shake of Italian seasoning or poultry seasoning
a drip of light-colored vinegar or a squeeze of lemon
salt and pepper to taste

This is a great "emergency" dip. Be sure to put it in a container with a tight-fitting lid, or put it in a small lidded container inside a larger lidded container that holds the veggies. You can make a passable main course with a carrot and a stalk of celery, or a little broccoli, or a piece of cucumber, and that last pickle from the jar. If you have some potato chips or tortilla chips, those can be fun to dip, too. Tomorrow, go shopping!

Improvising!

Root salad, asparagus, turkey dog, broccoli, tomato; half-sour pickle, apple, mango gelatin

Time to improvise: Tie the opposite corners of the napkin together--the napkin is both the lunch "bag" and the tablecloth! The ties make a convenient handle.

Stack sandwich boxes together and secure with a rubber band. Put a fork or spoon under the rubber band, if you like.

La Primera left her lunch bag at school yesterday. That can be a stinky problem if I pack shrimp! Usually they keep their leftovers to eat in the car on the way home. If we have an event after school, I pack extra lunch just for that reason.

Today they have karate, so I needed to pack lots of food with no lunch bag. Here's how we rolled: Stack two sandwich boxes, secure with a rubber band, and tie it all up in a big napkin. You can get quite a lot of food into two sandwich boxes, even enough for a karate kid. Heck, you could pack three sandwich boxes if you have a teenager on the swim team. Just put a sandwich in the third sandwich box. (I've never tried it, but it might work! Hee hee!)

Gelatin is a great lunchbox staple, for several reasons. You can make a bunch of them in minutes and have them ready all week. Nutritionally, gelatin helps the body absorb protein and minerals, one reason why soup made with bone broth is so sustaining: When food is scanty, gelatin lets you get more from less. Some parents worry that their kids don't eat enough or don't eat enough "protein." Human breast milk contains 5% or less protein--there is at least that much protein in vegetables, in addition to all the vitamins, minerals and fiber. If you're worried, toss in a gelatin to assure yourself that your child is absorbing maximum nutrition from what they do eat. Vegans and dieters can make a nourishing gelatin with agar that is high in fiber and high in minerals, especially calcium and iron.

Make your gelatin firmer so it's more like Jigglers; that's your insurance that it won't get runny at room temperature. In today's lunch-in-a-napkin, I could not pack the gelatin separately, so I popped it out of the container (which was too tall to fit into the sandwich box) and slid it into a silicone muffin cup. The muffin cups are flexible, making it easy to tuck the gelatin into a corner of the sandwich box.

SUB NOTES: Special diet? No problem!

Vegans can omit the turkey dog or sub a tofu pup, and use agar in the gelatin. Yum! Or leave out the gelatin and put a little cup of peanut butter to go with the apples.

Specific Carbohydrate Diet? We followed this for a while: Make the root salad from celeriac, rutabagas, carrots and golden beets, or whatever legal roots you prefer. Dress with homemade mayo. Instead of hot dog, sub a boiled egg, a slice of cheese or a homemade sausage patty.

Hypertension: This lunch is perfect already! The turkey dog is low fat; go easy on the mayo in the salad.

Diabetic: If you are avoiding fruit juice, sub peanut butter to dip your apples in. You might need to sub something for the root salad. Here is an interesting recipe using green bananas to make a mock potato salad:
http://www.diabetesforum.com/diabetes-recipes/4138-faux-potato-salad.html

Secret Ingredient

What do you remember as your favorite foods of childhood? Was it your grandmother's turkey gravy, or the green beans you picked in your Uncle Paul's garden? Was it the pizza you had every Saturday after you played baseball? One of my favorite meals of childhood (there were many), was the homemade yogurt and Syrian bread I always had at Auntie Jeanne's; as soon as a kid walked in the door, they were proclaimed to be too skinny and told to help themselves.

Last time I wrote about the importance of having a special treat in every lunch, but the real special ingredient, the essential ingredient, is love for the person you cook for and love for the food you prepare. It comes through, and it doesn't have to be fancy, or even healthful. If you're a child and someone who adores you takes you to McDonald's as a special treat, I believe that meal will be more nourishing than a bowl of organic stir fry served by someone who resents having to cook for you.

Our goal with bento is not to kill ourselves making the most fancy lunch. The lunch you pack should make someone, even yourself, feel loved and cared for. Design your lunches around the joy of the cook as well as the joy of the diner. It can be a difficult dance at times finding foods that are packable, keep well, please a variety of diners, and are a pleasure to make. Know your limits. Mine is that I will not make more than one meal--that is to say, everyone gets the same thing! Or at least, variations of the same thing.

The point is, don't make yourself crazy. While you prepare the seared salmon or the peanut butter sandwich, think about how much you care about the person you are cooking for, and how lucky you are to have this moment to cook for them. Then take one extra second to lay the salmon neatly on the bed of noodles, or to cut the sandwich into perfect triangles, and off you go. This is your contribution to world peace.

Special Food for Special People, or, It's Only Good If They Eat It

Rice with sprinkles, teriyaki shrimp, deviled egg, marinated gigandes, cucumber, carrots and apple

Okay my special ones, here is an example of a Lock & Lock container with dividers. It has a leak-proof lid that snaps on. La Segunda can drop kick this thing across the elementary school gym, and as long as it doesn't break, her lunch items will remain separate. Cool, huh? This is one way I appease her--give her a lunch box that is "special."

This lunch is a good example of another strategy for helping a lunch that's different from everyone else's seem different in a good way: Include a small luxury item. Nothing says "don't you wish this was your lunch?" like a few shrimp. Seriously, a bag of frozen shrimp is a good investment when you only serve three at a time, and it's a great stash item. Also note the sprinkles on the rice--the sesame seeds add extra calcium and there are loads of minerals in the nori, but mainly my kids think it tastes good and makes them "cool."

The luxury item should be whatever the recipient of this box of edible love perceives as a treat: strawberries, or snap peas, or a tofu-dog cut to look like an octopus and served with catsup. The main thing to remember is that the people sitting next to your diner often influence their perception of what they are eating. Are their table mates envious, or are they grossed out? The corollary to the luxury item is NEVER pack anything that smells funny or looks like puke. Ever. It is irrelevant whether they loved it for dinner: If someone at their table says, "Eeewww!" that lunch is going in the trash, and your diner will be offered something from one of their friends' lunches. This leads to having a child come home in a funk from eating the wrong thing, or nothing at all. There are many temptations in the lunchroom, and an awesome bento makes that easier to handle.  (Case in point: See the deviled egg in the picture? My kids used to get teased because hard-boiled eggs "stink," so they threw them away. If the eggs are deviled, everyone at the table wants a piece. Go figure. And if they're deviled and shaped like a flower, well, that's a luxury item for sure!)

This lunch took about 10 minutes using stash food: leftover rice, frozen shrimp, pre-made teriyaki sauce, and fruits and veggies from the fridge. The egg was already made the night before as well. Just warm the rice and simmer shrimp in the sauce for about 3 minutes. While the rice and shrimp cool back to room temp, cut up the fruits and veggies, and assemble it all in the bento. Toss a couple cookies and a little container of applesauce into the lunch bag, and you're good to go.

A Blog About Mom-Style Bento

Salad, wings, cucumbers, apples, pasta salad. Little bear holds ranch dressing.

American Mom-style, that is. Since I find myself posting all my lunch creations on Facebook, this seemed like a good move. Hope you like it. This is a blog for people who like to bring delicious meals along with them, for whatever reason.

Bento is a Japanese-style portable meal, usually lunch. I first got interested when my kids had food restrictions, and we had to bring meals everywhere. If you can't eat wheat or corn syrup, then museum visits, car trips, plane rides, and even the daily school routine mean packing food to take with you.

Now, although we like Japanese food, we don't always pack it to take along. Bento, to me, is a mindset. I happen to like fresh food, not industrial food, so premade Gluten-Free breads and such don't appeal to me. We turned to cuisines that have used a minimum of wheat for thousands of years. I advise you to do the same, no  matter what your dietary restrictions are--look for delicious recipes that are not trying to be something else. A sandwich on gluten-free bread will always be lacking, but a well-made tamale will always delight.

There is a style of bento that emphasizes cuteness over nutrition. It includes processed cheese, food coloring, and other such gimmicks to achieve the perfect Hello-Kitty-Gets-Married or Spiderman-At-The-Beach lunchbox theme. If that is your goal, this is not the blog for you. The most important decorative element is also the quickest, cheapest, and most nutritious: an eye for color, texture and placement. I also use colorful picks, silicone muffin cups and egg molds, but these are reusable and they are also not necessary. Bento by Mom is all about walking out your front door with something nutritious and satisfying to eat in a landscape of bad food choices.

Welcome to good eating at home and abroad!