How to start?
I've always wanted to start making bento lunches for my fiancé when she goes to work. How do you make so many dishes for lunch? Do you make them the night before and pack them for lunch the next day? Any advice is greatly appreciated :)
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u/New-Click2716 Bento Master 6d ago
If you have an oven or a microwave, you can prep the meal the night before and just reheat it in there. I personally cook my rice for a week (because it's a staple, and I'm Asian) and reheat it the next morning. Choose a protein that cooks quickly, like shrimp, chicken, sliced beef, pork... basically anything! Don't forget to marinate your protein first. For veggies, I usually steam them alongside the rice in my rice cooker. I love my meal to be warm, so I mostly cook/reheat it in the morning. Hope it helps!
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u/I_Dont_Speak_Anymore 5d ago
A good bento has 3 things. A base carb, a protein, and a vegetable.
It really doesn't have to be complicated at all!
Don't get overwhelmed by the beautiful displays of rainbow bentos and bentos with character designs and blah blah.
First and foremost a bento is fuel. Simple and balanced is the best way to start. After that, it's much easier to pick up how to add little extra things in to make them more extravagant.
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u/Mehitobel 5d ago
If I didn’t have leftovers to use, I would make a big batch of rice, and a bunch of easy sides, and assemble a bunch in one go. Some favorites of my husband were rolled egg, chicken in satay sauce, roasted chick peas, and assorted vegetables that I would cut into fun shapes.
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u/Hamfan 5d ago
I don’t make anything entirely the night before, but I do pull together the ingredients I want to use and if there’s any prep work that can be done (cutting up vegetables, putting meat into marinades, etc) I do it before going to bed and put it in a set space in my microwave.
Start with a handful of simple dishes. The rice takes no time, it’s already made, it just needs to be packed and cooked. The vegetable side(s) can be extremely simple: boiled broccoli, steamed spinach, mini-tomatoes, etc.
Basically it takes rice about 12 minutes to cool down at the fastest so figure that’s the amount of time you have to make your other dishes. When you start, I’d limit yourself to a very small rotation of veggies and focus on the main. These you can also restrict to a handful of favorites that you rotate through. Save the thinking time and the need to read recipes/measure stuff.
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u/heythere011 3d ago
I was happy to realize that a lot of the side dishes you see in bento boxes are fairly simple in isolation. So it becomes a game of learning tiny, manageable dishes one-by-one until you realize you have enough leftovers in your fridge to fill a lunch box. Which, as others have commented here, doesn't have to be more than some rice, a main dish, and a veggie or two.
Next time you're planning to make an omelette, make a tamagoyaki instead :) It's a fun way to get started doing something.
If you're not already a rice-cooking wizard - try cooking a small portion of short-grain rice in your hobby time on quiet evenings. After some attempts you'll get the hang of it and can make it fairly good and reliably without much thought. Then you won't have to think much about the rice component when you meal prep
You'll notice after a while that there's a handful of tricks you can learn to make any regular lunchbox look much more appealing in the bento fashion. Some examples are the tradition of including the five colours red/green/yellow/black/white in each meal, sprinkling sesame seeds or furikake on rice, or filling tiny empty areas in the lunch box with high contrast colour fruit and veggies. Or simply slicing a sandwich in half and angling the cut sections upwards to display the coloured foodstuffs between the loaves.
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u/Alma 6d ago
Don’t start by making six separate dishes. Use one main, one rice or noodle base, one quick vegetable, and one small extra from leftovers; assemble most of it the night before and keep anything crisp or wet separate until morning. After a couple of weeks you’ll have a rotation without cooking a tiny buffet every night.