Intro to anna, and to bento!

Hello everyone! I'm anna, and I'm going to be blogging primarily about bento and other elements of Japanese cuisine and culture- recipes I make, Japanese candy I eat, that sort of thing. I'm a white girl living in the Pacific Northwest, which is just about the second-best place besides Asia to get into Asian cuisine (in some cases Australia is better, IMO), plus I'm an internet junkie, so Japanese food is a natural focus. Some of my favorite things about Japanese food are bento, rice, sushi, and teriyaki. Certainly you know rice, sushi and teriyaki, but you might be a bit less familiar with bento. (If you already know about it, feel free to skip this post- but check the links throughout- they're cool stuff!)

弁当 (that's bento!) is the traditional box lunch of Japan. While other countries were figuring out the concept of サンド イッチ (sandoicchi), Japanese cooks were making true works of art with 漬物 (pickled vegetables), protein (especially fish), and most important of all, ご飯 (rice). These are usually packed in a ratio of 4 parts rice to 2 parts protein to 1 part other ingredients. However, modern guidelines often shoot for a bit less rice (the also easy to remember 3:2:1 ratio), and you can adjust depending on what you're going for (more carbs and protein for a growing kid, more vegetables for a dieter) or what's in season.

For more backstory on bento, check out the Wikipedia article, Just Bento, Lunch in a Box, or just Google "bento." There's a lot of history I've skipped already, and many types of bento I won't be addressing in this post, and it's all really interesting!

Modern day bentos don't need to be nearly as complicated as they were in the olden days: one big 御握り (onigiri, or rice ball) can be your lunch! So can a sandwich: there's awesome collapsable boxes made for them. As long as you shoot for a good variety of foods and colors (lots of colors means lots of tasty nutrition!) you're set!

However, there are still a lot of crazy complicated bentos out there, and not just in the traditional style. キャラ弁 (kyaraben), or character bento, recreate popular characters such Bob the Builder, Pikachu, the Nekobasu, and Anpanman. (Since I don't do much in this style- like, nothing at all- I might every now and then link to a cool example of the style.)

My lunches generally have a grain or a pulse (rice and lentils are my big two), a small bit of dairy (wrapped cheese or cream cheese), fruit or vegetable or both (mango blueberry with honey, lime, and ginger is MY fruit salad), and something protein like- generally fake crab or a boiled egg. Or I'll do wraps: whole wheat tortilla, soft cheese, tomato, and basil wraps are my favorite. I try to have at least one Japanese element in every meal, to keep my on my toes. That doesn't always happen: the lunch I made the day I started blog-writing has no distinctly Japanese food: it was curry lentils, wheat tortilla, and a lettuce, basil, tomato, and onion salad.

(Then I wondered why I'd misplaced my delicious grape Pinky, a Japanese "mint" candy, because my breath smelled like alliums and the artificial grape would have knocked it out. More on Pinky later!)

For more on my bentos, head over to my other blog, Bentos and Booze, where an expanded version of this post, complete with an inventory of my bento boxes, will be available by the end of the day (midnight Pacific time) and probably sooner than that.

Vocabulary (click on highlighted kanji for stroke order from Kanji-a-Day.com):
弁当 (bento) box lunch
サンド イッチ (sandoicchi) sandwich
漬物 (tsukemono) pickled vegetables
ご飯 (gohan) rice
御握り (onigiri) rice ball