I am curious if any of you read the article in this week's Stretcher about packing Japanese Obento lunches for grade schoolers? The author describes cutting little boy shape sandwiches with a cookie cutter , dressing with red pepper shorts and a cheese shirt, then adding a soccer ball fashioned from a hard boiled egg and seaweed strips. Alternately, one might make a little hatching chick out of a hard boiled egg, carefully fashioned with a carrot beak and sesame seed eyes, or caterpillars out of peas threaded on toothpicks.I find the very idea of pulling off such culinary  feats overwhelming.

In my experience, a typical grade schoolers bag lunch consists of a white bread sandwhich, fruit roll -up (typically the stand in for the entire fruit and vegetable food group), chips, crackers, cookies, and milk money. Or, one of the horrid lunchable type things - 'kid kibble'.

When packing my kids lunches, I generally heated up last night's soup or stew and packed in a pre heated stainless steel  thermos, cut some fruit into kid friendly size ( I admit to halving grapes to prevent choking looonng after such a thing was neccesary : ) added some cheese chunks and maybe a  tortilla roll up. Nobody ever had a problem with it. 

Would you attempt an Obento style lunch?

Sounds healthy and fun... and yes alot of work but you could do something like that if your child was not feeling good so they can have a smile when the box is opened. I'm sure you could figure out ways to create something similar without using seaweed (which I can hear kids saying "ewww").  

 I read it and thought it had some cute ideas. I would never have done it every day, though.

I make cute lunches but not quite that cute. A great site for bento style lunches is http://lunchinabox.net/ , it tells you how to do some of the fancy or traditional things. I post my lunches on one of my blogs http://www.notjustpeanutbutterandjelly.blogspot.com/ . I pack a lot of leftovers.

SortaFrugal,

I can see the appeal for kids of those lunches with their neat little containers, especially with the more traditional foods that you show in your blog! Delish: )

Fascinating, Ariana!  My dd22 loves this stuff and does her own boxes a few days a week.  She's my creative one, didn't get it from me.  Hers are truly beautiful when she's done.

I was thinking of getting her a new box or two for xmas - where could I buy some?  I'm thinking maybe World Market?  I'm looking for a retail store...Liz 

I checked out the blog...very nice! I think just having lunch in the compartments makes it look so much nicer. I pack similiar lunches but just put them in a bag for me or in insulated lunch bags for dh or a homestay student. Dh likes sandwiches so he has a sandwich normally with a yogurt, banana and something sweet. he has limited tastes.  I do the same for students...main dish, fruit, something sweet, and a juice.

Araina,

I've seen bubble tea on the menu in my favorite restaurant...just can't convince myself that tea with tapioca hunks could be  worth shelling out several bucks for : )