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I lost the entire comment I was posting. Crap. erm. Anyway. It's all about what sorts of food you want to eat. Most of my bentos tend to be leftovers and bits and bobs I have in my fridge.

Laptop lunches are fine for bentos. I'd suggest roaming through your local Asian grocery store for other lunch containers. I'd suggest a good thermos for soups. If you have any Korean grocery stores near you, you might want to try out their prepared side dishes.

If you like zucchini, then this recipe might work for you. I pulled it from koreanrecipes.org for my own bento today.

Simmered Squash
1/2 squash or about 6 oz
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon soy sauce
1/4 teaspoon sesame seeds for garnish

Quarter the squash in length wise, slice in 1/4 inch thick.

In a small pan, add all ingredients and mix.Put squash, cover the lid.Bring to a boil on a medium high heat, reduce to low heat, cook for another minute or so.Transfer to a dish, garnish with sesame seeds.

"Black bean salad, guacamole, chips, yogurt
Humus, carrot chips, pepper strips, sliced cuke, yogurt, pita bread
Dal Mahkani, basmati rice, raita"

Spew!!!

My god woman, don't they have Spam where you come from?

@tusti - I've been reading serious eats for years now, but your post caused me to actually register so that I could tell you how freakin' rude I think you are. Yo, why the dick-like tude? I thought the post was pretty helpful.

Onto the subject at hand - I use lock & lock containers almost exclusively. They're not nearly as cute as bento boxes but they don't leak ever, which makes up for it.

Chisai is right on the money with everything she said. I've been making Bento lunches 5 days a week for about 8 months now and I often use leftovers and have been able to incorporate many more fruits and veggies into my husbands lunches than he could ever get eating out everyday. It's great for portion control, using up leftovers and being creative with food.

@tusti - I'm not sure what you meant by dissing someone's choice of lunch but if it makes you feel better my husband likes Spam and sometimes I put it in his Bento lunches for fun.

I'd never heard of bento boxes until this thread. very pretty, and a nice idea. Don't you have to be careful of how long moist ingredients sit in the lacquered boxes?

Hi Listener - If you live in new york, a good place to buy bento stuff is pearl river mart. I just went there this weekend, and they had a ton of great bento boxes. But honestly any good container that is the size you want it to be will work. The mL in the box correspond roughly to the number of calories, so 500 mL ~ 500 calories, 1L ~ 1000 calories, and so on. 1 cup ~240 mL, so if you fill a measuring cup with water and pour into your container until it's full, you can figure out how much your container holds. To be perfectly honest, the tupperware you have on hand is most likely fine - no need to buy a bento box, though the lock-and-seal are great because they don't leak. (side note: I was amazed at how little 500 mL actually corresponds to.) If you really want to buy a bento, amazon, Ebay as noted above, and also www.ILoveObento.com are good sources.

Anyway, for bento recipes, I like justhungry.com and justbento.com. I've had a lot of success with the recipes from there, including the vegan kidney bean curry, which I think you could make in a microwave, and also the microwave omelet - throw in some herbs, cheese, vegetables - whatever you have.
However, you don't have to do asian food - I've seen people use a lot of different things in their bento - hamburger helper, chicken sandwiches, tabbouleh, or even lentil salad (which unfortunately I have never found a recipe for this that I wanted to eat more than once)
If you have a freezer, making and freezing some rice if you have a rice cooker (you can also use the ricecooker to steam vegetables) would help.
you can also make soups in the rice cooker, which we did a lot when I was a kid.
I don't cook a lot with my microwave, but the omelet and bean curry are two things I can think of offhand that could be cooked in there, so I would check justbento.com for more recipes. Also, didn't mark bittman do a post on bitten about microwave cooking? There was an eggplant recipe he made I wanted to try. Hope this helps!

I use the Lock&Lock containers for my daughter when I make her a bento style lunch. I have yet to include rice in any of the meals that I send her to school with.

Typically, a bento lunch for her will be cold popcorn chicken, olives, sliced fruit, vegetable sticks, and some dipping sauce. She loves the idea of the individual portions of each. We have also done things like salmon salad, chicken salad. This week, she will have some smoked brisket and maybe some smoked chicken. As the weather gets colder, I will include a thermos of soup, or something else warm for her.

You don't need to stick to a traditional Japanese style bento lunch, the concept is a meal made of individual items.

As far as what to pack the containers into, we just picked up a LLBean lunch box to match her new school backpack.

The thing to remember is to enjoy it, make it fun for yourself.

Alan

@lemonfair - Yes!! What's fun and interesting is the variety of colors and textures you can add. We do eat with our eyes and if you're looking at something relatively pretty, you're more inclined to want to eat it! I have a few real Bento boxes (but not the nice lacquer ones) but Lock N Lock is great too. Plus there are all of the food picks to use and small silicone cupcake molds to hold food. Kids love them too. I plan to make them for my daughter when she's older. I tell my husband I'm just practicing on him for now. But the main thing is put in there what you like to eat!

@lemonfair - almost all of the bento's on jbox are plastic, the first one that came up was lacquer though, which is pretty unusable for me also.

I think the thing that's so great about bento is the feel of it. It always seems kind of special. Even if you had it for dinner last night, in the box, in it's own little tray, it takes on a new life.

Your cooking facilities are not best but you still do it. Canned beans are your friends as long as they're not mushy. I pretty much buy Goya exclusively since I think they have the best texture.

My Very Basic Black Bean Salad:
1 16 oz can Goya black beans, rinsed thoroughly and drained
1 cup corn - fresh or frozen (fresh is best, but frozen is perfectly acceptable - stay away from canned)
1/2 cup chopped red onion
3 plum tomatoes, seeded, diced
chopped seeded jalapeno to taste. I use a couple of them.
a handful of minced cilantro (if you don't like cilantro I guess you could do without, though it does add a lot to the dish.)
salt to taste
lime juice to taste. I like a good amount of it.

Toss all together. Done. It keeps in the fridge for a few days. You can add all sorts of stuff to it. I often throw in avocado, various colors of bell peppers, etc.

I'm not sure if this is helpful to you, but I'm a fellow Bento amateur--here are the Bentos I've been making for my girlfriend to take for lunch these past couple weeks. So far, I've found it to be a lot of work, but also very rewarding--which is really saying something considering I'm not getting to eat this stuff! :) Anyway, I hope this helps you get excited for making your own Bento lunches!

Weekly Bento Round-Up #1

Weekly Bento Round-Up #2

arm1970: What beautiful lunch boxes! What a lot of time and care this must take. Hubby knows you love him. These are the best pictures I've seen, looking around. Thanks.

@maxcriden: I couldn't open either of your pages. get a 404 error.

@lemonfair: Thanks for the heads-up! My HTML-fu is weak.

Here are the direct links:

http://beachcitycooking.blogspot.com/2009/08/weekly-bento-round-up-1.html

http://beachcitycooking.blogspot.com/2009/09/weekly-bento-round-up-2.html

arm1970: I would friend you in a heartbeat - in fact it was almost enough to make me sign up - but I've resisted facebook so far. I've got a lot of friends who are on, who keep telling me all the old mutual friends they've reconnected with. But I already spend too much time online. One of these days though... I've bookmarked your album, and I will indeed friend you if/when I sign up.

great links everyone

sorry to be a hater here, but what is the big deal about bentos or bento-style, specifically for the original poster? aside from the people who go crazy with the sculpting like Anna the Red [http://www.annathered.com/] I don't see how this is so crazy different from packing leftovers or doing multiple courses in multiple containers, unless you are just used to eating sandwiches or hot dogs for lunch. to me, bentos are just like any other meal except packed up. to address listener's original caveats about portion control, grocery and kitchen appliances, and dorm cooking, none of that is specific to bentos and you could do just as well looking up dorm-room-cooking (grab items from the salad bars and steam them with your microwave for instance, or better yet, get a rice cooker! you don't have to cook rice in it and it can make all kinds of food [http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/445483/]). I just don't understand how it is seen as something so different when it's just a plain old box lunch.