Obentou - a mistery food for us, normal life for japanese people

The obentou (in japanese 弁当) is what we would translate as packed food, but in asian cultures, and specially Japan, it has become not just part of the culture, but also has reached quite an important status.

And that's because nowadays, how's your packed lunch reflects your family/social life, and you can tell a lot just by being able to see "how good is someone's bentou". In school it may have a lot of meaning around your family status, and when you work it usually reflects your marital life.

We wouldn't, in most cases, take all this myths surrounding bentou so seriously, but it still an important point in Japan.

A bentou normally consists of:
- White rice or substitute (if not rice it may be noodles, but it will be rice 80% of the time)
- Main dish, normally fish or meat
- 2-3 side dishes
- Decoration, a lot of decoration. Most of the time decoration is also made with food, so it may be included in some of the other groups.
- Depending on how complete you want your bentou to be, you can also plan desserts.

This topic can really go really really long, so for today we'll just show some pictures. Theses ones are taken from the japanese site http://www.yoppi.ne.jp , I hope I can detail you guys some of them afterwards! :)

This first bentou is soccer-themed. As you can see, there are flags and rice balls that mimic real soccer objects. This bentou would consist of rice, mini-cheese hamburguers, a little bit of vegetables and so, and a little bit of fruit .. This is what children get from their mums from time to time :P---

This would be more like a traditional-adult type of bentou. The one that you typically would bring to work. You can clearly see the different parts, rice, meat (tonkatsu in this case), and side dishes with a little bit of fruit. Quite a normal one! :)

Ok, the last one I'm showing today is from the blog http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/kasumin_yorosiku which has a quite huge amount of bentou recipes and photos, this girl sure is great! It is quite difficult to see this kind of staff in real life, but if you have the time you can try to make something similar. Ingredients are not very difficult to find, rice, vegetables, meat balls and some colouring natural ingredients for getting your cooked rice some colour! And some weed also for the faces! Gotta try this some time, mmm....

See ya' all in next post!