Noriko Noriko - Simply Bento: a Complete Course in Preparing Beautiful Box Lunch Ideas for Healthy Portable Portions

We want to feed our families with safe meals. We want to make sure they have enough nutrition. We know what is in the food. Beyond the food itself, we want to save money for our families futures, to put away more for college and retirement funds, by not eating out all the time. But we are also busy with work and chores, and, yes, tired and lazy some days too! Bento makes it easy to get our kids the nutrition they need without using half the day to do it. We have become used to planning for bento as part of our everyday cooking.

While making dinner, for example, we always make extra so there is enough for the next days lunch, or we add a few extra steps, such as blanching and cutting vegetables the night before for a bento lunch the next day. Well share these tips and tricks throughout the book with you. Not sure if you can successfully incorporate bento into your busy life? We have an ultimate form of bento in Japan called osechi, which is the New Year feast. Osechi consists of layered boxes filled with many small dishes, and there are many tedious steps for making each dish. The work of making all the osechi dishes is so overwhelming that these days, more people are buying this feast rather than preparing it themselves. So how do you preserve a rich tradition such as osechi without the hours of tedious steps? The secret is that you really dont have to make it perfectly.

We once read in a cooking magazine that you can learn to make osechi by preparing only one homemade dish and then buying the rest of the dishes elsewhere. That same idea can apply for daily bento-making too. If a bento recipe seems like too much work, start with one of our . Eventually, youll feel comfortable enough to try two side dishes, and soon youll be making complete bento meals in no time. Then one day, perhaps, youll be skilled enough to prepare an osechi on your own!

We discovered that we were both originally from the Kansai region of Japan; Noriko grew up in Osaka, and Yuko in nearby Kyoto. We moved to America in the early nineties and studied here. Noriko became a pastry chef while Yuko worked in software in Silicon Valley. We talked about kids, we talked about school, but mostly we talked about food. We are both avid home cooks and make Japanese food, American food, sweets, and, of course, bento at home. We realized that so many Americans liked Japanese food but found it intimidating to cook at home.

We knew everyone could do it with some help, and so when our kids became older and we had a little more time to ourselves, we decided to make videos on how to make Japanese food at home with ease. This is how our website, Japanese Cooking 101 (japanesecooking101.com), was born. On the site, we try to show simpler ways of making your favorite Japanese foods with easy-to-find ingredients. We also introduce authentic dishes that Japanese families eat in their homes (besides sushi and tempura), so you can add a few new, delicious favorites to your dinner selections. But we had another big ambition when we started our website: we wanted to pass the Japanese food culture on to our children. Our kids were born in America, and being second generation, they have not yet fully appreciated the wealth of their Japanese background.