Bento Challenge

A few weeks ago The Boy and I were "ooooh" and "aaahh"-ing over the gazillions of seriously cute and impressive Japanese inspired Bento lunch boxes on Flickr.

 Woot!Team Awesome

Tokyo Bunnie

Our Entropy

Oneinchpunch

I soon became quite smitten with the idea of trying some out - however this idea was quickly dismissed due to the fact that I am rather completely incapable of getting out of bed any more than 30 minutes before I need to be out the door and on my way to work.  I do love my bed and the 5-10 minutes extra 'snooze' time is so delicious, right? But I am sometimes stressed out and rush around like a headless chook in those wee hours of the morning, resulting in breakfast getting eaten (and sometimes spilled) in the car.

I would like a reason to get up earlier in the morning - just to see what it feels like! So ... I have set myself a challenge, a Bento Challenge, much to The Boy's delight (you see it's unheard of that I make his lunch, I am a terrible housewife I know!), and will be blogging my daily creations.

Bento Challenge Rules (I love rules!)

1) Create a Bento lunch for The Boy and myself for 10 working days
2) Wake up at 6:30am (I normally arise at 7). This should give me ~30 minutes of prep/cooking time. I think it will be enough, depending on the difficulty of the lunch.
3) Each Bento lunch must have some cute factor, and no I will not be attempting to re-create Yoshi up there
4) Begin Mon 9th and end Fri 20th August

I'm giving myself a week to get prepared as I have a monster list of ingredients to collect, some special Bento making equipment to purchase, a book to buy from Borders tomorrow, pluuuus I sorta need to learn how to cook sticky Japanese short grain rice. crap.

I might add that the whole early morning thing might quash my present high hopes of this challenge working at all ... I will however try super hard to prevent a situation from occurring where The Boy ends up with a Vegemite sandwich wrapped in Glad Wrap with a smiley faced rabbit written on top with a Sharpie. 


I' will be posting my finds during the week :)


ps: If you have made Bento before I would love any suggestions or recipes.