Bento Craze

Some of you may know, some may not, but I LOVE the Japanese Culture! (well, all cultures actually, but I'm on a bento kick, along with my cooking kick). Inspired by my favorite anime movie as a kid, Logan and I adopted our wonderful chinchilla. If you have not seen My Neighbor Totoro, I suggest you look into it, and if you don't, I will probably be doing a review of it at sometime telling you about it, hahaha.

Anyways, before I started this blog I had not been able to sleep, so I was researching random things. My search for the Magic Bullet I would like stemmed from a friend "liking" on facebook, to looking up recipes, to remembering how much I want a Silicone kitchen set, to finding a bento set made with removable silicone inserts. And back to how Logan wanted to buy me a Totoro Bento set. (link to set I want now) I did not jump at it at the time because Truly, I did not know what bento was. So with a new topic in mind, I googled and wiki-ed and followed random links and learned a lot! I LOVE Bentos!

Bento means "convenience" and is the east's version of a brown bagged lunch, only with a really fancy bag and cute sandwiches and things that are so complicated (yet simple) that they are a competition and piece of pride to have your child go to school with the best Mom prepared bento.

In an experimental recipe I have not posted,  I made Salmon for the first time by myself in the oven at a friend's house.I tried making it a "bento bowl" with the hickory smoked baked salmon on a bed of rice with some crisp veggies on the side of the bowl, I tried to display artfully. I wish I had a picture, I actually quite liked it! The friend is a native Alaskan, grew up in a small village, and actually said the salmon was better than the way she prepares! I was proud!

So, when you look at what I am following, that is the story behind the Bento craze! I do hope that some of my future posts of recipes will be Bento in nature, for us to take to work and such forth. To do this though, I need some bento sets, and besides paying expensive money I don't have I found a site that is having a giveaway!

I want to make a shout out to BentoBloggy! who is holding a giveaway for a cute > Back-to-school Bento Basket!< How adorable are those things? Hope I win!