Bento 101: Assignment 2a

This week’s assignment was to take a regular meal that you’re planning to eat, and experiment with packing it into a container wisely. The point, I believe, is to show that you can fit a “normal” amount of food into a smaller container than you think, if you stack things in three dimensions.

Since it’s Sunday, normally I try to finish off leftovers we’ve accumulated during the week. So for lunch today, I took 4 leftover meatballs and cooked them in a can of diced tomatoes. Then I put a handful of homemade croutons (that were too hard to be tasty on salad) on top. To go with that are some celery sticks and some pieces of pineapple, and a slice of cherry pie.

Here’s what all that looked like on plates:

And here’s what it all looked like in 2 levels of my 3 level bento box stack:

Here are the lessons from this exercise, all things I already knew:

• My 3 level bento stack is too big for one person. I didn’t even use the 3rd box.
• The bento that’s divided into 3 sections - the one on the right with the veggies, fruit, and pie - is too short. The walls need to be higher. For some reason, it’s significantly shorter than the other two 2 levels. I say this because the celery and pineapple both stuck up above the walls, even though you can’t tell from this photo.
• The 2 levels that don’t have dividers aren’t very useful to me. They’re too big for what I consider a normal size dish. As you can see in the photo, the meatball and tomato dish I made only fills about half of it. (not to mention that the tomato juice would’ve leaked out if I’d taken this in my backpack to work with me)
• To pack really efficiently, I need to get better at cutting things more consistently. Since I wasn’t thinking ahead that I needed to pack all this in a bento, I cut the celery stalks the way I always do, pretty haphazardly. Therefore, two of the pieces were too long to fit properly into the little section that the other pieces fit in.