Picture of the Day: Bento

Most of my coworkers make and bring thier own bento, or box lunch, to school. It's hard to make so many small dishes when you are living alone (only cooking for one) because you often end up with too much food or it gets expensive, however, so I generally buy my lunch.

My school also provides a pretty decent lunch. I can go to the cafeteria (which opens at 11:00, an hour and a half before the the students have lunch) and get a cheap bowl of ramen or Japanese curry (both about ￥２５０ and come with tea and hot miso soup) or the daily special, which usually consists of some kind of meat (beef, pork or chicken) and rice. The other option is ordering a bento, or box lunch, which is made in our caf, changes each day and costs about ￥450.

To order a bento, I just put my name on a list by 10:00 am each day and the bento is magically delivered to the copy room at 11:00:
The bentos arrive in these blue baskets. The towel is supposed to keep the heat in and they label each box with our names. We also get soy sauce, another kind of sauce & disposible chopsticks to use.

It's a faux pax to put sauce directly on your rice in Japan, but I usually pour it on the little dishes in the other compartments, and then eat them with a bit of rice, following the example of my coworkers.

My bento is usually pretty easy to find because my name is written in the katakana alphabet (ブレンダ), rather than in kanji . It's also not bad just having to write down your name and getting hot, homemade food each day... we even got a little packet of beans for the Setsubun holiday yesterday:


I think elementary school teachers eat with their students in the classroom and junior high school students only have one lunch/bento option, so I believe this type of bento option might only be available to high school staff. I've heard of some schools ordering their lunches from other companies, too... but I sort of like that our bentos are made here. They're usually pretty good!