The chic online store ModCloth now carries several really cute bento boxes including some from Shinzi Katoh and Vivo bento boxes, but the one that interests me the most is their Take Your Picnic Tiffin.

This box is a two tier insulated lunch container that comes with a handy inner container that you can use to put rice in. The coolest part about it though, it that it comes with tiers that screw into each other.

I’ll need to get my hands on one of these to see how practical the screw tops and bottoms are. I’d also need to test these on the kids to see how they handle it. If it’s too much trouble for them, I’d just end up with a really disgusting, leaking bag of taken apart lids and jars with food all over it. The last thing I want is another “Oops, I forgot I left that there over the whole weekend” ant farm behind the front door.

The box also comes in red, which would make a really nice box for Valentine’s Day. It looks really small in the photos, but when you look at the product details, it says these things are 6″ in diameter. That leaves you with a pretty sizable lunch!

The Take Your Picnic Tiffin sells for $27.99.

When frying the meatballs, they had a pretty dark crust on some sides, but this basically gets “erased” by the soaking in the sauce so they look pretty good for bento.

I think this frog bento box is from J-List, but they’re out of stock. Amazon and AllThingsForSale sell an identical one with a different frog face.

In the bottom tier I put broccoli, meatballs, takuan, three grape tomatoes from Mr. Pikko’s growbed, and some eggplant pickles. In the other tier I padded the rice down flat and then sprinkled yukari powder with a heart stencil. It’s actually the first time I’ve used these stencils and I had a hard time finding them, haha! They came with my sets of charaben cutters.

A couple months back, I posted an Okinawan Sweet Pork bento and said I would be trying it again, only this time by cutting the meat into bite sized chunks. I finally got around to doing it this week and not only did the meat get fully flavored, but it was delectably soft and easy to eat, too. Here’s a new bento from this week that I did with the leftovers.

This magewappa is one of the best quality boxes I have. I’ve used it quite a few times and it still has that wonderful wood smell when you open the box. Sadly, this box isn’t available on J-List right now, which is where I got mine, but Bento & Co does have several in stock. Magewappa boxes should be looked at as an investment you can pass down to your children, which is one reason why they cost so much, they are made to last, handcrafted from cedars trees that have been grown and tended for a hundred years.

Inside this bento I have healthy rice (recipe here), leftover pork,broccoli, pickles, and one of Mr. Pikko’s grape tomatoes. This recipe below is from my Maui Cookbook.

A thin design, the box is quite small, but with three tiers, gives you ample room for packing enough food to satisfy you. It comes with a gorgeous carrier, a red elastic band, and chopsticks that conveniently help secure the boxes in place.

There aren’t individual covers for each tier; the box relies on the tier above it for cover and the top one has a little cover. I’d recommend washing your chopsticks in the bathroom before putting them back into the cover, otherwise you’ll end up with gross food bits inside there and I have no idea how you’d go about cleaning it.

Inside, one of the boxes has a food divider, but I find myself rarely using these and I have a graveyard drawer of them in my kitchen. I store them with my elastic bands and I’m sure every time I open the drawer to grab a band, the poor dividers get their hopes up for nothing. ^_^

The box is on the pricier side at $35, but with such a gorgeous and inventive design, it’s not hard to imagine that you’d look pretty darn cool taking this baby to work.

Sometimes though, people would put it in without any warning and I’d bite into it and be all grossed out. What a silly, picky eater I was to not like ume!

My brother works at the Sheraton Waikiki and he’s given us a stay now and then as gifts and at the little convenience shop downstairs they sell musubis, bread, snacks, etc. One time during our stay, I bought a musubi with purple speckles and it turned out to be an ume-flavored musubi and my goodness was it delicious.

Eventually through experimenting with purchases at Marukai, I found out that it’s called Yukari Seasoning. Essentially dried flakes of red perilla, or beefsteak, which is what is used to flavor ume. So while there is no plum in the seasoning, it tastes just like the pickled plum because this is what the plum is pickled with in the first place!

All you do is take hot rice and sprinkle the powder on. Mix it up really well and then form into a musubi!

In this photo I used two different brands of seasoning, with the one in front having little specks of ume in it and being more brightly purple. If you mix it up and then let it sit for a minute or so, I’ve found this helps bring the purple color out.

If you can find this seasoning at your local Asian market and you love ume flavor, definitely give this a try. It’s sooo yummy!

The sad part is, while we were eating, Buddy said, “Why do so many people have McDonalds?” I looked around and saw that he was right. There were quite a few Happy Meal bags. And it’s not like he was saying this because he envied them, it sounded like he was wondering why there weren’t many other lunches like ours, which I’d cooked that morning.

Since the tray of chicken was around $5 and the rice was probably like 50 cents, this meal cost about the same as a Happy Meal, except that it fed three of us. McDonalds is not cheap anymore and whenever we eat there for lunch it comes out to around $20, around the same as if we ate at Zippy’s or some other place.

I made us furikake fried chicken, which is very easy to make (recipe here) along with some plain triangle onigiri. It was a very simple lunch, nothing really elaborate, but the kids love this chicken and I had to slap a couple of little hands filching too much fried chicken in the morning. Buddy happily ate a lot of it.

Afterward, we went to his classroom to make a little gingerbread house, which was really cute.

For this chicken, I recommend the usual furikake, Nori Komi, but $8.67 for a bottle is actually ridiculously expensive so if you can find it at a local Asian market, go for it. Usually it goes on sale here for $2.50 a bottle. Sadly, Asian Food Grocer doesn’t carry it.

Hope you all had a great new year! Sadly, I return to work tomorrow and boy is my big fat lazy butt not looking forward to that at all… Sigh.

I used a lettuce leaf as a food divider for my pickled veggies, which included slices of cucumber kim chee and strips of takuan. On the left I stuck a little ume into my rice to round out the colors.

Since we have enough lettuce to keep us in salad for a few months, I have to do my part to help eat it so I packed a side salad to eat with my lunch. The tomato is bought from a store, but soon we’ll have our own tomatoes to eat as Mr. Pikko has some coming in soon. I made those croutons myself from the leftover bread from the Giant Jam Sandwich I made on Fictional Food. If you’re wondering why they’re so dark, it’s because I left them in the oven way too long, not realizing that cutting the bread up into really tiny pieces meant I should cut the time nearly in half… So now I have this huge ziploc bag of nearly burnt croutons.

Thankfully, they’re still edible, they just don’t taste fantastic. *sniff*

Christmas is this Sunday and I’m so ashamed that I have yet to do a single Christmas bento. This has definitely been an extremely lazy charaben year for me…

The boxes are available in four colors, pink, red, light purple, and green, each with a unique design. Although they’re on the pricier side at $27, they are on the bigger side with three tiers. Each tier is 4″ in diameter, which means you can pack quite a bit of food in it. It even looks like you could pack a snack in the top dome.

If you’d like to see all the individual boxes, you can view the gallery of images below:

[Show as slideshow]

I’ve been thinking about getting one for myself, but my conscious is telling me I better not since I already have so many bento boxes I’m not even using on a daily basis. Out of the four, I think I like the green one the best. Which is your favorite?

Buy this box at Bento&Co.

This bento is actually from like last week or earlier, that’s how behind I am in blogging. I think it’s a combination of cold weather, work, and a nonstop stream of Criminal Minds on the TiVo that have me so behind. Therefore, I blame Mr. Pikko since he’s the one that started watching the show in the first place. I’m currently 120 episodes behind… AUGH!

The meat in this lunch is some pieces of kalbi beef soaked in Sempio Kalbi Sauce (very yum!) and then cut into slices. I really should have cut them into strips and I did actually do this for another bento after this one that I’ll post soon. That was MUCH easier to eat than this!

Underneath the soboro eggs is fresh rice and the meat is surrounded by lettuce from the yard, which is growing totally out of control. On the side I have my usual trio of pickles along with some green beans and sliced crab stick. Overall a really tasty lunch and very easy to put together!

AllThingsforSale is hosting a big bento contest and voting is now open! All you have to do to cast a vote is go to their Facebook page (Like them!) and then go to their contest photoset for the Deco Food Contest and then Like the ones you want to vote for. There are 15 cute entries to choose from and one of them is mine, but I’m not going to tell you to vote for me. Just vote for the ones you think are the cutest!

Voting for this contest ends on December 8th!