Bento Boxes: Japanese Meals on the Go | Naomi Kijima

Bento Boxes: Japanese Meals on the Go | Naomi Kijima | Simple, elegant recipes and great pictures

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Bento Boxes: Japan...

	Bento Boxes: Japanese Meals on the Go Naomi Kijima Japan Publications Trading, 2001 - 64 pages average customer review:based on 44 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Best Bento book there is

Actually one of two available at all - so not exactly stiff competition but still even if there were a dozen books on Bento, this would be the definitive one.

There are some odd Japanese ingredients that will need substitutes and you may not want to sprinkle whitebait or pollywog looking baby sardines in your rice but if you can get by those things, there really are some great bento recipes.

The strength of this book though is in presentation. It shows you how to do up your bento the authetic way and will quickly make you an Ebay scouring bento fool like me.

I do have to say - why on Earth is bento not a big dealio over here? The closest thing we have to it in this country are Oscar Mayer LUNCHABLES. And hey I am not knocking them! But this bento is for grown-ups. No juice box required.

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Simple, elegant recipes and great pictures

This book, with its full color photographs and straightforward recipes, has helped me to cook authentic-tasting Japanese food for the first time. The ingredients for many recipes are easily found in my local grocery stores, although some of the recipes do require shopping at a specialty grocery. This cookbook would be excellent for a beginning cook since the cooking procedure for each recipe is clearly laid out and as mentioned before, the photographs help those new to cooking envision the finished dish. Further, the recipes focus on single-size portions but can easily be increased to feed a family. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Japanese food and would like to add some new elegant dishes to their repetoire.

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Great book for Easy, real receipies

This is a great book for Japanese Home Cooking-

I got this book because I was looking for a book on Japanese cooking that
A) Had simple to prepare reciepies
B) Wasn't focused too much on Seafood (I'm 100's of miles from the nearest coast)
C) Had a good selection of..err.."normal" food that didn't require exotic ingredients or "acquired" tastes..

To this end this book has been a jewel. Real bang for the buck in terms of the normal of usable recipes-

The organization is not quite what we would expect, loosely by theme. But each page (or pair of pages) presents a complete menu of 3-5 dishes that might complement each other. The pictures of the finished product are quite nice, very few pictures (and not much explanation) of the preparation process. But that's ok, most of these dishes are simple enough. Still there might be one or two that confuse you.

The dishes themselves are delicious, nutritious and fairly easy once you get the hang of it. This by and large makes this book a runaway hit. I've got kids and a busy life so food that I can make quickly that the whole family can eat and doesn't come out of a box is really something. The portions they give in the book are for single meal servings. I've found that for the family tripling the amounts usually works well enough.

Cons-
The book is now without room for improvement. They are several nice to haves but after you get over them they really don't detract from the core value (lots of good usable recipes you can fix at home).

-The biggest issue perhaps is the lack of a glossary. Your going to need some ingredients your not going to find at your local supermarket. It gives the Japanese name and sometimes a bad English translation. But going in I had no idea what Aburage or devils tounge jelly were. I am fortunate enough to live near a Japanese Market and got it all explained to me. They also don't cover any common substitutions that you might try.

-The organization of the book is a little odd, based more on menu than item or ingredient. So if you want to pick and choose (I want sukiyaki with the green bean thing) your spend a lot of time hunting till you remember where things are.

-A little more explanation on the prep could be useful for some. If you read the recipe and study the picture for a bit you'll get it eventually. But it keeps the book flowing and lots of space for pictures.

Conclusion-
If you want a good, cheap cookbook to explore Japanese Home cooking this is the one for you! Well worth the money. Quite a few of the dishes have made their way into my permanent list of things to cook.

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Mostly Satisfied

The recipies in the book are wonderful and it's full of beautiful pictures. With the popularity of oriental foods growing, it's not hard to find most of the ingredients either! The only qualm I have with this book is that I would have liked it to have some cultural background on the bento box. It's such a curious tradition for us Americans and it would have been nice to have some sort of introduction for the book, explaining a little bit about bento boxes. Other than that I think it's a great cook book!

Pretty but impractical

This book is full of pretty pictures and wonderful looking dishes. The author relies to heavily on the same few ingredients. Does every recipe have to have tofu puff and burdock root in it? Even after a trip to my local Asian market I was unable to find or figure out what many of the listed ingredients were, much less where to purchase them.

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