Alexander's

Amongst my friends in Japan bento — especially the 愛妻弁当^[1] — is all the rage now. This and the slippery slope of trying to be a good boyfriend motivated me to try and cook one myself.

Surely preparing bento must be super easy — every good japanese housewife mass-produces them every day. Every japanese high school girl dreams of cooking an artfully prepared bento to share with her boyfriend and even japanese kindergartners judge the value of their mothers by comparing bento decoration.

So off I went to the first japanese site that explains how to prepare these most wondrous things.
e-obento — crazy bento decorations for every day
Go look at that link now — even if you don’t speak Japanese!

After maybe ten minutes on that side I decided that I want to prepare something modest. Not for lack of confidence, but because I didn’t want to seem too pretentious with my first japanese bento.

A simple one with chicken & bell pepper in a sesame sauce and broccoli with wasabi flavour sounded like the ideal choice. A paltry twenty minutes preparation time — it takes my brother longer to prepare scrambled eggs — and well balanced nutritional facts made the prospect even better.

There was a funny note about using an electric kettle to pre-heat the water and thereby save two to three minutes, but I shrugged that off as a simple translation error on my side.^[2]

Anyway forty minutes and a staple dirty pots later^[3] I noticed that I had just cooked lunch for a whole japanese family — or one hungry european student.

This adventure clearly taught me that bento are delicious, beautiful, fun and probably the main reason why japanese are so slim. It also taught me that I’m not cut out to be a good japanese housewife. To be able to cook that in 20 minutes I’d need at least another pair of arms — even better a couple kitchen slaves.