Customer Reviews

Yum-Yum Bento Box: Fresh Recipes for Adorable Lunches

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been making bento lunches for myself & daughter for two years, and became a fan of Adventures in Bento Making blog during this time. So, when I heard Pikko was co-authoring a bento book, I was thrilled. Yum-Yum Bento Box is full of instructions, recipes and tips on how to make these fun, colorful and healthy meals. One of the best features is that most of the ingredients used are readily available, even in my small rural town.

The book has a brief introduction to bento, guidelines on how to pack a healthy bento lunch, and a section on boxes, accessories and tools. Also included is a helpful shopping guide and glossary at the end of the book. The pictures are a delight to the eye and demo photos make it easy to reproduce these adorable characters. I definitely recommend Yum-Yum Bento Box to anyone interested in learning to making bento lunches

As someone who's always been interested in not only preparing delicious and healthy meals but also presenting them beautifully, I was delighted to come across the idea of obento. I'm so looking forward to trying these ideas out for my little girl!

The book is very informative about the concept of "eating with your eyes" before you eat your meal, and also discusses the proportional nutrition of veg to starch to protein to fruit/sweets that is aimed for in the bento lunch concept. The sample pictures are oh-my-goodness adorable and extremely creative and instructions for each idea, as well as where to find extra materials (egg shapers, food picks, etc.) and cheaper but serviceable alternatives (hole punches, toothpicks, etc.) are clearly written. All concepts are defined and all recipes are clearly written - these ideas will take a bit of time to prepare, but are not at a difficulty level to make them something most people couldn't take on.

Personally I think this book will be just for ideas and instruction. The recipes were small portions (not practical in my household) and all but a few included meat (also not happening in my household). No big deal because they didn't write it to be a family-sized meal or vegetarian cookbook so I can't fault them for either. Just mentioning it as a heads-up to others who might be in the same situation (vegetarian and/or too busy to cook a tiny separate meal instead of simply including a portion of the whole family's larger meal).

The only critique I have of the book is one that another reviewer mentioned and that is the repetitiveness. For as adorable as the obento features in each recipe are, all are made of either egg, rice, lunch meat, hot dogs, or sliced cheese. Most of the facial features are made of nori. Again, I like the overall concepts and instructions but especially for a book that is supposedly super health-concsious, I was surprised at overprocessed foods being such staple ingredients and for my own creations plan to improvise with lower salt, nitrate, food coloring, and fat content items. There were some tiny decorative veg garnishes, but there weren't any recipes that didn't use the above mentioned items as the main part. The eggs & rice are healthy things, I just note them because it seemed like a repetitive use of ingredients, but even so was also glad to see a variety of options for shaping and presentation.

I love reading this book and would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in getting the basics of really cute obento theory and presentation.

As a public school teacher, it's easy to see how kids are not at all enthused about eating their meals, or being picky about veggies. You would too, if you were faced with bland, colorless, unappetizing fare on a daily basis (no offense meant to our hardworking cafeteria staff, I'm perfectly aware it's hard to cook for hundreds of kids with different tastes on a certain budget everyday!). However, if their parents used a resource book like this to create nutritious meals for them, chances are very high that these aforementioned problems will go away. Love is in the making, and there's hard evidence to eat! Yum!

As an Asian, it seems to me that bento is one of the super kid-friendly meals we have. I remember growing up using bento boxes as baon and eating every single grain of rice! Too bad the characters - if there were any - weren't as cute as the ones in this book, but at least I'll have ideas for my kids. It's so easy, we can make these when my students have a lesson that involves cooking & nutrition! They actually had a taste of it when we had a hanami by the Tidal Basin this past Cherry Blossom Festival - and even those that professed a dislike for veggies ate the cucumber pickles!

This book allows people who are first-time bento makers to have an idea of how easy it can be to make, given easy-to-follow instructions and colorful graphics that enable one to see the finished product. The only problem is, having to give it away before you eat all of the kawaii food you just made.

There aren't too many English bento books that are this clear and "idiot"-proof. It even gives you a time frame so you can work it into your busy schedule. Try it, you'll like it!

Below is my comment for Ms. Negative Reviewer, in case you don't get to read it. To think that the authors she mentioned are close friends of Maki-sensei and even recommend this book - why would they do that if they were copied, right?

* I would think that kyaraben & oekakiben aren't copyrighted - even those authors mentioned by Ms. Negative Reviewer may not even have had the most original designs - and if a book is useful and allows English speakers to access making kawaii bento better, it should have a place on any bento fan's bookshelf. Now that I've read this review and comments, I'm buying this book (good thing the store is within walking distance) as well as recommend it to others, so no fear, Maki-sensei! <3
d(^3^)b

As an avid reader of bento blogs and a collector of bento books I was pleased overall with this book. It's bright, attractively laid out and easy to understand. Some of the ingredients are harder to come by if you don't live near an Asian market but overall, the authors do a good job of offering alternatives. If I had a complaint it would be that I wish all of the pictures were clear and crisp. In the interest of focusing on one part of the bento, some of the side dish items are blurred out so you can't see what it looks like. Not a major issue though.

My daugher bought a Panda Bear Bento Box recently to make her own lunch to school. Rice balls with meat inserts. She's 15. She loves all the cute pictures and ideas from the book. Great for anyone who has the time and artistic in mind.

I'm a regular visitor to Pikko's site (Watanabe), but I hadn't visited Maki's before.

This book is based toward kids, but even I don't mind a little kawaii in my lunch occasionally.

What I liked:
- nice introduction to bento at the beginning if you're new to the world
- very colorful and bright pictures and sturdy pages
- their "food pyramid": 4 parts veg, 3 parts protein, 2 parts carbs, 1 part fruit/dessert. Yay for healthy!
- each bento has several recipes with it, and they're all easy to mix-and-match
- while this is a charaben book (character bento), none of the ideas are too complicated (usually involve some cutting and/or punching)-- all the ideas seem very feasible!

What I didn't like:
- there's no index. I remembered seeing a bento that included macaroni and cheese, went to the back to look it up, but nope, no index. And, when food is sometimes disguised, it makes flipping back through challenging.
- yes, that's all!

While I haven't put together any of the recipes/bento yet, I do have a few planned... visit my blog at [...]! I never was interested in charaben until I looked at this book, actually; while I enjoy looking at photos of others' charaben, I never had much of a desire to put cute faces on food... until now! Too bad I don't have any face punches!

This book is so adorable! When I opened up the package and saw the book, I was amazed! The book looks way better irl than in the tiny picture on amazon! Big and clear full-page pictures are on almost every other page, and there are lots and lots of recipes I've yet to try. The book is very useful to me; I am glad I bought it. It serves more as an inspirational book for me rather than a recipe book though.

When I got this book in, I was first struck by the excellent quality of the book itself. The book is well put together and the color vibrant. I absolutely love the fact that every 'recipe' is illustrated for you so you have a guide to work from. The pictures and step-by-step instructions make it easy to understand and replicate. I have already started making things from this book. I made a fun animals out of hard boiled eggs yesterday, and onigiri today. I am waiting on some nori punches and other tools to come in the mail(I tried three local Asian markets and I could not find so much as a triangle mold) and I think after I get them, I can try some of the more challenging boxes. 5 STARS!!!

I initially bought this book for the "cute factor", to see what fun things people were able to put together with their lunches. I didn't expect that I would be using many of the recipes or creating my own bento right away. I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly I was able to utilize both recipes and the cute food. A few days after receiving the book, my office did a potluck to celebrate the World Cup. To represent Japan, I did the Teriyaki Meatballs and re-created the soccer balls found in the sports bento. The teriyaki sauce was simple to make, using ingredients I already had in the pantry. The musubis definitely were a crowd favorite and I got lots of compliments. Little did everyone know that they took just a few minutes to make with the help of Yum Yum Bento.

I found that even though the foods in this book look impressive and seem to be time-consuming, they are simple enough for even the busiest person to use. A few extra minutes of prep gives food a flourish. The book does a great job of simplifying everything and making bento accessible to the masses. I can't wait for the next excuse to create something from Yum Yum Bento!

This is the first bento book I have purchased, and my first attempt at making bento. I couldn't put this book down for about a week after it arrived- it's beautifuly done! Very clear and easy instructions for everything, and great extra tips in the back. It's art really! I made bento lunches for the whole family for a pinic at our son's Korean culture camp, and they were a big hit- as fun to eat as they were to make. I just love this book!