Welcome to Week 2 of the 5 week Getting Started Bento Challenge! Week 2 officially starts on Monday January 19th (Martin Luther King Day for USens, and the day before the Inaugural!), but join in whenever you can!

Here's a quick reminder of the outline of this and upcoming Challenge weeks.

• Each week, we'll be focusing on a particular aspect of making tasty, healthy and cost conscious bento lunches as efficiently as possible.
• There will be three task and goal levels: Basic, Going Deeper, and Weight Loss. Basic is what you should try to do at a minimum. Going Deeper is for people who are very motivated and want to take on more. Finally, Weight Loss is specifically for people who want to use the Challenge to kick start, or enhance, a weight loss plan.

(Click here to skip down to the task descriptions, or just the summary.)

Week 2 Focus: Healthier Bentos

For Week 1, the focus was on getting yourself organized for making bentos on a regular basis. That will still be your foundation, so if you had some trouble with that aspect, continue to work on that primarily. As a lot of people who took the Week 1 Challenge found out, things like planning ahead and having your bento making equipment and supplies ready to go are really useful.

If you're ready to tackle more though, this week's focus is on making your bentos healthier. Whether you are interested in losing weight or not, a healthy lunch is the fuel that's going to keep you going for the rest of the day.

The building blocks of any main meal are to have a good balance of carbs, proteins and fruits or vegetables. This is so much easier to focus on within the confines of a bento box. Many Japanese bento books have formulas like 4:2:1:1 (carb:protein:side1:side2) or 3:2:1 (carb:protein:vegetable/side), but the easiest one I have seen was detailed in a book I've reviewed earlier, Yaseru Obento Recipe (Slimming Bento Recipes). I think this formula is useful whether you are dieting or not!

Step 1: Fill only up to 1/2 of your bento with carbs

Carbs include rice and other grains, pasta, bread, potatoes and other starchy vegetables, crackers, etc. All of your carbs combined should not take up more than 1/2 of your bento.

Step 2: Fill 1/4 of your bento with proteins

Proteins include meat, fish, eggs, cheese, tofu and other vegan/vegetarian proteins.

Step 3: Fill 1/4 of your bento with nutrient-dense vegetables

This is the tricky part. Not all vegetables are that nutritious - for example, most lettuces, especialy light colored ones are basically mostly water with a bit of fiber. For a bento lunch where you have to cram is as much nutrition as you can in a very limited space, go for dark or bright colored veggies. Dark green leafy vegetables (blanched or sautéed if ou want to squeeze a lot into a small space), bright red peppers, carrots, beetroot, broccoli, etc... you get the idea. Brightly colored vegetables make our bento look really nice too! If you do bring a salad for lunch, try to include some dark leafy greens in there like baby spinach leaves, arugula (rocket), mache (lamb's lettuce), darker lettuce like romaine, and so on.

(An exception to the brightly colored = healthy, pale vegetable = not so much rule is cabbage and other cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower. Pale cabbage is a good healthy vegetable.)

Step 4 - Optional: Brighten your bento with 'accessory' food

This is an optional step, but it can make the difference between a blah looking bento and one that makes you happy at lunchtime and people around you jealous! I think of things like cherry tomatoes, lettuce leaves,and snow peas (mangetout) as 'accessory food'. Other accessory food can include things like brightly colored pickles, a few green peas, umeboshi, furikake, and so on. And of course you can add color with non-edible accessories like picks, little flags, or what have you.

Don't worry too much about this though this week - focus on the health aspect rather than looks!

Fruit?

If a little bit of fruit is part of the bento box, I usually treat fruit as an 'accessory' or part of the vegetable section. Otherwise, if it's packed separate it's well, 'fruit.'. Keep in mind that some fruit, like bananas for instance, are more carb-like in terms of their nutrition profile, a concern if you're trying to lose weight.

I try to follow these principles with all the bentos I post here, especially the 'formal bentos' that get a number and are listed on the Bento archive lists, but in Bento no. 39 I show this in step-by-step detail.

Not just for traditional bentos!

This principle doesn't just apply to traditional bentos either. Let's take a look at this traditional brownbag lunch for example:

• 1 sandwich (2 slices of bread), peanut butter and jelly
• 1 brownie
• 1 apple
• 1 small bag of potato chips (crisps)

Do you see the problem? It has way too many carbs (bread, brownie, potato chips, not to mention the sugar in the brownie, jelly and peanut butter). Let's see what we can do about it...

• 1 sandwich (2 slices of whole wheat bread), peanut butter, no-sugar jelly or preserves
• small pack of carrot and broccoli floret salad or maybe Orange Juice Carrots, etc.
• Babybel cheese
• small apple
• brownie saved for mid-afternoon snack, or maybe as a mid-morning snack? (If you bake your own, think about adding some nuts)

Your tasks and goals for this week

Whatever level you decide to tackle, you should do the following:

• Photo. At lunchtime, take a photo of your bento, and upload it either to flickr (and add to the Just Bento pool) or to your preferred photo hosting service. A record of your first bento steps!
• Report. At the end of the week, report back here in this forum with how it went for you! (Or link to your blog post with your report.)

Basic

• Make one bento more bento than you did last week. Didn't make any bentos last week? Then make one! If you made one, make one more!
• Mise en place. Continue to do this if you can. If you don't have space on a countertop or table, or you have to keep those clear since you share the kitchen - how about setting it out on a tray or something, putting it in a cabinet or drawer, so you can take everything out at once?
• Consider doing a little pre-planning. Look at <a href="Week 1's 'Going Deeper' level.

Going deeper

In addition to the Basic tasks:

• Look back at the bentos you made from Week 1 (now you see the point of the photos!). See how you can improve them nutritionally. Try making just one or two bentos a bit better balanced.

Weight Loss

If your goal is to use bentos for weight loss for the long term, you should by now know how many calories you want to allocate to lunch. You will need to work within that figure to create a balanced bento.

Let's say your goal is to make bentos that are under 500 calories. If you are using rice as your main carb, you should not use more than 1 cup, which, depending on the type of rice, is around 200-250 calories. (The same goes for most grains.) Using brown rice or zakkokumai ups the nutrient value of your rice. So, with the rest of your bento you need 1 or 2 proteins, which will come to around 150-200 calories. Vegetables barely count for any calories, but you do need to count the oil and things you use to cook them.

So your task for this week is basically the same as the Going Deeper task. You do need to add up your calories, but if you are too busy for that, you can:

• Concentrate on improving the quality and quantity of the veggies in your lunch.
• If you're packing too many carbs, consider reducing the amount. (Onigiri + crackers + Pocky is not a very balanced meal...)

(A note about onigiri. You can get a fairly accurate measure of their caloric value if you use the put-in-a-cup method of making them. Figure out the capacity of the cup you are using. 1/2 US. cup of white rice (110ml) is about 120 calories, so if you make 2 1/2-cup onigiris that's 240 calories. You don' really need to fuss about the innards of the onigiri since the amount is so small, unless you are making big onigiri with fried chicken filler or something!

If you use onigiri molds (moulds), you should measure their capacity also to see how much rice they hold.)

Sites where you can calculate calories

There are tons of sites where you can input your food and figure out the calories, and a lot more, but here are a few:

• Calorie King - I use their standalone software to calculate my calories
• The Daily Plate
• Fit Day
• Spark People

If you can't be bothered to use a particular site though, you can also just type in 'calories in 1 cup of brown rice' in Google search and come up with a reasonable answer fairly quickly.

But you need to know what exactly is 1 cup, or 1 ounce, or...

If you are really serious about losing weight, whatever program you are following it is really helpful to have these tools. They also make you a better cook!

• A set of graduated cup measures, ranging from 1 cup to 1/4 cup
• A set of graduated spoon measures, ranging from 1 tablespoon to 1/4 teaspoon
• A kitchen scale, ideally a digital one with a TARE feature (where you can put a bowl or something on the scale, then zero it out, so you can add the ingredients you want to measure in there withing having to do math in your head)

Cup and spoon measures are cheap, even if you get fancy stainless steel ones or something. (I do have a set of fancy stainless steel ones that I got ages ago - they last forever.) A good digital kitchen scale is not that expensive either (you can get one for around $20-30 in the US) and is a very worthwhile investment. If you have been guesstimating how much food you've been eating so far, you might be surprised...most people tend to underestimate.

(On a practical note, I do not measure things all the time by any means! Who has that kind of time in the morning? But, through lots of repetition I know how 1 cup of rice etc. look in my bento boxes.)

Summary

Basic: 1 more bento than last week, start planning, mise en place.

Going Deeper: Basic + Analyze your past bentos, improve 1-2 aspects of it.

Weight Loss: Basic + Going Deeper, concentrating on veggies and carb amount. Optional: gather your online and physical measuring tools.

Just tackle the level you feel capable of. And I'll see you at the end of week! (I'll be around during the week too, doing the challenge along with you and hanging out of course.)