This is the third day of the week long giveaway party to celebrate the first anniversary of Just Bento, as well as the fifth anniversary of Just Hungry. (The first day of Just Bento's part, and the second day.) Today's bento memory is about school outings, or ensoku.

This is the second day of the week long giveaway party to celebrate the first anniversary of Just Bento, as well as the fifth anniversary of Just Hungry. (The first day of Just Bento's part is here.) While over on Just Hungry I'm looking back at the first five years of the site, here I'd like to go even further back in time, and talk about some memorable bentos from my past. (If you want to skip ahead, today's giveaway is at the bottom.)

While I do try to keep a good stash of pre-made food to quickly assemble bentos in the morning, sometimes I've just run out, or am not in the mood to use whatever I have in the freezer, or leftovers in the fridge. That doesn't mean it's not possible to assemble a bento quickly using fresh ingredients and pantry items. Here are a couple that I made last week. The only premade 'stash' I used was frozen brown rice.

I've been working on a some recipes which work when I just throw them together, but aren't quite ready for prime time publishing here. So the meantime here are a couple of bentos that are too similar to other bentos already shown here, but may be of interest to look at anyway. Both feature chicken recipes from the recent chicken mini-marathon.

Last time, I mentioned how I thought the Fit & Fresh™ Breakfast Chiller, which is decidedly not a bento box in the traditional sense, could serve as a bento box. I put this into practice with some leftovers. It doesn't look that photogenic so I'm putting it in the also-ran category of bentos, but it's here since I thought it might be useful to see how to use a container like this.

Whenever I post a complete bento how-to I try to pick ones that have something unique or noteworthy about them. Of course I actually make a lot more bentos than I post about. Here are few that didn't make the cut - the 'also-ran' bentos, with an explanation of why they didn't make it to star status.