The Challenge: 150 days of Bento! (Starts August 17th, 2011)

The Challenge: I will be using five books this year in which I pull healthy lunches together from for the kids. They won’t be exactly the Bento style as we have Laptop Lunch Boxes, and not true Bento Boxes. The Laptop Lunch Boxes are great, and you can find my review of them over here! Don’t forget to follow my blog here, so that you can come back every single school day and see what I’ve made new for the kids and how well they liked it! Yes, that’s right! There’s also going to be a 5 star rating system on how well my children ate that days lunch. Both my children that are in school this year, a 5yo kindergartener and a 7yo second grader, will be giving their own ratings on each lunch.

So, we have five books, they are:

Each day I will be pulling a lunch from one of these books. Three of them, Good Food to Go, Vegan Lunch Box and the Laptop Lunch User’s Guide, are all based on the Laptop Lunchbox 2.0 Bento System. You can find the lunchboxes on sale here, or you can always check eBay for used products, as re-using is something we at Crunchy Goodness support 100%! They are hard to find on eBay and they go quick, so don’t be too disappointed if you can’t find one.

The Yum Yum Bento Box book is more about making food look fun for kids using some Japanese Bento style ideas like sushi paper, rice molds and even hard boiled egg molds. The idea is, if they have a car shaped hard boiled egg in their box, they are probably more likely to eat it!

The Top 100 Recipes for Happy Kids, is more about feeding your child each meal to encourage proper growth, both physically and mentally. Make sure your child gets the macro and micro nutrition they need daily, and making healthy food fun for kids! I will be trying all sorts of recipes from this book, but you’ll only find the lunch recipes I use on the 150 days of Bento page. Any other recipes I use from this book will of course, go under the Recipes page under the proper category.

Against the normal grain of how we live as a family, I have purchased all of these books, and they sit on my kitchen shelf. My library didn’t have all of them, and I don’t think they’d lend me a book for the school year without declaring it lost anyway! And I figure, when we’re done with them, I can donate them to the library and then they will have all the books for others to then use. As always though, check your local library first to see if they have the books so you can borrow instead of buy!