I'm Biggie: avid cook, speedy lunch packer, mom in San Francisco, & former expat fluent in Japanese. 
Book Review of Hawaii’s Bento Box Cookbook
Bento lunch cookbooks can be challenging to put together. Should they focus more on standalone recipes or an arrangement of full lunches? Decorative food or speed? Bento lunch principles or practice? Japanese-language bento cookbooks are often highly visual, with color photos on each page that both stimulate and inspire the reader while informing them of how-to steps at a glance.
Up to now, I haven’t seen books in English that capture the spirit of a Japanese cookbook for children’s fun bento lunches, making Hawaii’s Bento Box Cookbook: Fun Lunches for Kids the first example to date. (Read on for the full book review.)
The title and cover convey the book’s approach of making playful bento lunches for children with a mixture of Asian and Western food that are characteristic of Hawaii. You’ll find 60+ recipes for a variety of American, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean dishes as well as some classically Hawaiian ones like kalua pork and spam musubi. You can browse the inside of the book here at Amazon, and view the full table of contents and indexes. 
1. The Book Structure
The book is split into two main sections: 1) recipes, and 2) the bento lunches themselves with big color photos and step-by-step instructions on how to create the decorative food art. There’s also a short glossary and a page about bento tools in the back, but they’re pretty brief. The book’s main focus is on kid-pleasing artistic bento, with pretty straightforward instructions on how to create little food sculptures like a ballerina, owl, panda, penguin, ladybug, etc.
Although there is a basic glossary, the author assumes that the reader has a certain level of bento knowledge. The Penguin Spam Musubi recipe, for example, starts out with the following sentence: “Using a nigiri sushi mold, make 3 musubis.” You’ll be fine if you already have a decent understanding of Asian foods and bento gear such as a nigiri maker, musubi maker, cutters, etc. But be prepared to do a little online studying if you’re walking into it cold. You’re reading this review on a bento website, though, so you already have a head start!
One thing I really enjoyed was seeing how inventive the author was in using different shaped cookie cutters to create other shapes, as in the Japanese Girl bento photo above. Yuen uses a circle- and a rabbit-shaped cutter to create an entire little girl, which she does with other cutters and designs throughout. Very creative and inspiring, showing that you don’t have to have a drawer full of specialized cookie cutters to make different designs.
2. The Food
Author Susan Yuen has a culinary background, having worked as a sous-chef at restaurants in Hawaii and co-owning a catering company. She has two children, and makes bento lunches for her 6-year-old daughter.
The recipes themselves are a little simplified but manageable, making it a pretty friendly entrance point to bento foods. Once you’ve mastered the basics, though, you may want to invest in more advanced cookbooks for each cuisine. But if you look at this cookbook as a visual collection of inventive, kid-pleasing food art with simple recipes and how-to steps for food art, I think you’ll be satisfied.
I add the caveat about the recipes as I notice that they’ve been simplified, but not necessarily fatally. For example, the tonkatsu recipe doesn’t include tips like cutting incisions into the fat around the edges so the meat doesn’t curl up when frying, and the spam musubi recipe repeated in numerous bentos often doesn’t mention common ingredients like teriyaki sauce or furikake. (See my spam musubi recipe.)
3. The Bento Section
The section on bentos has photos and step-by-step directions on how to make the decorative food art. Her designs are quite cute and I think you’ll get a number of good ideas for little edible characters from it. My main concern is that there’s no guidance on how to keep decorations in place. So once you make a cute creation and your child shakes the lunch around on the way to school, odds are good that your hard work will be destroyed by the time they sit down to eat.
I put together a list of tips for stabilizing edible decorations to supplement the cookbook, with help from well-known oekaki (picture) bento food artist Amorette (Sakurako Kitsa), who recently ran a series of guest posts on decorative food art here on Lunch in a Box. Here’s the full list of anchoring tips and edible glue ideas.
Overall, I found Hawaii’s Bento Box Cookbook to be a fun little cookbook with appealing decorative bento ideas. I probably won’t cook from the recipes that often, but will definitely flip through it when I’m in the mood to make simple food art that will amuse my preschooler (granted, that’s pretty rare for me, but still). It might make a good holiday gift for the bento-lover in your life (Amazon link here). Thumbs up.
(Disclosure: I received a free review copy of the book from the author.)
FURTHER READING:
- Book review: The Manga Cookbook
- Book review: Face Food
- All food books in my kitchen
- A list of all reviews on Lunch in a Box
- Bento FAQ and Biggie’s list of top speed tips, tutorials and reviews
October 30th, 2008 | Categories: bento, pasta or noodles, review, tips | 
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October 30th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Glad to see Hawaii coming onto the bento scene with a splash! Now they will need their own Daiso to go with this fun book.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Very cool. Now if I could just find things to replace the eggs and cheese.
October 30th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Glad that you reviewed this book, I’ve been curious about it. Now, I’m off to a happy reading and browsing interesting food arts. Thanks!
October 30th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I got this book at our local borders about 2 months ago.
its really great!
Living and growing up in Hawaii I’ve experienced bento in many different ways. Its a big part of our culture as a lot of families are influenced by Japanese and other local cultures.
The recipes in this book are very traditional to Hawaii family style cooking. Totally love it!
October 30th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Bento is huge here in Hawaii. We grow up on them. There’s Marukai, Daiei, and Shirokiya to fill our tummys with goodness.
This is a great book:)
October 30th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I have also purchased this book and love it! I’m from Hawaii and it has many of the local favorite recipes.
October 30th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
I got this book when it first came out and I love it too! I’ve tried the chili recipe (twice) and my 8-year old daughter loves it!
Here in Hawaii, we have local-style bentos and the traditional japanese bentos. Ono-licious!
October 31st, 2008 at 5:35 am
Now they just need a vegetarian version.
How meat-heavy is this one?
October 31st, 2008 at 6:43 am
Thanks for the review. It was nice seeing inside photos and getting an idea of what the book encompasses. I’m always on the hunt for good lunch/bento books for my kids and I have not purchased this yet, but I will consider it now. I’m not sure I want to go down such a creative route, but it sounds like there are some good suggestions on what you can include. And I’m always looking for new ideas!
Thanks!
November 3rd, 2008 at 6:25 am
@8 from Kara: Hmm, I’d have to say it’s very meat-heavy. There are some vegetarian recipes for noodle and vegetable dishes, but they’re definitely a minority.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:54 pm
i am tempted to shell out some emergency munny. LOL
thanks, biggie, for the heads up.
November 4th, 2008 at 5:45 am
[...] have found several great sites on bento box lunch-making. I also think a photo-filled cookbook on the subject would be a great [...]
November 6th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
You know if you want a veggie vertion you can use vegitarion alturnitves. [sorry about my spelling] soy cheese,bologna, tofu, and ‘fake’ meats of all kinds are fairly easy to find.
November 10th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Maukai Hawaii has some translated recipes for Japanese mixes and packaged foods..
http://www.marukaihawaii.com/english/Recipes/index.html
The Hawaii Japanese TV station KIKU runs a Japanese cooking show called Today’s Menu. Yesterday’s episode was about speedy bentos. The recipes were not up on their website yet though but others are. http://kikutv.com/todays-menu.asp
January 7th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
[...] out what Biggie thinks about Susan Yuen’s bento cookbookfor kids on Lunch in a Box. Share and [...]