Laptop Lunches

We bought our first Laptop Lunch bento-style lunch box for Z as a Christmas gift. Since she only needs lunch two days a week, we started using hers the rest of the week. Finally, we decided that we each really needed our own, so we ordered two more.

Our most recent Laptop Lunch purchase: Pink for Mom, multicolored (not shown) for Dad. The two of us swapped around parts with Z until we were all satisfied with the arrangement.

A Laptop Lunch bento box is a hard plastic case containing five smaller containers, one a little tiny one for a sauce or dressing. (We used ours today for salad dressing to go with our salads.) It also comes with a fork and spoon, which fit inside the main container as well. One of the two biggest containers comes with a lid too. Enhanced sets include a bag to carry the case in and a drink bottle. Tomorrow, thanks to Obentec, inventors of the Laptop Lunch box, we're drawing a name to give away a Laptop Lunch System to one of our email subscribers.

Here are the three big reasons we love these kits and would recommend them to anyone.

1. Healthy eating

Having a predefined number of boxes to fill reminds us to pack a more balanced meal. And it really works. Jenni is not really a "wash an apple and eat it" kind of person so that extra, empty box encourages us to prepare the fruit we want to eat in advance (preslicing an apple or an orange). We're all eating more balanced diets using them. Also, because the inside containers are smaller than the standard plastic containers you buy at the grocery store, the laptop lunch system helps us keep our serving sizes un-supersized.

Clockwise from top left: Cream cheese spread with flower shaped pita breads (snack), sliced strawberries (snack), garbanzo beans (lunch), and wild rice and vegetables with seitan chicken

For Z's lunchbox, we pack two of the four main inner containers with her lunch for the day and two of them with her snack for the day. For the snack, we use the larger container that has a lid, and put a little piece of labeled wax paper over one of the smaller ones. These go "in back," and Z seems to play by the rules here. She has daycare folks managing her food consumption so it's up to them to make sure she doesn't get her yogurt and fruit (or some similar snack item) before naptime instead of her lunch.

More health notes: The boxes are lead-free and made of polypropylene plastic, making the Laptop Lunch system a great replacement for questionable vinyl lunch sacks and downright dangerous BPA-laced polycarbonate plastic products.

2. Efficiency

We are busy people. We like to cook extra food at dinner and take leftovers as part of our lunches. But between using leftovers and building the kinds of lunches we like, which generally have three or four smallish components, we have spent the last several years ferrying plastic bags back and forth from work with what looks like a college student's kitchen full of Gladware. Standard-sized containers are bulky and have a lot of dead airspace that goes unused when you have a few parts to your meal, and this makes for very bulky bags. Jeremiah works in a small office where everyone shares a mini refrigerator, and he has sometimes faced the embarrassing situation of having some of his lunch, which needs refrigeration, not fit in the refrigerator.

The Laptop Lunch bento box is like a closet organizer for your lunch. It measures about 6x8" and is only about 2" tall. The design allows for the efficient packing of food that you need to get through your day, and your lunch will fit on the crummiest, narrowest shelf in that mini fridge. If that wasn't benefit enough, you then get to pack all of your outgoing dishware back in the Laptop Lunch box to take home, eliminating the risk that your containers will sit around in the shared fridge and annoy your coworkers.

Simple Laptop Lunches for Mom and Dad in the making: Mexi-casserole, apple and orange slices, and green salad (covered). Salad dressing and sour-cream topping is to the right.

It also makes the dish pile considerably smaller when you get home from work, and (at least in our house) substantially reduces the search for containers with matching lids that has been a nightly (or morning) ritual in our household for years. Jeremiah knew a girl once who threaded fishing line through her plastic containers and lids to keep them together because she was sick of not being able to match them up, losing them, and so on. That always seemed kinda crazy to him, and possibly unsanitary. He likes this much better.

Clockwise from top left: Yogurt with flax seed (snack), flower-shaped pancakes and flower-shaped soy-nut butter and jelly sandwiches (snack), sliced apple and strawberry (lunch), and wild rice, pinto beans and Cheddar (lunch)

3. Lunch as an event

Playing with garnishes (carrots and avocado)

The other dimension to using the Laptop Lunch system is its emphasis on presentation. Jenni has always said (usually when trying to make an inexpensive gift look nicer) that "presentation is key," and that's certainly true here. Having the three open containers really invites you to think about how you are going to present the food you're serving.

Jenni got some very cool food cutters for Christmas, and the Laptop Lunch is the perfect excuse to use her flower garnish cutters (left), fish garnish cutter and butterfly. (Click here to browse through Amazon's selection of garnish cutters. Then say "garnish cutters" three times fast.) She got a lot of inspiration from the bento boxes that Japanese mothers prepare for their kids. Everytime we give Z something cut in a clever shape, she squeals with delight (and eats with gusto!). And if you run out of ideas, there's always great blogs like BentoTV , Cooking Cute, or Vegan Lunch Box, or the more than 13,000 images of bento lunches on Flickr.

We'll be giving away a full Laptop Lunch System to one of our email subscribers on Friday. There's still time to sign up and be eligible for the drawing!