Bento Blast!

The lunchbox reinvented: transform the boring routine of your children's packed lunches into cute, edible cartoon characters! Packing school lunches for fussy children can be a chore. Parents are bored of making the same old soggy sandwiches every day, and your picky eaters don't even show any appreciation when they return their lunchboxes with uneaten veggies and scrappy bits. What if you could entice your children to eat balanced lunches every day? Even better: how do you transform the routine of unoriginal packed lunches into a joy for yourself? Inspired by the Japanese tradition of the bento box, a home-packed meal served in a box with compartments containing different food, Bento Blast! reinvents the concept of the stale packed lunch. Learn to make your very own creative bento boxes and turn the law of don't play with your food on its head by reimagining dishes as colorful cartoon characters. Entice your children with: Teddy bear-shaped mini pizzasHot dog bunsScrambled egg chicksPorky pastasPanda bambooAnd many more edible critters! With more than 160 step-by-step tutorials on how to assemble balanced bento boxes, create food art, and cook individual recipes that bridge the East and the West, Bento Blast turns food preparation into an art and makes eating fun again for both parent and child. Soon, your children will boast to their friends about their lunches, and your spouse might even ask for his or her own takeaway lunch! Lunchtime, or dinnertime, will never be the same again.

Li Ming Lee is a stay-at-home mom who first began making character bentos when her sons started school and had problems adjusting to their mother's absence. She started documenting her bento adventures on Bentomonsters.com in 2011, and has since created nearly one thousand different bentos. Her character bentos have been featured on New York Post and The Huffington Post, and her Instagram, instagram.com/bentomonsters, has more than 250,000 followers. She lives in Singapore.