Yummy Kawaii Bento: Preparing Adorable Meals for Adorable Kids

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 foods--Yummy Kawaii Bento 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 pizzas
- Hot "dog" buns
- Scrambled egg chicks
- Porky pastas
- Panda bamboo salads...and 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, Yummy Kawaii Bento 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.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Good Books and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of cookbooks, including books on juicing, grilling, baking, frying, home brewing and winemaking, slow cookers, and cast iron cooking. We've been successful with books on gluten-free cooking, vegetarian and vegan cooking, paleo, raw foods, and more. Our list includes French cooking, Swedish cooking, Austrian and German cooking, Cajun cooking, as well as books on jerky, canning and preserving, peanut butter, meatballs, oil and vinegar, bone broth, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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 1,000 different bentos. Her character bentos have been featured on New York Post and The Huffington Post, and her Instagram, instagram.com/bentomonsters, has received 88,000 followers. She lives in Singapore, Singapore.