I am joining my Bento Bloggers & Friends on this Back to School Basics lunch hop and giveaway which is open worldwide. We have awesome prizes so please hop through to collect the letters and enter the code in a Raffelcopter on the Bento Bloggers & Friends blog. Today I am sharing what I consider basic essentials for making cute bento lunches.

EasyLunchBoxes: These boxes are one of my favorite lunch boxes and I use them often. I use a bag that allows it to be carried upright without turning the lunch on it’s side.

Cookie Cutters: I use cookie cutters to cut and shape a variety of food including: bread, flour tortillas, rice, mashed potatoes, vegetables, fruit, cheese, pizza dough, and cracker dough.

Silicone Cups: These are great for adding color, separating food, holding small amounts of food, and holding food that you don’t want to heat when heating the rest of the lunch in a microwave.

Picks: I admit that I don’t use picks as often as I could but they do add a bit of whimsy and fun to a meal. My niece and nephews seem to enjoy having picks when I use them.

Planned Leftovers for Lunch: This is a simple lunch made with the tools shown above. I like to plan leftovers when I prepare dinner. For this lunch when I made pizza for dinner the night before, I made some mini pizzas in cute shapes using cookie cutters. This is supposed to be a cow but I think it looks like a sheep. Some shapes work better than others but they are all fun. When I use a cookie cutter on pizza dough I have to use more flour on the dough than usual when I roll out the dough and cut it.

Container: EasyLunchBoxes

Contents: Homemade cow shaped cheese pizza, spinach leaves, chocolate, green grapes

Bento USA and Eats Amazing (UK) are some online stores where you can buy bento supplies.

Here is your codeword piece from my blog. Continue on to the other blogs in this hop to collect all of the pieces to spell the codeword.

Please click on the button below to go to the Jackie’s blog – Loving Lunches and to collect your letter and number.

Once you have the collected all the pieces from visiting each of the blogs in this hop. Please enter our giveaway on the Bento Bloggers & Friends blog.