The winner of the random drawing for the 501 Bento Lunch Boxes book is....

red the opinionated from Portland, Oregon! Ms. red, please email me at maki at makikoitoh dot com to claim your prize!

Look for another giveaway on Just Bento or Just Hungry soon!

One thing I love about the Just Bento community is how international it is. Now thanks to Momoko * Bárbara, we have Portuguese versions of our Weekly Bento and Menu Planners, in addition to the original English and German. Many thanks to Momoko * Bárbara, as well as Antje who made the forms that much easier to adapt to other languages! If you'd like to tackle other language versions of the forms, just let me know! * Weekly Bento Planner page * Weekly Menu Planner page

Some site news: May bento contest deadline reminder, the Bento Gear Flickr pool, a cool bento blog, and a big thank you!

I was interviewed on WRS Geneva, an English-language radio station in Geneva (Genève), Switzerland, this past Tuesday, on their food programme called Stir It Up. The MP3 is up now for download (link now corrected!), so if you want to know how I sound, with a stuffed nose (from allergies...agh!) complete with my totally mixed up accent, my segment starts after the rhubarb at around 9:45. It might be of interest to people who want to know why I started blogging about Japanese food after moving to Switzerland of all places. I also talk about about the growing popularity of bento boxes! (Cross-posted to Just Hungry and Just Bento.)

If you have 'get notified for new replies to your comment' turned on, and you got mass emails today from the server (aka Onigiribot) for old comments, it was a technical glitch. My apologies! Short version: the database burped. Long version: I had to restart the database server, and somehow all 'anonymous' comments got unpublished. So, I was publishing them 20 rows at a time, before I realized that that would cause new notifications to go out again! (Massive thanks to Lyvvie for letting me know before I spammed more people!) Then I remembered the power of command line MySQL. Whew! So anyway, I'm really sorry if you did get tons of emails! And...have a great weekend! ^_^;

I've just added a Bento links feature to the site. You can see it in the left sidebar. My thinking is that this is better than a blogroll, which can go stale; instead I'd like to bring you freshly cooked bento related links of interest that I've found around the web. Here's the RSS feed link. I'm using delicious to manage this, so you could just follow my bento tag there if you're a delicious user. (And if you have something you think I should link to, just send it to me there or Twitter me.)

I know that quite a lot of people who follow Just Bento and/or Just Hungry are interested in Japanese culture in general. So, this is a very-infrequent plug for my Japanese language mini-lesson blog and Twitter account. The Twitter account is separate from my main chatty Twitter (@bentotips, where I actually rarely tweet any bento tips...); it's at @mainichinihongo. There is also a companion blog, Hungry For Words, which has longer lessons on occasion. The lessons are not very structured or anything - I just talk about words or phrases that pop into my mind.

So, if you are studying Japanese, or just interested in nihongo, take a look! It's all part of my mission to spread Japanese culture over the world, like gomashio on rice ^_^.

(Cross-posted to Just Hungry and Just Bento.)