It?s beginning to look a lot like?

…it’s time for Christmas bentos! :D After the Halloween and Thanksgiving bunch of seasonal bentos, having holiday themed lunches just seemed like the right thing to do from now on. I won’t curse myself by saying I’ll do a lot of Christmas bento because by now I’m sure you all have noticed that once I say I’ll do something, some event or cold or bento drought comes along to muck up my plans.

To kick things off, I made an ornament bento, though I’d planned it a little differently in my sketch. I have a bunch of rice blocks in the freezer and I used one this morning to make the two small ornamental onigiri. Curious how I got purple and red (ok, ok, it looks orange…) rice? If you’re guessing food coloring, guess again!

Normally I’d use ketchup or food coloring to get the red/orange color, but my bento buddy in Japan said she found a new product called Deco-Furi and offered to send me some.

You’ll have to excuse the crappy reflections on the package, because I took these photos in my lightbox and it really hasn’t been helping me very much. I have been trying to get motivated to set up something near the patio window so that I can use a combination of sunlight and my big ass tota light, but I keep procrastinating. Soon that area will have to be cleared for our Christmas tree, though, so that may have to wait until next year.

Anyway, I was going to open one and then take a picture of one of the other unopened packages, but lo and behold, I couldn’t find any of the others. No doubt my rascally children have hidden them during one of their “Mommy is such a meanie!” tirades. I should hide some of their precious belongings out of revenge. You’ll have to look at my silly already-opened package.

Inside, there were five individually sealed packages of colored “furikake” that is used for coloring rice red, yellow, purple, green, and pink. I was a stingy little chef and didn’t put the whole package into the rice as I was mixing. My excuse is that it would have ended up too salty. As a result though, my red rice looks orange and the purple is probably better suited for an elephant onigiri, which I hope to do in the coming weeks.

Being lazy, I looked around and found a package of pre-cut nori shapes and one was a Christmas tree, so I just topped the ornaments with one each and then added two of those umbrella picks as the hooks. The patty is a pork patty cut in half. For red, I added half a strawberry (I was going to add the whole thing, but Buddy came in right then and demanded some of it.) and half a tomato. They’re pretty shriveled right now, so I’ll probably have to stew them soon. On the right side I have baby carrots and some bell pepper sticks. Half a kiwi rounds out the lower left side.

The tree pick is a cupcake pick that I bought from Shop Bakers Nook. I sent quite a few to my bento buddy for the deco-furi because they all come in sets of 4-6. The picks were pretty huge, but still add a nice holiday touch, so I’m glad I bought them. They’re all plastic and therefore all reusable, which is a big plus in my book.

Happy Hump Day! :)