It’s beginning to look a lot like…

…it’s time for Christmas bentos! 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!

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