Just Bento it...

One of Nicole's Christmas presents was a Bento box sent directly from Japan. A Bento box is a Japanese lunchbox. I chose Nicole's with a panda on it, since she LOVES pandas. Aunt Ophelia tells her when we come to China they will take us to the town of Chengdu, which is the panda capital of China. Nicole loves her Bento box. The food they create to put inside is so artistic and beautiful. If you google Bento recipes, you can see the variety and creations that people make. It is so colorful with fun shapes and accessories. This is Nicole's first Bento. All the kids in the lunchroom were so curious and wanted to see what she had. One boy even tried to touch it, which Nicole told me "he went to touch my Bento and I slapped his hand away!"It has two tiers, the top one with a tupperware type lid. Once all together it has a band to hold it secure. On the bottom layer, Nicole has a mini bagel with peanut butter, cooked broccoli "trees" and some leftover salsa pulled pork in a tinfoil muffin cup. On the top tier she has a mini muffin cup full of raspberries, two (one stacked on top of the other) skewers of grapes (the skewers are plastic party pics in the shape of mini swords), a large radish made into a "rose" and cucumber cut into flower shapes with smaller flower cutouts of carrots placed back into the middle of the cucumber flower. On top of the cucumbers is a red piece of radish with an orange carrot flower placed in the middle. (One is also placed in the middle of the radish "rose"). We made it the night before. Here it is done, ready to be taken out of the frig in the morning. It is so fun creating these, and although this is only our first one and kind of lame, we hope to get better and more creative. We will periodically post pictures of ones that we do.