1/14 Rainbow Bentos
I have been thinking about doing a rainbow bento for a while and finally got around to it. I also have been wanting to experiment with using fresh vegetable juice to dye things like rice, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I also wanted to use at least 1 fruit and 1 veggie in each color. Here is what I came up with. Fruits: strawberry, orange, pineapple, green grapes (I wish I had kiwi), blueberries and purple grapes. Veggies: red bell pepper, cherry tomato, carrots, orange cauliflower, golden beets, crookneck squash, snap peas, turnip (tried to dye with blue dye but it didn't take well), and purple kale.
This was CDC's version of the rainbow bento. He got some pork bites and chicken veggie dumplings as well. I tried a different configuration, but neither bentos really came out as I envisioned them. Arranging them was very difficult.
To make the fresh veggie juice dyes first I finely grated or chopped the veggies (I mostly used the fine side of my cheese grater). For each color I used about 1/4 cup of grated veggie. I put that in the center of a piece of cheese cloth (about 6" X 6") and gathered the edges. Then I started twisting the excess cheese cloth until it started squeezing the veggies. Holding it over a small bowl I kept twisting and squeezing the juice out of the veggies as much as possible. Depending on the veggie I would get about a tablespoon of juice.
Red : Beet juice with a drop of vinegar (helped brighten the color and make it more red than pink)
Orange: carrots
Yellow: golden beet
Green: spinich
Blue: Purple cabbage with a little baking soda (makes it turn from purple to blue) I got the idea from my son's science kit. It has some red cabbage powder that you can get to change color by either adding baking soda or vinegar.
Purple: Purple cabbage
I then added a few drops of each color to small amounts of rice and mixed them well before putting in the cube shaper. Some colors were not very bright so I decided to add a little of the grated veggies to help brighten them up. I did this with the carrots and golden beets. The golden beets still did not have enough color so this was the only one I added a drop of regular food coloring to. Next time I will try tumeric for yellow, I didn't have any this time so I was getting creative with the golden beets and it didn't work out.
So that's it . My experiment went well I think. Blue was the hardest to figure out. I've read that blue is a taboo color in bentoing. I'm not sure why, but maybe because there are very few natural foods that are blue. We haven't eaten these yet so I don't know how they will taste. They could be horrible with all the different flavors or maybe they are very nice subtle flavors? I'll let you know in a later post.
