Boo! Bento…A Hair-Raising Lunch For Your Little Goblin
Halloween is a favourite holiday around our house. Costumes have been decided on for over a month, spooky crafts start adorning my refrigerator, and decorations come out from the cupboard under the stairs. Spiders, bats, skeleton bones, and rats start to find their way into our house. They’re on the walls, up the stairs, on the ceiling, and in our lunches. That’s right. Our lunches.
From the moment our Canadian Thanksgiving is over, my kids start asking for spooky lunches. The bigger the ick factor, the better. Eyeballs, gravestones, and vampires, oh my!
This little bento is one of our first Halloween-themed lunches of the season. It’s very simple to put together, I promise. I’ll take you through it one layer at a time…
The bottom layer has a simple gravestone sandwich cut with a cookie cutter and drawn on with food-safe decorative pens. I also used a sticker tag and pressed it into the top of the sandwich. I cut the bread first, wrote the epitaph, put the filling on the bottom layer, and then pressed the two pieces together…
*If you try to build the sandwich first and then cut it with the cutter, you will find it is messier and your filling may spill out the sides.
The cucumber grass is very simple. I cut about two inches off of the side of a cucumber. I cut two half moon pieces off the bottom and placed them on their sides in front of the gravestone sandwich. With the remaining piece of cucumber, I cut little triangles off to form the grassy spikes…
I added little tiny plastic spiders and a rubber skeleton finger puppet to spook up the rest of the bottom layer.
The top tier of this particular bento box is shallower than the bottom tier. This is usually where I put the sides or snack portion of the lunch…
I used little spider rings to hold the salami rolls together and added candy bone sprinkles to the cup of cheddar. I used candy eyeballs and pressed them into the muffin. The “boo” divider is actually a cupcake topper. I cut the post off to use it as a baran (divider) sheet in this and in future bentos. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box when it comes to bento-making. Repurposing can work just as well in lunches as it does in crafting!
I stacked the two tiers together and instead of using an elastic bento strap to hold it together, I used a piece of craft ribbon and placed a paper straw for her thermos of milk.
So there you have it! A little spooky lunch for your little one, all wrapped up in a bow. I promise this lunch will take you less than 20 minutes to put together now that you have a plan. And your kids will LOVE it. Really.
Happy Bento-ing!
~Arlee Greenwood, Assoc. Editor for Bonbon Break
ABOUT ARLEE: Arlee is an Early Childhood Educator, earning her degree at BYU Idaho. She runs a government accredited care center in her home in Red Deer, AB. She studied with the New York Institute of Photography and she owns her own photography studio. Arlee is a mother of 6, an aspiring yogi, a lover of books, travel, good food and wine. She’s a blogger and Associate Editor for Bonbon Break in her “spare time” and she will never say no to chocolate.
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