Tiptoeing into the New Year

What a tired morning for the first bento of the New Year! I think I did an okay job making a bento in 10 minutes flat after only 3 hours of sleep and a 5 am drive to take my husband to meet the airport shuttle. It's extremely simple and the only thing that got cooked was the broccoli, but I still think it's pretty :) I had envisioned making a beautiful, perfect bento for the first bento of the year. The scramble to get my husband all packed and to his plane on time made me throw that plan out the window, however. Oh well :D So instead of starting the year out with a running leap, it's more of a quiet tiptoe.

In the bento: Two circle sandwiches of peanut butter and strawberry jelly (very, very little jelly!), a piece of steamed broccoli, one baby tomato, small carrot sticks and a huge bunch of grapes.

The flowers are provolone cheese with candy stars in the center. The large flowers are held onto the sandwiches with honey as a glue and then the stars are also held on with honey. The flowers were cut out with my new daisy fondant cutters that were on sale at Hobby Lobby last week! (The largest one is pictured beside the box.)

Our holidays were extremely chaotic this year. It was the first time in 128 years that our area got snow on Christmas! Not only snow but a good deal of snow - around 6 inches which is almost unheard of here. The snow was so beautiful. Until we got out and played in it, that is! We enjoyed being able to track the forest animals in the snow - rabbits, deer and wild turkeys. A-chan built a snowdog with her daddy and a snowboy with me.

On Christmas eve our well died (impeccable timing, lol) and we were without water for 5 days. Cooking and cleaning with bottled water was just like being back in India and was more of an adventure than anything. Until the last day when we ran out of clean socks. Having my husband home to help out with the disaster was very nice! The poor guy had to leave again this morning and lost his wallet during his trip back to California.

Here are some pictures of the holiday treats that I made this year. They are in Pancha Ganapati color order: Yellow, blue, red, green , orange. A-chan sorted M&Ms to color-coordinate for each day.

Yellow day - Coconut Butter mochi and the ingredients for apple pulao.
Blue day - Divinity and a smattering of pecans and a bowl of blueberries with coconut topping.
Red day - Chocolate dipped coconut macaroons, bing cherries and some chocolate dipped cherries.
Green day - Badam burfi (a type of Indian almond fudge) and green apples for apple strudel.
Orange day - Broken biscuit cake, lots of nuts and clementines which were later chocolate dipped!