A Jell-O Bento!

I took a bunch of pictures of my Jello egg making, then our egg dying, and then thought, “Wait this has nothing to do with bento… hmm.” However, this morning when I was doing my pictures, I realized that I did have something bento related to post.

Being a peach Jello addict, I wanted a batch of the stuff at home that wasn’t in egg form, so I made it with one of the layers of my 3-tier jubako bento box, which is something my mom used to do when I was a kid. I used four boxes of peach jello to fill it up. After it hardened I cut it into nice 1″ squares. I did remember that she used to make cuts in the lacquer though, so when cutting it, I made sure I was very careful not to knick the bottom with the butter knife. The box I have has rounded corners, so if you have a similar one it’ll net you four rounded squares, but some boxes are perfectly square.

The recipe I used was the one on the back of the Knox box, but instead of using fruit juice I use Jello.

Knox Blox

Ingredients:

• 4 boxes Jello
• 2 packages Knox gelatin
• 3 cups boiling water
• 1 cup cold water

Instructions:

1. Sprinkle the knox over the cold water and let it sit for a minute.
2. Add the boiling water to the Jell-O mix and stir until dissolved, then pour into the Knox mixture. Stir until the Knox dissolves.
3. Let your Jello cool down a bit before pouring it into the lacquer box. Lacquer cannot take very high heat, so you don’t want to warp the sides with really hot Jello liquid.
4. Since your mixture shouldn’t have been too hot going in, let it cool for another 10 minutes, then store it in the fridge until firm.
5. To cut into blocks, use the back side of a butter knife. You don’t want to scratch the box!

After this was in the fridge, I started making the Jello eggs.

My cousin uses a more precise recipe than I do, but I’m Miss Lazy and just dump in more Knox. This usually means your Jello will end up with a rubbery bottom, but this is actually my favorite part of Knox Blox. I like to eat all the regular Jello and then savor the hard bottom for last.

As you can see, I’m a lucky gal who has Jello egg molds. I bought them one day from Foodland years ago and let me tell you, they’re miraculous. My aunty used to save her eggshells all year to make these for us, then moved on to plastic eggs. Meanwhile I am blessed with this awesome plastic gizmo. I told this story last year. I guarantee you I will tell it again next year too.

I made Strawberry, Berry blue, Peach, Lime, Blackberry, and Pineapple. I only made one box of Pineapple cause I just can’t stand certain yellow things and only bought the box so that I could have color balance. I hate yellow Skittles, yellow Jello eggs, and yellow gummi bears. I think I should give this one a chance though, since it’s pineapple and my favorite gummi bear is the white, which I suspect is pineapple. I think I just don’t like lemon jello. I don’t like lime jello either, which is strange because I really love lemonade and limeade.

The kids loved them as usual, which is nice. Baby Girl has been eating my batch of 1″ peach blox faster than me and last night when I was getting her some I put the box on the sink, which has a bump where it touches the counter. About 1/3 of the jubako container was gone, but I made the mistake of putting the side with Jello facing out, so being tilted, it fell right off the counter and landed on my big toe. I screamed really freaking loud and it actually still really hurts. The box landed with the edge on the joint of my toe. Maybe I’m just a big baby, but that tray of Jello was heavy. This morning when I gave Baby Girl one piece for waking up and going to the toilet by herself, she whispered a warning to me, “Mommy! Don’t drop it on your toe again!” 🙂

I took some ribbing from Mr. Pikko and my in laws probably thought I was nuts for sitting down and decorating like a dozen eggs, but that’s too bad, cause coloring eggs is fun stuff and at age 30, I still love it.

It’s also a lot of fun to take pictures of eggs with your new camera. Of course, it was a bit of a madhouse, with anxious kids throwing eggs into dye cups and then dipping them into so many cups until they were a nice, dark, gray but after a while they got bored and it was just me, Baby Girl, and my two nieces (ages 5 and 15).

*cough* Eggs were on sale at Foodland, costing a mere $1.80 per 18. As such, we dyed over 50 eggs. We had a small egg hunt with 19 plastic eggs, which I have to admit was a bit of a disappointment to me since our hunts used to be outside in the yard with tons of eggs, including the ones we’d dyed. Instead, we dyed them, I took pictures, and we put them away with thoughts of eating egg salad sandwiches for the next two weeks. Expect more than a couple egg chicks this week.

This morning I had a dentist appointment to replace a filling and I got to watch Slumdog Millionaire on their DVD goggles. It made the time go by very quickly and everything was painless. Talk about a huge difference from the nightmare I used to go through getting 5-6 silver fillings at a time when I was a teenager.

I hope you all had a Happy Easter! ^_^