Olympic Rings Reveal

On Monday, I asked you, my readers, to make your best guess regarding which foods I used to create Olympic Rings in this bento. Here are some of the guesses. The blue ring: dyed egg or dyed daikon radish. The yellow ring: bell pepper or yellow squash. The black ring: seaweed. The green ring: bell pepper, cucumber or zucchini. The red ring: bell pepper. All very good guesses.

The blue ring is a dyed, hard-boiled egg slice. After hard-boiling a few eggs, I completely cooled, peeled and sliced them. I looked through the slices to discover which egg slices looked the most like a perfect ring. Then, I removed the yolk from those chosen slices. Mixing quite a few drops of blue food coloring with a bit of water, I added each slice individually into the blue water for about 30 seconds. Carefully lifting egg rings from the water, I placed each one onto a prepared stack of paper towels to air dry. When all the egg slices had been dyed, I gently pressed another paper towel on top to finish the drying process. (I hard-boiled a few eggs at a time, just in case some of them didn't turn out right. Then once I sliced all of the eggs, I had quite a few slices from which to choose the most perfect rings.)

For both the yellow and the red rings, I used a mandoline to cut even slices from mini bell peppers.

The green ring came from a cucumber. Using my mandoline (such an awesome Christmas present from my husband!), I sliced several rounds of cucumber. With a sharp knife, I carved out the inside of the cucumber, making it look like a ring.

The black ring - well, let me tell you! That one gave me some trouble at first. I mean, what food is naturally black AND round? An olive! But no olive was big enough to coordinate well with the other rings. Enter onto the lunch scene - nori! It is edible seaweed, pressed into sheets. Usually, it is used for wrapping sushi or creating cute faces on rice balls. Instead, I used a 1" circle punch (found in the scrapbooking aisle of a craft store) to punch a hole in a square piece of nori. Then with scissors, I oh-so-carefully rounded the edges to complete the ring. 

Meanwhile, I had rice cooking in my wonderful rice cooker. When it was finished, I packed the rice into one layer of the bento box. Once it had cooled a bit, I placed the blue, black and red rings onto the rice as the background; in the foreground, yellow and green rings overlapped the existing rings, seemingly connecting them.

To round out the lunch, I repeated the colors of the Olympic Rings in the second layer of the bento. Blueberries proceed yellow, mini pepper strips. The middle section showcases black olives. Quartered cucumber slices constitute the green section, followed by red, mini pepper strips.