Beets to Bento

    

Last night I was browsing the articles about preserving at Homegrown & Healthy and when I reached a post about beets, I realized something - I have never eaten a beet! Have no idea at all what they taste like. And they are such a pretty colour too! I like radishes, rutabaga, turnip, parsnips, & carrots - they are all root vegetables ... would I like beets? I wonder... Anyways,  I've been thinking about ways to add colour to the sproutlets lunches without using artificial food colourings, so that vibrant purple got me thinking... could I use beets? Would they be good to colour things pink or purple, such as pancakes or muffins, or would that taste awful? I searched baking with beets. This title near the top of the search results caught my eye:  Just Hungry | Baked Beets. I hadn't been planning on baking beets just yet, thought I'd ease the kiddos into it by first using the beets to colour something familiar, so if they liked it I could eventually use it as an example to entice them to try the veggie itself - but I clicked the link anyways, out of curiosity. And at the top of the page, under the heading My Bento Book, was a photo link to The Just Bento Cookbook, a book by the same author as the blog I had landed on, who also happened to write Just Bento, a blog I had on my own blogroll. Ha! I had to laugh, because here I was not even looking for bentos, and I find a book about bentos.  It's all about bentos with me lately :)

I got distracted and never did find out how beets would do in baked goods...