New Year's Eve Wrap Up - Bento Blogger & Friends Top 13 of 2013!

2013 has come to a close, and the Bento Blogger & Friends thought it would be fun to do a little round-up of our favorite 13 posts of 2013.  It was hard to narrow it down to just 13, but I managed to do it.

I have put my favorite posts into three sets.  Each set represents a kind of New Year's Resolution to myself for the blog in the coming year.

The first is special lunches.  I would love to do more lunches that are a little more than simply throwing food in the boxes - though there is nothing wrong with that, and I will likely continue to do elaborate decorations on a more special occasion basis.  In this set, I included one of my Rainbow week lunches - I picked the Red Day lunch, (which included some of my rainbow pain de mie - I hope to make this more often in the coming year), the lunches from the first day of school, my Frightful Fall blog hop lunches, where I first used wafer paper on sandwiches, my Star Trek blog hop lunches, in which I made a pretty decent Commander Data on cheese, and my Roald Dahl Day lunches, which I think may have been my favorite of the year - I was very very proud of my Mr. Fox.

The second set of posts is recipes and culinary adventures.  I have been a bit lax on posting recipes recently, and I hope to get back to posting them more often.  If you are a fan of mine on facebook, you should know that I do a lot of linking to recipes there that I get from other sites.  I will continue to utilize my facebook page in this way, as it is much more efficient, so make sure you visit my facebook page if you care to see what kind of things I am whipping up.  That being said, I have so much fun with culinary adventures, like the South African Baby Pineapple I got my hands on, and we had a ton of fun making homemade apple cider with my mom, and creating our own version of Fish Fingers and Custard (with souffle!) for our Doctor Who Blog Hop, and although I have fallen away from Wacky Worldly Waffle Wednesday, Sri Lanka was one of our absolute favorites.  I plan on doing my very best to make a return to our world travels with a waffle iron in the coming year.

Finally, 2013 brought fewer outings for the family.  Our summer was taken up by a play The Girl and I were in, and then she got Lyme Disease and was too achy for our customary hikes, not to mention the unfriendly weather we had in the summer - first it was too rainy for any fun, and then it was too hot!  Our hope for 2014 is that the summer weather will be more conclusive for lots and lots of hiking, and that in between, we have time to go on more outings to museums and the like.  I have included our lunches from our trip to the Shelburne Museum, lunches from our only really good hike of the season at Wheeler Mountain (and what a great hike it was!), lunches from our abbreviated hike around Silver Lake (we had planned on hiking on the The Falls of Lana, but then... predictably... it started raining...), and finally, picnic dinners we brought when Prairie Home Companion came to town.

I hope that you had a fantastic 2013, and that 2014 brings many more adventures to you (and to us!), culinary and otherwise.

Be sure to check out the Bento Blogger & Friends blog to see a link-up of some of the other favorite posts from 2013 from our little bento blogger community.  Happy New Year!