Two Bentos

Okay, so yesterday I had my yearly wimminz exam and so when I was packing up my laptop and getting ready to make the longass trek down to the parking lot, I remembered I'd forgotten to post my lunch. HOW UTTERLY THOUGHTLESS OF ME. *sigh* I need to slap myself.

Maybe I forgot to post it cause I didn't like the look of it. It reeks "lazy". There's no color, too. Wrong box for brown food! And then I just toss edamame in there like that makes it all better. Well it doesn't! Yech!! Food tasted great, though. Grandma J made chicken tofu. LOVED it!

I asked her for her pork hash recipe and she kind of laughed and said she just mixes pork, mushrooms, a bit of oyster sauce, and green onions. She doesn't measure. She cooks it in a pot, but obviously like you saw, you can fry them in little patties. Yum yum!

Okay so anyway, back on topic. That was yesterday's lunch and it was le good.


Today I am having teriyaki hamburger patty. I had to think of yet another way of presenting this since last time I did hamburger fried rice and before that I did toddler style meat loaf. This time I opted to slice them into little wedges. They weren't really tall so I took one of the wedges and sliced that in half flat-wise to use as a little "platform" for the wedges. That worked out nicely!

I made a ball onigiri and meant to put sesame seeds on it, but forgot it. I was in a hurry! I put in some sliced bell peppers and colorful tomatoes. Unfortunately, these are not illegal. I'm sure they taste good, just not illegal good. People back in Hilo have this saying that "Lichee tastes better when it's stolen." I know, you're thinking, what the hell kind of people does Pikko hang out with back home??? Stealing lichee isn't that big of a deal because even if you buy it down at the farmer's market, you know they must have stole that anyway. The same can be said for tangerines and some mangoes. Anyway, last of all, I have some julienned baby carrot and parsley.

When I recovered from the Flu of Death, I came back to work to find this amazing "award" on my desk:


Isn't that just about the COOLEST award you've ever seen!? She put everything in! Musubi with ume, sushi grass, fish, chicken, boiled egg, carrot, and even a lil soy sauce bottle. I was blown away, but hadn't had a chance to take a photo until yesterday. I don't know if she would want me to post her name, so I'll just say, you know who you are, thank you so so much! Of course I could just walk 20 steps to her desk to gush about it with her again but bento blog thanks are way cooler.

On to the Chibo pics!


This, obviously, is the entrance to the bathroom. I kid!


As I mentioned, I got a "special dinner" so it came with appetizers. This appetizer tray had beef tataki, tofu, and ahi poke.


The beef. VERY good. I love medium rare! Or rare if you're going to nitpick.


The tofu with bonito and green onion. Most of this went to Baby Girl, until I accidentally let a green onion about 1/2 millimeter in size get onto the piece I gave her. She has razor sharp green onion eyes.


This is the ahi poke. The first piece I ate was great, but the other two had a lot of tsuji, so I didn't like it overall.


My sister-in-law got the yakisoba crepe style and this is her crepe laid out to cook. I got to try some and though it was interesting, I didn't really like it.


The crepe being folded up! He basically dumps the yakisoba into the middle and folds it neatly. Then he adds the okonomiyaki sauce to the top and slices it into fourths.


This is someone'e else's food. I think it's a cabbage one. If you read the Wikipedia article on okonomiyaki that I linked the other day you can get a better description of it. It looked like they were frying cole slaw to me!


And finally we have here my yakisoba "Chibo". I asked for more shrimp instead of squid, but I guess that request didn't make it to the kitchen because I had squid in it. It worked out though, Buddy loved eating little donut shaped food thingers. It should be noted however, that he will eat practically anything. Except eggplant.

I got off my lazy ass and bought shoes for exercising at home and actually did Tae Bo last night. It didn't help that my legs were still rubbery from doing jumping squats, but at least I'm exercising again. I anticipate this lasting at LEAST 3 days. Wedding is less than two weeks away and I'm still at 128. At least I'm not at 132 though, which was where I was at a couple weeks ago.

This morning I was ready to rip my ears off and fling them at Mr. Pikko because I was so frustrated with my earrings. I bought new ones yesterday and for some reason my left ear decided it didn't WANT to have something going through it today. After like half an hour of trying and Mr. Pikko trying, I ended up with my stud in backwards cause that was the only way I could get it in. He tried really hard, but I really wanted to strangle him only because I was so mad at my ears and he was the closest breathing person. Who knew you could get so gosh darned MAD at your own body parts!

Chibo Yakisoba (212)

For Mother's Day the family decided we should beat the crowds and eat out on Saturday instead of Sunday. We went to a restaurant at Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center called Chibo, which is an "Okonomiyaki" restaurant. I had actually never heard of this type of food before and really wasn't sure how I'd like eating Japanese food in a crepe, so I went with the yakisoba. They cooked it right in front of us and this amused the kidlets for about 5 minutes before they were throwing napkins, stealing chopsticks to break them apart and toss them, and asking to go outside.

I don't eat yakisoba very often but have made it a few times at home myself. I got the "Chibo" combination special dinner. Though the food was good, I'm not really sure it was worth the money. I guess it's the experience you pay for. I have additional pictures of the food that I will post tomorrow!

For today I have leftover yakisoba from the kid's meal. Buddy and Baby Girl split a yakisoba dish with chicken and pork, so that is what I am eating today.

I added some green onions to the top to give it a bit more color and added in a flower-shaped onigiri with nori paste in the middle and small umeboshi stuck into the middle. This tasted pretty good reheated!

Yoshida's Sauce Chicken (211)

I got an e-mail this morning from someone at Chow.com telling me about a Food Discovery contest they have going on right now. I wrote up a quick entry about bentos and kim chee crab salads, so make sure you vote for it to keep it visible! There's no need to register! Any votes are appreciated!

Yesterday Grandma J made Yoshida's Sauce Chicken. I asked her for the recipe once. The words that came out of her mouth were basically, "I put chicken in some Mr. Yoshida's Sauce and a bit of water." LOL I think she thickens the sauce at the end, but other than that, the name of the recipe is pretty much the recipe itself. I'll have to clarify how long she cooks it and on what heat, but I assume it's cooked on low to get it really soft. It's by far one of my favorites of hers.

My rice looked really plain and white and I have had furikake on my rice a lot lately, so I added nori paste. Mr. Pikko finds this stuff disgusting, probably because it's wet and black and just all-around yucky looking but don't judge a paste by it's color! This stuff tastes GREAT! It makes a really tasty onigiri filling too.

Next to that I have corn with illegal tomatoes sitting on it. Illegal tomatoes?? Yes, illegal tomatoes. I think I've mentioned the wild cherry tomato plant in my yard. That thing is going wild and is giving tomatoes like crazy. We're not allowed to grow things in the ground at our place but I've let it go nuts for a couple of months now. There are a couple that even fell to the ground because I forgot to check it, so it's possible I'll have a serious tomato plant problem soon. I picked all of these this morning, so they're quite fresh. Aren't they so cute?? I wish I could grow a regular garden in the ground... that one plant is doing like 50x better than my potted ones did. Someday!

Pork Hash (210)

My son has definitely entered his Terrible Twos. The other night I was putting the kids to bed and he wanted to watch more TV. After the usual squabbling back and forth, I finally just pushed him into his room and shut the door behind us. I tried reading to Baby Girl but he was screaming his head off and she said it was too loud to hear. He was holding a little toy Thomas train in his hand and when he finally calmed down he was in grumpy mode. He finally gets my attention with his glare and then proceeds to very flagrantly lick the wheels of Thomas.

Next thing I know, he is steamrolling Thomas up and down Baby Girl's blanket, which of course turns into more chaos. Oi. Later, when he's finally in bed, I'm reading him a book and he begins to very carefully roll Thomas the Spit Engine up and down my arm. He'd long dried out, but I knew the evil intent behind that seemingly cutesy toot tooting.

Today for lunch I had pork hash, which Grandma J usually makes in a gigantic wheel of meat and then slices into wedges. This time she made some of the excess into little patties, which makes for great looking bento food!

My sister-in-law had brought home some fancy looking rice from a client, so I took some of that instead of the plain white rice. It turned out to be sushi rice with cut up cucumbers, tuna, and pickled ginger. I sliced 1 patty in half and layered it together with the last half that I had taken in addition to the whole patty. On top I layered baby carrots and edamame. There was some extra space so I added two tomatoes and finished the whole thing off with a little thing of parsley.

Happy Boy's Day!

I am finally back at work today. That "cold from hell" turned out to be the flu. I was out for a whole week and it really sucked. My diet consisted of soup, McDonald's, soup, rice, tofu, cucumbers, and soup. We were finally better on Saturday and SO ready for real taste in our mouths that we had to go to Panda's and get orange chicken to put some zing back in our taste buds. Last night I had Zippy's chili as that was another tasty yum to help bring back the feeling to my mouth again.

I was too busy with meetings all day to post this, but I had furikake wasabi salmon. Grandma J had given this to us earlier in the week but I just didn't have the appetite to eat it. I added in some mixed tomatoes and put French dressing into the little Hello Kitty container.

Friday Mr. Pikko went to work and actually brought me home Gina's Korean Miso Soup, which I had been craving but couldn't have due to them closing down their Waipahu location. *sob* I felt so gross and uncivilized after being at home for a week that I actually moved my take-out miso soup and veggies to the nicest dishes I had and ate them off that, just to feel normal again.

Anyway, hopefully I'm back to normal. I won't have a bento tomorrow as I'm going to a work assembly. It's 5:30 PM, I'd post more, but I want to go home!

10 Toddler Commandments

I haven't had a bento since last Thursday and this is due to the cold from hell. On Friday Buddy had it pretty bad and so I stayed home to watch him. Unfortunately I picked it up from him and for the last 3 days I've felt that confusion, "Am I hot? Am I cold? I have a fever, yet I have chicken skin, wtf?" My head has felt like it was going to explode and Mr. Pikko has been hacking away next to me like coughing is going out of style. Thankfully, I do not have a cough, but he definitely does it enough for both of us. I don't feel enough like a bitch to tell him his coughs are making my headache worse.

As if this cold wasn't bad enough, my kids were taken in the night and replaced with little demons. Buddy has had what my sitter called "Night Terror" which basically means he shrieks his head off every hour and cannot be comforted. Picking him up is only wise if you enjoy hard kicks to your exceptionally tender stomach. This does wonders for our heads, obviously.

Add to that, I have committed many dastardly crimes against my sweet children. Mommy must learn the following when she feels better:

1. Mommy shall not declare it "brush teeth time" while Curious George is still on.
2. Mommy shall not fold jelly bread in half.
3. Mommy shall not threaten to delete The Rugrats Movie off the TiVo.
4. Mommy shall not give her children Apple Jacks in a play food bowl because it is "too small".
5. Mommy shall not give milk when asked for milk, for her children really wanted juice.
6. Mommy shall not refuse to read Where The Wild Things Are more than three times in a row.
7. Mommy shall not pick out the wrong pink shirt to wear to school.
8. Mommy shall not say for the third day in a row that she's been too sick to go buy more milk.
9. Mommy shall not pour into the green cup instead of the blue cup.
10. Mommy shall not state that it is "too dangerous" to turn around while driving to look at every pair of Fruit Loops miraculously stuck together.

I write this down now so that when I'm 90 years old and driving my children insane, I can say, HAY KIDS, go look at my blog entry on April 29, 2008, you'll see why I'm so demanding!

Last Thursday before we became deathly ill we actually went out with some friends, which is now causing me to wonder if this is bachi for actually going out without our kidlets. D: We met at Yakiniku Million, which was an old haunt during the college days. Back in the late 1990s this place was that hole in the wall place that had some godly dish that everyone had to have. All of us would drool on the drive down (with the exception of one guy who was made to sit in the trunk of the hatchback since we only had one car) at the thought of their side order meat jun.

Millions had, hands down, THE best meat jun in town. All of us would order the same thing: side order meat jun. Sometimes we'd bring someone new and he'd order BBQ chicken and we'd look at him like he had two heads. They served it with a lettuce leaf and sometimes one last piece would be hiding under there, which was so awesome we started hiding a piece under the leaf just to have a surprise at the end of the meal. Then somehow, somewhen, they changed cooks or something. The meat jun is still really good, but it just doesn't have that legendary taste that I remember. My current favorite is now O-Bok, at Manoa Marketplace. No sauce needed.

We ate with a different set of friends this time so we actually did order Yakiniku. I think this is Combination B or something:

Cooking the food on a grill:


Yakiniku is something Mr. Pikko just doesn't get. He says he goes to a restaurant to get fed, not to cook his own food. He rescued both of us and ordered two side order meat jun.


There's the meat jun in the middle. We ended up getting three plates because in the midst of the talking, our friends said, "Hey, this meat jun is pretty good!" Notice the lack of lettuce leaf though. :(

I wasn't really big on their sides as it was the fancier fare of Korean sides. I much rather have the take-out type veggies: bean sprouts, kim chee, mac salad, cabbage, chop chae, etc. Legendary meat jun missing aside, the food was still great. I was pretty relieved that I wasn't the only one that took about half an hour to understand what the smoke vent was for...

Hamburger Fried Rice? (208)

We had hamburger patties last night and this is something I've been finding increasingly hard to arrange nicely without repeating the same old things, so I decided to try making it into a fried rice. I don't recall ever eating a hamburger fried rice, so hopefully it turns out all right.

The first thing I did was heat some olive oil in a little pan. Then I crumbled up the hamburger patty into small pieces and separated the rice as best I could. It was a mixture of white and brown rice. I had some already chopped up bell pepper and added that into the mix. After it had been cooking for a bit, I poured about a tablespoon of Mr. Yoshida's sauce over it. I added the broccoli last, since I hadn't thought about putting it in until I noticed it was rather bland in color.

Since lacquer boxes cannot stand high heat, I lined the box with some lettuce to help protect it. I poured everything in and arranged the pieces as best I could with chopsticks. For snacks I have baby carrots, some of those new Brother's Potato Crisps (freeze dried, ZERO oil, ZERO fat, yahoo!!), salsa, and popcorn.

Shoyu Chicken (207)

My apologies for the technical snafoo yesterday with my picture. I went to look at my Flickr and was like WTF?!? Where is my picture??? *sigh*

Grandma J made shoyu chicken the other night. It was still on the bone so I refrigerated it overnight so that it would be hard and then in the morning was able to pull it off the bone in one nice piece. I wanted it in one piece so that I could slice it nicely. When the meat is warm and soft it tends to flake and looks terrible. I laid the slices on top of some furikake rice and then poured some Mr. Yoshida's sauce onto the chicken since it was looking a little pale from refrigeration.

I added broccoli which I had let sit in some hot water heated up in the microwave in a Pyrex cup. I find this is much easier than boiling water in a pot and it cooks the broccoli just fine. I cut a slice of takuan into little wedges and tucked it into some empty space near the end of the box.

We have this wild tomato plant that is growing from a seed of an old tomato from our potted plants. It's growing under the AC unit and it's CRAZY huge. I wish we were allowed to grow plants in the ground, but we're not. I've been letting it grow just to see how many tomatoes it spits out. One was nicely ripe and we picked that one. I had told Baby Girl two other ones were only dark orange so we'd pick them in the morning for my bento. Then we went out to the yard and the two were gone!!! We think the birds got them. I'm really surprised she didn't blame it on the beavers.

Ramen Strikes Again!

First off, lunch from yesterday!

We met at the UH Campus Center and ate at Yummy's Korean BBQ. I got a MINI bbq chicken plate. Yes, people, that there is a "mini" plate. People here eat so much frickin' food that you can now buy a "mini" plate of too much food for just $6.95. Seriously, when did we get to be such porkers? I was too scared to think about what a full size plate looked like. I skipped the rice to get an extra veggie side. I ended up getting chop chae (the noodles), bean sprouts, and choi sum. Veggies at Yummy's is really good. I think I'd put them second behind Gina's sides.

Today I took the day off to take Baby Girl to an allergist and was very sad to hear that he was prescribing adrenaline shots for emergencies because this means my daughter is one of those kids you hear about that can die from food allergies. He made this very clear to me, hammering into my head that she can go braindead in minutes... Not that I mind a doctor like that. I'd rather have an honest doctor than one who sugarcoats everything. We've got some adjusting to do that's for sure. I figure I have at least six months of "I WANT PEANUT BUTTER TOAST!!!!!!!!!" tantrums to put up with before she accepts it. Definitely not looking forward to those. I've already hidden the Costco-size jar of Skippy...

With this rather sobering news, I decided to fill the prescription in Mililani Town Center, where I knew there was a ramen shop. I dropped it off and headed over to Genki Ramen.


I decided that I was getting into a miso ramen rut, so picked something new and ordered their Mabo Tofu Ramen. I left my brain at the allergist's office and realized I was sitting in a cash-only restaurant with only a dollar in my purse, so I had to tell the waitress to hold my table while I went to go get more moolah. When I came back, my ramen was waiting for me.


I really enjoyed this! It tasted like mapo tofu yet still had a ramen-y soup taste to it. It was slightly spicy and the noodles weren't too thick. Ever since I ate at Kiwami Ramen I've found that I don't really care for fat noodles too much. As I was eating this reporter guy was going around talking to people about the Town Center, so after I was done I gave him my card to come read my blog. This was only the second time I'd eaten at Genki Ramen but the first time was so long ago I don't remember what the food was like. It gets two thumbs up from me now!

UFC 83 & Kokua Festival

I have no bento today since I am going out to lunch with my old friend who just moved back to Oahu and is working here at UH again. YaY!

Here is the picture of the miso ramen I had at this place in Manoa Marketplace called Nishi Mon Cho. To be honest, it wasn't that great. The bean sprouts were really bland and the miso was congealed at the bottom, so I didn't know where the taste was until I was halfway through the bowl.

This past weekend was pretty awesome. Saturday was UFC 83, Georges St. Pierre vs. Matt Serra. I was, of course, rooting for GSP since he's mega hot and I can't stand Serra. He completely dominated him in awesome GSP fashion and it was great to watch. Rich Franklin looked great as well and it was pretty amusing to watch him fight against a completely gassed Travis Lutter.

My mom paid us a visit on Sunday and so knowing her love for movies, we went to see Horton Hears a Who with her again. This was Buddy's third time! He loves "BIG tv". We ate at Sumo Ramen and I had a miso ramen. People are going to be like, wow, Pikko is a ramen addict now. True story!

After that, it was time to drop them off and head down to the Kokua Festival. I had bought tickets online by making a donation to the Kokua Foundation. Go Jimmy Go, Paula Fuga, Mason Jennings, Tim Reynolds, Dave Matthews, and Jack Johnson were playing. No disrespect meant to Jack Johnson since he does have a great voice and lots of catchy songs, but we went purely for Dave Matthews. He'd never played in Hawaii before and the chance to see him live was just too good to be true. Things went pretty well, Dave didn't come on until 6:30, so we got to the area at around 4:45 or so. We turned into the zoo parking lot (against my advice) and amazingly, someone pulled out right in front of us. So.. parking was a breeze. So lucky!


We decided to go into Waikiki to find a place to eat and soon found out that there really weren't that many places to eat on Kalakaua Avenue. We walked for 20 minutes and then I figured since I'd dragged Mr. Pikko almost clear across Waikiki, we would be able to just eat at Kiwami Ramen which was A-OK with me! I got the Miso Ramen with Tasty Egg (which you can kind of see peeking out of the dashi). It was VERY good! The noodles were perfect and the soup very tasty. I didn't even mind the chili peppers. Their chasu is very soft, two big thumbs up!

We got back to the Waikiki Shell just in time and found our seats in time. The announcer called their appearance "epic" and "historic" and then just like that, Dave Matthews came on stage. Now, I have a thing for mellow male voices but there is just something special and magical about the voice of Dave Matthews. I actually had tears in my eyes during three of his songs. Maybe it was because it feels like he's singing to your soul.


I'd never heard of Tim Reynolds before this concert and they made a great duo. They played for a little under an hour and a half and I can happily say that my drawn out Valentine's Day gift was a smashing success with Mr. Pikko.


My only complaint was definitely the stage camera operator. That dude needs to get another job because every time they had him focusing in on the people on stage, I swear, he'd suddenly drop the camera angle down to the stage floor and they'd have to shift to another camera. My pictures didn't come out so great since we were kind of in the back, but I was able to take the above one by going down the aisle to snap one.


Luckily there was a big screen that we could watch whenever they'd zoomed in on him.


The festival was very sold out, so a lot of people camped out on the grass in Kapiolani Park just to listen to them from outside. I took a picture during a break.


Jack Johnson on the big screen. He played a lot of songs with his band, then later came back out to play by himself and with other singers. We stayed just in case he sang with Dave later in the show...


Here I am with Mr. Pikko, who is blotted out with a picture of Pokko's face. He doesn't like to have pictures online and so out of spite, I figure I might as well dig in the Mr. Pikko embarassment bit. ^_^

I got THE last Kokua Festival T-shirt they had there, taken right off the wall of the only merchandise booth left open. I love fitting into small size shirts. :D