Somen Salad (215)

We had spaghetti for dinner last night but due to some kid craziness, I forgot to take leftovers again, something I was really upset about since I love spaghetti. With no food to take to lunch today, I ended up making somen salad.


I had somen noodles hiding away in a drawer. They've been patiently waiting for me to remember them and so this morning they cried out in joy at the thought of being the center of attention on AIB at last. Luckily, I still had eggs. I say "luckily" because I am really bad at keeping fridge inventory. I'm constantly going to the fridge for eggs or mirin and going, "Oh crap."

I had a kamaboko in the freezer, which was easily defrosted under water. The Okuhara or Okamura or whatever brand of kamaboko is usually cheaper, but having grown up in Hilo, I am biased and always buy the Amano brand. I chopped up romaine lettuce really fine, added the egg (which I did not mess up TOO badly), added the kamaboko, then topped it with toasted sesame seeds. I have the sauce separately. My mom has a reeeeally good somen salad dressing recipe, but unfortunately she never wrote it down and can't quite remember it. She's working on getting it down again and hopefully I can post it then. For today I have store bought sauce.

I was going to add spam to it, but horror of horrors, I looked in my cabinets and found NO SPAM. I AM A DISGRACE TO ALL HAWAII MOTHERS. *sob* Trip to Costco planned ASAP.

As I mentioned, we ate at Kyoto Ohsho on Friday night. This place is located at Ho'okipa Terrace at Ala Moana or "the fancy schmancy top floor".


We had pre-ordered all our food because had a huge ass party (maybe 35 people) but we still didn't get our food until like 7:45, which was quite annoying, especially since we seemed to have only one waiter for all of us. I do have to note though, they have AWESOME rice. I can't really describe it, but the rice was just divine. They brought a bowl of miso soup for the kids and a bowl of rice and while feeding them I tasted some and I just had to keep eating it. Plain, nothing else. It was that good.


I got the Grilled Salmon. Usually I drown (and I am speaking literally) my salmon in shoyu because I just love salmon with my shoyu, but the salmon at Kyoto Ohsho was salted, so it was very tasty on its own. It was also cooked thoroughly, yet still very moist. So in the end, despite the service, I was quite happy with my food. The kids' teriyaki chicken was really good, too. I had a lot more pictures of the appetizers and sides, but I ended up having to delete them because my camera was full. Candle blowing and family pictures are more important than food. ^_^


On Saturday we took the kiddies to go eat at Genki Sushi and while we were eating I suddenly smelled smoke. I looked up and one of the chefs in the middle was flamethrowing some sushi. I picked one up off the line and

OH

MY

GOD

It turned out to be something they'd added since my last visit, Garlic Salmon. It was soooo good. Raw underneath, cooked with char taste and mayo on top, this thing was some of the best sushi I'd had in a really long time. I ordered a second one and popped it into my mouth before remembering to take a picture, so that is why one is missing. I just couldn't wait to eat it!! They had two other garlic sushi types, but I didn't try them. Someone commented on my Flickr stream saying the ahi one wasn't as good, so maybe I'll just stick with the salmon cause boy that one was a winner for sure. Yum!!

Tonkatsu (204)

I type this with blurry eyes. Buddy woke up at 4:15 AM, asking for "chicken and rice" since he didn't eat much dinner the night before. I went to the kitchen and like any other good, kind, caring bento-minded mother woken up at 4 AM would have, gave him a wonderfully nutritious and beautifully prepared breakfast: chopped up microwaved hotdogs. LOL

Did I have you going? I suggested everything from Cheerios to strawberries to pancakes to grapes to peanut butter whole wheat toast. He wouldn't have any of it while he waited for the rice to cook so that I could make him some Costco chicken fried rice, so that's what he ate. And then when the rice was ready to fry, he was "full" and wanted to watch tv. Typical toddler, living in the now, which changes every 5 minutes.


Today I'm having tonkatsu. I had meant to cook some chicken I didn't get a chance to use over the weekend and try chicken katsu in a different way, but fell asleep putting the kids to bed. This looked a lot better before the sauce all oozed together, but unfortunately I took too long to take the picture. The katsu is cut into small pieces, there's rice underneath, and the asparagus lays nicely on top.


In my second tier I have a salad. I topped it with some Costco chicken so that I didn't need dressing, but I might go trolling into the work fridge and see if there's some healthy dressing I could sprinkle on.

Someone commented yesterday with a really great link to a blog post by Biggie on how to do thin omelets in the microwave. It made me think back to when I had lots of time to read everyone's blog and see all the great lunches and I really miss doing that. Biggie has such a wonderful, helpful blog and if I ever get around to constant reading again, hers is definitely on the top of the list. When I first got into bentos a year ago, hers was always a favorite of mine. Please take a look at her site if you haven't seen it yet. ^_^

Happy Easter!

I had a rather hectic weekend with a lot of things to do ahead of time for Easter. Add in the fact that my two little devils very thoroughly went through all of our belongings, making sure that every last thing was out of place or ripped to shreds. I did a lot of really bad grazing on the Costco bag of almonds I bought and fortunately, all the walking and bending over to pick up things probably helped negate it. That's still no excuse for bad habits though...

We currently have five little kids in the family that adore anything Jell-O, which is a really good thing for me because I'm always looking for backup excuses to make Jell-O eggs, something I've never been completely sure any adults other than me care for. My Aunty is the one who passed on this odd craving for egg shaped Knox Blox. Before advanced technologies were discovered (plastic eggs & molds), she used to poke holes into the tops of her eggs and siphon the egg out whenever she made scrambled eggs. She'd then save the rinsed out eggshells all year until finally Easter came around and she could use them to fill with Jell-O. I still remember helping crack the eggs under warm water. This freaking insane yet endearing technique must have done something to my head over the years because as it is now, I cannot have an Easter without Jell-O eggs. And I don't just make a dozen, I go crazy and make at least 50. My co-workers will find this out tomorrow. He he.

This year I made Cherry, Orange, Lemon, Lime, and Berry Blue. I made one box of Grape, but I ended up eating all of them with the kids on Saturday... hee. I still have tons of boxes of Strawberry, Raspberry, and Grape to make. Since Buddy had hidden a bunch of boxes around the house (I found one in the toy chest), I was missing some boxes and had to go to Foodland to round things out. I almost broke down crying when I saw that they didn't stock Peach flavored Jell-O anymore. Peach Jell-O was something I was addicted to while I was pregnant and I only have two boxes left. Hopefully they just don't stock it and it's not discontinued. My mom had a favorite Jell-O flavor: Blackberry. That got discontinued! D:


I had talked about my co-worker's cupcakes and how I was going to steal her idea. Well, there they are! They didn't come out quite as good as I had hoped. I should have gone for Jelly Bellys instead I think. I thought about using the little box of Bertie Botts I had here, but then thought that would be mean and that maybe eating a Booger flavored bean would make the cupcake experience a bit less than pleasant. They're topped with green dyed coconut and Smoothie flavor Skittles. Sadly the bag had very few purple Skittles and I found those made the cupcakes look the best.


I made a really huge ass Kim Chee Crab and Avocado Salad for the family and everyone liked it, so that was a good success again! I added sliced baby carrot this time for a bit more color since I forgot to buy grape tomatoes. Easter was really fun overall. My almost brother-in-law made scallop with mustard sauce appetizers and and a really, really good beef dish. We dyed eggs. Buddy dyed his legs yellow. I had a lot of fun with this Tye Dye set I bought. Yes, I dyed eggs. I'm still a kid at heart, so sue me. Sadly, no egg fights. I'd seen an oddly pointed egg while boiling them too. I had plans for that egg! Perhaps when the kids are older. It's just as well, they'd probably cry too much from Aunty Crystal owning them.

After that we played Rock Band and I finally gave it a try. It was fun and even Grandma J tried it out. Yay!


On Thursday, my boss mentioned I should grow some wheat grass as Easter grass for the kids. I had heard of wheatberries before but had no idea what they were or how completely dirt cheap they are. I headed to Down to Earth after work and bought 2 pounds of wheatberries for around $2. I soaked way too much and laid them out in one of my roasting pans on top of wet paper towels. The next day they had started to sprout already:


They're really fun to grow!! The only bad part is that like I said, I soaked way too much and so now they're all piled up on top of each other trying to grow. I transferred some of them to the bottoms of my flowerpots but there are literally thousands of them still needing transplanting. The really retarded part is that I'm doing it by hand, one at a time. LOL


These are the transplanted wheatberries on Day 3. They grow really fast!! Luckily I had a spray bottle and the kids have been having a ton of fun watering them by misting them. The grass is actually even taller now. Updates tomorrow!

We took the kids to see Horton Hears a Who! again. It was Buddy's second time and Baby Girl's first. She chickened out the first time and this time was sobbing, asking if we could go home. I had to trick her back into the theater and eventually she started peeking and as soon as the credits rolled, she yelled, "NOW I LIKE IT!" When I was younger I used to watch movies like Aladdin and Lion King and wondered why the hell these little kiddie movies were so riddled with adult humor. Now that I am older, wiser, and nearly braindead from whining children I understand that the humor is there to make the movies bearable for parents. It really just wouldn't do to have a bunch of stupefied parents driving their children home. They no doubt already have that dead look in their eyes from one too many Barney's or Dora's. That being said, I really enjoyed seeing Horton twice. My son adores him. Now if I could just survive the 50 daily requests for the longest Horton video I could find on YouTube (7m 5s), things should be okay.

Two Jell-O eggs were consumed while writing this post.

Jang Su Leftovers (197)

I passed out last night with 8 Easter Baskets unfinished and so it was a good (well, not all good) thing that Baby Girl woke up this morning at 5:15 am to announce that she'd wet her bed. We finished them together and she so kindly topped it off with a nice big tantrum/meltdown. I can't wait til these "Tantrum Threes" are over as lately I can just about see the edge of the cliffs of sanity.


There we have it, all 17 baskets. Now my brain can rest easy. One had no tag cause I forgot the name of a kid. 16/17 is still good though...

With all of that going on, I had to rush this bento and managed to finish in 10 minutes. Go me!!


We ate food from Jang Su BBQ last night. This place is at Waimalu Shopping Center and though Kim Chee still has my favorite food, Jang Su's food is pretty good. I took some of the chicken and bulgogi (thin bbq beef). I put some nori paste onto the rice because I just bought a bottle of this recently. I looooove nori paste. They have different types, I think plain, mushroom, and bonito. Since I'm allergic to mushrooms this is the bonito one. Sooo good on rice.

The bulgogi had a lot of fat on it but since I refrigerated it, the fat was white and hard and very easy to just pluck off. Much easier than staring at a piece of hot meat not knowing which is meat and which is fat. Tucked in with it are cucumber pickles and a baby carrot all sliced up. I only put it in for color, I have a whole bag of baby carrots to eat too. I bought one of those Costco baby carrot bags. You know, the one so huge you could mistake it for a Longs bag? (Longs Drugs bags are bigger than supermarket bags, thus are win.) Anyway, I'm in a Carrot Race right now to eat them all before they go bad.

I missed Idol last night and hadn't even watched Tuesday's show. I dunno why but I've lost a lot of interest in this season suddenly. I'm still pulling for David Archuletta and Ramiele Malubay, but I just got so bored with the show. Mr. Pikko says its because of the two weeks of Lennon/McCarthy and I think he's got something there. I mean, they made great songs, but they're very mellow and not very exciting. I don't get how they expect the kids to MAKE a mellow song exciting. Survivor was on last night, but I'll have to watch it tonight! I hope Cirie is finally gone! I despise her for getting rid of Yao Man.

Crab & Avocado Sandwich (194)

Sorry for the lack of bentos this week, but as I mentioned last Friday, we had a potluck on Monday. Lots of yummy foods were consumed including an apple/nut salad, lobster ravioli, healthy rice (from me, more on that later), enchiladas (which I didn't eat after someone said, WOW THEY'RE SPICY!), lots of fresh veggies, some REALLY ono fresh salsa with corn chips, salami & cheese on toothpicks, cold cut sandwiches, and lots of other goodies including the cuuuutest Easter cupcakes which I am so stealing for Easter this year.

Yesterday I stayed home because poor Baby Girl caught Buddy's stomach virus. She lay limp and miserable all day, the poor thing. ;(

As I mentioned, I made Healthy Rice, which is a very good and increasingly popular dish that I got from Grandma J who got it from someone else. It's very simple to make and I was asked for the recipe by at least half the office.

5 cups cooked rice
1 jar Nametake mushrooms
1 jar Ochazuke furikake
2 cups shelled edamame

Instructions:

1. Combine and stir together well.

I still have leftover ingredients so I'll be sure to make more for a bento once I buy more edamame. The best part of it all? I am allergic to mushrooms and I gave this a try, happily discovering that I can eat nametake mushrooms no problem! WOOHOO!!!

I haven't had a sandwich bento in quite some time so I decided to use some of the big pack of Costco imitation crab meat that I bought for a sandwich. Since mayo is a big no-no in calories and I've brought a lot of food for lunch, I opted to use Laughing Cow Light Swiss Cheese instead. It's possible this will turn out to be a terrible combo, we'll see!!


I lightly toast the bread but it gets a bit soggy in the fridge anyway, so I only toast it to make the cutting easier. I lined the sandwich box with lettuce, which I eat with the sandwich so nothing gets wasted. I also sliced up some avocado to make it less boring. With the cheese and the bread, this comes out to a 5 point bento. Each slice is 2 points! D:

The silliest part of this bento is the baby carrots. This bag was a bad batch, containing a lot of carrots that didn't get peeled well, so were therefore very bitter. Trust me, peeling little baby carrots is a severe pain in the ass. And I just noticed one of them had the nerve to fall out of place in the box before I took the picture. How rude!


I haven't had one of these in a while. Since this is an additional quarter avocado, this salad is 1 point. But, with all the walking I do for this job, the 1 point isn't a big deal. I get about 40 minutes of walking done per day just to pick up the mail. Pretty good, huh? :D


Lately I've been eating a lot of food so I have to keep myself under control by eating a lot of healthy food. I brought miso soup with tofu to eat in the morning, which was a good thing since Buddy had me up at 4:30 AM asking to eat everything under the sun. (catching up for 3 days of almost no eating) I brought more of my ancient kiwis along with their buddies the Senior Citizen Blueberries. If you look closely, you can see their wrinkles. As I've said before, I hate wasting fruit. You should have seen the nasty ass raspberries I very reluctantly threw away this morning. (I almost ate a few before tossing too, lol!)

It's more important than ever for me to be adhering to my diet now because my bridesmaid dress came in. I ended up being asked to pick my own and I chose this one. I love it! And even better, I fit quite perfectly into a size 6 petite! WOOOO! That's actually better than the dress, hehe!

Beef Cutlet (180)

It's been miraculously sunny on Oahu for the past, I dunno, five days or so? It was getting to the point where on a day of sun you go out of the house and say, "Wait wait wait, what? IT'S NOT RAINING!?!" But then as soon as I'd go to fiscal or something, I'm about to go out the door when I hear roaring rain outside.

Someone mentioned an ice storm yesterday and I started joking that my brain couldn't process such a term. Ice is in your water or soda! Ice is what you eat when you go to Baldwin's or Waiola Shave Ice! It doesn't STORM ice!

Anyway, point is, the seasons we have in Hawaii are basically "Sunny" and "Rainy", but if I had to break it down into four pidgin seasons, I'd say:

Winter = "Stay Sum Cold Outside"
Spring = "Get Choke Rain"
Summer = "Frickin' Hot"
Fall = "I No Can Stop Sweating"


Today I have this three bowl contraption that I bought at Price Busters. I've used a green one before for my salad kit once long ago and have had this pink one sitting around in a cabinet for quite some time since. I finally busted it out to carry some soup to work. I have here some Chicken Long Rice, made by my MIL.


In the main dish bowl I have some green salad with grape tomatoes, which I dripped with 4 drops of Caesar Italian Lite. Then I have beef cutlet, rice, and corn. In the Hello Kitty bowl I put some katsu sauce.


In my last bowl I have fruits. I cut two kiwis, half an orange, blueberries, and raspberries. Adding the oranges really brought the other three fruit colors together. I was really happy with how it turned out. To cut the orange I sliced it in half, then made half moon slices, then cut those in half to make little triangles.

As most people know, tomorrow is Valentine's Day. I just got back into posting my lunches at LiveJournal and of course, the bento challenge for this week is a V-Day theme, so I have to think today how I want to do my entry tomorrow! My eggs expire tomorrow, so maybe I can implement tamagoyaki somehow...

Kung Hee Fat Choy!

Yesterday before the meeting, we went to eat at Kim Chee 7, which is my favorite place to eat Korean food. They have really great kim chee here, especially the daikon pickles, which are pictured below on the left. On the right is their regular kim chee, which I didn't like before, but now love. In the two little bowls are their onolicious meat jun sauce. SO GOOD!

I had the lunch special, which is a combination plate of meat jun, bbq chicken, mandoo, and vegetables. I don't really care for their plate veggies all that much, it's really the only weak part of Kim Chee restaurants. If you want the best bean sprouts namul, potato, cabbage, and taegu you have to go to Gina's. Usually I dump the cabbage into the kim chee sauce in a little attempt to make myself more of that yummy stuff.

Before the people who pay attention to my dieting completely flip out, I did not eat all of this. I ate all the meat jun and a small part of one chicken. The rest will no doubt show up in a bento tomorrow. I ate very little rice, so it wasn't too bad.

Work parties and meetings are proving to be a constant interruption to my bentos! lol Today is Chinese New Year and so we had a team meeting + potluck. I bought some pork hash from Chun Wah Kam this morning.

This is a very beautiful salad made by my boss:


We also had another Chinese chicken salad, pasta salad, cantaloupe, watermelon, a spicy shrimp and pepper dish, curry manapua, pie, almond float, a noodle dish, choy sum, and some sticky rice with meat. My plate:


As you can see, I was pretty good, even though it was a lot of food. I took from both salads, the shrimp dish, half a manapua, choy sum, and fruits.

I hope no one is getting annoyed that I'm posting regular food here now. I just figure that bentos aside, the food we eat here in Hawaii can be just as interesting. I bet I make my ex-Hawaii mainland dwellers drool too, haha!

"OHHHH! MANAPUA!!"

"OHHHH! PORK HASH!!!"

"OMGGGG MEAT JUN!!"

Hehe.

By the way, the teacher gave an exceptionally glowing review of my darling spawn, leading me to the conclusion that I am the proud mother of the Teacher's Pet. It was a combination of the "she defends the littler kids from bullies" and "she's like a leader in the class" comments, the fact that she gets to sleep next to the teacher's desk, and the story she told us on the way home about how the other kids go out to play and she stays in class with her best friend and they eat gummy bears (A whole package, Mommy!!) with the teacher. Nice.

Also, I'm a bit worried about the quality of education my baby is getting here:


I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do when she watches The Secret of Nimh for the first time!!

Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon (174)

Last night was the season premiere of LOST and I have to admit that I was very happy with what I saw. Last season was such a drag to watch and the only redemption in the whole year was the finale with the flashforwards. Without spoiling anything, the premiere continued on this flashforward trend and with that, has brought life back into the series. And boy did it need it. Manual labor cracking rocks? Locked in cages and tricked into having sexy time on camera for your doctor crush to see? It really did sound like some silly fantasy a girl has as a teen. Hot doctor/hot bad boy love triangle on a remote island. Oh yeah, baby, who didn't wish for something like that when they were 13? I sure as hell did.

Okay now that I've got my schoolgirl fantasy confessions out of the way, we can move on to my lunch.

Last night Grandma J made Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon, a recipe which I actually remembered to ask her for this time! Woohoo! And even better, I have a picture of her to share with everyone. The majority of my bentos contain the food she so lovingly cooks for three families, so I think some credit is due. She protested the picture, but Mr. Pikko insists that under the surface she likes it. So if she meets us with a screech this afternoon, I'm so blaming it on him.

I've also decided to start referring to her as "Grandma J" because when I named the pic of her "MIL", Mr. Pikko's brain did some flipflops because it's too close to "MILF". Anyway, this is her! She's holding up a cookbook on the page with the recipe for the salmon, which follows:

Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon

1. Drizzle salmon with Mr. Yoshida's teriyaki sauce. (or other teriyaki sauce)
2. Spread mayo on top of salmon. If desired, mix some wasabi into the mayo.
3. Sprinkle Aji Nori furikake on top.
4. Place in microwave safe dish and microwave on high for 5 minutes. Check the salmon and if needed, cook for another 2-3 minutes.

Pretty quick, huh?? I am not a wasabi fan at all, but I tried the wasabi one (she makes with and without) and it tasted really great. It had the wasabi taste, but not the hotness. It's a quick 10 minute recipe, give it a try! ^_^

I forgot to mention that my ear is still swollen. I'd done the Neosporin and it seemed to help, but then last night I was cleaning my puffy ear when I realized that I was cleaning it with eye makeup remover. GOOD JOB, ME!

Roast Chicken (165)

Every day this year so far has been a unique mixture of shit and today is no different, but somehow I feel a little better about things. I'm not sure why. The situation I'm in is just as crappy or worse now, but my head is clear and my emotions in check. Maybe I'm just numb already, which is probably bad.


My lunch today is sliced Sam's Club rotisserie chicken with furikake rice. On the side I have some green salad and tomato. There is French dressing in the little orange container. The green shamrock bottle has some soy sauce for the chicken.

In my crappy 2008 year I do have something awesome and win to look at with glee. Something to look at and squeal, "EEEEEE!!" whenever I feel like I need a picker-upper.



OH YEAH, BABY! That's right!! A pic of me with Colt Brennan!! I was walking through campus to meet Mr. Pikko to go to a UH rally at Bachman Hall when I see Colt standing on the lawn in front of Hawaii Hall. I kinda hung around then went to meet the Mr. I told him we should go back and we waited with two other women until he was done filming the promo. The other ladies got his autograph and I walked behind until he noticed I was there. Mr. Pikko took the pic really quick and my hair got in the way, but it's still a good pic with great lighting! He's really freaking tall, lol! (ie I'm really short)

So yeah, that made my day yesterday.

The highlight of today will be the canning of Herman Frazier. I will have to pinch myself. Someone at UH actually has half a brain for once?! How is this even possible??

Pot Roast (156)

My mother in law makes really good pot roast but I always love the vegetables in pot roast dishes the most. When I was packing up food last night I wasn't sure how I'd turn this into a nice looking bento since pot roast generally doesn't look very attractive. So to help offset the doodoo like characteristics of the meat and potatoes, I decided to make the majority of this bento focus on the salad instead. Lettuce and tomato always look really nice in a box (in my opinion anyway) and so I took a large portion of salad to go with a tiny portion of food. I figured this is healthier for me anyway.

I packed some Catalina dressing in the little lion container for the salad. Not my best bento, but it looks yummy to me! This is packed in my Doraemon box, which is a wonderful size!! On the side I have some blackberries we bought at Costco last night.

I don't know how everyone else is doing but I am slacking so badly on Christmas shopping. I've bought the exact same DVD set for both my parents and presents for Mr. Pikko, my mainland niece and nephew, but that's about it. I still have to shop for my brother, in-laws, niece and nephew, sitter, sitter kids, MY OWN KIDS, and my grandma. D: It's December 11, this is not going to end well!! Normally I'm so good about shopping in November, but my head has been scattered with too many things lately.

Pork Tofu

As any Hawaii resident knows by now, the University of Hawaii Warriors are the WAC (Western Athletic Conference) Champions!!!! The game against Boise was last Friday and it overtook the Fresno State game I attended years ago as the most adrenaline pumped game I've ever attended at Aloha Stadium. There was a point during the game when the stands were just electric and the shouts and screams were deafening. It was truly magical to be there. This picture will be too big for my blog, but I wanted to put it up anyway:



We started chanting B-C-S and that gave me chicken skin! I feel so good for Colt and so happy that he came back. The season was looking kinda bleak with the injuries and all but now it just seems like this was all he could have hoped for. Baby Girl got into it too. I'd hoist her up and her job was to scream and wave the shredded ti-leaves we had. I can't wait for this week's game. GO BOWS!!!!

Last night I had to make something that I thought Buddy would gobble up because he's sick and hasn't been eating much so I made pork tofu. It was a lil lacking in taste so I think next time I'll use Kikkoman instead of Aloha. I'm also out of onion powder so I need more of that... It's the only way I can sneak the taste of onions into food because Mr. Pikko has the Ultra Onion Detector 3000 built into his tongue.


It looked real plain, so I picked some of my last green onions and cut them up with my scissors. When we had severe rains a couple weeks ago I looked out at my plants to see my poor green onions floating in a pot of water. They're still alive though, miraculously.


A KCCA salad, yay. This was all nice and good until I realized that I forgot to pack LETTUCE. hahahaha! So I guess I'm having this as sides instead of a salad. Good job, me!

Pork Chop!

YaY! Bentos are back! Well, only one for this week like I mentioned, but hey. Better than nothing!

My trip was ten kinds of awesome. I got to meet hundreds of people, signed 3 autographs, took pictures with Square Enix big wigs, and got to watch the UH vs. Nevada football game at the ESPN Zone restaurant in Downtown Disney with some random guy who JUST so happened to be from Mililani. He was even on the same plane ride home as me. Hawaii: too small! I don't know what his name was, but I thank him for being there. Watching those last two kicks wouldn't have been nearly as fun if he hadn't been there pacing around and jumping and screaming with me!


Today I'm having leftover pork chop with cabbage and rice. On the side I have a salad with some fancy pants greens that my MIL says she bought at Sam's Club. They're really yummy!! In the little blue container I have some Catalina Free dressing.

Tomorrow of course, is Thanksgiving. I'm going to try out a recipe for potato salad from the Harumi Kurihara book that I got. We're ordering from Zippy's this year, so I'll let all you Hawaii folks know how that turns out. Last year we ate from The Willows and not sure if I'm remembering right, but I didn't like their sides at all. I don't remember the turkey. That must be bad right? lol

Friday is Black Friday and although I was going to skip it for Wings of the Goddess, the PC version of the game got messed up and won't be here until tomorrow or Friday. I'm going to try my luck at CompUSA tomorrow night. If not, I will brave the BF crowds at Gamestop. I have no idea how their stores are on BF, but I guess I'll learn won't I??

Teriyaki Pork and Pomegranate Salad (144)

Me and Baby Girl went to Costco on Saturday before the reeeeally soggy weekend kicked off and boy did me and her go fruit crazy. We bought a huge tub of big blueberries, persimmons (which we tried in store), a set of 4 pommelos, and a tray of gigantor pomegranates. Pomegranates are one of my favorite fruits to eat and each tray had 6 mega big ones. I was scared I'd waste a couple, but I ended up eating 3 this weekend alone, hahaha!! No need to worry about fiber now!

I'd seen a recipe by Nigella Lawson where she combined pulled pork and pomegranate seeds, so I thought I'd try something similar with the leftover teriyaki pork chop from last night's dinner.


I sliced up the chop cold this morning and arranged it on top of an entire romaine heart head of lettuce. I added some of my tomatoes (which are backing up) and then sprinkled pomegranate seeds on top. It added a nice bit of color and I was pretty happy with the way it looks. I didn't pack any dressing as I don't think it'll be necessary.

It rained and rained and rained and on Saturday night it was thundering like crazy. I just so happened to peek out at my plants and saw that the rain was coming down so hard that my green onions had been uprooted and were floating around in rain water 3 inches thick. lol I'll have to make some tamagoyaki to save them from being wasted.

Being rained in, we decided to clean house, which meant I had finally run out of excuses to start folding the laundry in the crib, where we have been dumping clean clothes for the last 3 months or so. After at least an hour, I still hadn't dented it, probably because I was folding like 200 little shirts and onesies which took up very little space. I did learn that we could forget to do laundry for the kids for a month and they'd still have enough clothes to wear.

I also baked two pumpkins in order to make fresh pumpkin pie. I went to Foodland to buy some pie crusts, came home, baked the pumpkins, then realized that I did not have ground ginger. Cursing myself, I put the pumpkin pulp away where it will probably rot before I have the motivation to make it into a pie again. I had used another Allakhazam admin's blog post about roasting the pumpkin and there's this one part where she mentions that cutting the pumpkin in half is "hard". This is apparently the way Alaskan people say, "You need a freakin' AXE to get this pumpkin open." Really, I'm surprised I have all my fingers today.

Fan Fest is next. freakin'. week. After working all day Sunday on my costume, I realized that I wasn't going to have enough time to finish it. *SIGH* I have to work on something else for everyone and the briault is just not going very well, so I have to abandon it. *sob*

Core Bento (134)

After two days of sickness and a weekend of last minute naughty food gorging, I'm back today on the Core diet to lose the last 10 pounds to reach my goal.


On the left side I have some shrimp and in the little yellow container there is cocktail sauce to dip them into. I didn't get to photograph the egg too well, but this is from one of the new egg molds I mentioned last week. Next to the egg I have cucumber kim chee, then some small carrot sticks, and two small blocks of tofu. I've got a fish with soy sauce for the egg and the tofu, but now that I think about it I should have brought a piggie cause the fish isn't much sauce. Guess I'll eat the egg with salt!

I've also got a kim chee crab and avocado salad. I took a picture this time since it's been a while and people may not know what it is when I say KCCA. Foodland sells at their deli Kim Chee Imitation Crab and since it's spicy I use that along with avocado and romaine lettuce to make a dressing-free salad.


I'm starting this new phase of my diet at 129.5 pounds, so let's see how well I do by the time Fan Fest rolls around!

Furikake Salmon Salad (130)

As you can tell from the salads and lack of rice lately, I'm really trying to get back into losing weight. After finding out that I weigh 9 pounds more than ImperialNinja, my co-admin at Allakhazam, I really must get those last few pounds out of the way. There's mayo on this, but maybe only a tablespoon or so, which makes this a 2 point lunch I guess?


I've been really bad with cucumbers this year. I love to eat them but I always forget about them and by the time I'm ready to eat some for lunch, they're already going bad. This seems like an odd salad, I know, but I'm going to make it even weirder! I have a hard time eating salmon without soy sauce, so this is going to be a salmon/soy sauce/salad, haha!

Yesterday was a pretty bad day for me, but we got 3 batches of bad news so hopefully that's the end of it. First, Randy Couture resigns from the UFC. To people who don't watch, obviously this news doesn't mean much, but I enjoy UFC and I was very sad to hear this as Randy was one of my favorite fighters. Then, my boss pulls me into his office and lets me know that he only has enough funding to keep me around for 3 more months. Yeah, mad bummer. The icing on that assmatastic cake of lame was that I got into a little fight with my mom. We made up, but it still sucked ass obviously. Anyway, like I said, I hope that's the end of all that.

You think having a cute lunch blog would look good during an interview? ^_-

Mapo Tofu (127)

Work and FFXI forum drama have kept me occupied these last two nights so I have little time to make cute bentos lately. Plus, there's all the tv shows that have finally resurfaced! My Heroes taping last night came in with no sound for the first 45 minutes, *sob*. I'll have to find time to watch it online.

Last night we had Mapo Tofu, which is one of my favorite dishes of my MIL's and what I like about it is that it's not spicy. Most times that I order Mapo Tofu in a restaurant it comes with a bottle of chili sauce dumped onto it and that drives me mad because while I can handle some kim chee, I can't really enjoy the taste of things when my mouth is completely on fire and I'm chugging water like its going out of style. This is why I eat my sushi without wasabi. To me it just flames up your mouth and you completely lose out on the taste of the fish.


On the side I have a little salad with more of my cutie tomatoes that I picked just this morning. In the Hello Kitty container is some Kraft Free Ranch dressing. And as you can see, no rice! I've got to control my rice consumption again. I'll have to admit though, that's not the only reason I'm back up to 129 lbs. My sister in law is on this baking kick and she brings over cakes and cookies and bars and brownies like every other day. It's all really good but I have a much harder time resisting now than I did before. I sort of have this "Ah, I'm skinny now, I can eat it." attitude, which is really really bad. I have to get myself back on a more moderate eating attitude. In addition to what's in my bento I have a big bento box of strawberries and a bag of black grapes. I don't remember black grapes existing before, but they do taste really great. They're hard and crunchy and very sweet.

Keep voting for Biggie!

Last night Baby Girl was practicing her football cheers in the car. She kept yelling, "DEFENSE!" then "TOUCHDOWN!" then "GO BOWS!!". Suddenly she starts yelling, "THREE FOR NOTHING!!" and we were cracking up laughing. Then she goes, "COTTAGE CHEESE!!!" lol!! Mr. Pikko insists we must use these cheers at the next football game.

Teriyaki Beef (124)

Once in a great while I do a bento that take me less than 10 minutes to put together and thankfully, this was one of them. Lately I feel like I have 3x the amount of things to do to squeeze into 24 hours and on top of that, I seem to be getting sleepy earlier and earlier. I did manage to get some work done on my costume last night though. I'd burnt out and had to force myself to get back into it.

We ate teriyaki beef last night for dinner and since my mother in law's recipe is a very strongly flavored one, instead of eating it with rice I ate it with all salad. As you can guess from my KCCA salads (which means Kim Chee Crab & Avocado Salad) I like to use meats with heavy or spicy flavoring so that it eliminates the need for salad dressings. While doing Weight Watchers I of course got into the habits of reading the food label of everything I could and found that salad dressings actually have quite a bit of fat in them. Granted, I don't use the whole serving listed at 2 Tb, but still... 2 Tb of salad dressing with 17% of your daily fat? Nuh uh. With heavily flavored toppings, you really don't need any dressing.


I took salad greens for today's bento but since I had some rice leftover from yesterday I put that in with an ume. I added some of my fresh tomatoes to the salad. Notice how some are even tinier than the tiny ones? lol I guess some of them are just in a super hurry to ripen already. It's pretty cool, I get to pick maybe 5-8 tomatoes every morning. Pretty soon I'll have to start taking them to my mother in law's house because I don't think I can keep up eating that many!

Ham 'n Cheese Pizza (121)

Yesterday at the market we were strolling to the fruit section when I spied some pizza crusts. I decided to let the kids try making their own homemade pizzas for dinner. We have this cute book, which is currently AWOL in our house somewhere, that is a story about how to make pizza and so I picked up a packet of three 7" crusts, a bag of fat free mozzarella, and a jar of pizza sauce.

Baby Girl did surprisingly well in spreading the sauce all over and then putting the cheese on. She was putting a little too much cheese on her own, but just needed a little guidance. Then Godzilla Buddy came into the kitchen. He grabbed a handful of cheese from her pizza and threw it down on the floor! He grabbed another and shoved it in his mouth! Oh the horror! I kid, of course. It was cute. I chopped up some ham for them to sprinkle on and then promptly confiscated the tray to make some ham adjustments. Baby Girl thought she was being so clever by putting 1 or 2 pieces on her pizza and the rest on her brother's. Anyway, I guess the idea of pizza was more fun to them than eating it because as I suspected, they weren't really hungry yet. We'd eaten a really late lunch at 3:30 so I had a lot left to take today.


I have about 3/4 of a pizza stuffed into this box and then on the sides I have olives and carrots. I should have remembered the olives when I was making the pizza, but this is me we're talking about. I rarely remember things. My fruit layer:


On the left are some black grapes, which the market claimed was "seedless" but they most certainly are NOT seedless. I learned this the hard way after I chomped into one and bit into a ton of bitter seeds. They're still great grapes though. On the right are gala apple slices. And in the middle.... this is the highlight of my lunch today. Kookaburra licorice. My friend from Allakhazam, Kaolian, sent me 3 bags of this amazing stuff in thanks for sending him a copy of the FFXI Starter Pack and this is by far the best licorice I have ever eaten. I used to hate licorice when I was a kid but somewhere along the way to adulthood I tried it and love Red Vines.

These however, totally kick Red Vines into distant memories. They're soft and gummyish and taste so good. I cleaned out almost the entire bag this weekend and Baby Girl is addicted too. They're coming out with Mango and Raspberry flavors soon and I'll definitely have to try those. Anyway, thank you SO much Kao. It's a miracle these pieces survived the weekend, really.

There's still more to my lunch! I haven't posted a picture of a KCCA salad in a while, but since this one features my very own home grown tomatoes, I had to take a picture!


They're so cute and yummy! They don't turn completely red and some of them were starting to burst open on the vine, so now I just squeeze them and if they're a bit soft, I pick them. I had about a dozen tomatoes to use as of this morning. I'm quite the happy gardener today!

Teri Hamburger Salad (106)

As you may have noticed, I have snazzed up my blog a bit. It was getting stale and crusty and so I checked the Sell By date and it was pretty bad. Luckily I was able to scrape off the mold and put it in a pretty container for safekeeping for many months to come.

Doing this blog has done a lot of great things for me. I've learned a lot about cooking, I have something to look forward to every day, I lost 22 pounds thanks to Weight Watchers, and now I am getting freebies! Somewhere on the mainland a FedEx box containing the new cookbook by Harumi Kuriyama is flying over to me. I'm very very excited about it and can't wait to try out recipes and give a review on it. I didn't recognize her name at first but then when I went to Amazon to look it up I recognized her book immediately. I never bought that book though, mostly because they seemed more like dishes you cook for company. This one is on Home Cooking so I'm hoping it will have a lot of bento potential!

Last night we had teri hamburgers, which we usually eat with rice but since I was feeling in a good girl mood I decided to try it out with my salad with no rice. It was surprisingly very good. It tasted just like eating a hamburger with no bun, which I'd always though would be lame, but it wasn't. So continuing my good girl streak I've made a hamburger salad. The patty looked rather depressing though, so I added a face made out of cheese and nori.


I wasn't sure what kind of face to make so I just went with a silly face. Baby Girl saw his jaggedy mouth and announced that I was having a football bento and I guess from her angle it does look like a football. I added some grated carrot for added color and some edamame for variety. I'm going to stretch a bit and call this all Core because of the trivial amounts of things in the patty that would count for points. I mean I don't think I need to count a few bread crumbs and the lil bit of sugar. The box I'm using is a black lacquer box with gold bunnies on the cover.


I haven't had time to put this up on the store yet, but I do have two black and two red boxes like this available for $2.99 if anyone is interested. Also, be sure to check out the boxes section as I added in some of the Hello Kitty stuff that I'd run out of before. The orders I'm backed up on should go out tomorrow as I have to take the day off to pick up the kids. My in-laws are going out of town and so we'll have to cook or buy food for ourselves starting tomorrow. I think it'll be a great time to try out new dishes!

I was able to open a separate WordPress account and successfully import everything to a blog account there, but then it turns out that there are several aspects of WordPress I don't really like. For one, StatCounter doesn't work so well there, which is something I've really come to depend on. Two, I don't seem to be able to easily change fonts or colors or whatever. I'd need to change the css code and I'm not fully comfortable doing that. So for now I'm going to stay on Blogger and see what I can do around here. I'll have to think of something to do with my domain though as it seems a shame to let it rot there. Maybe a gallery! We'll see. ^_^

Zebra Bento & Countdown

Yet another reason why I am mental, I dragged the family to Don Quijote (formerly Daiei, formerly Holiday Mart) to look for good items to use in my bento #100, which I thought was going to be today's one. Well lucky thing I came home and triple counted my bentos cause this is actually bento #96! Oh well... the things I bought should hold up fine until then. But from today I will do a countdown. Three actually.

Bento Countdown to 100: 4!
Days until UH Football: 9!
Days until UFC 74: 2!

Granted our opening game is like the joke of all college football but hey, I'm still excited to see Colt throwing again and to see how the team is shaping up this year. A game against a seriously outmatched underdog makes me worry a lot less than opening against Alabama like last year. So, this is at the very least good for my nerves. I'm still nervous since losing to this team would ruin everything, but it's just a little teeny nervousness. What I am nervous about is our season tickets. Where the hell are they??

And yes, we're having another UFC party this weekend, so I'll have to watch what I eat tomorrow because I know I'll probably end up overeating Saturday night.

On to the bento! Today I have made an entry for bentochallenge! The theme this week is favorite song and although I don't have any one single favorite song, this one that I did is definitely high up there. The sandwich the zebra rests on is a turkey and avocado sandwich on Roman Meal Honey Oat bread, so that will count as 3 points. (since I cut off the crusts) The zebra is made out of Swiss cheese and nori cutouts. I'm quite proud of him as I did all the cutting freehand. No printouts this time! His eyes and nostrils are made out of black sesame seeds.


He's wearing a red bell pepper sweater. I wasn't sure this would be clear so that's why I added in the yellow zig zag. At the top are the letters HELLO carved out of bell peppers as well. This word is part of the hint to the song, so pay attention to that too! On the right side I put a KCCA salad for Mr. Zebra to eat. A close up view:


And now for the answer:









Take a guess!














Mr. Zebra by Tori Amos

Lyrics:

Hello Mr. Zebra
Can I have you sweater
Cause it's cold cold cold
In my hole hole hole
Ratatouille Strychnine
Sometimes she's a friend of mine
With a gigantic whirlpool
That will blow your mind

Hello Mr. Zebra
Ran into some confusion with a Mrs. Crocodile
Furry mussels marching on
She thinks she's Kaiser Wilhelm
Or a civiliaes syllabub
To blow your mind
Figure it out
She's a goodtime fella
She got a little fund to fight for Moneypenny's rights
Figure it out
She's a goodtime fella
Too bad the burial was premature she said
And smiled

So you see, he's Mr. Zebra and he's wearing a sweater which Ms. Amos wants. :D

If you've never heard the song of course you'll think I'm nutters for liking it and that Tori Amos is clearly singing more than two bricks short of a full load, but if you listen to it, it's a really cute and chipper song. It's very short and is old school Tori back when she still sang with only her piano.

One last thing, a friend from Allakhazam is a finalist on Hunt for the Hunter so that she can be a guest star on the Sci-Fi show Ghost Hunters. Please vote for her! She is the first video displayed, Brittany Beaulac!