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!

The Road to 200

Alrighty, it is now 1:52 AM on Friday and I am obviously tired out of my mind and starving to boot. However, I brushed my teeth to ensure that I wouldn't eat something just before going to bed. No guarantees on correct spelling and grammar in this post though.

As I mentioned yesterday, the kiddie terrors put a damper on my Thursday plans, so I had to continue my bento tonight. This one took me a lot longer than the first, mostly because the food preparation took so much time. I took three hours yesterday to cook food and today I took another three hours to complete the embellishments, bringing this gigantic mass of Sanrio lunch to six hours preparation time. Here it is!! (click it for bigger photo)



Before I start describing just how messed up in the head I am, let me just say that I'm not all that pleased with the results I got from this landmark lunchie. I had envisioned something much more vibrant in color and my favorite character, Pochacco, ended up looking the worst of the little guys. I think it still looks cute and all, but it's nowhere near the one I'd put together in my head.

There is food underneath the characters and so at the top I have oyako donburi sprinkled with chopped wheatgrass, since I had no green onions. I thought this was amusing since we watched the finale of Celebrity Apprentice last night and so much attention was given to wheatgrass, which I just so happen to be growing all over my house and at work. Too funny!! On the right side there is some vegetable yakisoba, on the bottom I have little squares of Okinawan sweet potato. People ask me about the potato all the time and to answer the inevitable question again: No, I do not dye the potato. It is naturally colored that way. On the left I have shelled edamame.


First up, to get rid of my shame early, is what is supposed to be Pochacco. I think I just picked a bad picture of him to copy and it was too small as well. He's made out of nori, pear skin (shirt), egg, and toasted sesame seeds. All the little characters sit on a d'anjou pear star. I thought afterwards that I should have dyed it yellow to add more color, but by then I had already stuck Bad Badtz and Keroppi on, so it was basically too late. *sob* Also, I had wanted to use my star shaped Whale of a Punch, but it's gone AWOL. I suspect either Baby Girl or Buddy have hidden it in a secret place and have forgotten where already. So anyway, that star is freehand!

I had previously used white cheese or d'anjou pear to make white things but finally figured out something even better! Boiled egg whites! With all the boiled eggs still sitting in the fridge, I realized that it would make the perfect white carving material. It worked out great for all the characters. I am so unhappy with Pochacco that I wasn't going to take a close-up picture of him. But then I realized that he's sitting on top of my donburi and I didn't want him to get offended and pee all over my food. He is a dog after all...


Monkichi is a rather old Sanrio character from when I was in high school. I'm not sure a lot of kids nowadays would recognize him. I made him out of hotdog skin. You can kinda see how he is slightly curled, which actually turned out good because it made him look more 3D. The lighter parts of him are hotdog as well, only the inside part is showing outwards. I forgot to make him his two cheeks, but after six hours I no longer give a crap.


Picke Bicke is another older character that you don't see around much anymore. He's a cute little mouse that should have a tail with a red ribbon on it, but it was too microscopic of an effort for me to undertake. His ears are made out of Okinawan sweet potato, his body is made out of sliced ham, and the white parts on him are boiled egg. His eyes and nose are toasted sesame seeds, which I trimmed to give them less of a pointy shape.


Chococat was nice and simple and I took us to McDonald's and made Mr. Pikko run out and grab a straw for me to cut out his eyes easily. I should have had my own straws at home, but since my children like to drink with at least 5 straws at a time, we run out pretty quick. His eyes and mouth are made out of boiled egg and nori. I used a hole puncher to make his nori pupils. His collar is boiled egg dyed yellow and his nose is a little bit of hotdog. He's quite happy to be sleeping on a bed of edamame!


For some reason, Keroppi was very difficult to photograph. I had to try 4 different angles and finally got one that didn't have too much shadow. Same as the last time I made him, his face is made out of d'anjou pear skin. This time though, his eyes are made with boiled egg instead of cheese and his shirt (tomato skin) is not striped this time. I forgot to give him cheeks too!! :(


I have saved the Badtz for last. He's such a great character and if Pochacco is my cutie pie favorite, Bad Badtz is my favorite Sanrio character with attitude. He's of course, being a rascal and sticking tongue at you, no doubt thinking several kinds of @*#& thoughts. I cut him out of nori and then put egg white eyes and tummy on top. His beak is the same as Chococat's collar, egg white dyed yellow. His tongue is made out of tomato skin and nori. He was by far my favorite to make!!

In the middle of all of them I have the Queen of them all, Hello Kitty. Her ribbon is made out of red-dyed pear. The onigiri is to eat with the donburi. I lined the whole box with lettuce to make it look a little more frilly. I still wish I'd thought early on to dye the pear stars yellow. That would have looked great! I had tried to make colored egg omelettes to wrap my food into so that I could have brightly colored sections of egg wrapped food. The egg stuff just wasn't meant to be for some reason.

For one, I was cracking the five eggs needed for the donburi and on the fifth egg, I crack it open and blood comes pouring out. I was SO disgusted and didn't feel like scooping it out. What a total waste of 5 eggs. And then, I'm preparing the omelette mix when I add in the red coloring to make it pink. What do I get? ORANGE EGG MIX! Grrrr!! I tried cooking it, but it just didn't look good. I ended up using it to wrap some string beans in. You can see a few down by Badtzmaru. I'd also wanted to use a pink bento box, but I didn't have any that were big enough for what I needed.

I had more to talk about, but right now my eyes are closing involuntarily. I hope you guys like it. Tomorrow I probably won't eat anyone except Hello Kitty. I'll line them up in the bento cover and they can watch me eat lunch.

Zoo Bento (183)

Today was a rather exhausting day. It was President's Day and since I work for the state, of course we get the day off. At least, I think it's President's Day... lol! Anyway, my mom stayed over last night so that we could go to the zoo together today before she flew home. I made a bento for all of us. Mr. Pikko was going to go, but then discovered the toilet was leaking and so had to stay home and fix that. Yuck!!

So me and moms headed off to the zoo with one really itchy girl (she broke out in hives last night for some unknown reason) and one monkey. It took us like an hour to get from the car to the picnic area because Buddy wanted to stop and "WHOAAAAAA!" at everything. It was a sweltering day and I was ready to leave after staying 5 minutes in the Keiki Zoo.

I made spam musubis and tucked in some sliced fishcake to fill the spaces on the side. This time I used Spam Lite so that I could excuse myself for eating more than one. ^_^


I could have just brought the musubis and that would have been enough, but I made yakisoba, sweet potato, and shoyu hotdog for the second layer. I don't know why, but it didn't even occur to me to use my octopus dog cutter that I bought from J-List during Christmas. I was packing them in when I remembered it and I was ready to kick myself. Oh well... next time!! Baby Girl didn't seem to mind. She grabbed like 5 hotdogs and proclaimed to all that were listening that those were HER hotdogs. When she couldn't eat them all she ever so graciously gave them to Buddy to eat. Cause she's so nice like dat.

For the yakisoba I just had a package of yakisoba noodles in the freezer. I bought a bag of stir fry veggies, fried it in 2 Tb of olive oil, added two slices of Spam, the noodles, and then 10 Tb of oyster sauce. Very quick and easy to make and tastes really good. I have some for my lunches this week.

After the zoo we went to Waiola for shave ice and man the line was retardedly long. My mom took like 20 minutes to come back with the cups. Tasted so good though, was worth the wait. Anyway, it's 8 pm and I need to go bathe and pass out.

Mapo Tofu & Beef Broccoli

I had a very stressful night last night as I had to make my bento for today ahead of time so that we could leave on time today and then I had to pack up the many bento packages for the store. I ended up going to bed at 2 am because my bento was giving me such a hard time! The colors were so drab in one layer yet vibrant in another. Eventually I just gave up and settled on one brown themed layer and one bright layer.


From left to right I have rice, beef broccoli, mapo tofu, and then a boiled egg bear. I soaked him in soy sauce for a bit to make him brown and then gave him a little brother to snuggle with. (more soy sauce)


This layer is thankfully healthier than the top layer, though not by much. I have leftover yakisoba in a food cup, sliced cucumbers (which I will eat with plain salt), carrot flowers, a grape tomato, and then my dessert. The dessert is in the cute little animal cup. There are 3 little strawberry Whoppers hidden in there. Hee!

Yesterday I tried to go down to Satellite City Hall to pay my van registration and I got lost in the Ala Moana parking lot and when I finally got there, lo and behold they'd just closed the door. So typical of me. Not wanting to let that get me down, I drove over to Marukai, heehee. I picked up a bunch of new things for the store but unfortunately, still no new bento boxes. :( I'll probably go to Price Busters today to get some of the Hello Kitty stuff.

Pipi Kaula

Last night we had pork hash for dinner and although I really like it, the leftovers I packed for myself to arrange into a bento were just never meant to be eaten by me. I put the piece of it into my bento box and left it on the counter for when we went home. My nephew got a hold of the box and eventually it ended up crashing and the ball of pork was on the kitchen floor. Since they just got their kitchen renovated, Mr. Pikko said that it was still ok to eat. So I packed it up again and we went out to the car to leave and I put the bento box on the dashboard. The car is on an incline so it slid down and plopped open on my seat, tossing the meat out. I picked it up within 3 seconds, so everyone agreed it should still be ok. None of us knew what tragedy would occur not even 15 minutes later.

We got home and I was trying to juggle one 3 year old, two bento boxes, and Pickles the plushie frog when the bento box suicided out of my hands and landed on the pavement. It was so ridiculously hilarious that Mr. Pikko actually called up his mom just to tell her that I'd accidentally dropped it yet one more time. That pork hash simply did not want to be my lunch today.

Back when we had our UFC party I'd defrosted two packs of pipi kaula thinking I'd have to cook another but we had so many hotdogs it wasn't necessary. So I had a pack of it still in the fridge and busted it out for lunch since I couldn't find any other kind of meat to use.


The rice was leftover and the yakisoba is another serving from the freezer. I added in a boiled egg but it didn't peel very nicely or cut well so I covered it up as best I could with a little pink food divider. In a foil holder I added some simmered pumpkin. I'd bought some frozen pumpkin and just tossed it into a small pot with a recipe I found online for simmered kabocha. It was quite easy since the pumpkin was already chopped into pieces. Very convenient! The pink soy sauce container is for the egg. Extreme close-up! The box I used is one I'd found at Marukai down here about a month ago. 99 cents and thankfully, made in Indonesia!


I have I think 4 of these boxes, I'm not sure. Yellow, pink, green, and blue maybe. Not positive about the blue. They come with a cute fork though! Not sure if I mentioned it before, but I bought adventuresinbentomaking.com in case I ever want the domain. Didn't want someone to squat on it and it was cheap too. Hopefully now I can work on a page that will nicely showcase my bento box collection!

Mango Wazowski

I think I mentioned before that character bentos were killing me. Too bad I didn't remember that earlier when I started on today's bento, which was done for this week's bento challenge. The theme this week is favorite Pixar characters so I chose Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc. I debated doing Boo as well, but after finding a picture of her I decided that much cute in a bento might kill people.


Mike is made out of cigar mango skin, thus the title "Mango Wazowski". He is lying on a slice of yellow peach with some bing cherries to keep him company. There is mango on the other side so I'll definitely eat him. His eye is made out of sliced Baby Bonbel cheese with a nori pupil and mouth.

Ok... the teeth. Extreme close-up. The teeth are sesame seeds cut in half applied with some extra sticky rice and a pair of tweezers. Mr. Pikko came into the kitchen while I was applying the teeth because I was moaning and groaning about my back. When he saw me slicing sesame seeds in half with my X-Acto knife he said I was insane. I wasn't going to even post Mike because I didn't really like how he turned out, but he insisted that Mike looked fine. I realize that mango does not go well with nori and sesame seeds but give me a little leeway here.


For the smaller layer I put a little portion of yakisoba from the freezer, sliced fishcake, and oh! What a surprise! Meatballs! Haha! I'm not packing a salad or anything else because tomorrow I'm going to some work picnic and I have to help setup and cook food. I'm going to eat this before we leave so that when it's time to eat lunch I'll be moderately full already. Sadly, this layer is 5 points all by itself, so I'll have to stick to all core foods at the picnic and at dinner.

Zoo Bento

As I mentioned earlier today we took a trip to the zoo so I went to Foodland earlier this morning to get a few things such as stir-fry veggies, fishcake, and some turkey hotdogs. The kidlets were driving me absolutely BANANAS so preparing the lunch took a lot longer than expected and by the time I was done it was 5 to noon, so Mr. Pikko suggested we just eat at home. It would have been nice to actually eat it out, but in the end I figured it was more convenient to eat at home anyway.


I used my large 3 tier bento box but only needed to use the top layer since we were the only ones going. There are spam musubis on the right. I made 9 musubis and then froze 5 so that next time I can just bust them out and nuke em. Same for the yakisoba, I was able to freeze 5 separate servings for future bentos.

On top of the yakisoba are some crab hotdogs! I was finally able to use them, I was so thrilled!! I mauled a couple until I got the hang of how to use it, then cooked them in the same sauce I'd used to make the spam musubi. The legs and pincers fanned out after they'd been cooked for a bit. To go with the hotdogs I made two round onigiri for the kids decorated with the new nori punches I got. For the cheeks I lightly dabbed them with some red hana ebi (colored shrimp flakes). It needed color and they looked nice and cheerful after I dabbed it on! Last of all is some sliced vegetable fishcake.

The zoo was fun, but right after the elephants some poor little girl about 6 or 7 fell down hard and was screaming something awful. Hubby suggested I go over and offer whatever I had in my little first aid kit and when I got over there it was horrifying. Her mouth was full of blood and her mom was saying that two of her teeth were gone. *CRINGE*

After the zoo we went to eat Japanese food and I had sushi. I gained four pounds today, hahahaha!! Hopefully the 2 1/2 hours of walking around the zoo with a bag full of water bottles and sleeping will bam that down to at least 131 or something so I don't have to feel like such a porker after just reaching a nice goal. But even with that weight gain, here is my picture as promised.


If you're wondering why I took my own picture in the bathroom and why I'm not looking up, it's cause I tried to get Baby Girl to take my picture but she's too short so all the pictures ended up looking like they were taken by.. well, a 3 year old. The front view picture turned out too blurry and I'm too lazy to go take another one already. The ones where I'm looking up look kinda creepy cause I'm looking above the camera angle. I don't know how to explain it, but trust me, it looks scary.

So anyway, this is me exactly three months after joining Weight Watchers. I canceled yesterday and left them a nice feedback message. Hopefully I'll be able to reach my goal on my own and maintain successfully from there!

Spam Musubi & Chicken Yakisoba

I was playing a bit of Vanguard last night when at around 11 I just got so completely tired all of a sudden, so I went to bed *gasp* an hour early. Woke up at 7 am and started cooking the spam and hot dog in the shoyu sauce (equal parts sugar and soy sauce with maybe 1/8 cup water for volume). I'd made a lot of rice the day before while doing the football bento so that I wouldn't have to cook more. It was a little dry so I had to add some water and let it steam a bit.

I sliced up the extra yakitori chicken I made yesterday and some kamaboko (pink fish cake). Fried that up with a bag of chop suey veggies then added the yakisoba noodles, which I'd chopped up for easier eating. Added a bit of oyster sauce and it was done! Yum!

While that was cooling off I worked on the spam musubi. I decided to cut them in half this time so that my daughter wouldn't pig out and eat 2 1/2 whole ones all by herself. It worked, cause she only ate half of one before moving on to the mango. Though now that I think about it, maybe it didn't work, cause she ate three for dinner. =[

Last of all, I put the hot dog and cucumber kimchee in. I wrapped the cukes in a paper towel so that they wouldn't ooze water all over the musubis. I had thought about making egg omelette too, but it was just too much food as it was, so I stopped there. Besides, I'd already made us half an hour late. D: The finished goods:

Only MIL came along with us because everyone else was busy or chillin' at home. It was a very nice day at the zoo, sunny but breezy. We got a nice table at the snack bar and the food made us very popular with the flies and birds. Those suckin' pigeons are huge and seriously brave! Next time I wear a tank top though, I need to remember I'm not immune to the sun. My shoulders are red. O_o