Beef Broccoli (224)

The cutesy-ness continues today with usage of my new awesome animal food picks. I look at them and I think to myself, gosh, I should have bought a couple more!! I realize that I don't need more than those, but I still want them. Then I can lay them all out and count them and rub my hands together going "hehehhehehehhehehe preeeeciousssses". This is what new bento accessories do to me. Scary, huh?


I started off with a bunny onigiri. My Aunty K had sent me a while back some animal onigiri shapes and I never did get a chance to use it because I opened the box when the kids were around. Several OHHHHs and MINE, NO MINE! later they had claimed them and were soon all over the house. I only recently recovered them from the wild savages and now they happily sit in my utensils drawer doing whatever it is onigiri molds do. Knitting, perhaps?

I cut the ears out of my breakfast ham steak. I had thought they were too long at first so I cut them short, but now they look too short. Go figure. I made the nori face with my punch. It only took me 10 punches to get that one face to come out right. The rest of the mangled nori will have to be cut up for ghetto furikake or given to the monkeys for immediate consumption. The bunny rests on a lettuce leaf cause even though he's smiling, he's actually hungry too. Here's a closer picture:


Next I put in the beef, then cut the broccoli stems off and laid the tops down nicely (stems hidden underneath). If you're wondering why it's so clean, Grandma J leaves the broccoli separate so that it doesn't overcook, which is pure genius. The beef brocco comes out much healthier and brighter that way. I cut up two pieces of takuan and put them into a little orange food cup and tucked that next to the broccoli.

After that I started to fill in the parts around bunny. I cut up red bell pepper and sliced some baby carrots. He's a hungry, hungry bunny! After that I still had a lot of empty space so I used olives with food picks to finish things up.


This is one of the new boxes I got at Marukai. It's a bit thin even though the box seems thick but this is because there's space for chopsticks in the cover. It's also a great place to hide some Red Vines. ^_^

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I just so happened to remember last night that it's JUNE!!! WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

BON DANCE, BABY! First one is tomorrow! We'll see if I can twist Mr. Pikko's arm hard enough. Probably not since UFC 85 is tomorrow too. ^_^

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!

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.

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. ^_^

Sesame Omelet with Shrimp (203)

I had this recipe in some little Japanese food cookbook at home and had been eyeing it for a while. The recipe itself made little sense to me though, asking for 2 large eggs, 1/4 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper. Do you have any idea how much salt and pepper that is?!?! Either the "large" eggs I buy at Foodland are like Japanese people to mainland people or this lady really loves pepper in her Japanese food. The recipe is called Sesame Omelet with Shrimp and I modified it a bit by cutting down the mayo. (it asked for 3 tablespoons)


I messed this up in many ways, as usual. First of all, I actually listened to what she said and added 1/4 tsp pepper. Maybe fresh ground pepper is less, but I added the already ground one and holy bob damn my mouth lit on fire when I tasted a piece. Then I used a pan that was too small, so my omelet was thicker and smaller than it was supposed to be. I also didn't have watercress, so I used broccoli, which turned out to be very difficult to roll.

I rolled it up, put it in the fridge to set, then sliced it into nice sushi-like rolls. I'll have to modify it and try again, maybe tomorrow since I still have lots of shrimp. I know it's weird to have a shrimp roll and then shrimp on the side, but I really wanted to eat some with cocktail sauce, which is in the little yellow container. It didn't look colorful enough to me, so I tucked in a couple slivers of carrot in the middle. The edamame was pre-cooked and frozen, so I just defrosted it in water and placed them in nicely.

Pork Tofu (202)

With Mr. Pikko and Baby Girl off to a lesson on Saturday, I trucked Buddy off to the supermarket to buy vegetables for my soup. I ended up trying the first Garden Vegetable Soup recipe I found. Though I didn't need any, Buddy would not stop furiously pointing at the "brokko zee" until I picked up this one tiny little stalk that got broken off and gave it to him. This did not satisfy him because after I handed it to him, he demanded "BEEG WUN!" but then I put it in a bag and suddenly it was like, Magical Bagged Broccoli Extraordinnaire and we were able to move on.

Having not made a soup in quite a while, I opted for the whole head of cabbage instead of the conveniently cut-in-half ones. I figured, the recipe said "half a cabbage", so I just bought one, thinking I'd just go double.

I do not recommend this unless you want a pretty good vegetable soup with ASSLOADS of cabbage in it. No, seriously. It tastes pretty good, kinda like the Campbell's Vegetable Soup (which I love) but with enough cabbage to kill someone. I looked at other recipes this morning and found that you're supposed to use 2 cups cabbage. Great. Good thing cabbage is cheap. I used vegetable bullion and don't have nearly enough soup for the vegetables, so I'm kinda stuck eating mostly heaps of cabbage for the early part of this week so that at the end of the week, I can have a nice soupy soup. Next batch, I will use beef bullion, cause I had to add some extra salt this round.


I made Pork Tofu this past weekend. Grandma J makes a really good non-spicy Mapo Tofu and I use this recipe as a substitute for when I want some. It reminds me a lot of the Pork Tofu dish that Y's Lunch Shop used to make on occasion. Let me tell you, that dish was made in heaven. Whenever I saw they had it, I bought it. Mine totally pales in comparison, the only thing similar is the look. I think maybe when the wedding comes around, I should beg my friend to bring me some Y's before she drives over from Hilo side. The last time I went to my cousin's wedding in Kona my aunty did that, bringing us musubi and fish. I'm drooling right now just remembering it.

Anyway, this is Pork Tofu with some diced carrot on top for color and my brokko-zee.


We bought champagne mangoes at Costco yesterday but I need to go get credit for it or something. I cut them open and they were black in the middle. These ones were the third mango I peeled and though it was still black, I just cut that part out. Added some strawberries in too, sliced up for easy eating. ^_^

I never did post more pictures of my wheat grass! It's dying by now and I had to toss most of it out due to mold, but I will try again and this time will harvest them as sprouts as they look in this stage here:


They were actually pretty sweet and tender at this stage. Right now my last tray of grass is really stringy and tastes like... well, grass. The sprouts were much better. I still have a huge bag of berries, so I think I'll just grow a batch, harvest sprouts fresh from my desk at work, and then start over. It's really quite fun!!

Meat Loaf (201)

I bet a lot of you have been like, ZOMG, where the hell are the bentos?! Maybe Bento 200 KILLED PIKKO! Ahhhh!!!!

Nah.

I've just had a slew of lunches this week. As I mentioned, Tuesday we went to a Thai restaurant. I ended up not taking any pictures because we ate family style and I didn't know all of the people very well and I thought they might think I'm some kind of freak if I busted out my camera to take pictures of our food before they were allowed to eat it. Plus, the lighting in the restaurant was quite poor. The food was great though! Our waiter was very entertaining and at the end, he brought us out this heaping plate of ice cream on top of warm sticky rice. It was a truly wonderful dessert and we asked him what it was on the menu and he said he'd made it up right there, which I admit kind of disappointed me because I thought it would be a regular dessert I could get at any Thai restaurant. I was very happy that only a couple of the dishes were spicy. I can't handle things that make me want to call the fire department on my mouth.

Wednesday one of my co-workers took me to a birthday lunch, which was really nice. We walked up to Manoa Valley and ate at a little Chinese restaurant called Asia Manoa. I had a Chicken with Vegetable plate that tasted really good. I don't know why, but they served it with I swear, half a pot of rice. My eyes practically fell out of my head when they brought it to the table. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said it was around 4 cups cooked rice.

Thursday we had our monthly work potluck, which I have pictures for after my bento.

Last night we had meat loaf, which I've found to be one of the most difficult things to bento. Then I realized that I could do this food TODDLER STYLE! Toddler style means you chop the food up into little itty bitty bits and mix it all up together with rice. This isn't a bad idea for bento really, since you can mix it all up, add garnishes, and bing! Nicer lunch than you might have had with a hunk of hamburger. Though I dunno about eating the carrots to be honest. Carrots and ketchup just isn't something that sounds good to me. Maybe I can just lick the ketchup off and then eat the carrots? Anyway, that's what's in the main section.

On the side I have cucumber kim chee, takuan sprinkled with roasted sesame seeds, and pickled eggplant.

On to the potluck!


First up is salad from The Boss, made with I think Nalo greens, avocado, and a Costco chicken! With the chicken I didn't need any dressing, which is always a bonus in my opinion.


Next, we have some ham and turkey wraps, which were REALLY good. I love wraps, but the meat in these were the thin sliced deli kind and were really tasty. I had two. >.<


Here we have some pork tenderloin, which was really good! I love stuff with black pepper, that's one spice I really don't mind.


This is a wonderful Salmon and Egg salad with cheese sprinkled on top. Really tasty! Next to that is my bowl of Healthy Rice. I brought my rice cooker in to work so that I could make it fresh here before the potluck. I ate way too much of this stuff. >.<


Here's a veggie platter alongside a cabbage/celery/apple salad which I really liked, though I hope the mayo was light! Next to the veggies was another salad and then a chocolate cake in the back from Safeway. That was good stuff! :D


Lastly, we had some really good banana muffins. I'm not sure what the banana slice on the top meant, but I took one without and it had yummy bits of apple in the middle. Maybe the banana slice one had nuts! If so, I should have taken one, I love nuts.

This has been one heckuva bad eating week, but thankfully, I am still at around 130. This is still not good, but better than I thought. I've been thinking about making a gigantor batch of Cabbage Soup from the Cabbage Soup Diet to eat during the day to fill me up so I snack less.

Before people freak out, I realize that the Cabbage Soup Diet is only water weight loss and not fat. I did it once a few years ago and despite the need to use the bathroom every 15 minutes, I thought the soup tasted pretty decent and the recipe itself is basically all vegetables, so it's actually all Core anyway. I just have to tweak the seasonings enough where I like it a lot and I'll have a large supply of something to eat whenever I get salty tummy rumblings. Plus it's not like I'm giving up bentos, this is just something to eat on the side.

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.

Teri Hamburger Patty (199)

Tomorrow is a holiday for us state slackers, so if all goes well, Bento #200 should land this Thursday. I've finally decided what I want to do, but am not going to say what it is so that it is a nice surprise for everyone. And just so that it will be more impressive, I made a really crappy bento today. LOL

In reality, I was just lazy. I slept in a bit and didn't start making my bento til it was like 7 AM. I have a teriyaki hamburger patty, cut in half to make it lay out nicely. Next to that, some cucumber pickles and garlic pan fried asparagus (in garlic salt and olive oil). I filled in some space with some chopped up egg whites, more leftovers from Easter. To make it not look that horrible, I added some sakura shaped carrots. Hopefully those distract you guys enough. I put soy sauce in the tomato bottle to eat the egg with.

I bounced down a bit to 128.8, so hopefully I can keep up a good thing this week with increased work exercises, walking, and being good in general. I think my problem for the last few months has been that I adopted this really bad "Hey, I'm skinny now, I can eat wutevas now." mentality. Someone commented that I shouldn't obsess over my weight, but instead pay attention to how my clothes fit. Good advice, only my pants ARE getting tighter, so I do need to get back on track. I am happy to report that I successfully dodged the box of Truffles some evil person brought in to work.

Chicken & Egg Salad Sandwich (198)

Today I'm having a chicken and egg salad sandwich. With Easter, was there ever any doubt that I'd be having this for lunch today?? I'll be eating boiled eggs for snacks for a week! I usually eat them with soy sauce, yolk tossed. I loooove boiled egg whites with shoyu, especially Kikkoman.

I used light mayo for the filling and so that with the bread already makes this a 5 point bento. The Jello eggs are probably 2 points since one is Sugar-free, but one is not. Those will zero out though, since I did a hundred squats earlier today and still have to walk to fiscal later (40 min walk). I still want to try that Spark People site and have been getting really useful tips via e-mail from them, but I find myself still looking at everything in a points mindset. Perhaps a combination of both will help me out. Easter waged war upon my midsection and came away with only a minor victory. I gained .2 pounds as of this morning.

Anyway, I toasted the bread to make it easier to cut and added chopped Costco chicken to the egg mixture, meaning I can use this one to start off my 10? 12? 20? Ways to Eat a Costco Chicken thing. I tucked in as many baby carrots as I could fit. I love d'Anjou pear (crunchy, not soft) so I sliced up a whole pear to fill up all that empty space. Next to the carrots is a silicone cup of cucumber pickles and then for dessert, my two Jello eggs! My cousin e-mailed me after she saw yesterday's post and was like, "omg me too!" The Jell-O egg frenzy is alive and well!

I still dunno what to do for #200. :( It's only 2 bento away! D:

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!

Chicken Tofu (191)

I made like the hugest mistake ever and bought one of those jars of garlic salted Planters peanut jars and I am whacking it at work. It's ungood. I know peanuts are healthy, but in moderation. There ain't nothing moderate about my peanut intake, let me tell you! The sooner it's gone the better. You know this translates into "eat it all today". Gah!


I was lazy this morning, so this isn't much of a bento. I have leftover chicken tofu, a car shaped boiled egg that I had in the fridge already. I dyed it green cause my kids have this thing for green cars for some reason. On the side is some edamame and carrots. On my bottom layer I have strawberries. For snacks I brought a yogurt and a Fuji apple.

This past Sunday was the 6 week marker for my earrings to come out and so I went earring shopping. I bought a ton of earrings and then was able to wear some hook ones for a day. Then I tried to wear some hoops and the dang holes were being stubborn and I was poking around and could not find the hole in the back. My holes started bleeding and everything, I was sooo frustrated. ;( My co-worker finally got them in for me. I put the studs back in and will leave them there for a couple more weeks. Such a bummer!

Ebi Curry Noodle (186)

I heard a really cute joke last week on Leahey and Leahey Live that I forgot to tell.

What did the rice say to the spam?





Let's get nori.

LOL!! OMG, I think that joke is so cute. I guess you'd have to either be from Hawaii or love spam musubis to get it, but I find it hilarious!

My weekend was okay, nothing much happened, but it wasn't completely boring either. I got a good amount of moat carps turned in (92!) which put me at around 3,400 for my Lu Shang's Fishing Rod in game. Girl's Day is coming up soon and so I have to think about what to do for that bento. I think a pretty bento for Baby Girl is in order! I'll definitely have to do the pink sakura tamago again!


I bought a new kind of salad I from Costco on Saturday which was a shrimp salad with tomatoes in it. All it really has is shrimp with celery and mayo so it didn't have much taste so I ate a lot of it with cocktail sauce. It was a $13 salad and contained massive amounts of shrimp. I ate this for two days straight and then used some for this Ebi Curry Noodle pack that I had forgotten I still had in the freezer. I washed the mayo off to fry it for this noodle dish though. I fried some asparagus so that I have more veggies and don't waste the pack that I bought.


This is the box I used today. It was a gift to Baby Girl from her teacher at school. Which reminds me, still no Hello Kitty Online access!! I got some e-mail saying I have to make a video explaining why I should get into beta. I made one, then went back to check the tutorial on how to add tags, and the tutorial opened in the tab I created the video in, erasing it. MAN I was pissed!! I still haven't made another one yet...


I've got a big round Pooh tupperware full of fruit to go with today's lunch. Baby Girl nagged her way into me buying a tub of tropical fruit, so I've got watermelon, cantaloupe, and pineapple in here to help us not waste it all. I also bought strawberries and raspberries again. I still have like 10 kiwis left to eat too, gah!! And danjou pears... and apples... and oranges... and blueberries... When it rains it pours!

I went to cut my hair on Saturday and was pretty bored so decided to get some highlights. I've never colored my hair before and am pretty happy with the way it looks. Mebbe next time I'll dye my hair dark red or something. Next week marks 6 weeks with my piercings, so I can go out and buy earrings this week!! :D

My bridesmaid dress came in and it's a size 12... I have to exchange it for 6 or 8. How fun is that?!? :D A year ago I'd have fit in that dress!!

Turkey Croquette

Living in Hawaii you tend to get used to the whole "small town, small state" thing where everyone seems to have a friend who knows this person who is related to this person who is real good friends with your next door neighbor or something like that. Hilo is especially notorious for this because it's such a small town but it happens here in Honolulu as well. Take for example the fact that one of my readers works at the same campus as me or that one of my FFXI linkshell members is a mere 10 minute walk from my office. A real shining example showed itself today though!

One of my co-workers here calls me over to her desk to show me an e-mail from her sister and it's got the picture of me and Colt in it. I was looking at it thinking, Err... HUH?! Turns out she found my blog, figured out I work at UH, realized her sister also works at UH, thought to ask whether she knows me, and turns out she sits right here in this office with me. We were all cracking up about it. Hi Cindy! Thanks for reading! ^_^


Today I have for lunch the turkey croquette bento I mentioned yesterday. I cut it in half so that it would fit into the box nicer, shoved a tiny bit of white/brown rice into the corner, and added broccoli, sweet potato, carrots, and cucumber kim chee. The cucumbers were being really stubborn because they're big fat pieces, so I sliced it thinly to make them more cooperative and that worked out pretty well.

There are times when my kids drive me completely insane and I blame this for the evil mommy that comes out of me occasionally. I don't know if it's just me and my parents goggles, but sometimes my kids make the most hilarious frickin' faces when they're sad and I crack up laughing. Sometimes when I'm thinking straight I try to hide it, but most of the time I burst into giggles or cackles about it.

Take for instance dessert the other day. Grandma J bought a box of these Skinny Cow fudge bars (which, at 50 calories per, rock by the way) that my kids are now addicted to. Buddy loves them and shared one with me. He couldn't bite it very well so would only come away with little nibbles. When Baby Girl had one to herself, he of course wanted some. Since he was only skimming the surface of the pops, I told her to let him have some since he can't bite off much anyway. She holds it out and he comes over and CHOMPS off a good 1/3 of the bar, leaving her with this look on her face which I think was a mixture of shock and being on the verge of tears. I'm still getting the giggles picturing it now.

Anyway, I told him he should give some back, kind of as a joke. But kids sometimes listen in a very literal sense and so he spits it out, nibbles off a bit, and gives it back to her, melted chocolate and spit and all. Of course, she took it and ate it immediately. lol

Chicken Lettuce Wraps (178)

I was driving in to work this morning when I heard the radio hosts I listen to talking about a "Hawaii Chair". As soon as I got to work I looked it up and it just about split my sides open watching it.



That is just too funny. I'm lucky I wasn't drinking water when I saw it.

Today's bento is almost entirely from Costco. As usual, the Costco chicken was a big part of the weekend meals and I chopped up a lot of the white meat this morning and made the lettuce wraps I've made before. This time I added some diced bell pepper into the mixture to give it more color and veggies.


The grape tomatoes, kiwi, blueberries, lettuce, chicken, bell peppers, and raspberries are all bought from Costco. The only thing messing up the all-Costconess of it is the two little carrot flowers. Dang those carrot flowers!! ^_^ Here's a blurry close-up:


I ate some of the blueberries Saturday and I dunno why but they taste like they have sand in the middle. I'm debating taking them back and telling them this and getting an exchange. I know they don't normally taste this way but I'll see if maybe I just had a few bad berries in the bunch I picked up to eat.

I finally got some real gardening done this weekend and cleaned up all my dead tomato plants. While I was pulling weeds I discovered that a stray tomato must have fallen to the ground and then had the seeds dispersed all over the yard because I found at least 10 tomato plants sprung up all over the place. Some had no leaves and I didn't understand why until I found the gigantor caterpillar on a nearby plant. The most bizzare discovery though, was the little pools of shrimps. My kids have little play pots and pans in the yard that have been collecting rain water and I was about to dump one out when I noticed there was a bunch of tiny little pink "things" in it. Upon further inspection, I found that they were actually dozens of tiny little itty bitty dead shrimps.

At first I thought maybe they were there because of the little container of seashells Baby Girl had left out, but then I found more little containers nowhere near the shells container that had MORE dead shrimps. It was very weird and quite stink.

The yard looks neater now and hopefully next week we can plant some edamame plants. :D

I noticed that a bunch of my earliest blog entries were using pictures from my Swapsonian domain, which I have basically given up hope on. I'm so pissed with Ipowerweb that I'm never using them again. I continue to pay for a broken domain and cannot get my files off the server. I wait forever on the phone and in chats and no one seems to know how to help me. Ipowerweb can SUCK IT! Anyway, I fixed the pics to use my Flickr ones.