Yoshida's Sauce Chicken (211)

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

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

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

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

Shoyu Chicken (207)

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

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


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

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

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!

Valentine's Day Bentos (181 & 182)

Yesterday I went to go look at the screenshots of the new MMORPG coming out soon, Hello Kitty Online and I about died of anticipation. I realize that people in the Allakhazam community will likely look at HKO with complete revulsion and disgust, but I find myself mysteriously drawn to a world of pink and flowers and Pompompurin houses. You can make farms and grow crops and pick fruit from trees. A virtual gardener such as myself cannot stay away from such a game, especially since it's free! I used to be such a Sanrio freak as a teenager and from looking at these pictures, apparently I still am.

I woke up at 5 am this morning to cook rice and make tamagoyaki for my bento this morning and to make my first ever bento for Mr. Pikko. He usually doesn't eat lunch or just buys food, so I never bothered to make one. But... since the Kokua Festival tickets I had planned on giving are not here yet, I thought maybe a bento would be a nice, thoughful gift to give that wasn't costly.

This is Mr. Pikko's bento, which has 3 little chicken drumsticks and wings. Grandma J made a new recipe last night as a test for some function she is going to and I think these are called "Lip Smackin' Wings". To go with the chicken, I made a round onigiri dyed with red food coloring. I had initially wanted it to be all pink, but then when the coloring didn't mix too well, I thought the haphazard coloring came out really well. I cut out the two hearts from bell peppers and sprinkled black sesame seeds on to add more color.

In the middle is some sliced asparagus and then on the bottom area I have some pink tamagoyaki cut into sakura flowers. I added about 5 drops of red food coloring and then after it was cooked, rolled the egg into a circle shape with my bamboo sushi thing before putting it into the fridge to cool. I sliced it up and used my veggie cutters to get the sakura shape. Next to that I have some imitation crab and then a slice of orange. Behind the onigiri I put a little raspberry too! I was quite happy with the amount of food I was able to cram into this little box! The tradeoff was that I was pissed to find out that 4 of my romaine heart heads were frozen in my crisper drawer. GRRR!! What a waste!!


Here is my matching bento! It's basically identical except I have a grape tomato hiding behind my onigiri, one less chicken piece, and kiwi instead of orange.

We're giving the night off to the in-laws so we're leaving work early to pick up the kids and will probably take them to eat dinner at IHOP. If you're wondering why we're eating at a pancake house for dinner on Valentine's Day, it's because for a mom of two toddlers, I'm still pretty stupid about some things. Tuesday was Free Pancake Day at IHOP and so I stupidly started telling the family about this in front of the kids. Buddy's eyes glazed over and he starts waddling towards me chanting, "CUP CAKE... CUP CAKE... CUP CAKE..." Baby Girl starts in with her broken record repeating, going, "Mommy, I want paaaaaancaaaaake? x500" Yeah, big mistake. Never say any word that contains "cake" in front of toddlers unless you're ready to bust them out right then and there.

It was 9 pm, but I got us all to go there only to find it was dine-in only with a half hour wait. NO CAN DO! So this is sort of a makeup for the other night. An emergency trip to Foodland for frozen pancakes had to be made.

Anyway, Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!

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.

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??

Oven Baked Chicken (163)

Yesterday I started my new job at UH and it was a very nice first day! All the people that I met are great individuals and my boss is the greatest. Our office is just renovated (an old anatomy classroom that stored bodies, omg!) and my desk is brand spanking new. I'll try to take a picture of it today or something. I have increased responsibilities, which is something I've yearned for. 2008 is looking like it will be a good year work-wise.

My lunch today is an oven baked chicken thigh with rice and corn. On the side I have a small piece of banana cake I made earlier this week and some mega huge blueberries I got at Costco yesterday.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas! I had a pretty rough and emotional Christmas, but things are looking up now. I'd go into details, but I don't want to paint my blog in blue. I'm getting excited about the Sugar Bowl coming up in just 4 days!! GO WARRIORS!!

Chicken Lettuce Wraps (159)

Yesterday we finally got off our asses to go take the kiddies Christmas tree shopping. I figured Walmart was a good place to start since they always seem to have the short little trees we want so we headed out to the Mililani one because if they had none, City Mill and Star Market are right there. All three stores had no trees left! We headed back onto the freeway with Baby Girl asking us every 15 seconds why we didn't buy a tree yet and whether we thought the trees on the side of the road were nice. By the time we got to Home Depot I was ready to claw my eyes out at her non-stop questioning. Oh wait, I mean, my daughter is the most wonderfulest little person in the whole world!

We could see buttloads of trees in the back but there was a chain on the gate, so we went into the store and come to find out Home Depot's tree lot, which is open from 8 am to 8 pm, closed at 4 pm for a Christmas party. ON SUNDAY. There were at least 4 other customers with us in shock that they'd be this dumb. I hope Home Depot eats all their trees. Yeah, I'm bitter and full of scorn, so sue me.

We went to the Pearl City Walmart nearby, but they had no short trees either, so we went all the way to Waikele to Lowes where we found out that they had only 6-7 foot trees left but they were all 50% off! Woohoo! That's my kinda tree price! We chose a nice grand fir tree and had the guy cut all the love handles off to leave us with a nice 5 foot tree for $20. YaY!

Buddy was driving me insane, picking off all the glass balls and throwing them like fast balls into the middle of the tree, then picking them up as they fell out and throwing them again. On the bright side, he's got quite the throwing arm! I had to put each ornament on like 5 times, but eventually it got done. I tried to get them to take our Christmas photo but just couldn't get it done. I even busted out the puffs and that didn't work, so I'll have to try again another day. D:

We ate Costco chicken for lunch on Saturday so I used up some of the leftovers in today's bento. I chopped up the thigh meat into small pieces and added a tablespoon of light mayo to make it stick together then wrapped scoops of this mixture into romaine lettuce leaves. These leaves were pretty awesome for making what look like temaki sushi rolls. I ripped the stem out until about halfway, put the chicken mixture into the cup area at the top of the leaves, then wrapped the two strips of leaf at the bottom around to make this nice shape!


I fit three in very nicely and added a wedge of Laughing Cow Light Swiss cheese plus some carrot sticks for a side and color. My bottom tier didn't look so great so I didn't post the photo. I have peeled tangerine slices and some fat free chocolate pudding. Mmm!!

Beef Brocolli & Party Leftovers (154 & 155)

Last week Friday I can't even remember why I didn't blog my bento, which shows how the holidays are taking a toll on my sanity in addition to the transition to the new job and a Fan Festival writeup that is now over 3 weeks overdue. I had leftover Beef Brocolli.


It didn't have much color so I just put a few star shaped carrot slices onto the middle of it. It's a very easy way to brighten up a bento and so quick too! I have some Christmas shaped mini cookie cutters I'd like to try out on my bentos in the coming weeks, but I'm not sure what I'll cut out just yet.

Yesterday we went to my cousin's son's birthday party and they had food catered from a place called Tanioka's in Waipahu. The food was really good!! I totally snarfed down about 3 meals worth of food like the horrible WW cheater that I am lately. I bounce between 125 and 128 all week and at the end I can usually end up right back at 127. If I were to finally go back to my diet I think I'd have no problem getting to 120 at last, but I've just been so lalala lately that maintaining this way just seems a great way to have fun with food.

Anyway, we had leftovers to take home and I packed a lot into my bento because I didn't want it to go to waste.

In the back is some sliced steak. On top of that are two mochiko chicken wings, which though I know are so horrible for you, tasted oh so good. In the middle I have rice with little slices of baby carrot decorating them. Tucked next to that is a piece of lumpia and then a salmon patty. In the little yellow tulip bottle I put some soy sauce for the lumpia. I added the tomato and celery for additional color!

Shoyu Chicken (150)

Sorry for the late posting, I've hit 9,999 posts on Allakhazam and I've been busy prepping what I'm revealing for my 10k ding. Today I had a three tier bento but don't let the pictures deceive you, this box is actually really small, maybe 5 inches long or less. It was a plain box that I got at Marukai this summer during E3 and I added a sticker to make it a little cuter.

This is shoyu chicken made by my MIL with some white rice decorated with mixed veggies. If you're thinking to yourself, "Geez I wonder if she placed those vegetables into her bento one by one", the answer is yes I did. I used chopsticks. In Allakhazam IRC yesterday we were all laughing at this guy who doesn't know how to use chopsticks. All in good fun, but I just wanted to mention how awesome chopsticks are. I even eat spaghetti with chopsticks; a habit I picked up from my friend Janis.

I packed more kim chee crab and avocado without lettuce. I found after forgetting the veggies that it's actually not too bad without it, especially if I don't have room in the box. I bought the avocado at Foodland on Sunday and I'm very proud to say that I chose perfectly. The next morning when I cut it open it was beautiful and the best possible texture for slicing. It looks exactly the same as yesterdays just with no tomatoes.

My tomato garden died while I was in Anaheim. Mr. Pikko claims, "Hey! I watered them!" but I have my doubts. The plants are all brown and I think they're unrecoverable. Not too bad though, I must have gotten like 200 tomatoes out of those plants and now I have the pot space to grow edamame!! Weeeee!

Finally I had pomegranate seeds for dessert. Actually I lied, I had some godly pumpkin pie for dessert. George at work brought by some pieces of this pumpkin pie that his wife made and holy omg it was divine. I asked for the recipe and hopefully I'll have that in my grubby little pumpkin pie loving hands soon. Yum yum!

Shoyu Chicken (146)

Sorry for the late post folks! My computer at home is out of commission to help repair our poor sick Series 3 TiVo and then this morning I had training to do for work. This is actually a bento that Mr. Pikko packed for me last night!!! OMG OMG OMG! lol

Of course, I had to do some cosmetic rearranging because the corn was sprawled all over the rice and I ate a little bit of it for dinner and all and he put the cover on upside down and stacked the lower tier on top, but overall the food was very nicely packed. What a guy!

Our FFXI radio show debut last night was riddled with audio issues but overall I was happy with how things went. We had a few weird silences here and there but I still got a lot of good feedback and people seemed to enjoy the show. Next week I will only have one bento as I am taking Wednesday-Friday off for Fan Fest and Monday is a holiday.

I might end up working something out with the people that have orders open with me as I have had zero time lately to do the bento store. :(

Shoyu Chicken (136)

I went to Sephora yesterday to get a makeover and this nice pregnant lady named Maria helped me with a makeover then took me shopping. By the time I got to the register, the bill was a heart attack inducing $254!!! I got back down to earth when I got home and picked out three things that I'm going to return, which brings my purchase price down to a more reasonable $170. Still enough to cause my wallet to burst into tears, but I've been feeling for the last 6 months or so that I'm too plain and wanted to at least learn how. So... I'm happy. I just have to practice application now. -_-

My life has been consumed with Fan Fest and my bentos have been made in auto mode lately. I can't wait til this is finally over, then I can think about things other than FFXI and databases and websites and booth promotions and costumes etc etc. I've been slacking so badly on bento orders and for that I sincerely apologize. Fan Fest is just 3 weeks out, hopefully I survive until then.


Today's bento took me a shockingly quick 15 minutes to make. I had rice leftover for the onigiri but the nori face was frustrating me. I guess certain brands of nori just don't cut well. The chicken I let cook in Yoshida's sauce overnight on low, so it was pretty difficult to cut and still get them in nice pieces, they kept falling apart! My MIL usually cooks them in the sauce, adds a little water, then thickens the sauce, but I didn't have time to thicken the sauce so I ended up with what just looks like Shoyu Chicken. Still tastes good tho! The broccoli I heated up water in a pyrex and then let them sit in the hot water for a few minutes and the carrots and tomatoes were put in for color.


My second layer picture is terribly blurry and not very exciting, but it will taste great and give me a nice spicy boost after lunch!

Total points for this bento is 1 for the onigiri. The chicken is made from boneless skinless, trimmed thighs so I didn't count it, though I suppose I should. 2 points? ^_-

Oven Baked Chicken (128)

The great thing about sleeping early, not doing cutesy bentos, and being lazy is that I've actually been able to put together my bentos a lot faster now. I seem to have fallen into a groove where I just plop things in and bingo I have my lunch in about 20 minutes. It may not be my best work, but I end up with a decent looking lunch in a small amount of time. Lately, this has been important with things at work.


I took one of the oven baked chicken thighs my MIL made last night and cut it in half for easier display. I'm not 100% sure I'll eat it because I forgot to put it into the fridge when we got home last night. I had a little discussion with a few other Allakhazam admins on the safety of this chicken thigh and got two thumbs up and one veto from a former butcher. I think perhaps I will eat the other stuff and then go down to this lunch cart that I've never seen before just outside the office building. They sell ham sandwiches and such. When I made the bento, I'd decided I was going to eat it after all, but now I'm on the fence again!

Fan Fest is now 36 days away! I reeeeally have to get cracking on my costume again. *sigh* I'll probably be going to Disneyland on Thursday, yay! Will be a short day as I have to help set up our Allakhazam booth, but fun anyway I'm sure! I haven't been there since I was like 12 or something. If any of you are going to FF, please be sure to find me and say hi. ^_^

Chicken Parmigiana

Today's post is a bit late as the second I arrived at work this morning I got a call and had to go pick up Baby Girl. So now she's here at work with me driving me mad asking me 5 million questions an hour.

This morning Buddy woke up at 4:45 am and an hour later I got pulled in to take my turn with him. I caught him scribbling down his plans for an experiment titled, "How Hard One Has To Pull On Mommy's Pants While She's Cooking To Make Them Fall Down". He's been nearly successful and I'm positive that soon he'll come up with a strategy to achieve victory. My bento will no doubt have crooked elements on that day.

Today I have leftovers from the weekend which is Chicken Parmigiana from Costco. I've gotten one before and it tastes good but I've never understood why the instructions say to cook it in the plastic pan. This time I didn't transfer it to a metal pan and used it as the instructions said to and it turned out fine. I guess it's a hardy plastic or something. I still find it odd to cook something in the oven with a plastic container.


I put some egg noodles under it and then a cup of cucumber kim chee on one side and then another cup of blueberries on the other. Unfortunately I didn't eat much of this bento. Baby Girl wanted the blueberries and then after that insisted that she NEEDED to eat the cheese on the chicken. So I ate the cucumbers and avocado and just abandoned the chicken.


This is the box I packed it in. I finally found the fork, spoon, and cover for it. It was hidden in a little area under a table. Woot! I have a garden update from last week too. My tomato plants all have varying amounts of tomatoes and I'm very happy at the rate at which they're growing. Soon I'll be including lots of tomatoes in my bentos! ^_^


A close-up photo:


The only problem I see is suddenly having a crapload of ripe tomatoes to use and not enough bentos to use them in. I will have to get really creative with my tomato usage!

Pineapple Chicken w/ No Face

The title sounds kinda weird/gross no? Haha! Well I have done another みやざき (Miyazaki) themed bento for bentochallenge. It's not terribly creative since it's just nori and cheese cutouts, but I still wanted to do it as he's another of my favorite characters from Spirited Away. When I think about it though, what character from Spirited Away couldn't qualify as a favorite?? ^_^


As you can see I've used my leftover blue rice from yesterday's 100 bento to make my fried rice. In it I put some chopped up imitation crab, my carrot fishies, sliced kamaboko, my bell pepper corals all chopped up, and the okra sliced up. I cracked an egg into it, but that didn't go so well. My egg curse continues. As I mentioned, I only ate the sushi and hot dogs yesterday and with this bento today I've used up almost everything that was left. There's just a bit of rice left.

On the right I have some leftover pineapple chicken which was a new recipe my MIL tried last night from one of her friends. It tasted great! It's very soft, has a teriyaki flavor with a slight sweet taste. There are chopped up green bell peppers as well as chunks of pineapple.

As I said, No Face is made out of nori and cheese. His face was quite a challenge to cut out, especially his eyes. I had to cut three versions of those before I got them right. Here is a closer picture of him:

All this Miyazaki bento has made me want to watch the movie again. Unfortunately my DVD is damaged and the PS2 doesn't read it anymore so I have to watch it on my computer, which I don't like much. Though maybe it'll be better now that I have a widescreen monitor!

I started up a Guestbook yesterday, so feel free to sign it! It's on the right sidebar. I had a lot of wonderful comments yesterday both here and on Live Journal and I want to thank all of you for the lovely things you all said. It was definitely worth the work!

Oven Baked Chicken

Just in case the media on the mainland has failed to report that Flossie is now a Wussie, I live on Oahu and am fine. I did not even feel the earthquake. Heck, I didn't even know there was one! It was gusty yesterday morning but it had died down quite a bit by the time I left work. Still, I am very happy we dodged a bullet. How demeaning would it have been to get owned by someone named Flossie??

Yesterday my MIL made us oven baked chicken and it tasted oh so greasy and oh so good! I took a piece along with some white/brown rice and topped it with some kewpie mayo. After I oozed it on I kinda regretted it because I didn't do so well on the design of it. Maybe next time I'll draw a flower. Next to the chicken are two tomato slices and the last two pieces of tamagoyaki.


On my bottom layer I have some hastily pickled cucumbers (chopped and tossed with salt), carrot flowers, grape tomatoes, sliced avocado, and underneath that there is a wedge of Laughing Cow Light Swiss. I estimate this as a 4 point lunch: 1 for the rice, 1 for the cheese, 1 for the mayo, and 1 for the cornflake breading.

As promised, here is my Yeah! Bon Dance video from last Saturday!



That just kills me. Halfway through Mr. Pikko says something like, "Next up is It's Getting Hot in Here." Anyway, enjoy!

Leftover Chinese

My family ordered out Chinese food last night so it was a good thing I'd had an all Core day because it's very easy to overeat Chinese food. We ate from Waimalu Chop Suey and though a couple dishes weren't so great, the others were more than tasty enough to make up for those and the gau gee was so freaking gigantic it was like eating a whole one even cut in half.

Today's lunch is pretty drab, I'm basically just showing you what I'm eating. I wish I could have presented it better, but there's not much else to it. There's a mixture of a bunch of veggies as well as some pieces of chicken, beef, and pork. I took mostly vegetables as that's a good way to keep your calorie intake down when pigging out on Chinese food. Or at least, I like to tell myself that. I usually load up on tons of broccoli, won bok, ong choi, carrots, and then start picking lean meats and then last of all noodles.


I'm still trying to get my Yeah! bon dance video imported to my computer, but turns out I need a special cable, which I hope to get today. I watched it again last night on my camera and it's so hilarious.

Next week Tuesday I have a "brown bag" meeting so I will have to come up with something that looks yummy so that I can have a great lunch to talk about. I'd never even heard of such a thing, so I was pretty thrilled!

I have a few things to add to the store, but I haven't had the time to add them yet. I hopefully can get that done tonight. I have some nice 3 tier picnic bento boxes available as well as some nice small circular boxes good for packing sushi for lunch. Mr. Pikko took vacation today so I may end up going to Marukai this afternoon.

Shoyu Chicken Wings

Today I have for lunch the shoyu chicken wings that I forgot to take home the other day. I've only got 1 wing and 1 half piece of something else, I'm not sure what, but obviously I took it so that the point count wasn't so high. If my memory serves me correct, these things are like 3 points each so although my lunch looks quite healthy, I estimate it at a hefty 5.5 points. Sad, because that means that today will probably be another maintenance day and not a 5 point diet day. Unless I can restrain myself properly at dinnertime that is!


On the left side I have two slices of tamagoyaki (it's actually dashimaki tamago), the chicken, some sliced avocado, and two small onigiri (1 point). On the right side is my salad which is made out of romaine lettuce, grape tomatoes, celery, edamame, cucumbers, and carrot flowers. In the Hello Kitty bowl is some Kraft Free Ranch. Everything is Core except the chicken and rice.

Today was day 8 of preschool for Baby Girl and I am one proud mama to announce that it was the first day she did not cry when we dropped her off. She smiled and went to the attendant and then happily waved to us goodbye. *sniff* *tear* Such a good girl.

We leave for Kona tomorrow and I'm pretty excited about seeing my family again, especially since one of my cousins has never met Buddy before! It'll be our first official family vacation, woot!

Tonkatsu w/ Chicken salad

The preschool drop-off today went ok with no tears while we were there! Whew! We'll see how things are tomorrow when she has to go back, heh.

As I mentioned yesterday, with 10k I wanted to reward myself so I went to Marukai. Mr. Pikko had taken the day off and I had a splitting headache by afternoon so I left about an hour early. Of course, headaches at work suck but headaches while shopping for bento things suck a bit less, so I went anyway. The only bad part about it was that while I was in the dollar store they had this horrifying music playing on their telephone speakers throughout the store. It did not help my pounding head.

Still, I found some great accessories! There were no new boxes and as usual the place looked like a ransacked trinket store, but I got a lot of cute paper food cups, some cute seafood food dividers, some animal food cups with covers, and some other animal food cups (which I have used today). I bought two of the plastic animal food cups thinking I could sell one but then later I discovered that the two packages, though identical in shapes and animals, had different colors for different shapes (meaning the triangle one was blue in one and green in another) so of course I had to keep both. Haha! I picked up a couple other things to sell as well. I hope to have a PayPal cart of extra items up soon, keep an eye out for that if you're looking to get started!

When I was up in LA my cousin and I were joking around about how we'd buy Marukai subscriptions and then by the next time we go back, it's been well over a year and the subscription is expired so basically we pay $10 a year to shop there once. Well, I am determined to change that! After the dollar store I stopped by the Marketplace next door and picked up a few things. One of the things I was excited to get was what I've seen called "kewpie mayo" on several other blogs. It was a bit hard to find and was labeled "QP Mayo" instead, but I finally have one in stock at home! I also bought two packets of noodles to make "Ebi Curry Spaghetti". Once I buy me some shrimp I will have to try that. The calorie/fat info on the back was surprisingly low! It was a bit odd. I couldn't find the front door for some reason. There was only one door that said EXIT EXIT EXIT DO NOT ENTER all over it. Finally it ended up being all the way down where it looked like a different store. And then when I checked out, they didn't bag my stuff, just put it back into a basket and shoved the bags in there! I didn't mind, it was just odd since I didn't know that's how they do it!

Today for lunch I have leftover tonkatsu along with furikake rice, veggies in the food cup I mentioned above, sliced fishcake, and romaine lettuce with cukes, tomatoes, and rotisserie chicken. I count this as 3 points: 1 for rice (since it's mixed w/ brown), 1 for the flour on the tonkatsu (fried in olive oil, pork and egg are Core), and 1 for the fishcake. I'm just guessing on the flour though. I figure it's better to overestimate. Inside the little thermos bottle is some Catalina Free salad dressing, also Core.


Lunch is packed in a new bento box that I found at Price Busters. They had the same box in three colors so of course I had to get them all... They each have different pictures and at $1.99 I can't resist. And bonus, they all have food dividers! I love boxes that come with those! :D I've found that most of these really cheap boxes are old ones as the copyright date is around 2003 or so. But I don't care if they're from the 90s. If it's cheap, I'm there!

Today is August 1st, which marks 1 month until what will be the greatest season in UH Football history. Can. Not. Wait.

Grilled Asian Chicken Stir-fry

Last night I decided to try to make it up to my family for ignoring them for basically 16 hours while I plowed through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by pulling out a cookbook and making something new. I ended up using my All Recipes cookbook and chose the Grilled Asian Chicken.

I took the kids with me to Foodland and as soon as we enter, there's some Harry Potter books at the door. Baby Girl very loudly yells, "LOOK MOMMY! There's the book Daddy stood in line for!!" If only I'd known that Foodland was going to have a midnight book sale of Deathly Hallows I would have sent my poor Mr. Pikko there instead of Borders. /guilty

Anyway, I get home and I'm starting to get the marinade ready when I realize that I can't find my garlic and I'm out of sesame oil. Gawd was I pissed. I had to go back and buy more, grrr!! It turned out wonderful though. Mr. Pikko said it smelled really really good and I really enjoyed the taste. I sliced it up and stir fried half of it with fresh veggies I'd been chopping while the meat marinated.


Veggies included are: Celery, snow peas, sweet onion, broccoli, red bell pepper, yellow bell pepper, orange bell pepper, and sakura shaped carrots. Extreme close-up! The key to cooking veggies like this is to never overcook them. I thought I stopped soon enough but turns out I didn't and so the veggies are a little less vibrant in color than I'd intended. The heat can always cook it more, so it's best to just lightly cook the veggies then let it sit in it's own heat to finish cooking. I boiled the extra marinade and added it to the veggies and this was REALLY good. Included in the corner is a small bit of rice and furikake. To accompany my bento I have a KCCA salad and a yellow peach from Costco.

I had tried to find ready-made stir fry veggies but couldn't find any so I got the fresh stuff and that was great for taste. The snow peas were some disgustingly high price like $6.00 a pound but thankfully, the handful I bought only cost a dollar, so I guess the price wasn't too bad after all. I bought some green onions and planted the stalks outside in our garden! Also, Baby Girl's string bean plants have finally sprouted more beans and she should have 5 more coming along soon. Hooray!