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.

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.

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

Teriyaki Beef (184)

I made teri beef for dinner on Sunday so that's what I'm having for lunch today. I made spaghetti last night but decided I will freeze the leftovers into single portions like I've seen on Biggie's blog before. This is assuming that I remember to do it though... My mom wanted to eat sashimi, so we bought a couple of ahi fillets and she sliced it up nice and pretty for us on a bed of lettuce. Tofu was on sale, so I bought some of that too. My kids thought it was completely hilarious to pick up a tub of tofu and put it in the wagon, so they started doing this over and over while giggling uncontrollably. My mom thought she weeded them all out, but when we got to the register, we found one last soft tofu tub hiding under a bag of green onions.


I have a small bit of furikake rice to go with the beef as well as Okinawan sweet potato, a grape tomato, some thin slices of cucumber kim chee, eggplant pickles, cucumber pickles, sashimi, and tofu. I added a little shoyu fishie on top of the tofu. I squashed it down so no doubt when I eat lunch, there will be a funny fish imprint on the tofu, haha!

I am happy to report that my ear is no longer infected. Out of all the advice people gave me I think the one that worked was to stop cleaning it so much. I cut it down to 2 times a day instead of 3 and that seemed to help a lot. Two more weeks and I can wear other earrings!

I just realized that I am only 16 bentos away from #200! Augh! I have to come up with something!! **brainstorm begins**

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? ^_-

Core Bento (134)

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


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

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


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

Oyako Donburi (111)

Last night I made oyako donburi for dinner and Mr. Pikko classified it as an "overeating food", which means he really loves it. It's a fairly simple recipe and credit goes to my Mom for this one. She's got some real winners and this one is definitely in her top 3.


I've packed with it a small amount of rice, which makes it about 1 point. The amount of sugar that goes into the entire dish is very little, so I don't count it in my portion. The kamaboko doesn't count for much either, but I'll give it 1 point. Everything else is Core, so this is 2 points total.

Recipe:

2 boneless chicken breasts, cubed
1 small sweet or Maui onion, chopped
1 pink kamaboko, julienned
1/4 cup soy sauce (I use light)
1/4 cup mirin
1 tablespoon sugar
5 eggs, scrambled
Green onions, chopped (optional)

1. Fry chicken until half cooked and set aside in bowl.
2. Fry onions and kamaboko for 1/2 minute.
3. Add soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. Add chicken back to pan.
4. Simmer 5 minutes then add scrambled eggs. Let it simmer on low until eggs are cooked, stirring it gently if necessary. Serve over hot rice. Garnish with green onions.

Since Mr. Pikko will turn into a 2 year old and throws tantrums at the slightest sign of onions, I have to use onion powder and nix the green onions all together. I like the green onions because they add a lot of color to an otherwise very brownish looking dish. If he wasn't on such an anti-onion crusade, I'd add them in before the eggs. Garnishing works well too though.


The box I used is the same one as the black bunny one I posted earlier (which I am now out of). I have two of these if anyone is interested. I also have two small tamagoyaki pans for $2.99 each. These exact same ones sell on eBay for like 10 dollars! I've added both items to the store today. And yes, I have that EXACT same pan in that auction. And yes, I bought it for $1.99.

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!

Brown Bag Meeting

Today at work we're having a "brown bag meeting" where we meet over lunch we bring. We ate chili last night and that doesn't make for a very pretty lunch so I started from scratch this morning and made a pretty decent Core bento.


On the left side I have some small shrimps that I bought at Foodland on Saturday. Inside the little orange dog is some cocktail sauce to go with it. On the right side starting from the top left going clockwise there is: Carrot sticks wrapped in turkey, kim chee crab, avocado, two slices of boiled egg, a mini Babybell cheese, grape tomatoes, and cucumber kim chee.

In total it comes out to 2 points for the cheese. Lately my weakness has been in desserts. We had two birthdays last week which meant I kept eating cake day after day (leftovers) and plus I tend to excuse eating candy too. I've decided that I have to limit myself to 2 desserts per week and I eat a small chocolate Riesen candy to appease my sweet tooth on days I'm not eating any dessert at all. This morning I was 127.8 lbs so hopefully I can keep up with my Core bentos and stick to small dinner portions. That's another bad habit I've been feeling myself falling back into: larger portions simply for the taste. I can feel my stomach being full and yet I still eat, which is totally against what Core is about!

We're now 11 days away from the start of the UH Football season and still no season tickets in the mail! WTF? We'll go to the post office tomorrow probably (since I have a bunch of orders to send out) and see if they're waiting. They freakin' better be! Regardless, I'm really excited. Baby Girl has all her football cheers down too, maybe I'll try to take video of her doing them. So far she's got "DEE FENS!" "GO BOWS!" and "TOUCHDOWN!" all ready. I'm so proud. *sniff*

Chacha Rice & Miso Soup w/ Somen

I woke up this morning and my nose is still running and now my throat is scratchy. I can feel a phlegmy cough coming and I can NOT get sick now so I upgraded myself to DEFCON 1 and have prepared various foods today to defend myself against my enemy. It's a Cold War in House of Pikko!


I made miso soup with tofu for breakfast and packed the rest of it for lunch. To eat with the soup, I packed some of my rainbow somen noodles. These noodles are cute, but there aren't really that much colored noodles so it's disproportionately white if I don't cook a whole lot. On that note, I'll have to email my mom and ask for her somen salad dressing, it's win! Added some cucumber kim chee since it's salty and may help.


In my bottom layer I have plain rice and ume. I'll eat the ume with some of the rice first and then make the tea and add the ochazuke mix. When I was a kid we called it "chacha rice" and it was a great comfort food when sick. I didn't think to bring the camera to show what it looks like once I open it, but it's flavoring, little strips of nori, and little cracker sticks. The tea is my favorite type of tea, brown rice tea.


Last of all I have some honey lemon peel that my mom made for me a couple years ago. It's been sitting in the back of my fridge all this time and the years have made it taste a lot better than it did when she first gave it to me. She had these lemon peels soaking in a jar in the yard for what must have been 5 or 6 years and they were still pretty bitter. Now that they've been drowning in honey all this time, it tastes perfect. Also, she says it's great for just adding to a cup of hot water to drink.

All of these things should help me get better. Hopefully I can nix this cough before next week or even better, by tomorrow as we're having a UFC 73 party at our house. No kids this time too, woot! Weight was 129.5 this morning.

Teriyaki Chicken

My plans for a soup and salad lunch were nixed when I stepped on the scale this morning and found that I'd lost almost 2 whole pounds overnight. Hooray for increased metabolism! That'll teach me to shovel rice into my mouth like crazy! Or wait, that makes no sense. Haha! I <3 and miss rice.


I made teriyaki chicken last night and we had a lot of leftovers so I froze 3 portions and took some for lunch today. The rice really isn't much because these musubi are so small, so I'll count it as 1 point. I'd count it as two if I'd packed more rice in, but I didn't so there! My veggie layer:


Foodland was finally stocking cucumber kim chee that didn't look brownish, so I bought some. Most of the time I go and it doesn't look so good and the cover is bulging up and ready to pop. Eww! The corn is from those Steam Fresh packets that you microwave. I love that brand! I brought along cherries, grapes, and a KCCA salad as well. The only thing counting for points today is the rice, so that keeps me nicely on track. My friend's wedding has been pushed back to May, so I now have a whole 11 months to lose those last 10 pounds. The pressure is officially off, haha!

Miso beef w/ potatoes

I'm going to have to do a monkey bento soon. My two kiddos have been watching so much Curious George lately that I can't get Will Ferrel's voice out of my head. Maybe a monkey bento will help. Haha yeah right...

I decided to try the miso marinade again with beef this time. I dumped all the ingredients into a ziplock bag with a round steak and let it soak overnight then broiled it this morning. It didn't brown on the edges as well as I liked, but since I was cooking in the morning I had no time to re-broil them. The marinade is from my bento box book:

4 oz steak
1 1/2 Tbsp miso
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp sake
1 tsp mirin

I added in a boiled red potato chopped into cubes with garlic salt sprinkled on top:


The picture isn't the best, but you can still tell what it is right? :) Maybe this week I can go buy the stuff I need for a homemade lightbox at last. For the other layer I put tofu sprinkled with red shrimp flakes with a strawberry soy sauce bottle and some broccoli and cauliflower with carrot stars. This photo came out terrible too, but that's what happens when one falls asleep early when they should be making bento!


Since I didn't have time to eat much breakfast I packed a side bento to eat earlier in the day that has baby carrots, cucumber kim chee, and ahi poke. I'll probably eat this around 10:30 and then eat lunch at 1 or 2.


A miraculously all Core meal! There is sugar in the steak, but so little that it doesn't count since the bento book says to scrape off the marinade before broiling. Obviously I couldn't find time for a pirate bento, but I'm fine with this since I still haven't even seen Dead Man's Chest.

Inarizushi with veggies

Ok so I realized just now that Flickr is resizing my 1000 pixel wide shots to 500 pixels, so there's no real point in uploading a big size and a small size if the big is only 100 pixels wider. If I have time I'll upload the big files to my Swapsonian domain later.

Due to an extremely busy television night with two 2-hour finales, (one which cut off right after Ryan Seacrest said, "After a world record 74 million votes, the American Idol 2007 is...") I could only make another small bento. As for the finale, it would be an understatement to say that I was pretty upset had to go look online to find out who won. That's twice in one month mah TiVo let me down!

This one is pretty simple with just two cone sushi (inarizushi), the last of my cucumber kim chee with some leftover diced carrots that I put into the sushi rice, and three grape tomatoes on the brink of death. Not sure I'll eat the tomatoes... When I was growing up we always called inarizushi "cone sushi" because sometimes people make it by cutting the aburage diagonally and then stuffing it, making it look like a cone. But anytime I see this kind of sushi I just call it cone sushi cause that's what I'm used to.


This doesn't look like much, but quite a bit of rice can fit into those tofu skins so it comes out to 1/2 a cup of rice in the whole meal. I'd bought a package of already cooked, already simmered, already cut aburage so all I did was rip open the package and stuff the skins. The instructions were all in Japanese so good thing there was little need for them.

So much for my all Core lunches, ha! I knew it wasn't going to fill me up, so I also brought along baby carrots, watermelon, a fuji apple, and some grapes. Contrary to what I said earlier this week I'm now thinking of toning down my diet and losing weight at a much slower rate so that I'm able to keep my healthy eating mentality longer. I don't want to suddenly fling myself off the diet in anticipation of all the missed rice and bread I've been thinking of this whole time. I won't be in my friend's wedding for another 7 months, so that's quite a long while for me to lose the last 14 pounds considering I lost 16 in just under two months.

Grilled salmon w/ asparagus

Last night me and the kids went out to eat at Big City Diner with my mom and brother and he very nicely treated us! This being my 3rd time eating out after switching to Core, I can understand why I was so overweight before. Portions are huge, everything has butter, and most things are fried. After closely examining everything I settled upon the salmon (as usual) and following WW advice, asked if they were willing to grill it for me. Thankfully, they were happy to do so and the miso sauce it came with was a nice compliment. I'd upgraded to their garlic mashed potatoes, which turned out to be insanely yummy, but very buttery. I made myself count this meal as 5 points.

Digging my old bunch of asparagus out of the fridge, I was sad to find mold on the bottom of the stems. But ever the food optimist, unlike my husband who will issue death sentences to apples with the slightest spot, I simply picked out all the ones that were still crisp at the top and snapped off the moldy end. Should I die in the very near future, please attempt to contact my next of kin and point out that it's likely I stupidly ate myself to death with some old asparagus. The spinach is arranged a certain way to cover up the parts of the fish I'd already eaten and I added the lemon, tomato, and parsley for decoration and color.


I'd mentioned before about some bento cloths I found at Marukai for wrapping my box. Well I finally got to use it! Here is the box all packed up in a bunny rabbit cloth with my matching color bunny rabbit chopsticks.

We're going out to dinner AGAIN tomorrow for a special occasion. It's likely I'll end up eating... yep, salmon. *sigh* I re-packed (from MIL's containers) Buddy's dinner to make it prettier. I have a Pokemon cloth I can take it in for him. :) Here is the top layer:


It has half brown/half white rice, stewed baby carrots, and chopped cucumber kim chee. I used one of my "Whale of a Punch" scrapbooking punches for the stars.



The bottom layer contains the stew. I'm so demented with bento obsession that I actually took the piece of carrot out, washed it, sliced it, and made them into sakura carrot flowers. The extras I shoved underneath the stew for him to eat. The parsley was really cheap at the market and is a really handy decoration for bento. I'm an instant parsley fan!

Tomorrow will be a really bad day in points... damn restaurants!

Teriyaki beef w/ veggies

MIL's dinner tonight was teriyaki beef and I know what you're thinking by now. Yes, it's true, I am so completely blessed in life that we eat at my mother-in-law's house every week night. And add to the fact that I don't have to cook all week, she's an insanely great cook. She gave us banana bread yesterday too, which tastes like five kinds of win.

No, you can't have her.

Anyway, I have more pics to share than usual. This afternoon I had to run some errands and they took a lot less time than I'd thought, so I went to Marukai 99 Superstore at Ward. I'm standing in front of the wall of miraculously cheap bento accessories trying not to overflow my basket and there's this lady with a baby standing to my left just in my peripheral vision. When I'm finally done being a soy sauce bottle hog, I turn and holy-freaky-wierd-coincidence! it's my ONLY other friend-with-a-baby Hyechin and her little sumo who is already way bigger than my own son, yet less than half his age. He smiled at me, awww!! It must be the small town Hilo genes that brought us together. How the heck else does something like that happen?

I continued on my purchasing rampage through the store and when I was done, I still had a buttload of time to kill so I stopped by Shirokiya again. I found some cute chopsticks, 3 tier lacquer bento boxes 40% off, and this strange Japanese grill that was only $5.00! And drool!!! I saw the Zojirushi Ms. Bento for sale at $34.99, 8 bucks less than Amazon! Mentioned to hubby that this would make a very nice Mommy's Day present. His response included an inquiry as to why I didn't just buy it and save him the trouble of going down there and getting it. Men.

I went to the Sanrio store but damn the Ala Moana one suxass! With even more time to kill I went to Kahala Mall and bought two bento boxes at Sanrio Surprises along with some seriously expensive Hello Kitty picks. Most of the stuff I bought is for me to sell on eBay or to further entrench Nexa into the bento obsession. Teehee. Here's my stash of things for myself:


Okay, so back to the teri beef. I wanted to avoid rice today so I went with a lot of veggies. Using one of my new bento boxes from Marukai, I lined the bottom with a lettuce leaf and put the sliced teri beef, remainder of the cucumber kimchee, chopped up vegetable fishcake, and some of the tsukemono I made the other night. I added in a tiny soy sauce bottle for the tsukemono. I have a whole bottle at work, but I wanted to use one of my new toys. :D It looked too green, so I added a few grape tomatoes and dropped some minced carrot into the middle.



Fruit bowl is boring, but here's a pic anyway:



The boxes look pretty when closed up! Since these boxes don't come with straps, I stacked them and tied em up in a kitchen dish cloth. The fishcake is low in calories and I'm kinda sorta cheating by putting down "lean beef" and "teriyaki sauce" separately in the Weight Watchers planner so that it counts as Core. But really, it doesn't make any sense to say "teriyaki beef" is 7 frickin' points per slice while I can eat 1/4 cup teriyaki sauce and lean beef round as 0 points. So 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

Yakitori chicken

Went to Marukai 99 Superstore in Waipahu today in search of some cheap bento accessories only to find out those bastards closed the store! GRR! Very sad..

I ended up going to Don Quijote again and bought a bunch of bento things I needed such as more nori, vinegar, sushi seasoning, sauces, etc. Since we were planning on going to the UH Football Ohana Festival at Aloha Stadium, I packed a bento for all of us and hid it deep in the bottom of the diaper bag in order to sneak it past the guards. We didn't think we would make it in, but the lady barely looked into the bag.

I didn't get to marinate the chicken for very long, so most of the taste was on the outside. We ate it cold, because we were waiting in line for Colt Brennan for almost 2 hours. We were one of the last people to get an autograph and picture, getting to him in the final minute of his autograph session! The beans did not hold up well at all, they were all shriveled and uneatable by the time we sat down to watch the practice. I made some extra chicken for tomorrow because we're going to the zoo and I'm going to fry some yakisoba tomorrow and the chicken will go nicely with it. I didn't have any appropriate container, so I just used one of my Tupperwares.


The onigiri I made didn't look so good presentation wise because I didn't have a good container. I forgot to salt them, so hubby made a face when he ate his. Oops!

Tomorrow's zoo lunch menu:

Spam musubi
Shoyu hotdog
Chicken yakisoba
Pickled veggies
Edamame
Fishcake