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. ^_^

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. :(

Tonkatsu (145)

Last night as predicted, I didn't feel like making a pumpkin pie. The good news though, is that I now have ground ginger! My mother in law lent me her bottle. I'm told I have two days to use the pumpkin before it goes bad, so we'll see what happens tonight.

We had tonkatsu for dinner and I took home two pieces for Mr. Pikko, who was home sick again. He didn't eat all of the second piece so I sliced it up and took his leftover rice as well.


In the little green container (which was a gift from one of my bento customers!!) is some tonkatsu sauce. I included the three tomatoes for color. I should have added some carrots too or used the orange sauce container instead, but I was in a hurry. I peeled some sections off the cucumber before I sliced it to give it that look.


In my second layer I have some sliced persimmon on the left. On the right side is a mixture of pomegranate seeds and blueberries. A very healthy fruit layer!! :D

Tomorrow I start off hosting a gaming radio show on the net at Online Gaming Radio. Yet another reason why I've been going cuckoo lately. The show is about Final Fantasy XI and is called "The Mog House". It will air live every Wednesday from 6 to 9 PM PST. My co-hosts are two of my fellow administrators at Allakhazam, ImperialNinja and Exodus. If you're into FFXI and are bored around this time, please tune in! Shows are available later as podcasts. To listen in just go to the Online Gaming Radio website and click on "Listen Live" at the specified time.

Chicken Tofu (143)

The highlight of my day came this morning. I was just about to lie back and fall asleep on the way in to work when Kanoa Leahey (we listen to Leahey and Leahey on Mondays and Fridays) says, "Soon we'll be joined by Dana White, president of the UFC!" and both me and Mr. Pikko were like, "WHAAAT!" lol

It was a cool interview and Mr. Pikko had me call the show people (I talked to a screener) to ask them to ask Dana White if he was ever going to bring UFC to Hawaii. They did ask, whether it was because of my call, I'll never know, but he did say that perhaps in 2009 there would be a Hawaii UFC card. But yeah, possible third hand phone call question to Dana White was pretty amusing, haha!

Yesterday was a very rainy, gloomy, and chilly day so it was really cool to be greeted with the nice smell of hot miso soup yesterday evening. My MIL's chicken tofu is a really good rainy weather comfort food and though I wanted to make more miso soup and bring it in today, I ended up deciding I didn't feel like going through the hassle of making it this morning. There was a lot left over, so I took what I thought was a really small portion, but when I put it into the box it looked like a lot of food!


I cooked rice this morning for this, meaning it will probably go to waste. I always tell myself I should freeze onigiri, but I always forget cause my brain is so muddled lately. On the left side I have cucumber slices, some kamaboko, and okinawan sweet potato.

!!!SURVIVOR SPOILERS!!!




Two weeks ago I was fuming at the tv and cussing at the pompous and cocky attitude of Jaime, who thought she was so funny and clever to be throwing a challenge to vote off one of their new tribemates that she couldn't help snickering at the thrown challenge AND could not help laughing at tribal council. I was just like, what a freakin' bean!!! I hated her!! Things started to look up last week when Todd gave the hidden immunity idol to James with a plan to get rid of Jaime. That didn't go well since they didn't win immunity, so I was let down.

BUT THEN! Oh this week was such sweet television watching. I finally got to watch that snide chick get her bachi. She has in her possession what is a "fake" immunity idol, so she plays it before the votes are read. Jeff Probst says that if she has immunity, then all votes for her do not count, then he announces that it's NOT the idol and then throws her idol into the fire. HAHAHAHAHA! And then she gets voted off! Oh my gawd. Picture me on the couch rolling, dying, crying. lol

Man I <3 Survivor.

Veggies Bento (142)

Last night's trick or treating was so much fun! We left work early to take the kids out and it was still pouring rain all the way home, but when we got to MIL's house, the rain was just drizzling here and there. We ate dinner and got the kiddos dressed. Buddy was very resistant, protesting the entire time I took off his clothes and then finally took off running in just his diaper and I had to chase him around for a bit. He had some serious issues with wearing his costume and kept crying, "Nooooo! Nooooo!" whenever I tried to put it on until finally I said, "You want puffs??" (those star shaped Gerber things) and his eyes glazed over and he said, "Puff." He let me put it on no problem! Yay, problem solved right?

Everyone is dressed and standing against the wall except him, who his looking at the camera going, "Nooooo! Nooooo!", going limp, etc. I tell him, "Please just stand by your sister!" He is fussing fussing fussing then suddenly goes, "Puff?" As soon as the word "yes" escaped my lips he stood over by them and grinned ear to ear saying, "Eez!" Not even two and a negotiator already. :(

I had nothing but fruits and vegetables to put into a bento today, so that's what I ended up with. I've got a bunch of cucumber slices, which I will sprinkle with salt before I eat, then three colors of bell peppers with some fat free Ranch dressing in the little cup. It's oh so healthy, no??


Hahaha!! Second layer: NOT! I've got some Halloween munching to do and so I picked out one of my favorites, peanut M&Ms! I figure this is a much better portion than if I were to go buy a regular sized bag from the vending machine. I've also got this lil packet of sour apples and then some sakura shaped banana slices. There's also a little hidden Laughing Cow Light Swiss wedge in there.


Today is November 1st, I leave for Fan Fest in less than two weeks! Ahhhhh!! Panic panic panic!!!

Hammy Sammy (133)

Last night we ate at the Old Spaghetti Factory at Ward Warehouse, which is... dun dun dun! right across the street from Marukai! Imagine my squealing when I finally saw what I've never seen at Marukai in like 10 trips so far: EGG MOLDS!!!!! Woohoo!! They were the star and heart shapes, which are coincidentally, the only egg molds I do not have. I was so thrilled! I bought one for myself and 6 to sell to people. I didn't get a chance to take a picture, but this is the one I'm talking about. If you want one, I'm selling them for $2.99 and I'd guess that with the lightness of the item, shipping/handling would be around $2.00 to the USA. I'm placing a limit of 1 per person on these as I don't want people buying them just to sell on eBay. E-mail me at pikkopots at gmail.com if interested. Also, don't forget to enter my 30k celebration drawing! See yesterday's post for details!


If I had been a good girl at dinner last night, I would have stopped eating halfway through the meal when I was full, leaving me with a yummy leftovers lunch today. Alas, the mizithra cheese grabbed a hold of my senses and shook me silly and I ate it all. I also could not resist and joked to my friend Doug that "mizithra" is like "mithra with zi!" and he was like, "Oh god, you had to Final Fantasy our dinner!!" Muahahaha!

Anyway, I made a ham sandwich for lunch today. I put in some swiss cheese, fat free Ranch (cause I couldn't find the mayo), sliced cucumbers, and lettuce. There was space on the side of this box, so I sliced 3 baby dills and tucked them into the side. I can't wait to eat this!! I bought these thick ham steaks at Foodland once and froze them and they taste really super in sandwiches. The last time I used one was for that Ham and Egg Salad sandwich and boy was that yummy!!

I also brought a box of more of the Greek pasta salad with a star shaped egg. I had wanted to take a picture, but Mr. Pikko snagged the camera for something at work.

Furikake Salmon Salad (130)

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


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

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

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

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. ^_^

Bento #100!!!!!

After long, tiring, endless, painful hours of planning (2 hours this afternoon) and a quick tossing together in the kitchen tonight (3 1/2 hours) I have finally completed my 100th bento! It's a sealife theme featuring some creatures that I've seen before on the crazy Japanese bento site e-obento.com.


The corners each hold 3 pieces of maki: 1 cucumber, 1 ume, and 1 avocado. Tucked inside the three pieces is a piece of okra. I have no idea what it tastes like, but it looks cute. heh. The ocean water in the middle is made of white rice dyed blue and green to give it a more aqua look. Click this close-up picture to enlarge.


At the bottom I have some furikake "sand" with a crab hotdog on it with cheese/nori eyes. I learned tonight that Redondo Hawaiian Winners, though nice and bright red, do not make for good bento hot dogs. They're very difficult to cut due to the little balls of fat. Plus, finding little balls of fat is gross in itself. I'll stick with turkey hot dogs!

The coral is cut with an exacto knife out of bell peppers. The fishies are carved out of carrots and bell peppers. The starfish is made out of kamaboko (fishcake) and has sesame seed eyes and a nori mouth. The squid in the middle is made from a Redondo hot dog and the head is a thin slice of turkey hot dog.

Since this is an obscene amount of rice, I doubt I will be eating the ocean. The 12 pieces of maki and the two hot dog pieces are more than enough to fill me up for lunch. It sure doesn't feel like I've done 100 bentos!

Many of you know that I'm giving away some bento items in celebration of today's lunch. I wrote everyone's name on a piece of paper and folded them all up and put them into a little lacquer bento box. Baby Girl picked one out and the winner is...

Jennie from the US!

Why Jennie loves bento:

Because I need and want my children to eat healthy well balanced meals. Plus sometimes it is just cool!

Congratulations Jennie! Funnily enough, I shook those little papers around like crazy and yet the person who won was the last person to enter. ^_^ I'll be in touch for address info and what not!

My regular readers may remember that I mentioned a certain okazuya shop a couple weeks ago in Hilo called Y's Lunch Shop. My Aunty K did in fact deliver me some of their awesome fried fish and musubi and it tasted exactly as I remembered it. Having just relived the old taste memories of high school so recently, I was very sad to receive an e-mail informing me that the "Pop" of this little "Mom and Pop" okazuya store had passed away. Frustratingly, I don't remember his first name; I only knew him as "Mr. Miyamoto".

He was a very kind old man, I remember going next door to buy something to eat and sometimes he'd give me a couple extra potatoes. (probably cause he'd seen me scrounging in the car for any little coins to use) I remember sitting on the back steps watching him bring back bags of food from the downtown KTA, wondering how it was possible for him to buy ingredients at the same market we shop at and yet produce such amazing fried chicken, egg, fish, and spam musubi. They'd be there at I swear, 3 or 4 am to start cooking their addictive food. Sometimes at the end of the day when they hadn't sold everything, he'd pack it all up and give it to me or my brother. I had this massive crush on his oldest grandson who I never did get the courage to talk to during the summers he was in Hilo.

I dedicate my 100th bento to Mr. Miyamoto, who smiled a lot and gave to us whenever he could. May Y's Lunch Shop always be there on Keawe Street. Hilo just wouldn't be the same without it.

Soot Ball Onigiri

When I first started getting full on into doing bento every day, one of my favorite images was from Little Yuzu's blog in which she did some soot ball onigiri from Spirited Away. Since the bentochallenge this week is Hayao Miyazaki, I had to do one. It's been done quite a few times on other blogs I've seen such as Lunch in a Box and Kitchen Cow, but as I mentioned it's one of my favorite bentos ever so despite the unoriginality that's what I'm eating today.

Yesterday I went home with a bad stomach ache so Mr. Pikko brought me back some pork hash from dinner at his mom's and some kind of tofu carrot patty, which tasted really good. I decided to use that for the filling in my onigiri. The rice came out to just about 1 cup cooked rice, so this bento will be 4 points just like yesterday's. It may look like more, but the filling takes up a decent amount of space inside.


The eyes are made with swiss cheese and I had a hard time with it because I don't have anything circular to cut them out with that small. My first try, I used the bottom of one of my soy sauce bottles but that turned out to be too small so I used one of my thermos soy sauce bottles instead. The nori pupils were punched with my happy face punches from Japan. The stars are made from carrot, Okinawan sweet potato, and cucumbers.

I showed it to Baby Girl and she loved it but I showed it to Buddy and he immediately backed away whimpering with his scared face, so I guess big black onirigi with eyeballs staring at him is way too scary! lol

As you can see from today's and yesterday's photos I'm pretty bored with my plain white background and so have decided to put my numerous furoshiki cloths to use as prettier backgrounds. So far I am pretty happy with how it turns out. It adds more life to the photo, don't you think?

I didn't go jogging again last night because of my lingering stomachache plus my legs are so sore I can barely walk right. We'll see how I do tonight. No promises on that one since tonight I have to make #100, get more bento orders ready, and do the drawing.

3 Bento Day & Store

Today is Admissions Day, the day that Hawaii became the 50th state. It's also check-ins at UH Manoa which means that starting Monday, I'll be taking much longer naps on the way in to work. Muahaha! Anyway, while normally I'd be celebrating a long weekend, Mr. Pikko has to work so that means for the next two days I have to watch my two darlings by myself. In case it's lost in the interwebs, I say that with sarcasm. Somewhere along the way my children were replaced with Tazmanian devils. Today Baby Girl stripped and refused to put on clothes for 2 hours and Buddy spilled like 4 cups of water and 3 bowls of cheerios.


My bento today consists of all leftover things. Strawberry spinach salad on the right side topped with slivered almonds. In the strawberry bottle is some of my MIL's salad dressing that goes with this salad. On the left side I have two pieces of leftover Tiger Maki, which is basically a California roll with shrimp covering the top. Sadly, I did not make it, I bought it yesterday from Sushiman. Also on the left is edamame soaked in something that smells like Italian dressing and then in the little cup is the rest of my cucumber pickles and a grape tomato.


In the hopes that they'd calm down, I made the two little hurricanes spam musubis and put them into little bentos. Baby Girl did not do so well, eating only the sweet potatoes, cheese, and apples. I guess by the time she was done with that she wasn't hungry enough for the musubi. Though she claims she'll eat it later, I had to toss it out. She can eat one of the extras when she gets up from nap.


Buddy is very good with vegetables, so his bento is structured a bit differently. He's got spam musubi just like his sister but also has edamame sticks, chunks of apple, cucumber slices, and carrot fishies. Unfortunately since their goal for the weekend is to drive me insane, he ninja'd a sweet potato star from Baby Girl who then screeched to high heaven about it and when I convinced him to give it back to her, she then threw it back at him declaring it "Yucky!!" because "He SPIT on it!!" *sigh* Although he completely dismantled the musubi, he did eat it all. And he ate most of the veggies and all of the apples!

The store has been updated with most of the new items I have available, most notably the boxes. I have a few more accessories I have to put up, but aren't those Hello Kitty boxes adorable?!? Click the link in the sidebar to take a look!

Shrimp & Avocado Salad

As I mentioned last week, we took a trip to Kona this weekend. It broke the wallet to be sure, but was definitely worth it to take a vacation and see all the family I haven't seen in forever. It probably would have been nicer if my little Buddy wasn't such a ball of terror at night, but I can't blame him for having what appeared to be a hard time sleeping in a strange place. Plus, I dragged everyone up into the boonies of Kona to go to a bon dance, so that likely didn't help, haha.

Since I wasn't home all weekend I didn't get a chance to shop for food so I ended up making a salad for today. It's just as well since I ate a whole lot of cookies and bad foods over the weekend. (we went to Mrs. Barry's Cookies) I did discover that I sure stock a whole lot of salad foods in my fridge.


On the bottom where you can't see I have finely chopped romaine lettuce, celery, and edamame. On top I have cucumber slices, radish slices, sakura shaped ham, shrimp, avocado, grape tomatoes, and sakura carrots. This is a pretty big bento box so it's a nicely sized salad and with the 3 fruits (1 plum, 1 nectarine, 1 banana) I brought along with a bag of Smart Pop popcorn, that should be more than enough to tide me over for today. All Core salad, so I'm on the right track for this week!

The bon dance we went to was at this temple called Kona Koyasan Daishinji Mission (in Holualoa, up on the mountain, basically) and it was a nice, cute bon dance. We got there when they were taking a break for dinner, which oddly appeared to be free for all attendees. Mr. Pikko says he saw some lamers leaving with plates of food. We had just eaten so we didn't take anything. Their towels were free though, so I took two of those as I like to sort of collect those. They had a small yagura tower and the drummers were at the foot of it rather than inside it. They played some great songs and the drummers usually beat to each one, making them all pretty entertaining.

I took video of a lot of it and it was a good thing too because I was able to capture on camera one of the most hilarious and hip dances I've ever seen. They had a man announcing each song and he goes, "Next up we have "Yeaaaah!" and I thought eh? Then they start up "Yeah!" by Usher and all the old ladies in kimonos are dancing to Usher and saying, "Yeah!" Once I find my Adobe Premiere cd I am so putting that up for people to see. It was their favorite song, they played it three times!

Their last song was Fukushima Ondo and sadly, there was no one there to play the flute for it. Still, I got in and danced (once again carrying Baby Girl). There was a small group of kids there that were trying to get a "betcho" started, but didn't do so well since there weren't too many people. It died out right after the first "Betcho, betcho, betcho! Yo, yo, yokoisho!". Still, I was still happy to hear them trying! My dad says he saw a special on tv about the betcho and I was kinda bummed I missed it. Hopefully I can figure out who made it and find it online somewhere.

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!

Tamagoyaki Attempt #3

Last night my mommy in law made her shoyu chicken wings, which are really good, but really high in points. The taste outweighed my points conservation though, so I packed 2 of them to eat for today's lunch. That would have been awesome except I forgot it on her kitchen counter! Very typical of me.

So anyway, I had to come up with something from scratch again, which I seem to be doing rather often. Unfortunately I am nowhere near as fast as the Queen of Speed bentos over at Lunch in a Box. In fact, considering the time it takes me to do these, I'm the polar opposite. I don't consider that a good thing. Okay, so I decided to try some tamagoyaki again with my expensive ass tamagoyaki pan from the local Japanese ripoff store, Shirokiya. I'd seen a cool video on YouTube and that woman's recipe included potato starch to make it roll nicer. Well, I forgot to buy potato starch last time I was at the market, so I ended up trying Biggie's recipe. She's got a super awesome tutorial here.

I read that and thought, well hey now, that's precisely what I needed, a "Tamagoyaki for Dummies" page with pictures. My first attempt came out ok, I'd done it in a frying pan and it tasted good. My second attempt was frustrating because I wasn't aware of the oiling I was supposed to do with a regular pan. I was hoping my third would land me with a standard recipe I'd use all the time. So I started things going and went out to pick (at 11 pm) green onions from my little potted stalks. (I'm running out!!)

I've mentioned before that I'm cursed when it comes to cooking eggs. This time was no exception. I followed the tutorial exactly and was getting so upset because the darned eggs were so soft and jelly like that every time I folded it over, it would simply crack and I had 3 layers of egg instead of a rolled egg. It took me a good 40 minutes to finally cook the stupid thing and shockingly, AMAZINGLY, it came out fine. Seriously, what a lot of stress. At least now I know that no matter how much I screw it up, it'll turn out okay as long as I can make it though the entire omelette without chucking it in a furious rage.


I put in more of the leftover brown fried rice. Although it has taste and the chicken is good, the ham stars I had them with previously were really good so this time I added ham flowers with a little cheese center cut out with a straw. In the middle is some microwaved pipi kaula. On the right side is half a boiled egg (though I forgot to pack soy sauce) and two wedges of above-mentioned tamagoyaki. On the left side I put some veggies: three cucumber slices, some carrot chopped into little triangles, and a grape tomato.

My cousin informed me yesterday that when I get to Kona, something totally frakin' amazing will be waiting for me: FOOD FROM Y'S LUNCH SHOP. OMG OMG OMG! To give some background, my parents used to run the family floral shop in downtown Hilo and it was right next door to this holy shrine of good food called Y's Lunch Shop. Whenever I go home and I want okazuya, my mom will take me to Hilo Lunch Shop or something across from the tennis stadium and I'm sorry, but it's just not the same. My old time favorites from Y's:

- Spam musubi!!
- Fried fish!!
- Fishcake (thin little circles, lol)
- Fried chicken!! (to die for, no joke)
- Egg (I used to just call it "egg", obviously I now know it's "tamagoyaki")
- the tiny potato fritters!! (10 cents each back then)
- Okinawan Donut (or as my husband will curtly correct me, "It's called andagi.")

Once in a blue moon Mrs. Miyamoto would cook this pork tofu dish. Broke da mouth just thinking about it. I was lucky enough to eat the food when she was still cooking it, but the recipes are still the same so the only thing that would be missing is the love that she obviously put into her dishes. Needless to say, my mouth is watering over it already. I haven't eaten there in at least 8-10 years or something crazy like that. The only problem with Y's was that they were only open whenever they felt like opening. I remember all too well the many times I ran out the front door of the florist and was greeted with their door, closed. It's probably better now, but since my aunty always refers to "calling Y's to see if they open" I'm guessing not much has changed schedule wise. Hahaha!

Mapo Tofu & Beef Broccoli

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


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


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

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