Two Bentos

Okay, so yesterday I had my yearly wimminz exam and so when I was packing up my laptop and getting ready to make the longass trek down to the parking lot, I remembered I'd forgotten to post my lunch. HOW UTTERLY THOUGHTLESS OF ME. *sigh* I need to slap myself.

Maybe I forgot to post it cause I didn't like the look of it. It reeks "lazy". There's no color, too. Wrong box for brown food! And then I just toss edamame in there like that makes it all better. Well it doesn't! Yech!! Food tasted great, though. Grandma J made chicken tofu. LOVED it!

I asked her for her pork hash recipe and she kind of laughed and said she just mixes pork, mushrooms, a bit of oyster sauce, and green onions. She doesn't measure. She cooks it in a pot, but obviously like you saw, you can fry them in little patties. Yum yum!

Okay so anyway, back on topic. That was yesterday's lunch and it was le good.


Today I am having teriyaki hamburger patty. I had to think of yet another way of presenting this since last time I did hamburger fried rice and before that I did toddler style meat loaf. This time I opted to slice them into little wedges. They weren't really tall so I took one of the wedges and sliced that in half flat-wise to use as a little "platform" for the wedges. That worked out nicely!

I made a ball onigiri and meant to put sesame seeds on it, but forgot it. I was in a hurry! I put in some sliced bell peppers and colorful tomatoes. Unfortunately, these are not illegal. I'm sure they taste good, just not illegal good. People back in Hilo have this saying that "Lichee tastes better when it's stolen." I know, you're thinking, what the hell kind of people does Pikko hang out with back home??? Stealing lichee isn't that big of a deal because even if you buy it down at the farmer's market, you know they must have stole that anyway. The same can be said for tangerines and some mangoes. Anyway, last of all, I have some julienned baby carrot and parsley.

When I recovered from the Flu of Death, I came back to work to find this amazing "award" on my desk:


Isn't that just about the COOLEST award you've ever seen!? She put everything in! Musubi with ume, sushi grass, fish, chicken, boiled egg, carrot, and even a lil soy sauce bottle. I was blown away, but hadn't had a chance to take a photo until yesterday. I don't know if she would want me to post her name, so I'll just say, you know who you are, thank you so so much! Of course I could just walk 20 steps to her desk to gush about it with her again but bento blog thanks are way cooler.

On to the Chibo pics!


This, obviously, is the entrance to the bathroom. I kid!


As I mentioned, I got a "special dinner" so it came with appetizers. This appetizer tray had beef tataki, tofu, and ahi poke.


The beef. VERY good. I love medium rare! Or rare if you're going to nitpick.


The tofu with bonito and green onion. Most of this went to Baby Girl, until I accidentally let a green onion about 1/2 millimeter in size get onto the piece I gave her. She has razor sharp green onion eyes.


This is the ahi poke. The first piece I ate was great, but the other two had a lot of tsuji, so I didn't like it overall.


My sister-in-law got the yakisoba crepe style and this is her crepe laid out to cook. I got to try some and though it was interesting, I didn't really like it.


The crepe being folded up! He basically dumps the yakisoba into the middle and folds it neatly. Then he adds the okonomiyaki sauce to the top and slices it into fourths.


This is someone'e else's food. I think it's a cabbage one. If you read the Wikipedia article on okonomiyaki that I linked the other day you can get a better description of it. It looked like they were frying cole slaw to me!


And finally we have here my yakisoba "Chibo". I asked for more shrimp instead of squid, but I guess that request didn't make it to the kitchen because I had squid in it. It worked out though, Buddy loved eating little donut shaped food thingers. It should be noted however, that he will eat practically anything. Except eggplant.

I got off my lazy ass and bought shoes for exercising at home and actually did Tae Bo last night. It didn't help that my legs were still rubbery from doing jumping squats, but at least I'm exercising again. I anticipate this lasting at LEAST 3 days. Wedding is less than two weeks away and I'm still at 128. At least I'm not at 132 though, which was where I was at a couple weeks ago.

This morning I was ready to rip my ears off and fling them at Mr. Pikko because I was so frustrated with my earrings. I bought new ones yesterday and for some reason my left ear decided it didn't WANT to have something going through it today. After like half an hour of trying and Mr. Pikko trying, I ended up with my stud in backwards cause that was the only way I could get it in. He tried really hard, but I really wanted to strangle him only because I was so mad at my ears and he was the closest breathing person. Who knew you could get so gosh darned MAD at your own body parts!

Sesame Omelet with Shrimp (203)

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


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

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

The Road to 200

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

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



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

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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

Gyoza & Onigiri (196)

Someone commented on yesterday's entry with a link to Spark People and I went to take a look and will definitely have to give that a try. I realize that I owe Weight Watchers a lot for helping me lose 22 pounds, but right now Mr. Pikko is very concerned about all the doom and gloom talk that economists are having so I need to shave spending. A subscription to WW again is something I want and not something I necessarily need, so I really need to thank mbbored for the referral. Free 99 is most definitely a Pikko kind of price tag!

As I mentioned, economy has become a hot issue in my household. To show my support for this, I'm going to start trying to focus on doing more cost-friendly bentos. I might even start a series of a subject like say, 50 Ways to Eat A Costco Chicken. Actually, 50 is a lot... I should start lower with 12 maybe, haha!

For now though, I'm trying to uh... purge my fridge and freezer from things that I've bought during naughty trips to Foodland. I packed 3 pork gyoza into this bento along with a leftover pink onigiri from the freezer. The fish bottle has soy sauce for the gyoza. Next to it I have kim chee crab, which I will eat with the lettuce that lines the box. In the middle I have sliced takuan, ume, and edamame.

When I first got these small round boxes I didn't really care for them but now I really enjoy packing small lunches into them. I wish I had more of these black lacquer boxes as I really think food in a black box makes for great contrasting colors. I haven't used my two-tier boxes in quite a while, I guess I am just going through a bento box mood right now.

Easter is right around the corner and UGH do I hate holidays like these because it means giving a whole lot of things to a whole lot of kids. Don't get the wrong idea, I do enjoy giving to kids. But 17 kids? My wallet is crying uncle! My husband's eyeballs are still rolling around the cash register at Price Busters. My sanity is pleading insanity! (Don't you just love the feel of Easter grass between your toes?) And this doesn't even include my own kids and my niece and nephew. After this ridiculousness I'm done with classmate Easter baskets. Next year, I'm having a big Easter card project at my house for my two kids and we're giving handmade painted egg cards and a healthy snack. This just costs way too much.

Miso Pork (195)

I thought I had it all figured out last week when I skipped bentos in order to have my 200th bento timed right in time for the day after Easter. But then yesterday I woke up and immediately yakked and stayed home. The one day I made my bento the NIGHT BEFORE (OMG OMG OMG!) I end up sick. I guess me being on time just disgusts my body and this started some kind of inner revolution. So anyway, this was yesterday's bento. I also did not take Good Friday into account. So while I was supposed to have bentos 195-199 done this week, alas, there is a little fly in my ointment.


I made miso pork on Sunday, though this time I put sake and I could really taste it. Since the kids had been throwing tantrums on an hourly basis I drank some of the sake while cooking. Bwahaha!

Okay, that was funnier on Sunday.

I despise the way the pork looks in this picture and it looks that way because it was refrigerated overnight. It looked much more golden brown and attractive when I first made it Sunday. D: Underneath it is the healthy rice I mentioned last week. I sliced up a piece of takuan and tucked it into the section with some cucumber pickles. Lastly I have garlic salted asparagus spears pan fried in olive oil.

I've decided to join Weight Watchers again after Easter. Next Monday will mark 2 months before the wedding and I'm basically 130 right now. My eating habits have really slipped and so I'm hoping having the online tracker at my disposal will once again put me back on track and help me kick off that last 10 pounds. My problem is usually dinnertime and weekends. That and my new weakness for curry ramen. ; ;

I know a bunch of you watch Lost and that you all might agreed the Desmond episode was highly emotional and probably one of the most tear jerking so far. Well that was true before last week's episode, Ji Yeon. My butthead husband figured it out about 15 minutes in, so I didn't have that fuzzy "Oh I'm so stupid to not have figured it out!" feeling. That didn't matter though, I still cried my eyes out. I'm not sure if it's because Sun is Asian and that makes me identify with her more or something, but damn did that scene break me down! I even watched the ending again last night just to find out if it was still that raw and sure enough, Niagra Falls again!



I love, LOVE the new, slow piano theme they play lately. *sigh*

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!

Hamburger Patty (172)

Yesterday the office peeps forgot to do our exercises, so in a shocking turn of events, I did them at home on my own. Monday I participated twice, so I did a total of 120 squats and maybe 30 push-ups, cause I'm such a weeny when it comes to arm stuff. Yesterday I did 75 squats, 60 lunges, and 40 push-ups by myself at home. And I'm not sore! Yay!

After my bad eating yesterday I'm back up to 128, but since there are no more lunch meetings this week, hopefully I can get back on track. I had taken some of my MIL's corn chowder to eat, but I forgot to bring it in today. :( It's so cold here lately, which is really nice because when its hot on Oahu, sleeping is a pretty miserable experience. By the way, by cold I am talking about "Hawaii cold". This equals about 70 degrees or so. Yes, yes, laugh it up mainland people. I'm the one really laughing. Bwahaha!

Today I have one hamburger patty cut in half. There was empty space around it so I added some sliced up mini bell peppers for color and filler. On the other side I have a small star shaped onigiri with some chazuke sprinkles on it. I tucked in some leftover edamame that I'd defrosted the other day and then on top before I closed the box, I added a small yellow bear container full of ketchup.

It's been about a week and a half since I pierced my ears and my right lobe is a little swollen. I keep disinfecting it and am trying to sleep on the other side of my head, but it's still puffy and it's getting difficult to grab the stud to twist it now. Anyone have advice on how to get it to stop swelling? I clean it 3 times a day as I'm supposed to, but it's been like this for several days now. At least it doesn't hurt though!

I am returning to my FFXI radio show this Sunday. Although we had moved the show at the beginning of the year to Sundays, we never did get around to doing a Sunday show. After I announced it, I realized that this weekend is Superbowl Sunday, but we are going to do a show anyway. It'll be a little sad, since we will be short one host as our friend ImperialNinja has left us, but we'll try to make do without him as best we can. If you play FFXI and are interested, tune in on Sunday from 2 PM to 5 PM Pacific time by going to http://www.onlinegamingradio.com. It's been a really rough year and hopefully this radio show can bring some light back into 2008.

Rotisserie Chicken (171)

I had another uhh... interesting weekend this week. As I mentioned before, I drank alcohol for the first time in my life two weeks ago. All that was really left was to find out how much I needed to drink before I got drunk and so with a lot of leftover beer in the fridge from a UFC party forever ago, Mr. Pikko suggested we have an experiment.

We had some Budweiser Select and some Fire Rock Ale that our friend had left here. I drank the Budweiser first and it took me quite a while. The ale tasted better, but still didn't taste that great. The second ale went down quicker and by the time he gave me the last Bud, I drank that in like a minute. After that one, the crappy wine we had bought didn't taste so bad and I downed a little less than a glass all at once. I was ready for more, but thankfully I was drinking with my husband and he cut me off. So anyway, the lesson here is that anywhere else, I shouldn't drink more than two beers because after that I become a snowball slowly rolling down a hill.

All in all, I thought it was fun, but it's not something I'm going to do very often. The next morning I woke up really early and seriously hungry and I made a pan of fried rice (and ate half of it), drank like 3 glasses of water, then went back to bed. I woke up and weighed myself and was completely horrified to find that I weighed 129.3!!! As of this morning, I am 129.9!!! *sob* It was probably a combination of eating Korean food Friday, then sushi for dinner, plus all my leg exercises and walking, but still WTF... My pants are really freaking tight today and I've got to do some serious good eating for a while to get back to where I was. No more Sapporo Ichiban saimin or cinnamon bagel chips or ice cream...



Costco chickens have got to be the best thing ever because 1) they're really cheap at $4.99 fully cooked and delicious 2) my kids actually EAT them and 3) they can last for two lunches, a dinner, and a bento. We ate at Arby's Saturday, thinking fast food was cheaper but that came out to around $23. We ate sushi for dinner and that was around $25. Zippy's can run around $18. With those numbers, Costco chickens win all around. I sliced this up after it had been refrigerated because when you slice it hot, it crumbles up.

Costco chicken goes really well with Nori Komi furikake, so I sprinkled some of that onto my rice. I've got about half a cup, so this bento is 2 points. I have some little carrot sticks and a tomato bottle with some soy sauce to put on the chicken. On the side there are chopped up mini bell peppers, which are really sweet. On top are three skewers of shelled edamame.


I bought myself a new bento box last year when I ordered an item from JList for my grandma. This one is a pale green Totoro box by Skater, who makes awesome boxes.

A Ninja Sushi just opened by where we live and I've eaten there twice already. They have really beautiful sushi pictures and so far I've had their Osaka Maki and their Tiger Maki. Once again, I forgot to take pictures. :(


I had Mr. Pikko take a picture of me for some ZAM marketing thing, but I'm posting it here to show off my BJ Penn tank top. Too bad you can't really see much of it, lol. The front has his face and his signature. The back says "Just Scrap Sexy".

Mapo Tofu

It was the strangest thing this morning. Pigs were flying around in the sky in droves! I was confused for a bit, then I realized that they were out because the University of Hawaii announced this morning that Greg McMackin is our new head football coach, meaning that UH... ***UH*** hired someone in 9 days. This my friends, is a miracle!!

The flying pigs make my bento today very fitting because 1) it's got pork in it and 2) it went flying.

I love my MIL's mapo tofu because it's tasty, moist, and not spicy. I added shelled edamame and grated carrot for color so that put together with the pink container, it would make the food look more attractive. Unfortunately, when I took it out to the car, I made the fatal mistake of placing the bento box onto the top of the car where I ALWAYS forget things.

We didn't hear it fly off so I don't know where it is, but this box is presumed lost which makes me so sad because it was a wonderfully shaped box and one of my matching Putifresh containers. I'm hoping that it is just sitting nicely in our parking stall at home, but I won't kid myself. **sigh** I didn't even figure it out until I got to work. Clearly I accidentally packed my head into my lunch this morning along with the food.

I think to console myself I will have to go down to Marukai and buy myself some new bento goodies. Bwahahaha!

Veggie Burger

2008 has been a pretty crappy year so far, starting with emotional carry-over from 2007 then going into the UH slaughter at the All-State Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, then heading right into heated debate about whether the UH Warriors football coach, June Jones, would be leaving the school.

This morning when we woke up and checked the Honolulu Advertiser they were reporting the worst, that sources had said that Coach Jones was leaving. As the morning progresses it just gets worse and worse. First, people maintain that it could still reverse and go in our favor, but then we get confirmation from his agent that he is indeed leaving and that he's taking almost the entire mofakin' coaching staff along with him.

I'm extremely disgusted with the University administration. I'm a UH drone to be sure, but even so you still hold out hope that the people making 10x as much as you have some, you know, BRAINS MAYBE?!? I'm leaving for a rally soon and I don't know what it's going to be about now since previously it was supposed to be a supportive rally to get the coach to stay. Now I just hope it's a head hunting riot that will wake the University up to the pitiful state that it has left this school in and that in the end we get rid of that immensely incompetant and seemingly completely uncaring athletic director we have had to suffer with named Herman Fraizer.

Anyway, on to more cheerful, on-topic things: my bento today is a vegetarian bento because I had no idea what else to use. I have a veggie pattie from Costco cut into fourths along with a slice of whole wheat bread cut into fourths to make a nice sandwich. In the yellow container I have ketchup for the sammies.



On the side I have two silicone cups filled with edamame on one side and fresh raspberries on the other. I'd write more, but have to leave for the rally now. Maybe I can get on the news!! lol

Stuffed Aburaage (162)

Yesterday morning my cousin Jennifer e-mailed me to say she'd missed her flight to Honolulu and that she needed to find a hotel to stay. I ended up offering to pick her up after the radio show and letting her stay the night. We had a nice night talking at Zippy's and laughing at the kiddies who apparently were high on the idea of Aunty Jennifer coming over. Baby Girl put on a Christmas singing show and at the end of one song did a shaka. She sang the song again and her shaka was taking on a weird form and we were like, what is she doing? Then suddenly she does what she wanted, which was to have only her thumb, pointer, and pinky pointing up. Then she screams, "ROCK ON!!!!!!" We almost busted our sides open laughing!!

While we were talking she mentioned a co-worker of hers that reads my blog every day. Hi Christina! Thanks for reading!! ^_^


Today I'm eating stuffed aburaage. Aburaage is fried tofu skin and the stuffing is made out of pork. It's my mother in law's dish and something that doesn't smell so great, but tastes really yummy. On the side I have some white rice and stewed carrots. I added the shelled edamame and a little sprig of parsley for extra detail.

I've been slowly but surely going down in weight, probably because I've been really good about portioning lately. My other cousin Stef heard I've become really skinny and told me I need to eat food but as you can all see here, of course I eat food. lol My best friend's wedding is at the end of May, I'm pretty confident that I can be at my goal weight of 120 by then!! YaY!

I will have no bento tomorrow as we are going to have a Christmas lunch for work.

Meatballs (157)

Last night Baby Girl had her Christmas program and she was chosen to be in the finale. They assigned her to carry the 'C' in MERRY CHRISTMAS and we were of course quite proud of this since not every child gets to be in the finishing number. They come filing out and she's looking looking looking for us and starts dilly-dallying until she lags behind so much that the sign now says MERRY HRISCTMAS and Mr. Pikko is laughing his ass off saying, "Our daughter ruined Christmas!" Afterwards we took his parents to their first trip to Genki Sushi, which was fun!

Having no leftovers to use for my bento I busted out my frozen Aidell's stash of meatballs and cooked a cup of rice for onigiri. I added carrot sticks and edamame but it still looked rather dull in color so I used some of my animal food dividers, which just waste away in my cabinet. If you listen carefully you can hear them all giggling with glee at being used in a bento!

My wonderful friend and co-worker Cem has very kindly taken up a campaign to get me more Bloggers Choice Awards votes for Best Food Blog this year and I felt that for his efforts in spreading the word about my blog I owed him a personal thanks here. <3! I have to admit I'd started to get a little sluggish on my bento enthusiasm after Fan Fest and with Christmas stressing and work overload, but seeing how much effort he put into getting people to read my blog and vote for me has brought back my bento drive.

Chinese Leftovers (135)

So as you all know, I had a very good girl Core lunch yesterday and everything was going quite well and then suddenly, the CHINESE TAKEOUT DINNER OF DOOM struck! Before I saw an article in the paper about the intense calorie content of Chinese cuisine I'd always looked at Chinese food as one of the more healthier types of foods. Now that I know better I get so scared because not only is it full of calories, but it's so damned good too!

But fear not, I was good. I ate very little noodles and focused on broccoli and ong choi. I ate only until I wasn't hungry too, rather than stuffing myself until I felt full. So hopefully day 1 is not completely lost. There was a ton of leftovers so I felt obligated to take some. I took all veggies and a little bit of the noodles then added some rice that I cooked this morning. I've gone back to my old WW Core breakfast of scrambled eggs with sweet onion, bell pepper, and lean turkey slices and it was nice to be back to eating a hot breakfast again. I've been eating cereal every morning for about a month now and at least this way I'm fuller longer and it doesn't cost very many points.


From left to right I have white rice, broccoli, ong choi, and then the noodles in a cup on the right side. On the bottom layer I have:


This is the last of the shrimp I bought on Sunday. I have to use it up before it goes bad! The cocktail sauce is in the pink Hello Kitty cup. I have more tofu and then some edamame topped with a carrot flower. There's a little soy sauce bottle for the tofu. :D

I really really have to find the time to do my Dreamland again. I've been working so hard on Allakhazam while at home plus I've been trying to do more Pikko Pots updates so that by the time Fan Fest rolls around, I have a nicely updated site to show off. Then there's my costume and booth work... ugh. I really don't think I'll be able to find time to use all my spiffy tools and toys until after Fan Fest. This is just sucking so much of my time.

P.F. Changs (129)

Last night Mr. Pikko and I went out to dinner and a movie. I picked P.F. Changs down at Ward Center because it sounded like a fun place to eat and was right by the theater. We started off with the chicken lettuce wraps and although they had shiitake mushrooms that I had to pick out (allergic) they still tasted really, really good. We made the silly mistake of ordering noodles, fried rice, and "duck in bun". So we had three starch dishes, like idiots. Next time we will definitely skip the fried rice, which was decent, but very unnecessary, and get a meat dish instead. The Singapore Street Noodles, which I have for lunch today, was really good.


This was the first noodle dish I've had with tomatoes in it and it fit surprisingly well. We didn't use the lime at dinner, so I'm going to squeeze it over the noodles for lunch. Yum yum! In my lower tier I packed edamame and fresh tomatoes, which I'll probably eat with the noodles. The edamame was difficult to pack because a lot of them were freezer burned. I don't think it can be avoided though, cause they came looking like that straight from Costco. They still taste good though. We have some soy bean seeds to plant, so hopefully once I get off my lazy ass and buy more pots, we can have fresh edamame from our garden!

After dinner we went to see The Kingdom. I wasn't really expecting much, but I thought it was pretty good. Interesting plot, good character setup, good action, and to boot, a touchy political subject. Plus, on the way over to the theater we got sucked into Ben and Jerry's. I'm pretty sure any movie is made better having just eating Chocolate Brownie ice cream!

Mochiko Chicken Again! (117)

When it was game time last Saturday I kind of forgot all about my poor mochiko chicken waiting patiently in the freezer, so I took pity on it this morning and nuked a piece for lunch today. It still looks rather burnt, but smelled great. Also, since I fell asleep really early with the kids last night, I woke up at 5 am. With all that time on my hands I decided to try out Harumi's tamagoyaki recipe. I may have misread the directions and added way too much mirin because it came out incredibly sweet and tastes like the kind you eat at sushi bars, which isn't a bad thing, but I'll definitely have to use the rest of it to make me some tamago sushi. Maybe tomorrow!


Miraculously, this round of tamagoyaki cooked rather nicely. I'm not sure if it's something in her recipe, but for once my egg actually looked like a roll by the second round of egg. Could be some kind of magical egg powers her book gives me. I nuked the chicken straight out of the freezer for 1:11 and it turned out just right and good for slicing. I usually microwave things at 1:11 or 2:22 or something like that because Mr. Pikko is a pro at simplicity and efficiency (ie laziness) and taught me to microwave 1/2 of a second faster than I could before! I made some Costco fried rice from leftover rice, leftover rotisserie chicken, olive oil, soy sauce, and Seto Fumi furikake. The edamame as I've mentioned, is the pre-cooked, frozen kind from Costco so I just defrost some in water and it's ready. Baby Girl helped me to string the yellow pick and she was so proud to have helped me make my bento! I added the carrot flowers and parsley for color and garnish.

Square Enix just recently announced the release date for their new expansion Wings of the Goddess and it will ship November 20th, just a few days after the Fan Festival. Content will be released on Thanksgiving Day. AUUUGH. Maybe they thought everyone would be at home and would be happy to play right after they stuff themselves silly, but last year we ended up trying Black Friday shopping. I can't play Wings of the Goddess if I'm camped out at Toys R Us and Office Depot!! *sad*

Teriyaki "Butt" Chicken (115)

I am now on Day 5 of wild and crazy busy week. I can barely find the time to think lately, I'm even forgetting to blog! D: Last night we ate May's Teriyaki Chicken thighs, which I think is a Hawaii brand of foods. They make wicked teriyaki burgers too! Anyway, I packed some up and put it on the dashboard when we were putting the kids in the car. I forgot we were on a slope and the tupperware came skateboarding down onto my seat and crash landed in a violent frenzy of rice, corn, and chicken. I screeched and picked it up immediately, but Mr. Pikko still felt the need to say, "Don't worry, the only thing that goes there is my ass." Well, gee, thanks dear! Anyway, that's why I put the "Butt" in the title. It fell under the 5 second rule, so it's all good, right?!?


I added in some edamame and an umeboshi. The box I used is actually quite ugly, I bought it simply for the nice food separations inside the box. Not that it mattered today since in my haste to get into the car this morning I dropped my bento bag, causing it to land upside down. *sigh*

Teri Hamburger Salad (106)

As you may have noticed, I have snazzed up my blog a bit. It was getting stale and crusty and so I checked the Sell By date and it was pretty bad. Luckily I was able to scrape off the mold and put it in a pretty container for safekeeping for many months to come.

Doing this blog has done a lot of great things for me. I've learned a lot about cooking, I have something to look forward to every day, I lost 22 pounds thanks to Weight Watchers, and now I am getting freebies! Somewhere on the mainland a FedEx box containing the new cookbook by Harumi Kuriyama is flying over to me. I'm very very excited about it and can't wait to try out recipes and give a review on it. I didn't recognize her name at first but then when I went to Amazon to look it up I recognized her book immediately. I never bought that book though, mostly because they seemed more like dishes you cook for company. This one is on Home Cooking so I'm hoping it will have a lot of bento potential!

Last night we had teri hamburgers, which we usually eat with rice but since I was feeling in a good girl mood I decided to try it out with my salad with no rice. It was surprisingly very good. It tasted just like eating a hamburger with no bun, which I'd always though would be lame, but it wasn't. So continuing my good girl streak I've made a hamburger salad. The patty looked rather depressing though, so I added a face made out of cheese and nori.


I wasn't sure what kind of face to make so I just went with a silly face. Baby Girl saw his jaggedy mouth and announced that I was having a football bento and I guess from her angle it does look like a football. I added some grated carrot for added color and some edamame for variety. I'm going to stretch a bit and call this all Core because of the trivial amounts of things in the patty that would count for points. I mean I don't think I need to count a few bread crumbs and the lil bit of sugar. The box I'm using is a black lacquer box with gold bunnies on the cover.


I haven't had time to put this up on the store yet, but I do have two black and two red boxes like this available for $2.99 if anyone is interested. Also, be sure to check out the boxes section as I added in some of the Hello Kitty stuff that I'd run out of before. The orders I'm backed up on should go out tomorrow as I have to take the day off to pick up the kids. My in-laws are going out of town and so we'll have to cook or buy food for ourselves starting tomorrow. I think it'll be a great time to try out new dishes!

I was able to open a separate WordPress account and successfully import everything to a blog account there, but then it turns out that there are several aspects of WordPress I don't really like. For one, StatCounter doesn't work so well there, which is something I've really come to depend on. Two, I don't seem to be able to easily change fonts or colors or whatever. I'd need to change the css code and I'm not fully comfortable doing that. So for now I'm going to stay on Blogger and see what I can do around here. I'll have to think of something to do with my domain though as it seems a shame to let it rot there. Maybe a gallery! We'll see. ^_^

California Roll & The Dreaded Ex

I have a lot to write about today but first order of business: the bento. I had a pretty wild and rampant calorie weekend, eating a total of 5 Pizza Hut slices (3 Veggie Lovers and 2 Pepperoni) as well as having some very yummy Nabeyaki Udon from Kabuki Waimalu last night. Plus Milano Freezer and cheesecake afterwards, eeps! Anyway, I have to let myself down slowly, so today I have a 4 point bento all from the rice in the sushi.

This bento has some imitation crab that I bought at Don Quijote and I've made a note never to buy their imitation crab again as it was quite smelly and some pieces were a bit slimy. I picked the best looking and best feeling one and threw the rest away. It's not even crab of a good consistency, being very rubbery and hard. I've seen the kind at Foodland which is the one that is pretty soft and you can peel the layers off. They're covered in a plastic wrap and freeze well too. I bought it from Don Quijote because I went there to get something else and was too lazy to go to two markets just for imitation crab. Though now I have to go to two anyway to get more crabso good job me!


On the side I have edamame and soy sauce in a tomato bottle. I totally love the already-cooked edamame they sell at Costco, but it freezer burns very quickly, so you kinda have to eat it fast.

Next up is the garden! I have some new pictures of my brand new tomatoes, which have finally shown themselves!! First up, a general picture of the plants now:


I had larger versions of these pictures but I forgot to upload them to my domain so I'll fix that up later tonight if I remember. Next is a picture of my corn plants:


And finally we have my little babies:


I have like around 10. I had 11 until I accidentally broke one off. :( They're growing pretty quickly as this morning when I went to check on them, they were noticeably bigger!

Ok and last but not least, the dreaded ex. No, I did not run into an ex-boyfriend! I was lying on the couch watching something when I realized that I'm having a hard time sticking to the 5 points a day Core diet so the only thing left for me is to... ugh... exercise. Apparently I mean business too because I went out last night and jogged. An entire mile. A little factoid about me: I despise jogging. I mean what's not to hate? You get tired as heck, your legs hurt, your face turns red, you sweat like mad, you feel like crap. Or at least, I do anyway. I know people who love to run feel good while doing it but I don't run, therefore I don't feel good while doing it. When I came back in last night and went to shower the person looking back from the mirror said, "Don't you ever freakin' do that to me again!" But hopefully I will keep it up. I sure do need it with my jelly belly.

And speaking of jelly belly as a result of pregnancy, I had a sudden surge of hits yesterday, over 500 on a Sunday! I guess someone posted my link on a baby board and now loads of new mamas came here to read and look at my interesting hotdogs. Welcome ladies!! Hope you're all having great healthy pregnancies!! ^_^

One last thing, the bentochallenge poll is up, so if you liked my

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!

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!