Somen Salad (215)

We had spaghetti for dinner last night but due to some kid craziness, I forgot to take leftovers again, something I was really upset about since I love spaghetti. With no food to take to lunch today, I ended up making somen salad.


I had somen noodles hiding away in a drawer. They've been patiently waiting for me to remember them and so this morning they cried out in joy at the thought of being the center of attention on AIB at last. Luckily, I still had eggs. I say "luckily" because I am really bad at keeping fridge inventory. I'm constantly going to the fridge for eggs or mirin and going, "Oh crap."

I had a kamaboko in the freezer, which was easily defrosted under water. The Okuhara or Okamura or whatever brand of kamaboko is usually cheaper, but having grown up in Hilo, I am biased and always buy the Amano brand. I chopped up romaine lettuce really fine, added the egg (which I did not mess up TOO badly), added the kamaboko, then topped it with toasted sesame seeds. I have the sauce separately. My mom has a reeeeally good somen salad dressing recipe, but unfortunately she never wrote it down and can't quite remember it. She's working on getting it down again and hopefully I can post it then. For today I have store bought sauce.

I was going to add spam to it, but horror of horrors, I looked in my cabinets and found NO SPAM. I AM A DISGRACE TO ALL HAWAII MOTHERS. *sob* Trip to Costco planned ASAP.

As I mentioned, we ate at Kyoto Ohsho on Friday night. This place is located at Ho'okipa Terrace at Ala Moana or "the fancy schmancy top floor".


We had pre-ordered all our food because had a huge ass party (maybe 35 people) but we still didn't get our food until like 7:45, which was quite annoying, especially since we seemed to have only one waiter for all of us. I do have to note though, they have AWESOME rice. I can't really describe it, but the rice was just divine. They brought a bowl of miso soup for the kids and a bowl of rice and while feeding them I tasted some and I just had to keep eating it. Plain, nothing else. It was that good.


I got the Grilled Salmon. Usually I drown (and I am speaking literally) my salmon in shoyu because I just love salmon with my shoyu, but the salmon at Kyoto Ohsho was salted, so it was very tasty on its own. It was also cooked thoroughly, yet still very moist. So in the end, despite the service, I was quite happy with my food. The kids' teriyaki chicken was really good, too. I had a lot more pictures of the appetizers and sides, but I ended up having to delete them because my camera was full. Candle blowing and family pictures are more important than food. ^_^


On Saturday we took the kiddies to go eat at Genki Sushi and while we were eating I suddenly smelled smoke. I looked up and one of the chefs in the middle was flamethrowing some sushi. I picked one up off the line and

OH

MY

GOD

It turned out to be something they'd added since my last visit, Garlic Salmon. It was soooo good. Raw underneath, cooked with char taste and mayo on top, this thing was some of the best sushi I'd had in a really long time. I ordered a second one and popped it into my mouth before remembering to take a picture, so that is why one is missing. I just couldn't wait to eat it!! They had two other garlic sushi types, but I didn't try them. Someone commented on my Flickr stream saying the ahi one wasn't as good, so maybe I'll just stick with the salmon cause boy that one was a winner for sure. Yum!!

Teriyaki Meatballs (107)

My two kids are going through a tornado phase right now and I'm still getting used to it. So when I asked Mr. Pikko to watch them so I could take a nap Saturday morning, I was a bit... unnerved to wake up and find that the big Costco pack of Kirkland toilet paper we had bought was busted open and used in a toilet paper fight. Also, the books on the shelf were thrown out, the mail on the table tossed about like confetti, there were tiny little papers all over the floor because Baby Girl was "playing with scissors", and lego blocks were all mixed in between for color.

All this mess was of course enough to make my brain explode, but I think there is a good side to me having to clean the house on a daily basis. For some reason this weekend I lost a lot of weight. I was 125.7 this morning! Or maybe it's more sleep? Well, whatever it is, I'm happy. Carry on kids!

I'm really unhappy with my bento today as it was done in a rush and simply don't like the way it's put together. Mr. Pikko was all cranky with me this morning for taking a long time so I'll definitely have to do this at night all the time now. I'm sick of rushing in the morning anyway.


On the left I have a dog shaped onigiri with a dog shaped slice of turkey with a nori face on top. I have the onigiri mold and cutter to make both these shapes along with the bunny and bear shape available in the store right now. Under the doggie I have two slices of fish cake made by my MIL and given to us before she left. Next to that I have two Aidel's teriyaki pineapple chicken meatballs cooked in Mr. Yoshida's sauce. Then I have corn in a Miffy cup and an orange bell pepper stuffed with Laughing Cow Light Swiss cheese, something I've seen others do that I've wanted to do for a while.


I'm not sure why this pic came out so blurry but this is my fruit layer, which has slices of white peach, grapes, and some blueberries. It's a funny thing about these blueberries. I am not a blueberry fan. I love all berries but have never really taken to these much. So when I took the kids to Costco on Friday, for some reason Baby Girl wanted them in the worst way. She asked me I swear, at least 50 times to buy her a pack of blueberries, insisting she loved them and that she promised to eat them. Since her word as a toddler is about as good as a year-old-expired coupon, I said no at least 50 times.

Finally though, she cracked me and I bought one. I figured I could give them a try again and lo and behold, I did like them.

And I would eat them in a box.
And I would eat them with a fox.

Yeah, it's like Green Eggs and Ham in real life. Scary stuff. I'm eating them in a box but thank goodness I don't really have a fox to eat them with. Or I do, but he always eats at work. Anyway, that's why they're in my bento today. I haven't been able to stop eating them all weekend.


I used my pink Feel at Ease box today with the matching side container that I found in Little Tokyo in July. I have edamame in that container. The fruits were bulging out so I had to use the furoshiki in the background to tie it up tight.

I am happy to report that Hawaii won against Louisiana Tech last Saturday. It was a nervewracking game that I had such a hard time watching because I was sooooooo nervous. So much hangs on every game and to have it be that close and have so many mess-ups was very hard for a fan to watch. UNLV this weekend will probably be even harder to watch. I have a great idea for our next football bento, so stay tuned next home game for that.

As I mentioned last week, I started my Live Journal documenting my costume making effort for the Final Fantasy XI Festival coming up in November. Doing this has really got me interested in sewing again and this weekend I bought a pattern for a blouse and some materials to make my own shirts. If anyone else out there likes sewing or scrapping, I found some good coupons for shipping at Joann.com from CouponChief. They also have a good one for free shipping on baby and maternity clothes from Old Navy. I always forget to check coupon sites before I go shopping so I definitely need to make a better effort in that area. "Free shipping" are magical words to a cheapass like me.



I really wish I could stop the outlines from appearing around every single image but bleh, if that's the price I have to pay for the nice green border, so be it.

Mochi with Chickie Egg (105)

We ate yummy lasagna last night but I actually FORGOT to pack some for lunch. *sob* The one my MIL makes is the Stouffer's Meat and Sauce lasagna and it is sooooo yummy. I like to make turkey lasagna but this one is just so good I can never get enough of it. Too bad it's like 6 points a piece, haha! Maybe it's best I didn't take any...

Anyway, I had to start from scratch for today's bento and so I took from a recipe I saw on Kitchen Cow since I had leftover peas to use. I was freaking AMAZED. For once I fried some eggs and they turned out ok. They did not stick to the pan like Baby Girl to my legs and came out nice and crumbly. The only change I made to her recipe is that I added a bit of pepper as I like to have pepper in my scrambled eggs.


The eggs are in a baking cup in the top left. Going clockwise I have some vegetable fishcake, avocado, mochi, an egg chickie, and some imitation crab sticks. In the orange container I put some sugar, which I will use to eat the mochi. I bought a pack of frozen mochi last night and chopped it up into fourths. I'll microwave it until it's soft and gooey then eat it with soy sauce and sugar. This is different from chichidango; it's the kind of mochi that you eat at New Year's time. I'm going to guess that this one mochi is at least 4 points because a lot of rice goes into each one. That makes this bento around 5-6 points with the sugar and the fishcake.

I have been trying without much success to import my blog to WordPress so I can finally move this thing to my own domain. It's very frustrating, but hopefully soon I'll be able to post without having to worry too much about losing everything, which apparently Blogger likes to do sometimes. Scaryyyyy!!

Hawaii vs. Northern Colorado (103)

Our first football game went reasonably well, I was able to watch at least half of the game successfully, though the kids were a bit alarmed at the noise. Apparently sitting in the staff section means you get put right by the Manoa Maniacs and student section. This means all the crazies go walking up and down the stairs past us. You know, all the guys with painted bodies that make psycho faces for tv down at the bottom. Anyway, the seats are thankfully decent and I lost about a pound carrying one of the kids from Radford to the stadium.

My in laws couldn't make the game so I ended up going with just spam musubi, fishcake, egg, and hotdogs. Even this ended up being too much and sadly, no one ate the tamagoyaki but me. Mr. Pikko says it's cause the egg is a bit gross to eat by hand. The kids didn't like it either for some odd reason. Anyway, I ate maybe half of it myself. I was able to snugly fit in all but one half of my spam musubis into my black and gold lacquer box.


The egg and hotdog I packed into Baby Girl's Hello Kitty box. I added foil so that the soy sauce wouldn't leak into the egg part. The egg gave me a bit of trouble while cooking but seemed to fold much better than last time.


I didn't really care for how the hotdog came out. It's Redondo's Hawaiian Winners and I guess they're best left for bbqs and what not. Maybe we'll use them today as we may have a little pool party for Labor Day.


This is a picture of the top cover of the box I mentioned. I really like this one and I got it at a really good price at Marukai. It's a 3 tier box and the same one that I used for my 100 bento, but I still don't know how big it is. I had thought it was 500 due to the label that was on it, but now that I think about it, it can't be that small.

I have a picture of Colt throwing his first touchdown pass of the season but unfortunately he's so blurry you can't tell his number. You can see the football mid-air though! We won the game 63-6. And now I will take the time to talk about bachi. Anyone who grew up in Hawaii knows what bachi means, which is basically karma coming back to bite you in the ass. Michigan got their bachi by losing to Appalachian State. Those turds got lawyers and threw a hissy fit to get out of their game with us, getting the ball rolling for us to have the crappiest football schedule ever.

We have two away games coming up next so I have a couple weeks to plan what other kinds of food I want to bring. I don't want to end up bringing the same old things over and over and there is no way I'm going to buy food at the stadium this year. It's not like you're supporting the school by buying food and who the hell wants to pay $3.75 for one slice of Papa John's or $4.00 for a regular soda?

Sun, Moon, & Stars Bento

Last night I figured I'd make my bento ahead of time so that we could leave early this morning. Since I wanted to do a low point lunch I decided to make fried rice with brown rice and the leftover Costco chicken from the weekend. I started cooking my rice at 9:45 pm and the darned rice cooker was still puffing away at quarter to midnight. This was for ONE cup of brown rice!! Finally I gave up and went to bed and just as we're falling asleep Mr. Pikko is like, "What was that??" It's the rice cooker beeping. *mumble grumble*

This week's bento challenge is a Space theme, so though when I started making my bento this morning I didn't intend to have a space theme, the ideas for it came into my head as I was arranging things and as a result, I have a Sun, Moon, and Stars bento. They're going to start offering prizes too! I'll have to work harder on my bentos!


Underneath on the bottom left is my fried rice which is brown rice, olive oil, green onions (snipped from my garden this morning!), Costco chicken, peas from dinner last night, and some Aloha Hawaiian Honey BBQ sauce. On the right is one diced fishcake, which is 1 point I think. At the top are some sugar snap peas that I lightly blanched. In the Hello Kitty mini bowl I have some Kraft Free Ranch. On top I have ham stars, a mini Babybel sliced in half for a moon, a bell pepper sun, and two grape tomatoes to give some red in the middle. Extreme close-up! Total points: 2!

I would have taken a picture of the box, but I made the mistake of letting the kids play with this box so now I'm missing the little sliding bar that holds in the fork and spoon. It's really a miracle that I still have the utensils!

My bento store has really taken off nicely! I've made 4 rather big sales so far. Hooray! Now I can tell fellow bento nuts that I'm a "bento personal shopper". Bwahaha!

Tonkatsu w/ Chicken salad

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Mango Wazowski

I think I mentioned before that character bentos were killing me. Too bad I didn't remember that earlier when I started on today's bento, which was done for this week's bento challenge. The theme this week is favorite Pixar characters so I chose Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc. I debated doing Boo as well, but after finding a picture of her I decided that much cute in a bento might kill people.


Mike is made out of cigar mango skin, thus the title "Mango Wazowski". He is lying on a slice of yellow peach with some bing cherries to keep him company. There is mango on the other side so I'll definitely eat him. His eye is made out of sliced Baby Bonbel cheese with a nori pupil and mouth.

Ok... the teeth. Extreme close-up. The teeth are sesame seeds cut in half applied with some extra sticky rice and a pair of tweezers. Mr. Pikko came into the kitchen while I was applying the teeth because I was moaning and groaning about my back. When he saw me slicing sesame seeds in half with my X-Acto knife he said I was insane. I wasn't going to even post Mike because I didn't really like how he turned out, but he insisted that Mike looked fine. I realize that mango does not go well with nori and sesame seeds but give me a little leeway here.


For the smaller layer I put a little portion of yakisoba from the freezer, sliced fishcake, and oh! What a surprise! Meatballs! Haha! I'm not packing a salad or anything else because tomorrow I'm going to some work picnic and I have to help setup and cook food. I'm going to eat this before we leave so that when it's time to eat lunch I'll be moderately full already. Sadly, this layer is 5 points all by itself, so I'll have to stick to all core foods at the picnic and at dinner.

Zoo Bento

As I mentioned earlier today we took a trip to the zoo so I went to Foodland earlier this morning to get a few things such as stir-fry veggies, fishcake, and some turkey hotdogs. The kidlets were driving me absolutely BANANAS so preparing the lunch took a lot longer than expected and by the time I was done it was 5 to noon, so Mr. Pikko suggested we just eat at home. It would have been nice to actually eat it out, but in the end I figured it was more convenient to eat at home anyway.


I used my large 3 tier bento box but only needed to use the top layer since we were the only ones going. There are spam musubis on the right. I made 9 musubis and then froze 5 so that next time I can just bust them out and nuke em. Same for the yakisoba, I was able to freeze 5 separate servings for future bentos.

On top of the yakisoba are some crab hotdogs! I was finally able to use them, I was so thrilled!! I mauled a couple until I got the hang of how to use it, then cooked them in the same sauce I'd used to make the spam musubi. The legs and pincers fanned out after they'd been cooked for a bit. To go with the hotdogs I made two round onigiri for the kids decorated with the new nori punches I got. For the cheeks I lightly dabbed them with some red hana ebi (colored shrimp flakes). It needed color and they looked nice and cheerful after I dabbed it on! Last of all is some sliced vegetable fishcake.

The zoo was fun, but right after the elephants some poor little girl about 6 or 7 fell down hard and was screaming something awful. Hubby suggested I go over and offer whatever I had in my little first aid kit and when I got over there it was horrifying. Her mouth was full of blood and her mom was saying that two of her teeth were gone. *CRINGE*

After the zoo we went to eat Japanese food and I had sushi. I gained four pounds today, hahahaha!! Hopefully the 2 1/2 hours of walking around the zoo with a bag full of water bottles and sleeping will bam that down to at least 131 or something so I don't have to feel like such a porker after just reaching a nice goal. But even with that weight gain, here is my picture as promised.


If you're wondering why I took my own picture in the bathroom and why I'm not looking up, it's cause I tried to get Baby Girl to take my picture but she's too short so all the pictures ended up looking like they were taken by.. well, a 3 year old. The front view picture turned out too blurry and I'm too lazy to go take another one already. The ones where I'm looking up look kinda creepy cause I'm looking above the camera angle. I don't know how to explain it, but trust me, it looks scary.

So anyway, this is me exactly three months after joining Weight Watchers. I canceled yesterday and left them a nice feedback message. Hopefully I'll be able to reach my goal on my own and maintain successfully from there!

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!