Ebi Curry Noodle (186)

I heard a really cute joke last week on Leahey and Leahey Live that I forgot to tell.

What did the rice say to the spam?





Let's get nori.

LOL!! OMG, I think that joke is so cute. I guess you'd have to either be from Hawaii or love spam musubis to get it, but I find it hilarious!

My weekend was okay, nothing much happened, but it wasn't completely boring either. I got a good amount of moat carps turned in (92!) which put me at around 3,400 for my Lu Shang's Fishing Rod in game. Girl's Day is coming up soon and so I have to think about what to do for that bento. I think a pretty bento for Baby Girl is in order! I'll definitely have to do the pink sakura tamago again!


I bought a new kind of salad I from Costco on Saturday which was a shrimp salad with tomatoes in it. All it really has is shrimp with celery and mayo so it didn't have much taste so I ate a lot of it with cocktail sauce. It was a $13 salad and contained massive amounts of shrimp. I ate this for two days straight and then used some for this Ebi Curry Noodle pack that I had forgotten I still had in the freezer. I washed the mayo off to fry it for this noodle dish though. I fried some asparagus so that I have more veggies and don't waste the pack that I bought.


This is the box I used today. It was a gift to Baby Girl from her teacher at school. Which reminds me, still no Hello Kitty Online access!! I got some e-mail saying I have to make a video explaining why I should get into beta. I made one, then went back to check the tutorial on how to add tags, and the tutorial opened in the tab I created the video in, erasing it. MAN I was pissed!! I still haven't made another one yet...


I've got a big round Pooh tupperware full of fruit to go with today's lunch. Baby Girl nagged her way into me buying a tub of tropical fruit, so I've got watermelon, cantaloupe, and pineapple in here to help us not waste it all. I also bought strawberries and raspberries again. I still have like 10 kiwis left to eat too, gah!! And danjou pears... and apples... and oranges... and blueberries... When it rains it pours!

I went to cut my hair on Saturday and was pretty bored so decided to get some highlights. I've never colored my hair before and am pretty happy with the way it looks. Mebbe next time I'll dye my hair dark red or something. Next week marks 6 weeks with my piercings, so I can go out and buy earrings this week!! :D

My bridesmaid dress came in and it's a size 12... I have to exchange it for 6 or 8. How fun is that?!? :D A year ago I'd have fit in that dress!!

Beef Cutlet (180)

It's been miraculously sunny on Oahu for the past, I dunno, five days or so? It was getting to the point where on a day of sun you go out of the house and say, "Wait wait wait, what? IT'S NOT RAINING!?!" But then as soon as I'd go to fiscal or something, I'm about to go out the door when I hear roaring rain outside.

Someone mentioned an ice storm yesterday and I started joking that my brain couldn't process such a term. Ice is in your water or soda! Ice is what you eat when you go to Baldwin's or Waiola Shave Ice! It doesn't STORM ice!

Anyway, point is, the seasons we have in Hawaii are basically "Sunny" and "Rainy", but if I had to break it down into four pidgin seasons, I'd say:

Winter = "Stay Sum Cold Outside"
Spring = "Get Choke Rain"
Summer = "Frickin' Hot"
Fall = "I No Can Stop Sweating"


Today I have this three bowl contraption that I bought at Price Busters. I've used a green one before for my salad kit once long ago and have had this pink one sitting around in a cabinet for quite some time since. I finally busted it out to carry some soup to work. I have here some Chicken Long Rice, made by my MIL.


In the main dish bowl I have some green salad with grape tomatoes, which I dripped with 4 drops of Caesar Italian Lite. Then I have beef cutlet, rice, and corn. In the Hello Kitty bowl I put some katsu sauce.


In my last bowl I have fruits. I cut two kiwis, half an orange, blueberries, and raspberries. Adding the oranges really brought the other three fruit colors together. I was really happy with how it turned out. To cut the orange I sliced it in half, then made half moon slices, then cut those in half to make little triangles.

As most people know, tomorrow is Valentine's Day. I just got back into posting my lunches at LiveJournal and of course, the bento challenge for this week is a V-Day theme, so I have to think today how I want to do my entry tomorrow! My eggs expire tomorrow, so maybe I can implement tamagoyaki somehow...

Ham, Avocado, & Egg Salad Sandwich (122)

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but last weekend I attempted to use my Dreamland egg gadget. It did not end well. In true Pikko Egg Curse fashion, I completely mucked it up. I didn't take any photos because they were that horrible. The yolks were like edible sponges, a texture I did not even know yolks could attain. The problem lay in that I didn't know how to use the device properly and therefore seriously messed things up from the start. It's hard when you can't read the directions ya know!! I learned a lot though and hopefully I can do it right on my next round.


In this picture are the egg "space maker" attachments. It comes with this really fun yolk separator thing and you pour the egg whites into the cylinder then put one of these attachments into there to "make space" in the egg whites. At the bottom of the cylinders, there is a ring for the bottom and a flat coin shaped circle to cover the bottom.

My first mistake was that I was supposed to rub this thing down all over with oil but thinking it was the same thing, I sprayed the whole thing with Pam. Bad idea, but I didn't know this. You're supposed to fill up the cylinder enough so that the egg reaches the top (more on why later) but I had no idea so I just put one egg white inside and put the space makers in. That was my second mistake.

Once I put the whole contraption into the pot of water I knew something was wrong. The flat circles on the bottom had floated out and the space makers were bobbing around. This meant my precious egg whites were floundering around uncooked in the water!! I picked it up immediately and after a while, noticed little slots that allowed you to lock the space makers in place thus keeping the flat circles in place at the bottom and preventing water from coming in. Too clueless to start over and too cheap to waste 4 eggs, I proceeded with the boiling, water invasion and all.

24 minutes later I removed the Dreamland from the pot and opened the thing up to find that there was nowhere near enough egg whites in each cylinder, causing the egg cylinder to be only about 3/4 way up. And in addition to that, my egg cylinders had bubbly holes in them, probably from the water. They didn't come off very well from the space makers, but I still managed to get them out. Now I had to fill in the yolks. I poured them in to the top of the egg cylinder and put the Dreamland back on the stove. I did not know that the space makers actually detached from the locking mechanism, so I did not put the locking mechanism back on. So eventually my 3/4 cylinder size eggs with yolks in them began to rise up like buoys at sea because they weren't locked down. And even if I did lock them down, then still floated up because they weren't tall enough to hold down the flat circle at the bottom. This let even more water in.

So as a result, I had eggs basically boiling directly in water. I couldn't even really cut them. You could still see the shape of the yolk so the concept of it worked fine and Baby Girl insisted they tasted fine. I let her eat some until I tasted one myself, then I just dumped the rest. Yech!! Now I just need to lick my wounds, apply what I learned, and try again.

Although I did horribly with eggs on Saturday, I am still able to boil eggs without looking like a complete noob. This morning I made myself a ham, avocado, and egg salad sandwich for lunch.


It didn't quite fit into the lunch box I picked so I had to trim the crusts off the sides. I've used Roman Meal Honey Oat bread, 2 boiled eggs, 1 Tb mayo, 1/4 avocado, a nice thick piece of ham steak, and some lettuce. I also added salt, pepper, and thinly sliced celery to the egg salad. I used my Banana Putifresh sandwich box, which I have available for $2.99 in my store. I've used these sandwich boxes twice so far and if you refrigerate the box it really doesn't do much for toasted sandwiches. Since it didn't work out so well the last two times, I didn't do anything to the bread this time. I would just leave it out, but its got egg in it and I don't want to get sick. The box:


I think I have 5 of these available. It's pretty small, but fits a nice thick sandwich cut into thirds very well. I ate the trimmed crusts with my breakfast. For fruits I brought some grapes and some fresh papapya. In the little bottle I put some lemon juice, which is what I usually eat papaya with. I don't know if people on the mainland get to eat fresh papaya, but I've eaten the dried stuff and the frozen stuff and boy is it nasty. I suppose its because I don't like overly sweet fruits and that's why I have to eat it with lemon.


I had told the OOTers at Allakhazam that I would try to make a 9000 bento for my 9k post ding, but I ended up falling asleep with the kiddos again so maybe with my 10k ding I'll give it a whirl.

Spaghetti & 20k! (108)

It looks like today I will be hitting the 20k mark, which is really something for me since I've only had this counter up since May, making it 20,000 visits in just over 4 months! Thank you to everyone for reading and I hope you keep coming back!

Yesterday Baby Girl was adamant about eating spaghetti for dinner so we headed to Foodland to do the week's grocery shopping and I picked up a McCormick packet of spaghetti this time instead of the usual ready made sauce jars. I had wanted to try something new but apparently before I do things like this I should be made to go back to elementary school for reading lessons as I cooked it totally wrong. I read "tomato sauce" instead of "tomato paste" and added 3/4 cup too much water. +_+ Pure genius. I figured the kids wouldn't care so I just fed it to them kinda watery and I was right, they ate it all up. Probably because I added the magic ingredient, Kraft cheese. I was told once that this is a Big Island habit and that elsewhere it's considered really weird. Mr. Pikko had to wait an extra hour for the sauce to burn off the extra water. *sigh*


This spaghetti is all Core because I used extra extra lean meat, olive oil, a seasoning packet, tomato sauce, and whole wheat pasta. I have some extra and will likely freeze them tomorrow into cups as Biggie has suggested on her blog. To top the spaghetti I have half a small red bell pepper thinly sliced and then topped with parsley. On the side I have the last remaining butt of garlic bread, which will count as 2 points all by itself.


On my bottom layer I have a small cup full of blueberries. Ever since I started eating them I've felt that they have a very familiar taste and last night I finally realized what it is. They taste just like waiwi (pronounced why-vee), which is a small guava that grows here in Hawaii. The picture on that page shows a red guava, but the ones that are more common on the Big Island are the yellow variety. I loooooooooooove waiwi. My dad knows that if he ever sees a big cluster of green ones that he should pick it for me and send it over. When I first met Mr. Pikko he took me to meet his grandpa and he had a yellow waiwi tree in his backyard. Unfortunately the dumb plant was growing into his water line so he had to chop it down. *sob*

I am a serious fruit fan and the best part about growing up on the Big Island is that we have all kinds of awesome weird fruits to eat including waiwi, guava, rambutan, lychee, starfruit, etc. What I miss the most though is hands down: mountain apple. Ohhh man. My grandma had a bigass tree in her yard and my dad used to climb the tree to pick it riddled with spiders and all kinds of gross crap. Lots of times they had worms in them but when you did get one that was free of stings and ripe... ohhhhh. It's times like this I really miss Hilo. Take a look at this page to see some farmer's market pictures and maybe you'll see what I mean. Hilo may have been a dumpy town to grow up in but it sure does have it's moments.

Ok so back to the bento, haha. I also have green grapes which we bought yesterday. Thankfully, most places seem to be stocking more and more USA produce. YaY! Next to that I have some diet horrors. A brownie cut in half so that it fit into the box on it's side and then half of a sugar cookie. My sister-in-law baked these and brought them over, claiming they didn't taste very good but of course she was lying, they taste like heaven. The cookies are a bit odd as they are spongy, but the best part is they taste exactly like pancakes soaked in maple syrup. I wish I could have fit a whole one in there... On the side I also have a KCCA salad and a white peach.

On the menu for tonight: teriyaki ahi with fried tofu steak! Mmmm..

Fruity Bento

Nothing much to offer today because we're having a luncheon at work. I still had to pack snacks though, so I've taken a picture of my fruit bento. In it there are slices of some Jonagold apples, which I bought at Costco because they were the cheapest ones. They're pretty good, interesting taste and a little tart. There are also peaches and banana flowers. I put the rest of the banana slices and flowers on the mini Eggo waffles for the kids this morning and they went bananas over it, haha!


I know, boring. But I figured it was better than nothing at all! ^_^

Shoyu Chicken Rice

Dinner was very yummy last night and I got to peek at the recipe card my mother-in-law had out on the counter. It was such a simple recipe yet such a nice comfort food! Unfortunately my limited brain power has already forgotten the measurement of one ingredient so that recipe will need to wait until I've finally gotten around to building up adventuresinbentomaking.com with a recipe section.

While I was packing up lunch I got a little bored with the regular kind of arrangement, so I decided to save me some hassle of keeping the food all separate and just mush it all together like a toddler meal. I chopped up the chicken then squished it all together with the rice and corn then added some furikake and voila! Shoyu chicken rice. This morning I added some garnish to make it prettier. Extreme close-up!


In my botton layer I added some sliced kiwi and mango. I liked Nexa's idea of storing food in the cover too, so I snuck some Honey Nut Cheerios into a baggie and tucked them under the lid.

Yesterday Mr. Pikko sent me a "kinda cool" link as he called it. I took the test, putting in what info I knew that was optional and filling in all the required stuff. The result?

Your healthy weight range is 99-121 lbs.

You are overweight.

You can suck my ass, Joanne Larsen. Anyway... this guilt tripped me into going back to the Core diet. I am 7 pounds away from being healthy and I think my WW vacation has gone on long enough. *sigh* Today's lunch is 1 point because of the rice. YaY! This morning I also returned to my Core breakfast of eggs with sauteed bell peppers and onions. Usually I use egg beaters but today I actually read the container and it said to use it "within 7 days of opening". The rest of my cartons were frozen, so I had to use regular eggs. Boy did I royally mess that up. I don't know what it is about me, but I just cannot seem to cook eggs nicely. They always end up brown or black or crunchy.

Yes, I said crunchy.

Long story short, they came out black and gross but I ate it anyway. I remember once a couple years ago I cooked some scrambled eggs for my daughter at my grandma's house and she looked into the pan while I wasn't there and commented to my mother that I make "interesting eggs". She is such a kind woman. I really need a "Frying Eggs for Dummies" book.

Meat Jun & BBQ Chicken

This morning I had the latest newsletter from J-list in my Inbox and I was so devastated to read that they've got a booth at AX! *sob* To think I could have been bento shopping while covering an FFXI event at the same time! *cry cry*

Ok I got all my emo out, on to the bento for today!

We ate takeout from Kim Chee 7 last night and I took a piece of Mr. Pikko's extremely oily but oh-so-good meat jun for my lunch. Kim Chee serves good everything. Their chicken is juicy and tasty, the meat jun is soft and well marinated, they have KILLER sauces, the shrimp tempura is HUGE and onolicious, and their soup and veggies are really good. My only "complaint" is that their cabbage and bean sprouts namul are nowhere near as good as Gina's. I've eaten at Kim Chee 2 in Kaimuki and 7 at Westridge. I have no clue where Kim Chees 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are! Haha!


This is my other new box, a 2-tier piggie bento box! (pic below) It's got a food divider, which I love. None of my other boxes have had them and I'm so giddy about it! This layer has my veggies tucked snugly into one side and that includes: cabbage, bean sprouts, daikon kim chee, seaweed, and kim chee. On the other side is more half brown half white rice with sliced BBQ chicken and the piece of meat jun. There is meat jun sauce in the little thermos.


The lower layer contains my fruits which are cherries, kiwi, and some peeled lychee. If you've never had lychee before ohhh, it's good stuff. The only problem is the peeling! Augh I hate it!! My dad will just bite into the shell and eat it like that but I find that so gross cause the shell is so bitter, yech!! But even though I like lychee a lot, I'll take rambutan over lychee any day! This paragraph needs moar !!


Here is the box all closed up and ready to go. Aren't the lil piggies so cute? I still can't believe I won this for one $5, what a steal!

I've kinda ditched my 5 points per day diet for the last few days and switched to a higher point "maintenance" allowance. I figure one week of flatlining isn't going to make me balloon up. My class reunion is this Sunday, thank goodness I've slimmed down so much. It would have so sucked to be fat at the luncheon. D:

Pointless Bento

I got on the scale this morning and I'd gained a pound and a half, so apparently my 3 day dessert binge this past weekend has finally caught up with me. Plus we ate sushi last night and though I didn't eat much, I ate past being satisfied then had Jamba Juice afterwards. *sheepish face* So today, I have an all Core bento, which I decided needed a nice joke to spruce it up. It's point-less. GET IT? Ahahaha! No? Well, fine then. I thought it was punny.


One side has my kim chee crab and the avocado on top. The other side has some cucumber pickles that I made this morning. I finally bought this book I'd been wanting on Amazon called Easy Japanese Pickling in 5 Minutes to One Day and though this is only the first recipe I've tried and I haven't yet eaten the pickles, the book itself looks pretty awesome. It's got lots of nifty pictures and easy instructions. The recipes themselves have very few ingredients. The one I chose today is called "Tosa Style Cucumber Pickles" and it took me less than five minutes to prepare. They're to soak for 20 minutes but I only had enough time to let them soak for 15. I figured they'd be sitting in my bento for a bit anyway so it didn't matter. It's basically a sliced cucumber with shaved bonito and soy sauce. We'll see how it tastes.


My fruit layer consists of yellow peach and a few strawberries. These are the good strawberries I have. To me there are two different varieties of strawberries and I can always tell which ones are the ones I like. At Costco I bought a big box of the yuckier ones (they look fat and the seeds stick out) to make fruit leather cause I bought a food dehydrator to preserve the Costco fruits we can't manage to eat in time. It's pretty awesome and the kids love it even though there's no sugar added.


Instead of showing a boring picture of what is just lettuce in my top layer, here is a picture of my bento all packed up in my Doggie Woogie container. Though this is one of my most costly bento boxes, I've found that it was well worth it. I've used it on many occasions and it's the perfect size for taking a day's worth of food to work instead of packing 3 different bento boxes.

Zippy's Chili

We ate Zippy's Chili last night, which is without a doubt the best chili to be found in Hawaii. If you are reading this from the mainland and you know what I'm talking about, are ya homesick yet? Hehe! I used to eat only the beanless chili but after finding out that chili with beans is less points than without, I decided to give bean chili a shot again and found out that it's pretty good. There was a lot leftover, so I took some for today's lunch. It doesn't look all that appealing in a bento, but hey, it really makes up for it in taste.

I dug out my very very first "bento" container from years and years ago. It's a really old fashioned stainless steel Zebra 3-tier food carrier which I'm sure Hawaii old-timers would recognize right away. I bought it forever ago at some little store at the Hilo Shopping Center. The thing had really shrunk in my mind because when I finally did dig it out I was like, "WTF! It's so huge!" Probably because it's meant to carry food for more than one person. But anyway...


I stuck my Doggie Woogie divider in there to keep the chili separate then added in a little tiny container of ahi shoyu poke and another tiny one of dried daikon kim chee. I bought the kim chee from Kim Chee when we ate there last weekend. They sold me a pretty big tub for $2.00, which is actually cheaper than the smaller tub of cucumber kim chee I buy. It's really yummy. It looks wet but is called dried daikon kim chee because it's, well, dried and then soaked in sauces and such.


No surprise here, yet another kim chee crab and avocado salad! Hehe.. For the last layer I packed a chopped fuji apple and a sliced white peach. I ate like 4 of these peaches on Sunday because eating fruit from Costco is a race against time. You stand in the warehouse looking at the box of really yummy looking fruit and you think to yourself, I can eat it before it rots... I think. And then you get home with 3 types of fruits and you're like CRAP I can't even fit it in my fridge! I'll have to eat what's left outside! *sob* And then the next time you go to Costco you see a new batch of berries and you're like, ooooo. A vicious cycle I tell ya.


I know what you're thinking: Oink! Oink! The reason I've packed so much food is because this whole week we've been getting in to work by 7:45 am so as to prepare Baby Girl for a preschool routine. This means that I'm waking up and eating breakfast two hours earlier than before so now I'm hungry by 10 or so. I'll eat the salad around 10ish, the chili at around 1, and snack on the fruits around 3 or 4. If I don't pack enough to last me all day I end up eating more at dinner, which is what I want to avoid. We ate hot dogs with the chili last night and I almost passed out after seeing the nutritional info so I just ate half of one. I'm not sure how many points the chili is, but the Wendy's chili isn't too bad, so going on that I'm still on track for the week. And hey, I'm back down to 133.5! :D

Turkey Sandwiches

I was able to make my lightbox last night and it didn't come out so good. So much for "couldn't be easier to use"! I should have known that something labeled so easy was going to have the fine print "except for short dorky Asian girls named Crystal" where I wouldn't see it. Good thing it only cost me like a dollar to make it! It's not completely sucky though, as I was able to use it for my pictures this morning. I do like the seamless white background so that I don't have to wrestle with my dirty white kitchen towels anymore. I blame me not having good lights. These photos were taken after I removed the top side tracing paper and then placed the lightbox under the stove lights.

I've really missed bread and since I had a 2 point lunch and an all Core dinner yesterday (steak, salad, onions, zucchini) it seemed ok to finally eat some. Lunch today consists of star shaped turkey sandwiches made with Roman Meal Honey Oat Wheat bread, lettuce, 96% FF turkey, bell pepper, and Laughing Cow Light Swiss used instead of mayonnaise.


The swiss is a pretty soft cheese, so I just mushed it up a little bit and then it spread onto the bread with no problems. I used bell pepper because it's a brighter red and tomatoes were going to be too messy. Filled in the spaces with some julienned baby carrots and grape tomatoes. I bought a small box of the grape tomatoes at Foodland. They were pretty expensive at $3.99 for the box, but at least I can take comfort in the fact that I won't be letting 100+ tomatoes rot in my fridge. Plus, these particular grape tomatoes are super sweet!


My sister-in-law gave us a pack of pre-cut fruits including honeydew melon, watermelon, cantaloupe, and pineapple so I sliced them up and put them into my fruit layer then added two strawberry flowers. Now that I look at the picture I'm sad that I didn't notice that my strawberry flowers don't have their seeds aligned. :(


I may be tired of lomi salmon, but I'm still not tired of Kim Chee Crab & Avocado Salad!! This stuff really is SO good and so I couldn't resist packing another one today. Mr. Pikko keeps raiding the tub of crab and saying "ohhh so good!" so I have to use it if I want to eat any! ^_^

Bento challenge this week is Sci Fi TV and though I'm dying to do some kind of Battlestar Galactica bento, I have no fracking clue what to make...

Korean BBQ Chicken

As you may have noticed to the right, I signed up for the Best Food Blog at the Blogger's Choice Awards. At first I thought it'd be incredibly lame of me to sign myself up but then Mr. Pikko said he didn't see anything wrong if others did it. I don't expect to win at all, but I like little contests like that! ^_^

We ate at Kim Chee 7 last night and though I ordered a small portion BBQ chicken, they gave me a full size so even with sharing with the two kidlets we still had leftovers. Today there's a softball tournament we're watching and so I packed up a bento for Buddy to eat and we planned to pick up something for Baby Girl. I also packed a salad for myself, but ended up eating this at home during an intermission.

On the left side there's chopped up BBQ chicken (Kim Chee has the best chicken on Oahu imo, though Gina's at Market City has the best vegetables hands down), bean sprouts namul, and kim chee. On the right is rice with Seto Fumi furikake. In addition to the food I packed fruits:


This has sliced strawberries and pitted cherries. It looks like a lot of food for an 18 month old boy, but he ate every bit down to the last tiny piece of strawberry. My salad: (click it to enlarge)


This consists of thinly sliced romaine lettuce topped with 1/4th of an avocado and some kim chee crab. The kim chee crab from Foodland is tastes a LOT better than the one at Don Quijote. It's very flavorful and really spicy so that I don't need any dressing. Lettuce and crab and avocado mixed together is so yummy!!

We're going to another game at 6, so I may pack up bentos yet again! In another type of adventure, my tomato garden is coming along nicely. Baby girl is growing beans and watermelon and her plants look pretty cool too. Problem is we've got bugs! If someone knows what is eating our poor plants and what we can do to combat them, please let me know. We have also planted the Beekeeper Mix that came with a Tori Amos album we bought years ago. It's full of various wildflowers and so far 5 have sprouted. Here are my tomato plants, I hope to have real Pikko-grown tomatoes to put into my bentos in a couple of months! :D


I have like 20 of these, so hopefully that gives me good odds on keeping at least a couple alive in time for them to give fruit!

Rib eye Stir fry

As I mentioned yesterday, we ate at Outback on Sunday night and I got the very tasty rib eye steak but only ate half of it. I'd ordered it with broccoli and so took all of that home for today's leftovers bento! I sliced some red bell pepper for additional color and stir fried it all with a bit of Pam. I didn't cook it long as I wanted to preserve the "medium rare" state of the meat. EXTREME CLOSE-UP! Whoaaaa!


If I've learned anything from making bento it's that with a Costco 5 minutes away I need two fridges. I picked up blackberries, strawberries, and cherries. The cherries were so expensive I'm surprised they didn't have someone sitting next to the little suckers offering financing. The good news is everytime I bite into one I'm glad I dished out 13 dollars for a pack. Ok, maybe not glad, but it tastes at least moderately worth it.


I wanted to take watermelon, mango, and lomi salmon today too, but snapped out if it when I was trying to find a third bento box to take with me. Making up for what I ate yesterday will include extra stairclimbing at work this week.

Elmo snack bento

Years ago when I used to do decos (mail art, viewable at Swapsonian Gallery link to the right) I always favored the color themed decos. That particular fancy of mine has carried right over into bentomaking and so since the bentochallenge theme is Red I needed a good excuse for making another one. Kids make great excuses for bentos and as luck would have it, I've got two on hand.

I'd been brainstorming about this bento for a few days and Ms. Nexasaurus was kind enough to supply me with the wonderful idea of giving Elmo some balloons. This turned out great, so give yourself another great big hug Nexa! Here's the lil' guy:


His face is made of bell pepper, as are the balloons. I put the back side facing out for his face for texture and the shiny side out for the balloons for... shinyness. I did this with my Exacto knife I use for scrapping (washed and dried). That sucker may give me headaches cutting cardstock, but it's no slouch when cutting veggies! I cut up a mini Babybel for his eyes and punched out some dots for his eyeballs. I cut the mouth and balloon strings with a scissors and used a knife for his nose, which is carrot.

It's funny how things work out. His nose was a teeny bit too big and that meant part of it was the clearer carrot center. This really bothered me, but I decided carrot was a better looking orange than Kraft cheese. In the picture, the carrot center makes the nose look textured and lumpy, kinda like Elmo's nose! Anyway, here is the whole bento:


The other side contains raspberries, sliced watermelon, and a Japanese strawberry milk candy. I put in a food pick to add more red too. Before I did this I had seriously contemplated using plain toothpicks with little printed out flags with Dorothy (Elmo's goldfish pet) on them. A couple minutes into Googling Dorothy images I snapped out of my crazy spell and fished out a regular pick. "Fished out", haha!

Obviously this isn't much of a bento food-wise. After I placed Elmo I decided it was just too small for fitting enough red and meat too, so I decided a snack bento would be the best way to go. We're going to a softball game tomorrow, so it seems as if I'll have the opportunity to scare some family members.

Next week I'm going back to regular "nicely arranged" bentos. This is too much stress!

Kim chee fried rice

I lost 2.2 lbs this week even though I ate like 4 lbs of food at yesterday's buffet. Very bad... I did my best, avoiding the battered fish and the chow mein but I utterly failed when it came to the crab salad. It was extremely win and I ended up eating two servings. I also ate a piece of cake and a slice of custard pie.

Anyway, I had no lunch, so after watching the Survivor finale I decided to make some kim chee fried rice using the immense bag of brown rice I bought at Costco. When hubby saw I bought this he flipped out because not two months ago we gave the bag of brown rice that he had bought from Costco to his parents. When I told him to go buy rice he came back with brown and I screeched about how I hated brown rice. But I'd seen someone's picture of brown fried rice and I thought, hey, I think I could live with eating that instead of straight up brown rice.

I had no idea what I was doing or if I even liked kim chee fried rice, but I started the rice and after about 20 minutes decided to start cooking the veggies so that when the brown rice was done I could just toss it in and finally go to sleep. It was shortly after 12 am now. Starting with the half head cabbage I had leftover from my tsukemono, I fried that in olive oil then added pepper and some chicken bullion. Next I added onions, onion powder, kim chee, leftover peas, Costco chicken (breast meat, no skin), and some of my pre-chopped bell peppers for color. As previously mentioned, I had no idea what I was doing and was actually just tossing anything I thought might taste good from the fridge. It was 1:15 am by the time I was done with this and the stupid rice cooker wasn't even steaming yet. I couldn't tell if it was even cooking and I was dying to open it up to see!! Hubby was just laughing at my dilemma cause he knew how badly I wanted to open the cooker but how bad it would be to do so mid-cooking, should it actually BE cooking.

Giving up at last, I went to take a shower. When I came back out I pressed my ear to the cooker and could finally hear bubbling inside. I watched an SVU. I put the veggies away. When I was just about to go to bed at 2:15 am, THE FOOGIN' RICE COOKER FINALLY BEEPS. So lesson learned here is: when cooking brown rice, anticipate it taking like 2 hours to do so. *mutter*

Anyway, I had to cook it this morning and I added some soy sauce as well. I was tempted to add ketchup too but figured dousing it in 4 condiments was probably making the brown rice feel pitiful enough. Since I hadn't used it yet, I packed today's lunch in my new 3-tier Doggie Woogie bento box from Morning Glory. This box was pretty expensive at $13 so that's the last big one I buy for quite some time. The fried rice:


I really don't like how my pictures turn out by the sunlight, so I think I'll stick to the kitchen. The fried rice doesn't really look that colorless and drab. My veggies layer has tsukemono, takuan, grape tomatoes, tofu and carrot sticks. I used one of my new carrot bottles! :)


Fruit layer has mango, blackberries, strawberries, and some of this new melon I saw at Costco called a Galia melon. It's not as good as I was hoping, but they made up for it by having Tuscan melons in stock the last time I went. Those are way sweeter than cantalopes btw!


Though this meal looks like it contains a lot of points cause of the rice, Weight Watchers Core actually lists brown rice as a Core food. This is why I chose to make brown fried rice of course. :) This entire lunch is happily all core. Which is good because I forgot to eat breakfast and ended up eating at Jack in the Box for breakfast. +_+ Their menu is repulsive! I ended up getting the grilled chicken sourdough with no cheese and no mayo, then I took out the bacon and only ate one of the slices of bread. The chicken fillet was really juicy and the lettuce and tomato they put on were very fresh and thick, which was nice. It was the best I could do, since I wasn't strong enough to just go without breakfast! You should have seen the monster cane spider I saw at the drive-thru though. *shudder*

My throat is almost all better, so it really must have been that I just burned my throat and not something more serious. Considering the pain and discomfort I went through this past week, you can bet I won't be overheating my tea water again!!

Tonkatsu

Hubby was home sick yesterday, so I had the car to myself. I had to stop at Price Busters to buy some gift bags for the goodie bags we're giving out for Children's Day and of course me being the total cheap ass shopper, I cannot enter a bargain store like Price Busters without inspecting every possibly good aisle for things I didn't know I needed, but suddenly wanted. In the kitchen section there were quite a few great finds!!

First, I saw the pink Hello Kitty box that I was using from the start of this bento blog for a mere $1.69! I ended up buying 4 things which included two Hello Kitty two-tier boxes in green and blue for $1.99 each. I also found these generic looking stackable containers with a neat handle! A great deal at $1.69 each. There were a lot of colors: white, yellow, blue, green, and pink. I got the green and pink. The last one I got was a set of little yellow cap containers, 6 for $1.49. When I have time, I'll make up a page showing the different boxes I have.

Dinner last night was one of my favorites, tonkatsu! (pork cutlet) I took only a small portion for lunch so that I could take some rice and packed it into the smaller container so that I could use the bigger top box for my fruits. The really mental part is that after I took the picture, I put the rice back into the rice cooker, lol. I want my rice to be nice and steamy in the morning so that it's got that lukewarm sweaty taste at lunch. All I have to do is remember that I took it out. Would be pretty hilarious if I opened my lunch to find a big empty half cause I was too gg to recall removing it.


For the fruits I did mango, kiwi, and some strawberries I bought yesterday. I have really bad luck buying strawberries, usually getting the nice looking ones that have no taste or the big ones that taste like they juice them to get strawberry lemonade. But these seemed to have a lot of potential, being firm and having the right "look" to them. I didn't try any because it was almost 11 and I have what I call my "gremlin time", meaning I can't eat anything after 10 pm. I finally got to use some of the cute food dividers I bought at Marukai. Stuck in a couple picks to use to eat with too. I packed some tsukemono and tonkatsu sauce in my new little yellow boxes. I don't like tonkatsu sauce so I make my own by mixing soy sauce and ketchup. Hubby hates it, but I could eat the sauce by itself, lol.


I'm so thrilled to finally have a two tier box. I keep wanting to buy the red rabbit and blue dragonfly box I see on eBay, but after finding out that the sellers probably bought those things for $1.99 I just can't bring myself to do it. And to think I almost bought the rabbit one from Jlist for $16.00!!!

Meat loaf garden

MIL made some really yummy meat loaf last night but I found myself thinking for more than 20 minutes on how the heck I was going to make meat loaf look pretty in a bento. Much to my delight, she had a container that looked just like a bento box, so I happily borrowed it for lunch. After much thought, I settled upon making little foil dividers under the food and separated the rice, corn, and meat into neat little thirds. It still looked rather bland and colorless though, so I kept thinking more on the way home and nothing came to me until I got home and looked at it again. I needed to add more color, so the obvious choices in the fridge were green beans, edamame, peppers, or carrot flowers that I'd simmered last week.

In the end, I chopped some french green beans to look like grass, stems, and leaves and added the carrot flowers on top. It looked really cute and hubby once again proclaimed my insanity, then mentioned that I should have laid it out so that the meat loaf was the dirt, the rice was in the middle, and the corn was in the corner as a little sun. It was a great idea, but unfortunately I wasn't about to take it all apart and rearrange it for another 15 minutes. So cute that he is coming up with suggestions for me though. ^_^

Since OOT was talking about fruit salad yesterday and I didn't use the usual Hello Kitty bento box for food, I decided to make a larger fruit bowl for today. Chopped up and entire Fuji apple, a mango (which baby girl ate almost half of), a kiwi, and blackberries. Added a cheese wedge and done!

This comes out to around I dunno, a 4 point meal with the cheese? I was a little lax with the meat loaf because I took a really small slice and there really weren't that many un-Core ingredients in it. Later this week I'm being taken out to lunch for Administrative Professionals Day, so I'll be missing a pretty lunch. Hopefully I will have some leftover to be creative with!

Roast Pork Sushi w/ pickles

Yesterday's lunch was a success! I ran into a co-worker on the way to the microwave and after he gave me some paperwork, he came back to ask if I'd bought my lunch or made it, because it looked very good. Aww, make my day! The Freska mango, though yellow skinned, was frakin' green!! I should have taken a pic of my face eating it, I'm sure it was caved in. I ended up eating the cocktail tomato and it tasted better than the first two I'd eaten. Maybe ignoring them in the fridge for a week sweetens them up...

We took a trip to Costco tonight since we needed gas and after going in for just sweet bread and milk, I filled up the wagon with a bunch of healthy things I thought would look nice such as Manoa green leaf lettuce ($3.99 for three huge heads), a box of grape tomatoes ($5.79), Laughing Cow Light Swiss Cheese ($7.69) because I'm not eating my dairy every day, English cucumbers (3 for $4.49), a whole pack of 6 mangoes that look like yesterday's Freska mango ($5.49), a huge bag of French green beans ($5.49), and blackberries ($5.99, they were on sale! Woo!). So... now I have an assload of tiny sweet tomatoes which I will no doubt only eat half of, and lots of other veggies and fruits.

MIL's dinner tonight was pot roasted pork shoulder and the pot looked really oily, so I had to pick out every little piece of fat and as I was eating tried to think of a good way to incorporate this into today's lunch without being excessive. Since Nexa mentioned sushi yesterday, I thought I'd give that a try for once.

I've never made sushi before and I have never eaten pork sushi before. Hopefully, there's not some super secret good reason why you don't see pork sushi. Regarding taste, I figure if I would have eaten dinner with rice (I skipped the rice so I could eat it for lunch), the pork, and won bok all together anyway, then what is the difference if it's rolled up in nori?? Anyway, after a small snafu with unnecessarily cutting the nori sheet in half, I managed to make my first ever sushi roll! It cut pretty easily and I started on the second. Sadly, I ended up with a little extra rice and instead of leaving it out like I should have, I shoveled it all on and ended up with two different sized sushi rolls. Darn it!!

And then to add to my un-neatness so far, my daughter comes into the kitchen asking what I'm doing. When she hears I'm making sushi of course she wants one. I give her one of the skinny ones. She doesn't eat it after the first two bites of course. Oh well, no biggie. I filled up the space with grape tomatoes. Added in some cucumber salad I saw on another blog along with kim chee, chopped sanbaizuke, and chopped takuan. I put all of these in little lettuce lined foil squares to keep the liquid and shape in.


Next I did the fruit bowl, which was very frustrating. I sliced up half of a minneola that was hiding in the fridge and those damned slices just would not arrange nicely. I added more of the Super-Lemon-like "Freska" from yesterday. Stuck in one of the cheese triangles, a strawberry, and some blackberries.



I can sense doom approaching. It's only my second bento and already I'm a bit pissy that I'm still using the same containers over and over. This will end up making my fancy new bento pictures monotonous!! Must go find more cheapie boxes to use!! Maybe only walking into a store with a ten dollar bill and no purse will help me control my spending...

Due to the lack of experience with sushi, the discovery that I had no grater for the cucumber slicing, and the stupid minneola slices this lunch took me a whole freakin' hour to put together. I intend to cut that time at least in half next time!

This meal isn't very Core unfortunately. The rice is half brown, so counts as 2 points. The cheese is 1 point and the pork another point. A 4 point lunch, which means tomorrow I have to make sure I eat a Core dinner or exercise.

Spaghetti with asparagus

Ok so, being pretty much a bento presentation n00b, I had to think for quite some time (the entire time it took me to do the dishes) on how I was going to arrange things. My bento box is on back order from this cool website I found yesterday called Jlist so I was going to just use a tupperware container when I remembered that someone had been nice enough to give my daughter a Hello Kitty bento box at one point. I happily dug it out of the toy chest.

One of the first things I had to do was clean the kitchen. I figure if I'm going to start making cute lunches for myself, I need to have better dish discipline. I washed all the dishes and scrubbed down the stovetop and after about 40 minutes, I was ready to start. Yeah. 40 minutes. I'm not really good about keeping the kitchen clean every day. In fact, some of the dishes I washed included my jello egg molds from Easter. Just one of my disgusting habits that I need to smash and burn this year. Maybe with bento making I will be successful at last. Now if I could just convince the hubby that it's completely fair for him to wash the kid's dishes in addition to his own. (the butthead doesn't do dishes I make)

Anyway, I thought all that cleaning time on what to put into the bento but was having a hard time with presentation planning. It turns out that kind of stuff came with actual doing and planning didn't really help all THAT much. Planning is probably the most useful for food prep. MIL had made spaghetti last night so I ate only some of the serving I brought home with me. (I ate at home so I could eat whole wheat pasta) I mixed up the spaghetti sauce with the steamed veggies she served and the pasta. I made a little foil "cup" for the spaghetti and placed it in the box so that it took up about 2/3 of the space and dropped the spaghetti in. To add more veggies, I fried up some chopped bell peppers that I keep in the fridge for a quick veggie omelette in the mornings, using only cooking spray, pepper, and onion powder. I topped off the bell peppers with some cheese flowers that I made with my new veggie cutters from Shirokiya.

Next I pan fried a few stalks of asparagus with garlic salt and a bit of olive oil. I'd chopped the top section so that they were all about the same length and chopped the lower portions into small bite size sticks so that I could use them to prop up the tips. That turned out pretty well! There was some extra space in the corner above the asparagus tips, so I tucked some sliced sanbaizuke (pickled daikon) in there. There was also some empty space at the bottom of the tip spears, so I added in one of the cocktail tomatoes I bought on sale. I doubt I'll eat it though, they taste like ass. They're all getting wrinkly, so at least this little guy got to be useful. I'll try to oven roast the rest and see if that helps kill the horrid taste any. Next time I'm buying cherry tomatoes! Here is the pic:

Next I needed to make my fruit/veggie snack bento. I'd bought this little round container at Don Quijote a few days ago and that came in really handy this time. I first added some baby carrots (which I found out yesterday, are NOT baby carrots but regular carrots chopped and shaved to look like baby carrots. the nerve!!!) then some slices of mango. I have no idea what kind of mango it was. It was hard and yellow and the sticker said Freska, Produce of Mexico. So either it's a Freska mango or Senor Freska of Mexico found a good tree to steal from last week. (in Hawaii all the swap meet people steal mangoes)

To top off, I added one strawberry sliced in half and sliced kiwi cut to look like sakura blossoms.

Hubby was very impressed, calling me "nuts" and saying "oh my god". It's just a start, but I'm very happy with it. I'm hoping that smaller portioning and the vegetable/grain/protein ratio of bentos combined with a very slow technique of eating will cause me to have very different eating habits than before. I'd read before that savoring each small bite of your food helps you to enjoy your food more and get more out of a smaller meal. Certainly having such a nice lunch would make me want to enjoy it slowly. We shall see if this works for a mom who has previously needed to snarf down her food in order to keep her kids from eating it all.

We shall also see how long it takes for me to burn out of this little fad of mine.

Everything in this lunch is a Weight Watchers Core food. ^_-