Pork Hash (210)

My son has definitely entered his Terrible Twos. The other night I was putting the kids to bed and he wanted to watch more TV. After the usual squabbling back and forth, I finally just pushed him into his room and shut the door behind us. I tried reading to Baby Girl but he was screaming his head off and she said it was too loud to hear. He was holding a little toy Thomas train in his hand and when he finally calmed down he was in grumpy mode. He finally gets my attention with his glare and then proceeds to very flagrantly lick the wheels of Thomas.

Next thing I know, he is steamrolling Thomas up and down Baby Girl's blanket, which of course turns into more chaos. Oi. Later, when he's finally in bed, I'm reading him a book and he begins to very carefully roll Thomas the Spit Engine up and down my arm. He'd long dried out, but I knew the evil intent behind that seemingly cutesy toot tooting.

Today for lunch I had pork hash, which Grandma J usually makes in a gigantic wheel of meat and then slices into wedges. This time she made some of the excess into little patties, which makes for great looking bento food!


My sister-in-law had brought home some fancy looking rice from a client, so I took some of that instead of the plain white rice. It turned out to be sushi rice with cut up cucumbers, tuna, and pickled ginger. I sliced 1 patty in half and layered it together with the last half that I had taken in addition to the whole patty. On top I layered baby carrots and edamame. There was some extra space so I added two tomatoes and finished the whole thing off with a little thing of parsley.

Happy Boy's Day!

I am finally back at work today. That "cold from hell" turned out to be the flu. I was out for a whole week and it really sucked. My diet consisted of soup, McDonald's, soup, rice, tofu, cucumbers, and soup. We were finally better on Saturday and SO ready for real taste in our mouths that we had to go to Panda's and get orange chicken to put some zing back in our taste buds. Last night I had Zippy's chili as that was another tasty yum to help bring back the feeling to my mouth again.


I was too busy with meetings all day to post this, but I had furikake wasabi salmon. Grandma J had given this to us earlier in the week but I just didn't have the appetite to eat it. I added in some mixed tomatoes and put French dressing into the little Hello Kitty container.

Friday Mr. Pikko went to work and actually brought me home Gina's Korean Miso Soup, which I had been craving but couldn't have due to them closing down their Waipahu location. *sob* I felt so gross and uncivilized after being at home for a week that I actually moved my take-out miso soup and veggies to the nicest dishes I had and ate them off that, just to feel normal again.

Anyway, hopefully I'm back to normal. I won't have a bento tomorrow as I'm going to a work assembly. It's 5:30 PM, I'd post more, but I want to go home!

Hamburger Fried Rice? (208)

We had hamburger patties last night and this is something I've been finding increasingly hard to arrange nicely without repeating the same old things, so I decided to try making it into a fried rice. I don't recall ever eating a hamburger fried rice, so hopefully it turns out all right.


The first thing I did was heat some olive oil in a little pan. Then I crumbled up the hamburger patty into small pieces and separated the rice as best I could. It was a mixture of white and brown rice. I had some already chopped up bell pepper and added that into the mix. After it had been cooking for a bit, I poured about a tablespoon of Mr. Yoshida's sauce over it. I added the broccoli last, since I hadn't thought about putting it in until I noticed it was rather bland in color.

Since lacquer boxes cannot stand high heat, I lined the box with some lettuce to help protect it. I poured everything in and arranged the pieces as best I could with chopsticks. For snacks I have baby carrots, some of those new Brother's Potato Crisps (freeze dried, ZERO oil, ZERO fat, yahoo!!), salsa, and popcorn.

Shoyu Chicken (207)

My apologies for the technical snafoo yesterday with my picture. I went to look at my Flickr and was like WTF?!? Where is my picture??? *sigh*

Grandma J made shoyu chicken the other night. It was still on the bone so I refrigerated it overnight so that it would be hard and then in the morning was able to pull it off the bone in one nice piece. I wanted it in one piece so that I could slice it nicely. When the meat is warm and soft it tends to flake and looks terrible. I laid the slices on top of some furikake rice and then poured some Mr. Yoshida's sauce onto the chicken since it was looking a little pale from refrigeration.


I added broccoli which I had let sit in some hot water heated up in the microwave in a Pyrex cup. I find this is much easier than boiling water in a pot and it cooks the broccoli just fine. I cut a slice of takuan into little wedges and tucked it into some empty space near the end of the box.

We have this wild tomato plant that is growing from a seed of an old tomato from our potted plants. It's growing under the AC unit and it's CRAZY huge. I wish we were allowed to grow plants in the ground, but we're not. I've been letting it grow just to see how many tomatoes it spits out. One was nicely ripe and we picked that one. I had told Baby Girl two other ones were only dark orange so we'd pick them in the morning for my bento. Then we went out to the yard and the two were gone!!! We think the birds got them. I'm really surprised she didn't blame it on the beavers.

Stuffed Aburaage (192)

I'm a bit disappointed in myself for not doing a Girl's Day bento and for not doing a bento to enter into the FFXI Fan Art contest. I had thought about doing it but kinda just lost track of it and now I wish I'd done one. /wrists

This is bento #192, which means that in a couple of weeks I will have reached the big 200. I'm still thinking of what to do, but have narrowed it down to two ideas. I might end up scrapping both and just making regular food nicely arranged, I dunno.


Today's bento was a little hard to do because it involved a lot of thinking. Grandma J stuffs triangles of aburaage with pork to make this dish and they turn out looking basically like cone sushi but with pork in it instead of rice. It tastes really good, but it's a very awkward piece of food to arrange nicely. I had meant to do this bento last night as I keep telling myself that the reason we're late in the morning is because of my lunches, but I had to think and think and think. I finally settled on slicing it up like a mini meatloaf and that turned out working really well.

I mixed the small amount of rice with some ume furikake and had made it into a round ball, but it didn't fit well so I mashed it around to just sit there as a bunch of rice. I sliced one asparagus spear to arrange. These pieces gave me a lot of trouble! :( I added takuan and pickles to the side and then raspberries in the last section. This box is great because it's split into 3 spaces, which I love. When I was at Shirokiya the other day I wanted to buy a Ms. Bento but they don't sell them anymore and even worse, all their pretty boxes are gone too. :(

Happy Leap Year! (189)

I've watched every single episode of Lost ever since Season 1 and even though fans like me went through some frustrating moments in Season 3, I've never really ever "lost" interest in the show. But that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate just how magnificently awesome Season 4 has been so far. Every episode we've seen this year has the old magic of Lost back from the first two seasons. Actually, I take that back, it's much better. Last night's episode certainly was no exception, ranking up in my top 3 episodes of the entire series. Or maybe I just <3 Desmond. Can you be any sexier, brother?

Yeah, yeah, I'm a sucker for the Scottish accent I guess.

YAHR GONNA DYEH CHAR-LEH!

Anyway, SPOILERS!!!!!!!



Oh god, tears. Yeah, I so cried last night watching that. *sniff*

On to the bento!


Since today is leap year day, I thought I should do a froggy. What cuter frog is there than Kerokerokeroppi?! Plus since my old buddy Jeth commented yesterday that I haven't done a face bento in a while, this fits right in! ^_^

The bento itself is pretty bad, consisting of furikake rice and shoyu chicken hot dog (with edamame on the bottom half). Keroppi's green skin is made out of danjour pear skin. His eyes and shirt are the white fleshy part of the pear. The black outlines are obviously nori. The red stripes on his shirt are the inside flesh of a strawberry, and his cheeks are little clusters of raspberry seeds. The way I made him was to print and cut out a picture of Keroppi, then cut the entire background of him out of nori. Then I cut him into little sections so that I could get all the inner black outlines too. I cut it into eyeballs, face, two hands, two feet, and body.

After I cut out the nori I cut the black part off the papers and then used that to trace cut the fruit. I kinda messed up on the eyes because I tried to trim them down, forgetting that the eyeballs fit right into the face, so I had to do some more trimming on his face to make it look okay.

Sadly, I had forgotten my purse at work yesterday and my camera was in there. :( This picture was taken with Mr. Pikko's new Samsung FlipShot camera. Quality came out pretty good, but I had to do a lot of lighting and color adjustments in Photoshop before it looked like this. Best I could do!

Tomorrow is UFC 82 and I'm not sure where we're going to see it yet, but I'm excited about it! Anderson Silva is a very entertaining fighter and I usually root for him whenever he's not kneeing Rich Franklin's nose into last year. ; ;

Teriyaki Beef (184)

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


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

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

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

BBQ Chicken (177)

Happy Friday, everyone!

Today I have for lunch the Korean BBQ leftovers from Wednesday. I used my red bunny lacquer box because it was a nice, compact size and tall too, so it fit everything in nice and tight.


I put some furikake on the rice to help hide all the brown juices that leaked onto it from the BBQ chicken. I sliced the chicken to make it easier to eat and then put the veggies in on top. It looked really dull, so I sliced up some carrot very thinly and tucked it in to give it more life. A very simple fix and the bento looks more colorful!

I am happy to say that I am the prowd owner of Kokua Festival tickets, which will be featuring... Dave Matthews! Woo! This will be his first ever concert in Hawaii. Should be fun! :D

Gyoza (175)

I don't really have a full fledged bento today as I ran out of time in the morning and decided to buy lunch at the little shop in my building at work. They usually always have spaghetti and pasta sounds like a good thing to eat today. I'll probably microwave it though, as I like to have my food on the verge of singing the skin off my mouth.

I made 3 pork gyozas with furikake rice for a little "filler" bento today. I desperately need to go to the market as I have basically no fruits and just carrots and bell peppers for veggies. I need lettuce (I'd have put some under the gyoza), parsley, broccoli, berries, and maybe some shrimp.

Usually what I do for the lettuce is buy romaine lettuce. The inner, lighter colored leaves taste better, so I use those for salad. The more bitter outer leaves I keep to line my bentos. This works out really well as I don't like to eat them, but I don't waste them either! They make great liners for bento boxes and add so much flair to a lunch. :)

The Mog House went well yesterday, especially since it was Superbowl Sunday! I have to admit, I was really disappointed in the commercials. Other than the E-Trade baby ones, I didn't really like any of the others. Some made me laugh, but they were only marginally funny imo. I didn't really care who won since I don't follow pro football anymore, but I'm sure once Colt is drafted, I'll have more interest then. :D

Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon (174)

Last night was the season premiere of LOST and I have to admit that I was very happy with what I saw. Last season was such a drag to watch and the only redemption in the whole year was the finale with the flashforwards. Without spoiling anything, the premiere continued on this flashforward trend and with that, has brought life back into the series. And boy did it need it. Manual labor cracking rocks? Locked in cages and tricked into having sexy time on camera for your doctor crush to see? It really did sound like some silly fantasy a girl has as a teen. Hot doctor/hot bad boy love triangle on a remote island. Oh yeah, baby, who didn't wish for something like that when they were 13? I sure as hell did.

Okay now that I've got my schoolgirl fantasy confessions out of the way, we can move on to my lunch.

Last night Grandma J made Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon, a recipe which I actually remembered to ask her for this time! Woohoo! And even better, I have a picture of her to share with everyone. The majority of my bentos contain the food she so lovingly cooks for three families, so I think some credit is due. She protested the picture, but Mr. Pikko insists that under the surface she likes it. So if she meets us with a screech this afternoon, I'm so blaming it on him.

I've also decided to start referring to her as "Grandma J" because when I named the pic of her "MIL", Mr. Pikko's brain did some flipflops because it's too close to "MILF". Anyway, this is her! She's holding up a cookbook on the page with the recipe for the salmon, which follows:

Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon

1. Drizzle salmon with Mr. Yoshida's teriyaki sauce. (or other teriyaki sauce)
2. Spread mayo on top of salmon. If desired, mix some wasabi into the mayo.
3. Sprinkle Aji Nori furikake on top.
4. Place in microwave safe dish and microwave on high for 5 minutes. Check the salmon and if needed, cook for another 2-3 minutes.

Pretty quick, huh?? I am not a wasabi fan at all, but I tried the wasabi one (she makes with and without) and it tasted really great. It had the wasabi taste, but not the hotness. It's a quick 10 minute recipe, give it a try! ^_^

I forgot to mention that my ear is still swollen. I'd done the Neosporin and it seemed to help, but then last night I was cleaning my puffy ear when I realized that I was cleaning it with eye makeup remover. GOOD JOB, ME!

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".

Last Legs Bento

I have a very strange bento today because I had to use up a lot of old food before it expired. We had pork chops last night but I didn't take any since I had a pot of rice about to dry up in my cooker. When I was looking in the fridge for something to put in with it I noticed a tub of kim chee crab that I had forgotten about. It actually expired yesterday but I figure one more day isn't going to kill me. *knock on wood*

The rice was actually starting to turn a light yellow color because I cooked it on Sunday so I mixed it up with a lot of furikake then added nori punch faces. These punches are so great because when you have several you can just mix and match the eyes and mouths. I was lazy so I just shoved all the crab into the middle. I have an avocado that I forgot at work, so I'll use that to help with the spicyness. I added two carrot flowers to the middle and two last sprigs of wilted parsley before finally dumping it. This is why I'm calling this my "Last Legs" bento, lol.

Buddy saw me slicing the carrots and wanted the flower outlines, so I gave them to him, thinking how lovely it is to have a son that eats veggies without blinking an eye.

Then I found regurgitated, chewed up carrot on the carpet in front of him in my bedroom. He was grinning ear to ear, the little fart.

I want to thank everyone for being so supportive and posting nice comments. I really appreciate everyone being so encouraging!!

Roast Chicken (165)

Every day this year so far has been a unique mixture of shit and today is no different, but somehow I feel a little better about things. I'm not sure why. The situation I'm in is just as crappy or worse now, but my head is clear and my emotions in check. Maybe I'm just numb already, which is probably bad.


My lunch today is sliced Sam's Club rotisserie chicken with furikake rice. On the side I have some green salad and tomato. There is French dressing in the little orange container. The green shamrock bottle has some soy sauce for the chicken.

In my crappy 2008 year I do have something awesome and win to look at with glee. Something to look at and squeal, "EEEEEE!!" whenever I feel like I need a picker-upper.



OH YEAH, BABY! That's right!! A pic of me with Colt Brennan!! I was walking through campus to meet Mr. Pikko to go to a UH rally at Bachman Hall when I see Colt standing on the lawn in front of Hawaii Hall. I kinda hung around then went to meet the Mr. I told him we should go back and we waited with two other women until he was done filming the promo. The other ladies got his autograph and I walked behind until he noticed I was there. Mr. Pikko took the pic really quick and my hair got in the way, but it's still a good pic with great lighting! He's really freaking tall, lol! (ie I'm really short)

So yeah, that made my day yesterday.

The highlight of today will be the canning of Herman Frazier. I will have to pinch myself. Someone at UH actually has half a brain for once?! How is this even possible??

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.

Furikake Salmon Salad (130)

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


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

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

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

Nuggets (119)

I know what you're thinking already. When the heck is Pikko going to use her darned fancy schmancy egg thinger!?!? I haven't had time yet. :( Maybe tonight! I keep falling asleep when I put Buddy to bed and that usually hoses my entire free time for the day. I really need to stop doing that and train the little fart to fall asleep on his own again.

I got up early this morning, 4 am! Geeeez! I cooked rice but got really lazy and so I looked in the freezer and decided to use some of my Morningstar nuggets, which if I remember correctly, are made out of vegetables but taste like chicken.


Some will look at this picture and this, furikake rice? With chicken nuggets?? This bento is actually just part of my stomach's master lunch plan. I felt like eating furikake rice this morning, but had no meat unless I wanted to eat mochiko chicken again (which by the way, my mother in law made for dinner last night!) so I used the nuggets. I'll eat some of the rice, then use the rest to put into a can of chicken noodle soup I brought along with my lunch. So this way I get nuggets, furikake rice, and soup with rice too. Oh and carrots.

Too bad I forgot to pack fruits. Way to mess up the master plan, Pikko!

Bento orders were packed up this morning and I'll go to the post office this afternoon.

Curry & Veggie Croquette

I'm one of those market shoppers that go with a list but then grab things that look good or things that are on sale and as a result I have a freezer that requires grunting to close because it's so full of frozen foods that I may one day use. This morning I decided to actually USE some of it and fried up one curry croquette and one veggie croquette. These are quite yummy and easy to make. All you do is deep fry them, I like to use a tiny little pot so that it covers the whole patty yet doesn't use up a ton of oil.


Last night I made teriyaki beef for dinner and we ate it all, but still had a lot of rice left so I was a bit generous with my rice portion this morning. I topped it with Seto Fumi furikake then put the croquettes cut in half on top of it. To add color I put some little carrot sticks and some corn.


Yesterday I mentioned that I would be mailing orders out, but as we were driving to the post office Mr. Pikko asked me if I wanted him to try picking the three Hayden mangoes that he had seen at his gramps' house the other day. Dangle Hayden mangoes in front of me and I lose all rational thought, so we went to try to pick them. Turns out the mango tree hates short Japanese people and we couldn't get the picking stick high enough to get them. By the time we were done with this futile attempt, we had to just hele onto the freeway to pick up the kids in time. My in-laws come back today though, so I will be able to go this afternoon for sure. I apologize for the delay. ; ;

Too bad for me that this morning I started cooking dinner for tonight, not realizing that we weren't even going to be eating at home. So now I have mochiko chicken marinating and we're not going to eat it. What I'll do is fry it tonight, freeze it, then defrost for the Charleston Southern game on Saturday. This will go along great with the plan I have for the onigiri. You'll see what it is! I'm terribly excited to do it!!

In my hasty post yesterday I forgot to mention that the UH football team won against UNLV Saturday. We're now 3-0! It was pretty hilarious to see the big Hawaii crowd because they were mostly old Japanese people retired in Vegas. Someone even had an old Rainbows banner! If you didn't know, Vegas is the Florida for Hawaii. That's where people retire to.

Teriyaki Ahi & Tofu Steak (109)

As I mentioned yesterday, we had teri ahi and tofu steak for dinner last night. I set aside a small piece for me to cook for my bento. It turned out pretty good even though I wasn't going by any recipe or anything. I simply cooked the tofu steaks and fish fillets in olive oil and then added Mr. Yoshida's sauce to the pan.


I have furikake rice underneath the tofu and broccoli on the side. The little fish bottle contains extra teri sauce for me to pour on the rice when I eat it today. With the small amount of rice, this bento is about 2 points. I packed this into my newest bento box that I got on eBay, a blue Doraemon box. It's a great size and has a food divider, so of course I love it! A picture of the box:


I forgot to freeze my spaghetti last night and I'm not even sure I'll be able to because my freezer is ridiculously packed with stuff. This morning Mr. Pikko called me over to it and said, "You hear that? That's the ice machine breaking." Apparently it's not good to shove packs of frozen gyoza and bagels into the ice tray. Who knew!? ^_-

Furikake Wasabi Salmon (102)

A few months ago my mother in law had brought back from one of her sorority group meetings a recipe book that contained all of their best recipes. She's been trying recipes from this book this week and last night tried an easy microwavable Furikake Wasabi Salmon. The salmon steaks are topped with mayonnaise, wasabi, drizzled with Mr. Yoshida's sauce (this is a brand of sauce), and then sprinkled with Aji Nori furikake. I did not eat this last night as they'd also bought some pork eggplant and beef with black beans that I couldn't resist. I just love eggplant dishes so I ate mostly that for dinner!


I didn't take much rice, so this will only count as 1 point. On the right side I have more of the above-mentioned eggplant and some of the bell peppers from the beef dish. The eggplant was rather oily from the pork, so I'll add another point on for that. The salmon was a bit oily too, but since this oil came from the salmon itself, I count that as a healthy oil. The mayo I will add another point, which brings this to a 3 point lunch. By the way, the (102) is the number of my bento. I need to keep better track!

I went to Marukai yesterday and learned it pays to scour every aisle up and down for things. Their bento accessories section has been lacking for the past 3 trips I've made down there but this time I was able to score on some really cuuuute bento boxes!! I've used it in today's lunch and here it is all covered up:


Isn't it beautiful!? A complete steal at $1.99! And best of all, it's made in Japan. With all the China recalls lately even I am getting paranoid about all China products. I saw a lonely four boxes hiding in between stacks of silly useless looking plasticware. I snatched them all up! I will sell one on eBay and have two to sell for $2.99 in my store, though I haven't taken a picture. Actually, if you're interested in it, you can simply e-mail me at pikkopots at gmail.com and place a reserve on it, then pay with PayPal once I confirm I still have it available. I have a matching drawstring bag for both of them, also $2.99. I took the photo on a matching furoshiki that I found buried under a box. It was only $.99 because it was out of the package and dirty and gross. I figured I can always wash it...

I also got another good cheap find yesterday. Today Baby Girl needed to wear a certain color and she didn't have it, so we went to Ross after leaving the in-laws. I found a set of red and blue silicon baking cups for $3.99! That's a lot cheaper than the $8.99 ones I saw at Walmart and at least this one had two colors! So yeah... very happy. I also bought a walking at home exercise DVD because Mr. Pikko has expressed concern about me running in the dark.

Speaking of the store, I added in more of the Hello Kitty stuff again as well as some additional accessories. I have a crapton of bento supples to sell in the store at home but am just too lazy to put a lot of it up. Amazingly, Mr. Pikko, who calls everything to do with any of my hobbies my "junks" refers to my bento stuff as "bento stuffs". Maybe he silently approves??

Tomorrow is the big day! Our first football game of the season! I bought Buddy a #15 toddler shirt and Baby Girl a UH windbreaker jacket so that she wouldn't get cold wearing the cheerleader outfit. This is our first year with season tickets so I really hope that we are sitting in a family friendly area. We bought staff tickets which should up the chances of getting seats by old timer football fans. I just hope they don't mind kids. So while I'm talking about football, I should mention the horrifying new haircut that Colt Brennan has.


Dude, we get you love Hawaii, but who got you drunk and took you to the barber? I suppose it's still better than the dreadlocks though... Also, unless he plans on looking at his feet everywhere he goes, when he puts his head upright the Hawaiian islands are upside down... Oi ya yoi!

I'm looking forward to our first football bento. I think I will pack cone sushi, dashimaki tamago, spam musubi, and hash patties. There will be 6 of us there with the two kids. We'll see if we actually get to watch the game or if this will be another season of "I want to go walking." and "I want a smoothie." Hopefully they have andagi this year!

Bento #100!!!!!

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


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


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

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

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

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

Jennie from the US!

Why Jennie loves bento:

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

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

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

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

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