Crab & Avocado Sandwich (194)

Sorry for the lack of bentos this week, but as I mentioned last Friday, we had a potluck on Monday. Lots of yummy foods were consumed including an apple/nut salad, lobster ravioli, healthy rice (from me, more on that later), enchiladas (which I didn't eat after someone said, WOW THEY'RE SPICY!), lots of fresh veggies, some REALLY ono fresh salsa with corn chips, salami & cheese on toothpicks, cold cut sandwiches, and lots of other goodies including the cuuuutest Easter cupcakes which I am so stealing for Easter this year.

Yesterday I stayed home because poor Baby Girl caught Buddy's stomach virus. She lay limp and miserable all day, the poor thing. ;(

As I mentioned, I made Healthy Rice, which is a very good and increasingly popular dish that I got from Grandma J who got it from someone else. It's very simple to make and I was asked for the recipe by at least half the office.

5 cups cooked rice
1 jar Nametake mushrooms
1 jar Ochazuke furikake
2 cups shelled edamame

Instructions:

1. Combine and stir together well.

I still have leftover ingredients so I'll be sure to make more for a bento once I buy more edamame. The best part of it all? I am allergic to mushrooms and I gave this a try, happily discovering that I can eat nametake mushrooms no problem! WOOHOO!!!

I haven't had a sandwich bento in quite some time so I decided to use some of the big pack of Costco imitation crab meat that I bought for a sandwich. Since mayo is a big no-no in calories and I've brought a lot of food for lunch, I opted to use Laughing Cow Light Swiss Cheese instead. It's possible this will turn out to be a terrible combo, we'll see!!


I lightly toast the bread but it gets a bit soggy in the fridge anyway, so I only toast it to make the cutting easier. I lined the sandwich box with lettuce, which I eat with the sandwich so nothing gets wasted. I also sliced up some avocado to make it less boring. With the cheese and the bread, this comes out to a 5 point bento. Each slice is 2 points! D:

The silliest part of this bento is the baby carrots. This bag was a bad batch, containing a lot of carrots that didn't get peeled well, so were therefore very bitter. Trust me, peeling little baby carrots is a severe pain in the ass. And I just noticed one of them had the nerve to fall out of place in the box before I took the picture. How rude!


I haven't had one of these in a while. Since this is an additional quarter avocado, this salad is 1 point. But, with all the walking I do for this job, the 1 point isn't a big deal. I get about 40 minutes of walking done per day just to pick up the mail. Pretty good, huh? :D


Lately I've been eating a lot of food so I have to keep myself under control by eating a lot of healthy food. I brought miso soup with tofu to eat in the morning, which was a good thing since Buddy had me up at 4:30 AM asking to eat everything under the sun. (catching up for 3 days of almost no eating) I brought more of my ancient kiwis along with their buddies the Senior Citizen Blueberries. If you look closely, you can see their wrinkles. As I've said before, I hate wasting fruit. You should have seen the nasty ass raspberries I very reluctantly threw away this morning. (I almost ate a few before tossing too, lol!)

It's more important than ever for me to be adhering to my diet now because my bridesmaid dress came in. I ended up being asked to pick my own and I chose this one. I love it! And even better, I fit quite perfectly into a size 6 petite! WOOOO! That's actually better than the dress, hehe!

Shrimp Cocktail (187)

Allakhazam.com has been under constant DDOS attacks this past week and it has been a very frustrating ordeal for the employees and the users of the site. I wish there was some way to help, but all I can do is get whatever work done offline that I can. It's so frustrating!!

As I mentioned, my bridesmaid dress came in so this is a reminder to me that the wedding is coming up really soon. I need to shed these last 8 pounds as I'm back up to hovering around 128 lately. I'm sure if I put my mind to it, I can get it done. I just have to get back to my constant healthy snacking instead of the constant junk food snacking I've been doing while at work. To help kick start this I've brought a cold bento with all core items in it!


I have more washed shrimp here from the shrimp salad I mentioned. I put them on some nice colored skewers. I sliced an avocado I bought last week. I had intended to make some KCCA salad, but every time I go to Foodland the deli is closed. ; ; I've got cocktail sauce in the little container, tomatoes, orange, kiwi, and half a boiled egg.

I had intended to eat an entire boiled egg sliced in half but my kids saw me peeling it and immediately turned into Egg Zombies, bouncing up and down going "EEEEEEGGGGG MOMMMMMY EEEEEGGGGGG!". So I cut it up hoping to make a chickie, but got lazy and just left it like that. For snacks I brought raspberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, and baby carrots. I need to go buy me another big box of Smart Pop. Hopefully by now the stock at Costco is popcorn without that nasty chemical in it.

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!!

Valentine's Day Bentos (181 & 182)

Yesterday I went to go look at the screenshots of the new MMORPG coming out soon, Hello Kitty Online and I about died of anticipation. I realize that people in the Allakhazam community will likely look at HKO with complete revulsion and disgust, but I find myself mysteriously drawn to a world of pink and flowers and Pompompurin houses. You can make farms and grow crops and pick fruit from trees. A virtual gardener such as myself cannot stay away from such a game, especially since it's free! I used to be such a Sanrio freak as a teenager and from looking at these pictures, apparently I still am.

I woke up at 5 am this morning to cook rice and make tamagoyaki for my bento this morning and to make my first ever bento for Mr. Pikko. He usually doesn't eat lunch or just buys food, so I never bothered to make one. But... since the Kokua Festival tickets I had planned on giving are not here yet, I thought maybe a bento would be a nice, thoughful gift to give that wasn't costly.

This is Mr. Pikko's bento, which has 3 little chicken drumsticks and wings. Grandma J made a new recipe last night as a test for some function she is going to and I think these are called "Lip Smackin' Wings". To go with the chicken, I made a round onigiri dyed with red food coloring. I had initially wanted it to be all pink, but then when the coloring didn't mix too well, I thought the haphazard coloring came out really well. I cut out the two hearts from bell peppers and sprinkled black sesame seeds on to add more color.

In the middle is some sliced asparagus and then on the bottom area I have some pink tamagoyaki cut into sakura flowers. I added about 5 drops of red food coloring and then after it was cooked, rolled the egg into a circle shape with my bamboo sushi thing before putting it into the fridge to cool. I sliced it up and used my veggie cutters to get the sakura shape. Next to that I have some imitation crab and then a slice of orange. Behind the onigiri I put a little raspberry too! I was quite happy with the amount of food I was able to cram into this little box! The tradeoff was that I was pissed to find out that 4 of my romaine heart heads were frozen in my crisper drawer. GRRR!! What a waste!!


Here is my matching bento! It's basically identical except I have a grape tomato hiding behind my onigiri, one less chicken piece, and kiwi instead of orange.

We're giving the night off to the in-laws so we're leaving work early to pick up the kids and will probably take them to eat dinner at IHOP. If you're wondering why we're eating at a pancake house for dinner on Valentine's Day, it's because for a mom of two toddlers, I'm still pretty stupid about some things. Tuesday was Free Pancake Day at IHOP and so I stupidly started telling the family about this in front of the kids. Buddy's eyes glazed over and he starts waddling towards me chanting, "CUP CAKE... CUP CAKE... CUP CAKE..." Baby Girl starts in with her broken record repeating, going, "Mommy, I want paaaaaancaaaaake? x500" Yeah, big mistake. Never say any word that contains "cake" in front of toddlers unless you're ready to bust them out right then and there.

It was 9 pm, but I got us all to go there only to find it was dine-in only with a half hour wait. NO CAN DO! So this is sort of a makeup for the other night. An emergency trip to Foodland for frozen pancakes had to be made.

Anyway, Happy Valentine's Day to everyone!

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...

Teri Hamburger Patty (179)

Today I'm using a new bento box but I forgot to take a picture of the outside of it. It's a two tier box with a cute froggy on the outside. It even comes with a matching fork! ^_^

Today I'm eating a teriyaki hamburger patty with leftover shrimp fried rice. I was trying to eat this for lunch during my radio show on Sunday but didn't get much eaten for fear of making too much noise. I really have to remember to eat before showtimes. The rice looked great with the peas so I decided to leave the shrimps on the side next to the patties. The piggy bottle has soy sauce in it for the rice because it wasn't the tastiest of fried rices and I'm one of those people that thinks soy sauce makes everything taste better. The little food dividers were a gift from one of my blog readers, Stephanie. I finally got a chance to use them! So cute! Thank you again!

I'm a little upset that I didn't notice that open space next to the piggy. I hate having open spaces like that. ; ;


In my bottom tier I packed a lot of fruit. I have two sliced kiwis, some raspberries, and then a little silicone cup of blueberries. The cup is from a set of cups that I got from Nizdaar in the Allakhazam Secret Santa exchange we did. They're so tiny and a perfect size for the shallower bento containers I have. I have the regular sized silicone cups and they're only useful in my taller boxes. This set came from Amazon and the set contained lots of different colors. A great bento item since you can use them over and over!

I noticed yesterday that the Hawaii Chair video got removed, so I edited the post to display a new video!

Chicken Lettuce Wraps (178)

I was driving in to work this morning when I heard the radio hosts I listen to talking about a "Hawaii Chair". As soon as I got to work I looked it up and it just about split my sides open watching it.



That is just too funny. I'm lucky I wasn't drinking water when I saw it.

Today's bento is almost entirely from Costco. As usual, the Costco chicken was a big part of the weekend meals and I chopped up a lot of the white meat this morning and made the lettuce wraps I've made before. This time I added some diced bell pepper into the mixture to give it more color and veggies.


The grape tomatoes, kiwi, blueberries, lettuce, chicken, bell peppers, and raspberries are all bought from Costco. The only thing messing up the all-Costconess of it is the two little carrot flowers. Dang those carrot flowers!! ^_^ Here's a blurry close-up:


I ate some of the blueberries Saturday and I dunno why but they taste like they have sand in the middle. I'm debating taking them back and telling them this and getting an exchange. I know they don't normally taste this way but I'll see if maybe I just had a few bad berries in the bunch I picked up to eat.

I finally got some real gardening done this weekend and cleaned up all my dead tomato plants. While I was pulling weeds I discovered that a stray tomato must have fallen to the ground and then had the seeds dispersed all over the yard because I found at least 10 tomato plants sprung up all over the place. Some had no leaves and I didn't understand why until I found the gigantor caterpillar on a nearby plant. The most bizzare discovery though, was the little pools of shrimps. My kids have little play pots and pans in the yard that have been collecting rain water and I was about to dump one out when I noticed there was a bunch of tiny little pink "things" in it. Upon further inspection, I found that they were actually dozens of tiny little itty bitty dead shrimps.

At first I thought maybe they were there because of the little container of seashells Baby Girl had left out, but then I found more little containers nowhere near the shells container that had MORE dead shrimps. It was very weird and quite stink.

The yard looks neater now and hopefully next week we can plant some edamame plants. :D

I noticed that a bunch of my earliest blog entries were using pictures from my Swapsonian domain, which I have basically given up hope on. I'm so pissed with Ipowerweb that I'm never using them again. I continue to pay for a broken domain and cannot get my files off the server. I wait forever on the phone and in chats and no one seems to know how to help me. Ipowerweb can SUCK IT! Anyway, I fixed the pics to use my Flickr ones.

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:

Salad kit

No bentos yesterday as I simply didn't have the time. At 9 am Baby Girl saw hubby watching "Mittsbusters" and since it involved a pool, she suddenly wanted to go swimming. Took us like an hour and a half to get ready and when we finally go there and get into the water the first thing out of her mouth was, "Ok, let's go home now." O_O

Poor Buddy had been completely heartbroken that we left him home (hubby can't go outside because of an eye infection) and so I let them play in the yard with the water pool while I pulled weeds. I am slowly but surely winning the war against those deeply rooted suckers! There's a whole 3' x 2' plot of gravel completely weed-free now! Before I knew it, it was 11:45 so I just defrosted some of the leftover turkey lasagna from Saturday night and they all ate that. I had some chicken salad.

For dinner I made Chinese style steamed fish and though it was the first time I'd done the sizzling peanut oil thing and the first time I'd used my fish poacher thing that had been hibernating on top of the fridge for two years, it turned out great! I'd planned on taking some for today's lunch, but the kids enjoyed the fish so much that they ate half a side of the fish by themselves! :D So after some thinking during Amazing Race (yay my team won!) and Sopranos I decided on what I'm calling a salad kit.


The lettuce bowl looked pretty zzZz so I put some momi nori on it. The back of the package says to put it on salad, so I'll see how that tastes. Seems wierd, but you never know! For toppings I went kinda nuts, adding chicken, tomatoes, and carrots. I also finally found the leftover avocado after almost needing to put out an APB on it. If Baby Girl had been awake while I searched the fridge, I guarantee she'd have said "I tink the avocado ran away from home, Mommy." She says that about everything I can't find. It may be a sign of things to come so I must note this down onto my "things I must remember when my daughter turns 13" list along with "bar her windows". Anyway, not sure I'll eat the Babybel as that would add 2 whole points to my all Core lunch.


Fruit bowl has blackberries, mango, strawberries, and kiwi. The goal of the salad kit was to fill it with lots of tasty things that would negate the need for salad dressing. I've tried all the Kraft Free ones like Ranch, Catalina, and Italian Caesar. They taste like how you'd expect fat free salad dressings to taste like: ass. They're so bad I'd much rather go without em.

Forgot to mention, one of the things I did today with Baby Girl was to start a tomato garden (obviously Nexa wishes to infect me with another hobby as revenge for getting her into bentos). Of course me being me, I did first and read instructions after and found out I'd done it completely backwards. We'll see how it goes. I couldn't find a good pot variety of tomato anyway, so maybe it's best this way and I can have another go next week. While at Lowes we ate shave ice with ice cream. *gleep* Since it's pretty much syrup and ice cream, that's probably like a 15 point item or something ridiculous. I weigh in tomorrow, so I'm crossing my fingers.

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!

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. ^_-