Fried Ahi Poke Don? (123)

This morning I tried an experiment. Having fallen asleep early AGAIN, I had to wing it and decided to fry the poke I had sitting in the fridge. I cooked rice, fried the poke, added some green onions from my garden, then set them both on the side. I fried up some sweet onion, added this Hawaiian Honey glaze by Aloha Shoyu, a bit of mirin, and then put that on top the rice. I put the poke on top, added parsley, and I was done!


I have no idea how good this will taste, but it certainly was fun to make something up! I've made the fried poke before though, so at least I know it won't taste bad. I keep meaning to do more Harumi book recipes, but I haven't had time to go to the market to buy the things I need. I'll definitely try to do some specific shopping for her recipes this weekend.

People seem confused over the Dreamland thing even with my demented recap yesterday and I think this is due to the absence of a picture of the thing the eggs go into.


This thing is what you put the eggs into and what you insert the space makers in. You see the little plastic stubs on the side of the cylinders? That's how you lock it in! I know it's confusing. I'll try to take pictures next time I work on it. :D

Pot Roast Pork

I had wanted to do a Harry Potter bento for bentochallenge but I just haven't felt the inspiration and last night I was bummed out over something so I ended up just watching King Kong and doing my bento this morning. I am definitely getting better at that by the way. We still end up late, but not as bad as before. Yay?


This is some pot roast pork leftover from dinner last night along with a bit of rice, some poke, and green beans. 3 points for this lunch: 1 for the rice and 2 for the meat since I couldn't get all the fat to come off. My bottom layer is here:


Tofu cubes and some shelled edamame. The last time I had tofu cubes my buddy Exodus made a comment, "Oh, tofu cubes, neat. What's it made of?" LOL! You crack me up, cheese man! I'm not really feeling all that wordy today, so I'm just postin' the lunch and gonna hele on out to frolic on the internets while I do work.

Hopefully I'll have bon dance and garden pics this weekend!

Chicken Curry w/ Croquette

I'd like to start off today's post with a quote from my daughter. I had bought a pair of sunglasses while in LA so that I didn't look like I had slits for eyes and now I wear them in the mornings to block out the sun so that I can sleep on the way in to work. (they're way cooler than using Mr. Pikko's black sock) On the way to dropping off the kids she likes to ask if she can use them and this morning I asked her why she needed it and her answer was simply:

"The sun is trying to kill my face!"

I can't argue with that kind of logic, so of course I gave it up. She totally cracks me up. She starts preschool next week Wednesday so I am trying to think about whether I should base the one bento I will make for her each week on a specific day (ie every Friday) or on days when I know she'll have a hard time with what they serve. I guess we'll see! Should I make her one on her first day to help her cope or just let her plunge head first into school?

Yesterday we had Zippy's frozen stuff for dinner, which never disappoints. For the first time I had their chicken curry and it was really good. I'd had their hamburger curry once before so I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised, but I hadn't eaten it in like 8 years so I forgot what it tasted like. I took leftovers and was at a complete loss this morning on how to dress it up. When I first started it was just boring rice and curry.


I ended up adding a cream corn croquette. This is actually the second one I fried. The first one I made the big mistake of sitting down at my comp instead of watching it and remembered the poor thing 2 threads later. But I ate the first one so it wasn't a complete loss. After a while I thought it was still too boring so I scooped out some of the rice and added sliced sanbaizuke. It made sense because whenever we eat at Curry House (Coco Ichibanya) they include brown pickles anyway and of course this one tastes worlds better than the bitter stuff they serve there. Then I finished it off with some nori flakes and crackers from a ochazuke flavor packet.


Instead of a KCCA salad today, I packed another bento with tofu cubes and ahi shoyu poke. To add color I put in a red tomato soy sauce bottle and some chopped green onions onto the poke.

Although I've been cheating by eating cream cheese brownies I made Sunday, my high vegetable intake seems to be working slowly. I'm back down to 127.2 from hovering around 128.5 for the last week or so.

Fried Poke & Costco Fried Rice

We had a UFC 73 party at our place on Saturday so to make lunch easy Mr. Pikko bought a Costco chicken for the kids while he was buying food and supplies. The food was great, in addition to the edamame and pipi kaula, we grilled 3 kinds of hotdogs (1 pack of monstrous dogs courtesy of teh Gonz) on my Foreman grill and thanks to a tip from a co-worker, I was actually able to clean it easily this time. Teh Gonz also brought this awesome crab dip, Phil brought mochi rice, Sean brought some Popeye's, and Shawn brought ahi limu poke. Obviously no one knows who Gonz, Phil, Sean, and Shawn are but I mention them as a thanks for bringing foods. The fights were not bad, though they could have been better.


Anyway, Shawn's leftover poke is what I made for lunch today so that it wouldn't go to waste. I've never tried the limu one from Foodland before so I'll find out today what fried limu tastes like. (limu is string seaweed) I cut up the leftover Costco chicken this morning and fried it with the rice I'd made for the curry Sean brought from Popeye's and furikake. I added the shoyu bottle in case I didn't season it enough but since Buddy ate it for breakfast no problem, maybe I won't have to use it.

I will likely only be posting 3 bentos this week as I'm going on a trip to LA on Wednesday for E3. I'm not technically *attending* E3, but it's why I'm going. It will be the first time I miss a weekday bento I think!! Oh noes! ; ; This trip should be a test for me to see how well I hold up to my diet without a fridge full of food that I've bought or cooked or portioned. Maintenance is still going quite well, I was 129.5 this morning. I don't even really count points anymore, I just try to stay conscious of how much rice and fat I take in and it seems to work quite well. I've been well trained it seems!

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

Fried ahi poke

Note to self: a whole pound of ahi poke is too much, so don't buy a whole tub from the seafood section just because the deli is closed! With my poke fast approaching the point of tossage, I had to use it all up, so I decided to try fried poke for the first time. Even though I'd used this in two previous bentos, it was still way too much so I ate a couple pieces then gave the rest to Mr. Pikko, who said it smelled awesome. Extreme close-up!

I fried it with olive oil, but it soon became apparent that this particular poke had oil already in it because there was a lot more oil than what I'd put in. So I looked up some recipes and LO AND BEHOLD an ingredient is sesame oil. WTH! Luckily most recipes I saw call for 1 Tbsp of it for 1-2 lbs of fish. So though a tablespoon of sesame oil is 4 points, I doubt I was eating much during each meal with the portion I took. Maybe 1/2 a teaspoon or so, which comes out to about .5 points. The ingredients listed were: ahi, nut, wheat, soy.

SUCKIN' FOODLAND!

Anyway, I stuck in more lomi salmon cause the hugeass bottle that I bought from Costco says I have to eat it by June 4th. In the middle is, durr, asparagus, fried with Pam and onion powder. I also packed some miso soup, which I will eat with the somen noodles that didn't get any love yesterday. I figure eating it with miso soup is better than eating it with a salty, sugary sauce.

On the exercise front, I've decided to always do the additional stairclimbing that I implemented this week. (i.e. yesterday *sheepish face*) I've always had thunder thighs and after the two kids they were upgraded to Category 5 Hurricane thighs, so this will hopefully put me on the path to once again being able to stand without thighs that nudge each other.

By the way, it appears that last night I got my 2000th hit! Thanks are in order for my readers! May the bento bug bite you!

Miso beef w/ potatoes

I'm going to have to do a monkey bento soon. My two kiddos have been watching so much Curious George lately that I can't get Will Ferrel's voice out of my head. Maybe a monkey bento will help. Haha yeah right...

I decided to try the miso marinade again with beef this time. I dumped all the ingredients into a ziplock bag with a round steak and let it soak overnight then broiled it this morning. It didn't brown on the edges as well as I liked, but since I was cooking in the morning I had no time to re-broil them. The marinade is from my bento box book:

4 oz steak
1 1/2 Tbsp miso
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp sake
1 tsp mirin

I added in a boiled red potato chopped into cubes with garlic salt sprinkled on top:


The picture isn't the best, but you can still tell what it is right? :) Maybe this week I can go buy the stuff I need for a homemade lightbox at last. For the other layer I put tofu sprinkled with red shrimp flakes with a strawberry soy sauce bottle and some broccoli and cauliflower with carrot stars. This photo came out terrible too, but that's what happens when one falls asleep early when they should be making bento!


Since I didn't have time to eat much breakfast I packed a side bento to eat earlier in the day that has baby carrots, cucumber kim chee, and ahi poke. I'll probably eat this around 10:30 and then eat lunch at 1 or 2.


A miraculously all Core meal! There is sugar in the steak, but so little that it doesn't count since the bento book says to scrape off the marinade before broiling. Obviously I couldn't find time for a pirate bento, but I'm fine with this since I still haven't even seen Dead Man's Chest.

Chicken tofu

Contrary to what I said about not losing weight this week, yesterday morning the scale informed me that I'd lost 2.5 lbs, making me exactly 134.0 lbs! I passed my 10% weight loss goal and have officially lost 16 lbs since the end of March. ^_^ Having very low point days is a good thing. The bad part is that since I had 4 extra points tonight, I decided I could have a cupcake. I did decapitate the frosting, but still, bad habit! In other news, my success has inspired two of my Allakhazam co-workers to join up with Weight Watchers! Wewt!

Last night we had a pretty yummy dinner, MIL made chicken tofu with long rice. I nuked one of my frozen packets of kim chee fried rice and added it in to help keep this lunch all Core. I'm still thinking about what to do for a pirate bento and am now considering sitting this one out. It's a pretty hard theme and not one I'm all that excited about. I do have some ideas for pirate ships. We'll see! Anyway, here is the top layer. It was quite dreary, so I added the parsley and tomato. Not that it helped all that much.


I've decided to make larger versions of my bentos available, so from now on you can click each image for an enlargement.

The pupu layer consists of the rest of the ahi shoyu poke, kim chee crab, and some baby carrots. The top carrots are actually sliced in half because it wouldn't have closed with two layers of carrots.


I'll end with one last bit of exciting news. My friend is currently on a trip in Japan and I had asked him to keep an eye out for these nori punches. He emailed me to say he was able to find them with ease and will be carrying them home for me! The best part is I have avoided the $17 shipping fee I saw on eBay. Good thing I have cast iron will and an amazing resistence to making impulse purchases online!

NOT! I'm just cheap...

Kaolian's Bane

In celebration of the arrival of my cute lil' Urara bento box set (box, strap, chopsticks, case, and bag!) I decided to make it color coordinated. This morning I fried up some asparagus and bell pepper (chopped last night) in olive oil, garlic salt, and toasted sesame seeds. On the bottom tray I put in the last of my kim chee crab, the last of the ahi shoyu poke, and some small cubes of tofu. I packed some soy sauce in one of my piggie bottles with the cap exchanged from the red piggie. The tofu expires today, so I'm bringing the rest of it in a separate container. I call it Kaolian's bane because he can't stand tofu and despises asparagus.

Top layer:



Bottom layer:



Fruits will be mango, strawberries, and blackberries. All Core meal! ^_^

Oyako donburi

Lots of bento pics today! I took the day off yesterday because hubby's eye was so red that I needed to drive him to the eye doctor. Later I was supposed to pick up the kids at my niece's softball game and since it was at 5:00 I figured, what a great excuse for making bento! I decided on Oyaku donburi, which is always a hit with the kidlets.

Recipe:

2 skinless chicken breasts, cubed
1 small sweet onion, chopped
1 pink kamaboko, julienned
1 handful chopped green onions
1/4 cup light soy sauce
1/4 cup mirin
1 Tbsp sugar
5 eggs, scrambled (I use FF egg substitute)

Fry chicken till half cooked and set aside. Fry onions until translucent. Add green onions and kamaboko, fry for 1-2 minutes. Add soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. Simmer 5 minutes, then add scrambled eggs. Simmer until eggs are cooked. Serve on hot rice.

It's quite easy and very yummy! I chopped all the ingredients much smaller for the kid's version. For the other half of the bento I defrosted edamame (frozen, pre-cooked from Costco) and shelled them and added mandarin orange slices for them both and added raisins for Buddy. They both look exactly the same, but I took pics of both anyway.



After the game I came home and cooked for myself. Hubby had eaten a big lunch and declined dinner, so I was able to add onions to this dish for the first time in like, I dunno, 10 years?? Usually I drown it with onion powder. As expected though, he kept going to the pan after I was done and eating food out with his hands. >:( Anyway, here is tomorrow's bento:


Top dish is rice and oyaku donburi.


Bottom dish contains some ahi shoyu poke from Foodland, shelled edamame, and some won bok kim chee.


I'd made miso soup to take for lunch too, but then we started watching Lost and by the time I remembered the soup it had been reduced to goo and had been sitting out too long and I didn't want to risk eating spoiled soup. Fruits are mango and strawberry.

My throat still hurts. In fact, it feels worse. The cotton feeling is gone and instead I feel like I have a marble going down my throat everytime I swallow. *sob* 3 Points meal. 2 for the rice and 1 for the kamaboko.