Oven Fried Chicken (219)

Ok so I've been moaning and groaning about my stupid camera spitting out blurry pictures when I photograph my bentos lately and I thought this would make for a great excuse to get a new camera. My plans were foiled when Mr. Pikko suggest I check for a smudge on the lens. Sure enough, there was a little fingerprint right across the front. I will blame Buddy, since he loves to take pictures, usually of people's chests and neck. Who knows, maybe he will be some weird modern art photographer.

The Art of the Neck!

So anyway, with my camera problems unfortunately solved, I still have a blurry bento picture for today, which fills me with complete and utter rage!! AUGH!!!

Just kidding. ^_^


This here is oven fried chicken and no, I have not fallen off the weight loss wagon just yet. I still have to lose 12 pounds before I'm considered "not fat" in scientific terms. Plus, my size 4 pants are no longer comfortable, a sure sign I need to control my eating again. I picked the smallest piece of chicken in the pan and then brought soy sauce for flavor so that I can pick all the breading off. I'll try my best not to eat all the rice.

Next to it I have broccoli and takuan in a little food cup. I tucked in one il/legal tomato for color and then wished I had more food to put in. I ended up only bringing one tier since the only fruit I had was a papaya and Baby Girl loves papaya so much if I had taken some there would have been some papaya riots in the kitchen this morning.

Alrighty so last weekend, as you all know, was my best friend's wedding. Much to everyone's shock, we left our kiddies at home. This however, turned out to be a very wise decision as I think I might have shown up at the wedding slightly demented if they'd come along. (more on that below) Traveling with toddlers is not fun. You have to rent carseats, their little bodies balloon your airfare no matter how much you tell the airline they can both fit in one seat, they are of course not used to sleeping in a strange place and therefore are really cranky at night, and ALL the bathrooms are not your house one therefore making the request to "go shishi at home" extremely unreasonable.

We stayed in Kona Saturday so that we could go to Kona Bowl to watch BJ Penn defend his title in UFC 84 and me not wanting to spend too much on a hotel we'd be barely staying at, chose to go with a cheapie condo. The place was pretty decent for the price so I can't really fault it, but it was definitely not a place I felt comfortable sleeping in. For one, it had a weird odor. Two, there was this HORRIBLE looking spider in the parking lot that gave me serious freaking nightmares (not kidding). There were lots of mysterious quarter sized holes in the ceiling. The comforter was dark green with lovely white stains on them. Later that night I ended up suggesting that we sleep without bathing so as to avoid getting any ickyness on our sleeping clothes. I slept with the sheets covering my feet because a part of me was afraid that yellow-assed demon was going to get off his web and crawl in to terrorize me. I woke up at least 4 times during the night checking my feet. I cannot imagine trying to get our kids to sleep in this place.

We had time to kill so we hung out napping in the Kona Bowl parking lot, then went to Macy's where I got the flipping deal of my life on a really great Eileen Fisher jacket. The price on the tag was $228 and I got it at 65% off with an extra 20% off for signing up for a Macy's card (which I got lectured about). I was supposed to get a total of 40% extra off, so if I'm feeling particularly stingy, I'll call them up to complain. But for now, getting a $228 jacket for $37 has me on Cloud Nine. Later, we met my Aunty C and Uncle L for lunch at Big Island Grille. That was fun, thanks for meeting us Aunty!!

UFC was freaking awesome! All the fights were pretty good with the exception (in my opinion anyway) of the Machida/Tito fight. That one just frustrated the hell out of me... I'd gone shopping at Pearlridge Friday and at Champs I found one woman's Extreme Couture shirt. I was really happy with it for the design obviously, but probably also because it was a size small and anything that says small and fits is a freaking great shirt. I had tried to blur our Mr. Pikko, but he ended up looking like a danged obake, so I just cropped him out.


Watching UFC with a lot of other people who actually like UFC is a heck of a lot better than watching at home by yourselves trying to convince the kids that UFC is just as fun as Curious George. I got some serious chicken skin when BJ entered the arena. He comes out to a mix of Hawaii 78 and E Ala E (you can listen to it below) by Eggman, which is what Baby Girl calls Bruddah Iz. We're still trying to figure out what the heck she's talking about. She gave us some spiel about how we showed her a video playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow and a big dragon was chasing Iz or something... I think maybe one night I must have accidentally given her a lollipop before bed and then let her watch a YouTube video of Iz, causing her to have psychedelic sugar high dreams about the "Eggman". ?!?!?



There must have been over a hundred people at the bowling alley watching and so it was the perfect atmosphere. When BJ knocked Sean Sherk out the place just erupted, it was awesome. My only complaint was that the guy was giving away prizes on an obnoxiously loud mic, sometimes during prelim fights. I mean, those are interesting too...

When it comes to MMA, Mr. Pikko likes to accuse me of name dropping, which I fully admit to doing because while I can appreciate the meaning behind a term such as a "beautiful armbar" and can remember tons of fights, I still have no freaking clue what a "kimura" is other than my friend's last name. I know just enough to appear to be a hardcore MMA fan, but in reality I just live with an MMA freak and find it much more convenient and time-saving to have him relay to me the latest gossip from the sites and blogs.

I have however, moved on from name dropping to what I call "shirt dropping". I have this thing about buying shirts lately. I have like 8 UH shirts and then now have my Extreme Couture shirt, my BJ Penn tank top, etc. It's pretty effective too, I wore my BJ tank to the salon when I was getting ready for the wedding and the lady doing the nails of the bride next to me mentioned what a great fight it was. The man at the front desk of the salon asked me if BJ won. At the airport some guy wearing an Extreme Couture shirt saw mine and later at Kona Bowl told us about his MMA clothing store at Schofield. So now instead of asking someone with potential MMAphobia if they watch UFC, I just wear it and wait for people to talk to me. Good stuff!

After UFC we went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was entertaining, but Last Crusade is still the best for me. "Water? No thank you, fish make love in it."


This is me and Lan just before her wedding. I'm kinda sad about the hair.. I should have had it down. I look like I just jumped out of that 80s music video Simply Irresistable only with less eyeliner. The back was really pretty with curls, but you can't see it. :( I loved Lan's hair and headpiece! Her wedding was loads of fun and their vows had everyone in tears. Best. Vows. Ever. Not joking. I wish I could have come up with something that beautiful. *romantic sigh*


Kahua Ranch had the most fantastic view. Mr. Pikko and I took this picture just after sunset. More to the right you had a clear view of Maui. I couldn't believe how beautiful it was up there. The road up was freakishly scary, so I was pretty relieved that we took a bus down in the dark later.

We stayed at the Hilton Waikoloa Village and I got this for free from my HHonors points. The room was like a 500% improvement over the condo in Kona and I don't know if I've ever slept on a bed that comfortable in my life. It killed me to have to wake up at 4:30 AM to get to the airport for our 7 AM flight. I was most definitely on crack when I made those reservations. The Hilton has retardedly spaced out towers, so it's best to take their tram. Only the tram doesn't start up until 6, so we had to walk half a mile from our room to the parking lot. Not cool. Still, I really wish we could have enjoyed the hotel more. This is the hotel with buttloads of artwork, waterways for boats, pools, a lagoon, possibly waterslides, (I forget), and dolphins! Next time! ^_^

Hopefully I can have more pics later, I had camera brain farts and didn't take many. We got home and ate breakfast at Anna Miller's so that I could look up on the laptop symptoms of brain aneurysms, which I mentioned yesterday. Despite all my complaints, it was great to see the kids again. Buddy had a wet head from running around in circles a lot, which didn't surprise me. I just hope he didn't do that the entire weekend.

Edit:

I forgot to talk about LOST!! I guess I'll do that next week though, when people have safely watched the finale thus ensuring I do not spoil it for people.

Spare Ribs & Leftover Panda

My apologies for the long delay in returning to the daily routine of bentos, but I had a really great time on the Big Island for the wedding and I think after a while, so much complete and utter freedom from two really cute, but really rascally children gets to you after a while. I've been in recovery since we returned in the freakishly early hours of Monday morning. I have pictures, but have not yet uploaded them yet. Coming soon with details!


This is last week's bento which I forgot to upload and then blog about. No one can blame me though, I was alternating between trying to find my head and wracking my brain to figure out if I'd forgotten to print any maps. Not that they were needed in Kona. Turns out if you drive along the main road you can basically eventually find everything needed. It was so simple that even Mr. Pikko took over driving after a while, which was shocking since he normally starts to lose his sanity any time he gets near the Big Island. Silly townie. (I say that with much love!)

These spare ribs are by far my favorite dish of Grandma J's. They smell horrible because of the vinegar, but they taste so so good. I stuck in tomatoes for color, added sesame seeds to the rice for some flair, and I have no clue as to why I added the lime wedge. I was pretty mad at it for being slightly open at the top, making it look like a lime wedge with it's head lopped off. Stupid lime! Ruined the look I was going for! (whatever that was...)


I stayed home because of a sinus headache yesterday because on the plane ride home Monday I fell asleep with my head on the side of the plane and began to very attractively snooze with my mouth wide open. This means I was not swallowing as we descended so when I woke up, I had some seriously crazy sharp pains on the left side of my face. I thought blood vessels in my face were popping and that I was going to die of a brain aneurysm before I could give my kiddies one last request to stop their whining. As you can see, I am thankfully not dead.

Anyway, enough of that. I wasn't so sick that I couldn't crave some Panda, so I went out to go buy us some. I had to drive so freaking far for this, it took me like I swear, at least a minute 30 seconds to get there. The things I do for food!

I remember years ago Panda Express was pretty gross and I only went there if I wanted Chinese American food and there was no other option, but they seem to have gone through a big makeover in the last few years and I really enjoy their food now. I was especially craving their String Bean Chicken so I got two servings of that along with plate with Chow Fun and Orange Chicken.

The bento itself looks horrible because the picture is blurry and the box is obviously too small. I was too lazy to move it out into another one. One of my worst habits is leaving my dirty bento boxes around. It makes no sense for me to dirty up extra ones when I can barely wash my lunch ones. You can tell I'm really lazy from the trip still...

Don't forget to enter my 100k Bento Contest!!

Two Bentos

Okay, so yesterday I had my yearly wimminz exam and so when I was packing up my laptop and getting ready to make the longass trek down to the parking lot, I remembered I'd forgotten to post my lunch. HOW UTTERLY THOUGHTLESS OF ME. *sigh* I need to slap myself.

Maybe I forgot to post it cause I didn't like the look of it. It reeks "lazy". There's no color, too. Wrong box for brown food! And then I just toss edamame in there like that makes it all better. Well it doesn't! Yech!! Food tasted great, though. Grandma J made chicken tofu. LOVED it!

I asked her for her pork hash recipe and she kind of laughed and said she just mixes pork, mushrooms, a bit of oyster sauce, and green onions. She doesn't measure. She cooks it in a pot, but obviously like you saw, you can fry them in little patties. Yum yum!

Okay so anyway, back on topic. That was yesterday's lunch and it was le good.


Today I am having teriyaki hamburger patty. I had to think of yet another way of presenting this since last time I did hamburger fried rice and before that I did toddler style meat loaf. This time I opted to slice them into little wedges. They weren't really tall so I took one of the wedges and sliced that in half flat-wise to use as a little "platform" for the wedges. That worked out nicely!

I made a ball onigiri and meant to put sesame seeds on it, but forgot it. I was in a hurry! I put in some sliced bell peppers and colorful tomatoes. Unfortunately, these are not illegal. I'm sure they taste good, just not illegal good. People back in Hilo have this saying that "Lichee tastes better when it's stolen." I know, you're thinking, what the hell kind of people does Pikko hang out with back home??? Stealing lichee isn't that big of a deal because even if you buy it down at the farmer's market, you know they must have stole that anyway. The same can be said for tangerines and some mangoes. Anyway, last of all, I have some julienned baby carrot and parsley.

When I recovered from the Flu of Death, I came back to work to find this amazing "award" on my desk:


Isn't that just about the COOLEST award you've ever seen!? She put everything in! Musubi with ume, sushi grass, fish, chicken, boiled egg, carrot, and even a lil soy sauce bottle. I was blown away, but hadn't had a chance to take a photo until yesterday. I don't know if she would want me to post her name, so I'll just say, you know who you are, thank you so so much! Of course I could just walk 20 steps to her desk to gush about it with her again but bento blog thanks are way cooler.

On to the Chibo pics!


This, obviously, is the entrance to the bathroom. I kid!


As I mentioned, I got a "special dinner" so it came with appetizers. This appetizer tray had beef tataki, tofu, and ahi poke.


The beef. VERY good. I love medium rare! Or rare if you're going to nitpick.


The tofu with bonito and green onion. Most of this went to Baby Girl, until I accidentally let a green onion about 1/2 millimeter in size get onto the piece I gave her. She has razor sharp green onion eyes.


This is the ahi poke. The first piece I ate was great, but the other two had a lot of tsuji, so I didn't like it overall.


My sister-in-law got the yakisoba crepe style and this is her crepe laid out to cook. I got to try some and though it was interesting, I didn't really like it.


The crepe being folded up! He basically dumps the yakisoba into the middle and folds it neatly. Then he adds the okonomiyaki sauce to the top and slices it into fourths.


This is someone'e else's food. I think it's a cabbage one. If you read the Wikipedia article on okonomiyaki that I linked the other day you can get a better description of it. It looked like they were frying cole slaw to me!


And finally we have here my yakisoba "Chibo". I asked for more shrimp instead of squid, but I guess that request didn't make it to the kitchen because I had squid in it. It worked out though, Buddy loved eating little donut shaped food thingers. It should be noted however, that he will eat practically anything. Except eggplant.

I got off my lazy ass and bought shoes for exercising at home and actually did Tae Bo last night. It didn't help that my legs were still rubbery from doing jumping squats, but at least I'm exercising again. I anticipate this lasting at LEAST 3 days. Wedding is less than two weeks away and I'm still at 128. At least I'm not at 132 though, which was where I was at a couple weeks ago.

This morning I was ready to rip my ears off and fling them at Mr. Pikko because I was so frustrated with my earrings. I bought new ones yesterday and for some reason my left ear decided it didn't WANT to have something going through it today. After like half an hour of trying and Mr. Pikko trying, I ended up with my stud in backwards cause that was the only way I could get it in. He tried really hard, but I really wanted to strangle him only because I was so mad at my ears and he was the closest breathing person. Who knew you could get so gosh darned MAD at your own body parts!

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.

Beef Tofu (205)

I woke up this morning thinking it was Friday, so I became very bitter when I started eating my Cheerios and realized it was actually Thursday. Then I came in to work and turned on my computer thinking it was Friday again. Then I went to heat up soup and the thought of it being Friday snuck into my head again. Despite this stupid day insisting on being Thursday, I declare it Friday.

Unfortunately this means I will have to come in to work on "Saturday", but for today, I think I can live with that.

Since I was in a bad mood over this day thing, I didn't do much for today's bento. I had take some of the beef tofu dish leftovers and re-cooked it this morning with added tofu, then just plopped it in with rice from yesterday that Buddy never ate.


The veggies in the middle are bamboo shoots and onions. I didn't cook it, Grandma J did. :) Very yummy, like a beef version of pork tofu but without the thickening. I still have to make my katsu sticks! >.<

Tonkatsu (204)

I type this with blurry eyes. Buddy woke up at 4:15 AM, asking for "chicken and rice" since he didn't eat much dinner the night before. I went to the kitchen and like any other good, kind, caring bento-minded mother woken up at 4 AM would have, gave him a wonderfully nutritious and beautifully prepared breakfast: chopped up microwaved hotdogs. LOL

Did I have you going? I suggested everything from Cheerios to strawberries to pancakes to grapes to peanut butter whole wheat toast. He wouldn't have any of it while he waited for the rice to cook so that I could make him some Costco chicken fried rice, so that's what he ate. And then when the rice was ready to fry, he was "full" and wanted to watch tv. Typical toddler, living in the now, which changes every 5 minutes.


Today I'm having tonkatsu. I had meant to cook some chicken I didn't get a chance to use over the weekend and try chicken katsu in a different way, but fell asleep putting the kids to bed. This looked a lot better before the sauce all oozed together, but unfortunately I took too long to take the picture. The katsu is cut into small pieces, there's rice underneath, and the asparagus lays nicely on top.


In my second tier I have a salad. I topped it with some Costco chicken so that I didn't need dressing, but I might go trolling into the work fridge and see if there's some healthy dressing I could sprinkle on.

Someone commented yesterday with a really great link to a blog post by Biggie on how to do thin omelets in the microwave. It made me think back to when I had lots of time to read everyone's blog and see all the great lunches and I really miss doing that. Biggie has such a wonderful, helpful blog and if I ever get around to constant reading again, hers is definitely on the top of the list. When I first got into bentos a year ago, hers was always a favorite of mine. Please take a look at her site if you haven't seen it yet. ^_^

Meat Loaf (201)

I bet a lot of you have been like, ZOMG, where the hell are the bentos?! Maybe Bento 200 KILLED PIKKO! Ahhhh!!!!

Nah.

I've just had a slew of lunches this week. As I mentioned, Tuesday we went to a Thai restaurant. I ended up not taking any pictures because we ate family style and I didn't know all of the people very well and I thought they might think I'm some kind of freak if I busted out my camera to take pictures of our food before they were allowed to eat it. Plus, the lighting in the restaurant was quite poor. The food was great though! Our waiter was very entertaining and at the end, he brought us out this heaping plate of ice cream on top of warm sticky rice. It was a truly wonderful dessert and we asked him what it was on the menu and he said he'd made it up right there, which I admit kind of disappointed me because I thought it would be a regular dessert I could get at any Thai restaurant. I was very happy that only a couple of the dishes were spicy. I can't handle things that make me want to call the fire department on my mouth.

Wednesday one of my co-workers took me to a birthday lunch, which was really nice. We walked up to Manoa Valley and ate at a little Chinese restaurant called Asia Manoa. I had a Chicken with Vegetable plate that tasted really good. I don't know why, but they served it with I swear, half a pot of rice. My eyes practically fell out of my head when they brought it to the table. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said it was around 4 cups cooked rice.

Thursday we had our monthly work potluck, which I have pictures for after my bento.

Last night we had meat loaf, which I've found to be one of the most difficult things to bento. Then I realized that I could do this food TODDLER STYLE! Toddler style means you chop the food up into little itty bitty bits and mix it all up together with rice. This isn't a bad idea for bento really, since you can mix it all up, add garnishes, and bing! Nicer lunch than you might have had with a hunk of hamburger. Though I dunno about eating the carrots to be honest. Carrots and ketchup just isn't something that sounds good to me. Maybe I can just lick the ketchup off and then eat the carrots? Anyway, that's what's in the main section.

On the side I have cucumber kim chee, takuan sprinkled with roasted sesame seeds, and pickled eggplant.

On to the potluck!


First up is salad from The Boss, made with I think Nalo greens, avocado, and a Costco chicken! With the chicken I didn't need any dressing, which is always a bonus in my opinion.


Next, we have some ham and turkey wraps, which were REALLY good. I love wraps, but the meat in these were the thin sliced deli kind and were really tasty. I had two. >.<


Here we have some pork tenderloin, which was really good! I love stuff with black pepper, that's one spice I really don't mind.


This is a wonderful Salmon and Egg salad with cheese sprinkled on top. Really tasty! Next to that is my bowl of Healthy Rice. I brought my rice cooker in to work so that I could make it fresh here before the potluck. I ate way too much of this stuff. >.<


Here's a veggie platter alongside a cabbage/celery/apple salad which I really liked, though I hope the mayo was light! Next to the veggies was another salad and then a chocolate cake in the back from Safeway. That was good stuff! :D


Lastly, we had some really good banana muffins. I'm not sure what the banana slice on the top meant, but I took one without and it had yummy bits of apple in the middle. Maybe the banana slice one had nuts! If so, I should have taken one, I love nuts.

This has been one heckuva bad eating week, but thankfully, I am still at around 130. This is still not good, but better than I thought. I've been thinking about making a gigantor batch of Cabbage Soup from the Cabbage Soup Diet to eat during the day to fill me up so I snack less.

Before people freak out, I realize that the Cabbage Soup Diet is only water weight loss and not fat. I did it once a few years ago and despite the need to use the bathroom every 15 minutes, I thought the soup tasted pretty decent and the recipe itself is basically all vegetables, so it's actually all Core anyway. I just have to tweak the seasonings enough where I like it a lot and I'll have a large supply of something to eat whenever I get salty tummy rumblings. Plus it's not like I'm giving up bentos, this is just something to eat on the side.

Jang Su Leftovers (197)

I passed out last night with 8 Easter Baskets unfinished and so it was a good (well, not all good) thing that Baby Girl woke up this morning at 5:15 am to announce that she'd wet her bed. We finished them together and she so kindly topped it off with a nice big tantrum/meltdown. I can't wait til these "Tantrum Threes" are over as lately I can just about see the edge of the cliffs of sanity.


There we have it, all 17 baskets. Now my brain can rest easy. One had no tag cause I forgot the name of a kid. 16/17 is still good though...

With all of that going on, I had to rush this bento and managed to finish in 10 minutes. Go me!!


We ate food from Jang Su BBQ last night. This place is at Waimalu Shopping Center and though Kim Chee still has my favorite food, Jang Su's food is pretty good. I took some of the chicken and bulgogi (thin bbq beef). I put some nori paste onto the rice because I just bought a bottle of this recently. I looooove nori paste. They have different types, I think plain, mushroom, and bonito. Since I'm allergic to mushrooms this is the bonito one. Sooo good on rice.

The bulgogi had a lot of fat on it but since I refrigerated it, the fat was white and hard and very easy to just pluck off. Much easier than staring at a piece of hot meat not knowing which is meat and which is fat. Tucked in with it are cucumber pickles and a baby carrot all sliced up. I only put it in for color, I have a whole bag of baby carrots to eat too. I bought one of those Costco baby carrot bags. You know, the one so huge you could mistake it for a Longs bag? (Longs Drugs bags are bigger than supermarket bags, thus are win.) Anyway, I'm in a Carrot Race right now to eat them all before they go bad.

I missed Idol last night and hadn't even watched Tuesday's show. I dunno why but I've lost a lot of interest in this season suddenly. I'm still pulling for David Archuletta and Ramiele Malubay, but I just got so bored with the show. Mr. Pikko says its because of the two weeks of Lennon/McCarthy and I think he's got something there. I mean, they made great songs, but they're very mellow and not very exciting. I don't get how they expect the kids to MAKE a mellow song exciting. Survivor was on last night, but I'll have to watch it tonight! I hope Cirie is finally gone! I despise her for getting rid of Yao Man.

Miso Pork (195)

I thought I had it all figured out last week when I skipped bentos in order to have my 200th bento timed right in time for the day after Easter. But then yesterday I woke up and immediately yakked and stayed home. The one day I made my bento the NIGHT BEFORE (OMG OMG OMG!) I end up sick. I guess me being on time just disgusts my body and this started some kind of inner revolution. So anyway, this was yesterday's bento. I also did not take Good Friday into account. So while I was supposed to have bentos 195-199 done this week, alas, there is a little fly in my ointment.


I made miso pork on Sunday, though this time I put sake and I could really taste it. Since the kids had been throwing tantrums on an hourly basis I drank some of the sake while cooking. Bwahaha!

Okay, that was funnier on Sunday.

I despise the way the pork looks in this picture and it looks that way because it was refrigerated overnight. It looked much more golden brown and attractive when I first made it Sunday. D: Underneath it is the healthy rice I mentioned last week. I sliced up a piece of takuan and tucked it into the section with some cucumber pickles. Lastly I have garlic salted asparagus spears pan fried in olive oil.

I've decided to join Weight Watchers again after Easter. Next Monday will mark 2 months before the wedding and I'm basically 130 right now. My eating habits have really slipped and so I'm hoping having the online tracker at my disposal will once again put me back on track and help me kick off that last 10 pounds. My problem is usually dinnertime and weekends. That and my new weakness for curry ramen. ; ;

I know a bunch of you watch Lost and that you all might agreed the Desmond episode was highly emotional and probably one of the most tear jerking so far. Well that was true before last week's episode, Ji Yeon. My butthead husband figured it out about 15 minutes in, so I didn't have that fuzzy "Oh I'm so stupid to not have figured it out!" feeling. That didn't matter though, I still cried my eyes out. I'm not sure if it's because Sun is Asian and that makes me identify with her more or something, but damn did that scene break me down! I even watched the ending again last night just to find out if it was still that raw and sure enough, Niagra Falls again!



I love, LOVE the new, slow piano theme they play lately. *sigh*

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. ; ;

Turkey Croquette

Living in Hawaii you tend to get used to the whole "small town, small state" thing where everyone seems to have a friend who knows this person who is related to this person who is real good friends with your next door neighbor or something like that. Hilo is especially notorious for this because it's such a small town but it happens here in Honolulu as well. Take for example the fact that one of my readers works at the same campus as me or that one of my FFXI linkshell members is a mere 10 minute walk from my office. A real shining example showed itself today though!

One of my co-workers here calls me over to her desk to show me an e-mail from her sister and it's got the picture of me and Colt in it. I was looking at it thinking, Err... HUH?! Turns out she found my blog, figured out I work at UH, realized her sister also works at UH, thought to ask whether she knows me, and turns out she sits right here in this office with me. We were all cracking up about it. Hi Cindy! Thanks for reading! ^_^


Today I have for lunch the turkey croquette bento I mentioned yesterday. I cut it in half so that it would fit into the box nicer, shoved a tiny bit of white/brown rice into the corner, and added broccoli, sweet potato, carrots, and cucumber kim chee. The cucumbers were being really stubborn because they're big fat pieces, so I sliced it thinly to make them more cooperative and that worked out pretty well.

There are times when my kids drive me completely insane and I blame this for the evil mommy that comes out of me occasionally. I don't know if it's just me and my parents goggles, but sometimes my kids make the most hilarious frickin' faces when they're sad and I crack up laughing. Sometimes when I'm thinking straight I try to hide it, but most of the time I burst into giggles or cackles about it.

Take for instance dessert the other day. Grandma J bought a box of these Skinny Cow fudge bars (which, at 50 calories per, rock by the way) that my kids are now addicted to. Buddy loves them and shared one with me. He couldn't bite it very well so would only come away with little nibbles. When Baby Girl had one to herself, he of course wanted some. Since he was only skimming the surface of the pops, I told her to let him have some since he can't bite off much anyway. She holds it out and he comes over and CHOMPS off a good 1/3 of the bar, leaving her with this look on her face which I think was a mixture of shock and being on the verge of tears. I'm still getting the giggles picturing it now.

Anyway, I told him he should give some back, kind of as a joke. But kids sometimes listen in a very literal sense and so he spits it out, nibbles off a bit, and gives it back to her, melted chocolate and spit and all. Of course, she took it and ate it immediately. lol

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**

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...

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

Beef Curry w/ Croquette

A couple days ago I found out that one of my favorite "secondary" TV shows, The 4400, had been cancelled. This severely pissed me off as it had been in my opinion, one of the best shows on USA. Granted, it was also the ONLY show I watched on USA, but that's neither here nor there. The theme song by Amanda Abizaid is my cell phone ringtone. It's a great lil tune!



So anyway, yeah, I'm mad. Especially since this is the THIRD good, quality show that has been cancelled in the past year. (the second being Journeyman) However, I was happy to find out that there is a movement to save the show, much like the one that successfully saved Jericho. If I'd had my way I would have picked The 4400 over Jericho hands down. You can buy sunflower seeds to send to the network to protest the cancellation. It's 5 bucks though... so I'm still debating. lol Some fan I am.

For lunch today I am having beef curry rice with curry croquette. I plucked out the carrot slices and cut them into flowers with my veggie cutter and then shoved the leftover carrots underneath. The flowers are a little thick, but I didn't have time to slice them up. I had fried two croquettes, but burned the first one by accident... It wouldn't have fit in the bento box anyway!!

My ear has become a mess. I've got this bumpy rash all over it and I totally blame my little eye makeup remover snafu. I can't even tell if it's swollen because all I can think about is how badly it itches. If the rash doesn't clear up soon, I'm definitely going to see my dermatologist.

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