120 x 520

I'm sorry for the lack of bento lately, but I've been really busy and tired this week! I have a lot of food to show though! I'm still missing one picture from lunch yesterday and can post that next week or something.

Monday and Tuesday I had to help at the Pacific Rim Disabilities Conference. It was in Waikiki and so during lunch on Tuesday we went across the street to the Waikiki Shopping Plaza or Center or whatever it's called. There was a food court downstairs and we wandered in and I saw this place called Kiwami Ramen. It was full of Japanese people and the prices were great, so I gave it a try. Unfortunately I couldn't try their extensive menu inside at the bar (which served Kirin!) because two of my coworkers were eating elsewhere. I picked from their small take-out menu and got Shoyu Ramen with a Tasty Egg added in.


It was really oily, but it was REALLY good. This one had their "thin noodle" and it was perfectly cooked. The tasty egg was great, though I didn't eat the yolk. It seemed to be a hard boiled egg simmered in dashi. I definitely have to drag someone down there to eat with me sometime.

Wednesday I was extremely lazy and had this craving for cold tofu, so I brought bentos of fruits and veggies and a whole package of tofu. I didn't even bother to pack it in a box, I just bought the whole container and cut it open at work. I ate the whole block of tofu, LOL. And I'm not talking about the half block, I ate a whole block!


Baby carrots and edamame, carefully placed side by side.


Here I have a plum cut into wedges and then some green grapes we got at Costco.


I brought this for lunch yesterday, but we ended up walking to Manoa Marketplace to eat at the ramen shop up there. I forget the name of it and haven't done the picture yet, so I'll give more info on that later. So... this is what I'm eating today. It's beef broccoli and I garnished it with a tofu daisy and bell pepper flowers. I cut a thin slice of tofu and cut it out with my flower veggie cutter. Buddy ate the leftovers. I bought red bell peppers to eat with eggs, so you guys will probably be seeing a lot of red in my bentos in the coming weeks. :D


My second layer has strawberries and green grapes again.

I bet you're wondering what 120x520 is. That is my goal. The wedding is at the end of May, so I am aiming to be 120 by 5/20. Everytime I want to eat bad things or go for seconds, I will tell myself "120 by 520!" and hopefully that will keep me in line. It's my weight loss mantra. I was up to 132 last week, but with the mantra this week am back down to 130. 120 by 520!

One last thing... I know I have quite a few Oahu readers, so I thought I'd mention that my workplace has recently opened up their diabetes study to the entire community of Oahu. If you or anyone you know has diabetes and would like more information on how you can participate, please visit our website: Live Healthy... Work Well. Tell them you heard about it on my blog!

Pork Tofu (202)

With Mr. Pikko and Baby Girl off to a lesson on Saturday, I trucked Buddy off to the supermarket to buy vegetables for my soup. I ended up trying the first Garden Vegetable Soup recipe I found. Though I didn't need any, Buddy would not stop furiously pointing at the "brokko zee" until I picked up this one tiny little stalk that got broken off and gave it to him. This did not satisfy him because after I handed it to him, he demanded "BEEG WUN!" but then I put it in a bag and suddenly it was like, Magical Bagged Broccoli Extraordinnaire and we were able to move on.

Having not made a soup in quite a while, I opted for the whole head of cabbage instead of the conveniently cut-in-half ones. I figured, the recipe said "half a cabbage", so I just bought one, thinking I'd just go double.

I do not recommend this unless you want a pretty good vegetable soup with ASSLOADS of cabbage in it. No, seriously. It tastes pretty good, kinda like the Campbell's Vegetable Soup (which I love) but with enough cabbage to kill someone. I looked at other recipes this morning and found that you're supposed to use 2 cups cabbage. Great. Good thing cabbage is cheap. I used vegetable bullion and don't have nearly enough soup for the vegetables, so I'm kinda stuck eating mostly heaps of cabbage for the early part of this week so that at the end of the week, I can have a nice soupy soup. Next batch, I will use beef bullion, cause I had to add some extra salt this round.


I made Pork Tofu this past weekend. Grandma J makes a really good non-spicy Mapo Tofu and I use this recipe as a substitute for when I want some. It reminds me a lot of the Pork Tofu dish that Y's Lunch Shop used to make on occasion. Let me tell you, that dish was made in heaven. Whenever I saw they had it, I bought it. Mine totally pales in comparison, the only thing similar is the look. I think maybe when the wedding comes around, I should beg my friend to bring me some Y's before she drives over from Hilo side. The last time I went to my cousin's wedding in Kona my aunty did that, bringing us musubi and fish. I'm drooling right now just remembering it.

Anyway, this is Pork Tofu with some diced carrot on top for color and my brokko-zee.


We bought champagne mangoes at Costco yesterday but I need to go get credit for it or something. I cut them open and they were black in the middle. These ones were the third mango I peeled and though it was still black, I just cut that part out. Added some strawberries in too, sliced up for easy eating. ^_^

I never did post more pictures of my wheat grass! It's dying by now and I had to toss most of it out due to mold, but I will try again and this time will harvest them as sprouts as they look in this stage here:


They were actually pretty sweet and tender at this stage. Right now my last tray of grass is really stringy and tastes like... well, grass. The sprouts were much better. I still have a huge bag of berries, so I think I'll just grow a batch, harvest sprouts fresh from my desk at work, and then start over. It's really quite fun!!

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!

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. ; ;

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!!

3 Bento Day & Store

Today is Admissions Day, the day that Hawaii became the 50th state. It's also check-ins at UH Manoa which means that starting Monday, I'll be taking much longer naps on the way in to work. Muahaha! Anyway, while normally I'd be celebrating a long weekend, Mr. Pikko has to work so that means for the next two days I have to watch my two darlings by myself. In case it's lost in the interwebs, I say that with sarcasm. Somewhere along the way my children were replaced with Tazmanian devils. Today Baby Girl stripped and refused to put on clothes for 2 hours and Buddy spilled like 4 cups of water and 3 bowls of cheerios.


My bento today consists of all leftover things. Strawberry spinach salad on the right side topped with slivered almonds. In the strawberry bottle is some of my MIL's salad dressing that goes with this salad. On the left side I have two pieces of leftover Tiger Maki, which is basically a California roll with shrimp covering the top. Sadly, I did not make it, I bought it yesterday from Sushiman. Also on the left is edamame soaked in something that smells like Italian dressing and then in the little cup is the rest of my cucumber pickles and a grape tomato.


In the hopes that they'd calm down, I made the two little hurricanes spam musubis and put them into little bentos. Baby Girl did not do so well, eating only the sweet potatoes, cheese, and apples. I guess by the time she was done with that she wasn't hungry enough for the musubi. Though she claims she'll eat it later, I had to toss it out. She can eat one of the extras when she gets up from nap.


Buddy is very good with vegetables, so his bento is structured a bit differently. He's got spam musubi just like his sister but also has edamame sticks, chunks of apple, cucumber slices, and carrot fishies. Unfortunately since their goal for the weekend is to drive me insane, he ninja'd a sweet potato star from Baby Girl who then screeched to high heaven about it and when I convinced him to give it back to her, she then threw it back at him declaring it "Yucky!!" because "He SPIT on it!!" *sigh* Although he completely dismantled the musubi, he did eat it all. And he ate most of the veggies and all of the apples!

The store has been updated with most of the new items I have available, most notably the boxes. I have a few more accessories I have to put up, but aren't those Hello Kitty boxes adorable?!? Click the link in the sidebar to take a look!

Pointless Bento

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


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


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


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

Turkey Sandwiches

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

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


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


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


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

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

Korean BBQ Chicken

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

Hello Kitty onigiri w/ gyoza

I joined a LiveJournal community called bentochallenge where they post weekly themes and you have a week to post entries for it. This week's theme is Red and I've been wanting to do something for it all week. I finally had the time and plan for it last night! I hope to do another one tomorrow for Baby Girl in the shape of Elmo. (still brainstorming all the details)

This was the first time I was able to use my Hello Kitty onigiri mold and I'm pretty happy with the result, though I'm not sure why the mold has little indentations for the eyes and bow and stuff cause there's no way it would show on the rice. Maybe this is an ice cream mold and I'm just a total dork. Here she is:


I have no shame in asking for showers of praise for this entry because I had to cut all those little nori whiskers, eyes, and nose by hand with a scissors and then apply them with a pair of tweezers! Feel free to hand out ooohs and aaahs for that red pepper ribbon too cause it took me (I swear) 15 minutes to cut with a knife. D: Miss Kitty has ume (more red) in the middle.

Also included are two pieces of Ajinomoto brand pork gyoza, which are basically little dumplings of heaven. They cost 1 WW point each, so that's why I only packed two. Next to it is some finely chopped bell pepper fried in the leftover juices of the gyoza (which doesn't require oil to fry, just water). I added a tomato shaped soy sauce container for the gyoza.


The bottom layer was quite the adventure to make as well. I bought a section of watermelon at Safeway and finally cut up that tuscan melon I bought at Costco. As I expected, the tuscan tastes wonderful! Anyway, I still had some galia melon, so I cut out flowers from all three melons then carved out a little center from each one with a plain ole drinking straw and exchanged the centers with other colors! Inside the bear cup is some fat free, sugar free instant pudding with a raspberry nose and blackberry eyes. Added the Babybel and strawberries for more red. I had to rearrange the strawberries and cheese to close it up, but it didn't look much different.

Here's the lunch all packed up and my miso soup in a red soup Tupperware to make my red meal complete. (and to help fill up my tummy)

This is a pretty naughty lunch. The gyoza are 2 points, the onigiri 1 point, the Babybel 2 points for a total of 4 points for lunch. But this should be ok since yesterday I had a relatively low points day. I may end up skipping the cheese though, as eating them again and again doesn't seem to change the fact that they don't taste too good. :(

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.

Children's Day!

Today is Children's Day! Excuse me... Boy's Day. I'm not sure when Boy's Day became Children's Day, but the poor guys got their holiday sniped from them, no idea when. When I was growing up I only knew of Girl's Day and Boy's Day. Anyway, as a treat for the kiddies I made them each a bento. I started off making the same one for both of them, which featured peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but as I was pbing the third slice of bread I remembered that Buddy isn't supposed to eat nuts until he's 3. (wtf 3)

Realizing I had to make two completely different lunches, I decided to make them very specific to each of their likes. Baby Girl got peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into circles, then cut in half. One half looked ugly so I ate it. (ha!) Four pieces weren't going to fit anyway, so that worked out. There was some empty space, so I filled that with Okinawan sweet potato. The other side had cubed mango, a cheese wedge, and 4 reduced fat Triscuit. I tried to find her tiny little toy food knife to pack, but I couldn't find it. I even looked under the couch and in the process I discovered 5 books, miscellaneous toy utensils, a watercolor set, a packet of cooking chopsticks I really could have been using before today, and one icky roach. :(

Anyway, she loved it and miraculously ate everything. She especially loved using the pick to eat the mango!


For Buddy's lunch I sliced up the last piece of leftover teri beef and added julienned carrots. I had bought some onigiri flavor packets and so I made him some little onigiri with the salmon flavored one. The other side had sweet potato and the cutest tiny strawberries, which I found in the boxes of strawberries I bought the other day. They were so adorable, just like the ones you grow in your backyard! He ate everything in his lunch too, so both were very successful with the kids. ^_^


We stopped at Windward Mall and I managed to drag us all to the Marukai store there. I found some $1.49 2-tier bento boxes, veggie shaped soy sauce bottles, and more food picks. I was going to pack a salad for myself so I could have a Core lunch, but then I weighed myself and I'd dropped over half a pound from yesterday. So I ate at Arby's! *gasp* But I was good, ate a grilled chicken sandwich and when I saw there was mayo on the bun, I stopped eating the top half.

Tonkatsu

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

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

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


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


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

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. ^_-