Somen Salad (215)

We had spaghetti for dinner last night but due to some kid craziness, I forgot to take leftovers again, something I was really upset about since I love spaghetti. With no food to take to lunch today, I ended up making somen salad.


I had somen noodles hiding away in a drawer. They've been patiently waiting for me to remember them and so this morning they cried out in joy at the thought of being the center of attention on AIB at last. Luckily, I still had eggs. I say "luckily" because I am really bad at keeping fridge inventory. I'm constantly going to the fridge for eggs or mirin and going, "Oh crap."

I had a kamaboko in the freezer, which was easily defrosted under water. The Okuhara or Okamura or whatever brand of kamaboko is usually cheaper, but having grown up in Hilo, I am biased and always buy the Amano brand. I chopped up romaine lettuce really fine, added the egg (which I did not mess up TOO badly), added the kamaboko, then topped it with toasted sesame seeds. I have the sauce separately. My mom has a reeeeally good somen salad dressing recipe, but unfortunately she never wrote it down and can't quite remember it. She's working on getting it down again and hopefully I can post it then. For today I have store bought sauce.

I was going to add spam to it, but horror of horrors, I looked in my cabinets and found NO SPAM. I AM A DISGRACE TO ALL HAWAII MOTHERS. *sob* Trip to Costco planned ASAP.

As I mentioned, we ate at Kyoto Ohsho on Friday night. This place is located at Ho'okipa Terrace at Ala Moana or "the fancy schmancy top floor".


We had pre-ordered all our food because had a huge ass party (maybe 35 people) but we still didn't get our food until like 7:45, which was quite annoying, especially since we seemed to have only one waiter for all of us. I do have to note though, they have AWESOME rice. I can't really describe it, but the rice was just divine. They brought a bowl of miso soup for the kids and a bowl of rice and while feeding them I tasted some and I just had to keep eating it. Plain, nothing else. It was that good.


I got the Grilled Salmon. Usually I drown (and I am speaking literally) my salmon in shoyu because I just love salmon with my shoyu, but the salmon at Kyoto Ohsho was salted, so it was very tasty on its own. It was also cooked thoroughly, yet still very moist. So in the end, despite the service, I was quite happy with my food. The kids' teriyaki chicken was really good, too. I had a lot more pictures of the appetizers and sides, but I ended up having to delete them because my camera was full. Candle blowing and family pictures are more important than food. ^_^


On Saturday we took the kiddies to go eat at Genki Sushi and while we were eating I suddenly smelled smoke. I looked up and one of the chefs in the middle was flamethrowing some sushi. I picked one up off the line and

OH

MY

GOD

It turned out to be something they'd added since my last visit, Garlic Salmon. It was soooo good. Raw underneath, cooked with char taste and mayo on top, this thing was some of the best sushi I'd had in a really long time. I ordered a second one and popped it into my mouth before remembering to take a picture, so that is why one is missing. I just couldn't wait to eat it!! They had two other garlic sushi types, but I didn't try them. Someone commented on my Flickr stream saying the ahi one wasn't as good, so maybe I'll just stick with the salmon cause boy that one was a winner for sure. Yum!!

Sushi Bento (118)

Today I'm breaking in a new box, my new Monokuro Boo box! This was one I bought a couple weeks ago but just haven't gotten around to using. It's a pretty small box and since I didn't have too much food to put in it, it seemed like the time was right for its debut.


I used two slices of the tamagoyaki I made yesterday and made me some tamago sushi along with a roll of ume maki to use up the last of my leftover rice. To add color I put in some sliced avocado and carrot sticks.


I forgot to sharpen the image this morning before uploading so the photo is a lil bit fuzzy. I have peeled rambutan and cigar mango in the bottom layer but didn't think it was exciting enough to photograph.

I do believe this is one of my very rare vegetarian bentos. I'll probably end up eating some Smart Pop today to help fill the meat void. I have heard about the whole popcorn lung thing, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop eating popcorn altogether. What I have decided is that eating a bag 3-4 times a week probably isn't a good idea anymore, so I'm limiting myself to one bag per week.

I've also got to somehow get my brain back onto the points system. I've been having difficulties ever since I dropped down past 130 because I guess part of me feels that this is the lightest I've been since 1997 so I'm really still way ahead of myself. I find myself still watching my portions but I no longer pay strict attention to how many points I'm eating. Still, I've been bouncing between 125 and 128 for the last month, so I suppose I haven't been all THAT naughty with my eating habits.

Bento #100!!!!!

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


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


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

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

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

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

Jennie from the US!

Why Jennie loves bento:

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

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

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

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

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

California Roll & The Dreaded Ex

I have a lot to write about today but first order of business: the bento. I had a pretty wild and rampant calorie weekend, eating a total of 5 Pizza Hut slices (3 Veggie Lovers and 2 Pepperoni) as well as having some very yummy Nabeyaki Udon from Kabuki Waimalu last night. Plus Milano Freezer and cheesecake afterwards, eeps! Anyway, I have to let myself down slowly, so today I have a 4 point bento all from the rice in the sushi.

This bento has some imitation crab that I bought at Don Quijote and I've made a note never to buy their imitation crab again as it was quite smelly and some pieces were a bit slimy. I picked the best looking and best feeling one and threw the rest away. It's not even crab of a good consistency, being very rubbery and hard. I've seen the kind at Foodland which is the one that is pretty soft and you can peel the layers off. They're covered in a plastic wrap and freeze well too. I bought it from Don Quijote because I went there to get something else and was too lazy to go to two markets just for imitation crab. Though now I have to go to two anyway to get more crabso good job me!


On the side I have edamame and soy sauce in a tomato bottle. I totally love the already-cooked edamame they sell at Costco, but it freezer burns very quickly, so you kinda have to eat it fast.

Next up is the garden! I have some new pictures of my brand new tomatoes, which have finally shown themselves!! First up, a general picture of the plants now:


I had larger versions of these pictures but I forgot to upload them to my domain so I'll fix that up later tonight if I remember. Next is a picture of my corn plants:


And finally we have my little babies:


I have like around 10. I had 11 until I accidentally broke one off. :( They're growing pretty quickly as this morning when I went to check on them, they were noticeably bigger!

Ok and last but not least, the dreaded ex. No, I did not run into an ex-boyfriend! I was lying on the couch watching something when I realized that I'm having a hard time sticking to the 5 points a day Core diet so the only thing left for me is to... ugh... exercise. Apparently I mean business too because I went out last night and jogged. An entire mile. A little factoid about me: I despise jogging. I mean what's not to hate? You get tired as heck, your legs hurt, your face turns red, you sweat like mad, you feel like crap. Or at least, I do anyway. I know people who love to run feel good while doing it but I don't run, therefore I don't feel good while doing it. When I came back in last night and went to shower the person looking back from the mirror said, "Don't you ever freakin' do that to me again!" But hopefully I will keep it up. I sure do need it with my jelly belly.

And speaking of jelly belly as a result of pregnancy, I had a sudden surge of hits yesterday, over 500 on a Sunday! I guess someone posted my link on a baby board and now loads of new mamas came here to read and look at my interesting hotdogs. Welcome ladies!! Hope you're all having great healthy pregnancies!! ^_^

One last thing, the bentochallenge poll is up, so if you liked my

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!

Inarizushi with veggies

Ok so I realized just now that Flickr is resizing my 1000 pixel wide shots to 500 pixels, so there's no real point in uploading a big size and a small size if the big is only 100 pixels wider. If I have time I'll upload the big files to my Swapsonian domain later.

Due to an extremely busy television night with two 2-hour finales, (one which cut off right after Ryan Seacrest said, "After a world record 74 million votes, the American Idol 2007 is...") I could only make another small bento. As for the finale, it would be an understatement to say that I was pretty upset had to go look online to find out who won. That's twice in one month mah TiVo let me down!

This one is pretty simple with just two cone sushi (inarizushi), the last of my cucumber kim chee with some leftover diced carrots that I put into the sushi rice, and three grape tomatoes on the brink of death. Not sure I'll eat the tomatoes... When I was growing up we always called inarizushi "cone sushi" because sometimes people make it by cutting the aburage diagonally and then stuffing it, making it look like a cone. But anytime I see this kind of sushi I just call it cone sushi cause that's what I'm used to.


This doesn't look like much, but quite a bit of rice can fit into those tofu skins so it comes out to 1/2 a cup of rice in the whole meal. I'd bought a package of already cooked, already simmered, already cut aburage so all I did was rip open the package and stuff the skins. The instructions were all in Japanese so good thing there was little need for them.

So much for my all Core lunches, ha! I knew it wasn't going to fill me up, so I also brought along baby carrots, watermelon, a fuji apple, and some grapes. Contrary to what I said earlier this week I'm now thinking of toning down my diet and losing weight at a much slower rate so that I'm able to keep my healthy eating mentality longer. I don't want to suddenly fling myself off the diet in anticipation of all the missed rice and bread I've been thinking of this whole time. I won't be in my friend's wedding for another 7 months, so that's quite a long while for me to lose the last 14 pounds considering I lost 16 in just under two months.

Roast Pork Sushi w/ pickles

Yesterday's lunch was a success! I ran into a co-worker on the way to the microwave and after he gave me some paperwork, he came back to ask if I'd bought my lunch or made it, because it looked very good. Aww, make my day! The Freska mango, though yellow skinned, was frakin' green!! I should have taken a pic of my face eating it, I'm sure it was caved in. I ended up eating the cocktail tomato and it tasted better than the first two I'd eaten. Maybe ignoring them in the fridge for a week sweetens them up...

We took a trip to Costco tonight since we needed gas and after going in for just sweet bread and milk, I filled up the wagon with a bunch of healthy things I thought would look nice such as Manoa green leaf lettuce ($3.99 for three huge heads), a box of grape tomatoes ($5.79), Laughing Cow Light Swiss Cheese ($7.69) because I'm not eating my dairy every day, English cucumbers (3 for $4.49), a whole pack of 6 mangoes that look like yesterday's Freska mango ($5.49), a huge bag of French green beans ($5.49), and blackberries ($5.99, they were on sale! Woo!). So... now I have an assload of tiny sweet tomatoes which I will no doubt only eat half of, and lots of other veggies and fruits.

MIL's dinner tonight was pot roasted pork shoulder and the pot looked really oily, so I had to pick out every little piece of fat and as I was eating tried to think of a good way to incorporate this into today's lunch without being excessive. Since Nexa mentioned sushi yesterday, I thought I'd give that a try for once.

I've never made sushi before and I have never eaten pork sushi before. Hopefully, there's not some super secret good reason why you don't see pork sushi. Regarding taste, I figure if I would have eaten dinner with rice (I skipped the rice so I could eat it for lunch), the pork, and won bok all together anyway, then what is the difference if it's rolled up in nori?? Anyway, after a small snafu with unnecessarily cutting the nori sheet in half, I managed to make my first ever sushi roll! It cut pretty easily and I started on the second. Sadly, I ended up with a little extra rice and instead of leaving it out like I should have, I shoveled it all on and ended up with two different sized sushi rolls. Darn it!!

And then to add to my un-neatness so far, my daughter comes into the kitchen asking what I'm doing. When she hears I'm making sushi of course she wants one. I give her one of the skinny ones. She doesn't eat it after the first two bites of course. Oh well, no biggie. I filled up the space with grape tomatoes. Added in some cucumber salad I saw on another blog along with kim chee, chopped sanbaizuke, and chopped takuan. I put all of these in little lettuce lined foil squares to keep the liquid and shape in.


Next I did the fruit bowl, which was very frustrating. I sliced up half of a minneola that was hiding in the fridge and those damned slices just would not arrange nicely. I added more of the Super-Lemon-like "Freska" from yesterday. Stuck in one of the cheese triangles, a strawberry, and some blackberries.



I can sense doom approaching. It's only my second bento and already I'm a bit pissy that I'm still using the same containers over and over. This will end up making my fancy new bento pictures monotonous!! Must go find more cheapie boxes to use!! Maybe only walking into a store with a ten dollar bill and no purse will help me control my spending...

Due to the lack of experience with sushi, the discovery that I had no grater for the cucumber slicing, and the stupid minneola slices this lunch took me a whole freakin' hour to put together. I intend to cut that time at least in half next time!

This meal isn't very Core unfortunately. The rice is half brown, so counts as 2 points. The cheese is 1 point and the pork another point. A 4 point lunch, which means tomorrow I have to make sure I eat a Core dinner or exercise.