The Road to 200

Alrighty, it is now 1:52 AM on Friday and I am obviously tired out of my mind and starving to boot. However, I brushed my teeth to ensure that I wouldn't eat something just before going to bed. No guarantees on correct spelling and grammar in this post though.

As I mentioned yesterday, the kiddie terrors put a damper on my Thursday plans, so I had to continue my bento tonight. This one took me a lot longer than the first, mostly because the food preparation took so much time. I took three hours yesterday to cook food and today I took another three hours to complete the embellishments, bringing this gigantic mass of Sanrio lunch to six hours preparation time. Here it is!! (click it for bigger photo)



Before I start describing just how messed up in the head I am, let me just say that I'm not all that pleased with the results I got from this landmark lunchie. I had envisioned something much more vibrant in color and my favorite character, Pochacco, ended up looking the worst of the little guys. I think it still looks cute and all, but it's nowhere near the one I'd put together in my head.

There is food underneath the characters and so at the top I have oyako donburi sprinkled with chopped wheatgrass, since I had no green onions. I thought this was amusing since we watched the finale of Celebrity Apprentice last night and so much attention was given to wheatgrass, which I just so happen to be growing all over my house and at work. Too funny!! On the right side there is some vegetable yakisoba, on the bottom I have little squares of Okinawan sweet potato. People ask me about the potato all the time and to answer the inevitable question again: No, I do not dye the potato. It is naturally colored that way. On the left I have shelled edamame.


First up, to get rid of my shame early, is what is supposed to be Pochacco. I think I just picked a bad picture of him to copy and it was too small as well. He's made out of nori, pear skin (shirt), egg, and toasted sesame seeds. All the little characters sit on a d'anjou pear star. I thought afterwards that I should have dyed it yellow to add more color, but by then I had already stuck Bad Badtz and Keroppi on, so it was basically too late. *sob* Also, I had wanted to use my star shaped Whale of a Punch, but it's gone AWOL. I suspect either Baby Girl or Buddy have hidden it in a secret place and have forgotten where already. So anyway, that star is freehand!

I had previously used white cheese or d'anjou pear to make white things but finally figured out something even better! Boiled egg whites! With all the boiled eggs still sitting in the fridge, I realized that it would make the perfect white carving material. It worked out great for all the characters. I am so unhappy with Pochacco that I wasn't going to take a close-up picture of him. But then I realized that he's sitting on top of my donburi and I didn't want him to get offended and pee all over my food. He is a dog after all...


Monkichi is a rather old Sanrio character from when I was in high school. I'm not sure a lot of kids nowadays would recognize him. I made him out of hotdog skin. You can kinda see how he is slightly curled, which actually turned out good because it made him look more 3D. The lighter parts of him are hotdog as well, only the inside part is showing outwards. I forgot to make him his two cheeks, but after six hours I no longer give a crap.


Picke Bicke is another older character that you don't see around much anymore. He's a cute little mouse that should have a tail with a red ribbon on it, but it was too microscopic of an effort for me to undertake. His ears are made out of Okinawan sweet potato, his body is made out of sliced ham, and the white parts on him are boiled egg. His eyes and nose are toasted sesame seeds, which I trimmed to give them less of a pointy shape.


Chococat was nice and simple and I took us to McDonald's and made Mr. Pikko run out and grab a straw for me to cut out his eyes easily. I should have had my own straws at home, but since my children like to drink with at least 5 straws at a time, we run out pretty quick. His eyes and mouth are made out of boiled egg and nori. I used a hole puncher to make his nori pupils. His collar is boiled egg dyed yellow and his nose is a little bit of hotdog. He's quite happy to be sleeping on a bed of edamame!


For some reason, Keroppi was very difficult to photograph. I had to try 4 different angles and finally got one that didn't have too much shadow. Same as the last time I made him, his face is made out of d'anjou pear skin. This time though, his eyes are made with boiled egg instead of cheese and his shirt (tomato skin) is not striped this time. I forgot to give him cheeks too!! :(


I have saved the Badtz for last. He's such a great character and if Pochacco is my cutie pie favorite, Bad Badtz is my favorite Sanrio character with attitude. He's of course, being a rascal and sticking tongue at you, no doubt thinking several kinds of @*#& thoughts. I cut him out of nori and then put egg white eyes and tummy on top. His beak is the same as Chococat's collar, egg white dyed yellow. His tongue is made out of tomato skin and nori. He was by far my favorite to make!!

In the middle of all of them I have the Queen of them all, Hello Kitty. Her ribbon is made out of red-dyed pear. The onigiri is to eat with the donburi. I lined the whole box with lettuce to make it look a little more frilly. I still wish I'd thought early on to dye the pear stars yellow. That would have looked great! I had tried to make colored egg omelettes to wrap my food into so that I could have brightly colored sections of egg wrapped food. The egg stuff just wasn't meant to be for some reason.

For one, I was cracking the five eggs needed for the donburi and on the fifth egg, I crack it open and blood comes pouring out. I was SO disgusted and didn't feel like scooping it out. What a total waste of 5 eggs. And then, I'm preparing the omelette mix when I add in the red coloring to make it pink. What do I get? ORANGE EGG MIX! Grrrr!! I tried cooking it, but it just didn't look good. I ended up using it to wrap some string beans in. You can see a few down by Badtzmaru. I'd also wanted to use a pink bento box, but I didn't have any that were big enough for what I needed.

I had more to talk about, but right now my eyes are closing involuntarily. I hope you guys like it. Tomorrow I probably won't eat anyone except Hello Kitty. I'll line them up in the bento cover and they can watch me eat lunch.

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**

Zoo Bento (183)

Today was a rather exhausting day. It was President's Day and since I work for the state, of course we get the day off. At least, I think it's President's Day... lol! Anyway, my mom stayed over last night so that we could go to the zoo together today before she flew home. I made a bento for all of us. Mr. Pikko was going to go, but then discovered the toilet was leaking and so had to stay home and fix that. Yuck!!

So me and moms headed off to the zoo with one really itchy girl (she broke out in hives last night for some unknown reason) and one monkey. It took us like an hour to get from the car to the picnic area because Buddy wanted to stop and "WHOAAAAAA!" at everything. It was a sweltering day and I was ready to leave after staying 5 minutes in the Keiki Zoo.

I made spam musubis and tucked in some sliced fishcake to fill the spaces on the side. This time I used Spam Lite so that I could excuse myself for eating more than one. ^_^


I could have just brought the musubis and that would have been enough, but I made yakisoba, sweet potato, and shoyu hotdog for the second layer. I don't know why, but it didn't even occur to me to use my octopus dog cutter that I bought from J-List during Christmas. I was packing them in when I remembered it and I was ready to kick myself. Oh well... next time!! Baby Girl didn't seem to mind. She grabbed like 5 hotdogs and proclaimed to all that were listening that those were HER hotdogs. When she couldn't eat them all she ever so graciously gave them to Buddy to eat. Cause she's so nice like dat.

For the yakisoba I just had a package of yakisoba noodles in the freezer. I bought a bag of stir fry veggies, fried it in 2 Tb of olive oil, added two slices of Spam, the noodles, and then 10 Tb of oyster sauce. Very quick and easy to make and tastes really good. I have some for my lunches this week.

After the zoo we went to Waiola for shave ice and man the line was retardedly long. My mom took like 20 minutes to come back with the cups. Tasted so good though, was worth the wait. Anyway, it's 8 pm and I need to go bathe and pass out.

Chicken Tofu (143)

The highlight of my day came this morning. I was just about to lie back and fall asleep on the way in to work when Kanoa Leahey (we listen to Leahey and Leahey on Mondays and Fridays) says, "Soon we'll be joined by Dana White, president of the UFC!" and both me and Mr. Pikko were like, "WHAAAT!" lol

It was a cool interview and Mr. Pikko had me call the show people (I talked to a screener) to ask them to ask Dana White if he was ever going to bring UFC to Hawaii. They did ask, whether it was because of my call, I'll never know, but he did say that perhaps in 2009 there would be a Hawaii UFC card. But yeah, possible third hand phone call question to Dana White was pretty amusing, haha!

Yesterday was a very rainy, gloomy, and chilly day so it was really cool to be greeted with the nice smell of hot miso soup yesterday evening. My MIL's chicken tofu is a really good rainy weather comfort food and though I wanted to make more miso soup and bring it in today, I ended up deciding I didn't feel like going through the hassle of making it this morning. There was a lot left over, so I took what I thought was a really small portion, but when I put it into the box it looked like a lot of food!


I cooked rice this morning for this, meaning it will probably go to waste. I always tell myself I should freeze onigiri, but I always forget cause my brain is so muddled lately. On the left side I have cucumber slices, some kamaboko, and okinawan sweet potato.

!!!SURVIVOR SPOILERS!!!




Two weeks ago I was fuming at the tv and cussing at the pompous and cocky attitude of Jaime, who thought she was so funny and clever to be throwing a challenge to vote off one of their new tribemates that she couldn't help snickering at the thrown challenge AND could not help laughing at tribal council. I was just like, what a freakin' bean!!! I hated her!! Things started to look up last week when Todd gave the hidden immunity idol to James with a plan to get rid of Jaime. That didn't go well since they didn't win immunity, so I was let down.

BUT THEN! Oh this week was such sweet television watching. I finally got to watch that snide chick get her bachi. She has in her possession what is a "fake" immunity idol, so she plays it before the votes are read. Jeff Probst says that if she has immunity, then all votes for her do not count, then he announces that it's NOT the idol and then throws her idol into the fire. HAHAHAHAHA! And then she gets voted off! Oh my gawd. Picture me on the couch rolling, dying, crying. lol

Man I <3 Survivor.

Wraps & Watermelon (140)

I think this is my worst bento so far. It's terribly underwhelming but all I had the time for this morning. On Sunday I wanted to eat the turkey wraps from Costco again so this holds the last 3 pieces leftover. I cut them in half to stow them away nicely but it turned out to be a pretty boring display, so I added some flower shaped sweet potato slices to the top. It still didn't turn out as nice as I wanted it to, but oh well. It'll taste good anyway! :)


On the side I have some slices of watermelon that my mom had bought us at the pumpkin patch. It had tons of seeds so I removed all of them for easy eating while I cut it all up. It's super sweet!! I included a tiny pink fork to eat them with. I bought these back during my E3 trip this past summer when my cousin took me to Little Tokyo. It's so nice to finally put them to use! Aren't they adorable! I have white, green, and pink ones.

I've been debating taking my store down for a while since I am having so much stress lately. I'm thinking maybe I could open it back up after Fan Fest when things are much calmer. Right now, I end up taking so freaking long to ship things and I feel terrible about it. I'll let you all know what I decide. >.<

I've got a hilarious kid story to share today. My son does not say "grandma" yet and this drives my MIL nuts, so she's constantly pointing to herself and saying, "Who am I?" or "Who is this??". Yesterday we got home and she tells us rather dejectedly that he's been making this kinda grunting noise to refer to her, like Grt grt! or something. So she demonstrates for us and I about died right there. She was wearing a pink shirt with three piggies on the front. So whenever she pointed at herself she was pointing at the pigs and saying, "Who's this?" and so he'd grunt like a pig. LOL

Soot Ball Onigiri

When I first started getting full on into doing bento every day, one of my favorite images was from Little Yuzu's blog in which she did some soot ball onigiri from Spirited Away. Since the bentochallenge this week is Hayao Miyazaki, I had to do one. It's been done quite a few times on other blogs I've seen such as Lunch in a Box and Kitchen Cow, but as I mentioned it's one of my favorite bentos ever so despite the unoriginality that's what I'm eating today.

Yesterday I went home with a bad stomach ache so Mr. Pikko brought me back some pork hash from dinner at his mom's and some kind of tofu carrot patty, which tasted really good. I decided to use that for the filling in my onigiri. The rice came out to just about 1 cup cooked rice, so this bento will be 4 points just like yesterday's. It may look like more, but the filling takes up a decent amount of space inside.


The eyes are made with swiss cheese and I had a hard time with it because I don't have anything circular to cut them out with that small. My first try, I used the bottom of one of my soy sauce bottles but that turned out to be too small so I used one of my thermos soy sauce bottles instead. The nori pupils were punched with my happy face punches from Japan. The stars are made from carrot, Okinawan sweet potato, and cucumbers.

I showed it to Baby Girl and she loved it but I showed it to Buddy and he immediately backed away whimpering with his scared face, so I guess big black onirigi with eyeballs staring at him is way too scary! lol

As you can see from today's and yesterday's photos I'm pretty bored with my plain white background and so have decided to put my numerous furoshiki cloths to use as prettier backgrounds. So far I am pretty happy with how it turns out. It adds more life to the photo, don't you think?

I didn't go jogging again last night because of my lingering stomachache plus my legs are so sore I can barely walk right. We'll see how I do tonight. No promises on that one since tonight I have to make #100, get more bento orders ready, and do the drawing.

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!

Spare Ribs

Last night my MIL made my personal favorite of all her dishes, spare ribs. It stinks something awful due to the vinegar she puts in to soften the meat, but man is it the tastiest, most tender thing ever! As soon as we walked in the door yesterday we were like *gag*, but it was an odd mixed feeling because we knew dinner would totally rock. Unfortunately, as much as the food rocks, I was in a complete rush this morning and so the colors in this one are rather drab.


I took a medium sized rib that had a little chunk of meat stuck to it so that it would arrange nicely. In a food cup next to it I have some corn and then tucked into the sides are some Okinawan sweet potato.

I've taken the day off to take Baby Girl to a doctor appointment and will be going to Price Busters to buy some Hello Kitty bento boxes to add to the store. Once I get back, I'll take pictures and add them to the store! YaY!

Starry Bento

This morning as I was watering the plants, I was ecstatic to find two string beans growing on Baby Girl's plant!!! We're so thrilled!! Even though I know she doesn't like green beans, she's very excited about giving them to Grandma to cook for her dinner. I'll post a garden update tomorrow. The watermelon plant is doing awesome too. My tomatoes are unfortunately quite sickly and yellow. Damned leafminers. Grr!!

My friend went to Japan last month and I'd asked him to keep an eye out for these cute nori punches I wanted from eBay. The shipping was something stupid, like $16. A cheapy girl like me is incapable of paying so much shipping!!! Anyway, he and his girlfriend brought it by the other day and he gave it to me as a gift. Infinite thanks to you Shawn!!! Even more awesome, turns out his girlfriend is into bento too. I've used it in today's bento and I totally love it already!! This will be sooo valuable for making kids bentos! As I mentioned earlier this week, the bento challenge theme is "stars". So without further ado, my starry bento:


Two onigiri with the nori punch faces plus two meatballs to go with it, pierced with a starfish food pick. In the green cup I have some sanbaizuke pickles. Off to the side are star shaped sweet potato and bell peppers. I had to put the bell peppers because the purple stars were real hard to see, plus I wanted more color.

Someone commented in a previous post that the Aidell's meatballs are very salty. I do agree they're quite spicy and rather salty, but I'm one that puts soy sauce on plain rice and chucks salt on my food like crazy, so I apologize if I've caused people to try something with too much sodium! I've still got buttloads of meatballs to use up, so expect to see meatball bentos for a while! My deadline to use them is July 9.

I'm back down to 130.8 as of this morning, so this 4 point lunch should be ok. Can I break the 130 barrier this weekend??

Big Bambucha Bento

Since today's bento contents pale so much in comparison to my onolicious steak stir fry yesterday, I tried to make up for it's lameness in size. There's no way I can eat this all for lunch, so I'll probably just snack on it occasionally all day.


In the top right corner I put some slices of baked Okinawan Sweet Potato. Next to that are rows of broccoli and cauliflower, leftover from Monday's dinner. Baby carrots and half an ear of corn surround the main part of my meal, lomi lomi salmon. If you've never heard of it or never eaten it, you really should! It's an all Core dish, very easy to make, and is full of taste! Do a Google search on it and you'll find tons of recipes. You basically just chop up salted salmon, tomatoes, sweet onion, and green onions then massage all the ingredients together. Extreme close-up!

In addition to all of this I'm taking a small bento of chopped watermelon. They were finally on sale for 19c a pound at Foodland and I was able to get a nice big seedless Sugarland watermelon for about $3.50! Too bad the darned thing comes with bazillions of little white underdeveloped seeds, which apparently qualify the melon as being "seedless". Wuteva!

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.