The cutesy-ness continues today with usage of my new awesome animal food picks. I look at them and I think to myself, gosh, I should have bought a couple more!! I realize that I don't need more than those, but I still want them. Then I can lay them all out and count them and rub my hands together going "hehehhehehehhehehe preeeeciousssses". This is what new bento accessories do to me. Scary, huh?
I started off with a bunny onigiri. My Aunty K had sent me a while back some animal onigiri shapes and I never did get a chance to use it because I opened the box when the kids were around. Several OHHHHs and MINE, NO MINE! later they had claimed them and were soon all over the house. I only recently recovered them from the wild savages and now they happily sit in my utensils drawer doing whatever it is onigiri molds do. Knitting, perhaps?
I cut the ears out of my breakfast ham steak. I had thought they were too long at first so I cut them short, but now they look too short. Go figure. I made the nori face with my punch. It only took me 10 punches to get that one face to come out right. The rest of the mangled nori will have to be cut up for ghetto furikake or given to the monkeys for immediate consumption. The bunny rests on a lettuce leaf cause even though he's smiling, he's actually hungry too. Here's a closer picture:
Next I put in the beef, then cut the broccoli stems off and laid the tops down nicely (stems hidden underneath). If you're wondering why it's so clean, Grandma J leaves the broccoli separate so that it doesn't overcook, which is pure genius. The beef brocco comes out much healthier and brighter that way. I cut up two pieces of takuan and put them into a little orange food cup and tucked that next to the broccoli.
After that I started to fill in the parts around bunny. I cut up red bell pepper and sliced some baby carrots. He's a hungry, hungry bunny! After that I still had a lot of empty space so I used olives with food picks to finish things up.
This is one of the new boxes I got at Marukai. It's a bit thin even though the box seems thick but this is because there's space for chopsticks in the cover. It's also a great place to hide some Red Vines. ^_^
I am very close to 100k hits, people! Time is running out to enter in my 100k Bento Contest!! If you haven't done it yet, hurry!
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.
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.
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.
Someone commented on yesterday's entry with a link to Spark People and I went to take a look and will definitely have to give that a try. I realize that I owe Weight Watchers a lot for helping me lose 22 pounds, but right now Mr. Pikko is very concerned about all the doom and gloom talk that economists are having so I need to shave spending. A subscription to WW again is something I want and not something I necessarily need, so I really need to thank mbbored for the referral. Free 99 is most definitely a Pikko kind of price tag!
As I mentioned, economy has become a hot issue in my household. To show my support for this, I'm going to start trying to focus on doing more cost-friendly bentos. I might even start a series of a subject like say, 50 Ways to Eat A Costco Chicken. Actually, 50 is a lot... I should start lower with 12 maybe, haha!
For now though, I'm trying to uh... purge my fridge and freezer from things that I've bought during naughty trips to Foodland. I packed 3 pork gyoza into this bento along with a leftover pink onigiri from the freezer. The fish bottle has soy sauce for the gyoza. Next to it I have kim chee crab, which I will eat with the lettuce that lines the box. In the middle I have sliced takuan, ume, and edamame.
When I first got these small round boxes I didn't really care for them but now I really enjoy packing small lunches into them. I wish I had more of these black lacquer boxes as I really think food in a black box makes for great contrasting colors. I haven't used my two-tier boxes in quite a while, I guess I am just going through a bento box mood right now.
Easter is right around the corner and UGH do I hate holidays like these because it means giving a whole lot of things to a whole lot of kids. Don't get the wrong idea, I do enjoy giving to kids. But 17 kids? My wallet is crying uncle! My husband's eyeballs are still rolling around the cash register at Price Busters. My sanity is pleading insanity! (Don't you just love the feel of Easter grass between your toes?) And this doesn't even include my own kids and my niece and nephew. After this ridiculousness I'm done with classmate Easter baskets. Next year, I'm having a big Easter card project at my house for my two kids and we're giving handmade painted egg cards and a healthy snack. This just costs way too much.
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*
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. :(
This morning on the way to work we executed our super smart football parking plan for the second week in a row. I don't need to go into details but I would like to boast that there will be no more parking at Radford and beyond for us! Tomorrow we play Utah State and I hope Colt's foot is better because I cringed hard during each of his career high 5 interceptions last week against Idaho. I'll try my football food thing again, but this time I'll make much less.
Last night I fully intended to have a small, healthy dinner again but when we got there it was spare ribs. My mother in law's spare ribs are by far the most onolicious things you ever tasted. For the mainlanders, "onolicious" (oh-no-licious) is the Hawaii way of saying delicious. The word "ono" by itself means delicious, but onolicious is just one of those words that people here have merged together and become common after a while.
Since there are tons of bones and I love this stuff, I took a stupid amount of meat. There was a lot left in the pot, so I used that excuse as a justification to pig out two meals in a row. To try to make up for it, I packed very little rice and a lot of broccoli. Boy, did I have an adventure trying to smash the cover onto this bento! There's a little area in the middle of the cover for the utensils and this means there's this long thing that goes into the box when you cover it. A bit frustrating design wise, but its still a really pretty box. I added takuan and carrot flowers to add color.
Voting for the Bloggers Choice Awards ends on October 19th and while I am very grateful for the 90 votes I've gotten from kind readers, the highest bento blogger on the Food Blog list is still Biggie. The vegan blogs are all still tops, so let's band together and boost her up! This is our last chance to get a bento blogger in the top 5 and I can't think of any other bento blogger out there who deserves the recognition more than her. You have to register, but its very quick. If you've already registered to vote for me, it's even easier because you can vote for more than one blog! Vote for Biggie!
Also, I got more work done on my costume last night! I'll update my LJ in a bit. Fan Festival is already next month!!!
I did a count today and excluding salads and fruit bentos, today's bento will be my 83rd lunch!! Wow!! I will have to start planning to see what I will do for my 100th bento! Must go look at e-obento.com for ideas...
Last night we had stew for dinner and though it was good, I didn't feel like coming up with yet another creative way to arrange stew. Though now that I say that, an idea comes to mind, haha! Next time! So anyway, I had to do something from scratch and ended up pulling out my packet of frozen gyoza. This is the Ajinomoto brand pork gyoza, which is by far the best one I've tasted so far. And even better, it's cooked with no oil, just water! Each one is a point, so this lunch comes out to a big 5 points because of the rice I used in the onigiri.
The onigiri is mixed with some furikake and wrapped in a pretty tasty brand of ajitsuke nori I got at Marukai. On the side is some shelled edamame, takuan, and an ume.
I bought this box at the Windward Mall Marukai and though the cover isn't the greatest, when I saw the partitions inside I had to have it. Plus, it was calling my name having a $1.49 price tag. I took stock yesterday while being bored at home and my bento box collection has reached an alarming count of 50. I'm going to have to look into alternative storage methods in another area of the house soon. One that my rascal son cannot unpack every morning like he does with my dry oriental foods drawer. >.<
Celebrations are in order for today my blog passed 10,000 hits!! Woohoo!! I will have to go celebrate by heading to Marukai or something. :D Thanks to everyone who comes back to see what I eat. I'd never have thought when I started that doing a bento blog could be so much fun. I hope I've helped spread my love of lunch to many!
I'm back to counting points today. Nothing like getting on the scale and seeing that you've gone back up above 130 to light the fire under your ass. I count this lunch as 2 points, one for the rice and one for the mayo in the tuna (leftover from yesterday). The meat in the middle is leftover mahimahi from last night. There are some steamed zucchini slices underneath it propping it up so that it stands nicely. I added some sliced takuan for color in an orange Miffy food cup and then some shelled edamame. The soy sauce fishie is for the mahi.
Today's lunch is packed in one of the bento boxes I got at the discount store in Little Tokyo. The cover is cute, though there was no matching band for it. :( It's a great size though and I love the color.
Today we took Baby Girl to the preschool open house and boy is this going to be a rough week. She wouldn't let go of my leg and wouldn't say hi to any of the other kids or the teacher. The good news is that one of the girls in her class is from her Gymboree class. Didn't do much good though, she stuck her head between my legs and then loudly proclaimed she would like to go play outside. *sigh* Also, looks like I'll be doing bento for her only when she goes on field trips. Mr. Pikko doesn't want to make her feel entitled or something. They had brownies and cookies out along with butter mochi.... but I resisted!
I'd like to start off today's post with a quote from my daughter. I had bought a pair of sunglasses while in LA so that I didn't look like I had slits for eyes and now I wear them in the mornings to block out the sun so that I can sleep on the way in to work. (they're way cooler than using Mr. Pikko's black sock) On the way to dropping off the kids she likes to ask if she can use them and this morning I asked her why she needed it and her answer was simply:
"The sun is trying to kill my face!"
I can't argue with that kind of logic, so of course I gave it up. She totally cracks me up. She starts preschool next week Wednesday so I am trying to think about whether I should base the one bento I will make for her each week on a specific day (ie every Friday) or on days when I know she'll have a hard time with what they serve. I guess we'll see! Should I make her one on her first day to help her cope or just let her plunge head first into school?
Yesterday we had Zippy's frozen stuff for dinner, which never disappoints. For the first time I had their chicken curry and it was really good. I'd had their hamburger curry once before so I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised, but I hadn't eaten it in like 8 years so I forgot what it tasted like. I took leftovers and was at a complete loss this morning on how to dress it up. When I first started it was just boring rice and curry.
I ended up adding a cream corn croquette. This is actually the second one I fried. The first one I made the big mistake of sitting down at my comp instead of watching it and remembered the poor thing 2 threads later. But I ate the first one so it wasn't a complete loss. After a while I thought it was still too boring so I scooped out some of the rice and added sliced sanbaizuke. It made sense because whenever we eat at Curry House (Coco Ichibanya) they include brown pickles anyway and of course this one tastes worlds better than the bitter stuff they serve there. Then I finished it off with some nori flakes and crackers from a ochazuke flavor packet.
Instead of a KCCA salad today, I packed another bento with tofu cubes and ahi shoyu poke. To add color I put in a red tomato soy sauce bottle and some chopped green onions onto the poke.
Although I've been cheating by eating cream cheese brownies I made Sunday, my high vegetable intake seems to be working slowly. I'm back down to 127.2 from hovering around 128.5 for the last week or so.
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??
Someone e-mailed me yesterday saying what a great advertiser I am for Weight Watchers. Haha! That's really nice to hear! Anytime you have questions feel free to comment or e-mail me, I'll be happy to answer. We went to a wedding on Saturday and though I had an entire plate of food, almost the whole thing was Core and I ended up eating a slice of cheesecake. Just goes to show that you can eat at a buffet and still stay on track!
The chicken meatballs have been an attraction for MIL since that day at the beach so she went down to Costco and bought some for dinner last night. They're a little spicy, but taste so good! These aren't hers though... I am still nursing that second bag of meatballs that I had bought. So if you see a meatball tucked in here and there in the coming weeks, you know why.
This bento features a red rabbit egg! I used my egg mold and then intended to dye it pink but ended up putting too much food coloring, leaving me with red fingers and a red bunny. Extreme close-up!
I dug out some of my frozen kim chee fried rice for the starch. The peas looked rather pale, so I took out some frozen ones and mixed them in with the rice to look brighter. The meatballs are on lettuce and I added takuan, carrot, and daikon kim chee to fill in spaces around the red rabbit egg.
I've begun to realize that I eat a crazy amount of food during the day... I mean, I eat an omelette for breakfast, I pack a lunch, a salad, and a fruit salad too. Sometimes I eat popcorn. Then when I get home I eat another salad, dinner, then a fruit snack again. I'm thinking maybe my metabolism has perked up again. It probably helps that I'm eating a lot of fibrous foods!
I made just a small bento this morning because I fell asleep last night while watching The Good Shepherd and didn't have much time to make a bigger one. We had curry last night plus corned beef hash. I'm a real sucker for corned beef hash so I chose that for lunch. I'd washed my two bento boxes at MIL's house and put my lunch portion into the Doggie Woogie container to arrange later. I woke up this morning and saw the Doggie Woogie box on the stove and thought, AUGH!, then sheepishly removed the empty Putifresh box from the fridge. I'd put away the wrong box... Since it was rather cool last night I decided to risk eating it anyway.
I cut the patty in half and added some sesame seeds and an ume to the rice. For color and filler, I added takuan cradled in a little pocket of aluminum foil then put a piggy bottle with ketchup in for the hash. That pig was pretty hard to fill with ketchup and I wasted quite a bit before deciding to use my sunflower bottle filler for it. The key was to open a new bottle of fresh ketchup because the old one in the fridge was too thick to suck up into it!
I'm a 28 year old mom to two, who I lovingly refer to as Baby Girl and Buddy. I am married to Mr. Pikko. We live in Hawaii with invisible pets and a colony of ants. I lost 22 pounds in 3 months on Weight Watchers and now I just follow their Core diet "when I feel like it".
