Chibo Yakisoba (212)

For Mother's Day the family decided we should beat the crowds and eat out on Saturday instead of Sunday. We went to a restaurant at Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center called Chibo, which is an "Okonomiyaki" restaurant. I had actually never heard of this type of food before and really wasn't sure how I'd like eating Japanese food in a crepe, so I went with the yakisoba. They cooked it right in front of us and this amused the kidlets for about 5 minutes before they were throwing napkins, stealing chopsticks to break them apart and toss them, and asking to go outside.

I don't eat yakisoba very often but have made it a few times at home myself. I got the "Chibo" combination special dinner. Though the food was good, I'm not really sure it was worth the money. I guess it's the experience you pay for. I have additional pictures of the food that I will post tomorrow!

For today I have leftover yakisoba from the kid's meal. Buddy and Baby Girl split a yakisoba dish with chicken and pork, so that is what I am eating today.

I added some green onions to the top to give it a bit more color and added in a flower-shaped onigiri with nori paste in the middle and small umeboshi stuck into the middle. This tasted pretty good reheated!

Gyoza & Onigiri (196)

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.

Butter Yaki Leftovers

My apologies for not posting on Girl's Day, but I didn't have a bento to post because I ended up not having enough time to finish it in time. ; ; We had to tour a preschool early in the AM and I had to just put my bento into the fridge for today. I ate leftover hamburger stew for lunch.

This is the bento, finished at last. I have as the "main" food, three pan friend shrimps, some eggplant, and some zucchini. Along with that is a flower shaped onigiri, a bunny shaped boiled egg dyed pink, pickled cucumbers, pickled eggplant, and a lone blueberry to fill up the middle. I put soy sauce for the boiled egg in a carrot bottle for the bunny. ^_^


For Girl's Day we went to Shirokiya to buy Baby Girl a yukata and hair piece, which looked so so cute. I also bought some chichi dango, which is pictured below. I couldn't resist bringing some to work for lunch. The pinks are strawberry, the greens are melon, the white are plain (?). There were blueberry ones as well, but I didn't really like the taste of them. My favorite is the white.

On Friday Mr. Pikko had a surprise for me. He took me to dinner at Sam Choy's in Diamond Head where we had some gift certificates for and then took me to see the Romeo and Juliette opera at the Hawaii Opera Theater. It was an interesting experience, but that darned place needs to turn up their AC! Who wants to sweat while watching Romeo and Juliet?? :( I had a very nice time though, especially at dinner. I took pics of our onolicious food, too!

Seared Sashimi Appetizer - VERY good!
Butterfish - Mr. Pikko's dinner
Red wine Braised Shortribs - My dinner, VERY GOOD!
Pineapple cheesecake - Looked great, but I didn't like it. I thought it would be pineapple flavored cheesecake, but it turned out to be cheesecake flavored pineapple.

The cheesecake was really cool because that fan you see at the top? That's a thin slice of sun-dried pineapple. I thought that was so cool, even though I didn't care for the dessert itself. I also had a melon dacquiri, which I really didn't like. I'll stick with strawberry from now on. D:

SUGAR BOWL

The ending of the first quarter at Saturday's game had us all stunned. We sat there in muted horror, unable to grasp what was going on. DOWN 21 to nothing? Was the scoreboard wrong? WERE THE WHITE JERSEYS A JINX??!?!?! (I seriously thought this at least 50 times)

And it rained. It was as if Hawaii was weeping and we were all bathed in its tears. We couldn't seem to get the ball past the 50 yard line. I took Buddy walking down to the other side and I talked him through the next drive. Colt will pass and the ball will go there. It happened. Again and again Buddy and I walked down and I whispered in his ear each time where the ball would go and that this was the drive we'd finally score on. And we did! He got a real kick out of me screaming and hoisting him up. He'd grin ear to ear and laugh and laugh and laugh.

It was truly a wonderful and memorable experience. I'll carry the memories of that game with me forever, just as I still carry the memories of that last catch of the Fresno State game years ago. When we scored to finally bring ourselves up we were screaming so much and so excited. Then to see the Huskies down at their own 4 yard line... it was too much. The thought of having to suffer through overtime was horrible!! Everyone was screaming "DEFENSE" but I was screaming, "PLEEEEEASE!" I really thought they caught that last pass, then to see it just bounce out of his arms and into the hands of Mouton... I thought I was dreaming.

I know the black box over her eyes is creepy, but Mr. Pikko is a privacy stickler. Just pretend they're sunglasses!

The kids were a real handful at this game and the monster sized Disneyland lollipop I bought for Baby Girl reeeeally came in handy, but we know that 10, 15 years from now our kids can happily say they attended that football game. And we have proof too! We watched the ESPN broadcast later and we're in a crowd shot at the end of the game. YaY! I look grouchy, but this is due to having to carry Baby Girl for almost the entire 4th quarter. That will make any person sour, trust me.

And the Warriors are bound for the SUGAR BOWL!! WOOHOO!!!!!!!!!!! GO WARRIORS!!!!

My mom came over to attend the game with my brother and they were in yellow CC, which I think was a good view even if they were in the nosebleeds. She dragged my brother down to Chinatown to get some char siu and spare ribs from her favorite place for Chinese food, Nam Fong. If you've never been to Nam Fong it's a little shocking at first. It's a really gross, bare place and the guy just takes it off the hook in the window and chops it for you right there. The char siu is SO good tho, I tend to nibble on the way home and that's a bad idea. It's possible to just stand at the container and just eat and eat. Anyway, I have some for lunch!

I have with it a flower shaped onigiri with ume in the middle, then a small piece of corn, char siu, spare ribs, and some sakura carrots. And in case anyone is still curious about my weight, I'm still maintaining at 127! :D

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.

Teriyaki Beef (124)

Once in a great while I do a bento that take me less than 10 minutes to put together and thankfully, this was one of them. Lately I feel like I have 3x the amount of things to do to squeeze into 24 hours and on top of that, I seem to be getting sleepy earlier and earlier. I did manage to get some work done on my costume last night though. I'd burnt out and had to force myself to get back into it.

We ate teriyaki beef last night for dinner and since my mother in law's recipe is a very strongly flavored one, instead of eating it with rice I ate it with all salad. As you can guess from my KCCA salads (which means Kim Chee Crab & Avocado Salad) I like to use meats with heavy or spicy flavoring so that it eliminates the need for salad dressings. While doing Weight Watchers I of course got into the habits of reading the food label of everything I could and found that salad dressings actually have quite a bit of fat in them. Granted, I don't use the whole serving listed at 2 Tb, but still... 2 Tb of salad dressing with 17% of your daily fat? Nuh uh. With heavily flavored toppings, you really don't need any dressing.


I took salad greens for today's bento but since I had some rice leftover from yesterday I put that in with an ume. I added some of my fresh tomatoes to the salad. Notice how some are even tinier than the tiny ones? lol I guess some of them are just in a super hurry to ripen already. It's pretty cool, I get to pick maybe 5-8 tomatoes every morning. Pretty soon I'll have to start taking them to my mother in law's house because I don't think I can keep up eating that many!

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.

Teriyaki "Butt" Chicken (115)

I am now on Day 5 of wild and crazy busy week. I can barely find the time to think lately, I'm even forgetting to blog! D: Last night we ate May's Teriyaki Chicken thighs, which I think is a Hawaii brand of foods. They make wicked teriyaki burgers too! Anyway, I packed some up and put it on the dashboard when we were putting the kids in the car. I forgot we were on a slope and the tupperware came skateboarding down onto my seat and crash landed in a violent frenzy of rice, corn, and chicken. I screeched and picked it up immediately, but Mr. Pikko still felt the need to say, "Don't worry, the only thing that goes there is my ass." Well, gee, thanks dear! Anyway, that's why I put the "Butt" in the title. It fell under the 5 second rule, so it's all good, right?!?


I added in some edamame and an umeboshi. The box I used is actually quite ugly, I bought it simply for the nice food separations inside the box. Not that it mattered today since in my haste to get into the car this morning I dropped my bento bag, causing it to land upside down. *sigh*

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.

Steamed Opakapaka

I've survived the weekend with my two little tornados. I had to clean the house three times, but what can I do, they're both in their rascal phase. Saturday I took them to Foodland and while I was buying kim chee crab, spotted a really huge opakapaka for sale. This is hands down my favorite fish to eat so even though it was a whopping $28 I picked it up. Unfortunately it was probably reaching the end of it's shelf life as on the way home it really stunk the car up something awful. I'm pretty sure truly fresh fish isn't supposed to stink.

Anyway, I steamed it with my Progressive fish steamer and then poured smoking peanut oil on it followed by liberal amounts of soy sauce. I've made this once before with a small Tai Snapper and it came out good this time too! The kids ate a lot, especially Buddy, who had like 3 helpings. I took a piece with the skin still on for looks.


My grandma would be SO proud of me for serving a dinner with carrot and celery sticks. I don't remember eating dinner at her house all that often, but one thing that definitely sticks out from all the dinners I do remember is her plate of carrot and celery sticks. It was always there without fail. Funnily enough, many of those dinners I remember as being a bigass steamed fish like this one I cooked. All I needed to give my kids to complete the nostalgic dinner was a really HUGE glass of milk. Sadly, I don't have the kind of big glass cups she had. Plus cups of milk that huge are just going to end up spilled on the floor or being swished around by Buddy's milk hungry fingers. Or both! Extreme close-up!

The fish tasted really great and healthy, though I still wish it had been fresher. I added to the top some of the fattest green onions I've ever seen in my life. In my little fish bottle I have Aloha soy sauce. With fish like mahi or salmon I prefer to eat it with a strong sauce like Kikkoman or Yamasa but light tasting fish like this one just get drowned out so I got for a light taste like Aloha. I count this lunch as 2 points for the rice.

Gyoza & Onigiri

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. >.<

Mahimahi and 10k!!!

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!

Pipi Kaula

Last night we had pork hash for dinner and although I really like it, the leftovers I packed for myself to arrange into a bento were just never meant to be eaten by me. I put the piece of it into my bento box and left it on the counter for when we went home. My nephew got a hold of the box and eventually it ended up crashing and the ball of pork was on the kitchen floor. Since they just got their kitchen renovated, Mr. Pikko said that it was still ok to eat. So I packed it up again and we went out to the car to leave and I put the bento box on the dashboard. The car is on an incline so it slid down and plopped open on my seat, tossing the meat out. I picked it up within 3 seconds, so everyone agreed it should still be ok. None of us knew what tragedy would occur not even 15 minutes later.

We got home and I was trying to juggle one 3 year old, two bento boxes, and Pickles the plushie frog when the bento box suicided out of my hands and landed on the pavement. It was so ridiculously hilarious that Mr. Pikko actually called up his mom just to tell her that I'd accidentally dropped it yet one more time. That pork hash simply did not want to be my lunch today.

Back when we had our UFC party I'd defrosted two packs of pipi kaula thinking I'd have to cook another but we had so many hotdogs it wasn't necessary. So I had a pack of it still in the fridge and busted it out for lunch since I couldn't find any other kind of meat to use.


The rice was leftover and the yakisoba is another serving from the freezer. I added in a boiled egg but it didn't peel very nicely or cut well so I covered it up as best I could with a little pink food divider. In a foil holder I added some simmered pumpkin. I'd bought some frozen pumpkin and just tossed it into a small pot with a recipe I found online for simmered kabocha. It was quite easy since the pumpkin was already chopped into pieces. Very convenient! The pink soy sauce container is for the egg. Extreme close-up! The box I used is one I'd found at Marukai down here about a month ago. 99 cents and thankfully, made in Indonesia!


I have I think 4 of these boxes, I'm not sure. Yellow, pink, green, and blue maybe. Not positive about the blue. They come with a cute fork though! Not sure if I mentioned it before, but I bought adventuresinbentomaking.com in case I ever want the domain. Didn't want someone to squat on it and it was cheap too. Hopefully now I can work on a page that will nicely showcase my bento box collection!

Chacha Rice & Miso Soup w/ Somen

I woke up this morning and my nose is still running and now my throat is scratchy. I can feel a phlegmy cough coming and I can NOT get sick now so I upgraded myself to DEFCON 1 and have prepared various foods today to defend myself against my enemy. It's a Cold War in House of Pikko!


I made miso soup with tofu for breakfast and packed the rest of it for lunch. To eat with the soup, I packed some of my rainbow somen noodles. These noodles are cute, but there aren't really that much colored noodles so it's disproportionately white if I don't cook a whole lot. On that note, I'll have to email my mom and ask for her somen salad dressing, it's win! Added some cucumber kim chee since it's salty and may help.


In my bottom layer I have plain rice and ume. I'll eat the ume with some of the rice first and then make the tea and add the ochazuke mix. When I was a kid we called it "chacha rice" and it was a great comfort food when sick. I didn't think to bring the camera to show what it looks like once I open it, but it's flavoring, little strips of nori, and little cracker sticks. The tea is my favorite type of tea, brown rice tea.


Last of all I have some honey lemon peel that my mom made for me a couple years ago. It's been sitting in the back of my fridge all this time and the years have made it taste a lot better than it did when she first gave it to me. She had these lemon peels soaking in a jar in the yard for what must have been 5 or 6 years and they were still pretty bitter. Now that they've been drowning in honey all this time, it tastes perfect. Also, she says it's great for just adding to a cup of hot water to drink.

All of these things should help me get better. Hopefully I can nix this cough before next week or even better, by tomorrow as we're having a UFC 73 party at our house. No kids this time too, woot! Weight was 129.5 this morning.

Tonkatsu

We had yummy tonkatsu last night and I took a few pieces for lunch today. Having fallen down a couple of stairs and twisting my ankle yesterday, it clearly rattled my brains because I forgot to bring sauce!! :( Lucky thing I have some Aloha Shoyu packets here to save the day! Since I had a hard time walking around the kitchen this morning, my bento had to be done rather quickly and I didn't have time to re-do it after being unhappy with the result.


There's a bit of corn underneath the katsu, but I couldn't fit the katsu without hiding it!

I got approval yesterday to cover the Anime Expo in Long Beach, so I will have to start planning on where I can go bento shopping. If anyone lives in LA and knows where to go, please let me know!!! Don't know where I'll be staying yet, but hopefully it's close to some bento-ish stores! I'll also have to plan my breakfast bento because last time I went to LA I got pwned by the airport food prices. $8.00 ham sandwich FTL!

Teriyaki beef

During my first trip to Marukai I bought this $1.49 bento box in a horrid orange color with 3 weird monkeys on the cover and the words, "Do you like living here? Yes I like it a lot". I have no idea what possessed me to buy it or why I bought 3 thinking I could sell them on eBay. Maybe the $1.49 price tag just fried my brain and from then on I was doomed. Anyway, that's the box I used today. The really creepy cover aside, it's a great size bento box!

We ate some very yummy teriyaki beef last night so I had to take some for lunch. I used one of my many onigiri molds to make a flower shaped musubi with an ume in the middle. Unfortunately the beef had touched the rice on the way home so some of it was brown. My poor flower has wilt! The ume also stained some of the flower because I wasn't careful as I pressed it in. These little umes are a little different from the bigger, wrinkly looking ones but they're definitely cuter. They seem crazy expensive too, like $5.00 for a small container of maybe 40 plums. I try to look at it as 40 bentos worth of ume and that makes it seem not too bad. As you can see, I put in broccoli and daikon kim chee for veggies. I also packed my crab avocado salad and two white peaches, but you already know what that must look like, lol!


I went back on what I said earlier this week and have not been using the online Weight Watchers points planner like I said I would. I wanted to continue my self-regulating Core diet to see how my weight would do without a complete Snarf-fest to start off the week. So far I seem to be doing pretty good, I broke 133 lbs this morning and weighed in at 132.7! ^_^

Corned beef hash

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!