BBQ Chicken (177)

Happy Friday, everyone!

Today I have for lunch the Korean BBQ leftovers from Wednesday. I used my red bunny lacquer box because it was a nice, compact size and tall too, so it fit everything in nice and tight.


I put some furikake on the rice to help hide all the brown juices that leaked onto it from the BBQ chicken. I sliced the chicken to make it easier to eat and then put the veggies in on top. It looked really dull, so I sliced up some carrot very thinly and tucked it in to give it more life. A very simple fix and the bento looks more colorful!

I am happy to say that I am the prowd owner of Kokua Festival tickets, which will be featuring... Dave Matthews! Woo! This will be his first ever concert in Hawaii. Should be fun! :D

Kung Hee Fat Choy!

Yesterday before the meeting, we went to eat at Kim Chee 7, which is my favorite place to eat Korean food. They have really great kim chee here, especially the daikon pickles, which are pictured below on the left. On the right is their regular kim chee, which I didn't like before, but now love. In the two little bowls are their onolicious meat jun sauce. SO GOOD!

I had the lunch special, which is a combination plate of meat jun, bbq chicken, mandoo, and vegetables. I don't really care for their plate veggies all that much, it's really the only weak part of Kim Chee restaurants. If you want the best bean sprouts namul, potato, cabbage, and taegu you have to go to Gina's. Usually I dump the cabbage into the kim chee sauce in a little attempt to make myself more of that yummy stuff.

Before the people who pay attention to my dieting completely flip out, I did not eat all of this. I ate all the meat jun and a small part of one chicken. The rest will no doubt show up in a bento tomorrow. I ate very little rice, so it wasn't too bad.

Work parties and meetings are proving to be a constant interruption to my bentos! lol Today is Chinese New Year and so we had a team meeting + potluck. I bought some pork hash from Chun Wah Kam this morning.

This is a very beautiful salad made by my boss:


We also had another Chinese chicken salad, pasta salad, cantaloupe, watermelon, a spicy shrimp and pepper dish, curry manapua, pie, almond float, a noodle dish, choy sum, and some sticky rice with meat. My plate:


As you can see, I was pretty good, even though it was a lot of food. I took from both salads, the shrimp dish, half a manapua, choy sum, and fruits.

I hope no one is getting annoyed that I'm posting regular food here now. I just figure that bentos aside, the food we eat here in Hawaii can be just as interesting. I bet I make my ex-Hawaii mainland dwellers drool too, haha!

"OHHHH! MANAPUA!!"

"OHHHH! PORK HASH!!!"

"OMGGGG MEAT JUN!!"

Hehe.

By the way, the teacher gave an exceptionally glowing review of my darling spawn, leading me to the conclusion that I am the proud mother of the Teacher's Pet. It was a combination of the "she defends the littler kids from bullies" and "she's like a leader in the class" comments, the fact that she gets to sleep next to the teacher's desk, and the story she told us on the way home about how the other kids go out to play and she stays in class with her best friend and they eat gummy bears (A whole package, Mommy!!) with the teacher. Nice.

Also, I'm a bit worried about the quality of education my baby is getting here:


I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do when she watches The Secret of Nimh for the first time!!

Teriyaki Chicken (170)

Today is a day that represents a fresh start to 2008 for me and so from now on I will try my best to keep my chin up and make the best of things. I was at home sick yesterday so I had no bento, but I did get a lot done at home.

For a while now my kids' bedroom has been a real mess, full of boxes of things, toys, old clothes, my scrapbooking desk, etc. I cleaned it all out, moved the crib from our bedroom into theirs so they can sleep in there, moved my scrapbooking desk into my own bedroom, and fixed up the bed so that the two kids can start sleeping in there. Baby Girl was incredibly happy about it when she came home and thanked me over and over for it, claiming that if it ever gets messy again, she promises that SHE will clean it up. Guess the pigs are still flying outside...

This is some baked teriyaki chicken from Wednesday that I had intended to make for bento yesterday. I have a small bit of rice, some mixed veggies, and some sliced mini bell pepper. Yesterday Buddy asked for a red bell pepper for breakfast. I have no idea why. He stared at it for a couple minutes, then demanded Cheerios and proceeded to eat three full bowls. Lucky for me I actually had Cheerios.

On the side I have blueberries and a wedge of Laughing Cow Light Swiss cheese. I have a Fuji apple the size of Pluto to snack on. I was 123.7 yesterday, so I'm slowly going down in weight. I think as long as I keep up my good portioning, I should be able to reach my goal weight by the time May and the wedding comes around. Which reminds me, I have to measure myself so my friend can buy my dress...

Shoyu Chicken (150)

Sorry for the late posting, I've hit 9,999 posts on Allakhazam and I've been busy prepping what I'm revealing for my 10k ding. Today I had a three tier bento but don't let the pictures deceive you, this box is actually really small, maybe 5 inches long or less. It was a plain box that I got at Marukai this summer during E3 and I added a sticker to make it a little cuter.

This is shoyu chicken made by my MIL with some white rice decorated with mixed veggies. If you're thinking to yourself, "Geez I wonder if she placed those vegetables into her bento one by one", the answer is yes I did. I used chopsticks. In Allakhazam IRC yesterday we were all laughing at this guy who doesn't know how to use chopsticks. All in good fun, but I just wanted to mention how awesome chopsticks are. I even eat spaghetti with chopsticks; a habit I picked up from my friend Janis.

I packed more kim chee crab and avocado without lettuce. I found after forgetting the veggies that it's actually not too bad without it, especially if I don't have room in the box. I bought the avocado at Foodland on Sunday and I'm very proud to say that I chose perfectly. The next morning when I cut it open it was beautiful and the best possible texture for slicing. It looks exactly the same as yesterdays just with no tomatoes.

My tomato garden died while I was in Anaheim. Mr. Pikko claims, "Hey! I watered them!" but I have my doubts. The plants are all brown and I think they're unrecoverable. Not too bad though, I must have gotten like 200 tomatoes out of those plants and now I have the pot space to grow edamame!! Weeeee!

Finally I had pomegranate seeds for dessert. Actually I lied, I had some godly pumpkin pie for dessert. George at work brought by some pieces of this pumpkin pie that his wife made and holy omg it was divine. I asked for the recipe and hopefully I'll have that in my grubby little pumpkin pie loving hands soon. Yum yum!

Mochiko Chicken (114)

As I mentioned yesterday, I had Mochiko Chicken marinating. I'm going crazy with too much to do, so I'm going to keep today's blog short and sweet. Recipe from Jean Watanabe Hee's cook book, Hawaii's Best Local Recipes:

2 lb boneless chicken thighs
4 Tb Mochiko flour
4 Tb cornstarch
4 Tb sugar
5 Tb soy sauce
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 Tb sesame seeds
1/4 cup green onions, chopped
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp grated ginger
2 eggs, beaten
oil for frying

Combine all ingredients except chicken and oil. Add chicken and marinate overnight or for at least 5 hours. Fry in oil until golden brown.

This tastes decent, but I wouldn't know just how good it is because I made the mistake of frying this while working on the Allakhazam website last night. As a result I have a whole lot of "overly golden brown" mochiko chicken, hahaha!


I ate this already and despite my hopes, it still tastes charred. I put in a bit of rice, some carrot and celery sticks, and in the bottom layer I put cheese, grapes, and banana flowers. That's all I have time for today! Bento orders were mailed out yesterday!

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.

Leftover Chinese

My family ordered out Chinese food last night so it was a good thing I'd had an all Core day because it's very easy to overeat Chinese food. We ate from Waimalu Chop Suey and though a couple dishes weren't so great, the others were more than tasty enough to make up for those and the gau gee was so freaking gigantic it was like eating a whole one even cut in half.

Today's lunch is pretty drab, I'm basically just showing you what I'm eating. I wish I could have presented it better, but there's not much else to it. There's a mixture of a bunch of veggies as well as some pieces of chicken, beef, and pork. I took mostly vegetables as that's a good way to keep your calorie intake down when pigging out on Chinese food. Or at least, I like to tell myself that. I usually load up on tons of broccoli, won bok, ong choi, carrots, and then start picking lean meats and then last of all noodles.


I'm still trying to get my Yeah! bon dance video imported to my computer, but turns out I need a special cable, which I hope to get today. I watched it again last night on my camera and it's so hilarious.

Next week Tuesday I have a "brown bag" meeting so I will have to come up with something that looks yummy so that I can have a great lunch to talk about. I'd never even heard of such a thing, so I was pretty thrilled!

I have a few things to add to the store, but I haven't had the time to add them yet. I hopefully can get that done tonight. I have some nice 3 tier picnic bento boxes available as well as some nice small circular boxes good for packing sushi for lunch. Mr. Pikko took vacation today so I may end up going to Marukai this afternoon.

Tonkatsu w/ Chicken salad

The preschool drop-off today went ok with no tears while we were there! Whew! We'll see how things are tomorrow when she has to go back, heh.

As I mentioned yesterday, with 10k I wanted to reward myself so I went to Marukai. Mr. Pikko had taken the day off and I had a splitting headache by afternoon so I left about an hour early. Of course, headaches at work suck but headaches while shopping for bento things suck a bit less, so I went anyway. The only bad part about it was that while I was in the dollar store they had this horrifying music playing on their telephone speakers throughout the store. It did not help my pounding head.

Still, I found some great accessories! There were no new boxes and as usual the place looked like a ransacked trinket store, but I got a lot of cute paper food cups, some cute seafood food dividers, some animal food cups with covers, and some other animal food cups (which I have used today). I bought two of the plastic animal food cups thinking I could sell one but then later I discovered that the two packages, though identical in shapes and animals, had different colors for different shapes (meaning the triangle one was blue in one and green in another) so of course I had to keep both. Haha! I picked up a couple other things to sell as well. I hope to have a PayPal cart of extra items up soon, keep an eye out for that if you're looking to get started!

When I was up in LA my cousin and I were joking around about how we'd buy Marukai subscriptions and then by the next time we go back, it's been well over a year and the subscription is expired so basically we pay $10 a year to shop there once. Well, I am determined to change that! After the dollar store I stopped by the Marketplace next door and picked up a few things. One of the things I was excited to get was what I've seen called "kewpie mayo" on several other blogs. It was a bit hard to find and was labeled "QP Mayo" instead, but I finally have one in stock at home! I also bought two packets of noodles to make "Ebi Curry Spaghetti". Once I buy me some shrimp I will have to try that. The calorie/fat info on the back was surprisingly low! It was a bit odd. I couldn't find the front door for some reason. There was only one door that said EXIT EXIT EXIT DO NOT ENTER all over it. Finally it ended up being all the way down where it looked like a different store. And then when I checked out, they didn't bag my stuff, just put it back into a basket and shoved the bags in there! I didn't mind, it was just odd since I didn't know that's how they do it!

Today for lunch I have leftover tonkatsu along with furikake rice, veggies in the food cup I mentioned above, sliced fishcake, and romaine lettuce with cukes, tomatoes, and rotisserie chicken. I count this as 3 points: 1 for rice (since it's mixed w/ brown), 1 for the flour on the tonkatsu (fried in olive oil, pork and egg are Core), and 1 for the fishcake. I'm just guessing on the flour though. I figure it's better to overestimate. Inside the little thermos bottle is some Catalina Free salad dressing, also Core.


Lunch is packed in a new bento box that I found at Price Busters. They had the same box in three colors so of course I had to get them all... They each have different pictures and at $1.99 I can't resist. And bonus, they all have food dividers! I love boxes that come with those! :D I've found that most of these really cheap boxes are old ones as the copyright date is around 2003 or so. But I don't care if they're from the 90s. If it's cheap, I'm there!

Today is August 1st, which marks 1 month until what will be the greatest season in UH Football history. Can. Not. Wait.

Fukushima Ondo! (& Mochiko Chicken)

Ever since I moved to Oahu in 1997, I've longed for that old feeling of excitement and fun from a bon dance song that us Hilo hicks only ever refer to as "becho". I'd been to a couple during summers when I'd go home and last year I went to one in Wahiawa, one in Manoa Valley, and another at Pearl City Hongwanji. The Wahiawa one was a wash, no becho to be found. Same with the Manoa one, which turned out to be more of a little Japanese carnival in which they got you to pay incredibly ridiculous amounts of money on scrips for food or neon fans or towels. I called up my dad and asked him to call up his friend Reverend Bruce and see if these silly Oahu folk simply don't do becho, but apparently they do. It's just they either play it after I leave or simply don't, I dunno. We finally went through the hassle of parking in a really dark and muddy area under the freeway to go to the Pearl City Hongwanji dance and they played a version of becho and I was somewhat happy.

Final Fantasy began their Sunbreeze Festival today and it means Tarutarus dancing around in their yukatas with music playing at night. This led me to YouTube where I found the following:



THAT my friends, is the becho I know from a decade ago. And now I finally know the name of the song, Fukushima ondo! Oh I feel so good today! :D If you've never been to one, I urge you to go. You don't have to be Japanese. You don't have to know how to dance. You can just go to watch, to eat the good food, to hang out, to watch people honor the dead. It's a great experience!

Ok so on to the bento. I totally pigged out at our Korean food luncheon so I weighed almost 129 today. Gah! I took home vegetables and packed them into today's lunch. The bean sprouts namul was really really good, but it's probably really bad for a WW dieter cause it's like, laced with sesame oil. Hee. Extreme close-up!


We had mochiko chicken last night, so that is what is in the middle. I've included furikake rice, corn, and some kim chee. My veggies below are the sprouts I mentioned and some cabbage:


I may end up listening to this song all day... it brings back so many great memories. Also reminds me that times change. Last year my aunty told me Hilo Hongwanji held their bon dance indoors. What the... Half the fun is when you get rained on dancing becho. Oi yoi yoi!

Grilled Asian Chicken Stir-fry

Last night I decided to try to make it up to my family for ignoring them for basically 16 hours while I plowed through Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by pulling out a cookbook and making something new. I ended up using my All Recipes cookbook and chose the Grilled Asian Chicken.

I took the kids with me to Foodland and as soon as we enter, there's some Harry Potter books at the door. Baby Girl very loudly yells, "LOOK MOMMY! There's the book Daddy stood in line for!!" If only I'd known that Foodland was going to have a midnight book sale of Deathly Hallows I would have sent my poor Mr. Pikko there instead of Borders. /guilty

Anyway, I get home and I'm starting to get the marinade ready when I realize that I can't find my garlic and I'm out of sesame oil. Gawd was I pissed. I had to go back and buy more, grrr!! It turned out wonderful though. Mr. Pikko said it smelled really really good and I really enjoyed the taste. I sliced it up and stir fried half of it with fresh veggies I'd been chopping while the meat marinated.


Veggies included are: Celery, snow peas, sweet onion, broccoli, red bell pepper, yellow bell pepper, orange bell pepper, and sakura shaped carrots. Extreme close-up! The key to cooking veggies like this is to never overcook them. I thought I stopped soon enough but turns out I didn't and so the veggies are a little less vibrant in color than I'd intended. The heat can always cook it more, so it's best to just lightly cook the veggies then let it sit in it's own heat to finish cooking. I boiled the extra marinade and added it to the veggies and this was REALLY good. Included in the corner is a small bit of rice and furikake. To accompany my bento I have a KCCA salad and a yellow peach from Costco.

I had tried to find ready-made stir fry veggies but couldn't find any so I got the fresh stuff and that was great for taste. The snow peas were some disgustingly high price like $6.00 a pound but thankfully, the handful I bought only cost a dollar, so I guess the price wasn't too bad after all. I bought some green onions and planted the stalks outside in our garden! Also, Baby Girl's string bean plants have finally sprouted more beans and she should have 5 more coming along soon. Hooray!

Butter Yaki

As I sit here once again in my freezing ass cubicle I am reminded of something odd I noticed about LA weather. When we were walking from the parking lot to the E3 hotel it was sunny, yet chilly too. It was like being in air conditioning outside! It was awesome! Something else odd is that no one in LA seems to use a/c in their cars. Taxis, my cousin, Matt from Square. Not that I'm complaining as I never broke a sweat in anyone's car, but it was just odd. I was standing out on the curb at the Honolulu airport for 5 minutes in a tank top and I started sweating!

As I mentioned yesterday, I made butter yaki for dinner which is basically veggies, meat, and shrimp cooked in butter in a pan and then dipped into a sauce and eaten with rice. VERY yummy. I'd never even heard of it until I met Mr. Pikko.


On the veggie side I have won bok (which was home to 5 stupid caterpillars that ate most of the cabbage), mung beans, eggplant, zucchini, and onions. I put the caterpillars into a little container for baby girl along with some of the won bok and she played with them until finally asking for them to be put outside in the grass near the car. The silly little things ate pretty much all through the head and I had very little to cook in the end. Grr!! On the meat side I have some beef and shrimp. Extreme close-up!


This box came with matching chopsticks and two side containers. In one container is the butter yaki sauce and the other contains rice and more mung beans. They all fit nicely into a matching floral zipper bag!


I've packed a KCCA salad and a nectarine as side snacks. I pigged out at dinner last night and was 127.5 this morning. My goal of 120 is right around the corner!! Notice the pictures don't look as bad now. I tried taking pics without the stove light on, relying more on the kitchen lights. Seems to look better!

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!

Miso beef w/ potatoes

I'm going to have to do a monkey bento soon. My two kiddos have been watching so much Curious George lately that I can't get Will Ferrel's voice out of my head. Maybe a monkey bento will help. Haha yeah right...

I decided to try the miso marinade again with beef this time. I dumped all the ingredients into a ziplock bag with a round steak and let it soak overnight then broiled it this morning. It didn't brown on the edges as well as I liked, but since I was cooking in the morning I had no time to re-broil them. The marinade is from my bento box book:

4 oz steak
1 1/2 Tbsp miso
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp sake
1 tsp mirin

I added in a boiled red potato chopped into cubes with garlic salt sprinkled on top:


The picture isn't the best, but you can still tell what it is right? :) Maybe this week I can go buy the stuff I need for a homemade lightbox at last. For the other layer I put tofu sprinkled with red shrimp flakes with a strawberry soy sauce bottle and some broccoli and cauliflower with carrot stars. This photo came out terrible too, but that's what happens when one falls asleep early when they should be making bento!


Since I didn't have time to eat much breakfast I packed a side bento to eat earlier in the day that has baby carrots, cucumber kim chee, and ahi poke. I'll probably eat this around 10:30 and then eat lunch at 1 or 2.


A miraculously all Core meal! There is sugar in the steak, but so little that it doesn't count since the bento book says to scrape off the marinade before broiling. Obviously I couldn't find time for a pirate bento, but I'm fine with this since I still haven't even seen Dead Man's Chest.

Kim chee fried rice

I lost 2.2 lbs this week even though I ate like 4 lbs of food at yesterday's buffet. Very bad... I did my best, avoiding the battered fish and the chow mein but I utterly failed when it came to the crab salad. It was extremely win and I ended up eating two servings. I also ate a piece of cake and a slice of custard pie.

Anyway, I had no lunch, so after watching the Survivor finale I decided to make some kim chee fried rice using the immense bag of brown rice I bought at Costco. When hubby saw I bought this he flipped out because not two months ago we gave the bag of brown rice that he had bought from Costco to his parents. When I told him to go buy rice he came back with brown and I screeched about how I hated brown rice. But I'd seen someone's picture of brown fried rice and I thought, hey, I think I could live with eating that instead of straight up brown rice.

I had no idea what I was doing or if I even liked kim chee fried rice, but I started the rice and after about 20 minutes decided to start cooking the veggies so that when the brown rice was done I could just toss it in and finally go to sleep. It was shortly after 12 am now. Starting with the half head cabbage I had leftover from my tsukemono, I fried that in olive oil then added pepper and some chicken bullion. Next I added onions, onion powder, kim chee, leftover peas, Costco chicken (breast meat, no skin), and some of my pre-chopped bell peppers for color. As previously mentioned, I had no idea what I was doing and was actually just tossing anything I thought might taste good from the fridge. It was 1:15 am by the time I was done with this and the stupid rice cooker wasn't even steaming yet. I couldn't tell if it was even cooking and I was dying to open it up to see!! Hubby was just laughing at my dilemma cause he knew how badly I wanted to open the cooker but how bad it would be to do so mid-cooking, should it actually BE cooking.

Giving up at last, I went to take a shower. When I came back out I pressed my ear to the cooker and could finally hear bubbling inside. I watched an SVU. I put the veggies away. When I was just about to go to bed at 2:15 am, THE FOOGIN' RICE COOKER FINALLY BEEPS. So lesson learned here is: when cooking brown rice, anticipate it taking like 2 hours to do so. *mutter*

Anyway, I had to cook it this morning and I added some soy sauce as well. I was tempted to add ketchup too but figured dousing it in 4 condiments was probably making the brown rice feel pitiful enough. Since I hadn't used it yet, I packed today's lunch in my new 3-tier Doggie Woogie bento box from Morning Glory. This box was pretty expensive at $13 so that's the last big one I buy for quite some time. The fried rice:


I really don't like how my pictures turn out by the sunlight, so I think I'll stick to the kitchen. The fried rice doesn't really look that colorless and drab. My veggies layer has tsukemono, takuan, grape tomatoes, tofu and carrot sticks. I used one of my new carrot bottles! :)


Fruit layer has mango, blackberries, strawberries, and some of this new melon I saw at Costco called a Galia melon. It's not as good as I was hoping, but they made up for it by having Tuscan melons in stock the last time I went. Those are way sweeter than cantalopes btw!


Though this meal looks like it contains a lot of points cause of the rice, Weight Watchers Core actually lists brown rice as a Core food. This is why I chose to make brown fried rice of course. :) This entire lunch is happily all core. Which is good because I forgot to eat breakfast and ended up eating at Jack in the Box for breakfast. +_+ Their menu is repulsive! I ended up getting the grilled chicken sourdough with no cheese and no mayo, then I took out the bacon and only ate one of the slices of bread. The chicken fillet was really juicy and the lettuce and tomato they put on were very fresh and thick, which was nice. It was the best I could do, since I wasn't strong enough to just go without breakfast! You should have seen the monster cane spider I saw at the drive-thru though. *shudder*

My throat is almost all better, so it really must have been that I just burned my throat and not something more serious. Considering the pain and discomfort I went through this past week, you can bet I won't be overheating my tea water again!!