Somen Salad (215)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OH

MY

GOD

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

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Tonkatsu (204)

I type this with blurry eyes. Buddy woke up at 4:15 AM, asking for “chicken and rice” since he didn’t eat much dinner the night before. I went to the kitchen and like any other good, kind, caring bento-minded mother woken up at 4 AM would have, gave him a wonderfully nutritious and beautifully prepared breakfast: chopped up microwaved hotdogs. LOL

Did I have you going? I suggested everything from Cheerios to strawberries to pancakes to grapes to peanut butter whole wheat toast. He wouldn’t have any of it while he waited for the rice to cook so that I could make him some Costco chicken fried rice, so that’s what he ate. And then when the rice was ready to fry, he was “full” and wanted to watch tv. Typical toddler, living in the now, which changes every 5 minutes.

Today I’m having tonkatsu. I had meant to cook some chicken I didn’t get a chance to use over the weekend and try chicken katsu in a different way, but fell asleep putting the kids to bed. This looked a lot better before the sauce all oozed together, but unfortunately I took too long to take the picture. The katsu is cut into small pieces, there’s rice underneath, and the asparagus lays nicely on top.

In my second tier I have a salad. I topped it with some Costco chicken so that I didn’t need dressing, but I might go trolling into the work fridge and see if there’s some healthy dressing I could sprinkle on.

Someone commented yesterday with a really great link to a blog post by Biggie on how to do thin omelets in the microwave. It made me think back to when I had lots of time to read everyone’s blog and see all the great lunches and I really miss doing that. Biggie has such a wonderful, helpful blog and if I ever get around to constant reading again, hers is definitely on the top of the list. When I first got into bentos a year ago, hers was always a favorite of mine. Please take a look at her site if you haven’t seen it yet. ^_^

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Happy Easter!

I had a rather hectic weekend with a lot of things to do ahead of time for Easter. Add in the fact that my two little devils very thoroughly went through all of our belongings, making sure that every last thing was out of place or ripped to shreds. I did a lot of really bad grazing on the Costco bag of almonds I bought and fortunately, all the walking and bending over to pick up things probably helped negate it. That’s still no excuse for bad habits though…

We currently have five little kids in the family that adore anything Jell-O, which is a really good thing for me because I’m always looking for backup excuses to make Jell-O eggs, something I’ve never been completely sure any adults other than me care for. My Aunty is the one who passed on this odd craving for egg shaped Knox Blox. Before advanced technologies were discovered (plastic eggs & molds), she used to poke holes into the tops of her eggs and siphon the egg out whenever she made scrambled eggs. She’d then save the rinsed out eggshells all year until finally Easter came around and she could use them to fill with Jell-O. I still remember helping crack the eggs under warm water. This freaking insane yet endearing technique must have done something to my head over the years because as it is now, I cannot have an Easter without Jell-O eggs. And I don’t just make a dozen, I go crazy and make at least 50. My co-workers will find this out tomorrow. He he.

This year I made Cherry, Orange, Lemon, Lime, and Berry Blue. I made one box of Grape, but I ended up eating all of them with the kids on Saturday… hee. I still have tons of boxes of Strawberry, Raspberry, and Grape to make. Since Buddy had hidden a bunch of boxes around the house (I found one in the toy chest), I was missing some boxes and had to go to Foodland to round things out. I almost broke down crying when I saw that they didn’t stock Peach flavored Jell-O anymore. Peach Jell-O was something I was addicted to while I was pregnant and I only have two boxes left. Hopefully they just don’t stock it and it’s not discontinued. My mom had a favorite Jell-O flavor: Blackberry. That got discontinued! D:

I had talked about my co-worker’s cupcakes and how I was going to steal her idea. Well, there they are! They didn’t come out quite as good as I had hoped. I should have gone for Jelly Bellys instead I think. I thought about using the little box of Bertie Botts I had here, but then thought that would be mean and that maybe eating a Booger flavored bean would make the cupcake experience a bit less than pleasant. They’re topped with green dyed coconut and Smoothie flavor Skittles. Sadly the bag had very few purple Skittles and I found those made the cupcakes look the best.

I made a really huge ass Kim Chee Crab and Avocado Salad for the family and everyone liked it, so that was a good success again! I added sliced baby carrot this time for a bit more color since I forgot to buy grape tomatoes. Easter was really fun overall. My almost brother-in-law made scallop with mustard sauce appetizers and and a really, really good beef dish. We dyed eggs. Buddy dyed his legs yellow. I had a lot of fun with this Tye Dye set I bought. Yes, I dyed eggs. I’m still a kid at heart, so sue me. Sadly, no egg fights. I’d seen an oddly pointed egg while boiling them too. I had plans for that egg! Perhaps when the kids are older. It’s just as well, they’d probably cry too much from Aunty Crystal owning them.

After that we played Rock Band and I finally gave it a try. It was fun and even Grandma J tried it out. Yay!

On Thursday, my boss mentioned I should grow some wheat grass as Easter grass for the kids. I had heard of wheatberries before but had no idea what they were or how completely dirt cheap they are. I headed to Down to Earth after work and bought 2 pounds of wheatberries for around $2. I soaked way too much and laid them out in one of my roasting pans on top of wet paper towels. The next day they had started to sprout already:

They’re really fun to grow!! The only bad part is that like I said, I soaked way too much and so now they’re all piled up on top of each other trying to grow. I transferred some of them to the bottoms of my flowerpots but there are literally thousands of them still needing transplanting. The really retarded part is that I’m doing it by hand, one at a time. LOL

These are the transplanted wheatberries on Day 3. They grow really fast!! Luckily I had a spray bottle and the kids have been having a ton of fun watering them by misting them. The grass is actually even taller now. Updates tomorrow!

We took the kids to see Horton Hears a Who! again. It was Buddy’s second time and Baby Girl’s first. She chickened out the first time and this time was sobbing, asking if we could go home. I had to trick her back into the theater and eventually she started peeking and as soon as the credits rolled, she yelled, “NOW I LIKE IT!” When I was younger I used to watch movies like Aladdin and Lion King and wondered why the hell these little kiddie movies were so riddled with adult humor. Now that I am older, wiser, and nearly braindead from whining children I understand that the humor is there to make the movies bearable for parents. It really just wouldn’t do to have a bunch of stupefied parents driving their children home. They no doubt already have that dead look in their eyes from one too many Barney’s or Dora’s. That being said, I really enjoyed seeing Horton twice. My son adores him. Now if I could just survive the 50 daily requests for the longest Horton video I could find on YouTube (7m 5s), things should be okay.

Two Jell-O eggs were consumed while writing this post.

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Jang Su Leftovers (197)

I passed out last night with 8 Easter Baskets unfinished and so it was a good (well, not all good) thing that Baby Girl woke up this morning at 5:15 am to announce that she’d wet her bed. We finished them together and she so kindly topped it off with a nice big tantrum/meltdown. I can’t wait til these “Tantrum Threes” are over as lately I can just about see the edge of the cliffs of sanity.

There we have it, all 17 baskets. Now my brain can rest easy. One had no tag cause I forgot the name of a kid. 16/17 is still good though…

With all of that going on, I had to rush this bento and managed to finish in 10 minutes. Go me!!

We ate food from Jang Su BBQ last night. This place is at Waimalu Shopping Center and though Kim Chee still has my favorite food, Jang Su’s food is pretty good. I took some of the chicken and bulgogi (thin bbq beef). I put some nori paste onto the rice because I just bought a bottle of this recently. I looooove nori paste. They have different types, I think plain, mushroom, and bonito. Since I’m allergic to mushrooms this is the bonito one. Sooo good on rice.

The bulgogi had a lot of fat on it but since I refrigerated it, the fat was white and hard and very easy to just pluck off. Much easier than staring at a piece of hot meat not knowing which is meat and which is fat. Tucked in with it are cucumber pickles and a baby carrot all sliced up. I only put it in for color, I have a whole bag of baby carrots to eat too. I bought one of those Costco baby carrot bags. You know, the one so huge you could mistake it for a Longs bag? (Longs Drugs bags are bigger than supermarket bags, thus are win.) Anyway, I’m in a Carrot Race right now to eat them all before they go bad.

I missed Idol last night and hadn’t even watched Tuesday’s show. I dunno why but I’ve lost a lot of interest in this season suddenly. I’m still pulling for David Archuletta and Ramiele Malubay, but I just got so bored with the show. Mr. Pikko says its because of the two weeks of Lennon/McCarthy and I think he’s got something there. I mean, they made great songs, but they’re very mellow and not very exciting. I don’t get how they expect the kids to MAKE a mellow song exciting. Survivor was on last night, but I’ll have to watch it tonight! I hope Cirie is finally gone! I despise her for getting rid of Yao Man.

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Crab & Avocado Sandwich (194)

Sorry for the lack of bentos this week, but as I mentioned last Friday, we had a potluck on Monday. Lots of yummy foods were consumed including an apple/nut salad, lobster ravioli, healthy rice (from me, more on that later), enchiladas (which I didn’t eat after someone said, WOW THEY’RE SPICY!), lots of fresh veggies, some REALLY ono fresh salsa with corn chips, salami & cheese on toothpicks, cold cut sandwiches, and lots of other goodies including the cuuuutest Easter cupcakes which I am so stealing for Easter this year.

Yesterday I stayed home because poor Baby Girl caught Buddy’s stomach virus. She lay limp and miserable all day, the poor thing. ;(

As I mentioned, I made Healthy Rice, which is a very good and increasingly popular dish that I got from Grandma J who got it from someone else. It’s very simple to make and I was asked for the recipe by at least half the office.

5 cups cooked rice
1 jar Nametake mushrooms
1 jar Ochazuke furikake
2 cups shelled edamame

Instructions:

1. Combine and stir together well.

I still have leftover ingredients so I’ll be sure to make more for a bento once I buy more edamame. The best part of it all? I am allergic to mushrooms and I gave this a try, happily discovering that I can eat nametake mushrooms no problem! WOOHOO!!!

I haven’t had a sandwich bento in quite some time so I decided to use some of the big pack of Costco imitation crab meat that I bought for a sandwich. Since mayo is a big no-no in calories and I’ve brought a lot of food for lunch, I opted to use Laughing Cow Light Swiss Cheese instead. It’s possible this will turn out to be a terrible combo, we’ll see!!

I lightly toast the bread but it gets a bit soggy in the fridge anyway, so I only toast it to make the cutting easier. I lined the sandwich box with lettuce, which I eat with the sandwich so nothing gets wasted. I also sliced up some avocado to make it less boring. With the cheese and the bread, this comes out to a 5 point bento. Each slice is 2 points! D:

The silliest part of this bento is the baby carrots. This bag was a bad batch, containing a lot of carrots that didn’t get peeled well, so were therefore very bitter. Trust me, peeling little baby carrots is a severe pain in the ass. And I just noticed one of them had the nerve to fall out of place in the box before I took the picture. How rude!

I haven’t had one of these in a while. Since this is an additional quarter avocado, this salad is 1 point. But, with all the walking I do for this job, the 1 point isn’t a big deal. I get about 40 minutes of walking done per day just to pick up the mail. Pretty good, huh? 😀

Lately I’ve been eating a lot of food so I have to keep myself under control by eating a lot of healthy food. I brought miso soup with tofu to eat in the morning, which was a good thing since Buddy had me up at 4:30 AM asking to eat everything under the sun. (catching up for 3 days of almost no eating) I brought more of my ancient kiwis along with their buddies the Senior Citizen Blueberries. If you look closely, you can see their wrinkles. As I’ve said before, I hate wasting fruit. You should have seen the nasty ass raspberries I very reluctantly threw away this morning. (I almost ate a few before tossing too, lol!)

It’s more important than ever for me to be adhering to my diet now because my bridesmaid dress came in. I ended up being asked to pick my own and I chose this one. I love it! And even better, I fit quite perfectly into a size 6 petite! WOOOO! That’s actually better than the dress, hehe!

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Beef Cutlet (180)

It’s been miraculously sunny on Oahu for the past, I dunno, five days or so? It was getting to the point where on a day of sun you go out of the house and say, “Wait wait wait, what? IT’S NOT RAINING!?!” But then as soon as I’d go to fiscal or something, I’m about to go out the door when I hear roaring rain outside.

Someone mentioned an ice storm yesterday and I started joking that my brain couldn’t process such a term. Ice is in your water or soda! Ice is what you eat when you go to Baldwin’s or Waiola Shave Ice! It doesn’t STORM ice!

Anyway, point is, the seasons we have in Hawaii are basically “Sunny” and “Rainy”, but if I had to break it down into four pidgin seasons, I’d say:

Winter = “Stay Sum Cold Outside”
Spring = “Get Choke Rain”
Summer = “Frickin’ Hot”
Fall = “I No Can Stop Sweating”

Today I have this three bowl contraption that I bought at Price Busters. I’ve used a green one before for my salad kit once long ago and have had this pink one sitting around in a cabinet for quite some time since. I finally busted it out to carry some soup to work. I have here some Chicken Long Rice, made by my MIL.

In the main dish bowl I have some green salad with grape tomatoes, which I dripped with 4 drops of Caesar Italian Lite. Then I have beef cutlet, rice, and corn. In the Hello Kitty bowl I put some katsu sauce.

In my last bowl I have fruits. I cut two kiwis, half an orange, blueberries, and raspberries. Adding the oranges really brought the other three fruit colors together. I was really happy with how it turned out. To cut the orange I sliced it in half, then made half moon slices, then cut those in half to make little triangles.

As most people know, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. I just got back into posting my lunches at LiveJournal and of course, the bento challenge for this week is a V-Day theme, so I have to think today how I want to do my entry tomorrow! My eggs expire tomorrow, so maybe I can implement tamagoyaki somehow…

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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!!

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Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon (174)

Last night was the season premiere of LOST and I have to admit that I was very happy with what I saw. Last season was such a drag to watch and the only redemption in the whole year was the finale with the flashforwards. Without spoiling anything, the premiere continued on this flashforward trend and with that, has brought life back into the series. And boy did it need it. Manual labor cracking rocks? Locked in cages and tricked into having sexy time on camera for your doctor crush to see? It really did sound like some silly fantasy a girl has as a teen. Hot doctor/hot bad boy love triangle on a remote island. Oh yeah, baby, who didn’t wish for something like that when they were 13? I sure as hell did.

Okay now that I’ve got my schoolgirl fantasy confessions out of the way, we can move on to my lunch.

Last night Grandma J made Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon, a recipe which I actually remembered to ask her for this time! Woohoo! And even better, I have a picture of her to share with everyone. The majority of my bentos contain the food she so lovingly cooks for three families, so I think some credit is due. She protested the picture, but Mr. Pikko insists that under the surface she likes it. So if she meets us with a screech this afternoon, I’m so blaming it on him.

I’ve also decided to start referring to her as “Grandma J” because when I named the pic of her “MIL”, Mr. Pikko’s brain did some flipflops because it’s too close to “MILF”. Anyway, this is her! She’s holding up a cookbook on the page with the recipe for the salmon, which follows:

Teriyaki Wasabi Salmon

1. Drizzle salmon with Mr. Yoshida’s teriyaki sauce. (or other teriyaki sauce)
2. Spread mayo on top of salmon. If desired, mix some wasabi into the mayo.
3. Sprinkle Aji Nori furikake on top.
4. Place in microwave safe dish and microwave on high for 5 minutes. Check the salmon and if needed, cook for another 2-3 minutes.

Pretty quick, huh?? I am not a wasabi fan at all, but I tried the wasabi one (she makes with and without) and it tasted really great. It had the wasabi taste, but not the hotness. It’s a quick 10 minute recipe, give it a try! ^_^

I forgot to mention that my ear is still swollen. I’d done the Neosporin and it seemed to help, but then last night I was cleaning my puffy ear when I realized that I was cleaning it with eye makeup remover. GOOD JOB, ME!

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Pot Roast (156)

My mother in law makes really good pot roast but I always love the vegetables in pot roast dishes the most. When I was packing up food last night I wasn’t sure how I’d turn this into a nice looking bento since pot roast generally doesn’t look very attractive. So to help offset the doodoo like characteristics of the meat and potatoes, I decided to make the majority of this bento focus on the salad instead. Lettuce and tomato always look really nice in a box (in my opinion anyway) and so I took a large portion of salad to go with a tiny portion of food. I figured this is healthier for me anyway.

I packed some Catalina dressing in the little lion container for the salad. Not my best bento, but it looks yummy to me! This is packed in my Doraemon box, which is a wonderful size!! On the side I have some blackberries we bought at Costco last night.

I don’t know how everyone else is doing but I am slacking so badly on Christmas shopping. I’ve bought the exact same DVD set for both my parents and presents for Mr. Pikko, my mainland niece and nephew, but that’s about it. I still have to shop for my brother, in-laws, niece and nephew, sitter, sitter kids, MY OWN KIDS, and my grandma. D: It’s December 11, this is not going to end well!! Normally I’m so good about shopping in November, but my head has been scattered with too many things lately.

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Pork Tofu

As any Hawaii resident knows by now, the University of Hawaii Warriors are the WAC (Western Athletic Conference) Champions!!!! The game against Boise was last Friday and it overtook the Fresno State game I attended years ago as the most adrenaline pumped game I’ve ever attended at Aloha Stadium. There was a point during the game when the stands were just electric and the shouts and screams were deafening. It was truly magical to be there. This picture will be too big for my blog, but I wanted to put it up anyway:

We started chanting B-C-S and that gave me chicken skin! I feel so good for Colt and so happy that he came back. The season was looking kinda bleak with the injuries and all but now it just seems like this was all he could have hoped for. Baby Girl got into it too. I’d hoist her up and her job was to scream and wave the shredded ti-leaves we had. I can’t wait for this week’s game. GO BOWS!!!!

Last night I had to make something that I thought Buddy would gobble up because he’s sick and hasn’t been eating much so I made pork tofu. It was a lil lacking in taste so I think next time I’ll use Kikkoman instead of Aloha. I’m also out of onion powder so I need more of that… It’s the only way I can sneak the taste of onions into food because Mr. Pikko has the Ultra Onion Detector 3000 built into his tongue.

It looked real plain, so I picked some of my last green onions and cut them up with my scissors. When we had severe rains a couple weeks ago I looked out at my plants to see my poor green onions floating in a pot of water. They’re still alive though, miraculously.

A KCCA salad, yay. This was all nice and good until I realized that I forgot to pack LETTUCE. hahahaha! So I guess I’m having this as sides instead of a salad. Good job, me!

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