Adventures in Bentomaking

I didn’t get a chance to post this yesterday, sorry! We at dinner at Gyotaku on Monday night and I got the Yasaka Bento (of course) which is assorted nigiri, California roll, teriyaki chicken, and mix tempura. Gyotaku is a really great Japanese restaurant. My only problem with them is that they replaced Suehiro, the old home of the most supercalifragilisticexpialidocious nabeyaki udon ever made. Not kidding. I even emailed that lady from the Star Bulletin that hunts down long lost recipes, but so far I haven’t heard back from her. *sob*

Anyway, this is the leftover teriyaki chicken since I was too full to eat more than one piece. Behind it I have tofu and on top of it is sliced avocado. I tucked a lil’ bunny rabbit sauce bottle behind the chicken with soy sauce for the tofu. In the two compartments I have sliced takuan and an umeboshi in one side and then some kim chee crab with fresh chopped green onions on top.

Everything in this bento is core except for the chicken, which I really should have asked for skinless, but I forgot. Since it still had the skin, I decided to eat it cold so that it was easier to peel all the fat off the top and from the middle of the meat.

Today we had our July office potluck. Being back on Weight Watchers I decided I should bring in something all Core and went with Brown Rice California Rolls. I’m not a big fan of brown rice, but I had to admit, this was pretty good.

Since I had leftover rice I decided to make some small maki rolls and made cucumber, avocado, and ume maki. I used kim chee crab for the middle to give it a little more kick. A closer look:

I learned a while back that if I want to have brown rice in the morning, I had darn well better cook it the night before. My rice cooker takes a whopping 90 minutes to properly cook brown rice!

My co-worker was sorely disappointed that I only brought in regular maki rolls. I think maybe she was expecting me to bring in California rolls shaped like cats or elephants or something after my star onigiri dish. Hahaha!!

I had a bitchin’ Saturday this past weekend. Why? I got to meet, shake hands, and take pictures with BJ Penn, UFC Lightweight Champion!

Should there be any other BJ/Bento fans out there, you may commence with the envy now. He was a very cool guy to meet, even if just for a minute. I’ve heard stories of really obnoxious celebrities and since BJ is a Hilo boy the potential for him being a jackass was significantly higher in my mind. Anyway, this was not the case  with him, much to my delight! (Sorry nice Hilo guys, but for some reason us nice Hilo girls have no idea where you hang out, but it’s probably with nice Honolulu girls.)

This was at Barnes & Noble Ala Moana, so we headed down and got there at about 9:45. The line curled through the bookshelf aisles but once he arrived it moved at a decent pace. We ended up waiting a little over an hour. It was just me and Baby Girl and she used her good behavior to extort some Juicy Fruit out of me. The bookstore wanted it to be fair to everyone waiting in line so they insisted that there would be no personalized autographs and no posed photographs, which was a bummer but after waiting in a really really bad line for Colt at the Ohana Festival two years ago, I can fully understand their policy.

That aside though, one of BJ’s guys went through the line writing names on Post-its to stick on items we wanted personalized, which I thought was awesome!! I wondered why they’d do that and came to the conclusion that maybe that eliminates the likelihood that you have someone making money off your autograph on eBay. The store people were telling everyone, “No pictures, no pictures!” but BJ looked up for posed shots anyway. Very nice!

He offered his hand when I said hi and when I apologized for not having a BJ Penn shirt, he said it was ok and then when he saw I’d brought my FBI shirt (From Big Island) he said, “FBI…” in an approving voice. I wished him good luck in his next fight and he said thanks and thanks for coming down. I’m out a sleepy shirt now but of course, I DON’T MIND!!

And holy crap if that wasn’t cool enough, I also saw Bad Badtz Maru down there. I grabbed his punky ass to take another photo. What are the odds of meeting two celebrities in one bookstore?!?

I wish now that I’d told him how great I think it is that he has put our little town of Hilo on the map. When I was in high school I just wanted to move to the big city and people told me that when you get older you like move back but I was just like, no way. I have to admit though, I get those feelings now and then. I love Pearlridge but there’s just something so familiar about Prince Kuhio Mall. I prefer Foodland over here but there’s just something so distinct about shopping for food in KTA. I trip out anytime I see footage of Hilo during UFC PPVs and it makes me miss home and the days where Y’s lunch shop was more than a MAYBE once a year thing. Mr. Pikko was looking at some pics of BJ yesterday and I was like OMG that’s the farmer’s market! I can still go back to that place and the same dang booth sells the best cigar mango. Some things just don’t change there and I guess that’s something really great about the town now that I’m not in such a hurry to leave.

Speaking of Hilo and farmer’s markets, my dad is shipping us lichee and cigar mangoes. Baby Girl will probably do cartwheels at the sight of the lichee. I’ll be doing my cigar mango cartwheels next to her.

Every once in a while, I get the yearning to eat some cheap food. And what cheap food tastes better than Hamburger Helper?? Beef Pasta is the flavor of choice for Mr. Pikko so I went with that. I re-joined Weight Watchers on Thursday and intend to start officially tomorrow since we’re celebrating goodbyes at work and birthdays at home. I’m not really sure why I joined last week if I intended to start on Tuesday, but oh well! LOL I know there is Spark People, but I need that nagging knowledge that I paid for something to make me stick to it. Since Spark People is free, I just found myself jumping off the wagon in only two days.

With D-Day approaching, I went a lil nuts this weekend, eating whenever I felt like it, eating whatever I wanted. I ate too much. I ate a lot of licorice and chocolate. And can you believe that this morning upon weigh-in, I’d lost 1.6 pounds? What the heck is up with that?? Anyway, the goal is 125 pounds by the time the Square Enix Summit comes around and 120 forever.

I have revived the infamous KCAA (kim chee crab avocado for new readers) salad from the depths of my WW success recipes. In my third tier I packed grapes and strawberries. Sadly, the grapes are from Mexico. E-coli, here I come!

Yummy yummy in my tummy! Hope you all had a great weekend like I did!

The fun bento stuff I mentioned the last week finally arrived and I was very amused to see the description on the box on the customs form: “toys”. Toys is right! I felt like a kid on Christmas morning! I decided I had to use them today to make a Hello Kitty themed bento!

At the top I have a bunny and Hello Kitty onigiri. The nori was cut out with a punch. I was sad to see these punches were made of plastic as they were hard to punch and kept getting stuck. I had to keep tapping it with a butter knife to get the thing to snap back. But still, it’s great!! The set came with some adorable veggie cutters. Obviously I’m in love with the flower cutter. Kitty and Bunny are surrounded by broccoli, imitation crab, and mochiko chicken. Here is a close-up shot:

On top the mochiko chicken I have slices of baked sweet potato cut with my new Hello Kitty veggie cutters. Adorable!! I added pineapple and a strawberry and separated it with some pink sushi grass.

This is packed in a Hello Kitty box and as if that wasn’t enough Kitty for me, I have Hello Kitty and Bunny cookies I made last night. On Monday I was showing my niece pictures from my Flickr and she saw the cookies I made for Baby Girl. Ever since then every day I get this ear to ear grin, “Aunty Crystal! Aunty Crystal! Did you make more Hello Kitty cookies????” I finally told her yesterday that I’d back them tonight. I made so many that I brought them to work so that people could help eat them down to a managable amount. It will be nice to see her reaction tonight. ^_^

Yesterday the in-laws bought meat from a golf country club in Mililani called Alonzo’s Meat Market. The meat was SOOOOOO tender, omg! If you’re one of my Oahu readers, you have got to try this meat!! It’s pre-marinated and ready to grill. I think they even sell it already cooked too. I tried looking them up on Yahoo, but couldn’t find anything. Perhaps this is a phantom meat market!

I used the meat I took to make mini kabobs. I used long picks to skewer green bell peppers, meat, and onions. To cook the veggies I just put a pan on high and put them in plain. Turned out pretty well! I added baby carrots, slices of pineapple (separated by food dividers), and some halved strawberries.

I’ve been invited to Square Enix’s 2008 Premier Site Summit, so if all goes according to plan, I’ll be making a trip out to LA next month! Woo! Very fun! :D

Okay so first order of business, pictures from the shower have been trickling into all of our email boxes at work and I wanted to post one of me and the happy mom-to-be with the onigiri dish I made for her shower. The ear to ear grin was exactly what I was aiming for! Woohoo! Still, don’t be fooled, she’s still the evil brownie source I mentioned a few weeks ago. I had to crop out my fat arm cause obviously all the brownie and caramel went there!!

There is something about today’s bento that is different but you won’t be able to tell what it is. I actually started making this bento *gasp* last night! Yes people, by some miracle combination of moon phase and day of the week, I actually started on my bento the night before! Not that it helped since I was still late for work today. At least I was on the right track though!

I started with the onigiri. I have a mold for these shapes and they just so happened to be a little too small for the box I chose so I put in some romaine lettuce leaves and that fixed it up quickly. I wrapped the onigiri in Korean style nori, which I think is called Qim, pronounced “kim”. This is secondhand info from Baby Girl through Uncle J, so don’t quote me on that. Next to that I have two pork hash patties cut in half and in quarters with sealife food dividers tucked in between. A sprig of parsley and a fish bottle of soy sauce fill up the back.

In the other section of the box I have sliced papaya, which I was able to sneak in since the kids were not up yet. I added a half strawberry to fill the empty space and gobbled up the other half.

Congratulations are in order for Frances of Puerto Rico, who after a week of polling, came out on top with the most votes to win my 100K Bento Contest! Here is her entry again:

Great job, Frances!! Thank you to everyone who voted and entered the contest! Hopefully I can have an excuse for another one soon!

On to my own bento for today!

As you may notice, I have pink onigiri in it. Yesterday Mr. Pikko ate dinner late and so while I was bathing the kids, I heard him yell from the kitchen, “Why is the rice pink?!?” The answer to that can be found in one of the many conversations I’ve had with Baby Girl since the baby shower last Thursday:

“What do you want for breakfast?”
“Blue musubi please.”

“What shall we have for lunch?”
“Mmmm, I think red and green and blue musubis.”

“Why aren’t you eating your dinner?”
“Because I want little star musubis, Mommy…”

She inhaled 8 of these yesterday along with some Costco chicken. The lesson for parents here is that if you want a way to get your kids to eat craptons of rice just color it, shape it, and sprinkle on some furikake for the Ultimate Combo +1.

They ate them for breakfast, that’s why I have some in my bento. I have a mold that does a heart, a flower, a triangle, and a star all at once, so it’s a great mold! The only problem is that it’s pretty deep, so I have to water down the mold and then slap it down onto a cutting board to get the onigiri to come out.

I’ve got sliced strawberries next to the onigiri then on the other side two chicken meatballs (Aidell’s from Costco) skewered with my now favorite food picks. Next to that I’ve got some edamame. I made more rotisserie chicken soup so that’s why today’s bento is really small.

It never ceases to amaze me how small Hawaii is. I got an email about where to find bento gear and it was from my cousin’s husband’s aunty. It’s pretty hilarious how word can get around like that. And of course as icing on the cake, she’s from Hilo. lol

Yesterday I stayed home to take Buddy to the dermatologist so that’s why there was no bento. I ended up eating ramen by myself at the Ezogiku at Waimalu Shopping Center. I ordered Chuka ramen, not realizing this was made of mushrooms. I’d been thinking that my food allergy to mushrooms was no longer a problem, so I ate it and nothing happened. I think I’m finally in the clear! The allergist I took Baby Girl to said that some food allergies do go away, you just have to try again maybe every five years. Woohoo! Mushrooms on pizza, salad, ramen, udon, everything again! :D

Today at work we had a very fun baby shower/farewell party for one of my co-workers. I signed up to bring onigiri and since she’s having a boy, I went with blue and yellow. I went for the “wow” factor and onigiri with faces always does that, guaranteed.

I got up at 5 am to do these because I had to cook two batches of rice. What I do is I add the food coloring to the water in the ricepot before I press the cook button. Three drops of coloring for 2 cups of rice gets me this shade of blue and yellow. I was very happy with how they turned out!! I used red shrimp flakes for the cheeks and nori for the faces. Many, many thanks to those that suggested I toast the nori before punching. That saved me TONS of time and nori!

Here’s a close-up of the lil’ guys. As hoped, I got many oohs and aahs and EEEEEKs and OMGs. Baby Girl came with me, having changed her mind about the splash party they were having at school. She ate a rather insane amount of them, around 8 or so. Kid approved, for sure!

On Saturday I felt like pizza, so I sent Mr. Pikko to go pick up one after he took the kids to Costco. Pizza Hut has a new kind of “grilled pizza” which I guess just has grilled toppings. It was a special reduced price while they promote is so I couldn’t use our Entertainment coupon on it. The guy was like, our large is $16.99 and I was thinking, “Ho ho! Score!” Then I mentioned the coupon and he’s like, “Oh I’m gonna have to charge you the regular price of $24.99.” I was like W T F! So, grab that price while it’s hot, people, cause the pizza was pretty good! I ended up ordering half Meat Lovers and half Combo, which is Meat Lovers with red and green bell peppers. The meats included are grilled steak, grilled chicken, and grilled ham. Mmm!

In order to bentofy my pizza, I used cookie cutters and cut the two slices into stars. I have 3 different sizes here and you can’t see, but there are two small ones tucked into the side. Next to them I have Hello Kitty food picks with sweaty olives and then baby carrots. I put all blueberries into the bottom tier in the hopes of distracting myself from the fact that I have such a naughty lunch, but I could hear the blueberries snickering at me, “Heeheehee, we know what’s upstairs!”

Buddy cried a little today, but it was my fault. He really really wanted to play on the jungle gym like, NOW. I coaxed him into the classroom by telling him we had to put his backpack away. When he realized I was actually leaving, he got pissed. We saw him as we were leaving though and he’d stopped crying already. Such a good boy! Grandma J was extremely shocked and informed us all that when Mr. Pikko went to preschool he screamed for three months and would be waiting at the gate for her to pick him up. lol

We had a pretty productive weekend in that we actually got our four lazy asses out of the house and into the *gasp* sun. Us gamers tend to forget what that big blazing ball of heat is unless we get out once in a while, so it was nice to refresh our memories. This past Saturday was the Walk Now for Autism and since my brother-in-law to be was going to be volunteering and the in-laws were watching my nephew down there, we decided to go to say hi and then go to the beach at Magic Island. Had we been better prepared we’d have registered for the walk but being the mediocre supporters we are, we forgot to wear shoes and bring strollers for our cranky kids. So in the end, this turned into a simple trip to the beach.

We headed to the Magic Island beach area only to find out the place was riddled with tons of rocks, which really sucks since that was a really kickass place to swim before. We ended up moving to Ala Moana beach, which was surprisingly uncrowded. I couldn’t go swimming for some monthly girly reason so I placed upon myself the task of digging the kids a large swimming pit. While at Windward Mall last weekend I bought two shovels for them and these came in pretty darn useful. I’m digging away, feeling all useful when suddenly this fist-sized crab jumps out of the sand and attacks me. I shrieked and jumped out and I guess he was pretty pissed at me for digging him out because he proceeded to fart in my little pond. Next time I eat him! I got burnt. And I learned that even if you’re not swimming, you should wear a suit instead of a bra.

For Father’s Day dinner, we went to Monterey Bay Canners. I don’t think I want to go back. Now that I think back, my last experience there wasn’t great either. They’re lucky these holidays only come around once a year and that we forget about our last time. For one, Baby Girl’s “chicken tenders” dinner came and it was basically little nuggets of batter like the popcorn chicken that KFC used to serve. My nephew had the same dish and his plate had two nice chicken breast strips. Her fries were obviously bottom of the barrell too, so I complained and she got a completely new dinner. They didn’t bring us dinner rolls until we were starving and stealing food from the kids and even then the server asked us if we wanted any. Who does that?

My food, unlike last time, was thankfully not drenched in a rich cream sauce (Grilled Opakapaka instead of Crab Stuffed Opakapaka). It took forever to get our food. My BIL’s mashed potatoes were refrigerator cold. My fish was ok though and I got two pieces, meaning one made it into today’s lunch. The white string beans were cool! I don’t think I’ve seen this in the supermarkets before.

I added furikake to the rice and cut the beans in half to get them into the box. I added a wedge of cheese and some grapes for snacks. The grapes are in a food cup because I didn’t want my grapes to taste like fish. This is one of my absolute favorite fishes to eat but this stuff is seriously stink.

Thanks to everyone who has voted in my poll so far! Keep spreading the word to come vote! You can easily see the contest entries at the top menu bar.

Today was Buddy’s first day of preschool. *sniff sniff* You could tell who the real babies were. He’s all running around the room excitedly, playing with things, telling kids hi. Mommy and Daddy are lingering at the door, “One more hug, Buddy…” “Bye Buddy….” “Be good, Buddy….” We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. Heh.

Yesterday while eating breakfast, Baby Girl suddenly turned to me and exclaimed in utter amazement, “MOMMY! My hair is still cut!!!” I told her haircuts don’t go away and she looked up at me in wonder at my vast knowledge of the staying power of haircuts. I need to get me more of these looks, they do wonders for my parental self esteem.

Today was party day for Baby Girl, so I decided to make use of those Hello Kitty cookie cutters I mentioned the other day. One of the less frequent but equally annoying things I do is buy pretty cookbooks which I rarely use. I looove cookbooks but when it comes to what’s for dinner, I usually find myself on Google or All Recipes or Cooks.com or something. This time however, I decided to pull out my copy of The All-American Cookie Book. There’s a whole section dedicated to sugar cookies and I picked the one that looked the simplest, which turned out to be something called the “Watkins Sugar Cookies” recipe.

I bought this book several years ago (okay, maybe 5+ years ago) and I think this is only the second time I’ve used it. The dough didn’t taste that great, but the cookies were awesome! Definitely a keeper! Here are the cookies cut up:

They didn’t turn out that great baked as the faces were harder to see. My friend Erika suggested that it’s probably because I didn’t chill the cookies before baking. I did this only for the last batch, which would explain why those looked the best! That and I think I baked them a lil’ bit longer.

Mr. Pikko made some comment about the boys in her class having to eat Hello Kitty cookies, but he seemed to have no problem eating them himself. Thankfully, he knows better than to go hog wild on kid cookies, so he only ate two and he made puppy dog faces to get them both. He fell asleep before I finished baking the scraps. “You snooze, you lose” applied quite literally here, hahaha!

Today I ate beef cutlet for lunch. I cut the piece into small bite size slices then layered it on top of the rice. To add some life to it, I added little food dividers and then a carrot bottle. There actually isn’t anything in that sauce bottle and this is because I hate the way these carrot bottles look with soy sauce in them. They get all dark and brown, so I just put it in there for fun. In the cupcake cup I put corn and shelled edamame. For fruits I brought blueberries and cherries.

A few weeks ago I got an offer for some free sparkling water from Hansen’s Natural. I said ok and thought I’d get a few cans in the mail but instead I got this gigantor box of 24 cans of soda! LOL! They had some really interesting flavors (read more about it here) and I ended up trying all but the dragonfruit, mostly cause I had dragonfruit once and I felt as though I was eating dedrobiums. Anyway, my family not being real big soda drinkers with the kids all being so young and us having a sudden plethora of flavors to try, I brought this in to work. We all tasted whilst trying our best to ignore the taste of free (we didn’t want that biasing our opinions). Comments I got:

J: I preferred the sugar free simply due to the fact that it was zero calories. The regular 90 calorie drink just wasn’t worth it for me. For 50 more calories, I could’ve just had my Coca Cola Classic. The drink is a little sweet but I liked the carbonation as it made the drink last a little longer.

D: It was tasty but a little too much carbonation for me.

C: The diet drinks were light, refreshing, and tasted better then other diet drinks. I would prefer this to other diet drinks if they were of similiar size and cost. I don’t know how much they cost but they are smaller.

P: I liked the blueberry pomegranate (sugar free) one and I’d buy it.

While no one did cartwheels while drinking it, it was all gone within a couple of days. For myself, I liked the idea of having a healthier orange soda. I rarely drink soda, but when I do I usually prefer orange, grape, or strawberry now. Coke and Pepsi just make me feel horrible, probably due to the odd fact that I do not know how to burp. All burps I’ve ever made have been involuntary. I did not like the sugar-free ones at all, but I can’t stand ANY diet soda. My favorite of the 3 I tried was the cranberry-grapefruit. Anyway, many thanks to Hansen’s for the drinks. My office was tickled pink at trying out new products.

We’re having a baby shower here next week Thursday and I asked Baby Girl if she wanted in to come in to work with me to attend. She’s like, “No… I don’t want to take a bath at your workplace, Mommy.” LOLOL