Since the lasagna was cold, that made it pretty easy to chop into small squares before I heated it up in the microwave. I picked some lettuce leaves from the growbed outside, added cucumber slices, which he loves, a little piece of broccoli, and a checkered apple. I included a snack pudding for dessert, which I think turned out to be a mistake.

He only ate half the lasagna and half the apple. It could be he didn’t like that the food wasn’t hot, but I hadn’t thought this would be a problem since he spends what feels like half his waking hours complaining to me how his food is too hot. Or… he ate the pudding first and it took too much time at lunch. I suspect he yaps away at lunchtime because the other times he’s brought a lot of food back, his excuse is he “didn’t have time” to eat it all.

I’m more happy he remembered to bring the bento box home. There have been a few times where he forgets it at school over the weekend, which is really, really gross…

I wish Korean places would sell bentos more often. Gina’s BBQ at Market City sells a mini bento, but it’s just a plastic container so stuffed full of food that calling it a bento is stretching it a bit. It’s more like a small plate lunch. But since they put so much emphasis in their veggie sides, I think it’d make for such a great lunch item. So many BBQ plate lunches are just crammed to the brim with food that I can split one with my two kids and be full. The lady at Gina’s who usually puts the veggies into the plates is so skilled with her tongs that I’m pretty sure she’d be amazing at packing a nice, neat bento like this.

About a month ago I had to run an errand down at Ala Moana and I stopped into Shirokiya to buy lunch. They’ve always sold bentos up on the top floor but they recently cleared out their whole bento/kitchen section and now the whole top floor is dedicated to food and various bento shops. It’s like a little Japan food court with like 20 different food options. It’s crazy! And soooo busy!

I bought this “special” tonkatsu and waited while they made me a fresh one. I’d been eating light, so finally getting some fried food with delicious crispy outside was so amazing. Next time I go there I’ll definitely take photos of the whole area because it’s really not something you can put into words.

After ignoring it for about a year, I’ve decided to start putting work into Bento Central again. Sadly, I had to move the whole blog off my old host and in the transition, I had to move everyone’s posts over to my account, so if you see an old post of yours there under “Pikko”, it’s because of that. If anyone is interested in helping me out, I have a small budget for one person to help me fill in content throughout the month. Email me if you have an interest in bento and want to work for Bento Central!

Still, I’ve managed to get exercise with Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred DVD and lose 11 pounds this year. It took me about a month and a half to get through all 30 days, but seeing as how I didn’t do much to change my diet, it worked pretty well! I plan to go through another 30 days in the hopes that I can lose 10 more.

Yesterday I felt so guilty about neglecting my lunch hour that I decided to make a quick sandwich. It’s just a ham sammie with cheese and lettuce Mr. Pikko grew in his aquaponic growbed. On the side I have some raw cauliflower, a wedge of cheese, and some grape tomatoes that Mr. Pikko grew as well. Overall a really quick, but light and healthy lunch. I had toasted the bread to give it a little crunch. It was nice to use my old sandwich bento box too. It’s such a cutie!

The chic online store ModCloth now carries several really cute bento boxes including some from Shinzi Katoh and Vivo bento boxes, but the one that interests me the most is their Take Your Picnic Tiffin.

This box is a two tier insulated lunch container that comes with a handy inner container that you can use to put rice in. The coolest part about it though, it that it comes with tiers that screw into each other.

I’ll need to get my hands on one of these to see how practical the screw tops and bottoms are. I’d also need to test these on the kids to see how they handle it. If it’s too much trouble for them, I’d just end up with a really disgusting, leaking bag of taken apart lids and jars with food all over it. The last thing I want is another “Oops, I forgot I left that there over the whole weekend” ant farm behind the front door.

The box also comes in red, which would make a really nice box for Valentine’s Day. It looks really small in the photos, but when you look at the product details, it says these things are 6″ in diameter. That leaves you with a pretty sizable lunch!

The Take Your Picnic Tiffin sells for $27.99.

When frying the meatballs, they had a pretty dark crust on some sides, but this basically gets “erased” by the soaking in the sauce so they look pretty good for bento.

I think this frog bento box is from J-List, but they’re out of stock. Amazon and AllThingsForSale sell an identical one with a different frog face.

In the bottom tier I put broccoli, meatballs, takuan, three grape tomatoes from Mr. Pikko’s growbed, and some eggplant pickles. In the other tier I padded the rice down flat and then sprinkled yukari powder with a heart stencil. It’s actually the first time I’ve used these stencils and I had a hard time finding them, haha! They came with my sets of charaben cutters.

A couple months back, I posted an Okinawan Sweet Pork bento and said I would be trying it again, only this time by cutting the meat into bite sized chunks. I finally got around to doing it this week and not only did the meat get fully flavored, but it was delectably soft and easy to eat, too. Here’s a new bento from this week that I did with the leftovers.

This magewappa is one of the best quality boxes I have. I’ve used it quite a few times and it still has that wonderful wood smell when you open the box. Sadly, this box isn’t available on J-List right now, which is where I got mine, but Bento & Co does have several in stock. Magewappa boxes should be looked at as an investment you can pass down to your children, which is one reason why they cost so much, they are made to last, handcrafted from cedars trees that have been grown and tended for a hundred years.

Inside this bento I have healthy rice (recipe here), leftover pork,broccoli, pickles, and one of Mr. Pikko’s grape tomatoes. This recipe below is from my Maui Cookbook.

A thin design, the box is quite small, but with three tiers, gives you ample room for packing enough food to satisfy you. It comes with a gorgeous carrier, a red elastic band, and chopsticks that conveniently help secure the boxes in place.

There aren’t individual covers for each tier; the box relies on the tier above it for cover and the top one has a little cover. I’d recommend washing your chopsticks in the bathroom before putting them back into the cover, otherwise you’ll end up with gross food bits inside there and I have no idea how you’d go about cleaning it.

Inside, one of the boxes has a food divider, but I find myself rarely using these and I have a graveyard drawer of them in my kitchen. I store them with my elastic bands and I’m sure every time I open the drawer to grab a band, the poor dividers get their hopes up for nothing. ^_^

The box is on the pricier side at $35, but with such a gorgeous and inventive design, it’s not hard to imagine that you’d look pretty darn cool taking this baby to work.

Sometimes though, people would put it in without any warning and I’d bite into it and be all grossed out. What a silly, picky eater I was to not like ume!

My brother works at the Sheraton Waikiki and he’s given us a stay now and then as gifts and at the little convenience shop downstairs they sell musubis, bread, snacks, etc. One time during our stay, I bought a musubi with purple speckles and it turned out to be an ume-flavored musubi and my goodness was it delicious.

Eventually through experimenting with purchases at Marukai, I found out that it’s called Yukari Seasoning. Essentially dried flakes of red perilla, or beefsteak, which is what is used to flavor ume. So while there is no plum in the seasoning, it tastes just like the pickled plum because this is what the plum is pickled with in the first place!

All you do is take hot rice and sprinkle the powder on. Mix it up really well and then form into a musubi!

In this photo I used two different brands of seasoning, with the one in front having little specks of ume in it and being more brightly purple. If you mix it up and then let it sit for a minute or so, I’ve found this helps bring the purple color out.

If you can find this seasoning at your local Asian market and you love ume flavor, definitely give this a try. It’s sooo yummy!

The sad part is, while we were eating, Buddy said, “Why do so many people have McDonalds?” I looked around and saw that he was right. There were quite a few Happy Meal bags. And it’s not like he was saying this because he envied them, it sounded like he was wondering why there weren’t many other lunches like ours, which I’d cooked that morning.

Since the tray of chicken was around $5 and the rice was probably like 50 cents, this meal cost about the same as a Happy Meal, except that it fed three of us. McDonalds is not cheap anymore and whenever we eat there for lunch it comes out to around $20, around the same as if we ate at Zippy’s or some other place.

I made us furikake fried chicken, which is very easy to make (recipe here) along with some plain triangle onigiri. It was a very simple lunch, nothing really elaborate, but the kids love this chicken and I had to slap a couple of little hands filching too much fried chicken in the morning. Buddy happily ate a lot of it.

Afterward, we went to his classroom to make a little gingerbread house, which was really cute.

For this chicken, I recommend the usual furikake, Nori Komi, but $8.67 for a bottle is actually ridiculously expensive so if you can find it at a local Asian market, go for it. Usually it goes on sale here for $2.50 a bottle. Sadly, Asian Food Grocer doesn’t carry it.

Hope you all had a great new year! Sadly, I return to work tomorrow and boy is my big fat lazy butt not looking forward to that at all… Sigh.

I used a lettuce leaf as a food divider for my pickled veggies, which included slices of cucumber kim chee and strips of takuan. On the left I stuck a little ume into my rice to round out the colors.

Since we have enough lettuce to keep us in salad for a few months, I have to do my part to help eat it so I packed a side salad to eat with my lunch. The tomato is bought from a store, but soon we’ll have our own tomatoes to eat as Mr. Pikko has some coming in soon. I made those croutons myself from the leftover bread from the Giant Jam Sandwich I made on Fictional Food. If you’re wondering why they’re so dark, it’s because I left them in the oven way too long, not realizing that cutting the bread up into really tiny pieces meant I should cut the time nearly in half… So now I have this huge ziploc bag of nearly burnt croutons.

Thankfully, they’re still edible, they just don’t taste fantastic. *sniff*

Christmas is this Sunday and I’m so ashamed that I have yet to do a single Christmas bento. This has definitely been an extremely lazy charaben year for me…