When the Bokksu arrived, I knew I might be in trouble. The box is one of those boxes that are so nicely made that you just can’t bring yourself to throw the box away. (And I was right, because it’s been a few weeks, and it’s still sitting empty in my dining room, waiting patiently for a reuse. Probably as a gift box.)

Seriously, though, it even has a smooth opening experience. Very sleek.

Bokksu has different options available based on your budget, with a smaller 10–14 snacks box and a larger 20–25 snacks box. Bokksu was kind enough to send me their larger box, and this one was theme to Hokkaido.

The snacks come with a really nice booklet that tells you what each snack is and a bit of history behind it. My daughter and I recognized the bun in the middle, as these are sold all over Hawaii in convenience stores, and the Hokkaido cream version Bokksu sent is actually one of our favorites. There were corn snacks, rice crackers, teas, gummies, pastries, fry chips (which we love!), and sweets.

I had told Mikia that we should go slow and try a few things a day, but that went out the window as soon as she saw everything, and we’d tried a bit of everything except for the teas within half an hour. Some were yummy, some were just okay, some were tasty. There was one croissant-type thing that was disappointingly stale, but I still ate it.

I haven’t yet had the chance to try the teas because it’s sadly still been really hot here in Honolulu, and I just can’t bring myself to drink hot tea yet. I’m looking forward to it, though!

Overall, we liked the box, and while the variety box is nice, I took a look at other things they offer, and oooooooomg, this is what we’d want: their KitKat Variety Box!

I made this lunch for Mikia last week, and when she got home, she told me the sandwich was really good. I used cold sliced Costco rotisserie chicken, La Brea wheat bread, and provolone cheese.

When packing sandwiches, I’ve found that using sandwich paper is a good idea, simply because it can be hard to 1) pack cut sandwiches in a tight space and 2) it’s hard to get them out to eat! I bought this pack of sandwich paper quite a while ago, and it’s lasted me a long time. If it’s too big, I simply fold it and tear it with a knife. There are cute newspaper prints available too.

I bought the bread at Safeway on a whim, and it’s super yummy. I’ve been enjoying sandwiches and toast with it for the last week. She said it was a tasty bread too.

Halloween soon! I’ve got a preliminary menu settled, and of course, it’s way too much. So now I have to pare it down because I currently have… five desserts written down. Oops!

I’m also in a sandwich bento rut. My stubborn son refuses to eat anything but ham sandwiches. I’ve noticed lately he tends to do this—eats something constantly, every day, until finally the day comes where that food no longer exists, and I have to find something else. No variety. No mix and matching. He eats it until he’s sick of it, and that’s that.

I’m anticipating the ham sandwich rebellion about one to two weeks from now.

I made these two little candy corns with… my measuring spoon! I was looking around for some kind of shape that resembled a candy corn when I saw that my spoon had a decent shape for it. They’re layered with provolone, cheddar, and Kraft cheeses.

I used a toothpick to round out the bottoms. I meant to put faces, but I was in a time crunch and couldn’t do it. I’ve been meaning to do the sandwich toppers at night so that I can just slap them on in the morning, but I keep forgetting!

Now I just need to figure out what can come next. Wraps, maybe?

I chopped up ham cold cuts to go into the rice. I fried it with soy sauce an butter, added peas and carrots, and then cracked an egg inside to finish it up. Then I added three shrimps from leftover dinner.

I topped it with fresh green onions I planted outside from a store bunch.

In the other side I have a little square of banana bread, sweet potatoes, apple slices, and a golden kiwi. Overall, a big lunch, but teenagers eat like vacuum cleaners, so I have to pack accordingly.

Happy Monday!

Turns out, two is like cranking up the drowsy factor to fifty, and I was walking around all day like I’d gotten ten minutes of sleep. I felt a tad better after seven hours or so, but I still needed like four naps to get through the day. I had to send both Mr. D and Mikia off with instructions to eat school lunch because I just couldn’t get my brain going.

So yeah, not doing that again.

This is the lunch I packed for Mr. D yesterday, using some leftover mac and cheese that Mikia had put away in the fridge. I chopped ham and added milk before microwaving it to make it creamy again, then packed it in the thermal box with sweet potato bats, apples, a strawberry, and a muffin (they’re almost gone).

FAIL. I got back the entire lunch, sans muffin. Not happy about that. He said he didn’t like the mac and cheese, and the apples weren’t cold. (Seriously, dude?) Some good news, though, he ate all three of the jack-o’-lantern sandwiches from Monday. So, it looks like sandwiches are the way to go with him.

Mikia is much more receptive to my packing lunch, and as a result, I poured my energy into hers today. More on that tomorrow!

I woke up in a fog this morning, so I didn’t have much time to plan this out, but Mr. D was happy with the result. We’ll see if he eats the apples, which I dunked in salt water this time.

He told me this morning he hates wasting apples, and I admit I almost bust laughed at him right there, since I don’t think he’s eaten any apples I’ve sent him yet. Apparently if there’s a millimeter of brown on any of them, they’re immediately rotten.

I used cheddar for the pumpkins instead of a Kraft slice, since the cheese is a darker orange. I used my Carla Craft cat punch for the triangles, though those are easy enough to cut freehand. I was too lazy to cut mini jack mouths, so I just used regular smilies.

I’m hoping to have leftovers to pack this week to make things simpler the rest of the week!

My longtime readers will probably remember that I am a huge fan of themed spam musubis, having done LOST ones, Fourth of July ones, and University of Hawaii ones. Clearly I’m not over that!

I started by cooking a batch of green rice, using cake gel instead of food coloring, since in the past I’ve found that mostly results in pretty light-colored rice.

Vital tools needed for this include sharp kitchen scissors, a spam musubi maker, and a good nori punch. This Chuboos one is the one I used, and I’m a huge fan of it because it’s sharp and has a really cute and useful assortment of facial features.

I started by cutting strips of nori. About two of the lined rows on the nori sheet were a good width. I then stacked it up and cut jagged edges on both sides for Frankie’s hair. Make sure the edges are flush when you cut either side, otherwise you’ll end up with flat hair spikes.

I used the double maker for this one so that it would go a bit faster, lining up two strips so they were evenly spaced, then I layered (see LOST musubi post linked above on how to layer) the musubi on top, covering the spiky hair parts. I then folded the strips over and sealed them with water.

After flipping it over, I had two full spam musubis stuck together. This will become four Frankie musubis. I cut it right down the middle and then wrapped it up to let it steam so the nori would soften.

I did them all before going back and decorating. This makes it easier to cut them down the middle into the nori.

Here’s a cut one, and you can see now how they’re two Frankies!

Prepping in advance is a good idea, so I punched out a bunch of eyes and mouths to play around with and applied them with a wet toothpick.

Of course, I didn’t account for Mr. Destruction, and after I gave him a ball of rice to “experiment” with, he ended up smashing it down right on top of my pile of eyes and mouths. His proud “Mommy, LOOK!” elicited a rather shocked face from me, and I had to punch a new batch. lol

After each was decorated, I wrapped them up in a bit of Saran wrap. I was able to make twenty Frankies from one can of Spam, though it’s worth noting that even little kids can eat a full rather than a half, so if you’re doing this for a potluck, plan accordingly.

Here’s one unwrapped. I so wanted to eat one, and maybe I still will today, even though I’m not supposed to eat rice. It’s just so tempting!

On his third taste test, Mr. D commented that they looked like Hulk musubis, and then later Mikia’s friend asked if they were Hulk musubis. I had cut nori for stitches to make it clearer that it was Frankenstein’s monster, but I ended up not having much space. Plus, this was already kind of labor-intensive, so I ended up skipping it.

They work as either Hulks or Frankensteins, so I guess if you’re having a Marvel-themed party, this would work well, and you’d just have to make them angrier than I did.

If you make these, let me know how it goes!

I’m just kidding. I do feel tired, though. I really need to make myself go to bed earlier, especially since I recently moved my morning alarm up fifteen minutes to 5:45.

Last week, after discovering that Mr. D doesn’t like to eat hot food cold (to be fair, it’s kind of a learned concession), I went searching for a thermal bento box. I looked at the Omiebox, which is insanely high rated, but after looking at the other images, that thing is huge. Like 7″ x 7″ huge. That’s just too much for a kindergartener.

I ended up getting a Shunxin box, the two-stacker one. I wanted that because it wasn’t huge, and you could still use it with only one tier, which is all I really need for Mr. D. With the second tier, I could always use it for Mikia’s lunches. It came in a few days ago, and I had Mr. D test it to see if he could open it on his own, and he was able to just fine, so that was good. I would have used it sooner, but, well, mummies happened.

I used my Carla Craft mini punches for this one. I used a paw for the right ghost and a baby for the left ghost, but I sadly messed up my punch doing the left ghost because the darn thing is stuck! I’ll try again later, because that punch makes a really cute tiny mouth.

Packed inside is some leftover chicken parm with penne. I cut up the chicken into little bite-sized cubes before heating it up with the pasta. And since the sauce was all hard and sparse, I added a bit of ketchup to help loosen it up, and that helped a lot. The garlic bread is a piece of Texas toast that I put in the toaster oven and sliced in half.

I put the insulating cover on while I worked on the ghosts so that the food would stay hot, then I put the ghosts on quickly to snap the pics. I told Mr. D that they’ll probably be melted when lunchtime rolls around, but he didn’t seem to mind. These ghosts were made from provolone, so they were a lot sturdier than when I use regular American Swiss slices. I’ll definitely have to go with a stiffer cheese when I need it to stand on something uneven.

Hopefully he enjoys this one! Have a wonderful weekend.

So last week Saturday, I finally made it to the Daiso that recently opened on Piikoi Street, and while it was a really cool store that I’m definitely going to go back to, I admit it was smaller than I expected. I’ve never had a chance to go to the one in Pearl City, but I’m assuming that one is bigger given it’s at Pearlridge.

Oh, and the parking at the Piikoi store. Yikes. I had to wait in a “car line” for a space, and much to my dismay, most of the people leaving the store would walk right out of the parking lot. Clearly these were the Piikoi Daiso veterans who knew to find street parking.

There were onigiri molds, which I really don’t like, so I didn’t get any. Onigiri boxes, food cups, cutter wheels (totally got those!). Everything in Daiso is $1.50 unless marked, so shopping here is much better than gawking at $7.95 food picks online and closing my browser in a huff.

More food picks as well as cute paper cups.

There was a special Disney section up front, which was cute!

Here’s (almost) everything I ended up getting. I had also bought a cute sausage cutter, but after I got home, I was taking a nap on the couch when Mr. D came and woke me up to ask if he could open the sausage cutter. Caught in a half-asleep stupor, I mumbled yes, and when I woke up, it was nowhere to be found. Almost a week later, and I still have no idea where it is. Neither does he. Typical.

So I was all set to try something new for today, maybe pumpkins or Frankenstein’s monster, but Mr. D was adamant—he had to have hot dog mummies again.

I told him he cannot have hot dog mummies for lunch every day, and I received a deep frown and an indignant “Why not?“

Anyway, one thing I’ve learned: placement of the mummy wraps matters. It’s so much easier to draw facial expressions on the browned bun parts than the softer parts, which is why Left Mummy’s left eye looks swollen. Or maybe Right Mummy’s fed up and gave Left Mummy a piece of his mind.

I found some red-skinned sweet potatoes at Times the other day, and so I bought them thinking they’d be orange inside so that I could make sweet potato pumpkins. Instead, they’re purple, and WOW, they’re delicious!

Anyway, tonight I will have to work on him to convince him to eat something else. Either that or there will be a sudden island-wide shortage of hot dogs. So sad.

The bagel box came back with only fruits left, which he says was because his apples were “rotten.” It made me realize that I’ve been forgetting to dip the apples in water or diluted lemon juice, so they’ve been browning. Probably why he hasn’t been eating them. Big oops on my part.

Today’s lunch has two mummy hot dogs, which I made with one bun-length hot dog and two Pillsbury Crescent roll triangles. I made the faces using Wilton FoodWriter pens. I went to Compleat Kitchen in Kahala to find them, and although they were freaking expensive at $12.50, I didn’t want to go to like two more stores looking for a better deal. I was pretty irritated when I saw Amazon sells them for $5.20.

I’d previously put faces on using nori and butter, but that was kinda hard, and the pens were super easy.

Here’s a closer look. I did smudge in some places.

Actually, now that I look at it, the way I made the one on the left makes that mummy look like a mama with her hair in a bun while wearing a kimono.

I used some Halloween foil my sister-in-law got me in Japan, but sadly, you can’t see it. Hopefully I can use it to hold a sandwich soon and you all can see what it looks like. It’s super cute.

Mikia’s bento was leftover pork tenderloin.

She recently told me she’ll eat salad as long as she has ranch dressing, so I bought some and included a little salad for color, along with a variety of pickles (fukujinzuke, takuan, and sanbaizuke).

She’s been asking me in the afternoon and at night the last two days, in between asking me seventy times what’s for dinner, “What’s for lunch tomorrow?” So I guess me packing two lunches in the morning is now officially a thing.

I forgot to time myself with this one! Happy Hump Day!