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Teriyaki Beef Bento

MIL’s dinner tonight was teriyaki beef and I know what you’re thinking by now. Yes, it’s true, I am so completely blessed in life that we eat at my mother-in-law’s house every week night. And add to the fact that I don’t have to cook all week, she’s an insanely great cook. She gave us banana bread yesterday too, which tastes like five kinds of win.

No, you can’t have her.

Anyway, I have more pics to share than usual. This afternoon I had to run some errands and they took a lot less time than I’d thought, so I went to Marukai 99 Superstore at Ward. I’m standing in front of the wall of miraculously cheap bento accessories trying not to overflow my basket and there’s this lady with a baby standing to my left just in my peripheral vision. When I’m finally done being a soy sauce bottle hog, I turn and holy-freaky-wierd-coincidence! it’s my ONLY other friend-with-a-baby Hyechin and her little sumo who is already way bigger than my own son, yet less than half his age. He smiled at me, awww!! It must be the small town Hilo genes that brought us together. How the heck else does something like that happen?

I continued on my purchasing rampage through the store and when I was done, I still had a buttload of time to kill so I stopped by Shirokiya again. I found some cute chopsticks, 3 tier lacquer bento boxes 40% off, and this strange Japanese grill that was only $5.00! And drool!!! I saw the Zojirushi Ms. Bento for sale at $34.99, 8 bucks less than Amazon! Mentioned to hubby that this would make a very nice Mommy’s Day present. His response included an inquiry as to why I didn’t just buy it and save him the trouble of going down there and getting it. Men.

I went to the Sanrio store but damn the Ala Moana one suxass! With even more time to kill I went to Kahala Mall and bought two bento boxes at Sanrio Surprises along with some seriously expensive Hello Kitty picks. Most of the stuff I bought is for me to sell on eBay or to further entrench Nexa into the bento obsession. Teehee. Here’s my stash of things for myself:

070502-Loot

Okay, so back to the teri beef. I wanted to avoid rice today so I went with a lot of veggies. Using one of my new bento boxes from Marukai, I lined the bottom with a lettuce leaf and put the sliced teri beef, remainder of the cucumber kimchee, chopped up vegetable fishcake, and some of the tsukemonoTsukemono is a Japanese term for pickled vegetables, but would be more accurately described as preserved vegetables. The most common tsukemono contains cabbage and carrot pressed with salt. I made the other night. I added in a tiny soy sauce bottle for the tsukemono. I have a whole bottle at work, but I wanted to use one of my new toys. 😀 It looked too green, so I added a few grape tomatoes and dropped some minced carrot into the middle.

070502-Teriyaki-Beef-Bento

Fruit bowl is boring, but here’s a pic anyway:

070502-Fruits

The boxes look pretty when closed up! Since these boxes don’t come with straps, I stacked them and tied em up in a kitchen dish cloth. The fishcake is low in calories and I’m kinda sorta cheating by putting down “lean beef” and “teriyaki sauce” separately in the Weight Watchers planner so that it counts as Core. But really, it doesn’t make any sense to say “teriyaki beef” is 7 frickin’ points per slice while I can eat 1/4 cup teriyaki sauce and lean beef round as 0 points. So there!