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Cinnamoroll Bento and Garden Update!

We had a busy, busy weekend that started off with a family potluck at my aunty’s house. It was the first time almost all the second cousins were together to play, yay! Saturday we took the kids to the Urban Garden Center in Pearl City. We’d seen the place all the time from the freeway but until something popped up in the paper, we had no idea what it was. We liked it, but it was massively hot out that day, so after we’d had enough of melting we went to Home Depot to buy gardening stuffs. I bought seeds, Mr. Pikko bought more fishie stuff.

After I got in a bunch of stuff from J-List and Amazon, I realized that the amount of unused bento goods I have right now is getting rather ridiculous. It inspired me to actually sketch out something in particular for using one of those neglected items. Today I went with my Cinnamoroll onigiri mold.

On Sunday I made Mr. Pikko take us all to the Haleiwa Farmer’s Market so that I could try the tomato basil pizza (which was very yummy!) and buy some fruits and veggies. We ended up buying quite a bit of stuff: bag of corn, 4 mangoes, a watermelon, a brownie, a scone, 2 tilapia, 1 catfish, baby eggplant, okra, smoked ahi, pizza, and some fried green tomatoes.

There’s a slice of the smoked ahi underneath Cinnamoroll. I’d originally intended to chop it up and place it in the top area, but Cinnamoroll was too short. The ahi served as a nice prop to bring her up a bit. I cut some flowers out using a piece from my Floral Flower Making Set. The eyes I punched out with a hand-held oval hole puncher that I found at a scrapbooking store. This worked much better than a nori punch! I cut the mouth out with scissors. I was so frustrated because I couldn’t find any scissors in the house for the longest time, even the kids’ scissors were MIA!

Anyway, the corn, watermelon, and eggplant are all from the market. For the eggplant I sliced it up thin and fried it with some onions, then put some teriyaki sauce on. I had wanted to add some nice katsuo bushi, but my bag was like dust, so that didn’t look as good as I’d hoped. I was trying to emulate the eggplant nigiri that they serve at Genki Sushi. That’s so yum!!

My yellow tomatoes have been hanging around begging to be picked, so I finally picked one on Sunday to eat then picked the rest this morning to put into the bento.

Don’t they look so cute?? It was tasty. I was happy.

Astonishingly, after tearfully watching so many of my little baby kumquats fall off the tree, many of them survived and are now at a nice big size! It amazes me that this little tree is giving fruit already.

These are the last two of my precious red tomatoes. I feel bad pulling out the plant after it gave me so many nice fruits, but I don’t see any new fruit and I want to plant something else! Buddy picked one of them this morning. He loves to pick tomatoes and runs inside the house to put it into the fridge for me. It’s so cute!

This thing is a complete mystery. At first I thought it was daikon, but then I pulled out a smaller, weaker one and there was nothing there. Then it flowered with purple flowers in a stem up the middle, which meant it wasn’t ong choy (my second guess). Then these weird pods appeared, which I’m guessing is the seed pods. Still, I’d like to know just what the heck this is. Anyone have a clue?

I’m getting close to 500k hits, so I’ll be posting a contest for that soon!