Tomorrow I will be at the Celebrations store in Mapunapuna (next to Ben Franklin) to do an Easter bento demonstration. I will be demonstrating 4 bentos and signing copies of Yum-Yum Bento Box afterwards. I will do two sets of demos at 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM. Hope to see you there!

Since I got a set of FunBites (available on Amazon) to review for Valentine’s Day, I had to make bread. Last night, I decided to try out a white bread recipe on Rapid, since I find waiting around 4 hours for a loaf of bread kind of ridiculous. Just as I was about to close the lid, I thought that it would be cute to make pink bread, so I added six drops of red food coloring and started it up.

It turned out so cute!!

The bread itself was pretty awesome, though maybe that’s because we almost never have white bread.

Here’s the lunch I ended up making with it:

I lined the box with lettuce from our garden, then carefully moved the sammy pieces over. I kept it short and sweet, as I think sandwiches go best with fresh fruits, so I put in strawberries and kiwi. Here’s another angle:

I’m so happy with the pink bread. If people don’t want to use red food coloring, I’m sure you could just add a bit of POM juice or something to get the pink color, removing the same amount of liquid from the water required for the recipe. I’ll have to give that a try next time to see how that turns out. POM bread sounds really yummy!

This cutter seriously reminds me of a Tangram puzzle. I’ll have to see if my brain can come up with other things to make out of it than hearts.

If you want to read my review of the FunBites Luv It and enter to win one for yourself, CLICK HERE.

I am still hoping that one day my family will get over their Mr. Pikko-instilled fear of green onions and let me cook it into the food. My donburi looks so drab without anything to contrast the yellow and brown.

I’ve really been slacking off with the food diary thing. It’s such a pain… but still, I’m still exercising at least 3 times a week and as of today am down 4.1 pounds for the year! Bentos have faded away again, but hopefully I can get myself back into it now that the kids are miraculously getting to school early almost every day on their own!

Here’s another view of the bento close up:

I can’t even explain how exciting this is for me because I’ve always wanted people to be able to read our cookbook on their e-readers. Plus, this is a really great excuse to finally get myself a Kindle Fire! Muahahaha!

It turned out pretty yummy, with the ham providing a nice salty sweet coating for the cauliflower. The roasted veggies are leftovers. I had bought a pre-cut pack of butternut squash and roasted some of it with baby carrot. The baby carrots were disappointingly half cooked, but the squash was yummy.

Here’s a closer look. I didn’t really want a soft boiled egg, but when you take the egg out of the water and cut it in half, it’s kind of too late at that point, right? Haha!

Yikes, talk about being behind only in January. This bento is actually from January 11th! Anyway, it’s leftover pot roast. Not your most traditional bento fodder, but still a moneysaver since it uses leftovers. I used my Zojirushi Mini Bento and actually filled it up too high. When I put the cover on it started hissing at me and food started bubbling out. Instead of removing food, I just wrapped it up in furoshiki to keep it on, but it didn’t keep the food warm because of the opening.

In the side dish I put raw veggies for me to eat with dressing at work. I’ve posted my weekly record for last week on Pikko’s House and I didn’t do so well on exercise, though I guess exercising 3 times is better than what I used to do, which was a big fat zero. As you can see, I didn’t eat very smart either, but I’ll hopefully get back on track this week.

I packed this in one of my favorite bento boxes. I think I got this one from J-List, but a quick check shows that it’s not in stock at the moment. I love the odd shape with the cut off circle and the smaller compartment has a half moon section divided into two, which made it perfect for carrying the kim chee. To pack the meat side, I put a small amount of rice on the bottom and then sliced up the chicken to place on top.

Here’s a closer shot of the chicken. If you think it looks good, man, you should try eating there. The food at Kim Chee restaurants here on Oahu are just amazing. The bbq chicken, the kalbi, the meat jun, the sauces, the shrimp tempura. It makes me want to go back right now and eat more!

I kept track of my food all week and posted the results on Pikko’s House. I managed to lose 1.3 lbs in my first week! I kept to my exercise plan, though failed in the dog walking department.

Baby Girl is still exercising with me, which actually is helping me a ton because she actually nags me to do it. She’s still going through this weird no-rice phase where she’ll only eat meat for dinner. The only time I can get her to eat rice is if I buy ochazuke packets and in that case I think if I let her, she’d eat a whole pot of rice herself.

Using shiso furikake for onigiri is still my current favorite way to make onigiri because I love the taste of ume and the purple is so pretty. I put little cut flowers of fish sausage on top of each and then added in fresh veggies and a cut up kiwi. To cut the kiwi like that I just cut all the sides off and then quartered it. I thought it looked pretty with all the cut shapes!

Here’s a closer look so you can see the onigiri. The flakes moisten up in the rice and begin to dye the grains, which gives it that pretty purple color. I took a rest day on Wednesday due to being barely able to move and was surprised how much it helped to let my muscles recover. I had my one cheat meal of the week Wednesday night when we went to eat at Kim Chee 2 and probably gained all my loss back, but hopefully I’ll end up losing at least a pound in the end.

I can’t honestly sit here and type that whole wheat pasta tastes amazing because it’s just… not, really. Hahaha! It seems to take forever to cook and you can of course taste the graininess in the noodle when eating. Even so, it’s not like it’s bad. As far as bentos go, this one is obviously very blah, but it filled me up and the broccoli was a nice veggie side. I’d normally cut up cheese in tiny shapes, but thought maybe I’d better just leave the cheese off since I’m trying to cut here.

Baby Girl is doing 30 Day Shred with me (in her own little girl way) because she’s a darling and wants to get fit along with Mommy. She’s done it both days that I have and is paying the same price as I am when it comes to sitting up in bed in the morning or walking down stairs, but I really admire her making the effort.

She’s not overweight, but I do want her to get used to doing exercise on a regular basis. The importance of this was never ingrained in my mind when I was young, mostly because we had a farm and manual labor was our exercise. Since my own family doesn’t have the kind of hard labor we did available, Jillian Michaels will have to substitute.

It helped a lot that I just didn’t have cooked rice on hand, hahaha!

I cut up a chicken thigh, salted and peppered it, coated it in potato starch, then fried it in olive oil until brown. I hate frying chicken in potato starch because it takes FOREVER to get the chicken brown. Maybe that’s why every time I eat chicken karaage, it’s really hard and tough from being fried so long?

In any case, it was yummy, but I didn’t salt it enough. Usually you marinate the chicken in sauce, but I was lazy and this did just fine in a pinch. I plopped in boiled broccoli, raw cauliflower, and a cherry tomato from the yard with a cute little panda food pick in it.

A small lunch, but I brought a lot of fresh fruit snacks with me to work to help tide me over!

It’s only day 2 of losing weight and eating healthier, but I’m still going!