Zippy’s Chili Bento

We ate Zippy’s Chili last night, which is without a doubt the best chili to be found in Hawaii. If you are reading this from the mainland and you know what I’m talking about, are ya homesick yet? Hehe! I used to eat only the beanless chili but after finding out that chili with beans is less points than without, I decided to give bean chili a shot again and found out that it’s pretty good. There was a lot leftover, so I took some for today’s lunch. It doesn’t look all that appealing in a bento, but hey, it really makes up for it in taste.

I dug out my very very first “bento” container from years and years ago. It’s a really old fashioned stainless steel Zebra 3-tier food carrier which I’m sure Hawaii old-timers would recognize right away. I bought it forever ago at some little store at the Hilo Shopping Center. The thing had really shrunk in my mind because when I finally did dig it out I was like, “WTF! It’s so huge!” Probably because it’s meant to carry food for more than one person. But anyway…

I stuck my Doggie Woogie divider in there to keep the chili separate then added in a little tiny container of ahi shoyu poke and another tiny one of dried daikon kim chee.

I bought the kim chee from Kim Chee when we ate there last weekend. They sold me a pretty big tub for $2.00, which is actually cheaper than the smaller tub of cucumber kim chee I buy. It’s really yummy. It looks wet but is called dried daikon kim chee because it’s, well, dried and then soaked in sauces and such.

No surprise here, yet another kim chee crab and avocado salad! Hehe.. For the last layer I packed a chopped fuji apple and a sliced white peach. I ate like 4 of these peaches on Sunday because eating fruit from Costco is a race against time. You stand in the warehouse looking at the box of really yummy looking fruit and you think to yourself, I can eat it before it rots… I think. And then you get home with 3 types of fruits and you’re like CRAP I can’t even fit it in my fridge! I’ll have to eat what’s left outside! *sob* And then the next time you go to Costco you see a new batch of berries and you’re like, ooooo. A vicious cycle I tell ya.

I know what you’re thinking: Oink! Oink! The reason I’ve packed so much food is because this whole week we’ve been getting in to work by 7:45 am so as to prepare Baby Girl for a preschool routine. This means that I’m waking up and eating breakfast two hours earlier than before so now I’m hungry by 10 or so. I’ll eat the salad around 10ish, the chili at around 1, and snack on the fruits around 3 or 4. If I don’t pack enough to last me all day I end up eating more at dinner, which is what I want to avoid. We ate hot dogs with the chili last night and I almost passed out after seeing the nutritional info so I just ate half of one. I’m not sure how many points the chili is, but the Wendy’s chili isn’t too bad, so going on that I’m still on track for the week. And hey, I’m back down to 133.5! 😀