Food for the masses

Ok I exagerate it's a good few people. Sorry for the sparce postings, my work is killing me and life's been a bit hectic.

One of the things I'm learning to deal with is figuring out how to put together all these lunches so that I'm not working all night getting it all ready. It really requires a bit of forethought and factory like mentality. Above you'll see a shipped box. Everything is wrapped nicely compartmentalized so that no sauces spill. I don't always use every compartment. On the weeks that I don't I get to pre-plate for the next day saving me a smidgen of work. In the end, for feeding five people it's not all bad, my initial endevour was to cook only for my new wife. That idea presented it's own challenges towards menu planning, it's hard to buy for a portion of one. How do you re-use your ingredients? Course there are lots of bento blogs that serve as a good resource for that problem. So going down the path to actually cook for more saves me a lot of waste and allows me to have more varied menus. The only hurdle on this "flip side" is still portioning, how do you make sure the recipes would accommodate five portions? If the recipe doesn't how do you scale it? I guess that's why I have my blog to try and put those experiences on e-paper.

Keeping track of the color schemes so everyone gets the right box is probably is a minor pain too :) I keep a map on the table. What I choose in my menus is actually influenced by how I can use the box space and what containers I can retain so I can pre-plate for day 2.



It managed to work itself somehow week after week and we end up with our final product boxed and shipped. I do miss doing my bentos at the same time, it's good to take a break and restart the planning for the next year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Da Chang Mian Xian 大腸麵線: streetfood challenge

Image
This is actually a post that's been sitting in the queue for quite some time. A while back we had a Taiwanese potluck where everyone brought a food favorite from Taiwan. I didn't have a favorite food so I said I'd make whatever someone wanted. One of my wife's friends had a real hankering for Da Chang Mian Xian (大腸麵線 also called Mee Sua), a Taiwanese vermicelli street food dish, I of course open my big mouth and say: "sure how hard could it be to make?" (famous last words). Surely there was a recipe or something to go on. As it turns out this no there's wasn't a recipe to go on. Fortunately this was something I had tried before, my wife took me back in 2012 to visit her favorite Mian Xian  restaurant (Ah Zong Mian Xian 阿宗麵線) when we were visiting her old university stomping grounds.  All I remember from this place were a few things: 1) it was really hot outside 2) there was no where to sit so everyone was standing around (ok a few chairs) 3) th
Read more

TRIP: London 2013 Pt1

Image
Ok more traveling, this time to London, first week for work (above is our view of Buckingham Palace from our office) and second week for vacation with my wife. Lots of pictures of a lot of different food, I've manage to cut the number of photos to the highlights of what and where we ate. I've put links to the various places just in case you're in the area and want to check out some of these places. Sorry in advance about some of the photos I shot everything using a Galaxy S3 mini android phone that I acquired while on this trip and it does a pretty good job, but under low light it gets a bit grainy. Got off the plane bright and early 6am and dropped my bags at the hotel. While there I started my trip off with a classic English breakfast. Bangers (sausage) mushroom, roasted tomato, potato cake, hash browns, vegetarian sausage (which was quite nice), eggs, beans (heinz I believe) and some black pudding (blood sausage, a little dry but tasty) Since my room wasn'
Read more

Holiday Bird ala the Orion Cooker "la torre del diablo"

Image
I've talked a bit about my Orion Cooker or as I like to call it, "la torre del diablo" (the tower of the devil) and lots of people come and visit looking for info on the orion cooker and turkey. So today I'm going to chronicle the step by step of cooking a turkey and hey look, just in time for xmas. It all starts with the brine. As many of you know the best way to get a nice juicy turkey is to brine it before hand. It allows helps the meat retain moisture through the cooking process and you can impart some nice flavors. I used a slightly modified brine recipe (see below) by my favorite food geek/hero, Alton Brown. It's quite simple really, you need a high salt content I believe the rule of thumb is one cup each of salt and sugar for every gallon of brine. In this case, the vegetable stock has salt in it, and I trust that's why there's less salt in the recipe, and of course the word of Alton Brown is never wrong he is after all the culinary equivalent of C
Read more