Eating in a box

Wow, I made the Austin Chronicle's top Austin Food Blogs ! Thanks, I am honored!

Just a couple of more weeks of bento hiatus since everyone is still out for the holidays. It's been a nice little break for me, time with family and all that. None the less, I've queued up a few themes for the new year so I'm eager to get back to cooking, I do confess that having my Sundays to myself have been nice. A lot of people ask me what my most indispensable kitchen tool is and without a doubt it's my Chinese cleaver it's usually the only knife I ever use in the kitchen. It's cheap, but more to the point it's the ultimate multi-tasker, it does all the obvious cutting and chopping, but also delicate garnish work, has a huge face making it a good bench scraper, you can use it as a garlic masher, and it's lighter than a regular cleaver, but heavy enough that it does most of the work for you when doing a lot of chopping. And as with every knife it needs care and love to perform at it's peak, which is a nice lead-in to our post today. Today's

From my family's table to yours, I wish you Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

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

Yes it's that time of year, everyone is going on vacation and holiday so I'm shutting down operations until the new year. It's a good time for me to recuperate and have a small vacation from my Sunday cooking. I'll be posting some stored up posts over the next few weeks, gadgets and talking turkey so stay tuned! I kept today's meal fairly simple because I was limited on time, but I also wanted to focus on each dish. Most of the bento was gathered from various issues of Southern Living that were laying around at my doctor's office. The recipes were all *almost* there meaning all great starting points but looking down at the ingredients they didn't look like they would taste remarkable in anyway. For the main entree we have a Portabello Pork ragu over Panko crusted Parmesan grit cakes. I re-worked it a bit and played with some of the textures and the spices because I wasn't quite happy with the results. The grits were a touch too bland for the for the the

Hey, real short post here. I was invited to Vivo 's new second location to help them celebrate their grand opening. There was music, food and drinks a plenty. Lots of hospitable folks and even more guests, everyone from friends and family, investors, to us food bloggers. Guest bartender Tipsy Texan was on hand to serve us some very tasty drinks. The space is tucked away in a strip mall shopping center, they're still working on signs and lights, but once I walked in I had to do a double take to make sure I was at the right place. The restaurant is darkly lit, but the decorations are colorful and really catch your attention, everything from the Graffiti art at the front, to the painting from San Antonio artists that cover the walls. This place definitely has character and isn't shy about making statments. Vivo seems to be going for a adult themed type restaurant where folks can hang out listen to live DJs (as seen above in the dedicated DJ station) at the semi enclosed bar,

Not really any good cohesive theme today. These are a few of the dishes I've had on my list of "gotta try" that say fall to me. It's gotten cold and dreary lately and what better way to warm the bones than with some stews and soup. Let's start with the main dish, Chicken and chickpea stew. Its a nice blend of spices and vegetables, more reminiscent of a thin curry with more going on than I usually attribute to a stew. The carrots provided a bit of unexpected sweetness to the overall taste. The original recipe called for chicken thigh, but in the interest of trying to cut back on fats I went with chicken breast, in hindsight this may have been a mistake because the chicken thigh would have produced a more flavorful stew it was a call between health and flavor we'll see what the jury has to say about it. Here we have a nice Penne pasta with Green Pea Pesto. Usually that much basil pesto would really turn me off of a dish, but the green peas really sweeten and li

The folks at Promise Pizza invited a few of us over to tell us their story and dish out their pies. Promise Pizza literally started out of a garage of one of the owners where they set about perfecting their pizza recipes. The thing that really sets Promise pizza apart from your run of the mill pizza joint is that they are focused on natural and organic fresh pizzas. This required quite a great deal of research, trial and error, but a well fed neighborhood no doubt appreciated their experimentation. From their company owned fleet of deliver Smart Cars to building their facility according to Austin Green Building certification, Promise pizza has a second mission of social responsibility. This includes their cooking facility, equipment, and even offsite facilities (more on that later), a lot of thought and planning went into building the identity of this "more than meets the eye" pizza parlour. Our kind host was George Cordeiro, one of the four owners of Promise Pizza (we dubbe

Another gadget post this week, it's been a good two week recharge, full of catching up with stuff and gathering new ideas for the coming year. I only have a few more bentos for the year with the holidays and all but I promise to bring you a food post next week. This week's gadget is the Blendtec blender that's right, from the folks that bring you " Will It Blend " (I can practically hear a studio audience chant the phrase as I type it). I decided on this purchase based off of my inability to blend my broccoli soup to the consistency I needed it to be, unacceptable. I spend so much time in the kitchen that I've made it a point to try to always buy commercial grade equipment, ultimately only two made the final list. I was trying to decide between a Vitamix or this Blendtec blender, it turns out what was available at my "local shop that allows me to use my handy-dandy coupons" only had the Blendtec so there we have it. I understand the Vitamix is also a