Bento from Mom

Sorry about the lack of posts. I've had to travel for work (food posts to follow), but when I returned I was instantly stricken with a cold. My mother came into town this weekend just to look after me. Obviously coming from a food culture, the fix was to cook me dinner :) so I have leftovers today to help me recuperate.

The main dish is her famous Hsin Tsu Mei Fun (Hsin Tsu rice vermicilli) I posted about this before but there's nothing like mother's cooking. On the left is some Chinese watercress (also known as water spinach), the leaves are picked apart and quickly sauteed with chopped garlic

This is a chinese brocolli with textured tofu and bell pepper. Again, a quick stirfry dish, more veggies and vitamins to help me past being sick. Did you know that tofu can be rendered into various textures not just soft blocks? The oval shaped tofu on the left side of the picture has a nice snap like a vietnamese meatball you'd find in some pho. While on the right is a sheet like tofu, that is stetchy in texture. In fact the sheet tofu is sometimes layered together to make vegetarian duck, while not quite the same as the real thing, the texture is pretty amazingly close.

Finally, I fall back to various liquid methods of curing myself when I encounter a could. Usually I brew a ginger root and cinnamon tea. This time I cooked up a nice chicken broth with ginger and cubed some daikon radish. Not much to look at, but it's amazing what happens to daikon when you subject it to various cooking methods. Raw, it's spicy. Boiled it becomes soft and loses the spicy taste. Roasted there's a hint of sweetness. Pickled adds the pizzaz you taste in a lot of Japanese dishes. A very versatile root vegetable.

Ok, I'm glad I was able to punch out this post, back to recovery. Hopefully more posts to follow