Eating in a box

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...

No lunch this week or next so you'll have to suffer to through some of my "yammering" posts. As usual for my off posts you'll be seeing some of the tools that I use to produce lunch. So with my additional eaters I went ahead an invested in six more obentec boxes. I've been eyeballing the 2.0 system for some time now and am pleasantly surprised at some of the modifications they've made. The new gear seems more robust, "refined" and grown up than their first iteration. I'm glad they've incorporated some of the changes that seemed to answer for some of the minor gripes I had. Let's start with the containers. They beefed up the outer box and thinned the walls of the inner containers. This has quite a few major benefits. The outer box snaps shut a lot tighter than the original box and initial tests shows it doesn't suffer from the upper lid "warp" from dishwasher wear and tear. Also, the thin segments in side the outer box (to ke...

Super sweet, I had motorcycle class so I can get a license for my new scooter, the only downside is that it left me very little time to prepare a lunches. I really needed to find a set of dishes that would be either very easy to put together or extremely quick. Hence my quickfire bento, ok not quite the same quickfire as in the TV show, but I had to call it something and quickfire has a catchy ring to it. Like him or hate him, Gordon Ramsay is an accomplished chef and researching his "fast" and "easy" books as well as watching a few youtube videos I was very inspired by his methods and philosophy of letting ingredients speak for themselves. I will say there will probably be some future inserts of his dishes because both books had some very tasty looking stuff, but for today we're sticking with the fast and easy. We have two quasi mains today we start with Curry dusted shrimp with Corn Salsa. I made a slight modification in using shrimp instead of scallops to tri...

So last week's dessert was an assortment of fruits which was originally to be served over yogurt. It turned out I had so much extra fruit that I just went with serving the fruit and left the yogurt unopened. What to do with a giant tub of plain yogurt? Well, why not get more yogurt and do some investigation on cooking with yogurt. There's a whole lot of applications for yogurt, a lot of them center around middle-eastern and Indian cuisine, but as an ingredient I was shooting for using yogurt in every dish for the bento and trying not make it an "obvious" use of yogurt, like a parfait or something. Except for dessert everything manages to be gluten free. Despite not following that lifestyle anymore, I still like to look in to see how gluten-free-friendly my boxes/recipes are just incase. First up, the entree: grilled mint beef kabobs and grilled cumin chicken kabobs. The acidic nature of yogurt does a great job of breaking down tough cuts of meat. I find that the marin...

Four Seasons invited me out to their holiday preview and man did they pull out the stops. They had a station for the food, drinks, spa and even tweet/blogging station. The designer for the event did a wonderful job. I'm lucky that my photo setup could still take pictures in the holiday lighting but with the decoration and flowers it made the event feel really special. Lots of pictures and things to say but I'll try to sum up everything. So the theme was to showcase Four Season's Holiday offerings from spa services to bar drinks and food from Trio. To the left were the drinks and their labels, they were kind enough to give out recipe cards for the drink recipes. If you see one you wanna try write me in the comments I'll get it to you. My personal favorite was the Yule-Thyme martini, it featured thyme infused vodka which gives you this cool refreshing taste. Then they add a splash of Oban (scotch) and garnish of smoked shitake mushroom which finishes the drink with a nice...

I have to say, I'm really enjoying my new camera lens and the more natural light looking shots I'm able to take with it. Hopefully you guys out there noticed the difference. (Ok the title shot was a little dark) So, I needed to reel back this week the bentos have been getting a little pricey on the ingredients and the dishes a tad labor heavy. I also had to buy six new boxes to accommodate my new bento-ees, so I'm trying to cut back a little at a time to re-coop some of those costs. I've been doing quite well, last week's was only a little bit over the budget. It's been a fun challenge over all this time to make changes and tweaks to take advantage of sales or simply making a recipe cheaper without losing any of the flavor. This week I bring you my second Indian themed bento. With the new audience it was tempting to dig up the old recipes, but there were a few things I wanted to look into and my trusty "future bentos" tag on my journal held some nice...