Eating in a box

I had the fortune to be invited to a special blogger event at the Carillon to celebrate their official "hard launch". I've been very curious about this place ever since the "soft launch" was announced about a month ago. The restaurant is located on campus over at University of Texas at Austin and seemed to be an unusual place to find fine dining. As an alum, when I hear UT and restaurant I instantly flash back to my dorm days eating in the dining hall, or the bevy of fast food cheap eats around campus. This was clearly *not* the case. The Carillon is located in the new AT&T executive education and conference center, which is actually a hotel, classroom, conference center and restaurant(s) all rolled into one. It was neat seeing fancy dignitaries intermixed with grungy college students. This restaurant is a pretty classy place, far bigger than I had imagined, but they did a good job at segmenting the large area to make it feel more cozy, but it definitely sti...

Cooking for twelve presents it's whole new challenges than cooking for six. You can't do a recipe that calls for caramelized onions in one go, in my home kitchen you'd be steaming said onions not caramelizing them. Instead of one stock pot poaching chicken, now you have two. Sure cooking for six is easier than cooking for one, but cooking for twelve becomes cooking everything twice. Normally this is not an issue, I like challenges, unfortunately cooking for twelve has turned into standing for hours of prep, cook, plating, photos, and finally cleanup. This presents a challenge and is re-injuring an old injury for me that I'm not letting heal week after week. In a commercial kitchen you have staff, but here it's only little ol me. If I include soup that's 90 portions of food i'm preparing and since most of my folks have enough to eat over two days it's more like 180. I'm not whining, I'd do it in a heartbeat if not for being on crutches or my pimp...

One of the more common gifts I get from friends and family are cookbooks. I have a huge wall of them and they're great! I glean cool new techniques, inspirations for new dishes, and just plain yummy stuff to try. I group them to a handful of categories: technique, ethnic cuisine, famous chefs, and restaurants. It's the last category that I chose to hit today. Growing up with a family Chinese restaurant there are a few types of foods that, while most people hate, are a rare treat for me because there's only so many times you can eat "Happy Family" and "Kung Pao Chicken". This includes fast food of any type, dorm food (yeah I liked dorm food and I have a pictures to remind me why not to like it), and finally cafeteria food. That's right we dive into the Luby's Cookbook today. Saturday lunch we would sometimes pile into the family station wagon where I would look forward to my rectangular fried fish with tartar sauce and a side of broccoli and chees...

First bento of 2010! Very excited to get back into the groove of things, I will say 2010 has started out quite bumpy for me, so having something familiar to come back to is nice. I've got loads of new themes that I hatched up over the holidays and I'm excited to be able to try them out. So how do I kick of 2010? With a little trip to Singapore! Singapore cuisine is heavily influenced by it's neighbors and it's history. Many of the dishes I sifted through, I've had variations of growing up with just a few changes here and there. Many of the ingredient changes show heavy influences from Thai, Indian, and Malaysian cuisine. It is interesting to see these ingredients fuse together and taste the resulting dishes. There's easily several bentos worth of cooking I could do to explore further, but I gotta get on with this post! Hainanese Chicken with Rice is probably the most common street food you'll find in Singapore, it's extremely popular and has several vari...