Eating in a box

This week's bento is courtesy of my enthusiasm after taking a cooking class over at Thai Fresh with chef and fellow foodblogger Jam from Thai Cooking with Jam . It was an incredibly fun time and full over great information about Thai food and ingredients. The class was a hands on so that meant plenty of time in the kitchen helping with the meal we all shared in at the end. If you've ever considered going, get off that duff and go, if you've never even knew it existed then you're just plain missing out. Ok just a bit of stuff on curry making, above you will see two of the three curry pastes (Green curry on the left, Sour curry on the right) used in the box. This is where most of the magic happens. Homemade curry paste compared to can has a fresher/cleaner taste, I'm not sure if it's because some of the ingredients aren't perfectly ground as you would find in the commercial version so you can get some of the components or duh you're using fresh ingredient

To celebrate St. Patrick's day I decided on another Irish Bento, I figured this time around I wasn't going to do the traditional Corned beef with cabbage, been there done that. I figure, how hard is it to find some good traditional Irish recipes that were preferably healthy? Apparently this proved to be a pretty tough task. I started digging and found loads of cool ideas, when I started researching it turns out they were actually Scottish, or British. Worse yet the things I did find were all cabbage, stews or corned beef and always the potato. I was at a loss, until I remembered that I work for a global company. I pinged one of my coworkers in the UK office who happens to be Irish perfect! (I thought) The conversation went something like this (minor paraphrasing but the just think Irish accidents on his parts): Me: "Hey, what do you guys eat in Ireland? What kind of traditional foods do you have? I'm trying to find something you don't usually get. I'm trying t

So in my previous post I talked about my work throwdown cookoff, and I saw no reason why I should take what our team produced and put it out as a bento. It's a fairly healthy, definitely quick to produce and well within budget. Besides, we didn't get any good close ups of the food from the throwdown, so I present my HomeAway Throwdown Bento. This will be a pretty short post don't have much time for yammering today. Our challenge protein was a pork tenderloin. We went with a Herb crusted pork tenderloin with a mushroom red wine demiglace over roasted fennel. I figured you could see the sauce in the bento picture above, the pork right out of the oven is a much more yummy looking picture. One of our teammates added the idea of studding the pork with slivers of garlic, a great tasting idea. The other team didn't use their fennel so we liberated it from their ingredients tray and gave it a good home with the pork. The roasting process cut down on the licorice flavor (which I

So at work they decided a good team building exercise was to pit our development management team against each other on a head to head cooking throwdown at Central Market. I have to say I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of a cook off, for one reason or another everyone decided I had some sort of advantage whereas, I just wanted to not look bad. We had visiting managers from across the globe and I was certain that there had to be a few ringers in there, besides when does having a blog qualify me to be any sort of cooking expert. There were a large number of us and above you'll see me and my teammates. A motley crew of foodies (as luck would have it) and all very capable and fun to cook with. We were kept in the dark about the format until we arrived in the kitchen over at Central Market. We were presented with two trays of ingredients a common "shared" ingredients section and an empty kitchen. We were to cook in shifts, the first shift was to create two different type

If there's one thing that people are passionate about it's bbq, everyone's got their opinions on the best, sauce, beans, coleslaw, what counts, what doesn't and then there's the basic arguement of beef versus pork. If I've done my reading and research correctly, most of the rest of the United States think pork when talking BBQ. Being a Texan, all I've really known is beef bbq. In fact, most places around the world call any method of slow cooking beef, Texas style bbq. A little history: the first BBQs in America during colonial times were pork bbqs, this was because pigs tend to be easy low maintenance animals that can be left out semi wild and caught and eaten when especially when times were tough. Althought there are many stories on the background at least one account tells us that American Indians understood the concept of cooking meat long over low heat. It is also told that the Spanish were the first to bring the noble pig to America. Between the two we