HomeAway Throwdown Bento

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'm not a fan of) and made it very mellow with a good amount of texture. I finished this with some Australian pink salt. Our winning team walked a way with a set of fancy salts that we used during the competition. To be honest, I did a side by side tasting and it is very subtle... I couldn't necessarily tell you what the difference is and even then I may have imagined it. I'll have to study this more.


Next up, green beans stirfried with pancetta. Short and sweet not much to say about this one. Finished this one with some of the Himalayan pink salt.







Last we did a parmesan polenta topped with Grape tomatoes in a champagne vinaigrette. This combo was actually an accident, we had one small pint of tomatos (we thought we had more) and were going to serve the tomatoes as a salad/side to give our plate some nice red color to go with everything. As it turns out plating the creamy polenta with the sour tang of the vinaigrette was *perfect*. You also got some nice texture from the tomatoes. A very happy accident and good thinking from the team. This one we used the fleur de sel and finished with the Himalyan pink salt.

I punked out on dessert (since we weren't asked to make any at the competition) and went with a nice box of biscottis that happened to be individually wrapped. Nothing special there, just a low calorie dessert.

Sorry for the sparce and quick post today. I have a blogger event to dash off to but wanted to make sure to get up my post today.

Box Contents
  • Herb Crusted Pork Tenderloin over Roasted Fennel with Mushroom red wine demi glace
  • Green Beans Sauteed with Pancetta
  • Parmesan Polenta with Grape tomatoes and Champagne Vinaigrette

Comments

Unknown said…
Wow all of that looks amazing!!
March 16, 2010 at 10:56 AM
Ironjack said…
:) why thank you. It was great meeting you in person yesterday at the blogger bash!
March 16, 2010 at 12:12 PM
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