Eating in a box

Work sends me out now and again to our various offices. I'm out currently visiting our offices in London, Paris, and Marseilles. Unfortunately for my London leg of the trip I kept forgetting to bring my camera so you'll have to suffer with my low-res iphone pictures. Above is the child of one of my coworkers that are traveling with me, he sucking on a bag of chicken casserole. Yeah, that was my first reaction "Chicken casserole puree huh". I seem to remember seeing things like pureed peas and carrots, but chicken casserole? There was a suggestion that I do a post on trying some of these. All I mustered was a "um. yeah maybe". None the less it was a cute picture and the "bag o sippy food" seemed like a good related picture. I've been to London quite a few times so I've hit most of the normal stuff even tracking down some haggis two years ago. The one place I *always* go to is the food hall at Harolds (a really famous department store) they g...

So once upon a time, many years ago I asked a friend for a food challenge. I was in the full swing of my life goal of cooking as many cuisines from appetizer to dessert to learn as much as I can about food. Austin, at the time was still more of a college town and food had not exploded to be what it is today. My friend said, "fine Ethiopian food" my response, "well that's not fair, we don't even have an Ethiopian restaurant for me to try the cuisine." him, "you asked for a challenge, and my favorite place in Houston is an Ethiopian restaurant". I wasn't really willing to drive out to Houston so I set to the web. I studied countless recipes and poured over every description I could find and created the tastes in my head. Did I pass? An enthusiastic yes. This turns out to be my favorite cuisine to cook, and I think it was because of the surprise complexity of the cuisine as well as the amount of research I had to do to get there. Anyway, I'm v...

So short post today, it's been tough with all the travel to make food for my folks. The one good thing about travel is that I take the time to catch up on my food magazines and try to get some inspiration for my bentos. For today's creation I found a magazine that focused on recipe makeovers, or taking stuff that tastes great but is bad for you and turning them into something healthy. I took the challenge a bit further and tried pairing together recipes so that I could make even further cuts in the calories and fat department. Without further ado Lunch time! I start us off with a Kung Pao style chicken breast. The authors used chicken breast instead of the usually cheaper chicken thighs and went with a lighter version of sauce. Not much variation for me here. I like that they substituted fat with a lot of flavor in the form of a more fragrant and sauce thanks to the sesame oil and heavy dose of ginger. Instead of going with the traditional rice as a starch, I picked up this rec...