Eating in a box

On facebook one of my friends pointed to this Cooking light dish featuring a nice Chipotle Rubbed Flank steak. She proclaimed if she were to start eating meat again it would be chopping on that dish. Looked like a keen enough menu to me so I went ahead and decided that it should be lunch for my bento-ers. The Chipotle-Rubbed Flank Steak did look pretty yummy. I had to take it the extra mile and do a 24 sous vide treatment on the steak. It's pretty much a slam dunk using the sous vide for a couple of reasons: 1) Doesn't eat up a stove or oven 2) Flank steak has lots of connective tissue and fat that benefits from a long slow cooking process. The rub was pretty simple, powdered chipotle and paprika for a nice smokey flavor and a bit of salt for some accents. The Gorgonzola sauce was out of this world, not too rich the recipe called for 1% milk but it was a perfect complement to the spice rub on the steak. The "menu" showed a couscous looking side dish that they didn...

I've been up to a lot of stuff at work and it's kept me pretty busy and unable to tend to my poor blog so I figured I should at least share something fun that I've had the opportunity to learn. Above you'll see a Graphical Recording of my process for producing a bento box. Wait, wha? what's Graphical Recording well it's one function of a larger skill set of Graphical Facilitation. It's a way of designing, facilitating and finally recording a meeting/class in both words and graphics to encourage participation as well as create a group memory. The results create an engaging graphic that captures the details of the meeting in such a way that even those that didn't participate directly in the meeting can understand what was discussed and decided. I think that was the best I could think of as an "elevator pitch as to what I spent three days last week doing", I'm sure someone will post a nice flame chiding me with the real definition. For me it...

Little ditty about Jack and Diane. Two kids growing up in the American heart land. Unfortunately that's about all the similarity this bento has with it's namesake. No chilli dogs and shade trees here I'm afraid. It's been a while since I did a fun theme name so when I had the chance I pounced on it. I get a whole lot of inspiration whenever I go on a trip, this recent trip to Vegas was no exception. I always load up on food magazines for the flight and rip out (and later scan) the recipes that seem appealing, making notes on future themes and flagging new techniques to follow up on. This trip had some great "easy exquisite" dinners for two, certainly a great seed to start up a bento. Oh starting this post all my pictures are being taken with my nifty new Sony Nex-3. My poor beloved Nikon is starting to fail on me. The shutter keeps sticking and the only way out is to yank the battery and restart, the bad part is it's in the middle of a write operation on t...