Southwestern Bento


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't elaborate on or even name so I had to improvise and make my own. I decided to keep with the southwestern theme and flavor by so we have a nice cumin spiced couscous. I wanted to keep with my mantra of simple and fast so I cooked the couscous in chicken broth for some added flavor and tossed in some frozen corn, grape tomatoes and green onion. It doesn't get simpler than that.



Next we have a easy wilted baby spinach with toasted almonds and it was exactly that. Wilt some baby spinach, toast some almonds and toss them together. Nuff said.









Finally for dessert I went searching for southwestern dessert and I liked this variant on flan called Jericalla (Cinnamon Custard). Originally it was to be cooked in individual ramakins but since I had to do eight (and I didn't want to send out my nice ramakins) I cooked it as one large baking dish. I ended up using the broiler dish to set up a bain marie, that is to say I surrounded the custard baking dish with warm water to gently apply heat rather than direct baking. This is useful for custards to prevent the egg in the custard from curdling. The dish came out quite nicely and reminded me of the texture of soft silken tofu. The spare use of sugar made it very light.

Sorry, it's a sparse post but there's not much to say today. Gearing up for the 4th of July so no bento next week but as usual "I'll be back". Have a good holiday weekend for those of you in the US for the rest of you, um have a good weekend!

Box Contents
  • Chipotle-Rubbed Flank Steak in Gorgonzola cream sauce
  • Cumin spiced Couscous with corn and grape tomatoes
  • Spinach with Toasted Almonds
  • Jericalla (Cinnamon Custard)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Da Chang Mian Xian 大腸麵線: streetfood challenge

Image
This is actually a post that's been sitting in the queue for quite some time. A while back we had a Taiwanese potluck where everyone brought a food favorite from Taiwan. I didn't have a favorite food so I said I'd make whatever someone wanted. One of my wife's friends had a real hankering for Da Chang Mian Xian (大腸麵線 also called Mee Sua), a Taiwanese vermicelli street food dish, I of course open my big mouth and say: "sure how hard could it be to make?" (famous last words). Surely there was a recipe or something to go on. As it turns out this no there's wasn't a recipe to go on. Fortunately this was something I had tried before, my wife took me back in 2012 to visit her favorite Mian Xian  restaurant (Ah Zong Mian Xian 阿宗麵線) when we were visiting her old university stomping grounds.  All I remember from this place were a few things: 1) it was really hot outside 2) there was no where to sit so everyone was standing around (ok a few chairs) 3) th
Read more

TRIP: London 2013 Pt1

Image
Ok more traveling, this time to London, first week for work (above is our view of Buckingham Palace from our office) and second week for vacation with my wife. Lots of pictures of a lot of different food, I've manage to cut the number of photos to the highlights of what and where we ate. I've put links to the various places just in case you're in the area and want to check out some of these places. Sorry in advance about some of the photos I shot everything using a Galaxy S3 mini android phone that I acquired while on this trip and it does a pretty good job, but under low light it gets a bit grainy. Got off the plane bright and early 6am and dropped my bags at the hotel. While there I started my trip off with a classic English breakfast. Bangers (sausage) mushroom, roasted tomato, potato cake, hash browns, vegetarian sausage (which was quite nice), eggs, beans (heinz I believe) and some black pudding (blood sausage, a little dry but tasty) Since my room wasn'
Read more

Holiday Bird ala the Orion Cooker "la torre del diablo"

Image
I've talked a bit about my Orion Cooker or as I like to call it, "la torre del diablo" (the tower of the devil) and lots of people come and visit looking for info on the orion cooker and turkey. So today I'm going to chronicle the step by step of cooking a turkey and hey look, just in time for xmas. It all starts with the brine. As many of you know the best way to get a nice juicy turkey is to brine it before hand. It allows helps the meat retain moisture through the cooking process and you can impart some nice flavors. I used a slightly modified brine recipe (see below) by my favorite food geek/hero, Alton Brown. It's quite simple really, you need a high salt content I believe the rule of thumb is one cup each of salt and sugar for every gallon of brine. In this case, the vegetable stock has salt in it, and I trust that's why there's less salt in the recipe, and of course the word of Alton Brown is never wrong he is after all the culinary equivalent of C
Read more