Eating in a box

It's been hot out here. We just broke the record for most consecutive three digit temperatures, it was set in 1925 I believe. Not exactly a "We're #1" cheering kinda moment but I noteworthy none-the-less. As the days of summer drag on, it really gets harder and harder to contemplate making lunch. There's all the driving around to buy food, and then cooking and rushing around, something about this heat just saps your energy. I pushed through and decided that a simple bento around the tastes of summer would be a nice theme. I tried to stick with things that were light and vegetables that tended to be in season. We start things off with the Asian caramel pork. I simply cubed up a bunch of pork tenderloin browned it up and made a nice sauce with some soy and brown sugar. After cooking the pork and onions I simmered the pork in the sauce until thick. This dish definitely needs some sort of accompaniment because I think by itself the sauce makes it too sweet. If ea...

I decided on a new tag, NIAB (Not In A Box) for any of my posts of meals I create but not in a bento. These are usually dinners or special occasions and allow me to put in an in between post when I don't have a bento to show off. So as I said I didn't have a bento this week instead I chose to focus on making a nice dinner for my girlfriend. I got some photos in so I figured I can share it with you. For dinner I did a quick and light menu. I started (Ok I say I started but i didn't want to be hussling so I really served everything up all at once) with a classic French Onion soup (a requested favorite), I think I could have eased up on the cheese as it was a bit much, still it was gooey and yummy. The long slow cooking time on the onions really paid off because the soup was delicious. There was some disagreement on how far you cook the onions, some say that you cook them down to caramelized, others say to stop short of brown. I went with "ju...

This week I saw a blog post in my google reader that took me into the rabbit hole of Sri Lanka cooking websites. Sri Lanka isn't one of the first countries I think of when I created my list of culinary countries to visit, heck outside of news reports of Sri Lanka I didn't know much about the place. From a brief study of the country it appears it inherits culinary traits from the Dutch and the Portuguese from colonial times, and Indian and Southeast Asia due to its proximity. I wish I was able to unearth more information about the culinary heritage. I only know what I've been able to find thru combing thru recipe stories and a brief blurb paragraph in wikipedia. What I know for sure is there's no shortage in the use of hot peppers, coconut and a large variety of spices and curry dishes which dominate the recipes that I ran across. The main dish today is called "Devil Chicken" and let me tell you it's a scorcher. The recipes I ran across were a bit vagu...