Eating in a box

NIAB: Dinner at Tag in Denver Colorado

2012-01-31T22:49:00.008-06:00

So I'm in Denver for work and my friend/coworker told me he'd take me to a foodie worthy place to eat. So we went to Tag, above is a picture of their logo. The menu looked really tasty and I was all in to go. The menu is small but that just means they have time to really focus on some good food. I don't know much about the restaurant but my friend mentioned it was in the top 10 of Denver. Who am I to argue? The restaurant is a cozy place with plenty of smaller nooks for couples to feel a sense of privacy and an more open area where tables are right up next to one another.

To start we got the Kobe Beef Sliders with Gorgonzola Aioli and Shallot Confit this was served with "Duck Fat Fries". The fries had a sweet, salty with a bit of heat very delicious, the fries (after being fried) were tossed in a bit of duck fat. The sliders were very very tasty, great flavor. My friend mentioned it was a bit unfortunate to think about grinding up Kobe beef, but the results were very delightful.

For my main I ordered the Colorado Lamb Loin. It came with a cipollini onion config wild mushrooms (oyster, chanterelle, and one more I can't remember) butternut squash and schezuan glaze (yeah that's how they spelled it). Ok I believe hands down this is the best preparation of lamb that I can recall. Holy Cow err Lamb.

My friend ordered the Local Hanger Steak with truffle herb watercress salad, pueblo fingerling potatoes, gorgonazola and balsamic miso syrup. I'm not much of a starch eater but my friend was right, with the balsamic miso syrup this was very tasty. The steak itself was extremely well prepared and had a wonderful very rich meat flavor (the best description I could come up with) Beautiful presentation and absolutely delicious. I now understand why hanger steak was described as "the cut of meat butchers usually reserve for themselves rather than selling". Wow, hanger steak sous vide is coming up next.

I skipped dessert but my friend got this Chocolate Dacquoise, basically a layered chocolate cake with a melt in your mouth caramel layer. My friend seemed to enjoy it and really enjoyed the raspberry sauce that went with it.

Ok short and sweet, I just felt the need to capture this wonderful dinner. If you get to downtown Denver anytime it's a treasure trove of wonderful dining establishment, I wish I had a bit more time here to explore.

Meat Bento: It's what's for Lunch

2012-01-17T13:27:00.011-06:00

It's a New Year and always hard to get back into the rhythm of things when you've had a whole month to derail yourself. I managed to finally get a free weekend to put together a Bento but I haven't had much time to consider a theme. After four to five years it's getting more and more difficult to think of untried themes so I asked one of my eaters to come up with something for me. After careful consideration he comes back with "Meat", everything had to showcase meat. To be a little more fun, I added the stipulation that each course had to feature a different "meat". The difficulty was to tie the dishes together so that each course wasn't such a jarring experience so after a bit of research I went with "quasi" japanese.

We start in Beef land with this Fried Negimaki stuffed with King Oyster Mushrooms. I have to give credit to JustBento for the idea although I underestimated the effort of making 30 of these things. I went with the King Oyster Mushroom because it's got a really solid texture that I could still cut into large strips to fit inside the beef and seasoned it with a bit of salt and pepper. I'm still on the fence about fried foods in the bentos, they re-heat poorly, most folks ignore my advice to use a toaster oven and the microwave would the turn the fried parts into mush. I'll have to see how my bento-ers did this time around. I added a bit of Sriracha to add a bit more flavor. I think for next time, I'll make it a true Negimaki and glaze the inside of the roll with Teriyaki sauce (I'll spare the outside as it would interfere with the crust).

On to chicken. Nothing Earth shattering with this Chicken with Soba Noodles in Spicy Peanut Sauce. Again, this dish tends to have bento issues because when it chills the sauce locks up and it turns into a giant pile of noodles all glued together. A gentle reheat in the microwave fixes the problem. The chicken was quickly poached in some salted water. The peanut sauce consisted of peanut butter, sesame oil, soy sauce, and a bit of chili oil I had on hand for some spice. I ended up using only half of the stated amount of sauce, it would have been way too overwhelming otherwise. Rather than a bento this is definitely a quick lunch party dish. Prep up night before then boil the noodles and put it all together. Very tasty dish and I can see it being a light crowd pleaser.

I had some dried salmon "sung" on hand, I had been meaning to try it out as I usually buy the "Pork Sung". This seemed like a great time to make use of the unusual ingredient. I featured the pork sung version of this roll in my second bento. This is the same roll just using the salmon instead (plus egg and chinese pickle). Honestly I can't say that there was a whole lot of taste and texture difference. Still yummy. Sorry about the picture, I need to get a new lighting rig, my NEX-3 doesn't do as well under fluorescent lights. You can always tell when I've lost my daylight while cooking. Photoshop does a reasonable job but you can still tell which ones are in natural light. You can tell when I have a bento that runs long when I have mixed lighting like this. Actually what I should say is "if it's all uniform natural lighting you know I was able to put together a quick lunch".

Finally the big challenge! I think the intent behind selecting "Meat" as the theme was to challenge me to use meat in a dessert. I could have side stepped this because I don't always put in a dessert but what fun would that be. I scoured the web looking for something interesting. Lots of interesting meat desserts lots involving bacon. Since "putting bacon in anything" seems to be pretty popular I filtered those out of the pile. I then filtered out anything that had too many steps or too intricate and we end up with "Sausage Cake". Apparently this is an old native Native American recipe. This doesn't pre-date colonial times since it was the Spanish that introduced the pig to the new world so I'm not exactly sure when it was developed or if another animal was used as a substitute. Ground pork is used as part of the batter, you first beat it together with the sugar until well incorporated. I will admit to some hesitation as I put this into the oven. (I was disturbed enough to tweet about it) As it turns out this wasn't a really bad cake. I think a good dark coffee would have gone quite well with a slice. It's like a fruitcake (I omitted the fruit), dense and sweet (but not syrupy). Someone said it reminded them of a dense banana nut bread. I'll probably stay away from making it again, but I think this will rate with the most interesting dish I've baked.

I have to say that this was probably not one of my best bentos. I'm still waiting to hear back from my bento diners. It certainly took me a lot of time to produce, I *barely* fit inside of budget, and the reheat challenges I talked about. All meat really made for a heavy box. I should have opted to somehow include more greens in the menu. Anyways lesson learned, better to come up with my own themes or face some weird oddball request. I'm going to have to pick something easier this next time around.

Box Contents

Fried Beef Negimaki stuffed with King Oyster Mushroom
Chicken and Soba noodles in Spicy Peanut Sauce
Mom's sushi roll with Salmon Sung
Native American Sausage Cake

A Taiwanese wedding banquet

2011-12-11T08:28:00.001-06:00

So one of the reasons for returning to Taiwan was to celebrate my Sister's wedding with my extended family in Taiwan. As you may have noticed food is a very central theme in Asian culture. What's that title picture got to do with it? Nothing. Actually that's a picture of the rock we were suppose to climb but got rained out. We did manage a nice hike, but I'm sure that was a poor replacement for my brother in-law who was looking forward to the climb. Anyhow it just seemed like a nice picture to lead us into "The Banquet", I'm not making light of the title, 13 courses of food with no fillers. That's right no rice, no "extra carbs" just lots and lots of food.

Ok there's 13 courses, no need for a lot of my yammering it'll be like the last post.

Small plate appetizers to start us off. I'll spare you the other photo. We have smoked tofu, bitter melon, roasted peanuts, lilly flowers, pickled daikon radish, and pickled seaweed.

Seafood platter with blanched squid, shrimp, and crab. Served with a garlic soy vinegar sauce.

Out comes the sashimi course. On the upper left is one of he largest oysters I've eaten. The really new one for me is near the right of center. It's fish that has been sliced to expose the yellow roe. I'm not sure if it's flying fish roe or not. All of the fish was exceptionally firm and fresh. I guess that's what happens when you're near the source.

Tea smoked duck. This is a traditional presentation of the duck where you have the crepes on the left and you build your own "burrito" with duck, plum sauce, green onion and cucumber. Unlike Peking Duck the skin is not separated from the meat and the duck is smoked with a wok with tea leaves to impart flavor.

Abalone soup. This isn't actually abalone, but a cousin that is many times smaller.

I need to get the name for this. It resembled a noodle dish. It's actually a large helping of vegetables, mushroom, and egg. There's baby shark fin here. I know it's controversial, I'm simply a guest here don't shoot me.

Braised beef short rib.

I've seen this ingredient on the show "Chopped" it's called "black boned chicken soup". The chicken is a black skinned and black boned chicken. The meat is also darker in color but otherwise tastes like regular chicken. The traditional preparation is a soup that is very "boo" or "hearty". I really have a hard time explaining this one. It's a very thick and rich broth infused with a lot of traditional Chinese herbs and medicinals.

This fish is called golden knife fish. We were not sure what to make of this. Apparently the fish in it's natural habitat stands face down and thus looks like a kitchen knife. The staff insisted that we eat the fish freshly cooked, because as it cooled the meat got tougher. It's cooked "white water" style which is a quick poach and finish with hot oil over a bed of green onion, garlic and ginger.

This one is a new one for me, i've never encountered this dish. It's a taro puff (but dense in the center) topped with a egg white mixture. I figured out it had egg white, mushroom, and some sort of fish stock, we debated if the prepartion was a quick fry or steam. The Taro Puff was accompanied by pickled vegetables.

Sea Cucumber cooked with LIly stems. Sea cucumber is one of these ingrediants I don't quite understand. I need to do a bit more research into the benefits. It's usually sold in a dehydrated form and re-consituted. It's got a squishy and somewhat slimey texture (making it hard for chopsticks). It' always served as part of an "very nice" meal but usually is flavorless.

The first part of dessert is a sweet soup of red dates, white "wood ear" (mushrooms) and lotus seeds. This also considered a "Boo" or "hearty" dish reserved for the winter. It's December and we're rocking 60 to 70F.

Finally, every Chinese meal, whether a banquet or a meal at friends house ends in fruit.

Needless to say no one walked away hungry. It was a ridiculous amount of food. And I really enjoyed having such a wonderful meal with my family here in Taiwan. It's a rare treat to be able to get everyone together. Ok I think there are a few more posts in me before I head out of here next week.

Dining in Taiwan 2011 part 2

2011-12-08T20:05:00.001-06:00

Did this pic on our drive to sun moon lake. Took the pic with my iPhone and used the colorburst app. Anyhow, not bad with an iphone and doing the photo work with your finger on a bumpy car ride up a mountain. This is part two of my food post for my trip to Taiwan. It's been really neat, I've seen a ton of interesting stuff like, temples, lakes and mountains (we got up to 13,000 ft) and of course the food. So much neat food and I have so many pictures I decided I needed to just pick out a few highlights and go from there.

Interesting preparation: TIlapia sliced length wise stuffed with greens and aromatics. Then folded width wise tied and deep fried fried. The fish is extremely tender and the exterior fins and bones are completely edible.

Green Tofu with sesame and peanuts in soy vinegar sauce. Auntie said it was made from green beans (perhaps as opposed to white dried soy beans for soy milk). Maybe fresh soy beans like the edamame you eat in restaurants I was unable to get a clarification. The really neat thing is that the restaurant where this dish and the fish above were taken, all of the produce is literally grown right outside the restaurant. Talk about local sourcing! Super fresh food and the most tender Chinese water spinach I've had.

Hands down the most unusual breakfast I have ever had. Mexican stone leaf (i think it's a succulent type plant) two types of bitter gourd, Clams in Soy sauce broth, salted duck egg, two types of siu mai braised tofu, jelly fish salad, dragon fruit, boiled sausage, and of course bacon. I crowded the most interesting things into this one plate. It's a little weird but for both the ham and the sausage they were "boiled". They had the traditional Congee as well, and they had some other stuff that I just couldn't get to. It's good to see that no matter the culture bacon still makes the breakfast menu.

We went to Fulong city they are famous for they're train bentos. One of my cousins was telling my sister, "oh yeah if you go to Fu Long you've got to get their bento". This box of food is produced out of a very small kitchen. You don't get any choices here the only question the person in the kitchen asks is: "Ji Ge?" How many? There was a line of easily 50 people ahead of us ordering stacks of these boxes. It's the simplest of lunches, five spice braised meat, tofu, and egg, pickled mustard greens, sauteed fish cake, slab of braised pork belly (which apparently is everywhere here), sausage, cabbage over a bed of rice. The cost? 45 yuan, like a buck and half. If you get it on the train they mark it up to 100, but if you're not stopping at Fu Long then you don't have much of a choice.

We dined at the Imei factory. They are very famous for their cookies and pastries. Many people buy their specially packaged cookie "tins" as presents for folks back home. They recently opened a restaurant and served fresh made dim sum. The above is a pastry that is stuffed with sweet roasted pork and paste made with dates and honey. Very tasty! Their sign at the front claims that they are about sustainable organic foods. I think there's a pretty big movement on this type of dining here in Taiwan. Most people eat out because they have limited kitchen space and the food is extremely inexpensive this makes it doubly more important that what they consume is chemical free.

I've managed to catch a cold I'm not sure how much more posting I'll get in, we'll see. Nothing like being sick to make you miss home.

Hsin Chu Fish Market

2011-12-05T03:57:00.001-06:00

My awesome Uncle took us to the Hsin Chu fish market as one of our stops on his tour of Hsin Chu for me, my sister and brother in-law. This place always amazes me every time I stop by. The above is one of the stalls that sells dried seafood. I'll keep this post short on the yammering and just give some pics and descriptions.

Fresh water crabs they aren't the famed Chinese hair crabs but I was told they go for at least 30 USD a piece. So there's pretty darn close to the pricepoint.

Baby Shark.

The famous Black Mullet (also I've heard it called Grey Mullet) prized for it's roe which is dry cured and considered a delicacy. One of my most favorite foods. Expensive and hard to come by. Apparently the italians prize the roe as well (called Bottarga Di Muggine). They grate the cured roe over pasta. Can't say I agree with that application but different strokes for different folks I suppose.

Street vendor had some sausage with flying fish roe. It's a sweet chinese style sausage with flying fish roe mixed in. A very unusual texture, like a regular sausage but punctuated with crispy pop from the roe.

A very fun excursion trip. I didn't end up buying anything because we were still full from the street food (see previous post). There's a restaurant on the second floor where you can take your purchases from the market and have them prepare it any way you desire. I love this place!

I leave you with a a picture of some beautiful fresh fish.

Taiwan trip 2011 day one eats

2011-12-04T05:38:00.000-06:00

I'm still working out this blogsy software, sorry about the formatting. I decided to make this trip sans laptop and try to do everything off the iPad. I have to say, not having internet is a real handicap but when I actually manage to find access it's been pretty successful. For instance I managed to find some wireless while at my grandparents (open wifi at a hotel across the street) and uploaded a bunch of photos to start my post. I worked on the content offline and waited for more internet to post. I'm still getting use to it, I have a photo connector to download new photos from my iPad.

Anyhow first full day in Taiwan and visiting relatives and off course it's all about the food over here so day one didn't disappoint. We started our day in Tao Yuan.

Breakfast starts off with hot soy milk and fried "donut" (literally called Oil stick) in a flaky sesame bun. The donut itself isn't sweet nor is the flat bread like bun which is somewhere between a flatbread and a pastry dough in consistency. As with the an American breakfast, it's got a good share of carb goodness to start your day.

The other breakfast specialty here was the Dragon purses, or soup dumplings. It's a steamed bun with meat inside, the way it's prepared there's also a good bit of broth that spills out as you bite into it. Some places specialize in giant versions of this that you first drink with a straw before cutting into it. This was a big favorite of my brother in-law, he claimed he could have wolfed down a couple more trays of those.

We hopped a train and proceeded to visit my grandparents and uncle in Hsin Chu. One of the things you'll notice when coming to taiwan is that there's a shrine pretty much as often as you would see a starbucks in the US. The one pictured above is a very famous one in Hsin Chu and is happily located next to a food market.

These markets probably wouldn't pass any health food inspection back home but of course that's where you find the best foods. My uncle explained that the little food stalls are actually passed down generations and that the 30 square foot of cooking/eating space is probably some of the most valuable realestate around. Most of the vendors carry the same type of stuff and my uncle brought us to one place where he has dined with family for about three generations during his lifetime.

First we start with Oyster Pancake. It's a pan fried mixture of oyster, egg, vegetables (I think chopped bok choi) and batter. The batter consists of, tapioca flour and stock. It's topped with a sweet sauce, which I think is oyster sauce. It's a love or hate texture, but a definitely authentic taiwanese dish. The resulting dish is a bit gooey and hard to cut into and remains pretty true to the oyster in it's raw form.

Second course was a noodle soup with beef tendon meatball. There were two types of noodles here, an egg noodle and a rice noodle vermicelli. The stock for the soup has been stewing a long time with large hunks of pork shoulder.

Next was a fried plate of Fried oyster pancake, fried sweet rice cake, and chicken roll. I'm not sure I heard the name of the chicken roll correctly because I believe it had pork in it, the wrapper was a tofu skin wrapper. Needless to say all three were delicious, kind of hard to go wrong with fried stuff. All three were served with a sweet chili sauce.

Above we have Hsin Chu sausage. It's a steamed sausage, that's very large whole chunks of pork fat and thick walled intestines as casing. It's unusual since normal sausage has very thin casing.

Pork intestines. Came with a chili sauce. This is one of those things that my uncle told my brother in-law to just eat it and ask questions later. I give him great marks for being adventerous, being Chinese there are few very things that I won't eat, as an American I didn't think he'd go for it but he went full gusto and enjoyed it. The texture was like eating a properly prepared squid, which is to say has a chew but not like eating a rubberband. There's no real flavor to mention, its a great container for whatever condiment you use it with.

Remember the pork stock I mentioned from the noodle soup. The resulting stewed pork is what you see above. The meat is not very flavorful since it all went into the stock but it is very very tender and goes great with a garlic soy sauce.

Here's the most awesome part. I think we had about two of each dish plus one I didn't get a picture of a squid soup. The whole thing fed five of us and we had some to take home. All that cost us around eight bucks in US money. Can you believe that? I'm finding food to be extremely reasonable here. The cost of gadgets is about the same but street food is very inexpensive.

Ok this post went long so I'll have to revise this. We went to the fish market later on so I'll do a post on that when we go to Fu Long today to go rock climbing. Ok TTFN.

Happy Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-24T08:16:00.000-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving! I celebrated in Asian style this year with a traditional Hot Pot. Basically a hot cauldron of boiling broth is at the center of the feast and an array of raw ingredients surround the hotpot. You select what you want and cook it like in a fondue and cool it off with your personal blend of sauce.

I'm actually having a Thanksgiving potluck on sunday so that's where I'll be busting out the turkey.

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving! For those of you that are black Friday-ing right now best of luck to you.

Fall Short Rib Bento

2011-11-13T20:43:00.012-06:00

Three Day Shortribs. I know it's a repeat of a former bento but I didn't name that one three day shortrib err. oh wait.. well nevermind, better come up with a new title. Anyhow, it's been a while and I don't believe my current crop of bento-ers have had the chance the taste possibly the most wonderful thing that can come out of my sous vide machine. Outside of the fact that I wanted to do my short ribs again, the inspiration for the bento is the nice cool weather we've been having, it makes you wanna have something that hearty and "sticks to your ribs" if you'll allow for the pun. Besides, Thanksgiving is around the corner and I wanted to test out this sweet potato dish. So um. Fall Short Rib bento it is! I promise to work on more cohesive themes.

Three day short rib, what's there really to say? It's meat, lots and lots of meat slowly cooking for three solid days in a water bath. Why three? It's some sort of magic number. See one day just isn't enough. Two days is tasty. Three is like eating a little piece of heaven. Actually, just because I'm that obsessive about "knowing for sure" I ran a test of three batches starting each one day after the other until I had a sample of three to taste side by side. Two days is nice, but three days is a must if you have the time. What's that short rib doing in those three days? Well to answer that question you need to know a little bit more about the beef short rib. That particular cut of meat contains a lot of fat and connective tissue. These types of meats tend to be considered the "cheap cuts" (well once up on a time), stuff like flank steak, shanks, and short ribs. Why cheap? The various cuts have lots of connective tissue which, if not treated properly, produces a very tough and chewy end dish. So what's a cook to do? Well you have two options, cut the meat thin and cook it on high heat fast or keep it in large hunks and cook it low and slow. Let's take the short rib, you can get the "flanken cut" which if you think of a row of connected ribs is a slice off the top then you cook that fast as you would with Gal-Bi (Korean short rib barbeque). Still kinda chewy but, it's such a small cut that it's a tiny bite size not like trying to chew down a brick of meat. On the other hand, as in the case I did today with the "English cut" single rib, you can cook it really slow. What this does is apply a gentle heat that slowly lets the connective tissue break down and turn into a more gelatin state and let the liquids of the fat and the "meat gelatin" (ok I could come up with a tastier word) to really moisten up the cut of meat. I finished this off by searing the outside so you get the nice brown outside caramelized effect. This usually produces a lot of smoke and oil hence doing it outside on my butane portable stove.

I wanted a nice carb-y side dish without it being a empty carb like potatoes. I settled on this Creamy Truffle Quinoa. If you've read my blog you must know about my obsession with Quinoa. It's a great nutritious grain and an easy substitute for rice. The original recipe called for mint, but I decided to go with fresh basil because it felt a little more "right", besides the two plants are from the same family so it's not that far of a stretch. I cut down on the amount of butter and Parmesan, had to do my part to lighten things up a bit after the big short rib. I got multiple kudos on this dish everyone really enjoyed it. As usual I used a stock (in this case vegetable) to cook with the quinoa, it infuses the quinoa with a lot more flavor and you can effectively skip any need for salt. A lot of places that I've had quinoa seem to cook it like rice and simply use water, I find the resulting dish to be very bland and tasteless.

Since I already had my SousVide Supreme out for the short ribs, I put together a few packets of broccoli and roasted bell pepper while the beef was resting. I put in a bit of butter, the left over parmesan, and garlic. I love the flavor of the dish, since you don't lose flavors to a pan or cooking liquid the taste is very "bright" or jumps out at you. The only downside to this preparation is that the broccoli turned a bit yellow on me. I was quite surprised because I didn't experience this same problem with either the peas or beans I've done in the past with the SVS. I'll have to do a bit more research to understand where it went wrong.

Finally, I decide no on dessert but I did do something a little sweet and fall-ish and this recipe from A Veggie Venture past thru my blog reader: Sweet Potato with Cranberries. It looked nice and easy and fit the whole Fall cold weather theme I was going with. I opted to cut the butter and sugar in half and I got the comment that I could have gone even lower on the sugar. This is definitely a super simple dish I intend on serving for my holiday party coming up. I'm glad I chose to do the test run on this bento

I'm not sure if I'll have any more bentos for the year (maybe one) Thanksgiving is right around the corner shortly after I'm off to Taiwan to visit family then we run right into Christmas. I'm sure they'll be some food adventures in Taiwan, so I'll probably post some stuff from there. So just in case I don't get to post, Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Holidays!

Box Contents:

Three Day Beef Short Rib
Creamy Truffle Quinoa
Broccoli with Roasted Bell Pepper and Parmesan
Cranberry and Orange Sweet Potatoes

EatingWell Bento

2011-11-09T14:21:00.009-06:00

I couldn't really think of a good coherent theme this week. It's been so busy and although I've been busily clipping new ideas and storing them away it can get overwhelming when you stare at the "future bento" tag list for my note file. As it turns out I had quite a few recipes from the magazine EatingW ell so I assembled my top favorite looking recipes and off I went. I really enjoy the magazine, it's one of those that I pick up from the local bookstore when I happen to see it. There's always some interesting articles but the important part is they manage to put together some very tasty looking (while at the same time healthy and nutritious) foods. I might some day get around to a subscription, I just have so many magazines I have to "process" every month as it is.... oops I'm yammering. Anyhow healthy bento it was and I managed to score bonus points because I was able to make it a fully Gluten Free bento.

This was suppose to be Spicy Chicken Cakes with a horseradish aioli, but I did a few tweaks here. I opted to grind together chicken breast and thigh meat instead of just breast meat, I also cut the mayo and went with the Olive Oil based mayo which is half calorie and fat (that was part of the binder). And since I wanted to go gluten free, I subbed out the breadcrumbs with "corn flake crumbs". I went with the corn flakes because when it fried up it gave a nice crispy texture to the outside of the cake (and thus retain some moisture). Because I went with a bit more fat in the meat I didn't think I really wanted to add in further calories and fat in the form of the aioli sauce, it tasted just fine without it (that and I was getting a bit lazy). Anyhow these turned out great. Since it was hard to buy one pound of chicken I ended up with like 60 of these chicken cakes (about six pounds of meat), we'll see how well they hold up in the freezer.

For a starch component I went with this Rice and lentil Salad. I love the texture of the salad. The rice and lentils were tossed in with a bit of red wine viniagrette. The dressing was not very overwhelming, definitely added a slight twang to the dish. The original recipe asked for canned lentils which is a nice time saver but at $3 a can (for a total of $9) I decided to go with the single bag of dried lentils at $.67 and boil/simmering for 30 mins. That money could easily go to something else and I could afford the stove space.

There is a recent interest in Kale, you see it in all the cooking magazines and blog posts. Most of it in the form of smoothies, green smoothies have recently start popping up at work (we have a health challenge going on). Anyways, there's pretty good reason for all the attention, it's packed full of good for you vitamins and minerals. It's also high in fiber so it's really a big favorite with all the different diets floating around these days. Given all that I knew this Salsa Braised Kale was definite in, I figured this was a good chance to work with Kale and the recipe happened to be really really really simple. All you do is heat a bit of oil quickly saute the kale, add in some salsa and water and let it braise for 15 mins. Optionally toss in a bit of cheese but I though it was fine without it. I had some initial misgivings as the kale was very tough but the braise really softened it up quite a bit and it's a really tasty dish. I went with the "fresh" roasted tomato salsa in the fridge section and a carton of the fresh pico de gallo both had enough seasoning such that I didn't even need to add any salt.

Finally dessert, I wanted something dead simple and I found it with this Tea Scented Mandarins. I cheated and went with canned mandarins and rinsed off the syrup. From there you just boil up some black tea and add some honey and ground cardamom. The flavors really developed over night and was a surprise hit with the bento-ers. A few of them were like, huh canned oranges (the tea syrup is not immediately obvious) but the unusual flavor turned quite a few heads.

I got another bento coming up next week but then holiday season will be upon us. Stay tuned!

Box Contents:

Spicy Chicken Cakes
Rice and Lentil Salad
Salsa Braised Kale
Tea Scented Mandarins

Cooking with/for Friends 2

2011-11-01T12:32:00.014-05:00

Hey guys, sorry about the lack of bentos lately. Work has really ratcheted up and free time has gone down to a minimum. I've had a few photos and off topic posts that I wanted to put out but simply getting a moment to write a quick post has been difficult. I'm actually doing this one over my lunch just to take a break from my deluge of emails and meetings. Anyhow, enough belly aching.

I had the great fortune to cook with a long time friend and coworker. She and her husband use to have a Persian restaurant in town and both are fabulous cooks! She invited me to help host/cook for a party of our friends just to get everyone together. We've done this in the past and it was a wonderful opportunity to learn a bit more about Persian cuisine. So given the chance I immediately jumped on it. Besides, her house is beautiful and her kitchen a joy to work in just look at the view (from the title shot) and this outdoor/kitchen grill. The indoor kitchen was just amazing it really has everything I could ever want in a kitchen. I got to watch the sun set two nights in a row as we cooked, simply amazing. I need a kitchen like that!

Anyhow below are all the dishes we made, I assisted and took notes on most of the dishes and contributed two of my own.

Starting salads. Bean and olive salad and Tabbouleh.

Spinach with dried cranberries and prunes. Bademjan with lentil - Eggplant with saffron sauteed onions and yellow lentils. This was a nice stewed eggplant dish great just as a side dish or as a dip with some pita.

My two contributions: East meets middle east roll, Moroccan spiced chicken breast with saffron rice rolled as a sushi roll and served with a dynamite sauce (from my night cooking for the Flying Carpet as guest chef) and a spiced Pork tenderloin prepared sous vide. I was able to produce four of these all in one go in my little Sous Vide Supreme. I think I need to put up ads or get some sort of commission from these guys, I sure i've personally sold a few units just by cooking for people.

Next up were the dolmas. In the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern cuisines there are many variations on stuffed/rolled grape leaves. Some use dried fruits and make it sweet, some savory, vegetarian, beef, lamb, in this case used beef and added lentils. Then there's the preparation/sauce used to cook the dolmas which span tomato based, simple broth or in this case a mixture of lemon and garlic topped off with water. Like tamales, dumplings, raviolis and piergo, dolmas are one of those cultural foods that you grab the bowl and ingredients stand around the counter with friends and roll out a few hundred. I like how ever culture has at least one of those communal cooking foods. It's a great way to get folks to participate and catchup on how everyone's been doing.

To finish things up we have Kookoo made with sweet potatoes and beets. Last time I learned to make a kookoo sabzi which comprised of various chopped greens. The thing in common is it's mixed with spices and egg and it's skillet fried. It's kinda like a frittata with a lot less egg and a lot more vegetables or a fritter but a lot less fried. Last but not least was the "cutlet" that's pretty much all I got for the name. We were chatting with a Russian coworker and she mentioned a similar dish in the Ukraine that sounded very similar "Kotlet". We served the cutlet as just a little beef patty, but as a snack the previous night we made a sandwich with a bit of pita, fresh tomatoes, basil, and mint. (which made for a nice picture)

I had a wonderful time hanging out with friends and sharing food. It was a lot of fun and I can't wait to do it again! I hope to do a bento this week I might get one or two in before the holiday season takes up all my time. Thanks for dropping by!

Paleo Diet Bento

2011-10-16T22:07:00.011-05:00

So everyone around the office is doing the Crossfit training and the Paleo diet. It's really paying off for some of them. One guy has lost a total of 50 pound or so on just diet alone. That's the guy with the best result, others have similar, but with exercise and still others very small changes. Anyhow, since a bunch of the guys went on the diet they haven't been able to participate in my bentos. I told them I'd make a lunch just for them and they'd all be signed up so they didn't have to compete with the email crowd. I don't want to get into the details of the whole paleo diet, if you are curious you should buy the book or go to a whole host of websites that are dedicated to the thing. Basically it comes down to lean meats and no processed foods. It's a low/slow carb diet, no sugar, wheat etc so it's a very friendly diet for Gluten free folks. Without further ado, I give you Paleo Diet Bento or Paleo Bento (which sounds nicer)

Paleo comes from the word paleolithic so it's caveman food. That's a generalization of course there are things on the list that I wouldn't expect a cave man to be able to obtain. They might not be smart enough for car insurance but they apparently know what it takes to be a lean mean exercising machine. Anyhow what better cave man food than pork. Big ol slab of meat, in this case I sous vide'd up four pork tenderloin and employed a taragon herb mix that I had in the pantry (yes, I checked it didn't have gluten). The pork is hardly recognizeable with it's nice pink hue. I cooked it at 134F for about four hours. Honestly the texture of the pork is to die for, very tender very juicy. I've gone on and on about sous vide cooking so I'll just let you look one of those posts up. All I've got to say is "super yum".

This is probably one of the neatest things I wanted to try in the paleo diet, they substitute rice with finely chopped cauliflower. I wouldn't go so far as to call this a substitute for rice, but the flavors of this Asian "Fried Rice" was very popular with my diners. I used fish sauce for the salt component as it turns out some fish sauce brands are not gluten free, just like soy sauce. Luckily my brand was gluten free. I got the recipe here from Nom Nom Paleo (a great resource), the meat was bacon and was what I fried the onions an mushrooms in. I suppose with a flavor base like that you really can't go very wrong. There's still something missing without the starchiness of real rice, but as a filler it does a pretty descent job. I wonder if you could get away with doing this as "sushi rice" and make some sort of paleo sushi roll. I don't think the cauliflower would hold together, you'd probably have to have some sort of mayo/sauce binder.

On the paleo diet you're there's a lot of meat involved but unlike Adkins you can have your fill on veggies, so I made Roasted Summer Squash. It's actually a very eye catching dish when fresh out of the pan, the red onions and the yellow and green of the squash/zucchini make for a good picture. I haven't gotten thru the whole paleo book yet, but searching the internet for recipes and ideas on food there seemed to be a pretty generous use of coconut oil and coconut "amino". Coconut oil is a rather strange ingredient, it's a solid 76F. It looks like candle wax but has the consistency of melon and if you get any on your hands it immediately turns to liquid. I made the mistake of trying to incorporate the coconut oil as a solid, but quickly turned to the microwave to make it easier to homogeneously coat the squash. The only downside here is that the squash once refrigerated has this white coating that looks a bit unappetizing. Once heated it looks and tastes just fine.

Dessert is one of those difficult things with this diet, I didn't have a lack of recipes, but just from initial reading you're kind of limited to fruits. Some of the recipes I found went with chocolate, but there is some contention on whether chocolate is ok. Would the cave man know how to roast and ferment cocoa beans? I bet the cave man would know how to get honey but no clear direction there. Either way the point is no refined sugar but stay away from sweet in general unless it's fruit (and even sparingly at that). So I went with this Paleo Apple Pudding. I didn't really know what apple to go with so I went with some Jonagold (a hybrid of Johnathan apples and Golden Delicious) it had a pleasant sweetness and a crisp texture. I was afraid of the mealy texture of the Red Delicious (I'm told they are less so when uber fresh) and I was afraid of the tartness of the Granny Smith apple. I was told the Jonagold was good for cooking. As it turns out I found the "pudding" to be a bit tart, I warned my diners that they could deviate by adding sugar or honey but I stuck with paleo version. Turns out everyone really liked it. The apples were cooked with coconut milk and cinnamon, the thickener was coconut oil. Once chilled the pudding set quite nicely, I imagine that the coconut oil also muted the tartness which is why no one else seemed to notice (that or they all liked tart desserts)

Anyhow, there's my foray into Paleo diet, I may try to do another one or two of these since there's a demand for it. Thanks for dropping by, and as always if there's a recipe you want just post in the comments and I'll make sure to put it up here for you.

Box Contents
Tarragon Pork Tenderloin
Asian "Fried Rice" Cauliflower
Roasted Summer Squash
Paleo Apple pudding

Indian Bento 6

2011-09-30T10:30:00.008-05:00

By request I have produced another Indian themed bento. It was quite timely since the newspaper was featuring this Indian cookbook author that wrote a book on cooking traditional Indian dishes with a slow cooker. The book is called "The Indian Slow Cooker" by Anupy Singla. I just found her blog and will be earmarking it for a full read. I enjoyed the book, but I bought the e-book version for my nook and it's just hard navigating reference material on an e-book versus have the old fashion tree killing paper version. I do like the idea of adapting a cuisine to using the fire and forget slow cooker, it's a good way to save stove space and the lack of need to supervise the cooking lets me still have a reasonable Sunday. I will say I seized the opportunity to buy yet another slow cooker bringing me up to three (ouch am I like the slow cooker version of a cat hoarder?).

This Lamb Korma recipe actually didn't come from the book. I grabbed a few recipes from online and took some liberties. The resulting dish had a thinner curry than you normally would get at the local Indian restaurant (dunno how it compares to authentic) but I'm betting they used lots of ghee (which I skipped) and a ton more heavy cream. I believe one variation (northern style) even used ground cashews for thickening. Either way the five hours of cooking made for very tender and flavorful meat. I think the only complaint I got out of this bento was that I didn't include enough rice for both the curry and the dal. I considered using the larger container for rice, but I really didn't want to "cheap out" with the rice as a filler. Goes to show you that there are just certain things you gotta have with Indian food and plenty of rice is on top of the list.

I'm still playing with my new camera and my new acquisition of a reflector to bounce some light from the sun. I'm particularly fond of this picture, the colors really pop out and the picture is nice and crisp. Oh right the food, Aloo Gobi or Spiced Cauliflower and Potato. This was the dish that was featured on the paper (and online here). I was quite a bit concerned with the lack of liquid in the recipe. But just as the author promised the whole thing really cooked down. With this dish, I used White potatoes and I wasn't necessarily happy with the texture. The potatoes were cooked all the way through, but they had a really firm texture that at first bite made me think they weren't done. I believe this is from the lower starch/waxy characteristics of the white potato. With this slow dry heat treatment, I'm wondering if a russet (baking) potato would be a better choice the higher starch content would soak up the excess liquid from the cauliflower and have better flavor.

Palak Aur Sabut Moong Dal is a green lentil with spinach stew/soup. Really it could be considered either, as a classic dal you eat it with rice, but i've seen references to this recipe called a soup, which if you think split pea then you've got the right texture in mind. I had my doubts that the moong dal would actual break down, in Chinese cooking the moong dal is used as a dessert "green bean soup" (and the moong dal is called moong bean rather than lentil). Even under pretty generous pressure cooking the bean still has a reasonable held together texture. But I suppose if you subject anything to eight hours of cooking time even the most hearty of ingredients break down.

I got pretty good marks on this bento, and the theme requester was quite happy. I'll have to circle back to the cookbook and try out a few more of the recipes. Anyhow, as always thanks for reading!

Box Contents:

Lamb Korma
Aloo Gobi
Palak Aur Sabut Moong Dal

Fall Preview Bento

2011-09-11T22:55:00.010-05:00

It has been one long and hot summer here in Texas. We broke quite a few records locally, most days 100+ degree weather, most consecutive 100+ degree weather, and I believe we clinched hottest August in the US *ever*. It's been one of those summer that felt so ridiculously hot you simply have to cry at the sheer absurdity when you step outside. Last week that all changed (apparently it was only a brief respite since we're back to 100F today) and over the course of a Saturday the weather was actually quite pleasant. Tons of people went outside and enjoyed the cool weather, and if that's our preview of fall then bring it on. In honor of that very brief week long preview, I decided on my theme to be a "preview of fall".

Fall and winter foods always scream meat and potatoes to me and that's kinda what I went for this lunch. I started lunch off with a Beef Tenderloin in a Mushroom Cognac sauce. As usual I went with a Sous Vide treatment on the beef, it's really the only way to go since you're saving space and producing amazing texture. I finished the steaks in a cast iron and made a stroganoff-like pan sauce. The sauce itself called for beef broth, which I supplemented from the leftover liquid from the vacuum bag. This added a pretty strong beefy flavor more so than just the broth alone. I liked the introduction of dill from the recipe it goes with the sour cream based sauce nicely.

Meat and potatoes can be quiet the heavy combo, so I made these tomato stewed green beans. I had them simmering for a good 30 mins or so and I had to hot swap the pot (with the boil potatoes) and I think the heavy heat caused my beautiful green beans to yellow slightly (they looked fine and tasted crisp as I was about to pull them but after I turned around it changed dramatically). Goes to show you how an additional minute with too much temperature can do to you. I liked how it soften the beans a bit more so they didn't crunch like they were raw but I wish they were able to retain their color a bit better. A simple blanch and throwing in tomatoes and onions would not have been enough to infuse the beans with enough flavor. This really did require a slow and delicate cooking process. Not a complete fail, but I could have done better.

For the potatoes I made some Sour Cream Leek Mashed Potatoes and they taste just about as yummy as they sound. The sour cream and milk made for a very cream texture. I'm a bit on the fence about the use of leeks here. They didn't really add much to flavor and they seemed a little stringy in texture. Had I chopped/diced them they would have just gotten lost in the potato. In this case I think go big with the onion flavor or go home, there are plenty of good applications for leeks I just think it's a bit too subtle here perhaps some scallions. I went with a white potato, I couldn't find any yukon golds both are fine for mashing they have a lower starch content so they hold up well under boiling but I like the yukon gold variety because they can be a bit drier which would have offset the creamy texture that the sour cream added. That or I should have been more judicious about adding and mashing/stirring.

Finally, I saw an interesting recipe that required poached quince. Quince is a cousin of the pear and apple, having a bit of the characteristics of both. It's pretty old fruit and has quite a bit of history. It's a fall fruit so I figure it would be a good addition unfortunately since it isn't fall, it was a bit harder to come by. Apparently as you poach the fruit for a long time they turn a nice deep red color. I didn't have enough time to carry it that far so I went for a quick 45 mins in a bit of water honey and lemon quince. The result was a very tender fruit that had a nice aroma of honey. The fruit itself is not terribly sweet so the hint of honey and lemon really sat well with this "dessert". I could actually see steeping a bit of tea in the poaching liquid and serving it as a hot tea. (hmm. I'll have to remember that.)

It's funny how quickly you get out of practice when you're not cooking regularly, this lunch took quite a bit of effort for me despite trying my best to be organized. I'll have to work on my planning this next week as I've got a lot going on. Anyhow, Thanks for reading!

Box Contents:

Beef Tenderloin with Cognac mushroom sauce
Green Beans stewed in tomato
Sour Cream and Leek Mashed Potatoes
Honey poached Quince

Summer Time Bento

2011-08-24T08:07:00.007-05:00

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 eaten by itself the pork (sans sauce) was just right in that it picked up a ton of flavor from the sauce during it's braising time and still remained tender. This would have actually been great with a traditional steamed bun.

Whenever I think summer foods, I think of fresh vegetables, salads, vibrant colors and flavors. This Sugar Snap Pea salad is exactly that, the snap peas provide a nice interesting crunch texture and the vinaigrette is a nice burst of flavor. This dish produced a mix reaction and it mostly centered around whether or not folks like snap peas. Kinda like carrots some people don't like the raw snap pea. (too much crunch? too "raw" a flavor?). I liked the use of gouda in this recipe, it adds a bit of salt to the salad and combined with the slightly sweet vegetables balances out the acid in the dressing.

The pork was accompanied by a simple green peas with rice. The short grain rice was dressed with a little bit of rice wine vinegar, kinda like you would with sushi rice for making rolls. When combined with the pork it helped pull down the relatively sweet sauce in the pork dish. It's a great super easy side, I made use of frozen green peas and my rice cooker did all of the work.

Summer is definitely peach season, just going to the farmers market you see a lot of stalls featuring Texas Peaches. I love fruit based desserts they tend to be super easy to make and you can always rely on the natural sweetness of the fruits to bring a healthier alternative to usually empty calorie "bad" desserts. Here we toss the peaches in a bourbon mixture and slowly bake it down in the oven. I topped the peaches with a greek yogurt that I mixed with a bit of honey and vanilla bean. Universally this was the favorite in the box this week. I can actually see this as an easy party dessert to make, it's not quite finger food, but surely something nice to serve for a summer occasion, I'll have to keep a note of it.

On the tech side, I did get to try out my new light reflector, my kitchen has one bank of windows and a sliding glass door. Depending on when (time of day/sun position) I get to "picture time" for the food it can cast some pretty deep shadows. I have a two sided reflector (white/sunlight) and I tried some various light bounces to even everything out. I do still miss my SLR. (oh that reminds me I need to do a post on this camera of mine).

Enjoy Summer and try not to pass out in the heat. Till next time!

Box Contents

Asian Caramel Pork
Sugar Snap Pea Salad
Green peas and sushi rice
Bourbon Glazed Peaches with Greek Yogurt

NIAB: A nice dinner

2011-08-16T08:41:00.008-05:00

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 "just starting to brown" opting for a little sweetness from caramelizing. All told, without the cheese this could be considered a pretty low calorie dish. Next up is a simple asparagus wrapped in proscuitto, I topped it off with a bit of left over lemon zest and juice. This is always a simple dish easy to make dish that has a really nice presentation.

For the main entree, I went a recipe from the guys at SousVide Supreme (makers of my beloved "water oven"), Saffron-scented Halibut with Tomato Basil Compote and Zucchini. I'm not sure how this is defined as a compote, I believe a compote is a fruit that's been stewed in syrup. While techically a tomato is a fruit and I guess you can called this stewed (in it's own juices), this recipe is certainly contains no syrup. I'll have to follow up on this since more and more lately you hear terms like gastique, compote etc and a lot of them don't conform to definitions of those terms as I understand them. Perhaps it's time to update my culinary dictionary. I digress, this is the first time I've applied sous vide cooking technique with fish. The halibut came out extremely tender and delicate aroma of saffron and citrus zest was really pleasant. Both the compote and the zucchini had very bright and surprisingly strong flavors while maintaining a nice cooked but not limp texture. This is a result of not losing any cooking liquids to a pan and the heat being controlled so as not to over cook any of the vegetables. The recipe calls for mint and I saw some fresh mint in the photo but it was not used in the cooking step so I skipped it since there were lots of aromas and flavors dancing around once less probably was a good thing.

Finally dessert was a simple quasi trifle. I started by macerating some strawberries and taking a rolling pin to some plain biscotti. I figured the biscotti would act as the "sponge" component and provide an interesting texture. Since whipped cream is light and fluffy a little went a long way so the dessert wasn't nearly as "bad" for you as it might look. Yes there's a lot of useless sugar but most of it was air.

Dinner was well received and was well deserved since my girlfriend was in a workshop all weekend. Ok well, bento next week see you then!

Sri Lanka Bento

2011-08-10T10:07:00.008-05:00

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 vague on exact ingredients and I had to do some extrapolation on tastes based on the regions around the country. Obviously the "Devil" in the chicken meant it needs to be hot, and since I had to scale the recipe up I changed up the cooking methods and ingredients. First I seared the chicken in batches with some home made chili oil to start the first layer of heat. Once seared brown I dumped the whole lot in and added the spices which flavored the chicken up. Then I cooked up the veggies which consisted of tomatoes, red onions, a healthy dose of fresh green and red chilies and took a moment to deglaze with just a bit of chicken stock. The recipe called for chili sauce which I wasn't quite sure specifically what type so I blended a bit of Sambal Ulek as well as some Sriracha, I figure the two complemented the tomatoes and the lemon juice. Finally once done I combined everything together to heat up and bring the flavors together. I personally didn't find it overbearing in heat considering the shear amount of pepper and sauce that went in. I had a few others that disagreed. >:)

For a bit of starch (and to difuse the heat), I found a recipe for spiced couscous. Although it called for dried chilies the actual final dish was not very hot at all. The main flavor contributor were the curry leaves. Three of the four dishes for this bento make use of curry leaves. This seemed to be a heavily used ingredient in Sri Lanka cooking. I've done a fair share of cooking Indian food and seldom run into the use of curry leaves. I mean I know it's used (I bought the fresh leaves from an Indian grocery store) I've just never had to use them in a dish. Definitely an interesting ingredient it has a very unique flavor. We use bay leaves to impart flavor in stews and soups but curry leaves are have a more prominent flavor and I don't believe have the same kind of application. I first fried up the leaves in some oil before adding the rest of the aromatics, this added to the chicken broth base and really gave the couscous some flavor.

Kadala Thel Dala is a very nice chickpea dish. It too uses the curry leaf, which is first pan fried with mustard seeds and chilies. This was a really quick dish to put together. The mustard seeds gave a neat caviar popping texture. It's not quite as full flavored as a Garam Masala, but simple is better in this case. I think I would have preferred to let the onions actually carmelize some rather simply soften as was called for. And it could have used a strong dose of heat.

Last we have a Carrot Sambol or carrot salad. Again lots of onions and curry leaves. There's a good amount of fresh chilies but since there was no heat applied you only get bursts of heat since no oil was released via a cooking process. The "dressing' is a bit of plain yogurt and lemon juice. The dish is a nice fresh flavor and texture to lighten up the menu not to mention an attractive color splash to the bento. I originally forgot to add the coconut flakes and I'm very glad I remembered to add it. It changed the flavor of the dish dramatically.

I really liked exploring Sri Lankan cuisine. I had a few of the dishes that I earmarked that used some more foreign ingredients but was afraid of introducing them without tasting the results myself. Dishes like Karavila Sambola, bitter gourd salad for example is made of an ingredient that I'm not the biggest fan of, but the cooking style might change my point of view I'm just not willing to roll the dice for my diners on something even I think twice about eating. Anyhow, thanks for dropping by! Ayubowan!

Box Contents

Devil Chicken
Sri Lankan spiced couscous
Kadala Thel Dala
Carrot Sambol

Italian Lite 2

2011-07-24T22:27:00.010-05:00

I went with a light italian themed box today, had to really keep things simple since I had guests over and needed to put together something fast . I don't think I was quite as successful this time with a record breaking bento production time so I couldn't call it a "quicky bento". It took me roughly two hours this time (with prep), granted I did handicap myself by making breakfast at the same time for my visiting family. Quite a few additional fails too. I didn't get a good picture of the box and I missed taking a picture of the lasagna, guess I was a little distracted trying to entertain folks. As I've mentioned in the past, if you want to get thru a dinner party (or bento in my case) it pays to be organized. That means prep in stages and much like you see on TV every dish they put together magically has all the ingrediants chopped and ready to dump into a pan. This really beats trying to run from chopping block back to pan and then back to measuring out this that or the other. Do yourself a favor on your next multi-course dinner, break everything apart from preparation to execution and try to group stuff together, it'll save you a bit of time. That and if you have an audience watching you cook you look like one of those fancy TV chef/cooks that somehow make it look effortless.

Today's meal starts off with a Chicken Romano, it's a simple enough dish that packs the main part of the protein in the box. Whole chicken breast is dipped in a bit of skim milk and covered in a breadcrumb mixture of salt, basil, parsley and parmesan. I substituted for some tortilla crumbs since I had these on hand, but it's a simple substitution to make this a gluten free dish. The resulting crust is a bit more crunchy whereas the breadcrumbs would have been a lighter texture.

Had I gone with a gluten free lasagna noodle I would have gotten away with a gluten free box today, but I was already running into budget issues so I went with some whole wheat pasta to at least get a little bit of a healthy edge. These spinach lasagna rolls are a great way to create single portion lasagna instead of the giant pan and serving strings of cheese across your plate and table as you try to get the pasta from baking dish to plate. By far I got the best compliments on this dish. There's probably a billion different versions of this on the web, I just put a few together that grabbed the best of cutting calorie corners (or simply avoid bad fat, and bad carbs). I doubled up on the spinach from any of the recipes I was working with because looking at the volume it just seemed like a whole lotta cheese for so little of the good for you green stuff. In a most of the spinach lasagna that I've had at restaurants the spinach has often taken a back seat and been more like Lasagna (with spinach) if you know what I mean. I really really regret not having a photo of this dish. (guess I'll have to do it again)

Next we have a simple Cannellini beans with Pancetta. It's very similar to white beans I've done in the past. I decided to add a bit more flavor by rendering a bit of pancetta and adding some fresh rosemary from my ginormous rosemary bush out front. It's actually a pretty quick dish since I went with canned beans. Dry beans would have soaked up a bit more flavor since the cooking time would have been a lot longer but since we're trying to balance speed, flavor, and nutrition this is what I've got.

Finally, Caprese Salad on a stick. This was a nice party presentation that I wandered across in a magazine somewhere. It's exactly as you see it, tomato, mozzarella, and basil. I put a bit of cracked pepper on it, but opted not to add any salt I was afraid it would leech a ton of liquid over night so I left it to my bento-ers to add a bit of salt. If I were doing this as a party, I'd either drizzle this with some olive oil, salt and balsamic and serve immediately, or do a quick balsamic viniagrette as a dipping side. I actually like the simple presentation it brings a lot of nice color and variety to the final box.

Ok, no box this next week I need a minor break. I've still got a few more themes that I'm working out minor kinks on but there's definitely more to come. Thanks for dropping by.

Box Contents

Chicken Romano
Spinach Lasagna Rolls
Cannellini Beans with Pancetta
Caprese Salad on a Stick

Quicky Indian Bento

2011-07-22T07:23:00.006-05:00

I hadn't intended on creating a bento this week. My return trip from Legoland had me home at around midnight, hardly enough time to get something together the next day. As it turns out this is the last week for one of my regular bento-ers and I wanted to make sure and get her one last bento before she left. I got some inspiration off a "recipe calendar" while visiting my sister's house and built the box around the Indian themed dish. Again, I think this was a record breaking preparation (I'm not sure I can get any faster), I made it into a 24 hour grocery store on my way home and had my battle plan in hand from sketching it out on the airplane.

The main dish was meant to be a kabob, specifically a Chicken Tikka Masala Kabob. I ended up using chicken breast tenders and didn't see a need to skewer them since they were already the perfect shape and size and didn't needs to be held together. This was super easy since I setup the yogurt marinade the night before (just before I went to bed), the ingredients were quite simple. The yogurt did a fine job of tenderizing the chicken. I popped the chicken on an indoor grill for the nice grill marks (I have no desire to stand in the 100+ degree weather we're having). On it's own I think the chicken could have used a bit more flavor, however along with the saffron rice and sides I think it works out perfectly.

I'm told I do a pretty good Chana Masala, I attribute it to the longer stewing that I do with my version of the dish. I've had a couple of "quick variations" pop up over the years that I've been meaning to try. I picked a couple of recipes and fused them together to approximate the flavors that I usually end up with. The "quick" version makes use of tomato sauce (instead of cooking down the tomatoes) and significantly fewer spices (both flavor and heat spices). For a quick version it's quite tasty, since it lacked some zing, I resorted to some ghost pepper sauce on hand to jazz things up. This seemed necessary since the fast cooking time kept the chickpeas from really absorbing some flavor. There's no substitute for doing it the long way, but if you're in a pinch and you need to spin up a meal this is an acceptable alternative. The dish actually provided a nice backdrop of flavor to contrast the tender and less flavor accented chicken. The heat proved to be too much for one of my eaters but the rest seemed to really enjoy the burn and all seemed to agree the bento taken as a whole had a good amount of harmony to it.

To counteract the above burn, I turned to a standard coriander raita. There are many types of raita they tend to vary by region, heck I've done another version recently. I went for the economical route opting for coriander (cilantro), instead of mint since I was already using it in the Chana Masala. Only a few simple ingredients: yogurt, garlic, toasted cumin seeds, cucumber and cilantro. A quick stir and you're ready to go, but if you give it 30 mins the flavors really blend together. Lots of people mix it into spicy curry to cool things down. I actually like it by itself over rice. I really like the toasted cumin seeds for this dish they provide a pop of smokey flavor.

As I said up top I think this is a record, all done inside of one hour, including prep. Four courses for six meals in under an hour? Kickass. But as much time as I manage to save I can't seem to get my stuff together to do a post of my LegoLand trip and I need to post my review on my new camera. But I promise I'm on it.

Box Contents

Grilled Chicken Tikka Masala
Quicky Chana Masala
Coriander Raita

Vegetarian Chinese Bento

2011-07-14T09:35:00.007-05:00

Today's bento is actually a bento for one. My girlfriend wanted to do a lunch exchange with a co-worker who's Indian. Great! A cultural exchange, and this sounded like a fairly straight forward box to plan out but as my girlfriend and I starting going thru dishes and ideas it started to get harder and harder. Apparently if you remove meat, seafood (some folks make that exemption), and eggs (same) it gets kinda hard.

Always the favorite is the ketchup fried rice. Problem is fried rice usually involves some sort of meat and egg. So I simply skipped the meaty items. On our trip to the Chinese grocery store we found some vegetarian "ham". The stuff stilled tasted like soy protein but at least it gave some additional texture for the dish so I went with it. I've had some vegetarian duck that was pretty darn close and was very very tasty. So, I'm gonna go on a tangent here. Given folks are vegetarian there seems to be a huge amount of products that mimic the look and attempt to mimic the "flavor" of meat. For the ones doing it for health reasons I can get this. But those that go vegetarian for religious or moral reasons what gives? I'm sure i'll draw all sorts of fire for that simple question. Anyhow back to topic

To go with the rice I made some Garlic Eggplant with Fried Tofu. This was a tweak from my previous post. One of the challenges of cooking vegetarian Asian dishes is that a lot of our sauces do in fact have "meat" in them. Fish sauce (fish of sauce not for fish), hoisin, oyster sauce (duh, slaps head) the list just keeps on rocking. Soups all have a chicken broth base, there is just meat everywhere! Anyhow for this one I didn't have any vegetarian fish sauce on hand and and I had to go with what I knew. Fish Sauce is used in Vietnamese cooking to add salt to a dish (as opposed to soy sauce) and it has a somewhat sour component so I went with some water (to loosen the sauce) and a bit of vinegar and salt. It's obviously a pretty far substitution but you gotta do what you gotta do. The dish came out great. I liked the addition of the fried tofu it gives a bit more substance to the dish.

Nothing new here garlic sauteed water spinach, hot wok/pan oil, garlic sauteed, then down with the spinach and salt. This is usually a very authentic "Asian" vegetable that turns out to be a huge sleeper hit with non-Asians. Unlike it's English name sake, when wilted the vegetable's stem still yields a reasonable crunch. I'm not sure about the nutritional benefits of water spinach are compared to regular spinach but I have to imagine it's got a healthy amount of iron like spinach. I'll post an edit when I finally figure that one out.

Edit: So yeah it's good for you too lots of iron vitamin A,C. Lots of different sources but this one pulls it all together best.

The name for this dish is Liang Ban which really is a whole class of quick pickle/salad type dishes. This particular version uses pickling cucumbers and is simply dressed with ton of garlic, soy sauce, sugar, vinegar and drizzled with a bit of sesame oil for some nice aroma. It only takes about 30 mins to setup but I really really love this dish the next day. Just be warned that you shouldn't count of meeting any one special at the bar or talking to anyone you know for that matter because the garlic is potent! I've taken a shower and thoroughly brushed my teeth and sometimes this stuff still gets you. I my final solution is to add mouthwash on top of all of that. Still it's a good yummy dish I can't seem to resist.

I've not yet heard back on how the exchange went. I will say it's been a neat challenge modifying and tinkering the sauces and dishes to meet the vegetarian requirement. I'm kinda bummed because this easily could have been a normal set of bentos, but since I was gearing up to go on vacation I decided to keep the scale to one lunch. I'll have to make it up to my bento-ers. Anyhow, as always thanks for dropping by!

Foodblogger Event: Haddingtons a second time around

2011-07-10T17:49:00.017-05:00

I have to admit I was a bit curious about my invitation to Haddingtons for another foodblogger event. I felt like the last one was only a few months ago and checking my post, yup March was my last visit. Turns out Haddington's has relaunched with a new chef so there's new items to be had! I have to apologize in advance about the blurred picture i'm still getting the hang of my new camera and although it all looks good on the tiny LCD i should have re-checked it. I may have to reconsider either carrying an LCD booklight or using the flash (or try to find a lower light lense). It didn't help that the party room was dimly lit, but were it not a photographing event it would have been considered a cozy pub so you can't knock the lighting that bad :). The decor is the same but apparently the guys in the kitchen and bar aren't. I guess that's why we were invited.

New ideas and new menu items and this time I got a chance to speak with our host, Chef Jimmy Corwell (again, sorry for the blurry photo it's the only one I got apparently. Chef Corwell took the time to mingle with the crowd and I got a chance to ask him a few questions. He's from New Orleans and wanted to bring some of the familiar ideas from there and transform it into his interpretation of "American pub", he described his take on the oysters rockefeller a wonderful oyster poached in bacon fat topped with roasted pepper bacon and basil (YUM!) unfortuenatly that wasn't on the tasting menu for the evening, but you can bet I'll be back to give it a try. Chef Corwell also professed a love of lamb which is heavily featured in his new menu. He's a really nice guy that's totally approachable and clearly loves to talk about food. He seemed very excited to make sure everyone got a taste of everything making frequent trips to the kitchen to hussle things along as well as making lots of time to meet all his guests.

Chef Jimmy definitely wanted to show off his new menu with an impressive series of little bites. The presentations of all of these were wonderful My only regret is the few photos I was able to salvage. I'm really going to have to RTFM as I know my new Sony Nex-3 has some features that can help me fix this stuff on the fly. Anyhow to start we have Gourgeres on the left and the lamb meatball sliders and tartare. All three were quite delicious, the Gougeres were nice and crispy on the outside and perfectly airy in the center. The meatballs were something else, I'm not what's in them and they're not even on the menu (at least from their website) but when they get there you need to snap some of them up. I believe this was my girlfriend's favorite of the night, well one of them anyways. The lamb tartare was very nice, I really liked the presentation. Next up a corn fritter and cured salmon topped with creme fraiche and chives.

We restart things off with a nice agua fresca to freshen up our palates for our next scrumptious treats.Duck liver mouse was extremely tasty, there was a nice creamy texture and although I *am* a big fan of liver the usual liver taste that would put off non-liver lovers was nicely mellowed out. (still there just not as pronounced). The duck breast over melon ball was a cool sweet and salty taste paired with three different types of textures, you have the meaty duck breast, the softer melon ball, and the chewy almost tapioca topping.

Ok this was by far my favorite of the evening (I believe my girlfriend commented "wow, that look on your face") and I'm sure to get my share of grief about it: Duck and Foie Gras Meatballs it was covered in a nice sour cherry mostarda (mustard with fruit flavored syrup). In the previous Haddington's event they featured a Foie link. This is a massive improvement on the former dish (if there is any link at all). The meatball had a nice meaty meatball texture not bogged down by a lot of filler/breading and the foie gras flavor really stood out. I love it and would be a very happy guy if I had a plate of them right in front of me to scarf down.

Finally dessert the dessert tasting. (I can't wait till they produce the macro lens to this camera of mine...) On the left you'll see a nice strawberry covered in a honey gelatin. I actually liked this one, the slightly tart somewhat crisp fresh strawberry topped with this light honey jelly. The texture of the jelly was more like a tapioca jelly with a good subtantive chew, I thought it was pretty neat. The shot to the right was a "milk punch" to me it tasted like a adult milkshake (does that make sense?) , the shot of bourbon on the bottom is covered with a freshly whipped cream (no sugar) the rich cream is instantly cut when the liquor hits your mouth. I'm not sure I could drink a whole one of those but I bet a glass of that before bed will knock you out.

Great thanks to Chef Corwell for having us I really enjoyed visiting with him. (Sorry again about the blurred photo). I got a bento post to put out while I'm out on vacation (I'm at the airport now finishing this one.) Hopefully I'll get to post a shot out of my trip to Legoland!! Anyhow more soon.

Southwestern Bento

2011-06-29T14:43:00.008-05:00

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)

EatingInaBox Bentos: Graphically Recorded

2011-06-20T17:17:00.012-05:00

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 was one part adding to my facilitator toolkit but more importantly learning that doodling and drawing can and are productive things to help engage other people. (I'm not a very good artist and still left impressed with ability to pick up my skills I left behind at the age of five)

One of our group exercises was to take a member and interview them about a process and have the rest of the group design and transcribe the process onto paper (The paper above about four foot by six foot). This was one of our first exercises on the big paper and it was easiest since it was simply transcribing after hearing about the process rather than real time recording a meeting full of people Since I had a pretty well defined fun process to document I was the "interviewee" (although I did do a bit of drawing on the board once we designed the information architecture.) I was really proud of the result from our team. In one eye-catching and engaging piece of paper they were able to capture what it is I go thru for every bento.

So this post is one part showing off components of our drawings and another part describing what it takes to get one of my bentos out of the door. I actually did a post on this early on but it's kind of fun to see where this has gone (first post on this was in December of 2007 and it was a short one) and how the complexity has increased. In order to cook for (up to) twelve people a four to five course meal takes quite a bit of planning if you still wish to enjoy your weekend. So for the diagram our first order was to break up into phases obviously we broke it out into the four days up until delivery of food.

It all starts out on Friday, hopefully by then I have a theme in mind and even some dishes I've been exploring. Sometimes I draw from a backlog of ideas that I've got tagged as "future bento" in my notes software other times as I've mentioned, I've taken a trip and one of the many food magazines have managed to catch my eye. It might be a country theme that has been on my mind or in the news, ingredient, or even a technique. I usually pick out some interesting concepts and recipes from the theme to give me a general sense of what I'm going to design. I also send out an email to a giant list of people telling how many spots are open. (nope I don't tell them the theme ahead of time, it's blind faith time people!) It generally fills up pretty fast the fastest was 30 seconds the slowest was 30 mins. Finally that evening (or early Saturday) I build "The Battle Plan", I know ominous right? Well it's a detailed plan which tears apart every dish and recipe (post any alterations) I plan to make and assembles them in the order from prep to plate and I shuffle them in order so that everything is working in parallel. It's somewhat a leap of faith when I actually execute "The Plan" because half way thru you aren't quite sure where all the dishes are you just know when you are done with the plan it comes all together. This really involves a lot of historical estimation so I know I'm going to be able to pull things together or when things should start at the same time so they end near each other.

Out of the plan I also build the grocery list. Saturday is pretty uneventful it usually involves doing my shopping for the bento and is usually spread out between my local grocery and maybe some specialty stores (depends on the ingredients and theme). I spend a little bit of time doing the prep step of "The Plan" this usually fills my fridge up with a bunch of containers of chopped veggies and sauces that would be used the next day. It is a pretty fast step, but I try to balance it, the more prep I do up front the faster Sunday goes (and less hustle and confusion) I tend to get lost if I jumble everything to Sunday. I use to take one big breath and do everything from menu to end all at once but then I found I would be completely fried and the point of a relaxing weekend would be lost on me. That type of day essentially turned what was a joy into work, so I found a way to make it less stressful and more predictable to finish. Working in stages lets me add more to a stage in order to compensate for unexpected episodes (oops forgot to buy an ingredient, "this is more labor intensive than I expected", "oh that's not gonna be good, how to adjust?")

All of this planning makes cooking day a snap. I'm usually in and out pretty quickly if you count actual direct cooking time. If anything takes time at all it's because I've got stuff cooking sous vide or a in slow cooker at which time I have morning cooking (prep #2) and final cooking (finishing and plating). As each plate pops out and completes I keep a stand and some background drop cloth and do a model plate to snap a pic. After it's all done I wrap everything up and stuff it in the fridge. We skip a step in that I usually take a moment to outline what I'm posting for the blog and upload the photos I've chosen as well as write my "letters from mom" that I tape to each box. All that's done Sunday night before I hit the hay.

All that ends with driving and delivering the boxes and sending an email before I make my way into my first meeting at work. Ding! Done! Ok not quite, there's the step of collecting boxes and what not but that's an after step that is the prelude to starting the whole merry go round again. I'm particularly proud of my driver guy (right). For the drawing phase I was in charge of the "Monday" section and the pre-school rendition of the bento at the title. Before you give me too much credit the shading was done by someone else (far more talented than me)

Anyhow, I'm happy to have had a chance to take this class. I learned a lot of things that will help me with my day to day work life. Hopefully you found the post entertaining. I'll be working on the next bento and digging up a theme we'll have to see what I come up with. In the mean time thanks for visiting!

Jack and Diane bento

2011-06-08T22:16:00.009-05:00

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 the memory card and starts corrupting it. I'll try to get a review in on my new camera and go over my "pick process" for any of you that are considering moving from SLR to the mirrorless NEX and micro four thirds format.

Chicken Diane was the seed recipe (along with the pasta below). Given the "Diane" my brain instantly starting playing the old 80's song Jack and Diane, it's been stuck in my head ever since I concocted the idea to name my bento "The Jack and Diane". I may be doomed as it's even now playing in my head as I'm writing this post. Yes, never mind the fact that the Diane in "steak Diane" is named after the Roman goddess of the hunt. Ok, where was I? Oh yes, about the dish I made some modifications, the chicken I sous vide'ed and then seared off because 1) sous vide produces superior results and 2) one less burner to take up while preparing. I finished the chicken with the sauce which comprised of some shallots, brandy, a sundry of other little things and some cream all "steak diane style".

I followed the entree with the suggested linguine in truffle sauce. I had some truffle infused olive oil held over from a gift and added a bit of butter for some body. This was a nice simple pasta dish that got dressed up with the truffle oil. The greens were a courtesy of parsley and chives. This was nice because the quick re-heat didn't break the sauce and gave a full filled aroma of the expensive truffle without actually adding the "worth more than it's weight in gold fungus", course with the price of gold these days I'm not sure that's still a true statement. Anyhow, this is definitely an easy but elegant dish.

So this is where the challenge really began. How do you incorporate Jack in a "Jack and Diane Bento"? Quite a few things came up while I searched for ideas, a lot of the "named" dishes didn't make sense "Jack's favorite blah blah blah" I mean if I went with that then I could simply cook whatever I wanted so I went with ingredients. Monterrey Jack cheese vegetable bake was a nice start not too heavy not too light. I cut the butter in half and used half the eggs with just the whites. It was like a frittata and pretty popular with everyone. I doubled up on the recipe because the serving size showed six and I was cooking for ten this time. Turns out a single recipe was more than enough for twelve given the portion size that I delivered.

Finally for dessert I went with good ol' gentleman Jack. These whiskey balls were on paper looked nice and easy but they turned out to the most labor intensive part of food production this time around. The "cookie" was really sticky and difficult to roll out. I tried adding more dry ingredients to make it easier to roll. Once cooled in the fridge they were fine. I was on the fence about the taste (just because I'm not a sweets person) but everyone I've spoken with loved it and the extras got snapped up immediately. No amount of corner cutting could put these in a "healthy" category, I just had to limit portions to easy my conscience.

Recipe requested: Here

"Hold on to 16 as long as you can!" Ok I'm gonna go and try to find some other song to get stuck in my head now. I've had enough Mellencamp, do you hear me?! Fun theme, I enjoyed the challenge and again this was a fairly quick meal to produce (minus the dessert)

I've been meaning to do a post on Vegas and I have a few more things queued up.

Box Contents:
Chicken Diane
Linguine in White Truffle Sauce
Monterrey Jack Vegetable Bake
Jack Daniel's Whiskey balls

Indian Bento Four

2011-05-22T22:11:00.009-05:00

I so love Indian food, I grew up with the cuisine in high school trading lunches with my Indian friends. I like to believe I got the good end, trading my sushi rolls, and fried rice for their home cooked yummies from their mothers (my mom made 2x to help me accomodate my trading)! Anyhow it's probably a good reason why it's been a repeated theme here. I've been collecting recipes hoping for new themes and all the ones I tended to tag recently are Indian. I centered around this menu because they are a departure from what I normally get to experience, new items that I don't always get to see on the local menu.

Butter Chicken shows up in many London menus, I don't see it much here but I couldn't resist when one of the blogs I follow did a fast/budget version that look scrumptious. I went with the more flavorful chicken thigh (instead of breast) which added a bit of flavor. I loved that the recipe called for yogurt to add some flavor instead of the usual heavy cream that most curries asked for. Super thanks to Beth from Budget Bytes for her version of butter chicken to try out. I think it'll be a good "lite" staple to keep in my Indian folder. At first I was a bit dismayed at the flat taste of the dish, but when I finished it with the yogurt it imparted a good amount of creamy texture (without the fat) and a nice sour note. Note I'm not sure how she may have added the yogurt, but it "broke" in my dish leaving white flecks, it was still very delicious. I tasted before and after adding yogurt and it's a marked difference.

Okra is a strange vegetable. I didn't get a chance to review my mentor Alton Brown's show on Okra, I know he discussed how to get by the slimy component of the veggie. I wasn't quite so successful despite my efforts on washing and re-washing the cut pieces. Anywho, I find that the spices and the nice kick from the cayenne did offset my initial reservations on serving the dish. I personally love the duality of textures the vegetable gives me but the dish was hard to work with and I was sure I had failed the dish but the flavors of the spice I added made me treasure the leftovers I ended up with. I still need to work on the slimy consistency (which are normally covered by frying, soups or stews) but I am hopeful I did well here.

Finally, I happened on this Boondi Raita. Usually raita is a quick combo of spices (usually toasted cumin seeds) some tomatoes and cucumber that is very reminiscient of tzaziki. The yogurt side is a nice cool down side dish for most spicy Indian curry. Here the different spices are added and then Boondi, a crispy spherical Indian snack is hydrated and added in for some texture. I took it a bit further and added the crispy (and unhydrated version) in to add a third layer of texture to the dish. It turns out later that the boondi absorbs the yogurt (no need for the hydration step), but if served right away the extra crunch texture was actually fun. The original recipe asked for some black salt, no doubt to add the smokey flavor to the dish. (I didn't have any on hand). I'm happy to say that I could just eat this happy chilled side dish over rice and be content rather than relegate it to a "side dish". I've never heard of this version of raita, but I'm very happy to have clipped it way back when to supplement this bento.

The thing I really like about Indian food is that the spices are always unique and it's an easy "first step" for my less adventurous diners into new foods. I find that spices are usually more acceptable as "new ingrediants" than new meats or textures. Anyhow, I'm glad to have some extras for myself. No doubt there will be an Indian bento five and beyond.

I'm off to Vegas, it's my girlfriend's first visit. I'll snap some pics of food while I'm there. I'm hoping to make it to some of the celebrity chef restaurants to taste some of the wonderful foods I've been hearing about. See you soon and wish me luck on the tables!

Box Contents

Butter Chicken
Basmati Rice
Indian Spiced Okra
Boondi Raita

Birthday Dinner

2011-05-20T07:55:00.012-05:00

As I said, May is a tough month for my blog. Lots of travel and weekend commitments are keeping me from my usual bento delivery at work. I plan on doing one this weekend so stay tuned. In the mean time I wanted to post some pictures from my birthday dinner. My fabulous girlfriend Sophie treated me a very romatic dinner at the Mansion at Judges' Hill.

The restaurant is in fact an old Mansion that has been renovated to be a bed and breakfast. There are two dining areas one in a large hall and a smaller secondary room (about the size of a living room). We got really lucky because a large conference booked the mansion and large dinner space and they decided not to accept any further reservations or diners but since we reserved before the big group we got the whole secondary room to ourselves. (nice and cozy)

We each got the tasting menu, which at $35 per person is a really good deal for the amount and quality of the food we got. First course started with a cheese plate. The cheese is a Texas made cheese called "Eden" it's a blue brie wrapped in fig leaves. We got some candied pecans and dried apricots and it was served with a Chili jelly with Asian mustard. I was a little skeptical about the jelly, mustard combo with the cheese but it turned out to be pretty tasty.

Second course we ordered the Fried Gulf Shrimp and the Smoked Gouda and Poblano Soup. The waiter commented that the soup was the best thing on their menu and he was right! The consistency was not to thick as to feel heavy when eating it and the choice of smoked gouda was interesting, I'm not big on smoked cheese generally, but I guess when turned to soup form it's pretty good. The Shrimp was stuffed with Hatch green chilis and was very nice as well, just not as nice as the soup :).

For our main course I went with the Broken Arrow Ranch Chicken Fried Antelope. It came with a black bean Chayote hash (which I had mistaken for eggplant). I liked the antelope, it's the first time I've had any, the meat was pretty tender and had a "gamey" flavor but it was very subtle. My girlfriend got the Strube Ranch Kobe Burger, the waiter explained it was an American Kobe. It was served with some kettle chips with a bit of truffle oil. I'm not a huge burger expert so I can't say that I could tell the difference between the Kobe beef versus regular beef in this form. It was a good burger.

Last but not least dessert. There were only two selections so we just got one of each. The Texas Chevre Cheesecake with blackberry compote was good. Not too sweet and an interesting looking texture. The Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Tart was just as tasty. We had a bit of trouble with the shell it was a little hard to break into but the pecan pie filling was very nice.

Thanks to my wonderful girlfriend for one of the best birthday's I've had in recent years. So happy!

Quick Chinese Bento

2011-05-04T13:21:00.009-05:00

It's gonna be a busy May for me, lots of travel and filled up weekends so I feel the need to try to get in bentos where ever I can because I know getting cooking time in will be tough. I originally had a more ambitious theme but I was reminded that my weekend was going to be packed. So in honor of the dragon boat races I was at this weekend I decided to do a super quick Chinese bento. I wasn't messing around; from a dead start to clean kitchen I was in and out in an hour and a half (a new record for me I think) I even raised my arms in victory. \(>.<)/

So what makes for a quick bento? I've given this a lot of thought because I really enjoyed my extra free time. I think the keys are familiar dishes and very few cooking steps. Take this Asian marinated pork, step one put all the stuff in bag, step two next morning put in probe thermometer set for 155F dump it into oven, step three yank it out of the oven when loud thermometer starts beeping. Step four declare great success after 10 mins of resting. Ok so yes, I did cheat a little and started the marinade the night before but that took like two mins to put together. The point being is that there are certain dishes that can be very versatile (change up the marinade depending on theme) and a great dish. This of course is why the pork tenderloin makes lots of features in my history of menu items, it just sneaks in with a different disguise everytime (like a spy). Today's marinade features soy sauce, a sesame oil, fresh garlic and a little of this and that from the spice drawer (If someone cares I can list it out for you I just can't remember right now).

Nothing easier than fried rice. I decided to serve this the way my mom use to make it for us when my sister and I were growing up: with ketchup. You gotta go with me on this, the sweet and tang of ketchup really makes a nice addition to fried rice. Apparently this is very popular in Taiwan and kind of a common "comfort" version of fried rice. I'm actually kind of surprised this doesn't make a showing in more Chinese restaurants especially the more authentic ones here around town or at least the "Taiwanese" restaurants.

Finally I close out with some garlic sauteed water spinach. I'm not quite sure how it got it's English name in Chinese it's 空心菜 (literally translated empty heart vegetable) due to the stem being hollow. I didn't know this, but the plant is considered "environmentally problematic" (the USDA calls it noxioius) because it grows so fast. This by far was the most labor intensive of the dishes, I think a lot of restaurants just chop up the spinach stem and all and quickly saute it with a bit of garlic and oil. Growing up I was taught to painstaking pluck the leaves and the little tender stem that branches from the main stem and only cook that part since the main stem can be a bit tough. (I'm a bit of a perfectionist only the best for my bentoes). So two large bunches of water spinach (much like regular spinach) cooks down to a tiny little bit of food.

There was dessert, but to really cut a corner I just purchased some almond cookies from the Asian grocery store since I needed to save a bit of time. Anyhow like I said this was speed record setting for me this weekend. I'm off on a work trip next week, maybe I'll dine on something interesting.

Box Contents

Asian Marinated Pork Tenderloin
Ketchup Fried Rice
Sauteed Water Spinach
Almond Cookie

Slo Mo Bento 2

2011-04-27T11:29:00.008-05:00

I know, I just did a SloMo theme not too long ago. I like the fire and forget nature of the slow cooker and I had plenty of dishes I wanted to try out from last time that I really had to come back and re-visit using my multiple crockpots. There's a good reason why a lot of busy parents rely on the crockpot to serve dinner. I mean who hates putting in a bunch of stuff and setting it cooking right when you leave for work and have it all ready for you by the time you come home. (well that's the dream anyway) I find practically speaking if you factor in transit time even six to nine hour cook times you will find yourself rushing home to turn it off. (perhaps it will hold that extra hour or two, sounds like a future experiment) Anyhow it's still got the no fuss, no muss factor working in it's favor, and newer models let you set on and off times. If you pair all that with my sous vide rigs you could probably setup for a large dinner party and just worry about plating when you come home. I might have to give that a shot to see if it's really that easy. Anyhow on with the show.

For the main entree we have a Tomatillo Braised Pork, as with everything in the crockpot you just dump in all the goodies and wait for it to finish, there is an oven version of this recipe. I personally like a bit of browning with my pork so I finished this uncovered for 15 min in the oven. The acid in the tomatillo salsa did a nice job of breaking down the pork, just trying to pull these out with tongs caused them to break apart. I used a fat separator on the resulting liquid to save my eaters from some of the fat in the cooking liquid. I think five pounds of pork was more than enough to prepare at least 12 bentos (I only had eight to do) so I am happily munching on the leftovers this week.

It was suggested that the pork was served over rice or quinoa. I took a quick look at their recipe and decided to go with a modified version of my mushroom quinoa from a previous bento. As I've said before I love quinoa, it's got a neat texture and is a "super food" you can read all about it here. It's actually quite simple to make, I just fry up my aromatics, dump in some stock and bring it to a boil and drop in the quinoa and wait about 20 mins. I think the only thing I do different from the various recipes I've encountered was a 1:1 ratio of quinoa to liquid. I add more liquid after the initial cook time if it comes out a little dry. The end product reminds me of the texture of tobiko (almost a delicate pop when you chew on them, not hard little rocks). Most places I've encountered quinoa I personally feel like it's overcooked, the dish is usually "mushy". I'm probably the lone cook that has it all wrong, but I've yet to have someone complain about my quinoa so I must be doing something right.

Last time it was a toss up between creamy potatoes and scalloped corn. Obviously having done the potatoes previously I had to circle back for the corn. I have to say that I prefer the corn because it was a healthier recipe (no cheese, sour cream, and a lot less butter) and I think heavy starches going with some the pork would easily put my bentoers straight into an afternoon nap. I really enjoyed this dish. Tasting it right out of the crock it had a egg custard type of texture and the sweet corn was a perfect light flavored accompaniment. I ended cutting the butter by about a further half because it seemed a tad rich in my head, I'm glad I did because even with the version I have it seemed a little rich.

For dessert we have a Fruit Compote with Ginger. Basically it's pears, dried apricot and pineapple mixed with a bit of ginger and cooked for a long long time. I use a bit of sugar (brown and white) which I suspect drew out further moisture to 1) rehydrate the apricot 2) provide a nice "sauce". I garnished it with some sliced almond and coconut that I had in my freezer. Nice and simple.

I got great thumbs up for the food this week. I'll take the gold star :) Next week's bento will be another simple one, I have a lot going on this weekend but I should be able to manufacture something tasty. My hope is that my dying camera will take it's last shots and not give up on me. I've got a Nikon d50 so anyone with any advice to give on how best to upgrade and retain all my extra batteries and lenses please help me out with some suggestions! (It's having shutter issues and I don't want to pay the bucks to send it in) I'm considering moving to the four thirds format but I it seems wasteful since I only use my "big camera" for this, food events, and big vacations. Anyone have an opinion for me?

Box Contents

Tomatillo Braised Pork
Quinoa Pilaf
Scalloped Corn
Fruit Compote with Ginger

100th bento! Sous Vide Bento

2011-04-18T21:31:00.013-05:00

So this is a special milestone bento it's number 100! That's right, I've managed to churn out 100 of these babies. Looking back it doesn't feel like I've already been at this for nearly four years. This year has been a slower start for bento production but I'm pretty happy with my work/life/bento balance, sometimes it's not so easy to be inspired to cook up lunch other times my bentos are a refuge from the daily stress of life and work.

Enough nostalgia! What did I come up with you ask? Well for this bento I decided to go with a fully Sous Vide bento, meaning everything in the box was prepared sous vide. I recently ordered a series of books from the good people at Sous Vide Supreme. I went with this as my theme for a couple of reasons but mainly to experiment with non-meat dishes. Don't get me wrong I love the meat that the sous vide cooking process produces. The end product is always amazing and if any of you ask, yes both rigs (the commercial version and the home brew) are worth the cost and have long since paid for themselves in terms of quality of food and time savings. More recently the peas I did showed me the value of sous vide cooking for vegetables and I wanted to try more.

You can't beat the texture and tenderness of chicken, pork and beef that come out of my "water ovens". I considered re-doing my beef short ribs, a big favorite with my eaters but I ultimately decided I need to try another long cook experiment, this time beef tri-tip. The beef tri tip is a tough cut of meat that really benefits from long cook times to break down all the connective tissue. The beef tri-tip is a cheaper cut of meat often cooked with the fat cap on due to it being a leaner piece of meat. This means it benefits from a low and slow cooking method a perfect candidate for sous vide cooking. I did two batches, the first two days and the second a three day. Did it make a difference? Yes. Is it worth the extra day? Well, technically the three day tri-tip was more tender, but not to the point where it was really noticeable unless you did a side by side taste test. The tri-tip was amazing in texture and fork tender. To go with the tri-tip I whipped up a compound cilantro chile butter. Ancho chiles added a smokey flavor to complement the Mexican inspired dry rub I used with the beef.

I've never worked with pearl onions before but when I saw the recipe I knew I had to give it a try. I had to look up how to prep the onions as peeling each individual onion didn't seem to make any sense (I had over 100 to prep). Turns out the best way to go is to blanch, shock and chop the root off and the tough skin just pops right off. How did they turn out? The onions had a nice cooked texture, firm but not raw tasting a good balance of the sweetness of cooked onions without turning everything brown and yellow. I put in cooked bacon as well as some salted pork so the dish didn't suffer from an overly fatty taste of just poached pork belly. The cinnamon and thyme rounded out the slightly sweet onions and made it an interesting tasting dish.

I will say that roasted potatoes are a better way to cook this side dish. I think a nice crusty outer skin is preferable to the sous vide method. The texture was unusual in that it was a firmer potato (without tasting under cooked), but there wasn't any appreciable benefit to going the sous vide route. I'm thinking vegetables that let off lots of cooking liquid benefit from the sous vide technique because the resulting "sauce" captures all the goodness that is usually leeched off. In this case potatoes don't give off much moisture and the crispness from the oven is a desirable trait that goes missing from this cooking technique.

Finally I didn't really have a dessert scheduled, but this sweet corn tomalito (corn pudding) had enough sweetness (actually too much, I should have cut the sugar more) that it was a good middle ground between dessert and side dish. The biggest challenge here was that the baking powder gave off CO2 and caused the bags to float and I had to weigh the whole thing down with plates to keep the bags submerged. I think I could have designed a make shift snorkle to allow for keeping the bag deflated and allow for full water contact. An interesting dish with good feedback on the unusual taste but very tasty flavor. I added sage to this dish which gave it a more savory twist, a happy mistake since the sage was actually meant for the onions.

I actually got praise for this being one of my best bentos thus far :) definitely very happy that I was able to deliver on my 100th bento. I'm looking forward to trying to make it to bento number 200. Work is keeping me busy so I'm just happy to be able to post. Thank you all for coming by and visiting and supporting my little culinary endeavor. As always if you see something you like I'm happy to post any recipes just ask. Stay tuned for more!

Box Contents:

Sous Vide Beef Tri-Tip with Cilantro Chile Butter
Sweet Corn Tomalito
Pearl Onions withCinnamon and Bacon
Rosemary and Garlic New Potatoes

WSJ Mention

2011-04-07T12:03:00.002-05:00

Got a nice mention in the Wall Street Journal today. Welcome new visitors thanks for coming by!

Swedish Bento

2011-04-05T12:09:00.012-05:00

Back on track with another bento! It's gotten harder and harder to come up with new themes every week and I needed a bit of inspiration so I went over to the local Half Price Books and went through their ethnic cookbooks to scratch up some ideas. I tend to look for a nice worn out "old" looking cookbooks, usually those are the ones that have the super old school recipes that interest me the most (from a research standpoint). I did pull up some nice relics, so I'll be busy compiling, testing and cooking and hopefully come up with some new ideas and themes I can try.

This week I went with the Swedish cookbook I found. I'm not certain how much of it is authentic. I know the Ärtsoppa is traditional and the rest do use typical ingredients but I avoided a lot of the items that wouldn't reheat well (fish primarily) and the more cliche items (like meatballs and dumplings) which didn't leave much left to pick from the book and I didn't have as much time as usual to do a deeper dive on the internet. So here goes:

The main dish is a blend of a few recipes. I liked this one recipe for a blue cheese lamb burger, but wasn't impressed with the amount of fat and calories, so I blended this with a famous dish called: Biff a la Lindström. Apparently this was served at Hotel Witt in Kalmar and named after a Swedish inventor that was a frequent patron and brought the recipe from Russia. The beef patty was mixed with beets and capers and finished on a skillet. I really wanted to make use of some ground lamb but for some reason lamb is in short supply, and I tried veal since it was cheaper. Ultimately, I found the Veal to be too texturally soft and gamier lamb to be a better taste complement to the salty, sour capers. Fortunately, the store had just enough lamb that I could stretch out enough patties.

What Swedish meal would be complete without some form of seafood? For a salad I put together this simple Västkust Salad (west coast salad), not sure of it's authenticity but it sure did taste good. It's a mayo based seafood salad that features, shrimp, mussels, crab, asparagus and mushrooms. I went with the lower calorie/fat olive oil mayo which in my opinion carries a ton of flavor compared to the lowfat mayos. This is the only seafood component I put into the bento, I realize that Swedish food relies heavily on seafood, but I couldn't subject the lunch room to the smells of re-heated fish from the microwave (if you haven't made this faux pas before then be warned).

The next dish, I've done in the past, I just didn't have a name for it: Kålrotmos. Basically it's a mashed rutabaga (yellow turnip). Very simple dish to prepare, you boil it until it's soft much like a potato and you dress it with a bit of butter and sour cream. I opted for less butter and low fat sourcream. The rutabaga was a nice in between for the softer creamier cauliflower cream and the starchy carb laden mashed potato. They also hold well for cooking and don't tend to break down as quickly as a potato.

Ärtsoppa is a nice pea soup made from yellow lentils. It's very similar to a split pea soup except that the yellow lentil tends to hold up better under cooking. I used pre-sliced salted pork and cooked down some Vidalia onions. Then simmered the lentils in for an hour and a half. Normally a green split pea would turn to mush under this treatment. I was pleasantly surprised to have a perfect "al dente" (as described by one of my eaters) lentil that had some mush and some bite. Next time I'll go with whole chunks of salted pork so I can cube it for better texture. The thyme lent a nice almost "sweet" flavor to the final soup.

For dessert we have a Mandel Päron which is a baked pear with ground almonds. Normally it's topped with a whipped cream but I figured the cream would breakdown over night and the bartlett pears that I used had enough sweetness to hold it's own. The lemon juice I used to keep the pears from browning added a nice little tang.

Whew another one down. Next bento will be a big one. It's Number 100! I can't believe it 100 bentos. I've got a few ideas of what I want to do. Check back here and see what I come up with. As always thanks for reading. Smaklig måltid!

Box Contents

Lamm a la Lindström
Västkust Salad
Kålrotmos
Ärtsoppa
Mandel Päron

Curry in a Hurry Bento

2011-03-24T08:54:00.008-05:00

As usual, I have to bow my head in shame for such a late post. This bento was produced last week, but as has been the usual mantra lately work and life obligations have kept me from making lunch for my eaters. I'm helping out with a friends wedding and another party so I'm still busy in the kitchen, just not doing anything exciting enough that I feel the need to take pictures and talk about it.

Sadly, I was in a giant hurry to make lunch for this bento. I felt so bad about not getting to cook for such a while but I still had such a crunch on time that I couldn't really devote myself to a long planned out lunch. I picked a menu that I knew I could execute quickly and still keep light and healthy. Asian cuisine is good for the quick and healthy constraints and of course Thai is a favorite amongst my diners. In fact when I shouted over the cube walls, "hey I need a theme" there were quite a few chirps of "Thai, curry, Indian" seems like my audience had an Asian craving.

I've done a green curry before so this isn't anything new. I opted for japanese eggplant and chicken. The beauty of a lot of these curries is you can quickly turn out a giant pot of curry and throw in ingredients that suit your mood. You start out with a base of coconut cream and fry the curry paste, add the meat stir fry, add your veggies, and add the remaining coconut milk from the can until you get the desired consistency. I personally like my curry a bit thinner so it blends well with the rice. Prep work took the longest amount of time, once you hit the stove 15 mins is about all you need to get lunch/dinner on the table. (just make sure you start the rice before you start your curry)

For a nice light side, I went with this spicy thai cucumber salad. Lots of Asian cuisines have a variant on cucumber salad. They mostly amount to a quick pickle. I find the typically sour cucumber salad is a nice offset to a rich curry, and it's a nice way to cleanse the palate. The dressing was sweet, sour, hot and salty all of the components of the fours tastes (I suppose I could have used some soy sauce for the umami and rounded out all the tastes)

Finally, I have a simple shrimp cocktail with spicy thai peanut sauce. I used peanut butter as the base, but added a bit of fish sauce, lime juice and hot sauce to give it some kick and flavor. The peanut sauce turned out to be quite a hit. The shrimp was simply boiled with a bit of ginger and salt in the water.

At the same time I was making this bento, I was whipping up a batch of my father's hot and sour soup just for myself. I ended up with so much leftover I went ahead and packed it in.

Sorry for the light post. I'm just happy to have gotten it out there. I'm have to take another break this weekend as both party events that I'm helping out are happening on Friday and Saturday leaving me with no time for planning and executing a bento.

Oh in other news, someone here in austin is organizing a bake sale to help with the good folks in Japan. I've agreed to whip up some baked goodies to help with the effort. I'll put up a post on more details as I get them, I believe the bake sale is on the 2nd of April. So please, if you get a chance come by and buy some goodies to help out!

Box Contents:

Thai Green Curry with Chicken and Japanese Eggplant
Spicy Cucumber Salad
Shrimp with Spicy Peanut Sauce
Hot and Sour Soup

Foodblogger Event: Haddingtons

2011-03-13T19:53:00.013-05:00

This post is like two weeks late and even later trying to deliver content. Work and my personal life have picked up (mostly in a good way) and I've been delayed on doing bentos as well as writing out a few posts. Anyhow I was recently invited to visit one of Austin's newest restaurants: Haddingtons. It's aspiring to be Austin's first "Gastropub". What is a Gastropub you ask? If you've followed any of my posts while abroad in London you'll notice what was once labeled "pub grub" (fish and chips, shepherd's pie, all that comfort food feel you get when you think "pub") has somehow found new entrees such as sweetbreads, foie gras, and invariably truffle something or other. The hob nobbing of "higher end" food with pub offerings is what (as far as I can tell) a Gastropub, the art of bringing delicious uncommon food to the most common of places: a Pub.

The decor was wonderful. Lots of wood and earth feel to it, but it was a bit shiny to be a proper English pub. The restaurant had quite a few nooks and crannies so it definitely gave you a cozy feel. We were situated in the back bar. I was pleasantly surprised to find Bill Noris to be the head bartender. He was the bartender at Fino when I was invited to their blogger event. The guy makes some tasty and mean drinks!

I'll run thru the food and give you some fly by comments:

First up I got a nice Rabbit Rillette with whiskey Cherries, I didn't really know what to expect. Very tender rabbit meat that tasted a little rich by itself but with the sour cherries the whole bite just mellowed right out. Next up was the duckliver Mousse with Golden Raisins. Again the sweet raisins helped to soften blow of the richness of the the duck liver.

Scotch eggs, the scotch eggs were a mini version they used a pickled quail egg in the center. Delicious! the raspberry sauce was a great complement. Next was my favorite of the night. the TLT - Smoked Tomato, Bruno-ostoo cheese, lettuce and truffle aioli (whew) this was AWESOME! I would definitely come back for this. There was a great sweet smokey flavor and the sweet sun-dried tomatoes YUM!

Last was the Foie Link and the Grilled Strip. The foie link was delicious, I missed the flavor of the foie gras but the pear mustard was very tasty, the texture was very soft. Finally the Grilled Strip, the sauce was a nice creamy earthy sauce. The beef was very tender and the sauce was fun.

Thanks to the staff and PR folks for Haddingtons I had a great time and the food was wonderful, Thanks for having me!

Mediterranean Light Bento

2011-02-24T10:32:00.008-06:00

Works been nuts, I've had the photos ready but haven't had a chance to proof read and fire off the post. So I did get a chance to cook up a bento this week, I just didn't get my post out. So my inspiration? My original idea centered around a stuffed chicken breast something to do with a horseradish cheddar and some ham. I was talking about it with a coworker and she really wanted something light to go with that. Ultimately I decided to go with a Mediterranean inspired bento. There's a terminology thing going on here and a bit of confusion, see Mediterranean cuisine isn't cuisine locked to a particular country, it involves food from a region, in this case countries around the Mediterranean sea, Turkey being one of them. At the same time Turkey is also counted in Middle Eastern cuisine (and depending on who you ask some of the other Mediterranean countries). The term Mediterranean cuisine was apparently coined in the 1975 as more of a marketing term. Anyhow, i've noticed a people get a bit confused when you toss around Middle Eastern and Mediterranean as descriptions so I wanted to get that figured out. All very interesting stuff as I was doing my usual food research. Anyhow enough yammering.

I started everything off with a Mediterranean stuffed chicken breast. The stuffing included kalamata olives, feta, red onion, basil and a bit of cream cheese to hold it all together. I pounded the chicken breast flat and rolled it all up and sous vide-ed the whole thing. Couple of awesome benefit of doing this sous vide, first awesome moist chicken breast, second sealing it in vacuum bag held the chicken together until the cooking process made it hold together by itself (usually I have to use toothpicks). A quick sear on the stove top gave me the brown color I needed to make the chicken look good. This came out great, everyone really enjoyed it and commented on the tenderness of the chicken.

Next, to keep things simple I put together this Orzo with olive tapenade. I was really trying to cut some corners by going with store bought tapenade, but after seeing how expensive a jar of tapenade was I ended up saving half the price and making it myself. Just wizzed together some capers, olives, garlic, parsley and olive oil. I cooked the orzo like a risotto slowly adding chicken broth, it really let me control how "al dente" I let the pasta get. Easy and a tasty filler.

For something crunchy and green I turned to the humble green bean. I somehow got it in my head that walnut mint pesto sounded good and that I could easily make it work with some green beans. It was going quite well and I mixed everything together and but as I was finishing and tasting something wasn't quite right. I ultimately fixed it with a splash of lemon juice to which I found complements the olive oil in the pesto.

Finally for dessert I went with a simple Greek yogurt with some honey and toasted walnuts. Kinda like a yogurt parfait. Not much to say here, everything else I found "Mediterranean" was really heavy or extremely sweet. So this was a good compromise to satisfy the sweet tooth but stay on the healthy side of things

Active cooking time only took me about a total hour. Granted, the sous vide sat for two hours and I did prep on pesto and tapenade the day before. But really this was one for the record books. I had a whole day to go and do as I please which is always nice. Thanks for dropping by. I've got a foodblogger event at Haddingtons that I'll be posting over the next couple of days, so watch for that!

Box Contents

Sous Vide Mediterranean stuffed Chicken Breast
Orzo with olive tapenade
Green Beans with Walnut Pesto
Greek Yogurt with Honey and Toasted Walnuts

Chinese New Year Bento

2011-02-13T20:43:00.008-06:00

It's been a tough year to get restarted on the cooking track. I've had family visit, work interruptions all manner of excuses. I had wanted to get this bento out last week but events conspired against me. So I present Chinese New Year Bento (two weeks late). I figured I've done Valentine's day bentos in the past besides, the bento project is about exposing my diners to new foods and culture so this would be a little more.

Lions are a Chinese symbol for joy and happiness. The lion's head meatball is traditionally pretty large maybe baseball sized. I went with golf ball so I could fit three of them into the box. The greens represent the lion's mane. It's a really tasty braised pork meatball that is first seared and finished with the bok choi over the top of the meatball to steam down for the final cooking process. Lion dances and Dragon dances are a prominent tradition with Chinese New Year. Loud fire crackers and red paper were discovered to be the bane of the "Nian" monster that would yearly terrorize the ancient Chinese hence the performances and red signs everywhere to chase away the Nian.

So for New Years you must always eat Noodles to represent wishes for a long life. Not much in the way of naming creativity, simply "Long Life Noodles" the soup/sauce consists a simple soy chicken broth with egg flowers (eggs symbolize fertility to go with your long life). I added a bit of ham for flavor and some green onions. This is a very simple dish definitely a good one to have if you've done a bit too much ringing in the new year. Chinese New Year is usually celebrated over several days each day performing a different ritual from remembering your ancesters to celebrating the various Chinese deities.

Black Tea Marbled Eggs - again eggs for fertility. Usually there the eggs are of darker color when cracked open (left egg) I should have exposed more cracks per egg so I think I failed a bit on this recipe (it's only the first time I've attempted this one.) Next time more tea and soy sauce and probably a bit more time steeping.

Nian Gao with Sweet Azuki bean. Nian Gao has a double meaning as the words also sound like Yearly higher or wishing you great achievements in the new year. This is one of my Mom's favorite dishes to cook for the New Year, it's very unusual to the American palatte. It's got a sticky mochi type texture, sweet soft azuki bean and topped with a crunch crust of sesame and coconut. My mom uses soy milk instead of real milk and that flavor really comes thru on the dish. It's not terribly sweet and probably goes well with a bit of hot tea.

Really simple bento this week. I'm going to try to get back into the regular tempo, but I'm afraid some upcoming work travel will interrupt me. I'll do what I can. In the meantime thanks for stopping by.

Box Contents:

Lions Head Meatball
Long Life Noodles
Black Tea Marbled Egg
Nian Gao with Sweet Azuki Bean

Happy Chinese New Year!

2011-02-04T19:43:00.014-06:00

Ok Belated, but this week was Chinese New Year and I had family in town to celebrate. Happy Year of the Rabbit. It's great having a house full of people and coming home to busy activity. Yes, it got old after a few days, but I had a good time with my family and hanging out with my new brother in-law. I apologize for the sparse posts and I do wish I had time for a bento but work is killing it for this next week I'm hoping to get back to it next week. Anyhow I figure I could at least post something.

So a big part of Chinese New Year is the feast. The idea of New Years is a large feast so that you don't cook for the following days. I've taken pictures of our feast and I'll share with you what we ate. We start with a happy family made with a meaty variety of squid and roasted duck.

Next we have a classic "cold plate" of beef tendon, sliced red roasted tenderloin, thousand year old egg, peel and eat shrimp, chinese sausage and quick pickled cucumber. Followed by sauteed baby bok choi.

Traditional New Years fare include noodles for long life (didn't get a picture). A rice flour based dessert because the name of the dessert has a double sounding meaning for yearly prosperity. We also always eat fish, proverb of yearly having "excess" the tradition dictates that we don't eat all of the fish to symbolize the excess. This stripe base is prepared with a simple poaching method that is finished with hot oil to bring out the aroma of the ginger and green onion. It's called "white water method".

Another special delicacy is Black Mullet roe. It's salted and dried and in the northern part of China, steamed and pan fried. What you see in the picture is a piece of roe that costs about $50 and not purchasable in the US (because part of the curing method uses saltpeter which is not FDA approved). I suspect that the curing method has been updated to include pink salt, (bacon use to be cured with saltpeter) anyhow needless to say this is hard to obtain and I horde it like precious gems in my freezer. We finish with the last plate of pan fried giant shrimp.

Thai favorites Bento

2011-01-23T19:35:00.010-06:00

Thai, who doesn't like a good curry? Coconut milk, fresh ingredients and simple preparation makes Thai food an easy favorite to include as a theme. To make things even easier I even had a sous chef and taste tester to help things along. Ok, running short on time so no more yammering.

Panang Curry. Thai curries all have a start point of the basic curry paste, whether that be green, sour, red, massaman, yellow, or panang. They all have the same thing in common, a lot of work on a mortar and pestle. Savvy cooks and restaurants know that the best bet is to use some canned curry paste as a base. Yes I've made my share of homemade paste and I have the giant mortar and pestle to prove it, but a good canned paste is the home cook's best friend. The curry is pretty simple, I fried up the paste in some coconut cream and added the rest of the ingredients. And you can put pretty much anything in, I went with beef and bell pepper, but I've seen onion, bamboo shoots and baby corn. I served this over some fragrant jasmine rice.

Pad Thai a very common dish and a fan favorite for anyone that's been to a Thai restaurant. Most restaurant versions I've encountered seemed to be a lot more oily, I think they use that so that the noodles don't stick together after the soak in the water and first enter the wok, but careful cooking and diligent mixing can help you reduce the fat and focus on flavors.

Tom Kha is another favorite for most restaurant patrons. This is possibly the easiest dish to put together, you're heating up some chicken broth, coconut milk, adding some basic aromatics and finally adding what you want for filling. The aromatics come in the form of galanga (Thai ginger) and lemongrass. This again is a soup that I've seen different restaurants add different stuff in this case my Tom Kha is a Tom Kha Gai (for chicken) but you can have seafood, mushroom etc.

Bubor Pulot Hitam or black rice pudding is a dessert I've done in the past but not for this audience. The "forbidden rice" is so named because once upon a time the emperor of China was the only one allowed the luxury of black rice. It's high in fiber and low in starch. The dessert is cooked with galanga for flavor and a bit of sugar (brown and white) and finished with coconut milk to give it a hint of richness. The dessert has a very nutty flavor, and the "soup" has a light sweetness to it, and the texture is brown rice like.

A very tasty effort I hope my diners agree with me. I may have a break next week, I got family coming in and it's hard to do a bento when my house has been invaded.

Box Contents

Panang Curry
Pad Thai
Tom Kha Gai
Bubor Pulot Hitam

Foodblogger Event: Trace at the W hotel

2011-01-20T09:53:00.013-06:00

It's been a while since I've been to one of these blogger events, and I was really excited when I took a look at the menu and started reading up on the restaurant. Trace restaurant is located at the W hotel here in downtown Austin. It's a beautiful restaurant featuring four different themed "lounge bars". It has a nice and quiet atmosphere. Trace takes great pride in sourcing as much of their food from local farms. I spoke with Valerie Broussard their resident "forager" (pictured below) and she explained that they worked with the Sustainable Food Center on a token system which enables farmers to quickly get paid and bills the restaurant and hotel which pays on a more regular business cycle. Sounds like a win win proposition there. The menu changes a bit depending on what and where they can source various items. For instance our winter garden salad came from Springdale farms, where as on the website menu it says Animal Farms. And a few of the items we did taste didn't appear on the web menu at all. Chef Paul Hargrove was our creator tonight, unfortunately we didn't get a chance to meet him, but Valerie did a great job hosting us and representing the Chef.

There were plenty of fancy cocktails to be had. The one pictured above was a strawberry with black pepper nice and refreshing without being overly sweet. There was another that I had at the bar which was scotch with pear necter which is one I'll definitely go back for.

We were treated to six mini courses, above you see the winter's garden salad. It was very interesting, the Chef stylized this much like a mini garden. He used crumbled rye bread as "soil", and bit of tapioca, and baby carrots all in a nice hazelnut vinaigrette. The lettuce was sourced from Springdale Farm. The second course is the Heritage Farms Beef Tartar. Extremely well seasoned and very tender. The quail egg was soft cooked sous vide and accompanied with a light lemon based sauce. Delicious and I think it qualified as my favorite for the evening.

Next up Braised Pork Belly (from Richardson's Farm) it was served with a banana puree and a pineapple confit. The sauce had a nice sweet and smokey flavor and the dish was delicious, the big surprise for me was the pineapple, apparently it was steeped in with jalapenos which gave it a nice kick and fermentation which I believe gave it a zing. To go with the turf we had some surf in the form of this Crispy San Miguel Snapper. They served this skin side up and seared (the little spiky looking things at the top were the scales) with a bit of Preserved Oregon Truffle. This was quite delicious the fish was fall apart tender and the cauliflower foam was very interesting. It was definitely a nice counterbalance to the heavier pork.

Last "main" dish was the Banh Mi, which featured short rib from Niman Ranch and Charred Cilantro Creme Fraiche. The meat was extremely tender and juicy and I loved the creme fraiche. I definitely didn't expect to see Banh Mi on the menu and looking on the web menu it just so happened to be something the Chef whipped up with what he had. Finally dessert was the Chocolate Cherry Stout Cake. It was very nice looking dessert, the chocolate sauce had a beautiful gloss to it. I had expected the cake to be dense and very chocolaty it turned out to be quite a bit lighter and the sour cherry sorbet was a good pairing with the sweet chocolate cake.

I had a great time, got to talk to some of my blogger friends and catch up even met some new friends. Thanks so much to the staff at Trace for being such wonderful hosts. Everyone was super nice and knowledgeable. I'm going back Monday so I'll post up updated pictures of the food I will order.

New Years Resolution Bento

2011-01-16T15:03:00.012-06:00

Sorry for the lack of posts, the holiday season and some other issues cropped up. In fact this week's bento was suppose to be for last week. (the theme made a little more sense since everyone was just returning to work) I figured everyone probably made the same new years resolution of eating healthier and losing a bit of weight, so I decided to help everyone off to a good start with New Years Resolution Bento. I was inspired by a slew of nice and healthy recipes a little bit of tinkering and I came up with this menu.

First up, a DIY Chicken Pita sandwich with Salsa Verde. I saw a neat recipe for grilled chicken breast and another for a pita sandwich. I liked the idea of fusing the two together as the flavor for the salsa sounded like a nice burst of flavor. I sous vide'ed the chicken breast for maximum moisture and finished them on an indoor grill to get a bit of char. Eating lean doesn't mean losing a great tasting meal, the trick is to substitute fat for flavor. Yeah it's not the same, but a tangy sauce over chicken breast does a lot more for staying with your resolution. I treated the chicken with just a bit of salt and pepper and opted for a spring greens mix to get some of the vegetables into the diet.

Creamy vegetable pasta. This was a really interesting dish, the recipe uses yogurt to fake a cream sauce. Although I was not completely fooled it was an interesting substitution that saved a ton of calories. Mashed garlic with salt turned the yogurt into a very savory sauce. The dish normally calls for shrimp, but since I relegated it to a side dish, I added more bell peppers (for color) and even more asparagus and peas (because you can't have enough veggies). This turned out to be a very tasty dish. A gentle re-heat and you'd swear it was a cream based pasta. Wheat pasta was called for to lower the GI count, I didn't realize how far 12 ounces would go (was cooking for nine today). I've certainly learned a new trick in my keep healthy arsenal.

Recipe Requested see it here.

Ok yes, I cheated, I slotted in a dip and used the last slot for carrots to dip with. The last dish is a Ginger Edamame dip, it's prepared like a hummus (the only common item is the Tahini and garlic). I used a bit of Sriracha to spice things up. The ginger lent a very tasty accent. I packed baby carrots to dip with and a few rice crackers (trying to save on the carbs). Very simple dish to get people to eat veggies and even more veggies. It definitely had a less rich and heavy feel to it than hummus, hopefully it proves filling.

I'm very glad to be back! There's a food blogger event happening Monday so I'll have a post up on that as well.

Box Contents:

Build your own pita, chicken breast with salsa verde
Creamy vegetarian pasta
Ginger Edamame Dip

Noche Buena Bento

2010-12-12T19:07:00.010-06:00

I decided to continue my theme of "Holidays around the World" by going to the Philippines this time. Sadly, I didn't get to research as much history like the Hanukkah bento I did last week. The Philippines did surprise me on the amount of traditional foods and blending of flavors so I went ahead and did a quick dive into Filipino foods to bring you this nice (and hearty) lunch. Filipino food is greatly influenced by both Spanish and it's neighboring Asian cousins. This is pretty evident in the ingredients and dishes as well as their names (some taking on Spanish names). As a former Spanish colony, there is a heavy tradition around big feasts during the holiday season, namely Noche Bueno (Good night) for Christmas. I think there's a really rich food culture here and am looking forward to exploring Filipino food more, there's even a Filipino grocery/restaurant nearby for me to check out.

Hardinera is usually made out of pork and reserved for special occasions, I wandered upon a more healthy ground chicken variant that seemed quite interesting. I had to adjust the cooking methods and the times since 30 mins didn't seem enough time for a "chicken loaf" but I'm very happy with the results. The chicken was very tender and moist thanks to the binding ingredients and I'm glad the freshly ground chicken didn't come out tough. Special occasion dishes usually mean a lot of work but this dish is something I'm ok with holding on to and serving at the next holiday potluck. The simple mushroom gravy added a lot of flavor.

The next dish is called Bam-I, I loved this recipe it's an interesting fusion of texture and flavor. It uses two types of noodles, mung bean vermicelli and canton style noodles, this gives you a mushy, plus an al dente noodle texture but then we add on the wood ear mushroom for the ultra crunch. The noodles were reconstituted in soy sauce, sugar, fish sauce and chicken broth to produce and an amazing flavor. For protein we have chinese sweet sausage, shrimp and pork I should have just added beef to round it all out. It's a cross between a lo mein, pad thai, and vermicelli bowl WOW! This was admittedly the most labor intensive but I'm very happy to keep this in the "must do" category since it epitomizes asian food in flavor and texture. It's the "meltingpot" of noodles :).

Arroz Caldo is what you see to the left. It's also known as Chicken Congee or Rice porridge with chicken. I added a bit of salted duck eggs but I think I did the epic fail with using the starchy sushi rice, I should have gone with plain jasmine. My solution is to have my diners to further water it down in the reheat. I used a lot of chicken broth instead of water for flavor. I really wanted to pop in the thousand year old eggs but I didn't have any on hand but the resulting dish was still very tasty.

For dessert Bibing Ka. It's a really simple coconut cake that almost tastes like a sponge cake. The recipe asked for a lot of baking powder so I knew it would rise by quite a bit. I'm glad it wasn't very sweet it will make a great end to the lunch. If I had to make it decadent I would have soaked this cake with a rose petal honey glaze or treat it tres leche style but that's only for the +1 bonus and were trying to stay healthy here folks.

This might be the last of the bentos for the year. Holiday season is coming up and lots of folks are out on vacation. I'll find some things to post on in the meanwhile. Have a happy and safe holiday!

Box Contents

Hardinera
Bam-I
Arroz Caldo
Bibing Ka

Tools of the Trade: FoodSaver and Special offer!

2010-12-11T10:06:00.008-06:00

Howdy folks, quick off topic post today. I got a cool email on a special offer that I can share with you guys. The folks at FoodSaver contacted me and let me know about an offer for bloggers and food blogger readers. (more on that in a second) Normally I'm not one for adding this kind of stuff on my site, but it just so happens the FoodSaver is of my most used tools these days not only for preserving but also for my more recently frequent sous vide applications.

So I posted a bit on this topic in the past. Back then I was most concerned with preserving left overs or freezing items that I've cooked in surplus. Now that I've had a few more years to get into the groove of things I find that home vacuum sealing has quite a few applications. The obvious is storage. I've used the large robust bags to seal vacuum and seal lots of dry good products that I need preserved from oxygen, things like big bags of paprika and cumin from the indian grocery or large dried shitake mushrooms. It's a nice way to keep my pantry stocked for resupplying my spices jars and holding on to those more "obscure" ingredients.

As I've said, recently I've also been using my FoodSaver in my various sous vide applications. It's pretty great to cook up two large pork tenderloins in a bag or a bunch of chicken breast. Pictured left is a frozen sous vide spicy chicken breast. I took it straight from my rig and quick chilled and dumped the whole thing in the freezer. I simply pull out a bag and let it defrost in the fridge and I have a perfect one breast portion of extremely tender cooked chicken. I've done the same with various vegetables so I can have portions kept on hand. Re-heat is either microwave or bringing it back up to temp with my sous vide rig. As a single guy it's pretty convient to just rummage through the freezer to pick stuff to eat.

So ok this is a "Tools" post what about the gear? Of course (pictured right) there are plenty of options for your various vacuum sealing needs, I usually opt for the bags for what I do, they sell various containers for holding anything from cereal to marinating meats. For my bag use they offer pre cut bags in various sizes that you just put your stuff in and vacuum away or rolls where you can customize your bag size. I've really have yet to run into anything I couldn't vacuum with the rolls and I've sealed up some pretty big stuff. I've not made extensive use of the other containers as I only own a couple. They also have an attachment for sealing up your glass bell preserving jars it should be noted vacuum sealing is not a replacement for canning/jarring pasteurization process.

As to the units themselves from the title you can see I am now the proud owner of two FoodSavers, both are nice, I'm having trouble with the one on the right I can't seem to get it to consistently vacuum I think I just need to read the manual, but when it works it rocks. So for now I've kept my trusty twenty dollar craigslist acquistion. I like the idea of more handsfree operation which is what the one on the right promises, my current one you have to somehow hold the bag and also press down with both hands. I've got the practice down, it's just a bit inconvenient. Now, as I said in my previous post, my biggest gripe is footprint. These devices do take up some good counter space, but if you're only using them once and again in bulk pulling it out of the drawer and setting up isn't too bad. FoodSaver have recently come out with some upright models that auto store the bags, have integrated bag cutters, stowaway hosey thing for the containers, and liquid detection all in a small foot print (it's just vertical space).

Disclaimer time: Ok guys, I ain't making a dime off of this post (well ok if you click the ad to the right maybe, but not from FoodSaver). The folks at FoodSaver contacted me on this deal they were offering to bloggers and said we could pass it along. Since I use the product and everyone asks me about sous vide all the time, I figure that they probably would like to capitalize on the deal too. So bottom line, not being paid to be a shill, just passing along a cool deal I found on a product I happen to like and use.

And of course this brings me to the "cool deal". The folks that own FoodSaver recently contacted me and with cool "blogger" special basically you get up to 50% off (which is how I'm gonna justify getting the new small footprint hotness) and they'll toss in three vacuum containers! How cool is that? Anyhow here's the link to the offer. Enjoy!

Hanukkah Bento

2010-12-05T20:06:00.012-06:00

So I figure since it's the holiday season I'd take the time to pick a related theme. Hanukkah is a great excuse for me to do more research into the Jewish cuisine, I loved my dip into Rosh Hashanah bento and I enjoyed learning the history of the cuisine. I think I spent a week reading up on the Hanukkah food trying (in vain) to design a healthy Hanukkah bento. I think I learned a few things and my diners so far seemed to have enjoyed themselves.

The picture at the right is the brisket, but I neglected to put in the veggies and the final sauce you see in the bento box in the title picture. It's a braised brisket with a red wine reduction. Hanukkah cooking is mostly about preparations the day before so that no work is happening while the Menora is lit. I think the brisket could have done with a few more hours of cooking for my taste but every recipe I saw called for a three our cook time and since I like to at least try things the traditional way once we have what we have. The braising liquid was reduced greatly to give a nice thick sauce that was well worth the wait. The onions and carrots sweetened up nicely during the braise. The flavors really sunk in overnight, so clearly there's something to the traditional preparations.

Like the Rosh Hashanah kugel, I went with a savory Kugel (opting for noodle this time). A lot of the kugels I went thru all demanded sweet kugel, I personally don't like sweet so I hunted high and low until I found a series of savory kugels that seemed to fit my palate. Sour cream, cottage cheese, and parmesan were the main players on this dish. Dairy actually fits quite prominently in Hanukkah foods because it commemorates Yehudit (Judith) a Jewish Heroine that helps defeat the Assyrians. There's a big back story there that I won't go into, suffice it to say dairy and fried food are everywhere in Hanukkah dishes. I went for low fat cottage cheese and sour cream to help lighten things up as much as possible, and cut the oil butter in half. I added a few of the spices and sauces from another kugel recipe to compensate for the loss of fat. I can see how the "full monty" version would be very tasty and rich but I'm proud to say my "lite" version was pretty tasty too.

Next we have fried Ricotta balls. I took this recipe from Food Networks (courtesy Mario Batali) I'm not sure how this is Jewish except that it both has dairy and fried food. How does fried food fit into Hanukkah? Well the fried food features oil which symbolizes the miraculous oil that was able to light the Menora for long celebration of Hanukkah. The recipe called for goat cheese ricotta, but I couldn't find that, the ricotta was really wet and it was a struggle to hold the shape under the violent frying process. I tried my best to let the ricotta dry but I think the better bet was to double the ricotta and wringing it all out in cheese cloth. A very tasty morsel just very difficult to execute.

Finally we have Roasted Chestnut and Parsnip soup. This is probably the one and only time I'll roast chestnuts. It was humongous pain to shell and peel not to mention hard to find and expensive. The alternative was to used canned chestnuts but honestly I've never ever seen canned chestnuts, and if such a product ever existed now would be the time it should be on shelves. All the hard work resulted in a very tasty the soup, it was very creamy and thick and hint of the parsnips came through while the chestnuts added a really nice richness to the soup without adding much or any fat to thicken the soup up. I liked the result but I don't think I'll be adding this to the "must do in the future" list.

I'm so glad to have done the research to understand the symbols behind the food I loved reading up on the history and stories. I really enjoyed making the bento, a lot of it could be done in parallel so it was a simple execution. Happy Hanukkah folks!

Box Content:

Braised Brisket with Red Wine Reduction
Savory Green Onion Kugel
Fried Ricotta Ball
Roasted Chestnuts and Parsnip Soup

Slo Mo Bento

2010-11-16T13:55:00.013-06:00

It's getting to be that time of year, holiday season. Which means a bit of a slow down on the bentos since there are a ton of things happening around family and friends. As usual I'll post up what I get and any neat food related things I run into.

Anyhow, with all this work and experimentation with my new sous vide contraptions and trying out various temperatures to perfect my cooking debut, I got this idea to make a bento where the theme would be all slow cooked/Sous vide prepared items: Slow Mo if you will. It played out great in my head, I'll just throw a bunch of stuff in my two crockpots, vacuum up a few pouches and all I'd do is wait for magic to happen. I'll have a free day to do anything I want! Didn't quite work out that way. Yes, everything took hours to cook but I was chained to the house since everything had different timings and if I wanted to make sure everything popped out at roughly the same time all of it had to be prepared in stages. Anyhow on with the post.

Sous Vide cooking still amazes me in the type of texture you can achieve. I'm still learning about the process and the scientific procedures in which usually fly in the face of what I've always learned about preparing food (and I am not a chef so not all that much learning there). Yes, in the end of the day you're vacuum sealing a bag of food and dumping it in water. I still had to do some homework to understand why it was OK to cook a pork tenderloin at 140F for four hours as opposed to the normally accepted temperature of 160~165F for pork. I certainly didn't want to get anyone sick.

Here's the quickly researched answer that I know (so far). Above 130F you are pasteurize your food (killing an optimally safe number of the nasty bugs) given you hold it to temp for a sufficiently long enough time. What's long enough? Well depends on how thick the meat is (there are tables). According to the rules if served right away or immediately quick chilled (what I did) this is considered "safe". To be extra safe and get that nice crust that we all know and love as the Maillard Effect we give it a quick sear in the cast iron over the stove (around 500F). This really does two things one: gets that caramelized crust quick and two: one more chance to burn any of the little bad things to death. (ok my post has just earned it's yammering tag) As to seasoning I simply treated the pork with a bit of salt, pepper and ground ginger before it's water bath.

Next up I crock potted this creamy potato. This took about seven hours of total cook time and not exactly "healthy", but I figure everything else was pretty ok and it's the holidays right? Slow cooker recipes tend to be pretty easy things to put together, this had a lot of attributes to make it more of a potato casserole. Either way it was a big hit, it tasted like a really loaded baked potato. I think it would have been awesome with some bacon and green onions as a topping.

For a healthier veggie entry, I pulled the recipe for fresh green peas by none other than Richard Blais of Top Chef (season four) fame. This is actually the first time I played with vegetables in the sous vide supreme. It's a simple dish, I had to go with frozen peas as it's not easy finding fresh green peas, dropped in some olive oil, lemon zest, salt/pepper and a bit of garlic powder. 185F and 40 mins later, WOW. I mean you really get that hit of that flavor of green peas. It tasted really fresh as compared to other times I've worked with frozen peas. I think part of it is not losing any flavor to a cooking liquid and letting the peas heat to temperature and squeezed right up with the seasoning. The color wasn't spectacular, but the flavor was great. I'll have to try other vegetables sous vide side by side with traditional preparation to see the difference.

Technically even though this dish comes in the dessert slot it was meant to be eaten with the pork. I cooked down a big batch of apples and put in a bit of brown sugar and cinnamon. I went with a granny smith (green apple) I felt that it would hold up it's texture since it's pretty firm and that sour component paired with the sweet brown sugar would be a bold flavor to add to the pork which is very modestly seasoned. I got a "wow this was just like my Grandma made it", always a great compliment since we all know grandmas do some of the best cooking.

Anyhow nice to get out a post. Thanks for reading!

Box Contents:

Ginger Spiced Pork Tenderloin
Creamy Potato casserole
Fresh Green Peas
Cinnamon Apple Sauce

My Guest Chef experience at the Flying Carpet

2010-11-05T00:14:00.018-05:00

Whew. I'm starting this post at midnight here after a shift cooking at the Flying Carpet Moroccan Burger trailer. I'm beat, I served 79 people a four course dinner over 2.5 hours. Right now there's a shower and a nightcap waiting for me.

(Seffa - Couscous with ground almond milk, honey and cinnamon)

"Wha wha?! rewind splain that again?" Ok some background for everyone. The Flying Carpet features Moroccan burgers (normal, vegetarian or vegan) down on South Congress Ave. You *must* go it's amazing stuff. When Abdou puts that tomato sauce that he learned from his grandmother on the grill you're gonna start salivating. Anyhow, I digress, Maria wife and co-owner of said amazing Chef Abdou started following my humble blog and asked if I'd be a featured chef for them. This was part of the "South Congress First Thursday" event that happens every month where artists and musicians come out and it's a big street party. She told me for her trailer it was an artists type movement to give local foodies and chefs a chance to showcase their cooking and take over their trailer showcasing their Moroccan based concepts. My first reaction was, "um. me? You know I don't do this for a day job right?". She reassured me it would be fine. It sounded like an interesting challenge so I went ahead and said "ok, let's do this". I designed a menu based off my blog, usually I go full traditional menu to expose my bento-ers to the food of the region. This time I decided, two strict traditional and two my own concept dishes (let's flex those culinary muscles).

So the rest of this post, which will be sprinkled with pictures, will be a background (you just read), prep before hand, insanity moment, and what I learned. First the menu:

Moroccan Take on Eggs Benedict - Toast with Kefte patty, Tomato Harissa sauce and sous vide poached egg
Traditional Beet Root Salad with Cumin Vinaigrette
Japan Meets Morocco Roll - Saffron rice rolled with sous vide chicken breast spiced with Moroccan spices, fried in a panko crust with dynamite sauce
Seffa - Couscous served with almond milk, dusted with cinnamon and honey

(Japan Meets Morocco roll - saffron rice, sous vide poached chicken rolled up and panko crusted served with dynamite sauce)

Ok if any of you reading know me then you know I plan. My sister jokes about me having clip board on hand and planning... *everything*. I planned, I dropped a really serious amount of money on infrastructure in equipment, I rolled out sushi rolls and coated them in panko weighing before and after to understand a per unit cost of *every* dish I made. (and yes I was wrong about a lot of it, game day changes a lot of things). I think I ate the same food for three weeks in a row testing, re-testing, plating, re-plating every dish I've done. (the nicer pictures you'll see are the trials not the day of) This was my first kitchen debut and it had to be perfect. I stressed over how to sous vide 100 eggs (yeah, ok it was an excuse to buy a new sous vide rig). And the day before I was in the commissary and prepping like a mad man. Afterward I took a moment to post to facebook stating, "Somedays I ask myself if I've bitten off too much to chew. This is one of those days" (by the way the reply was "keep on chewing!". My ricecooker died on me (Bessie survived, just overheated) but just as the day looked like it was gonna die, I powered through and 14 hours later I made it the prepping madness. But for all the prep, I knew the day of event was gonna be huge unknown of working in a trailer .

Just so you know my parents owned a restaurant. I started working the moment I could stand on a chair and take money, imagine tiny Chinese kid on a chair counting out change to you (isn't there a law against that?). I've worked every part of a restaurant, I've cleaned, prepped, taken money, and for one precious day my dad let me handle full service cooking (he didn't want me to like the restaurant trade too much). Let me tell you right now, IT IS NOT THE SAME! In the trailer you are confined by space. I could only multi task on two servings at once (my fault for a four course ambitious menu). This completely does not work when you have a horde at your doorsteps. Maria counted it up and (thankfully) did not tell me there was a 25 ticket queue that I was behind on (thanks Maria for making sure I was hydrated and keeping me focused and not freaked out). I'm real sorry to those that had to wait during the busiest hour, I was doing my best but again I've never done this before.

Now I was very happy to see flashbulbs going off on the plates I was dishing (on the side is the plate, I had to use ring molds to steady the egg for service). And I got really good feedback that my food tasted good. I'm especially flattered that some Moroccan friends of the Chef did show up and were very happy with the food, and they were traditionalists on the food front. I'm glad they pulled their punches and gave me a thumbs up. (I think I won them over with the sous vide poached eggs but that's just crediting the gear). I also heard that I did a really good job on the Seffa. I also overheard a few folks that thought they only got one course for the price and were happily surprised and quickly lured in that I gave all four courses for eight bucks. Special thanks to the owner that let me price the "bento" to what I charge my bentoers. I tried really hard to limit the food costs to bare minimum to make sure they made as much as possible despite the fact they said "price was no option, this is about the art". Well to me, this was as much about livelihood, these folks entrusted me to deliver delicious food and not tarnish their good image. Abdou and Maria are an amazing team and I wasn't about to let them down.

So what did I learn? Well trailer cooking is it's own breed. Limited space puts a huge constraint on you. If I did this again I would factor that into the menu. As you can see the trailer is pretty small, I joked with my coworkers, "yup, um it's smaller than my office here at work". You don't understand the implications until you're there. I call it "game day", for a novice chef it is beyond what you expect it to be and the luxuries of a kitchen are not there. Water use is limited, plating space is limited, and if you take one step you will likely bump into someone. I managed to turned on the robot mode and powered through it but it was a lot more overwhelming than I expected. I apologize to my buddies that showed up to support me and I couldn't go out and say hi. I was slammed every moment of that service, SLAMed! And I thank everyone of you that came by and ordered food. Hopefully I delivered a nice meal for you.

Wow! Super thanks again to Maria and Abdou for having me and entrusting their trailer to me on the eve of the Gypsy Park Event(Go see them this weekend). This was a bunch of fun (and a good reminder not to go into the food biz). It was good to get away from the normal rut of cubicles and email. It was also super gratifying to see folks enjoying the meal you produced. And of course seeing my friends come and support me, I hope you guys had a good meal! I'm sure you'll tell me about it tomorrow.

EatingInABox meets a The Flying Carpet

2010-10-28T13:35:00.004-05:00

Just a short blurb telling everyone that I'll be down on South Congress next Thursday as the featured Chef over at the Flying Carpet! I'm both very excited and slightly nervous. I'll be taking over the trailer for the evening to execute my Moroccan menu. In keeping with the theme of the blog I've chosen two traditional dishes but am adding two more dishes that are my concepts. It's all part of the First Thursday event that happens every month down on South Congress.

Details here.
Nov 4 7pm – 9pm
Gibson Street and Congress (next to Perla’s)
Austin, TX, 78704

Please tell your friends and come and visit it should be a fun time!

Oh you want to know what I'm making? well. ok just this once diners will know my menu instead of just being surprised :)

Moroccan bento style

Moroccan take on egg’s benedict: Toast, topped with Kefta Patty, Sous Vide Poached egg and finished with a Tomato Harrisa Sauce
Traditional Moroccan Beet Salad
Japan meets Morocco: Tempura Fried Sushi roll with Saffron rice and Moroccan spiced chicken breast served with a dynamite sauce
Seffa: Traditional couscous with almond milk served with Honey and cinnamon.

All that for Eight bucks!

Post and pictures to follow of course.

UPDATE: Hey we're trying to get an idea of who all is showing up via the events page. If you're coming by it'd be awesome if you hit the like button (it's the only way I've seen to RSVP.)

Simple Light Bento

2010-10-26T08:52:00.008-05:00

It's been a tough schedule around here lately. Work's crazy and personal life is even crazier. But I did find time to pull off a bento this week. I had scheduled a pumpkin theme but decided that I needed to bust out something nice and easy since I had visitors in town. So Simple and Light was the theme, it's really the theme for this blog so I'm cheating a bit. Well lets just get down to business shall we?

First our main dish, I went with this Hoisin Dijon glazed salmon that I saw from Friendly Kitchen. Salmon is one of the few fish that reheats well without stinking up the office and it's always an easy dish to prepare. The recipe called for grilling but I opted for oven baking instead, the grill would have provided nice carmelization of the somewhat sweet Hoisin sauce, but oven baking had greater advantage in my mad dash in the kitchen. It was an interesting glaze, definitely an interesting idea to combine Hoisin and Dijon mustard, you had hints of sour and sweet.

First side dish is a Mushroom and Farfalle in a light cream sauce finished with white truffle oil. This was a no brainer, pasta is always an easy addition to a bento. I think I could have been a little more heavy handed with the truffle oil. I wanted to bring out the earthy qualities of the more plain crimini and white button mushrooms I was using. I'm overall pretty happy with the dish I eased up on the sauce to save a few calories and fat.

Next I replicated the oven roasted tomatoes I did with my friend Paula at the dinner party. Let me say, the tomatos roast down a lot faster in her convection oven then they did in my oven. Yeah, you just heard some gear envy in there. Anyhow, beautiful and delicious and so simple to make. Just cut a roma tomato in half sprinkle on your choice of herbs and top it off with minced garlic in olive oil. When you've got them all roasted down top them with a bit of cheese (I used parmesan) and hit it in the broiler till it's melty and delicious.

Finally Dessert: good old fashion Snicker doodle cookies. These and sugar cookies are one of my few dessert weaknesses. These came out a bit crunchier than I usually like. I think I needed to use a thinner dough.

Box Contents:

Dijon-Hoisin glazed Salmon
Mushroom and Farfalle pasta in a light cream sauce
Oven Roasted Tomatos
Snicker Doodle cookies

Cooking with/for friends

2010-10-18T14:42:00.009-05:00

Sorry for the long time between posts. Work's been really busy and I've been traveling a lot so it makes it hard to post about a lunch. My last trip was to visit one of my teams in Denver, I was whining about not being able to do lunch when my friend reminded me he had a full kitchen and if I wanted I could easily do a bento remotely. I plan on taking him up on that offer the next time I, it visit should be a fun experience. I've also been invited to a special event/project that I won't share just yet.

Anyhow, last week I was invited to work with a good friend of mine to cook for a dinner party for bunch of our development leads visiting from Europe. You can see us in hustle mode up there on the title photo. I even was wearing an official chef jacket, pants and had my thermapen nicely tucked away in my shoulder pocket. My friend Paula did a lot of prep the night before and we got an early start. We ended up working for about 14 hours and churned out six courses for about 30 people. Everyone seemed quite content so we must have done a pretty good job. I didn't get a chance to take photos of every course but here's what I did get.

We started with a nice pea soup shooter with a touch of cream and some crispy pancetta. Prepping and cooking in stages is one of those skills that I've had to learn out of self preservation. If I didn't break out my bentos over a weekend, I would be seriously wiped every Sunday. This was no different, we par boiled and sauteed most of the ingredients leaving the final whizzing and plating to be the last step. Ultimately, we should have made sure we knew where the stick blender was as we ended up doing stuff in batches in a blender. Anyhow lovely flavors and a good way to kick off dinner.

The salad course was Gorgonzola Apple salad in Red wine vinaigrette and candied pecans. We served this family style which gave us plenty of time to move into our first main dish. (all about stall tactics)

Our first "main" dish was pan seared scallops with risi bisi (risotto with peas) and garlic chives. I think the downsides of pre-prepping stuff bit me on the risotto, the rice came out a bit softer than I would have preferred, but most everyone put this dish as a favorite for the evening. The scallops were all slightly different sizes so we had to cook them by feel. We were snickering through the whole dinner thinking about all the "mistakes" we made that didn't get noticed by our diners. I completely forgot to put in the crisped pancetta into the risotto, which let me tell you makes a huge difference in taste.

Our second "main" was Chicken roulade stuffed with spinach wrapped in proscuitto. I brought my sous vide supreme down with me and we sous vide the chicken. The texture quality was very silky smooth and by poaching the chicken this way we maintained a nice juicy dish. I finished the roulades off under a broiler. It took a few pouches before we figured out how to not lose the proscuitto cover while bagging. At one point I had dubbed our perfect wrapping as a "proscuitto baby", I think you had to be there to get it. We served this with a roasted tomato with a basil infused olive oil. The tomatoes by themselves were very delicious and so easy to do. We just topped them with a bit of minced garlic, basil and oregano, roasted them in an oven and topped them with a bit of cheese. I'll have to remember this for a future bento.

Our final main was seared lamb chops served with asparagus and a gorgonzola sweet potato. We piped out the sweet potato and re-heated them under the broiler and recruited someone to help us with searing off the chops in a Big green egg. The lamb was simply dressed with a bit of salt and pepper. The egg did a marvelous job of searing the meat. Everyone must have really loved the lamb as there were calls for 2nds 3rds and 4ths.

Dessert consisted of a pumpkin bread pudding, unfortuneatly by that time I was so beat I didn't manage to get a picture. Paula used Challah bread which was a good choice and eased up on the cream to prevent a french toast effect. Very delicious.

I had a *fabulous* time cooking with and for my friends. It was a bit tough walking around the next day after being on your feet for so long. Definitely squashed any aspirations for cooking for a living :) but as a once and again dinner party I'd be up for it anytime! Thanks to my friends Ross and Paula for hosting and letting play in their shiny new kitchen. Ok I promise a bento next week so please stay tuned!

Peru Bento 2

2010-09-26T18:27:00.010-05:00

Back to Peru, I still have ingredients on hand from the last Peruvian bento so this is still a continuation of my pantry raid. There were so many awesome dishes that I spied from last time I felt it was a perfect time to sling in another Peru based theme. The cuisine is quite rich, lots of starches and heavy meat so I really struggled to make recipe alterations and pick things that would at least feel light. I think since my bento-ers eat these things in two sittings I'm still ok with the healthy theme.

We start with a Seco De Res. I again went with a Chuck Shoulder Roast cut of beef here, I think it's probably the best cut of meat to stand up to four hour slow cooking. I alternated the crock pot between high and low settings each of the four hours hoping to shorten the cooking time but still get the most out of the longer slow braise. I loved the braising liquid, it consisted of two bunches of cilantro pureed down, some aromatics and of course beer (I only had guiness on hand, seemed to work). The beef was melt in your mouth tender and the stewing liquid had a wonderful taste of cilantro. I'm really happy with this dish.

Next in a bid to use up all my gluten free spaghetti and the unopened jar of Aji peppers, I present Tallarines con Salsa de Aji. The sauce is a pureed yellow pepper that is enriched with some evaporated milk. I cut the butter and added a touch of cream and cooked the sauce down really good before adding the pasta and tossing it. The Aji peppers have a nice healthy kick to them, so it should satisfy my current audience that seem to have no fear of the capsaicin. This indeed makes the bento fully gluten free so a happy coincidence. (some of my diners or significant others are GF so it's nice when I can keep it that way.) I was quite surprised at how rich this dish came out, evaporated milk is not something I usually make use of, but seems to be very prevalent in Peruvian cooking. It might have to be something I stock in the pantry since it seems to have some versatile uses.

I looked really hard for some sort of vegetable side that wasn't full of cream or butter or starch and carbs. The best I could do is this Beet, Potato, and Carrot salad. A very simple dish, boiled root vegetables and tossed in with some olive oil mayo and mustard (I opted for both dijon and simple yellow mustard) I liked how it turned out, the beets and carrots added a good degree of sweetness to the dish without feeling too heavy, the potatoes were a nice addition and I like how they picked up stripes of the beet colors while I was cooling the veggies.

Finally for dessert, we have a Raspberry Espuma. I used some evaporated milk and whipped it like I would whipping cream and combined it with a bit of raspberry gelatin. It actually setup a lot harder than I expected. I was thinking a foamy like substance, but it was more like an airy more substantial gelatin. I garnished it simply with fresh raspberries.

Again another super fast bento, I clocked a nice three hours and 25 mins. Not too shabby. I'm gonna have to keep this trend for next week since I'll be cooking for a dinner party later in the evening. Ok enough yammering. Thanks for reading!

Box Contents

Seco De Res
Tallarines Con Salsa De Aji
Beet, Potato, and Carrot Salad
Raspberry Espuma

Pantry Raid 2

2010-09-19T19:00:00.010-05:00

So I need to empty the pantry again so we have another Pantry Raid! I dug through the pantry and was inspired by the picture to your left. It included canned tomatoes, Gluten Free pasta, various spices, and a bunch of canned vegetables. I still had my regular staples of olive oil, butter, and spices, but I still had to buy a few things to turn out lunch. Raiding your pantry is a great way to turn over some ingredients sitting in the cupboard and supplement it with a few staples like onions, cheap fresh veggies. It's also a great chance to be creative and see what you can improvise given random ingredients. I think this also caused me to create simple dishes. A lot of my discoveries into foreign cuisines result in my picking very complicated dishes to learn new techniques.

For the main it was easy enough to break out the Sous Vide Supreme and bust out a poached chicken breast. I had some seasonings, I picked a nice hickory spice mix with some brown sugar, I figured it would go well with the pasta give it a bit of sweet to offset some heat. I recommended that my eaters don't reheat this chicken breast, when treated at 146F chicken doesn't develop that grainy texture and is amazingly tender. I was going to use a cherry pepper salsa I had bought on a whim, but I didn't want to overwhelm the chicken because I expect my diners will eat the chicken with the pasta.

I had some gluten free pasta, canned tomatos and of course my favorite Tito's vodka. I went with vodka based tomato sauce. There's no way we can do a pantry raid without some supplements, I had to buy an onion and a small bit of cream for this dish. I sauteed the artichoke before hand to give it some flavor and texture and then cooked down a basic tomato sauce. The vodka added a nice flavor and the cream rounded out some of the red pepper I pushed into the dish. I under cooked the pasta and finished it in the sauce, I really like this technique as the pasta has a more cohesive flavor and there's no chance of clumping like you have when you serve it separate. The pasta was great and perfectly cooked and I added a bit of salt to temper the cream/heavy fat taste. I like how this dish really can be pulled together from your cupboard with minimal things to buy from a grocery store.

Recipe requested you'll find it here

I had to use some of the eggs and I spotted this great simple recipe for zucchini pudding. I was able to use some of my left over saltine crackers to boot! This was probably the least "healthy" item to put in, but I managed to cut the butter to make it a bit better.I really loved the texture, the cracker soaked up a good bit of the flavors and acted as a binder that normally is handled by a potato or plain flour. I did have to buy most of the ingredients, but it's good I could still whittle away at my pantry.

Finally I felt a nice bit of fresh vegetables was in order. Since I had so much canned corn I opted for this succotash instead of the roasted broccoli that I was thinking about. The dressing was made of butter milk, thyme and some agave syrup. Sweet sour and a bit of heat from the serrano peppers added to the texture of fresh veggies. I'm glad to have a bit of this left over for munching on this week.

I really enjoy the pantry raid challenge, it makes me think outside the box on what I can do. Improv is a key to cooking, you have to know what things taste like together, granted i'm still a fan of writing down recipes because you need to be able to replicate. Sometimes you have some ingredients and you have to make them work. The challenge for me is I have to decide what will taste good in my head before I cook the dish. I actually timed my efforts because I wanted to see what these effort takes. I've started splitting my cooking into Saturday prep and Sunday cook, it requires a bit of planning, but has made my Sundays enjoyable again. This one took me exactly 3 hours and 40 mins from prepping to completely cleaning the kitchen and having the dishwasher going. Not bad for eight meals with four courses each!

Box Contents:

Sous vide Poached Chicken Breast
Artichoke pasta in vodka cream sauce
Zucchini pudding
Succotash with buttermilk sauce

Rosh Hashanah Bento

2010-09-12T21:33:00.017-05:00

So on my business trip the NY times reported on the Jewish New Year Rosh Hashanah. It's pretty interesting learning about a culinary culture that has adapted to all the places it has immigrated to. The concepts of the original dishes remained true, but as Jewish settlers migrated to other places like Northern Africa they made use of spices and ingredients that they had on hand.

We start with a Mustard honey glazed chicken breast. Sweet foods are a big highlight during Rosh Hashanah, the sweetness is the blessings for a sweet new year. The sweet glazed chicken breast came up over and over again during my recipe search. The mustard honey gave the chicken a beautiful color after the oven treatment and I think helped seal in some moisture. My alternative to the chicken was fish. Fish is often eaten to symbolize fertility and abundance. I stayed away from the fish since it tends to not reheat (re: stinks in the microwave) well.

There's not any such thing as light eating in what I've found with traditional Rosh Hashanah food this Broccoli and Potato Kugel is no exception. You start with a base of potatoes that I mashed and blended with egg, mazzo meal, and mayo. I opted for a olive oil based mayo to help try to lighten things up. This was folded together with a bit of onion and broccoli and topped with some panko and baked until it's a yummy perfection. This was probably my favorite of the dishes.

I chose this great Kasha Pareve (kasha pilaf) as an accompanying side. I've never worked with Kasha and it's amazingly difficult to locate. I discovered that it is actually called toasted barley grouts (but that's still hard to find here). Looking at the kasha I expected a nutty harder texture like brown rice, or quinoa so it came as a surprise that a short 12 min simmer produced a soft mushier consistency with a nutty flavor. This will work as a great as a side to eat with the chicken.

For a vegetable side we have this Tsimmes Salad. It's a version that came from the NY times article that featured Tunesian influences on Jewish cooking. I didn't have any harissa to spice up the carrots so I slammed it with a bit of Sriracha sauce so it's a east meets middle east variation on a traditional Jewish dish. The caraway, ground coriander and cumin gave this a great sweet and savory taste, the spicy kick from the sriracha sauce rounded everything out.

Finally we finish dinner with a Kosher Cholent. This is a bean and beef stew that is cooked for about 15 hours. It's a hearty heavy rich dish using the long cooking time to break down the beans to add a creamy touch without using excess fat or cream to thicken things up. I warned my eaters that usually gobble up lunch in one sitting that even the hungriest of them will have a difficult time eating it all at once. It would be smart if you ran a full marathon or did a century ride on your bike before trying to wolf this bad boy down.

I enjoyed my little experiment in learning about Jewish cuisine. There's gonna have to be a bit more of investigation but for now this will do me. Everything was make-ahead-able so this turned out to be a fairly easy bento to make, I'm glad to be able to ease back into my cooking schedule.

I still owe you guys a post on my french food but I promise it's coming :) There's a bit more work travel coming up but I have a few more weeks before that happens. Thanks for reading!

Shana Tova Umetukah (a good and sweet new year to you)

Box Contents

Honey Mustard baked chicken
Potato and Broccoli Kugel
Kasha Pareve
Tsimmes Salad
Kosher Cholent

Foodblogger Event: Uchiko

2010-09-07T20:29:00.020-05:00

I'm all kinds of jetlagged from my trip to Europe but I couldn't help but accept an invitation to visit Uchiko. Uchiko is the sister restaurant to Uchi, my favorite restaurant in Austin. Chef Cole is a owner here but he's put executive Chef Paul Qui in charge of the endeavor and he was a lovely host. I really love the ambiance and vibe here you can see the influences of Uchi. The restaurant is similar but still stands on it's own on atmosphere, there's a lot of energy the staff were buzzing around and extremely friendly. I've been invited for a return visit next week so there will be a follow on to this post.

Lots of delightful showcases and many of the items we were presented were fanciful ideas and experiments so it's hard for me to map them to existing menu items, but it's a great show case of what they're all about which is taking ideas and experimenting. The first round of appetizers included some "cracklings" of squid in black ink and truffle shrimp paste fried up and served with a black truffle sauce. To the right you'll see their take on Srirachi sauce, the sauce had a nice sneaky heat to it but was at the same time creamy instead of tangy.

We moved on to a dish of scallops with a nice cilantro sauce with a "cereal and milk tulie", I believe this was a slight departure from their koviche, a very tender yummy bite of scallop with kalamata, none the less a beautiful single bite. There was a nice slice of green apple that provide a bit of tartness and helped to deliver a crisp taste. You can see the care and attention to detail on the watermelon and tuna "akami te", the masterful knife work to cut the tuna and the attention to individual ingredients was humbling in that someone would put that amount of care and attention for every single tasting but the results were delicious.

We had two fried entrees the first was the tempura fried eggplant "tempura nasu" with a nice sweet chili sauce. I could only have one since we had so many other delights to sample. The real treat was the fried Tuna tendon that is usually the "leftover" for the kitchen staff. Basically after harvesting the tuna meat you have the tendons of tuna that they fry and let the kitchen staff have as a snack. In my opinion this is one of the best and most delectable "treats", the fish tendon was definitely tempura-ed fish that had a nice "chew" to it, not as flaky or dry as fried fish.

The next appetizers are a yakitori which was quite similar to normal yakitori, perhaps my untrained palate didn't pick up anything distinguishing, very tasty. And Chef Qui presented a nice spring roll with asian pear and pork belly with fish sauce. It was a fun dish but I think there are some kinds that need to be worked out. I didn't get the usual rich tastes of pork belly and it fell apart really quickly.

Ok as I say constantly desserts are lost on me. We had a full court press of tobacco cream, chocolate fury and corn interpreted many ways. All of them were tasty and good however, I was most impressed with the corn dessert. Chef Cole told me that he challenged the staff with the color yellow as a theme and they worked back and forth until they settled on corn. I will say that they represented corn in texture and taste in more ways than I expected and still kept with the idea of dessert. YUM! (that says a lot since I hate sweets) If you go to Uchiko I would highly recommend getting this: sweet corn sorbet, polenta custard, caramel salt and lemon the dried crumbles were some sort of dehydrated corn tossed in with sugar.

As always it was good to see my blogger friends and geek out on new camera gear. Thanks to the staff at Uchiko for such a warm reception and showing off their skills. I'm looking forward to dinner on Monday!

Update: Here's what I had on at my dinner at Uchiko. Superb!

At Left Chef Paul Qui was on the front lines with his army of sushi chefs. My first starter was yokai berry - atlantic salmon, asian pear, yuzu and dinosaur kale. The dinosaur kale is fried and topped with a candied red quinoa. The sour yuzu was a great pairing with the sweet fruits. I was really interested in the candied quinoa what a great idea!

I ordered the Uni sashimi and Chef kicked it up by adding some fresh ingrediants they had on hand, he added some shrimp roe (? I didn't even know that existed) and some very fresh clams. I followed it with ika yaki, fresh squid with korean pepper compressed apple sorrel and red curry. Very tender and delicious. You really can't go wrong with anything you order here.

I saw this beef tongue on their sushi list so I had to give it a go, simply delicious and tender. Took a picture of the case.

My final two dishes. I had to get the ninjin bacon, a grilled pork belly over a carrot puree (the sweet carrots with the granulated pecan/olive dust help cut the amazingly delicious butter like pork belly. I ended the night with a usagi yaki, seared rabbit confit with a slow-poached egg. The egg was heavenly and I had to ask the chef whether it was cooked sous vide (no way you can get that perfect even texture doing otherwise), he confirmed they used the technique. Had I not had this before I would never have guessed but holding the egg at the perfect temp you have a poached egg where the yolk is a perfect custard with no hint of clumping.

Delicious!

Travels: London 2010

2010-08-30T09:45:00.014-05:00

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 get everything and have the most impressive array of, well, everything from cod roe to cured sausages from all around the world. My favorite is to hit the sushi bar and grab some uni (sea urchin)

I spent most of the time checking out all these gastro-pubs all the rage these days. The food at these pubs are quite amazing, I really hate that I didn't get to snap more pictures of the food we had. Above we'll start with the more common food that you expect out of "pub grub". On the left you see a burger with blue cheese and egg and onion rings on top (I didn't eat that). The thick cut chips were very delicious nice amount of crisp with what tasted like a creamy mashed potato in the center. We were at the Queen's Head in Hammersmith, the guys told me they had the best fish and chip in Hammersmith. I really wanted the braised pork belly or the lamb shank (I got that else where). I really couldn't argue with them, the batter was light yet substantial. The fish was a really thick cut of cod, easily 1.5 inches thick (just the fish).

They also featured some interesting shared plates to the left you'll see a nice plate of snacks, Lamb sliders, serrano ham, mini sausages, hummus with vegetables, gherkins and pita, finishing up with broiled Pork belly (up at the top I managed to snap this photo before they were all snapped up). Next we have a plate of breaded and fried Camembert with cranberry relish. Very rich and something that really needs to be shared.

The visit was a lot of fun, I may have enjoyed the bars a little too much. The office was very hospitable, to the point where we went out every night. (friday hit me the hardest) I bid my Londoner coworkers good bye and stepped onto a train bound for Paris. I'll post about my stay here later (I remembered my camera this time)

Ethiopian Bento

2010-08-15T16:27:00.008-05:00

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 very happy to finally get a chance to do this box, my previous audience was not amenable towards Ethiopian food.

Ok we'll start off with our main entree. Doro Wat is one of the classic dishes you'll find at any Ethiopian restaurant (we now have three in Austin). The base for this dish is onions, lots and lots of onions, it brings a sweetness to the stew, but the real kick is the berbere. I was dismayed at how difficult it was to obtain the spice mix I would have thought it easier to find these days. I resorted to putting the spicy pepper seasoning together and toasting it myself. Basically you put together the base and then stew chicken and hard boiled eggs together for a very hearty stew. It's usually a bit thicker than what I have pictured and that's due to the amount of butter used, I opted to lighten this box up as much as possible so I'll have to live with the thinner sauce.

Next dish is Alicha, it's slow cooked meats usually lamb or goat (I went with Sirloin Chuck shoulder as suggested by my butcher) in a nice flavorful curry. The amount of spices used really gave a really tasty "gravy" to the meat and my butcher was completely spot on in his recommendation for the cut of meat. I think the only thing I did wrong this time around was the sheer volume I was cooking (12 boxes this time) hosed me over so the sauce didn't get a chance to evaporate down as much as I would have liked. That's the beauty of cooking for 6-8 most recipes scale for that size in the same cooking vessels you'd normally use. Double that quantity and instead of caramelizing onions you're steaming them, or instead of a skillet you're using a pot which produces very different results.

For our first side Misr Allecha, it's very reminiscent of a Indian Dal. This is a very simple dish cook some lentils throw in some turmeric for color and add good amount of fresh green peppers (I used Serrano peppers). The relative "blandness" of this dish works well against the flavor explosion of the previous two dishes. I think one of the surprising things about Ethiopian cuisine is how heavy it is. I didn't really have any experience with the food those many years ago, but my thoughts were similar to the reactions I got when I told folks I was going to do Ethiopian bento "what an empty box?". A rather ignorant remark, but it does say a lot about our assumptions of the region which can be a bit unfair. I hope my work will change a few minds.

Finally we have Iab, usually it's made from a local farmers cheese. It's usually served with the meal as a last course, to help quell some of the spicy food. I've also read it to be eaten with food spicy foods to help cut the effects. Just a small layer of it in the injera and grab whatever you're eating. Ethiopean food is generally eaten with your hands using injera. Injera is a spongy, stretchy crepe that has a sourdough-like taste. In my first trials on Ethiopian food I tried four different methods and although some had the texture, none had the color, texture, and taste described. Real injera takes about three days to make and I wasn't feeling quite so ambitious. Now that we have Ethiopian restaurants I simply went down and bought some.

This was actually a delightful easy box to put together. I think it would have gone even faster had I chose not to double my audience for this week. I just had so many people respond, the first set of empty spots were full within the first minute of me sending my email. I also had a bunch of new people sign up as alternates, I decided I had to open another set of slots. Hopefully they enjoy!

Box Contents:

Doro Wat
Alicha
Misr Allecha
Iab

Light Asian Bento

2010-08-08T19:07:00.010-05:00

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 recipe for a Soba Noodle with Edamame and Citrus Vinaigrette. I halved the Vinaigrette to let it be the "rice" for the chicken. Originally this was meant as a main with shrimp as the protein, cutting the shrimp gave me another 400 some odd calories to work against, the portioning size of the obentec container did the rest.

I found this great side for grilled five spice carrots, instead I kept the marinade and turned it into more of a glaze. The flavorful marinade was something I couldn't just wash down the drain. I'm sure the flame grilled outside taste would have given it a more smoky component but I wasn't willing to sweat it out with my grill to make this side dish happen.

For soup, I went with the Spicy Coconut vegetable soup, again it asked for shrimp as a protein, but I readjusted the recipe and saved some calories by going with some bamboo shoots instead. To my pleasant surprise this is very close to a indonesian soup I've been trying to replicate for some time. The new findings will give me something to work with, but I'll lean on the opinion of one of my diners to tell me how close (we've been on the hunt together for years on the recipe for this soup.)

Finally, I end lunch with a Spicy Coconut Shrimp with Naga pepper Mango sauce. The original called for habenero, but my eaters have a good tolerance for heat, so I used a bit of the naga pepper sauce I had on hand to put a few more heat levels to the sauce. I should have used the blendtec for a better smother sauce. I'm still working on my plating design :)

I'm glad to be back in the kitchen if only for one or two bentos. I hope to churn out one more before my European trip. I did take this Kimchee class this weekend that I'll post about later.

Box Contents:

Kung Pao style Chicken
Soba Noodle with Edamame and Citrus Vinaigrette
Five Spice Glazed Carrots
Spicy Coconut Vegetable Soup
Coconut Shrimp with Naga Pepper Mango Sauce

Sous Vide Summit

2010-07-27T09:57:00.016-05:00

So I hosted what I dubbed a "Sous Vide Summit" at my house this weekend. What does that mean? It means getting a bunch of foodies interested in Sous Vide method of cooking, the result is a meat-a-thon of unbelievably tasty treats. I had a great time and am very glad to finally be back in the swing of having dinner parties. Although a bit of work prepping and cleaning, the fun with friends new and old is always a blast. Lots of pictures to share today so hang on to your hats for what probably will be a long winded post.

So to start, my own contribution to this shin dig was possibly the easiest (not that seasoning, vacuum sealing food, and dumping the package into perfectly controlled water is hard by any means) my experiment was to show case various grades and cuts of steak each cooked at the magical perfect 134 degrees Fahrenheit or better known as Medium Rare. If you click in you can see the steaks raw side by side, we have from left to right, three rib eye steaks USDA Prime, Choice, Select (great, good, ok) and two Sirloins USDA Prime and Select (great, ok). I popped them into the Sous Vide Supreme for two hours and finished them on the cast iron. The result is what you see on the right. Top two (left to right) Sirloin Prime and Select, bottom three (left to right) Rib Eye Prime, Choice, Select. General comments were that all the steaks were amazing, there was a split on picking the winner between the buttery goodness of the prime rib eye versus the big beefy flavor of the equally tender prime sirloin. We had general agreement that sous vide-ing turns most cheap cuts of steaks to be pretty darn awesome.

You can see the table full of meat we had and that only covered my stuff. We ended up creating the "overflow" table of "old" food as each course new course of food displaced the current set. My other contribution was Gordon Ramsey's famously simple broccoli soup (a hit).

Next up my new friend Paul of Xesla who brought the most amazing array of food (and gear). You'll see above his sous vide rig, it's a rice cooker with a PID controller that basically cycles the rice cooker on and off to hold the temperature stable. His other cool piece of tech is this small traveling plug in fridge he said it was meant for car camping. I'm going to need one of these.

Ok on to the food. Paul brought duck rillet, home cured pork belly, ham hock terrine, and his sous vide contribution of three day beef short ribs (grass fed organic, HEB brand, and Randal's brand). Most impressive, the rillets over his home made sour dough ciabatta bread was awesome a brilliant charcuterie showing. The short ribs (title picture) were of course fantastic, Addie (of Relish Austin) was the first to guess (correctly which short ribs were from where) I seconded the motion. The Grassfed definitely had a better and richer flavor, the interesting bit was that the Randal's short rib came out very dense. Of the three the grassfed held up to reheat better, the Randal's came out too dry. I did confirm one interesting fact, finishing meat on the cast iron causes lots of smoke, but not enough to set off my fire alarm but, if there's black pepper in the crust it will set off the alarm. I suspected this, but this third time around clinches it for me ;)

Paul did a post on the event see it here.

Ryan (from NoseToTailAtHome) was up next with an spicy asian marinated pork belly and a normal salt and pepper pork belly. Both were sinfully tasty, we were a little disappointed that the marinade did not seem to take on the pork belly. If I'm going to try my hand on this one, I may go ahead and finish on a cast iron, I think the fat could use a bit of sizzle to bring out some more flavor, but that's just personal preference.

Kent brought over a Shoulder of Feral Hog, which he later shredded and tossed with a Asian chili sauce. The flavor was fantastic and of course the pork was extremely tender. I loved the flavor of this one, I think as a pulled pork this actually yielded a better result than my lexington pulled pork bbq. The only thing missing would be the bark which you couldn't really obtain by cooking sous vide. Kent also brought over some Shrimp vacuumed in with some butter. The shrimp was amazing, it really retained a lot of that shrimp flavor since it was cooked in the pouch and not lost in a boiling process. Finally he served some soft cooked eggs, as always these eggs come out perfect, the yolk is like a custard perfectly cooked no hard spots.

Onwards to dessert! My picture of the peach crumble by Addie was blurred (sorry) I think one of the others got a good picture so either i'll post a link over or ask to borrow their picture. Paul of course comes in with Fennel and Pandam ice cream and a block of dry ice and asks for the use of my kitchenaid. I've heard of this method of making ice cream, but this was my first time witnessing and tasting it. The ice cream was actually kinda fizzy tasting, very delicious and interesting. Michael of cookingforengineers brought by some fudge made famous when the NY times did a piece him.

This was so much fun. I might have to do this one again, maybe even pick up a PID controller and cheap rice cooker and have two rigs for myself. Big thanks to everyone that came over it was so great tasting everyone's creations. Look forward to more dinner party posts.

Costa Rican Bento

2010-07-13T11:19:00.009-05:00

Well naturally after a trip to Costa Rica I *had* to do a bento on the subject. To be fair the only thing I did eat there that was in this lunch was the Gallo Pinto. The real inspiration is courtesy of my friend Kelly who picked me up from the airport and took me to his favorite bar for some Chifrijo which I talked about earlier. Kelly was nice enough to score me a book of Costa Rican traditional dishes, his estimate was that it was more like the normal day to day stuff that folks would cook in their own kitchen nothing too fancy, right up my alley.

We start our meal off with Tortas De Carne, or simply put beef patty, I like to think of them as squashed meatballs. I will say one of the hardest things about this bento was sourcing some of the ingredients. I had the forethought to bring home some Salsa Lizano a local variant on Worcester sauce that the local use on *everything*. It's thicker than Worcester sauce, has the same tang but has a slight spicy component that makes it interesting. The other "spice" mix that was called for was "Complete Seasoning". Apparently this is actually a well known "blend" and I was lucky enough to find some in the ethnic aisle in one of the larger markets here in town. Anyhow back to the beef, lots of cilantro, onions and red bell peppers complement the spices and they were quickly pan seared. The Tortas were very flavorful and the sear insured a moist patty.

Next up, probably the only dish that I actually ate in Costa Rica, Gallo Pinto. This is considered the national dish of Costa Rica and don't let the looks deceive you it's not just black beans and rice. There's actually a fairly large ingredient list to bring out some of the complex flavors of this slow cook dish. Again we use the Salsa Lizano and a bit of Worcester sauce. Ultimately, I failed on this recipe, not everyone thinks so, but deep down inside I *know* so. See I'm going to let you in on a little secret: Asians, or at least the ones I know including myself, we don't know how to make rice in a pot. No, really! Why do you think every asian household has a rice cooker, it freaking does everything for you. You just need to measure the water properly (I don't go with the markings on the pot, I use my mom's back of the palm trick) hit the button and it pops up as soon as the rice is done. Wait 10 mins, unveil and you're done. My gut told me to use the rice cooker, the stove is temperamental, but I didn't stick to my guns and went to the stove anyhow. The rice was a *bit* under cooked. I covered for it by adding more water to the beans and cooked the rice in longer. It fixed most of the problems but not all. I still contend that the stove is the crappiest way to prepare rice we have technology folks, you don't see me rubbing two sticks together to make fire do you?

Ok enough rant. The next dish is called Guiso De Chayote Con Elotes Tiernos or Corn stew with tender Chayote. I've never worked with chayote, it's got a very neutral taste, it's consistency is somewhere between a cucumber and broccoli stem. This is a very simple dish that is easily overlooked. The flavors were not as bold as the other items in the box, it's a simple veggie side. Personally this was my favorite in terms of balancing healthy and taste. The vegetables were simply simmered in milk until tender and treated with a bit of salt and pepper.

The soup features the Pejibaye that I bought and later improved into a dish. Kelly impressed upon me how good this Crema De Pejibaye soup was and if I had the opportunity that I should make it. I had my doubts on obtaining pejibaye, I scoured Austin and finally was able to find some at the local ethnic market jarred in brine. Apparently pejibaye is named different by region and country so I almost past up the jar but the visual on this fruit caught my attention. I won't say that this was the healthiest of soups but I will say I was surprised that it didn't rely on heavy cream or copious amounts of butter, rather some good old Cream of Chicken condensed soup. This was possibly the most popular part of the bento, folks really liked the creamy texture and the nutty flavor imparted by the pejibaye.

Last but not least is my quasi dessert. Pudin De Elote or corn pudding. This was very simple to put together, condensed milk, corn, and egg, yeah that's it. It's hard to describe this dish, the consistency was like a flan or custard. The corn flavor was very distinct which is an unusual quality in a dessert (hence me labeling it a quasi dessert). Folks seemed to like it just fine so I guess it worked out. I'm not a big dessert person so I found it a bit sweet for my own tastes.

Fun bento this time around I'm glad I've been able to at least get out this one bento this week. The next few months will be very trying when it comes to posting about cooking. I've got several trips for work through September, but I will get a chance to blow through Denver, Orlando, London, Paris and Marseilles. I'll be lucky to get in two bentos from now until the beginning of September. If I'm feeling really plucky I'll go for three. I will try to post from the road, and I'm having folks over for some some collaborative cooking, look forward to a post on that.

Ok, thanks for reading!

Box contents:

Torta De Carne
Gallo Pinto
Guiso De Chayote Con Elotes Tiernos
Crema De Pejibaye
Pudin De Elote