Eating in a box

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

I confess there's not really a good cohesive theme for this box. I just got two things of free food product and decided to just throw something yummy together. Above you see my attempt at creative swirling with the cream in the soup but it just looks like weird modern art. I need more practice. So part of being plugged into the food blog community I seem to get product samples a lot. By no means do they say, "hey you must shill for us" or obligate me to do so, but I figure it's nice if I find a product useful to put in a nice blurb at the very least, I like to let my bento eaters benefit as well. Kinda like the foodblogger events, I go, I write a nice entry about it. This is no different, but I figure it's important that I disclaimer that I did get free stuff, I'm using free stuff, and I've decided to write about the free stuff I got. I'm no professional so I'm in no obligation to disclose all this stuff, but I figure it shouldn't hurt to be up...

I'm back with another post, sorry about the sporadic posts things are very busy. I'm still getting over the cold I caught a few weeks back, this cough will not go away. I suppose one good thing came out of this cold, sitting in the doctor's office, I came across an issue of Better Homes and Gardens. The issue featured a showcase on strawberries, all strawberries all the time. What a great idea! Better yet, my new found love of going to the local farmer's market had to play into the bento. So the mission was produce the strawberry bento supplemented with ingredients from the farmers market. The farmers market was chock full of wonderful produce and meats. The prices were perhaps a little bit more than I would spend on groceries, but if you factor in the cost of organic produce I think the money comes out the same. The real difference is that all of that money goes straight to the hardworking local farmers. It was great speaking with the farmers, they were all very eager ...