Eating in a box

The Missus had a hankering for soba noodles so I did a little search in the backlog and found a cold soba salad that seemed pretty yummy. I paired it with a Japanese ginger chicken recipe to add a bit of protein to round out the bento. First up the ginger chicken. There are quite a few variations of this recipe and it's been referenced as a "comfort food" with many tales recounting mothers or grandmothers serving this dish over a bowl of rice. They're all about the same recipe wise so I picked this one that I saw featured on pbs.org. The ingredients are pretty straight forward: chicken thigh soy sauce, sake, honey, ginger, vegetable oil, chopped scallions and sesame for garnish. The marinade becomes the sauce, you cut the chicken in bite size pieces and drop it in a marinade. I let it go for a few hours as I ran some errands. Remove the chicken from the marinade and pan fry in batches until brown. Remove the chicken and then bring the marinade to boil ...

April 15th 2012 marked the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking. There's been a small buzz in the food blog world of people having "Titanic Dinner Parties" where they feature some of the offerings of the 1st class dining menu. I was then inspired to offer my bento-ers a taste of what would become the last dinner on the Titanic. Unfortunately in order to still fit inside my budget I had to pick simple-ish dishes that I could easily buy the ingredients without breaking the bank. As usual if you see something you like I'm happy to post a recipe if requested. So I'm sticking with my new format. I figured since I had to upload a giant image anyhow, you may as well benefit from seeing a bigger version of the photo instead of squinting at a smaller thumbnail. What do you think? It feels a little linear, but it does break up the monotony. I'm happy I'm able to use some natural lighting for my pictures recently but I miss my old Nikon, I still feel i...

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...

Got a new kitchen gadget! I bought an indoor grill with some holdover gift certificate that we had. I've always had a problem with grilling stuff. It's just too much effort to fire up the grill just to make something for one meal. You gotta clean it, you gotta fire it up etc. etc. Perfect solution: an indoor grill you can temperature control and fits on the counter! I couldn't help it, I had to build a whole bento around the fact I could grill on demand. I found these amazingly huge sea scallops at the store. I couldn't help it I had to put something together. So a simple soy honey sea scallops grilled to perfection. I think it'll be interesting to hear back to see how well they re-heated. I tried to undercook just a touch so that the microwave wouldn't produce a tough chewy scallop. I think the right thing to do was to grill at the max setting, I would have gotten some better grill marks. Still yummy, just not as pretty as I would have hoped. Had to add a bit ...

Sorry a dull looking lunch, I promise it was remarked as tasty. I was going for a higher healthy factor this time. My friend explaining the health benefits of Quinoa, I of course had to go and do some research on this grain and promptly incorporate it into a bento. I ran out of room on this box I took over the utensils slot and put in the asparagus. Now that I'm looking at it composition wise I think There's a little too much brown and orange. Tried to save some time and effort with this box. I bought a pre-roasted chicken from the store and defrosted some pesto from a previous box and put together some fresh mozzarella and tomato into a sandwich, the bread is a low cal low carb bread. Note to self to make 5 sandwiches you don't need a whole chicken. Half a chicken would do fine. Next came the Quinoa, I pulled a recipe for a shitake quinoa pilaf. I had some fears on using such an unknown ingredient but the recipe turned out quite nicely, I had to increase the liquid it cal...