Eating in a box

Finally a new bento! With the house move it's been hard to find a space in the kitchen to do any bento work. I'll apologize in advance for next week, i'll be traveling for work. I'll see if I can find some material to do some interim posts. Without further ado: I found some great ideas and recipes for a high fiber Polynesian style bento. I was a bit afraid that the flavors were going to be too bland for my eaters. A lot of the flavor came in the sauce which didn't seem to soak themselves into either the chicken or the sweet potatoes. My audience seemed to like the box ok so I must have done something right. We start with this Polynesian chicken. It's got a healthy dose of cilantro and green onions. The sauce is something like a teriyaki sauce, with a lot of ginger and a spike of star anise. Considering how much soy went into the marinade the flavor was very mild and the hints of ginger and star anise really came through. Next up is a Sweet Potatoes and Bananas i...

With the holiday season upon us, my wife prevailed upon me to take a break and take sometime off bentoing to actually enjoy the holidays. So this is my final box for the year. We've got a italian inspired lunch today. I tried to stay with a lighter theme the only hearty fare today is the stew. I had a pretty big hole since I decided to move the stew into an outside container. Fortuneatly the big plump strawberries were ready to take the spot. We start with a nice italian lamb stew, I didn't use the crockpot this time, I was actually afraid to make the meat too soft. Lots of great hearty ingredients to keep my eaters warm (it's getting cold down here). Carrots, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers potatoes, and of course lamb put that together with a hearty blend of herbs and you get some pretty tasty stuff. This side was a bit of a struggle for me. There were plenty of sides, but part of my new mandate was that the menu had to be doable very quickly. All the other sides I origin...

Wow, a little publicity and I triple my visits in 15 hours. Welcome all you laptop lunch newsletter readers! Again, a unsolicited plug, I *love* my lunch boxes, they are so versatile and have made it easier for me to pack these lunches for my wife and her coworkers. Back to the business at hand I've decided to go out with a bang on my last couple of bentos. The idea behind this bento was really the dessert, I had to build the entrees and the sides to make the desert fit. Since I started the concept with desert let's start by posting about it. I was kicking around the idea of making a creme brulee for my eaters. Two obstacles around that idea . First, glycemicly or health friendly? I don't think so. Two is the logistics of packing. I'd have to pack in six ramekins, not a big deal I suppose, but I need to keep transport easy for my wife. So I settled on another idea: Banana Brulee, I just broke out the torch and got to work. Instead of ice cream, I went with vanilla yogur...

Yeah, I could have saved this bento for March and St. Paddies day, but corned beef is good any day of the year. I've been on a kick to try to make it easier in the kitchen to churn out 10 meals in a night. Whereas preparation is definitely key and important, I'll say that the crockpot is the hardware lynch pin in making that happen. Anyhow, It's getting cold and I needed some hearty food to warm up my eaters. I'll confess the menu this time was a bit difficult to come up with. Irish food tends to be on the starchy side so trying to stay with the low glycemic was difficult, but I think I found some good alternatives to being somewhat low carb and glycemic index friendly. First up, we have the corned beef, this is one of those no brainer dishes. I love cooking up a corned beef brisket in the cooker it gives me something to munch on through the week so it was an easy choice to deliver as bento. I usually punch it up a bit by stewing it beer, but I didn't know how that ...

Sorry for the sparce post folks, the holiday season's been hard on me, and I'm trying to space myself out for the holiday as I already committed to take it easy and resume bentos after the new year. Fear not this doesn't mean I'm not posting! Without further delay here we have the Fritta Bento! The idea of cooking up a brunch had been nagging at me some time. It wasn't until I found a blog entry somewhere on pumpkin blintzes that I had to jump on it. We start with a simple frittata. Unfortunately it deflated on me as I packed it. Some things are just meant to be served fresh I suppose. Or the great chefs just have better technique. Very simple dish, I just put in some left over veggies that I had from another dish to whip this together. I made a gazpacho for a side "soup" , I think I made it a bit too strong on the onion side. I meant for it to be more light and refreshing since I have been sending out some heavy bentos lately. Anyhow, definite graded a B ...

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...

Welcome back! For my first box back from my Taiwan trip I put together a Thai themed Bento. I really like Thai food, I had to struggle with this box because there were so many great recipes in my head that I would have loved to go with. In the end because the "seed" idea for the box came forth from the desert (more on that later) which is rice based, I had to discard any ideas for a curry (besides I'll save a good curry for the Indian bento). For some reason my prep for this box wasn't very good and it cost me all of a night and some of another to crank out two sets of boxes. (lesson learned better prep == more sleep) We start with a Pad Thai. Everyone has a variant this happens to be mind. My rice noodles were from the pantry and a little dated, so it required a bit more rehydration. I topped it off with a quick bean sprout stir fry as I had a lot leftover, extra sprouts never hurt anyone. Had to use some fake grass as I couldn't use the container since it woul...

Will miracles never cease, I happened to have swapped memory cards and to my delight found that my substitute memory card did contain my Pot Roast bento pics! Anyway onto the bento. It's pretty amazing what you can throw together impromptu style given some inspiration. I had intended only to do one bento for the week as I was busy preparing for my trip to Taiwan. It just so happened that with my trip to the grocery store, for buying my goods for the South American bento, I qualified for 2 free pounds of chuck roast. What better way to celebrate my good fortune than to turn it and whatever leftovers I had into a bento! So I yanked out the crockpot and got cooking. Ok you're asking, why pot roast, blah so plain. Well growing up in a Chinese family that owned a Chinese restaurant, you don't get much American food. Things like Hamburger Helper and Luby's were a treat, otherwise it was Happy family this, Kung Pao chicken that. (believe me it gets old). The Pot roast was pret...

Today's bento is courtesy of some tutelage from couple that use to own a Persian restaurant here in Austin. For one of the dinner parties they hosted for our coworkers they were nice enough to have me over so I could watch and help prepare the meal. As with many middle eastern cuisine there's a lot of stews and curry type items, but what I found interesting was in Persian cooking, the preparation of rice is very important. There are a huge variety of recipies for the preparation of rice. For this bento I selected Baghali Polo which is a lima bean/Dill rice. I tossed in some of my Baba Ghanouj (courtesy Alton Brown, my hero). The main stew is called Fesenjoon, it's rather unique in that the recipe calls for a pound and a half of ground walnut to be cooked until the oils are released. It's then cooked with chicken and pomegrate syrup for two hours. The result is a dish that is a little sweet, a little sour, and a very tender chicken. The second stew is called Mirza Ghase...

So this was the original first bento I wanted to do for my eaters. It's a classic Japanese bento box. I did away with most of the compartments to give me more space, so the silicon muffin cups came in really handy this time around. I got to use my handy egg molds too. Yes that white heart is actually a hard boiled egg! Some of the blog sites had mentioned using x-large eggs so it would fill the mold, but I found that the x-large eggs actually burst when I tried to mold them, so when I stepped down to a large size egg it fit perfectly. The larger sauce container contains ponzu sauce for the gyozas, the smaller containers contain plain soy sauce. I liked that there was a nice balance of colors from the food and the various hardware I put into the box, it makes it more fun to shoot and no doubt more pleasing to eat. I cheated this time around and packed in some instant Miso for a soup. In order to do this many boxes, (2 days worth 6 people each) I'm going to need to learn how to c...

So With all of my bentos I post a little index card at the front describing the contents, any inspirations I had creating the menu for the box, and of course any serving and heating instructions. It's kinda like mom's note to their kids in the lunch box, hopefully it's not too campy for my eaters. There wasn't much in theme going into this box, I was originally going for some sort of Thanksgiving theme with the turkey wrap and optional cranberry dressing, but since the rest of the items didn't match I kinda gave up on a theme so tried to work with colors and stay in the healthy rules. Box Contents: Turkey spinach wrapped in a Sundried tomato wheat Tortilla with a side of cranberry dressing. Whole wheat penne tossed in Pesto and pine nuts Baby carrots Gingerbread men sandwitching Milano cookies Vegetable Barley soup (not pictured)

Chinese bento! Ok i'll admit, I *really* wanted to do a traditional Japanese bento to start, but this might have worked out better for me. Starting with Chinese food allowed to me work with recipes I was already familiar with and concentrate on the portioning as well as the logistics of launching lunch to 6 people. For the lunch itself I went with some basic comfort foods as I was growing up. For the main entree Moo Shu Pork with a scallion brush for the hoisin sauce. Hot and Sour soup (my dad's recipe) on the side. A chicken fried rice, unlike the fast food variety, the fried rice I had growing up was a lightly pan fried rice with very little in oil and no soy sauce usually topped with a thin omelette. For desert we have a sweet almond "tofu" (it's actually more like gelatin) mixed with a light fruit cocktail. Everyone seemed to enjoy their lunch and they're still wanting more so I guess I did something right. Things I learned: 1) Prep time is important don...