Eating in a box

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

To celebrate St. Patrick's day I decided on another Irish Bento, I figured this time around I wasn't going to do the traditional Corned beef with cabbage, been there done that. I figure, how hard is it to find some good traditional Irish recipes that were preferably healthy? Apparently this proved to be a pretty tough task. I started digging and found loads of cool ideas, when I started researching it turns out they were actually Scottish, or British. Worse yet the things I did find were all cabbage, stews or corned beef and always the potato. I was at a loss, until I remembered that I work for a global company. I pinged one of my coworkers in the UK office who happens to be Irish perfect! (I thought) The conversation went something like this (minor paraphrasing but the just think Irish accidents on his parts): Me: "Hey, what do you guys eat in Ireland? What kind of traditional foods do you have? I'm trying to find something you don't usually get. I'm trying t...