Eating in a box

While here in Fiji my wife and I decided to take a half day class at the Flavours of Fiji cooking school . It is located just outside of where we were staying at Denarau island it was a easy hop over from our hotel to the industrial estate. The cooking facility was pretty impressive, they had cooking stoves setup for up to 16 people (one instructor 15 students). It was a large hall that had two primary vents in the ceiling and two massive AC units to help keep things cool (towards the end when we had our curries going it did get a bit hot). Our host Ethee start off showing us the best way to pick between drinking and cooking coconuts. Ethee explained that you want young green coconuts (that you must pick off the trees) that don't actually slosh around when shaken (meaning there's no air space in the nut so it was full of jelly and water). Alternatively for cooking you want a brown coconut with plenty of flesh (just fallen off the tree would be good). Next Ethee w...

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 ...

I've been working on easy to cook lunches that I can put together during the week. Usually my bentos are made during the weekend when I have a bit more time to shop, prep and cook. I like this particular bento because a lot of the work is set and forget and doesn't require a lot of active prep time which gives me more time to unwind after work. I've made Hainanese chicken in the past  (wow it's been 5 years) it's basically a poached chicken. I say "basically" but that description doesn't do the humble dish justice, it's got a lot of flavor and a great simple protein meal. Certainly, such a dish can easily be done sous vide couldn't it? After a bit of searching there were lots of different variations so apparently I wasn't the first to come up with the idea. Oh well. As I said the ingredients are simple. The top for the poaching packets: Green onion, ginger, salt and chicken breast. The bottom picture is the sauce: rice wine, soy sauc...

Greetings from Down Under! I'm on temporary assignment in Australia (next two years) and we're finally settling into our new place. This is my very first use of the new kitchen. A simple bento box from what I could find at the local grocery store. Nothing fancy I'm afraid. I'm just glad I got to cook I'll confess I cheated this time around. I don't have any spices or really anything in the kitchen other than flake sea salt for seasoning. This chicken came pre-spatchcocked and pre-marinaded. I will say it was very convenient. From what I could tell (the label was sparce on details) the marinade was made of oil, garlic, onion, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper (maybe a bit of tarragon) and lemon and thickened with mayo. $13 AUD about $10 USD... (sigh) everything is very expensive here. This was my first experience in cooking with a convection oven. It browned the chicken quite well but the outside was achieving a golden brown faster than the internal t...

As always it's been crazy and getting time to cook has not really happened for me. I'm just glad I've had two posts in a row about food I've cooked even if there's been a long break. It's been a while since I've done a Japanese traditional bento and I figure why not. Most everything I cooked was from a blog that helped inspire me when I first got started on this blog,  Just Bento  and sister blog Just Hungry . She's got a lot of wonderful recipes and even produced a book. Lots of great tips that I've followed (even applying to non Japanese foods). I've posted links to the recipes. For the main dish I made Chicken Nanban . I used chicken thigh meat and went with using my fryer since I had so much chicken to make. The original recipe called for pan frying, I'm not sure if using the fryer was actually worse or better in terms how healthy the dish is. Immediately after frying you cool the chicken in the Nanban sauce, which is a sweet,...

Ok more traveling, this time to London, first week for work (above is our view of Buckingham Palace from our office) and second week for vacation with my wife. Lots of pictures of a lot of different food, I've manage to cut the number of photos to the highlights of what and where we ate. I've put links to the various places just in case you're in the area and want to check out some of these places. Sorry in advance about some of the photos I shot everything using a Galaxy S3 mini android phone that I acquired while on this trip and it does a pretty good job, but under low light it gets a bit grainy. Got off the plane bright and early 6am and dropped my bags at the hotel. While there I started my trip off with a classic English breakfast. Bangers (sausage) mushroom, roasted tomato, potato cake, hash browns, vegetarian sausage (which was quite nice), eggs, beans (heinz I believe) and some black pudding (blood sausage, a little dry but tasty) Since my room wasn...