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...

This isn't technically my third Thai bento, but it is the third one that I've labeled as "Thai Bento" and I really didn't have another theme to follow with this one and someone wanted Thai food.  I had a few new Thai recipes that I wanted to work on so this request worked out well. I've already professed my love for green curry. Here I went with a beef sirloin with Japanese eggplant in green curry sauce. I kind of screwed up here, I should have sliced the beef a lot thinner to keep the beef tender, that or I should have gone with large chunks of beef (probably preferrably beef short rib) and gone the slow cooker route. In this case (although everyone gave comments on really liking the dish) I felt the beef too tough and the eggplant a tad too mushy. Slow cook is the best call here since I don't eat up a burner space and can afford to stage the eggplant into the crock at the last second and get better texture. For a salad I found a salad called ...

For whatever reason I'm having a hard time getting this post writen. As always life is busy and finding time to cook is just as hard, but whatever reason the last two bentos made a slow appearance into a post and this one seems to be just as difficult. Once I start it goes quickly, but my brain has been put into procrastination mode. Anyhow enough excuses. If you remember, a friend suggested that I go through the various regions of India as a "set" of themes. A fabulous idea, Indian food is really diverse, each region makes use of different ingredients from spices to vegetables and proteins. This time we land in the west Indian state of Gujarat. Gujarati cuisine is heavily vegetarian based focusing on complex flavor profiles of being sweet, sour, and spicy (often all at the same time). I realize I said that the majority of the dishes from Gujarat is vegetarian, but I usually get feedback that the bento tends to be less "satisfying" when I produce an all...

Shame on me. I produced this bento last week and am only now getting to post it. I guess two impromptu posts about trailer food took the wind out of my sails. So I've mentioned before that coming up with new themes after five years gets a little tough. So a friend suggested that I narrow in on specific regions of India as a source of new bento themes. Since my Indian themes tend to be very popular I thought it was a great idea. I decided to start my journey with the northwestern Indian province of Punjab. We start off with our main dish Murg Makkai. It's it's a chicken curry with a tomato based gravy.  Every region of India has it's own signature to the nations cuisine. Punjabi cooking includes greater use of dairy as well as meat. Here we use yogurt to give the curry some tang as well as some thickness. The use of corn is a new concept for me in Indian food I cannot recall the use of corn in any Indian dishes I've eaten in the past. One of the compl...

I had a hell of a time getting the title photo into place. For some reason every time I tried to upload the photo it turned it on it's side. I was going to blame blogger for this but I finally fixed it by uploading via my mac. GRRRR. Who to blame? My browser or my OS. Ok.ok. in with anger out with love. WOOOSAH.  Originally I was going to go with another Indian theme since curries seem to be very popular with my bentoers but then I remembered I have a co-worker from Kenya so I quizzed her a bit about Kenyan dishes and started my research from there. Like many cuisines, Kenya draws on influences of regions around the area, Arab, Indian, and surprisingly English cuisine.  The main dish is called Kuku Paka, it's a chicken in a coconut based curry sauce. This is a nice combination of the Indian influences of curries as well as the English use of actual "Curry Powder". Curry powder (after digging around) was an English invention to mimic the flavors of Ind...

By request I have produced another Indian themed bento. It was quite timely since the newspaper was featuring this Indian cookbook author that wrote a book on cooking traditional Indian dishes with a slow cooker. The book is called "The Indian Slow Cooker" by Anupy Singla. I just found her blog and will be earmarking it for a full read. I enjoyed the book, but I bought the e-book version for my nook and it's just hard navigating reference material on an e-book versus have the old fashion tree killing paper version. I do like the idea of adapting a cuisine to using the fire and forget slow cooker, it's a good way to save stove space and the lack of need to supervise the cooking lets me still have a reasonable Sunday. I will say I seized the opportunity to buy yet another slow cooker bringing me up to three (ouch am I like the slow cooker version of a cat hoarder?). This Lamb Korma recipe actually didn't come from the book. I grabbed a few recipes from online and t...

I so love Indian food, I grew up with the cuisine in high school trading lunches with my Indian friends. I like to believe I got the good end, trading my sushi rolls, and fried rice for their home cooked yummies from their mothers (my mom made 2x to help me accomodate my trading)! Anyhow it's probably a good reason why it's been a repeated theme here. I've been collecting recipes hoping for new themes and all the ones I tended to tag recently are Indian. I centered around this menu because they are a departure from what I normally get to experience, new items that I don't always get to see on the local menu. Butter Chicken shows up in many London menus, I don't see it much here but I couldn't resist when one of the blogs I follow did a fast/budget version that look scrumptious. I went with the more flavorful chicken thigh (instead of breast) which added a bit of flavor. I loved that the recipe called for yogurt to add some flavor instead of the usual heavy cre...

As usual, I have to bow my head in shame for such a late post. This bento was produced last week, but as has been the usual mantra lately work and life obligations have kept me from making lunch for my eaters. I'm helping out with a friends wedding and another party so I'm still busy in the kitchen, just not doing anything exciting enough that I feel the need to take pictures and talk about it. Sadly, I was in a giant hurry to make lunch for this bento. I felt so bad about not getting to cook for such a while but I still had such a crunch on time that I couldn't really devote myself to a long planned out lunch. I picked a menu that I knew I could execute quickly and still keep light and healthy. Asian cuisine is good for the quick and healthy constraints and of course Thai is a favorite amongst my diners. In fact when I shouted over the cube walls, "hey I need a theme" there were quite a few chirps of "Thai, curry, Indian" seems like my audience had an A...

Thai, who doesn't like a good curry? Coconut milk, fresh ingredients and simple preparation makes Thai food an easy favorite to include as a theme. To make things even easier I even had a sous chef and taste tester to help things along. Ok, running short on time so no more yammering. Panang Curry. Thai curries all have a start point of the basic curry paste, whether that be green, sour, red, massaman, yellow, or panang. They all have the same thing in common, a lot of work on a mortar and pestle. Savvy cooks and restaurants know that the best bet is to use some canned curry paste as a base. Yes I've made my share of homemade paste and I have the giant mortar and pestle to prove it, but a good canned paste is the home cook's best friend. The curry is pretty simple, I fried up the paste in some coconut cream and added the rest of the ingredients. And you can put pretty much anything in, I went with beef and bell pepper, but I've seen onion, bamboo shoots and baby corn. I...

So once upon a time, many years ago I asked a friend for a food challenge. I was in the full swing of my life goal of cooking as many cuisines from appetizer to dessert to learn as much as I can about food. Austin, at the time was still more of a college town and food had not exploded to be what it is today. My friend said, "fine Ethiopian food" my response, "well that's not fair, we don't even have an Ethiopian restaurant for me to try the cuisine." him, "you asked for a challenge, and my favorite place in Houston is an Ethiopian restaurant". I wasn't really willing to drive out to Houston so I set to the web. I studied countless recipes and poured over every description I could find and created the tastes in my head. Did I pass? An enthusiastic yes. This turns out to be my favorite cuisine to cook, and I think it was because of the surprise complexity of the cuisine as well as the amount of research I had to do to get there. Anyway, I'm v...