Eating in a box

It's cold, it's October, time for some more hearty food and where better to find such food than to celebrate with a German themed Oktoberfest Bento. It was tempting to go with standard well known Oktoberfest/German foods. I was ready to break out the meat grinder and sausage stuffer for some bratwurst when I stopped myself and thought, what else do Germans eat? Thinking back to my business trip this summer, the menus I saw in Frankfurt were chock full of great tasting foods. So I began researching German foods and came up with an nice list of stuff and found some good stuff from various "Omas" (grandmothers) and made some modifications for my own tastes voila we have lunch Let's start with the main entree Kummel Klopse. I'm a sucker for meatballs, really, if there's a list of things I can make and meatballs is on that list, then I'm going for the meatballs. I'm fascinated that every society/culture has some form of meatball, they are all different ...

So why this picture instead of the tasting menu? Well, there was a ton of delicious food and I would need two pictures for the menu, yes it looks fuzzy, but if you click in and look at the bigger picture you'll notice that I wasn't actually focusing on the wine. I'm going to start off with an apology, I will not be able to describe all of the wonderful yummy food I had at this food blogger event. Shoreline was very generous with taste after taste of what seemed like their entire menu. I had assumed we finished our tasting during the appetizer stage. When they started making some noise about "are you ready for the entrees" and " we'll be sampling all of the desserts" I realized I was in some serious trouble. My little brain doesn't have the capacity to remember the details of every dish. So, for this post I will put up groups of pictures and post some highlights. Just a bit of a preamble for those that don't know Shoreline. Shoreline is one of...

So every year my wife and I like to give homemade gifts from the kitchen. This year we decided to go with a bundle of fudge. This sounded like a fairly easy and straight forward idea, it turns out there's a lot more to fudge than melting some chocolate. After 3 messed up batches and a pot that has been completely ruined, I have to say I've learned a lot about fudge and the science of candy making. For you're reading pleasure I present to you my trials and tribulations. I'm not a sweet's person, I actually dislike chocolate and ice cream ( I know I hear the gasps all the time), so I've never actually had fudge before. This really presents a challenge when that's the gift I'm to be giving. My wife was armed with a handful of recipes, and after reading them thru, I thought, how hard could this be. Turns out, VERY... Good fudge, I learned cannot be shortcutted, the very best you can do is to take out insurance to make sure you don't mess it up. The id...

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...