Eating in a box

It's been a while since I've been to one of these blogger events, and I was really excited when I took a look at the menu and started reading up on the restaurant. Trace restaurant is located at the W hotel here in downtown Austin. It's a beautiful restaurant featuring four different themed "lounge bars". It has a nice and quiet atmosphere. Trace takes great pride in sourcing as much of their food from local farms. I spoke with Valerie Broussard their resident "forager" (pictured below) and she explained that they worked with the Sustainable Food Center on a token system which enables farmers to quickly get paid and bills the restaurant and hotel which pays on a more regular business cycle. Sounds like a win win proposition there. The menu changes a bit depending on what and where they can source various items. For instance our winter garden salad came from Springdale farms, where as on the website menu it says Animal Farms. And a few of the items we d...

A trip down memory lane this week. I asked my eaters to give me their list of favorite dishes so that I can create a blast from the past lunch for them. Lots of suggestions, the tough part was picking something from everyone's list that still put a lunch with some balance of complimentary flavors. The lists were pretty big, I guess I'm doing something right. Let's explore what lunch brings us today. We'll start off with our entree, miso glazed salmon from our Omega 3 goodness box. Topped this one off with some chives today. (not from my aerogarden) I've learned a lot from my experiments on this blog and the number one tip is to slightly undercook certain things to allow them to finish when a reheat occurs. That way the food is at perfection when the eaters actually eat lunch. Also I've learned salmon seems to be one of the rare exceptions of allowable fish to be packed in lunch. Usually, fish type lunches that are reheated get lots of complaints from co-workers...

I'm back with another post, sorry about the sporadic posts things are very busy. I'm still getting over the cold I caught a few weeks back, this cough will not go away. I suppose one good thing came out of this cold, sitting in the doctor's office, I came across an issue of Better Homes and Gardens. The issue featured a showcase on strawberries, all strawberries all the time. What a great idea! Better yet, my new found love of going to the local farmer's market had to play into the bento. So the mission was produce the strawberry bento supplemented with ingredients from the farmers market. The farmers market was chock full of wonderful produce and meats. The prices were perhaps a little bit more than I would spend on groceries, but if you factor in the cost of organic produce I think the money comes out the same. The real difference is that all of that money goes straight to the hardworking local farmers. It was great speaking with the farmers, they were all very eager ...

I confess this week's box came from watching Food Network. I only made tweaks to the for taste reasons. The idea was to go out to the farmers market and see what was fresh and good. It just so happens all the fresh and good stuff I found conformed to the recipes for the show I was watching. It was a yummy menu so why not? I'm not sure why but I've not really gotten around to visiting my local farmers market. It's a habit I intend to change, everything was so fresh and looked very inviting. Yes, in some cases the food is a little more expensive but it's nice to support my local farmer. Well let's tuck in shall we? We start with a nice Pasta Primavera, originally a vegetarian recipe, I felt like I need some protein. I happened to have some marinated chicken breast in the fridge. A quick pop in the oven yielded not just the chicken I needed for my Bento-eaters lunch, but for my dinner tonight as well. I can't believe how easy it was to put together this bento, ...