Eating in a box

BBQ (more accurately grilling) culture is pretty big here in Sydney, I was talking with my coworkers about my friends back home and their awesome briskets and pulled pork in their big green eggs. Here they are more into grilling kabobs and steaks on the "barbie" it's a little more rare to hear about smoking and slow cooking. So folks seemed pretty excited when I told them I had previous made pulled pork in a slow cooker, I ended up promising to bring in a "Hawaiian" bento with my slow cooker Kalua pulled pork. I suppose this one is not much different than my first Hawaiian bento . The box is smaller and no compartments so I've had to learn to deal with "sauceless" dish (rather my backpack learned the perils of sauces during my walk to work).  One of the "cool" things here is that most everyone has standardized on "takeaway" boxes (the clear container above). They're all microwave safe and dishwasher safe, every lid fi...

Happy New Year all! (a tad late I know) As always it's crazy busy. I did this bento two weeks ago and am only now getting to posting the pictures and writing something up. Hot off the heels of my trip to Hawaii, I had to bring some of the great food back here to Austin and share with my bento eaters. The hard part was picking out what to make, it would be hard to cram all the great food I had into one small box. In the end after weeding out ingredients that would be hard to source and deciding what would taste good with what I give you: Hawaiian Bento. First there's just no avoiding some sort of pork. I didn't have the taro leaves for Super J's Lau Lau's so I had to settle with a Kahlua Pork. I cooked the pork shoulder wrapped in banana leaves for eight hours in the slow cooker and you can see the results above. Click in and see the full size, I realize the small picture is kinda funky looking (but I didn't want to show yet another plate of pulled p...

Today's bento is actually a bento for one. My girlfriend wanted to do a lunch exchange with a co-worker who's Indian. Great! A cultural exchange, and this sounded like a fairly straight forward box to plan out but as my girlfriend and I starting going thru dishes and ideas it started to get harder and harder. Apparently if you remove meat, seafood (some folks make that exemption), and eggs (same) it gets kinda hard. Always the favorite is the ketchup fried rice. Problem is fried rice usually involves some sort of meat and egg. So I simply skipped the meaty items. On our trip to the Chinese grocery store we found some vegetarian "ham". The stuff stilled tasted like soy protein but at least it gave some additional texture for the dish so I went with it. I've had some vegetarian duck that was pretty darn close and was very very tasty. So, I'm gonna go on a tangent here. Given folks are vegetarian there seems to be a huge amount of products that mimic the look and...

It's gonna be a busy May for me, lots of travel and filled up weekends so I feel the need to try to get in bentos where ever I can because I know getting cooking time in will be tough. I originally had a more ambitious theme but I was reminded that my weekend was going to be packed. So in honor of the dragon boat races I was at this weekend I decided to do a super quick Chinese bento. I wasn't messing around; from a dead start to clean kitchen I was in and out in an hour and a half (a new record for me I think) I even raised my arms in victory. \(>.<)/ So what makes for a quick bento? I've given this a lot of thought because I really enjoyed my extra free time. I think the keys are familiar dishes and very few cooking steps. Take this Asian marinated pork, step one put all the stuff in bag, step two next morning put in probe thermometer set for 155F dump it into oven, step three yank it out of the oven when loud thermometer starts beeping. Step four declare great succ...

I decided to continue my theme of "Holidays around the World" by going to the Philippines this time. Sadly, I didn't get to research as much history like the Hanukkah bento I did last week. The Philippines did surprise me on the amount of traditional foods and blending of flavors so I went ahead and did a quick dive into Filipino foods to bring you this nice (and hearty) lunch. Filipino food is greatly influenced by both Spanish and it's neighboring Asian cousins. This is pretty evident in the ingredients and dishes as well as their names (some taking on Spanish names). As a former Spanish colony, there is a heavy tradition around big feasts during the holiday season, namely Noche Bueno (Good night) for Christmas. I think there's a really rich food culture here and am looking forward to exploring Filipino food more, there's even a Filipino grocery/restaurant nearby for me to check out. Hardinera is usually made out of pork and reserved for special occasions, I...

So I figure since it's the holiday season I'd take the time to pick a related theme. Hanukkah is a great excuse for me to do more research into the Jewish cuisine, I loved my dip into Rosh Hashanah bento and I enjoyed learning the history of the cuisine. I think I spent a week reading up on the Hanukkah food trying (in vain) to design a healthy Hanukkah bento. I think I learned a few things and my diners so far seemed to have enjoyed themselves. The picture at the right is the brisket, but I neglected to put in the veggies and the final sauce you see in the bento box in the title picture. It's a braised brisket with a red wine reduction. Hanukkah cooking is mostly about preparations the day before so that no work is happening while the Menora is lit. I think the brisket could have done with a few more hours of cooking for my taste but every recipe I saw called for a three our cook time and since I like to at least try things the traditional way once we have what we have. T...

Ok today's bento was brought to you by the fine folks at Heinz . I was sitting in a meeting and saw a little ketchup packet that proclaimed, "The worlds best meatloaf". I thought to myself, "that's a bold claim my little friend" which lead me to this link containing a small archive of Heinz ketchup based recipes. Flipping through various links, I was fairly impressed with what all was being made with ketchup and when I landed on the peanut butter cookies (yes made with ketchup) I knew I had to build a box around it. Not much in the way of tweaking this time around (only a bit in the soup) I didn't want any mishaps to be blamed on my tweaking, let the ketchup shine through! Ok I was going to go into a case between Catsup, Ketchup and the origins of both in terms of word and sauce. This appears to be very diffcult to ascertain and give correct information. There's various citations on the spelling of Ketchup (catsup, catchup) by 16th and 17th century ...

I have to say, I'm really enjoying my new camera lens and the more natural light looking shots I'm able to take with it. Hopefully you guys out there noticed the difference. (Ok the title shot was a little dark) So, I needed to reel back this week the bentos have been getting a little pricey on the ingredients and the dishes a tad labor heavy. I also had to buy six new boxes to accommodate my new bento-ees, so I'm trying to cut back a little at a time to re-coop some of those costs. I've been doing quite well, last week's was only a little bit over the budget. It's been a fun challenge over all this time to make changes and tweaks to take advantage of sales or simply making a recipe cheaper without losing any of the flavor. This week I bring you my second Indian themed bento. With the new audience it was tempting to dig up the old recipes, but there were a few things I wanted to look into and my trusty "future bentos" tag on my journal held some nice...

So I counted it up, this is my 50th bento for my eaters. 50! Wow! granted I've posted more, but there's a lot of Offtopic "yammering" and also some meals that weren't lunches. So my eaters should have collected 50 small index cards with my lunch time greetings and menu description! Go me! Ok enough back patting. Another Fruit themed bento this week. My wife suggested a peach challenge for me. Didn't have time to hit the farmer's market this week so I had to make due with the regular grocery store. Despite the tenderloin, I came in under the five dollar mark this time (I was impressed) I suppose partly due to the fact that peaches are in season. I scoured the internet for various ideas and came up with this set of highly modified mix and match recipes. First of we start with a Pork Tenderloin with Peach Chutney. The shot isn't very pretty, infact the color from the chutney messed with the color of the overall picture (I picked the best one). I think it...

As I said last post this bento is all about economizing and making due with what I have on hand. Hopefully, you'll find my creations entertaining and fun. This certainly was a challenge for me to make some creations from a mish-mash of stuff in my pantry. As you can see my pantry is a mess, there's foodstuff from every cuisine I've ever dabbled in. The picture to the left is only the top 2 shelves, there's another two and a floor (and yes, they are packed to the brim, and yes, there's only two of us right now). Minus the stuff I rummanged from the fridge and freezer this is what I ended up choosing for my challenge. Peanut butter, coconut milk, some rice, GF flour, some canned goods, and some obscure goodies I bought once upon a time in a japanese market. Yes there's more, but those are the highlights that got me some inspiration. My biggest problem was the lack of fresh ingrediants. All I had in the fridge was some green onion, egg and frozen chicken. Everythi...