Eating in a box

So this paleo/gluten-free friendly mug bread has been making the rounds on facebook recently. Mug/microwave cooking has been around for a bit but people have gotten pretty creative over the years. I mentioned that I should created a bento box out of mug items made in a microwave. Since it's a rainy crappy day outside I decided to play in the kitchen. The microwave is a surprisingly versatile piece of equipment. I usually use it to reheat items (never to my satisfaction). There's some debate what the nuke box does to nutrients, some say it preserves them, other say they get nuked to death. All the supporting scientifically measured evidence I've read seems to support the former. Anyhow, that's not the subject of this post, the challenge: make a bento box around items you make in a mug and a microwave. I settled on brunch because it's probably the easiest thing to do because eggs are easy and most every other recipe out there sort of dessert or cake so brunch i...

Growing up I didn't have much in the way of traditional "American" food, my parents owned a Chinese restaurant so we had a lot of Kung Pao chicken and Happy Family.  In fact we had so much happy family I started calling it "sad family". The days we got to go to McDonalds (or as they call it here down under "Mackers") or even to the Luby's and Furr's cafeteria were for me a real treat. My Mom would do her best and learn as many of the dishes we'd request (she does a killer lasagna) but I never got burned out on what most of my friends would complain about. So every once and again I would get a weird craving for what my friends would describe as they're versions of "happy family". Being away from home I've had a double craving for "American food" so I decided to do a little east meets west, healthy meets comfort American bento box. New format here. I'm trying to make these posts short but still useful. I...

It has been one long and hot summer here in Texas. We broke quite a few records locally, most days 100+ degree weather, most consecutive 100+ degree weather, and I believe we clinched hottest August in the US *ever*. It's been one of those summer that felt so ridiculously hot you simply have to cry at the sheer absurdity when you step outside. Last week that all changed (apparently it was only a brief respite since we're back to 100F today) and over the course of a Saturday the weather was actually quite pleasant. Tons of people went outside and enjoyed the cool weather, and if that's our preview of fall then bring it on. In honor of that very brief week long preview, I decided on my theme to be a "preview of fall". Fall and winter foods always scream meat and potatoes to me and that's kinda what I went for this lunch. I started lunch off with a Beef Tenderloin in a Mushroom Cognac sauce. As usual I went with a Sous Vide treatment on the beef, it's really ...

So in my previous post I talked about my work throwdown cookoff, and I saw no reason why I should take what our team produced and put it out as a bento. It's a fairly healthy, definitely quick to produce and well within budget. Besides, we didn't get any good close ups of the food from the throwdown, so I present my HomeAway Throwdown Bento. This will be a pretty short post don't have much time for yammering today. Our challenge protein was a pork tenderloin. We went with a Herb crusted pork tenderloin with a mushroom red wine demiglace over roasted fennel. I figured you could see the sauce in the bento picture above, the pork right out of the oven is a much more yummy looking picture. One of our teammates added the idea of studding the pork with slivers of garlic, a great tasting idea. The other team didn't use their fennel so we liberated it from their ingredients tray and gave it a good home with the pork. The roasting process cut down on the licorice flavor (which I...