Eating in a box

Today's lunch is a collection of vegetarian items that I've had in my notebooks that I had been meaning to try. It just so happens that they all had a Latino flair to them so today's "Vegimex"/ "LatinoVeggie" theme happened to fall in my lap. This is actually a fairly low calorie/low fat, gluten free lunch . As with most vegetarian dishes, there's a lot of interesting flavors and spices used to make up for a lot of the flavors that animal fat and protein bring to the table. Also, there's a lot of attempts to bring meat like texture (some successful, some not so successful), probably to help out the new vegetarians with the transition. I've always been perplexed of this mock tofu duck breast that was sold at a buddist monastery, is not eating a fake duck in spirit the same? It seems like it's a question of intent to me. Anyhow I'm sure I'll get some flame in the comment for saying that. Let's get on with the description. Fir...

What's the surprise? Well down here the first day of fall is usually still a hangover of sweltering heat from the last days of summer. I was pleasantly surprised by a beautiful week last week (actually starting on the first day of fall) into a wonderful weekend of bike riding. In honor of the awesome weather I immediately retooled my plans and scrambled for a fall inspired theme. I did a lot of browsing through my large backlog of food magazines and managed to cobble something together. Edit: I forgot to mention this box is gluten free. So, due to some unfortunate circumstances, my one of my lights for my light box got broken. I've been doing photos for some time now with, "just get by" gear as I didn't know how long I'd be able to keep this blog going. Well, now that you're reading post 112 I decided to go ahead and get the macro lens and flash. Yay! New toys, hopefully you'll see improved photos. Still got lots of manuals to read but I digress, back ...

No bento this week. The wife was ill (my fault, got it from the guys at work). What better way to aid in recovery than to make some homemade chicken noodle soup. Simple as it may sound it is a time intensive soup to produce if you want to do it right. My wife of course is worth every minute, so no complaint here :) A good soup always starts with a good stock. The added benefit of course is you're cooking the chicken you'll be using for the soup. Standard stuff here, chicken (of course), celery, thyme, carrots, peppercorn, and bay leaf. I cut some time out of it by only simmering the stock for an hour, as opposed to an hour and a half. I didn't want the chicken to fall apart in shreds. On to assembling the soup. Simple here, lots of the same veggies that went into the stock are chopped fresh. Gotta remember to pull out the thyme and bay leaf at the ends but all you do is dump the whole thing in and put the noodles in at the last second. I think I ended up with like 3 quarts...