Eating in a box

We had a long weekend and decided we needed to see more of Australia so we booked a flight and a inexpensive serviced apartment and landed in Melbourne. A portion of my coworkers were from our Melbourne office (we collapsed everyone into Sydney) and they had plenty of suggestions as to where to go. The way it has been explained to me, Sydney and Melbourne are very much like L.A. and San Francisco back home. Sydney, like LA, has beaches and warmer weather and people tend to hangout preferring more outdoor activities, Melbourne like SF is colder and it tends to rain so people tend to stay indoors and as a result there are better restaurants, arts, etc. From our short three day tour, I'm in agreement with generalized comparison. Here's what we did: Our first day we spent a lot of time walking around. Where we were staying (near Chinatown area) there are lots of narrow lane one way streets. Our first restaurant was Il Bacaro Cucina and bar tucked away in one of those narrow...

Day Two of my vacation at Playa Del Carmen. The daytime weather was a fabulous upper 70F and nights a warm 65F. They had nightly entertainment, above is a picture from their "Elements" show, obviously they were featuring fire. Lots of food and drink so I won't bother you with a lot of yammering we'll just stick to the facts since there's more to write about for our day three dinner discovery. I didn't bother with breakfast, it was the standard buffet, bountiful but just like any other you'd find. We were on the hunt to try out all of the restaurants in the resort and hit the Tapas and Pintxos. It was on the patio next to the Pelicanos. The food was ok, they follow a very similar formula of plating and the same paprika red pepper sauce half crescent and very similiar pale colors. I ordered the Cream of Artichokes soup which was a pureed cream soup they added clams, fennel and chives, very good combo. To the right was the grilled Cuttlefish, th...

We had half a day left in Boston and it happened to be Easter Sunday so our friends helped get seats at their favorite brunch spot near their place, T.W. Food by chef Tim Wiechmann. (The picture above was from our duck tour of Boston the night before) The restaurant was a small 12 top labeled as a New American/ New French cuisine featuring local ingredients. The staff was very knowledgable and professional. The restaurant was tucked away right in the middle of the neighborhood. I'll just dive into the food there's not much commentary to be had. I opted for the Charcuterie plate with Chicken liver mousse, mushroom pate, whole grain mustard and pickled vegetables. I know I said New French, my wife got the Italian Wedding Soup, it's a very different style than we were use to. The poached egg was quite good. Our friends got the sweet potato pierogi with cilantro pesto. For my entree I got the Spring Lamb, slow roasted leg of lamb with braised shoulder ove...

Day 6 of our adventure. Today's big thing was the coffee plantation tour at Mountain Thunder located in Kailua-Kona south of where we were staying. Before that we had a bit of time to burn. So we started with breakfast. Here's our view from breakfast. We stopped by Island Lava Java Cafe. Nice breakfast joint that features 100% Kona coffee (as opposed to the places that serve "blended" Kona) The view was spectacular and they had a guy singing up front part time ukulele Hawaiian music and part time Christmas melodies. Breakfast was pretty straight forward the only thing unique about my breakfast was that it was served with some Portuguese sausage, it's slightly sweet and red from the paprika (not spicy at all). My wife ordered the "Oatmeal Brulée" (pictured above). Plain oatmeal topped with vanilla yogurt and bananas dusted with brown sugar and sugar burned by a torch. It certainly a unique presentation and very tasty. We went and shopped aro...

Finally! A bento! I talked about easeing myself back into things. I'm very glad that I did, it's so easy to get out of the habit of doing things not just cooking but sitting down and writing. I was able to get everything cooked and photographed but just getting the time to writing this post has been tough. Ok I'm just going to launch into the bento. I went with a "italian" light theme again, it's probably one of the easiest themes to fall back on. I started things with a sous vide poached chicken breast topped with a mint pistachio pesto. I poached the chicken with fresh rosemary, thyme, and basil. Sous vide-ing the chicken really brought out the flavors of the herbs. It was very fragrant without being overpowering paired with the bright flavor of the mint pesto really made it feel light and fresh. Of course the extra tender texture the sous vide process makes this a real winner. I'm not sure there's any other way to prepare proteins that can achieve t...

I went with a light italian themed box today, had to really keep things simple since I had guests over and needed to put together something fast . I don't think I was quite as successful this time with a record breaking bento production time so I couldn't call it a "quicky bento". It took me roughly two hours this time (with prep), granted I did handicap myself by making breakfast at the same time for my visiting family. Quite a few additional fails too. I didn't get a good picture of the box and I missed taking a picture of the lasagna, guess I was a little distracted trying to entertain folks. As I've mentioned in the past, if you want to get thru a dinner party (or bento in my case) it pays to be organized. That means prep in stages and much like you see on TV every dish they put together magically has all the ingrediants chopped and ready to dump into a pan. This really beats trying to run from chopping block back to pan and then back to measuring out thi...

It's been a tough schedule around here lately. Work's crazy and personal life is even crazier. But I did find time to pull off a bento this week. I had scheduled a pumpkin theme but decided that I needed to bust out something nice and easy since I had visitors in town. So Simple and Light was the theme, it's really the theme for this blog so I'm cheating a bit. Well lets just get down to business shall we? First our main dish, I went with this Hoisin Dijon glazed salmon that I saw from Friendly Kitchen . Salmon is one of the few fish that reheats well without stinking up the office and it's always an easy dish to prepare. The recipe called for grilling but I opted for oven baking instead, the grill would have provided nice carmelization of the somewhat sweet Hoisin sauce, but oven baking had greater advantage in my mad dash in the kitchen. It was an interesting glaze, definitely an interesting idea to combine Hoisin and Dijon mustard, you had hints of sour and sweet...