Eating in a box

Just threw together this quick lunchbox for tomorrow. Sous vide rack of lamb: Fresh chopped rosemary, thyme and oregano cooked at 134F (56C) for four hours. Accompanied with Sauteed mushrooms (button and golden needle), garlic spinach and zoodles with tomato sauce.

We've started off to Europe for a wedding in Belgium but first we're taking a cruise around northern Europe. We arrived in Amsterdam a day early to make sure we had plenty of buffer time for "just in case" moments so we wouldn't miss our boat. This worked out well since the airline managed to lose my luggage between checking in and prior to boarding our plane leaving home (I have no idea how that happens). As a result we got a late start in Amsterdam (above is the Amsterdam Central train station) but we did manage to take in a few sights and grab dinner. We wandered into this rustic looking pub "De Haven von Texel" that turned out to be quite a popular destination. The table next to us was telling us they had been searching high and low for the place and gave us a few tips as to what to try and helped us translate a few things on the chalkboard. For starters we ordered the Dutch Pea Soup served with smoked sausage and bacon on rye bread. The b...

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...

So I'm in Denver for work and my friend/coworker told me he'd take me to a foodie worthy place to eat. So we went to Tag , above is a picture of their logo. The menu looked really tasty and I was all in to go. The menu is small but that just means they have time to really focus on some good food. I don't know much about the restaurant but my friend mentioned it was in the top 10 of Denver. Who am I to argue? The restaurant is a cozy place with plenty of smaller nooks for couples to feel a sense of privacy and an more open area where tables are right up next to one another. To start we got the Kobe Beef Sliders with Gorgonzola Aioli and Shallot Confit this was served with "Duck Fat Fries". The fries had a sweet, salty with a bit of heat very delicious, the fries (after being fried) were tossed in a bit of duck fat. The sliders were very very tasty, great flavor. My friend mentioned it was a bit unfortunate to think about grinding up Kobe beef, but the results were ...

By request I have produced another Indian themed bento. It was quite timely since the newspaper was featuring this Indian cookbook author that wrote a book on cooking traditional Indian dishes with a slow cooker. The book is called "The Indian Slow Cooker" by Anupy Singla. I just found her blog and will be earmarking it for a full read. I enjoyed the book, but I bought the e-book version for my nook and it's just hard navigating reference material on an e-book versus have the old fashion tree killing paper version. I do like the idea of adapting a cuisine to using the fire and forget slow cooker, it's a good way to save stove space and the lack of need to supervise the cooking lets me still have a reasonable Sunday. I will say I seized the opportunity to buy yet another slow cooker bringing me up to three (ouch am I like the slow cooker version of a cat hoarder?). This Lamb Korma recipe actually didn't come from the book. I grabbed a few recipes from online and t...

Back on track with another bento! It's gotten harder and harder to come up with new themes every week and I needed a bit of inspiration so I went over to the local Half Price Books and went through their ethnic cookbooks to scratch up some ideas. I tend to look for a nice worn out "old" looking cookbooks, usually those are the ones that have the super old school recipes that interest me the most (from a research standpoint). I did pull up some nice relics, so I'll be busy compiling, testing and cooking and hopefully come up with some new ideas and themes I can try. This week I went with the Swedish cookbook I found. I'm not certain how much of it is authentic. I know the Ärtsoppa is traditional and the rest do use typical ingredients but I avoided a lot of the items that wouldn't reheat well (fish primarily) and the more cliche items (like meatballs and dumplings) which didn't leave much left to pick from the book and I didn't have as much time as usua...

Sorry for the long time between posts. Work's been really busy and I've been traveling a lot so it makes it hard to post about a lunch. My last trip was to visit one of my teams in Denver, I was whining about not being able to do lunch when my friend reminded me he had a full kitchen and if I wanted I could easily do a bento remotely. I plan on taking him up on that offer the next time I, it visit should be a fun experience. I've also been invited to a special event/project that I won't share just yet. Anyhow, last week I was invited to work with a good friend of mine to cook for a dinner party for bunch of our development leads visiting from Europe. You can see us in hustle mode up there on the title photo. I even was wearing an official chef jacket, pants and had my thermapen nicely tucked away in my shoulder pocket. My friend Paula did a lot of prep the night before and we got an early start. We ended up working for about 14 hours and churned out six courses for abo...

Sorry about the lack of bento post this week, it was memorial day and there was much bbqing to be had. It also was a great time for me to finally fire up my newest cooking acquisition: The Big Green Egg . As you can see above it is indeed big, green and somewhat egg shaped. I've been told over and over that having the above smoker, grill, wood burning pizza oven would complete my life. I have to say that I'm not much of a griller, there's too much variability in heat control on a grill, I must endure swarms of mosquitos, and it just takes a long time. If you couple that with the hefty price tag, you can understand why it's taken me quite some time to get around to owning this device. Now after all that whining above, what made me change my mind? Well one, a bunch of us at work did a bulk purchase and got a deal, but that wasn't the game changer. I was talking to several proud egg-owners at work and they explained the science behind it. It's basically similar to ...

Wow looky there I just crossed 20k visitors thank you all for dropping by! Today's post I bring you a farewell to an institution of the food magazine world. Gourmet magazine recently announced their closure and it's a sad thing to see a publication that's 70 years old go to the wayside. There's many opinions, "They needed to change with the times", "food publications have lost to the tv networks and how they present food", and my favorite "just goes to show how no one cooks at home anymore". I digest food magazines and rip out the recipes of interest, I use these as points of view to teaching me to "make it my own", the loss of one more point of view is always sad. Gourmet actually gave me my holy grail of black forest cake recipes, something I've only found at a small bakery in Ft. Worth. Granted I was always annoyed that most of their recipes spanned multiple pages, but certainly it was no reason that I would not buy a copy...