Eating in a box

One of the todo's from our northern European cruise was to replicate this delicious salmon dill soup we had while we were in Finland .  Lohikeitto is a hearty chowder with dill, potato, salmon and leeks. It's actually a very simple soup to make. Here's my crack at it: First the ingredients. Small onion, couple of potatoes (I used a white variety, it holds up under a boiling), leek, paprika, butter, dill light cream and some vegetable stock. I opted against fish stock in favor of vegetable stock, I figure that the vegetable stock is a little more neutral and the Salmon was rich enough to provide plenty of fish flavor.  I also went with salmon that had more of the belly attached since it's just fatty, tasty and a little more forgiving to reheating of the soup later. Prep: Sliced the leeks, cube the potatoes, dice the onions, chop the dill. Cut the salmon into chunk about 1.5 inches wide, we're working with fillet slices so they will vary in thickness but si...

So we've been doing this 21 day Challenge from Snap Kitchen . It's pretty simple, they have this 21 day menu depending on how many calories and diet you wish to keep to and you just show up every three days and they load you up and off you go. You can choose from various diets such as paleo, low carb, vegetarian, no dairy. It's all gluten free and pretty tasty (albeit it gets old after 21 days). Anyhow it's definitely convenient and takes the stress away from worrying about calories. You get five meals a day and you can do easy substations if there are items on the list you don't like. (they replace by calorie count). I'm doing the 1500 calorie challenge and after 21 days I did lose 10 pounds. Of course my problem is that I want to start cooking for myself and that meant re-inventing the box in "eating in a box". So I present my first attempt at two boxes, I stayed on the gluten free side (not for any particular reason other than there was only one...

So for whatever reason my food blog news feeds have recently been posting more and more Polish food recipes. And when a meatball recipe came thru and I was pretty sure I had to do a Polish Bento. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I LOVE meatballs and like I said it's what got me to make enough time to cook. Klopsiki Pulpeciki is a meatball (I went with pork only this time) in a mushroom sauce. But since I'm going off gluten for a little while, I made this a gluten free recipe. The binder was breadcrumbs and I used a cornflake gluten free substitute, for the sauce I used some of my all purpose gluten free "flour" blend and it thickened up like charm, and of course I served it over a brown rice flour pasta (regular egg noodle pasta pictured above). The interesting part of this dish is the use of sour cream as part of the binder for the meatballs and a lack of sour cream in what tasted like a "Stroganoff" type dish. I seared up the meatballs ...