Eating in a box

If your holiday season has been anything like mine then there was a lot of good food to be had and some pants to be let out. With that in mind, I wanted to bring in a low calorie, light lunch bento. Low cal does not have to mean low taste, so I set out to find a good blend of taste and technique to deliver just that kind of lunch. We'll start with our entree: Chicken with lemon artichoke sauce. The key to lower calorie cooking is to remove your usual suspects for taste (butter, frying, fatter cuts of meat) and replace them with taste highlights (lemon zest, spices) and plenty of vegetables. The veggies of course are there for low calorie filler and provide a satisfying lunch. I took some chicken breast cutlets and lightly dusted them with a season flour mixture and finishing them in a pan coated with a bit of cooking spray. Slow cooking got the onions and artichokes nice and soft while the lemon zest and juice punched up the taste. Next we have a polenta with mushroom ragu. I delet...

I have to confess, I was really struggling with coming up with a bento this week. Nothing I flipped thru looked good. I had no inspirations over the week, and the few things I saw were disqualified by the "must be healthy" guideline. Non-detered, I turned to the Food Network for some help. After watching a few shows I finally saw something of interest. They had this recipe for Wheatberry salad. I know my grains fairly well, but I've never worked with (or actually heard of) wheatberries. So there we have it, I built the box based off the show. I had to do some trimming and recipe changes to make serving the lunch calorie-friendly. It's weird even though the show is about healthy eating when you add up all the proper servings for the meal it came out to something like 1/2 the USDA calorie recommendation Anyhow, to the bento, we start things off with the main dish. I've got a do-it-yourself asian lettuce wrap. I used super lean beef and firm tofu as the basis of th...

Welcome back! And thanks to all who visited me over the break. It's a new year, and finally I've been able to produce my first bento. Over the break we shifted gears towards a new diet, we're aiming for a high fiber, low fat diet, now this kind of falls in line with the existing low glycemic index diet but it releases a few restrictions on the carb side and changes some of the ingredients I can and cannot use. Basically it works like this, increase consumption of soluble and insoluble fiber helps with keeping your insulin level stable. This is pretty much simliar to the low glycemic diet's philosophy. The harder it is to break down foods the more even the release of energy into the body. Soluble fiber has a second benefit in that it's been shown to also help with increasing the good cholesterol. So all in all it requires me to be a little more vigilant about my recipes and rethink my planned menus a bit. Anyway for my first bento, I wanted to try to crank out s...