Eating in a box

I've been on a fish streak lately. I've been trying to stick with lean protein and simple sides that can be quickly prepared after work. They didn't have any cod at the grocery store so the closest thing I could find was " Pink Ling " sold in fillets. It's a bottom dwelling "eel like" fish. Apparently related to the "Assfish" (sorry I couldn't resist when I found that I had to work it in somehow), the fillet was pretty thin and the resulting dish was large flakey meat. The meat has a little more elasticity similar to eel  than say a cod that usually easily flakes apart. 3 tbsp brown sugar, 3 tbsp miso, and 2 tbsp mirin. When you mix it you want a "watery paste", you want it a little runny, too solid and you get too much salt concentration, too watery and it won't stick to the fish. There are quite a few variations of the same theme that I've used in the past. I've used honey instead of the brown sugar, a...

Finally getting around to posting on last week's bento. I'm finding going with an Asian theme tends to make for very quick turn around on cooking time. Preparation is key, if you can get everything chopped up and sauces done ahead of time then cooking is pretty straightforward and simple. Usually just a quick stir fry and you're done. So no narrow ethnic theme this time just a few dishes from Japanese and Chinese cooking. For the main protein I put together this miso glazed chicken. Very simple marinade of miso, soy and brown sugar which sat with the chicken overnight. Some people will argue for shorter time saying that I'm risking the chicken to be too salty, but I used a white miso paste (which tends to be less salty) and I've done it before without much problem. So for what it's worth I did the experiment for you and overnight didn't hurt at least with chicken. As the chicken baked I boiled down the marinade and used it to glaze the chicken. Ca...

I confess there's not really a good cohesive theme for this box. I just got two things of free food product and decided to just throw something yummy together. Above you see my attempt at creative swirling with the cream in the soup but it just looks like weird modern art. I need more practice. So part of being plugged into the food blog community I seem to get product samples a lot. By no means do they say, "hey you must shill for us" or obligate me to do so, but I figure it's nice if I find a product useful to put in a nice blurb at the very least, I like to let my bento eaters benefit as well. Kinda like the foodblogger events, I go, I write a nice entry about it. This is no different, but I figure it's important that I disclaimer that I did get free stuff, I'm using free stuff, and I've decided to write about the free stuff I got. I'm no professional so I'm in no obligation to disclose all this stuff, but I figure it shouldn't hurt to be up...