Eating in a box

Sorry for the short post. Had to put something together for lunch, nothing special. Corned beef with Sauteed zucchini, shitake, king oyster mushroom and steamed broccoli. Longer post to come on Hainanese Sous vide chicken breast.

I've been craving this simple enoki mushroom soup that I had at my favorite Japanese restaurant back home so I've been on this crusade to make my own. While not quite the same, I like the version that I've managed to come up with. It's a simple recipe and although not quite a lunch time bento I've brought it in a thermos for breakfast after a brisk walk to work in the Sydney "winter" (I put that in quotes, it's so far been more like a chilly rainy fall than any winter I've experienced in Texas). I digress. After a bit of hunting and improvising this is what I ended up with. Let's start with the ingredients. As you can see it's a pretty simple soup: I have 100g of fresh shitake mushroom, 250g enoki mushroom, Dashi broth package, Soy Sauce, Chinese Mi Jiu  米酒  (Since I didn't have Sake or Mirin, but I like this better, less of a sweetness), and salt to taste. Yup that's it! First I remove the stems from the shiitake caps a...

As a kid I loved those packages of instant stove top noodles. Not just ramen but the ones that were "broccoli cheese", "alfredo", where you just add milk and butter, maybe some ground beef or tuna if you were using a "helper" version and voila dinner at $1.50 an envelope. I particularly liked the beef stroganoff, something about that powdered sour cream I suppose. Over the years, whenever I have a chance I order the dish and some variation has made it into this blog whether it's meatballs or eating on the cheap . This time I'm going to make it my main focus. First the pasta. With my new Veggie Twister device I decided to go with a "zoodle" option. The pasta honestly is just a conveyance for the sauce and the beef. I figured using zoodles I could save a few hundred calories and guilt. Just using zoodles freshly cut there's just way too much moisture in the zucchini. I decided to salt the zoodles first and let them sit for 30 m...

Greetings from Down Under! I'm on temporary assignment in Australia (next two years) and we're finally settling into our new place. This is my very first use of the new kitchen. A simple bento box from what I could find at the local grocery store. Nothing fancy I'm afraid. I'm just glad I got to cook I'll confess I cheated this time around. I don't have any spices or really anything in the kitchen other than flake sea salt for seasoning. This chicken came pre-spatchcocked and pre-marinaded. I will say it was very convenient. From what I could tell (the label was sparce on details) the marinade was made of oil, garlic, onion, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper (maybe a bit of tarragon) and lemon and thickened with mayo. $13 AUD about $10 USD... (sigh) everything is very expensive here. This was my first experience in cooking with a convection oven. It browned the chicken quite well but the outside was achieving a golden brown faster than the internal t...

Finally a food post! I'll admit this one has been on the backlog for posting but with all the travel it's been very difficult to get back on track. In my quest towards a healthy low calorie lunch box I was inspired with my previous use of soba noodles and Abalone mushrooms (King Oyster). Here I aimed to use the mushrooms as my protein and grill it to give a visual appeal of grilled tenderloin. The meaty texture of the mushroom is often used to substitute for animal protein and it's also a huge savings on calories. Here's a shot of the ingredients used.  (see recipe below for explanation) I cut the mushrooms into 3/4" thick rounds and marinaded them over night. The abalone mushrooms give the dish a nice meat-y texture without all of the calories. I let the mushrooms marinade overnight hoping to have the mushroom really get some of the flavor and maybe draw out some of the moisture with the use of the miso and salt. I then grilled the mushrooms on ...

Time really has gotten away from me so I've been trying to get my cooking in where I can. I have been seeing quite a few recipes calling for "kelp noodles" recently in my news reader so it's really this weird ingredient that managed to get me off my butt to cook. I landed on this sesame almond butter kelp noodle. It's very similar to the thai peanut soba noodles I prepared in the past except for the use of kelp noodles. Kelp noodles are a very curious ingredient, they are made of (surprise!) kelp or seaweed and containing about 10 calories for 12 ounces. The noodles are clear and look somewhat like glass noodles used in Chap Che except not nearly as elastic, when eating them they have a distinct "snap" and crunch to them (like a rubber band at breaking point). There is no flavor so they take on the flavors of whatever dish you might prepare. They can be used right out of the package without any sort of cooking (I do rinse them just in case) but I...

There once was a bento with the greatest of hope but something terrible went wrong. Twice there were attempts to recover it, even substitutions were considered but after a chain of colossal failures it was locked away forever to be known as "the bento that never was" (I considered the "bento that shall not be named" but I may try that as a theme one day). I mentioned in my last post I bought a cookbook from one of the owners of Masala Zone , "50 Great Curries of India" by Camellia Panjabi. I picked out four items and went to work giving it no thought since I've done Indian themes in the past. I prepped all of the food and created my cooking plan the day before just like any of my meal preps. And then..... I will state up front that I do not blame the book whatsoever. Several things contributed to "the great fall" 1) metric measurement conversion which were subsequently upscaled for 4x (so math error and cooking a dish at large scale...

It was between a pic of Akana waterfall or a magnificent peacock that hopped on a wall in front of me. I went with the creature I would have reached out and touched except that it would probably peck my eyes out. This was taken at the zoo at Hilo. Not the biggest zoo I've been to but considering it was free it was neat that I got to see a white tiger, ant eater, goats, exotic birds and some neat monkeys I consider it a pretty good experience. The peacocks and the chickens were free ranged and ran through all the exhibits (yes chickens in the white tiger exhibit guess they're pretty fast.) So we started the day looking breakfast. Jim gave us a great recommendation for the Hawaiian Style Cafe, as you can see we sat at a very plain "U" shaped counter with some really neat stuff on the menu. Wonton and ramen for breakfast? sure no problem. Pancakes with a 1 foot diameter for something like 1.5 dollars, yup got it! We went with "the Big Mok Loco Moco" ...