Eating in a box

We had a long weekend and decided we needed to see more of Australia so we booked a flight and a inexpensive serviced apartment and landed in Melbourne. A portion of my coworkers were from our Melbourne office (we collapsed everyone into Sydney) and they had plenty of suggestions as to where to go. The way it has been explained to me, Sydney and Melbourne are very much like L.A. and San Francisco back home. Sydney, like LA, has beaches and warmer weather and people tend to hangout preferring more outdoor activities, Melbourne like SF is colder and it tends to rain so people tend to stay indoors and as a result there are better restaurants, arts, etc. From our short three day tour, I'm in agreement with generalized comparison. Here's what we did: Our first day we spent a lot of time walking around. Where we were staying (near Chinatown area) there are lots of narrow lane one way streets. Our first restaurant was Il Bacaro Cucina and bar tucked away in one of those narrow...

So in Austin we have two dedicated Ramen shops. To most of us growing up ramen was a 10 - 50 cent (depending if you go with the good stuff or not) package of fried noodles with a delicious hypertension inducing soup base. It's the mainstay of surviving on a budget in college so you can still have fun on the weekends. I hadn't had "real" ramen before trying it at  Freddy's truck Michi  (now a  restaurant ). It was a life changing event. I recommend the meat lovers in stout broth, on a cold winter day (heck even in the heat of summer) it'll do you good. To my delight Australia is apparently full of ramen shops, granted quantity doesn't mean quality but just like most things I've encountered "down under" things are just a little bit different. One of the things I learned is that a lot of the shops here serve "thick" style broth. Now, being a fan of Michi's stout I figured "ok thick that's the stuff I want". Thick...

As part of my next post I acquired a new toy! I've posted about a dinner I made with zucchini ribbons as part of the dish and later a bento using the ribbons. Zoodles (ribbons or spaghetti strings) have come into some popularity over recent years because of the low carb trend. Certainly a small plate of zoodles from one zucchini will save you quite a few carbs and calories than a similar plate of pasta. I figured with all the cutting calories and low carb-ing I've been doing it's high time I incorporated zoodles as a pasta replacement into a bento. Since I don't have my full kitchen here I had to find a way to cut my zucchini into noodles (or zoodle-ize them) enter "The Veggie Twister" There are many forms of this device, in the US there's plenty of infomercials that sell the "Veggetti", I personally went with a Paderno  spiralizer (it was on sale on Amazon once) back home, you can even use a vegetable peeler with a julienne blade. For ...

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...

Merry Christmas everyone (ok the post hits on the 26th but the photos are from Christmas day)! Today was a pretty low key day everything was closed outside of the resort area. We went snorkeling in the lagoon at the resort. You can see in the picture above I was lucky enough to find a sea turtle. I actually found it twice and followed it around the lagoon. Were it legal I would have " pet him and squeeze him and hug him and love him and  and called him george " except I think his name was "Getha" as "getha hell out of here and leave me alone". I snapped some pictures with of various other fish I think we'll be looking for some more snorkeling spots. The resort lagoon had a lot of hot spots (causing foggy photos) and a lot of people kicking up sediment as well as the constant danger of being whacked on the head by the stand up paddle board people. For lunch, since the Queens' Marketplace was open my wife wanted to go back to Lemongrass expres...

I'm out on "The Big Island" Kona in Hawaii on vacation over the holiday. Despite being here before there's still a huge adventure of stuff check out all completely different from last time. Here's day one and there's a heck of a lot considering we only spent half a day. We managed to get in just past noon and settled into our accommodations and decided to look for a bite to eat. Our intended destination became our dinner so we ended up at the "food court" at the Queens' Marketplace at Waikoloa beach. Little did we suspect we were walking into some really neat local establishments. Our first stop was at Ippy's Hawaiian Barbecue, housed in the same building as an Arby's and DQ (Dairy Queen) I thought it was just another chain fast food. Apparently not! Owner Philip Aiona was a finalist on the 2012 Food Network Star and boy did we ever luck out. I ordered the "Hawaiian plate" which consisted of teriyaki beef, kailua pork...

So two days later and we're back at the North Austin Trailer Yard (NATY) because my girlfriend really was craving some more ramen and I was game to check out the other trailers. It was a pretty nice day the only downside was that most of the trailers were closed. That probably explains why there were very few people around. It turned out only Michi and Snarky's were open. And since I was on the low carb train I went with Snarky's. They do slow roasted sandwiches. Since it was a slow day I got a chance to talk with the chef and owner Chuck Watkins. He's been in the restaurant/bar industry for a while and decided to make a go of a food trailer of his own. It turns out he and his business partner were the ones that came up with the NATY idea. He wanted to build on the giant pink gorilla that was already located in the parking lot and go with a "zoo" theme, hence the sculptures you see from the title picture. Chuck said that he wanted to bring in a trai...

Ok one of my biggest complaints recently have been the unfair distribution of food trailers in Austin. THEY'RE ALL DOWN SOUTH OR EAST ok they are mostly down south and east, there's a random one or two that go north of downtown. Apparently this has changed, the North Austin Trailer Yard (NATY) opened up officially May 12, 2012. There's a modest amount of food trailers here but it's a great start. My girlfriend and I met with our friends Michael and Tina from Cooking for Engineers specifically to check out the Michi Ramen trailer but since I'm on the low carb thing I went and checked out the Big Fat Greek Gyros so I figure this post will be the start of my experiences at the NATY. So my first stop was the Big Fat Greek Gyros . The owner seemed really nice. I think they're still trying to get their rhythm going. He kept apologizing for the wait, but having done a stint in a trailer and having eaten at a few other trailers waiting is par for the course an...