Eating in a box

I went with a light italian themed box today, had to really keep things simple since I had guests over and needed to put together something fast . I don't think I was quite as successful this time with a record breaking bento production time so I couldn't call it a "quicky bento". It took me roughly two hours this time (with prep), granted I did handicap myself by making breakfast at the same time for my visiting family. Quite a few additional fails too. I didn't get a good picture of the box and I missed taking a picture of the lasagna, guess I was a little distracted trying to entertain folks. As I've mentioned in the past, if you want to get thru a dinner party (or bento in my case) it pays to be organized. That means prep in stages and much like you see on TV every dish they put together magically has all the ingrediants chopped and ready to dump into a pan. This really beats trying to run from chopping block back to pan and then back to measuring out thi...

So in my previous post I talked about my work throwdown cookoff, and I saw no reason why I should take what our team produced and put it out as a bento. It's a fairly healthy, definitely quick to produce and well within budget. Besides, we didn't get any good close ups of the food from the throwdown, so I present my HomeAway Throwdown Bento. This will be a pretty short post don't have much time for yammering today. Our challenge protein was a pork tenderloin. We went with a Herb crusted pork tenderloin with a mushroom red wine demiglace over roasted fennel. I figured you could see the sauce in the bento picture above, the pork right out of the oven is a much more yummy looking picture. One of our teammates added the idea of studding the pork with slivers of garlic, a great tasting idea. The other team didn't use their fennel so we liberated it from their ingredients tray and gave it a good home with the pork. The roasting process cut down on the licorice flavor (which I...