Eating in a box

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...

So at work they decided a good team building exercise was to pit our development management team against each other on a head to head cooking throwdown at Central Market. I have to say I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of a cook off, for one reason or another everyone decided I had some sort of advantage whereas, I just wanted to not look bad. We had visiting managers from across the globe and I was certain that there had to be a few ringers in there, besides when does having a blog qualify me to be any sort of cooking expert. There were a large number of us and above you'll see me and my teammates. A motley crew of foodies (as luck would have it) and all very capable and fun to cook with. We were kept in the dark about the format until we arrived in the kitchen over at Central Market. We were presented with two trays of ingredients a common "shared" ingredients section and an empty kitchen. We were to cook in shifts, the first shift was to create two different type...

It is with mix emotion that I post this bento. This bento represents some of my hardest work and my attempt at a really special lunch. The purpose of this blog was to deliver a healthy, delicious, economic meal for my wife and her coworkers. Unfortunately, I've no more wife to cook for, all the more reason to make this the best lunch I could produce, it's my last chance to cook for someone I care for and the new friends that I've come to care for. It was hard to plan out this lunch as I had to contemplate this being my last chance to cook for folks been cooking for for so long. There's just so many wonderful things I wanted to cram into this lunch and make it uber special. Here's what I came up with: We'll start the bento with the main entree: Crab artichoke stuffed raviolis with pine nut butter sauce. I have to admit, I spent a *lot* of time on this bento, by the time I got to the raviolis I was so tired I decided that instead of standard raviolis I would ma...