Eating in a box

Many people ask what the most important cooking gadget I have in my arsenal. Most of the time I'll reply, my Chinese cleaver, as a universal tool used pretty much every time I work in the kitchen it is in fact my most important tool. But if we're talking about actual cooking device/gadget I have to say my slow cooker. I've talked a lot about it in the past and even labeled my them "Slo-mo bentos". It's a magical device that's great for all sorts of applications and you can't have enough of them (I personally have four back home). So it's no surprise that the very first thing I purchased when I landed in Australia is a slow cooker. I was torn a bit, I like the simple off-low-high low tech version (great for a sous vide water bath when paired with a pid controller), but I opted for this multi function baby that has a removable non-stick insert that allows you to brown in the pot without taking up stove space. What to make? Pulled pork obv...

Growing up I didn't have much in the way of traditional "American" food, my parents owned a Chinese restaurant so we had a lot of Kung Pao chicken and Happy Family.  In fact we had so much happy family I started calling it "sad family". The days we got to go to McDonalds (or as they call it here down under "Mackers") or even to the Luby's and Furr's cafeteria were for me a real treat. My Mom would do her best and learn as many of the dishes we'd request (she does a killer lasagna) but I never got burned out on what most of my friends would complain about. So every once and again I would get a weird craving for what my friends would describe as they're versions of "happy family". Being away from home I've had a double craving for "American food" so I decided to do a little east meets west, healthy meets comfort American bento box. New format here. I'm trying to make these posts short but still useful. I...

Our second port of call is Tallinn, Estonia. We spent our day in the city center historical districts with it's old cobblestone streets and beautiful architecture. We found the oldest still operating pharamacy. It was pretty neat being part museum and part pharmacy, I'm sure the native population gets pretty annoyed whenever the ships roll in and clog up their place to pick up prescription medication. They had examples of medicinals, equipment (such as a ticture making device), and plant pressings with their medicinal usages all of them look older than say my whole country (which from anyone but the US point of view isn't that big a deal, but it's still a neat statment to make). Wandering up this very steep hill found the King's garden, which would have overlooked the whole town if not for the modern buildings and condos (the price of progress). It looked more like a castle/fortification than a garden but it was meant to be open to the people, they convert...

I know I've been quiet lately, it's been a busy year for me. My latest excuse is that I moved last week. I will just say this about my move: Paying movers to pack your stuff and haul it to the new place COMPLETELY WORTH IT.  In half a day they had everything packed up whereas it took us nearly a month to pack up five boxes worth of what we considered valuable enough for us to hand pack and move. Anyhow we've been in a mad dash to unpack and put everything away because we have 12 people coming over for Thanksgiving dinner. I question my judgement inviting everyone but what's done is done.  So why this post? Well, one I need to test my new kitchen stove to make sure I can cook dinner in a couple of days. Two, I wanted to post about this new thing they're doing at the local grocery store (but apparently only this one by my house not the rest of the chain) where they are packaging stew and soup kits (which is not new) with raw meat (which is new). This is in...

Happy New Year all! (a tad late I know) As always it's crazy busy. I did this bento two weeks ago and am only now getting to posting the pictures and writing something up. Hot off the heels of my trip to Hawaii, I had to bring some of the great food back here to Austin and share with my bento eaters. The hard part was picking out what to make, it would be hard to cram all the great food I had into one small box. In the end after weeding out ingredients that would be hard to source and deciding what would taste good with what I give you: Hawaiian Bento. First there's just no avoiding some sort of pork. I didn't have the taro leaves for Super J's Lau Lau's so I had to settle with a Kahlua Pork. I cooked the pork shoulder wrapped in banana leaves for eight hours in the slow cooker and you can see the results above. Click in and see the full size, I realize the small picture is kinda funky looking (but I didn't want to show yet another plate of pulled p...

Ok 2013 is closing and i'm bound and determined to finish this post tonight before the "Dick Clarke's special" rings off the new year. Day 7 is having trouble exiting my camera. It was a day off so you're not missing much we went to the Chinese restaurant at the hotel and had some Bejing duck and Abalone cold plate (abalone is an expensive ingredient VERY.) If I managed to pull the photos then i'll finally post day 7. Day 8 we went down south to the City of Refuge (the pictures are also stuck on my camera) But the best part of was our visit to Super J's with their famous Lau Lau. I saw them on the food network on one of those "best things I've ever eating" shows. I'm so glad I took notice because it would not have otherwise jumped out at me. We drove by the place and I exclaimed "ooh ooh that's the super J's  place" so after the island of refuge we returned to check the place out. Just like in the show Janice...

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...

It's a New Year and always hard to get back into the rhythm of things when you've had a whole month to derail yourself. I managed to finally get a free weekend to put together a Bento but I haven't had much time to consider a theme. After four to five years it's getting more and more difficult to think of untried themes so I asked one of my eaters to come up with something for me. After careful consideration he comes back with "Meat", everything had to showcase meat. To be a little more fun, I added the stipulation that each course had to feature a different "meat". The difficulty was to tie the dishes together so that each course wasn't such a jarring experience so after a bit of research I went with "quasi" japanese. We start in Beef land with this Fried Negimaki stuffed with King Oyster Mushrooms. I have to give credit to JustBento for the idea although I underestimated the effort of making 30 of these things. I went with the King ...

So I hosted what I dubbed a "Sous Vide Summit" at my house this weekend. What does that mean? It means getting a bunch of foodies interested in Sous Vide method of cooking, the result is a meat-a-thon of unbelievably tasty treats. I had a great time and am very glad to finally be back in the swing of having dinner parties. Although a bit of work prepping and cleaning, the fun with friends new and old is always a blast. Lots of pictures to share today so hang on to your hats for what probably will be a long winded post. So to start, my own contribution to this shin dig was possibly the easiest (not that seasoning, vacuum sealing food, and dumping the package into perfectly controlled water is hard by any means) my experiment was to show case various grades and cuts of steak each cooked at the magical perfect 134 degrees Fahrenheit or better known as Medium Rare. If you click in you can see the steaks raw side by side, we have from left to right, three rib eye steaks USDA Prim...