Eating in a box

We've started off to Europe for a wedding in Belgium but first we're taking a cruise around northern Europe. We arrived in Amsterdam a day early to make sure we had plenty of buffer time for "just in case" moments so we wouldn't miss our boat. This worked out well since the airline managed to lose my luggage between checking in and prior to boarding our plane leaving home (I have no idea how that happens). As a result we got a late start in Amsterdam (above is the Amsterdam Central train station) but we did manage to take in a few sights and grab dinner. We wandered into this rustic looking pub "De Haven von Texel" that turned out to be quite a popular destination. The table next to us was telling us they had been searching high and low for the place and gave us a few tips as to what to try and helped us translate a few things on the chalkboard. For starters we ordered the Dutch Pea Soup served with smoked sausage and bacon on rye bread. The b...

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...

So i've been on this diet for a few weeks now. There's just some stubborn pounds I can't seem to lose and since I work out nearly every day it has to come down to diet. My doctor suggested I try out this diet called the Ideal Protein diet. It comes in four phases and phase one (which i'm in) has me eating their food with only my own cooking once per day. This happens until I lose 90% of my stated goal, which feels like an eternity from now. So to "celebrate" I decided to create a bento that has a *loose* interpretation of my diet. Half of the bento I'm eating now the other half would be allowable in future phases. This is has been what I called a technically delicious lunch. I say that because sous vide italian marinaded pork with a yellow, zucchini squash sauteed with portabella mushrooms is indeed a wonderful lunch to have... Unless you've been eating it for about three weeks straight. Why did I select this golden manacle for lunch? Well it...

Hey guys, sorry about the lack of bentos lately. Work has really ratcheted up and free time has gone down to a minimum. I've had a few photos and off topic posts that I wanted to put out but simply getting a moment to write a quick post has been difficult. I'm actually doing this one over my lunch just to take a break from my deluge of emails and meetings. Anyhow, enough belly aching. I had the great fortune to cook with a long time friend and coworker. She and her husband use to have a Persian restaurant in town and both are fabulous cooks! She invited me to help host/cook for a party of our friends just to get everyone together. We've done this in the past and it was a wonderful opportunity to learn a bit more about Persian cuisine. So given the chance I immediately jumped on it. Besides, her house is beautiful and her kitchen a joy to work in just look at the view (from the title shot) and this outdoor/kitchen grill. The indoor kitchen was just amazing it really has eve...

So everyone around the office is doing the Crossfit training and the Paleo diet. It's really paying off for some of them. One guy has lost a total of 50 pound or so on just diet alone. That's the guy with the best result, others have similar, but with exercise and still others very small changes. Anyhow, since a bunch of the guys went on the diet they haven't been able to participate in my bentos. I told them I'd make a lunch just for them and they'd all be signed up so they didn't have to compete with the email crowd. I don't want to get into the details of the whole paleo diet, if you are curious you should buy the book or go to a whole host of websites that are dedicated to the thing. Basically it comes down to lean meats and no processed foods. It's a low/slow carb diet, no sugar, wheat etc so it's a very friendly diet for Gluten free folks. Without further ado, I give you Paleo Diet Bento or Paleo Bento (which sounds nicer) Paleo comes from the ...

It's been hot out here. We just broke the record for most consecutive three digit temperatures, it was set in 1925 I believe. Not exactly a "We're #1" cheering kinda moment but I noteworthy none-the-less. As the days of summer drag on, it really gets harder and harder to contemplate making lunch. There's all the driving around to buy food, and then cooking and rushing around, something about this heat just saps your energy. I pushed through and decided that a simple bento around the tastes of summer would be a nice theme. I tried to stick with things that were light and vegetables that tended to be in season. We start things off with the Asian caramel pork. I simply cubed up a bunch of pork tenderloin browned it up and made a nice sauce with some soy and brown sugar. After cooking the pork and onions I simmered the pork in the sauce until thick. This dish definitely needs some sort of accompaniment because I think by itself the sauce makes it too sweet. If ea...

It's gonna be a busy May for me, lots of travel and filled up weekends so I feel the need to try to get in bentos where ever I can because I know getting cooking time in will be tough. I originally had a more ambitious theme but I was reminded that my weekend was going to be packed. So in honor of the dragon boat races I was at this weekend I decided to do a super quick Chinese bento. I wasn't messing around; from a dead start to clean kitchen I was in and out in an hour and a half (a new record for me I think) I even raised my arms in victory. \(>.<)/ So what makes for a quick bento? I've given this a lot of thought because I really enjoyed my extra free time. I think the keys are familiar dishes and very few cooking steps. Take this Asian marinated pork, step one put all the stuff in bag, step two next morning put in probe thermometer set for 155F dump it into oven, step three yank it out of the oven when loud thermometer starts beeping. Step four declare great succ...

It's getting to be that time of year, holiday season. Which means a bit of a slow down on the bentos since there are a ton of things happening around family and friends. As usual I'll post up what I get and any neat food related things I run into. Anyhow, with all this work and experimentation with my new sous vide contraptions and trying out various temperatures to perfect my cooking debut , I got this idea to make a bento where the theme would be all slow cooked/Sous vide prepared items: Slow Mo if you will. It played out great in my head, I'll just throw a bunch of stuff in my two crockpots, vacuum up a few pouches and all I'd do is wait for magic to happen. I'll have a free day to do anything I want! Didn't quite work out that way. Yes, everything took hours to cook but I was chained to the house since everything had different timings and if I wanted to make sure everything popped out at roughly the same time all of it had to be prepared in stages. Anyhow on...

Ok today's bento was brought to you by the fine folks at Heinz . I was sitting in a meeting and saw a little ketchup packet that proclaimed, "The worlds best meatloaf". I thought to myself, "that's a bold claim my little friend" which lead me to this link containing a small archive of Heinz ketchup based recipes. Flipping through various links, I was fairly impressed with what all was being made with ketchup and when I landed on the peanut butter cookies (yes made with ketchup) I knew I had to build a box around it. Not much in the way of tweaking this time around (only a bit in the soup) I didn't want any mishaps to be blamed on my tweaking, let the ketchup shine through! Ok I was going to go into a case between Catsup, Ketchup and the origins of both in terms of word and sauce. This appears to be very diffcult to ascertain and give correct information. There's various citations on the spelling of Ketchup (catsup, catchup) by 16th and 17th century ...