Eating in a box

Today's bento theme is: Roasting. The application of dry heat to meat and vegetables to prepare a dish. A lot of the time, roasting is associated with low heat longer cooking but it's not limited to low and slow, sometimes you can apply the technique in a high temperature setting (usually on tender cuts of meat). But for the most part low and slow gets you a lot of flavor without having to stand and watch over a dish. In vegetables you get the sugars to caramelize, root vegetables get nice and tender. For tough or large cuts of meat it gives it time to break down collagen and connective tissue so it becomes "fall apart" tender. The key is retaining moisture. A lot of time you either sear (in the case of meat) or slather in fat or oil to help in that process. In this case, I did neither....  This recipe came from listening to NPR on my commute home, it was a "copy cat/fast food fakeout" recipe for a roasted chicken. The idea seemed sound, you put on a d...

Sorry a dull looking lunch, I promise it was remarked as tasty. I was going for a higher healthy factor this time. My friend explaining the health benefits of Quinoa, I of course had to go and do some research on this grain and promptly incorporate it into a bento. I ran out of room on this box I took over the utensils slot and put in the asparagus. Now that I'm looking at it composition wise I think There's a little too much brown and orange. Tried to save some time and effort with this box. I bought a pre-roasted chicken from the store and defrosted some pesto from a previous box and put together some fresh mozzarella and tomato into a sandwich, the bread is a low cal low carb bread. Note to self to make 5 sandwiches you don't need a whole chicken. Half a chicken would do fine. Next came the Quinoa, I pulled a recipe for a shitake quinoa pilaf. I had some fears on using such an unknown ingredient but the recipe turned out quite nicely, I had to increase the liquid it cal...