Eating in a box

While here in Fiji my wife and I decided to take a half day class at the Flavours of Fiji cooking school . It is located just outside of where we were staying at Denarau island it was a easy hop over from our hotel to the industrial estate. The cooking facility was pretty impressive, they had cooking stoves setup for up to 16 people (one instructor 15 students). It was a large hall that had two primary vents in the ceiling and two massive AC units to help keep things cool (towards the end when we had our curries going it did get a bit hot). Our host Ethee start off showing us the best way to pick between drinking and cooking coconuts. Ethee explained that you want young green coconuts (that you must pick off the trees) that don't actually slosh around when shaken (meaning there's no air space in the nut so it was full of jelly and water). Alternatively for cooking you want a brown coconut with plenty of flesh (just fallen off the tree would be good). Next Ethee w...

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...