Eating in a box

We had a long weekend and decided we needed to see more of Australia so we booked a flight and a inexpensive serviced apartment and landed in Melbourne. A portion of my coworkers were from our Melbourne office (we collapsed everyone into Sydney) and they had plenty of suggestions as to where to go. The way it has been explained to me, Sydney and Melbourne are very much like L.A. and San Francisco back home. Sydney, like LA, has beaches and warmer weather and people tend to hangout preferring more outdoor activities, Melbourne like SF is colder and it tends to rain so people tend to stay indoors and as a result there are better restaurants, arts, etc. From our short three day tour, I'm in agreement with generalized comparison. Here's what we did: Our first day we spent a lot of time walking around. Where we were staying (near Chinatown area) there are lots of narrow lane one way streets. Our first restaurant was Il Bacaro Cucina and bar tucked away in one of those narrow...

Ok more traveling, this time to London, first week for work (above is our view of Buckingham Palace from our office) and second week for vacation with my wife. Lots of pictures of a lot of different food, I've manage to cut the number of photos to the highlights of what and where we ate. I've put links to the various places just in case you're in the area and want to check out some of these places. Sorry in advance about some of the photos I shot everything using a Galaxy S3 mini android phone that I acquired while on this trip and it does a pretty good job, but under low light it gets a bit grainy. Got off the plane bright and early 6am and dropped my bags at the hotel. While there I started my trip off with a classic English breakfast. Bangers (sausage) mushroom, roasted tomato, potato cake, hash browns, vegetarian sausage (which was quite nice), eggs, beans (heinz I believe) and some black pudding (blood sausage, a little dry but tasty) Since my room wasn...

This is how lame I am, I'm just now getting around to post my final day in Hawaii and I feel so lame about it that I'm not even putting Hawaii Trip Day 9 in the title. That and the post basically revolves around the Lemongrass Bistro that we ate at on the last day (we didn't really do anything else). The picture above is the "terminal" at the airport, completely open air and no shops or anything. I'm not sure what they do when it rains. If you remember from my posts about my Hawaiian trip, there was a little cafe in the food court of the Queen's market  called Lemongrass which my wife absolutely loved. (we hit that food court at least four times during our stay) During our few excursions into the city of Kona Kailua we actually happened upon the original restaurant Lemongrass Bistro.  So when we were scratching for stuff to do before our flight Pictured above is the Ahi Poke. Everyone has their own take on making poke in Hawaii. With access to...

This isn't technically my third Thai bento, but it is the third one that I've labeled as "Thai Bento" and I really didn't have another theme to follow with this one and someone wanted Thai food.  I had a few new Thai recipes that I wanted to work on so this request worked out well. I've already professed my love for green curry. Here I went with a beef sirloin with Japanese eggplant in green curry sauce. I kind of screwed up here, I should have sliced the beef a lot thinner to keep the beef tender, that or I should have gone with large chunks of beef (probably preferrably beef short rib) and gone the slow cooker route. In this case (although everyone gave comments on really liking the dish) I felt the beef too tough and the eggplant a tad too mushy. Slow cook is the best call here since I don't eat up a burner space and can afford to stage the eggplant into the crock at the last second and get better texture. For a salad I found a salad called ...

As usual, I have to bow my head in shame for such a late post. This bento was produced last week, but as has been the usual mantra lately work and life obligations have kept me from making lunch for my eaters. I'm helping out with a friends wedding and another party so I'm still busy in the kitchen, just not doing anything exciting enough that I feel the need to take pictures and talk about it. Sadly, I was in a giant hurry to make lunch for this bento. I felt so bad about not getting to cook for such a while but I still had such a crunch on time that I couldn't really devote myself to a long planned out lunch. I picked a menu that I knew I could execute quickly and still keep light and healthy. Asian cuisine is good for the quick and healthy constraints and of course Thai is a favorite amongst my diners. In fact when I shouted over the cube walls, "hey I need a theme" there were quite a few chirps of "Thai, curry, Indian" seems like my audience had an A...

Thai, who doesn't like a good curry? Coconut milk, fresh ingredients and simple preparation makes Thai food an easy favorite to include as a theme. To make things even easier I even had a sous chef and taste tester to help things along. Ok, running short on time so no more yammering. Panang Curry. Thai curries all have a start point of the basic curry paste, whether that be green, sour, red, massaman, yellow, or panang. They all have the same thing in common, a lot of work on a mortar and pestle. Savvy cooks and restaurants know that the best bet is to use some canned curry paste as a base. Yes I've made my share of homemade paste and I have the giant mortar and pestle to prove it, but a good canned paste is the home cook's best friend. The curry is pretty simple, I fried up the paste in some coconut cream and added the rest of the ingredients. And you can put pretty much anything in, I went with beef and bell pepper, but I've seen onion, bamboo shoots and baby corn. I...

This week's bento is courtesy of my enthusiasm after taking a cooking class over at Thai Fresh with chef and fellow foodblogger Jam from Thai Cooking with Jam . It was an incredibly fun time and full over great information about Thai food and ingredients. The class was a hands on so that meant plenty of time in the kitchen helping with the meal we all shared in at the end. If you've ever considered going, get off that duff and go, if you've never even knew it existed then you're just plain missing out. Ok just a bit of stuff on curry making, above you will see two of the three curry pastes (Green curry on the left, Sour curry on the right) used in the box. This is where most of the magic happens. Homemade curry paste compared to can has a fresher/cleaner taste, I'm not sure if it's because some of the ingredients aren't perfectly ground as you would find in the commercial version so you can get some of the components or duh you're using fresh ingredient...

Cooking for twelve presents it's whole new challenges than cooking for six. You can't do a recipe that calls for caramelized onions in one go, in my home kitchen you'd be steaming said onions not caramelizing them. Instead of one stock pot poaching chicken, now you have two. Sure cooking for six is easier than cooking for one, but cooking for twelve becomes cooking everything twice. Normally this is not an issue, I like challenges, unfortunately cooking for twelve has turned into standing for hours of prep, cook, plating, photos, and finally cleanup. This presents a challenge and is re-injuring an old injury for me that I'm not letting heal week after week. In a commercial kitchen you have staff, but here it's only little ol me. If I include soup that's 90 portions of food i'm preparing and since most of my folks have enough to eat over two days it's more like 180. I'm not whining, I'd do it in a heartbeat if not for being on crutches or my pimp...