Eating in a box

So this paleo/gluten-free friendly mug bread has been making the rounds on facebook recently. Mug/microwave cooking has been around for a bit but people have gotten pretty creative over the years. I mentioned that I should created a bento box out of mug items made in a microwave. Since it's a rainy crappy day outside I decided to play in the kitchen. The microwave is a surprisingly versatile piece of equipment. I usually use it to reheat items (never to my satisfaction). There's some debate what the nuke box does to nutrients, some say it preserves them, other say they get nuked to death. All the supporting scientifically measured evidence I've read seems to support the former. Anyhow, that's not the subject of this post, the challenge: make a bento box around items you make in a mug and a microwave. I settled on brunch because it's probably the easiest thing to do because eggs are easy and most every other recipe out there sort of dessert or cake so brunch i...

I confess there's not really a good cohesive theme for this box. I just got two things of free food product and decided to just throw something yummy together. Above you see my attempt at creative swirling with the cream in the soup but it just looks like weird modern art. I need more practice. So part of being plugged into the food blog community I seem to get product samples a lot. By no means do they say, "hey you must shill for us" or obligate me to do so, but I figure it's nice if I find a product useful to put in a nice blurb at the very least, I like to let my bento eaters benefit as well. Kinda like the foodblogger events, I go, I write a nice entry about it. This is no different, but I figure it's important that I disclaimer that I did get free stuff, I'm using free stuff, and I've decided to write about the free stuff I got. I'm no professional so I'm in no obligation to disclose all this stuff, but I figure it shouldn't hurt to be up...

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 ...