Eating in a box

Greetings from across the pond. So the previous post showed Big Ben and parlament from my last trip. This is the structure from which I took that aerial picture (I took this picture this trip). The London Eye is a giant ferris wheel that lets you get some really breath taking pictures of London. I'm told it's quite a site at night, so I might be going back. I came up with some neat themes for bentos, but I thought of an idea that would knock out two birds with one stone. Readers, submit me some theme ideas, I'd love your thoughts. If I choose to use your theme, i'll obviously post what I created, but add the recipes and any techniques I used to create it. I can't promise *when* I'll get to having time to do this, but I would enjoy the challenge. If I don't get anything, I'll dig up some more ideas :) Themes can revolve around a dish, country, or quirky idea.

Life and work have conspired against me and prevented me from making bentos. Now work is shipping me out for two weeks. I suppose between the 12 hour work days I'll find time to hatch up some new menus ideas and resume my bentoing. Maybe i'll post some culinary finds from London.

I wanted to make lunch but as luck would have it, the majority of my eaters are traveling for work or just plain not around. This of course doesn't mean I can't make lunch for my loving wife. I had her pick out some recipes and I got to work. Simple healthy lunch bagged up instead of boxed just due to the wrap being hard to shove into those bento boxes. First up we have a wrap with provolone, red bell pepper, marinated artichokes, and spinach. I had to slightly wilt the spinach as the wife's not a big fan of raw spinach. I was going to flavor the wrap with some sort of a sauce but since I went the marinated artichoke route I let them do the flavoring. Wraps have always been difficult for me in packaging. They tend to fall apart easily or become unrolled. I ended up wrapping the whole thing in parchment paper to survive delivery. It's worth remembering that normal tape does not stick to parchment paper. In retrospect that makes a ton of sense since parchment paper is sup...

I promise, a short intermission, I'm preparing for a housewarming party and the "battle plans" (i'll post more on battle plans) for the party took up this last week. Since I'm cooking this week, it will leave little room for a bento. I'm still contemplating new themes so in the mean time, enjoy some towel animals I made while on a recent business trip :) (those cruise guys are very talented, yes it took a while to reverse engineer their ingenuity) If you guys have any theme ideas, i'd love to hear them, perhaps my eaters will be fed by your inspiration!

I've been wanting to do this bento for a while now. The challenge is that, vegetarian does not necessarily translate into healthy. Lots of indian food is cooked in Ghee (clarified butter) and has lots of cream added, saddle that to some white rice and you really don't have a high fiber, low glycemic friendly meal. I think I was able to put a nice balance between flavor and health to come up with a bento that was still in line with Indian food as a genre and fairly healthy for you at the same time. We start with the rice. I substituted some Texmati brown rice in lieu of the traditional basmati rice. After steaming up the rice, I tossed it together with some yogurt and poppy seed which produced a nice tangy moist rice that can really stand alone as a side dish or be paired with the other entrees that I provided. I briefly toasted the poppy seeds before adding the cooked rice so the flavor of toasted poppy really stands out to complement the tangy yogurt. Boo I find I didn'...

I'm back! Yes, finally! I think there will be some sporatic posts until I get my feet on the ground, but I forced myself to get a lunch box out today. As much as I am tired from working on the bentos yesterday, I'm very happy to have been able to get back into the groove as it were. So first bento back, we have light fare. My wife suggested the tea sandwich route, so I picked 3 different sandwiches, a soup, and a nice healthy side dish as the menu. I tossed in some "sugar free" shortbread cookies instead of the full on bad for you shortbreads and voila we have our bento. I tried really hard to stay the course on high fiber/low cal. I picked up some of the low-cal bread for the sandwiches, the veggies are basically free on the health scale. I was able to pickup a good "split pea" soup alternative that was fat-free and high in fiber. So we start with the sandwiches. I picked three tea sandwiches (out of the many out there) that sounded the most appealing. The...

For real this time, I'm going to restart my bentos. Stay tuned, I'm creating a calzone (hopefully in the healthy sense) slash italian themed bento to kick things off. Yet another diet change, but I'm hopeful it will be good!