Eating in a box

It's been hot out here. We just broke the record for most consecutive three digit temperatures, it was set in 1925 I believe. Not exactly a "We're #1" cheering kinda moment but I noteworthy none-the-less. As the days of summer drag on, it really gets harder and harder to contemplate making lunch. There's all the driving around to buy food, and then cooking and rushing around, something about this heat just saps your energy. I pushed through and decided that a simple bento around the tastes of summer would be a nice theme. I tried to stick with things that were light and vegetables that tended to be in season. We start things off with the Asian caramel pork. I simply cubed up a bunch of pork tenderloin browned it up and made a nice sauce with some soy and brown sugar. After cooking the pork and onions I simmered the pork in the sauce until thick. This dish definitely needs some sort of accompaniment because I think by itself the sauce makes it too sweet. If ea...

I decided on a new tag, NIAB (Not In A Box) for any of my posts of meals I create but not in a bento. These are usually dinners or special occasions and allow me to put in an in between post when I don't have a bento to show off. So as I said I didn't have a bento this week instead I chose to focus on making a nice dinner for my girlfriend. I got some photos in so I figured I can share it with you. For dinner I did a quick and light menu. I started (Ok I say I started but i didn't want to be hussling so I really served everything up all at once) with a classic French Onion soup (a requested favorite), I think I could have eased up on the cheese as it was a bit much, still it was gooey and yummy. The long slow cooking time on the onions really paid off because the soup was delicious. There was some disagreement on how far you cook the onions, some say that you cook them down to caramelized, others say to stop short of brown. I went with "ju...

This week I saw a blog post in my google reader that took me into the rabbit hole of Sri Lanka cooking websites. Sri Lanka isn't one of the first countries I think of when I created my list of culinary countries to visit, heck outside of news reports of Sri Lanka I didn't know much about the place. From a brief study of the country it appears it inherits culinary traits from the Dutch and the Portuguese from colonial times, and Indian and Southeast Asia due to its proximity. I wish I was able to unearth more information about the culinary heritage. I only know what I've been able to find thru combing thru recipe stories and a brief blurb paragraph in wikipedia. What I know for sure is there's no shortage in the use of hot peppers, coconut and a large variety of spices and curry dishes which dominate the recipes that I ran across. The main dish today is called "Devil Chicken" and let me tell you it's a scorcher. The recipes I ran across were a bit vagu...

I went with a light italian themed box today, had to really keep things simple since I had guests over and needed to put together something fast . I don't think I was quite as successful this time with a record breaking bento production time so I couldn't call it a "quicky bento". It took me roughly two hours this time (with prep), granted I did handicap myself by making breakfast at the same time for my visiting family. Quite a few additional fails too. I didn't get a good picture of the box and I missed taking a picture of the lasagna, guess I was a little distracted trying to entertain folks. As I've mentioned in the past, if you want to get thru a dinner party (or bento in my case) it pays to be organized. That means prep in stages and much like you see on TV every dish they put together magically has all the ingrediants chopped and ready to dump into a pan. This really beats trying to run from chopping block back to pan and then back to measuring out thi...

I hadn't intended on creating a bento this week. My return trip from Legoland had me home at around midnight, hardly enough time to get something together the next day. As it turns out this is the last week for one of my regular bento-ers and I wanted to make sure and get her one last bento before she left. I got some inspiration off a "recipe calendar" while visiting my sister's house and built the box around the Indian themed dish. Again, I think this was a record breaking preparation (I'm not sure I can get any faster), I made it into a 24 hour grocery store on my way home and had my battle plan in hand from sketching it out on the airplane. The main dish was meant to be a kabob, specifically a Chicken Tikka Masala Kabob. I ended up using chicken breast tenders and didn't see a need to skewer them since they were already the perfect shape and size and didn't needs to be held together. This was super easy since I setup the yogurt marinade the night befor...

Today's bento is actually a bento for one. My girlfriend wanted to do a lunch exchange with a co-worker who's Indian. Great! A cultural exchange, and this sounded like a fairly straight forward box to plan out but as my girlfriend and I starting going thru dishes and ideas it started to get harder and harder. Apparently if you remove meat, seafood (some folks make that exemption), and eggs (same) it gets kinda hard. Always the favorite is the ketchup fried rice. Problem is fried rice usually involves some sort of meat and egg. So I simply skipped the meaty items. On our trip to the Chinese grocery store we found some vegetarian "ham". The stuff stilled tasted like soy protein but at least it gave some additional texture for the dish so I went with it. I've had some vegetarian duck that was pretty darn close and was very very tasty. So, I'm gonna go on a tangent here. Given folks are vegetarian there seems to be a huge amount of products that mimic the look and...

I have to admit I was a bit curious about my invitation to Haddingtons for another foodblogger event. I felt like the last one was only a few months ago and checking my post, yup March was my last visit. Turns out Haddington's has relaunched with a new chef so there's new items to be had! I have to apologize in advance about the blurred picture i'm still getting the hang of my new camera and although it all looks good on the tiny LCD i should have re-checked it. I may have to reconsider either carrying an LCD booklight or using the flash (or try to find a lower light lense). It didn't help that the party room was dimly lit, but were it not a photographing event it would have been considered a cozy pub so you can't knock the lighting that bad :). The decor is the same but apparently the guys in the kitchen and bar aren't. I guess that's why we were invited. New ideas and new menu items and this time I got a chance to speak with our host, Chef Jimmy Corwell (a...