Eating in a box

So for whatever reason my food blog news feeds have recently been posting more and more Polish food recipes. And when a meatball recipe came thru and I was pretty sure I had to do a Polish Bento. I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I LOVE meatballs and like I said it's what got me to make enough time to cook. Klopsiki Pulpeciki is a meatball (I went with pork only this time) in a mushroom sauce. But since I'm going off gluten for a little while, I made this a gluten free recipe. The binder was breadcrumbs and I used a cornflake gluten free substitute, for the sauce I used some of my all purpose gluten free "flour" blend and it thickened up like charm, and of course I served it over a brown rice flour pasta (regular egg noodle pasta pictured above). The interesting part of this dish is the use of sour cream as part of the binder for the meatballs and a lack of sour cream in what tasted like a "Stroganoff" type dish. I seared up the meatballs ...

I took a mini stay-cation and on day two I set out to Lockhart Texas for the legendary big three bbq joints. Kreuz Market, Black's Barbecue and Smitty's have been around for a long time each have their own unique history, Black's claims oldest continuously opened bbq, Smitty's and Kreuz have a contentious history of it's own all lay some sort of claim of being oldest. I'll let you read up on the history and you can judge for yourself. The bottom line is: in Lockhart, they are hardcore bbq fans. If you haven't made the pilgrimage it's worth it just to check out the history in stores. I know I'm about to open myself up to all sorts of bbq religious zealot-ism in the comments with this post, but please keep in mind this is my opinion of what I ate and I'm actually not much of a griller so you're basic grill fanatic will probably detect more subtleties than I will and will have differing opinions on sauce/no sauce and cooking methods. Anyway,...

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...

I didn't really set a New Year's resolution but the standing order is for me to lose a bit of weight. Time has not been very helpful to me, it seems even going to the gym nearly every day all I'm doing is maintaining status quo. I've been trying a few supplements with mixed results. In the end diet is probably the biggest factor, even then I eat fairly healthy and don't really eat much in sweets. Anyhow, I'm trying to stick to low carb and lean protein so I hit up another Paleo Bento, so far probably the most sustainable "diet" I've been on to date, the no grain thing really bugs me since it keeps me away from my beloved quinoa. Anyone got a good successful sustainable diet I should look into please drop me a comment or email. To kick things off I started off with a spinach and beef mini burger. For filler I use spinach, mushrooms and onion and combine it with some lean 90/10 ground beef. I really liked the use of the veggies to give you the...

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...

Ok 2013 is closing and i'm bound and determined to finish this post tonight before the "Dick Clarke's special" rings off the new year. Day 7 is having trouble exiting my camera. It was a day off so you're not missing much we went to the Chinese restaurant at the hotel and had some Bejing duck and Abalone cold plate (abalone is an expensive ingredient VERY.) If I managed to pull the photos then i'll finally post day 7. Day 8 we went down south to the City of Refuge (the pictures are also stuck on my camera) But the best part of was our visit to Super J's with their famous Lau Lau. I saw them on the food network on one of those "best things I've ever eating" shows. I'm so glad I took notice because it would not have otherwise jumped out at me. We drove by the place and I exclaimed "ooh ooh that's the super J's  place" so after the island of refuge we returned to check the place out. Just like in the show Janice...

Ok the Coffee tour and roasting class was so awesome and informative I had to break it out into it's own post. We learned so much about the coffee plant, the process of arriving at a bean and finally roasting, grading and what makes a good cup of coffee. There's a lot of pictures so this will be a long post but hopefully informative. Also note that all of this information is based on Kona coffee specific to this farm, why? At Mountain Thunder they farm at higher altitude, by hand, and conform to organic farming practices. I'll try to call out the info that's specific to this farm but since I've not been to another coffee plantation to compare this information I can't be sure what's specific to Mountain Thunder and practices are different at a commercial producer that's trying to control environmental conditions to produce the highest yield all at one time. Ok it all starts here with the coffee plant and the coffee flower which is part of the gardin...