Eating in a box

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (Not the greatest of pictures. We had hotpot with friends and family that couldn't make it home this year.)

Finally a food post! I'll admit this one has been on the backlog for posting but with all the travel it's been very difficult to get back on track. In my quest towards a healthy low calorie lunch box I was inspired with my previous use of soba noodles and Abalone mushrooms (King Oyster). Here I aimed to use the mushrooms as my protein and grill it to give a visual appeal of grilled tenderloin. The meaty texture of the mushroom is often used to substitute for animal protein and it's also a huge savings on calories. Here's a shot of the ingredients used.  (see recipe below for explanation) I cut the mushrooms into 3/4" thick rounds and marinaded them over night. The abalone mushrooms give the dish a nice meat-y texture without all of the calories. I let the mushrooms marinade overnight hoping to have the mushroom really get some of the flavor and maybe draw out some of the moisture with the use of the miso and salt. I then grilled the mushrooms on ...

It seems that I'm doing more travel than I'm doing cooking this year. Heck, I still have a couple of posts from the last trip that I never finished. (One features a visit to a chocolate museum in Belgium) I still have a couple of cooking posts that I haven't managed to post either. I'm a bit behind.  As you can tell from the title picture we're in Sydney, Australia! This is a view from a harbor ferry of the opera house. This was a two week visit but I'm going to consolidate it into one post and skipped a few of the places we ate at (I left my camera in a few instances). We landed 6 am and since we had time to kill before checking in (and had to keep ourselves awake) we walked down to Chinatown and got some Yum Cha (Dim Sum) at the Emperor's Garden. It was ok, the fact of the matter is it was the only thing open so we couldn't be too picky and since we didn't have a fridge we couldn't order a lot to check out the variety. Here's a p...

Our cruise finished where it began, back in Amsterdam. We had one extra day in Amsterdam before we head to Belgium for our friends' wedding. The Amsterdam flag is the triple X which is part of it's coat of arms, I had originally thought the triple X marked the red light district.  I was further mistaken to think the locals were really proud of the red light district as I started seeing the triple X everywhere but was able to get a clarification from a tour guide. Well now that is out of the way.... Something I highly recommend if you take the cruise we were on is to take the Anne Frank House tour. Unfortunately no pictures allowed, so I got one of a statue of Anne Frank outside the house. The tour lets you bypass buying tickets a month ahead online and standing in a crazy 4 hour line. We basically shuffled in before the museum opened and got to see the whole thing. You can't go to Amsterdam without taking a picture of a windmill. I was only able to snap this pict...

I was invited to join NHK World's Global Lunchbox project on Japanese TV. I filmed a submission and sent into photos. The episode apparently aired 9/14 but I was unable to view it so I have no idea whether they used any of my video. They did feature me in the gallery with a shortened version of my video on making this bento here . Eating in a box goes global :)

Our last port of call before returning to home port, Copenhagen Denmark. I'm not sure whether to classify this as our last stop or the stop before last. I saw this sign on while we were walking down the street.... 'Nuff said yarr. The big attraction we decided to hit was Tivoli Garden. This amusement park/regular park is very popular destination (especially with the beautiful summer weather) it has a lot more green space sitting area for people to lounge on unlike the amusement parks in America. This is the second oldest amusement parks in the world (built in 1843). In fact Walt Disney modeled his Disney world parks after the Tivoli park. This is a shot of the Asian themed area of the park. There were lots of green spaces and where park go-ers can sit and listen to music (a couple of open air theaters). This is a shot of the Mrs. Peacock herding her babies. Denmark is the home of my favorite toy Lego! Lego seems to distribute all of its models all over th...