Eating in a box

Greetings from Down Under! I'm on temporary assignment in Australia (next two years) and we're finally settling into our new place. This is my very first use of the new kitchen. A simple bento box from what I could find at the local grocery store. Nothing fancy I'm afraid. I'm just glad I got to cook I'll confess I cheated this time around. I don't have any spices or really anything in the kitchen other than flake sea salt for seasoning. This chicken came pre-spatchcocked and pre-marinaded. I will say it was very convenient. From what I could tell (the label was sparce on details) the marinade was made of oil, garlic, onion, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper (maybe a bit of tarragon) and lemon and thickened with mayo. $13 AUD about $10 USD... (sigh) everything is very expensive here. This was my first experience in cooking with a convection oven. It browned the chicken quite well but the outside was achieving a golden brown faster than the internal t...

Happy Chinese New Year!

One of the many things on my foodie bucket list was to dine at a 3 Michelin star restaurant. I had my chance a few years ago on our trip to Las Vegas but at time we only had only stumbled upon Robuchon and there was only a day left and there were no places on the reservation list. After recounting our trip to my friend, he asked "OMG did you go to Joel Robuchon? I had the brioche from the bread cart and nearly cried". Since then I had been plotted my return to Las Vegas just to try this restaurant. I had no idea what to expect out of my experience at a three star Michelin star restaurant. I only knew that the food would be top notch and I was told that the service was a completely different level of experience. We had an idea when my wife asked the maître d' "can I...." his reply before she finished was "Yes of course! we never say no!". The bread cart was quite a site. Usually you get a bread basket, if you're lucky it contained a couple o...

Happy Holidays all! (Display made entirely out of roses at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. )

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...