| Lunch Box 627: "It's cool in Hawaii!" |
[Feb. 9th, 2009|09:23 pm] |
 Today's lunch is all about the tropics, where I wish I could be, especially when I'm standing around in a windchill below zero Fahrenheit waiting for a bus. Here's some Spam musubi, which is to Hawaii what hot dogs are to the US, or so my Hawaiian friends would have me believe. Then I have steamed snow peas and marinated, stir-fried tofu, which are not all that tropical, I suppose, but they bring to mind distant places which are likely to be less bloody cold than Georgia was this morning. Then there's some tropic-ish kumquats, strawberries, pink grapefruit, coconut, and a yates apple.
It's not a luau in my box, but I'll take what I can get. Or pack.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 613: Thanksgiving's over |
[Dec. 11th, 2008|09:02 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | apple, box, fruit salad, light-fried plantain chips, meatloaf, orange, persimmon, pink orange, plantain, pomegranate, steamed broccoli | ] |
 Enough with the turkey! Being a single person with a half a leftover turkey is not a bad situation at all if you like turkey - which I do - but by the time I've gnawed it to the bone I'm quite happy to move on to something else - in this case, good old-fashioned meatloaf slathered with ketchup. It may look weird and gray in this picture, but, trust me, the deficiency is in my photography skills rather than my cooking.
With it I have some very crisp steamed broccoli, light-fried plantains; and a fruit salad made with apple, pink orange, pomegranate, and persimmon. It's like a mini-Thanksgiving feast, but without turkey!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 602: Buttoned rice |
[Nov. 11th, 2008|09:52 pm] |
 This box is closer to the traditional Japanese bento format than most of my lunches. Close enough to the right ratio of the various bits (rice, vegetable, protein, fruit), and I've even put the pickled plums in the rice. Well, except there's two instead of one. By accident I bought koume instead of umeboshi, so instead of soft pickled plums (which are actually apricots) I ended up with grape-sized, hard pickled plumricots. They taste the same, but you can't squeeze out the pits, tear 'em up, and mix the bits with the rice, so I included two.
On the non-rice side I have zucchini & onion stir-fry, sauteed beef & mushrooms which I cooked together instead of making them separate as usual (I covered & simmered the mushrooms until they got juicy, then added the beef and stir-fried it the rest of the way), and some apple.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 590: Red pickles |
[Oct. 1st, 2008|11:15 pm] |
 This is a confused lunch. It doesn't know if it is decent healthy American or Japanese food, or American or Japanese junk food.
Here I have some okonomiyaki, made on a day when I didn't have much in the way of toppings and fillings - so, what the heck, I cut up some turkey bacon and mixed it in. Result: good! (The little container is filled with okonomiyaki sauce, of course.) Then there's the everpresent steamed broccoli and some simmered shiitake mushrooms that think they look classy. And next to the Kool-Aid pickles they actually do. Finally, I have apple slices and almond jelly for dessert.
If you pack almond jelly in your bento lunch, don't expect to be able to eat it with chopsticks. That way lies madness, not to mention humor if anyone sees you. Pack a little fork or toothpick or something you can skewer those slippery bits with.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 589: Sushi fantasia |
[Sep. 30th, 2008|11:45 pm] |
 Sometimes I luck out leftover-wise. I had a bunch of odds and ends plus a batch of rice. A few leftover shrimp, one lonely simmered shiitake mushroom, some omelet, a few shreds of smoked salmon, the tail end of a cucumber... What can I do with that stuff? Well, I can always stick it on top of rice... wait a minute, I'll season the rice, cut the miscellania up, arrange it all snazzy, call it chirashi-zushi, and nobody will know that I was cleaning out my fridge!
You won't tell anybody, will you? Shh.
And I've also got steamed broccoli, apple, and mochi. It's a safe bet that on any given day I will have at least two of those three items in my fridge.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 547: Curry is convenient |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|09:08 am] |
 I used to hate curry. That was before I understood that there was curry that would not burn the lining off the inside of my mouth, and which furthermore actually tasted nice. But now I like it, and furthermore appreciate its convenience. I stumble home and don't feel like doing fancy cooking, I can just stir-fry whatever I have handy, chuck in some curry mix, and I have a meal. So, here's some vegetable curry - in this case, an armload of vegetables that followed me home from the farmers' market - and baked Japanese sweet potato, corn bread, apple, and purple imo-yokan.
This is almost a vegan meal. I thought it was for a moment there, and then I realized that I'd put egg in the corn bread. Drat it.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 496: Nurse, hand me that pizza cutter, stat! |
[Jan. 11th, 2008|07:36 pm] |
 Presentation counts. All of this stuff - smoked salmon sushi, steamed broccoli, baked Japanese sweet potato, pizza, and a fruit salad made with apple, persimmon, and pink orange - is delicious. However, isn't it a bit weird to see pizza in among all that other healthy and/or Asian-type stuff? (The pizza is homemade, and is a whole lot healthier than regular pizza because it's non-greasy.) But what I really shouldn't have done was slice the pizza into little squares. Sure, it's easier to eat with chopsticks that way, but pizza cut into squares reminds me uncomfortably of school cafeteria pizza. Ugh!
Thankfully, I was able to subdivide it into triangles, which de-ughified it.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 495: Canned lunch |
[Jan. 10th, 2008|11:21 am] |
 It's been a while since I used one of my tiffins - East Indian metal lunch boxes - and, since they are cool, I went about remedying that oversight at once. I filled it with maki sushi, including shiitake, cucumber, avocado, and masago (salmon roe) with grape tomatoes as spacers, steamed green beans, and a fruit salad made with apple, persimmon, pink orange, and longans.
Once again, I nearly made a vegan lunch without realizing it, then screwed up with one little item, in this case the masago. At this rate I'll never get to date any hot vegan girls.
(Website post, with links to recipes.)
And a little off-topic note: Project Freetown has a new video for Move Your Feet. It's in the same happy, pixelated format as the original, and in fact it's even more happy and groovy-cute. Plus, it has come cute imagery that ought to please foodies. |
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| Lunch Box 492: All sorts of things |
[Jan. 7th, 2008|10:31 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | apple, baked purple sweet potato, box, carrots, fried potato skins, fruit salad, persimmon, pink orange, raisins, steamed snow peas, takoyaki, tempura, tsukune | ] |
 I started out filling this lunch box with whatever came to hand: tsukune, tempura, takoyaki, and fried potato skins. ("This lunch has been sponsored by the letter T.") That made for a lot of golden browns. On the other side, I'll admit I was going for color, with steamed snow peas, baked purple sweet potato, carrot, and a fruit salad made with apple, persimmon, raisins, and pink orange.
I have no idea why the carrot is shaped like sakura flowers. We all know that that kind of frou-frou business is not my style. I suspect sinister forces are at work.
And for something completely different, ( a disturbing sweet potato. )
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 491: Chicken meatloaf onna stick |
[Jan. 3rd, 2008|09:21 pm] |
 Here's part 2 of my recent kitchen-ninja binge" tsukune, which is balls of ground chicken and stuff, grilled and sauced and skewered. There's some steamed snow peas, baked Japanese sweet potato, and baked purple sweet potato. And finally, a fruit salad made with apple, persimmon, and pink orange.
I've heard of pink grapefruit, but pink orange is new to me. I found these in 99 Ranch Market. They were regular-looking navel oranges, but with "red flesh." Huh? Out of curiosity I got some. They are just a little sourer than a regular orange, and the rind is so tough they are impossible to peel. Googling around, I see that this is probably a Cara Cara orange.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 481: Packing material |
[Dec. 13th, 2007|06:41 pm] |
 My previous lunch was so chaotic it was practically anarchy, and the orderliness of this one may be an unconscious reaction to that. I have five pork & shrimp dumplings surrounded by steamed broccoli, which in fact serves as a kind of packing material. (Do not try this for Xmas shopping.) Then I have some more imo-gohan, and above it alternating slices of apple and persimmon.
I was mainly thinking of using stuff up to open up fridge and freezer space. The color combination, which I noticed only after the fact, was a pleasant accident.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 454: Neverending beans |
[Oct. 23rd, 2007|07:07 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | apple, box, buford highway farmer's market, chicken tikka masala, coconut gel, fruit salad, hoddeuk, kiwi fruit, korean rice cakes, persimmon, pineapple, rice, stir-fried long beans | ] |
 Yesterday I had a day off from work, so I got to go to the Buford Highway Farmer's Market and grab neat stuff, much of which will turn up in the next few entries.
Today's lunch starts with chicken tikka masala over rice... sorta. I had plenty of sauce left over from the original dish, so I grilled some chicken breast, sliced it thin, and mixed it up with the sauce to absorb some flavor. Hey, the sauce was tasty enough that I didn't want to throw out the extra, OK? The chicken & rice is surrounded by stir-fried long beans, which is one of the new-to-me things I bought. They can be cooked like regular green beans, but they're a foot and a half long, which makes them cool! (I cut them in half to stir-fry them, and even then they kept trying to escape from the skillet.)
On the other side I have Korean rice cakes, which are not terribly sweet until you get to the sesame filling, hoddeuk, and a fruit salad made with persimmon, apple, kiwi fruit, pineapple, and coconut gel.
By the way, if you live in Atlanta and are looking for bento boxes, the Buford Highway Farmer's Market has lots of them in different sizes and shapes. I got 650 and 800 ML "leaflet tight" boxes for $7 - $8, a great big ol' picnic-sized bento for about the same price, and I saw several different brands of lunch jars, Zojirushi among them. They also have taiyaki makers for $17. Sweet!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 451: The Temperature At Which Lunch Burns |
[Oct. 17th, 2007|08:21 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | apple, baked eggplant slices, banana bread, blueberries, box, coconut gel, fruit salad, kiwi fruit, pineapple, rice, salmon saka-mushi, tamarinds, zucchini & onion stir-fry | ] |
 I got home yesterday so not in the mood to do real cooking. Leftovers to the rescue! Here's some salmon saka-mushi over rice, zucchini & onion stir-fry, baked eggplant slices, banana bread, some tamarinds, and a fruit salad made with apple, kiwi fruit, pineapple, blueberries, and coconut gel. The only thing I had to cook was the rice, and I had that going while I cut up fruit and shelled tamarinds.
It seems that this two-tier box is the one I always use when I pack fruit salad. I guess the two parts are most efficient at keeping the fruit and its juices from mixing with the rest of the lunch, and vice versa.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 440: Out Of The Freezer It Came |
[Sep. 28th, 2007|07:39 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | apple, blueberries, box, broccoli stem stars, coconut gel, crab rangoon gyoza, crab rangoons, fruit salad, pineapple, satoimo noodles, shrimp, takoyaki | ] |
 It's Friday, which for a lot of us means a leftovers lunch and a slightly-less-cluttered fridge. That's the case here, although the leftoveriness is less because of a leftovers purge and more because I just got DDR Supernova 2. No time to cook fancy meals, busy arrow-stomping!
Fortunately, on days like this my freezer comes to the rescue. I have crab rangoon gyoza and takoyaki that I cooked quite some time ago and froze against future need. I have shrimp over satoimo noodles - OK, I did cook the shrimp, but I couldn't resist putting the orange & white on top of those lavender noodles. Then there's steamed broccoli stem stars and a fruit salad made with apple, pineapple, blueberries, and coconut gel. The coconut gel was an impulse buy the last time I was at 99 Ranch. My policy is that every time I shop there I buy something I've never tried before, and when I spied the coconut gel & pineapple in a small jar I had to give it a try.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 435: Scraps, not leftovers |
[Sep. 21st, 2007|08:34 pm] |
 Nope, I didn't pack a miniature pillow in my lunch. That's a steamed pork bun. The bread rose a little more than I planned, so I ended up with big soft squashy buns. It's surrounded by, get this, stir-fried zucchini peel. I was making an old favorite, stir-fried zucchini & onions, and it occurred to me that 1) loads of vitamins and stuff are in the skin, and they would go to waste if I threw that away, and 2) since I was stir-frying anyway, why not? So I stir-fried the peel separately, and it turned out quite good! Next time, however, I'll cut the peel into smaller segments. Eight-inch lengths of peel are a bit awkward with chopsticks.
On the other side we have simplicity itself: rice with egg furikake, apple slices, and mochi.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 422: Octopus & Garden |
[Aug. 20th, 2007|07:09 pm] |
 f this lunch's photo creeps you out, you're not alone.
Today I have some pork pies, which are my basic meat pies made with pork. Did you know that "pork pie" is British rhyming slang for "lie"? (And if you've played Dragon Quest 8 and been puzzled by Yangus's speech, "brown bread" is slang for "dead." This has been another *THUD* Useless Fact.)
Ahem. The pies are nestled in a nice field of stir-fried cabbage. On the other side I have some baked purple sweet potato, which means I finally went out to 99 Ranch Market again! (It was murderously hot, but I was desperate. The area the produce & cookware section was in is gone, and the produce is crammed into a much smaller area. The produce selection was also, to be honest, a bit anemic, but it looked like they were still in the process of rearranging things.) Finally, I gots a fruit salad made with apple, palm seeds, craisins, and blueberries.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 413: Recycling is good. |
[Aug. 6th, 2007|09:27 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | apple, banana bread, blueberries, box, craisins, edamame, fruit salad, hunter's stew, oden, orange, second stew | ] |
 The main item in today's lunch is a strange hybrid of oden and hunter's stew. The last time I made oden I used light soy sauce, which is much saltier than the regular stuff. It wasn't so bad when I was eating the chunky stuff, but the broth itself - whew, salty! So, when I finished the solid bits I thinned out the broth to half strength with water and threw in a bunch of veggies and stuff - potatoes, quail eggs, squash, cabbage, carrots, shiitake, seafood medley - and basically made a second stew. It turned out good.
I have the some of my usual staples: edamame and a fruit salad made with apple, orange, craisins, and blueberries. And I also have banana bread, which I baked for the first time ever this weekend and it turned out just perfect. I was really impressed with how easy and delicious it is. I love it when new dishes turn out so well!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 384: Return of the Fruit Salad Monster |
[Jun. 20th, 2007|07:41 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | apple, baked japanese sweet potato, blue food, blue omurice, blueberry mochi, box, fruit salad, grapes, lychees, mochi, omurice, persimmon, pink lady apple, simmered shiitake mushrooms, tamarind | ] |
 Guess what? The Blue Food Thing is still going. I got home an hour late last evening due to foul weather and the resultant foul traffic, hungry and in the mood for comfort food. As I already had rice, it took little time to make up a batch of omurice... and, hey, why not add some blue food coloring to make blue omurice? That helped snap me out of my foul mood. So did the egg I used to make the omurice, which was a double-yolker. I felt like I'd somehow gotten a little bonus.
I also have baked Japanese sweet potato and simmered shiitake mushrooms, and on the other side blueberry mochi, some tamarinds, and a fruit salad made with pink lady apple, persimmon, grapes, and lychees. Mmmm.
Not pictured: Wendy's ketchup packets. Hey, they always give me more of those than I need, and I don't like wasting even small things like condiments. Plus, it saves me the trouble of cleaning out little sauce containers.
(Blogger's Choice thingie. Vote for my blog if you want. Vote for other bento blogs like Ss-biggie's blog if you want.)
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 376: Revenge of the blue food |
[Jun. 6th, 2007|07:40 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | apple, baked purple sweet potato, blue food, blue takoyaki, boiled egg, box, dwarf bread, dwarf melba toast, fruit salad, lychee, persimmon, pink lady apple, steamed green beans, swedish fish, takoyaki | ] |
 Bet you thought I was done with the blue food. Hah! I made a batch of 3 dozen octopus balls on Monday, and the last dozen turned out like the ones pictured here. So, add blue takoyaki to the list of blue foods. (They also have red cabbage inside 'em, adding a purple tinge.)
In an astonishing break from the usual broccolifest, I have steamed green beans. Then there's a boiled egg and some baked purple sweet potato. On the other side I have a little container for mayo for the takoyaki, some Swedish fish (I had to fill that little empty space somehow), Dwarf melba toast, and a fruit salad made with pink lady apple, persimmon, and lychees.
I have not posted a recipe for Dwarf melba toast because I haven't posted a recipe for Dwarf bread. The reason for that is that I don't want people thinking I'm actually recommending it. It looks like granite, and... well, I haven't broken a tooth on it yet. You can find the recipe in Nanny Ogg's Cookbook if you're really determined to bake it. To make Dwarf melba toast, slice the Dwarf bread really thin and toast it on low heat several times, turning to heat it evenly. You don't want to brown it, just dry it out a bit.
(Blogger's Choice thingie. Vote for my blog if you want. Vote for other bento blogs like Ss-biggie's blog if you want.)
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 313: Easier than it looks |
[Mar. 1st, 2007|07:01 pm] |
 My fridge is still full of leftovers, but I cooked last night anyway. Hey, I was in the mood for beef & broccoli stir-fry, so that's exactly what I made. It's actually a pretty quick and easy meal to cook, and it goes well over rice - as you see here - or noodles. On the other side we gots a mochi, a pumpkin cookie, and fruit salad with apple, tangerine, and kiwi fruit.
I'm one of those people who usually order the same thing at restaurants. My Chinese Restaurant Thing is broccoli beef. It was a glorious day indeed when I discovered that I could cook it for myself.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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