| Lunch Box 642: Spring? |
[Apr. 9th, 2009|08:18 pm] |
 The weather in Atlanta has been insane. Warm Spring weather, then down to the 30s with snow flurries for a few days, then overnight the temperature jumps up by another 20 degrees. Oh, and tornadoes, but those are typical of Spring in the south.
Anyway, I've got a Spring lunch here. I don't care if it refuses to act like Spring, the calendar says it is. There's some beef & broccoli stir-fry, light-fried plantains, edamame, and sakura mochi (onigiri type).
The sakura mochi is the spring-specific part of the meal. In Japan, people have hanami - cherry blossom viewing parties - when the cherry trees bloom in Spring. I couldn't find a cherry tree to sit under, but from my 9th floor office window I can see some dogwoods.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 639: Shades of orange |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|10:49 pm] |
 I've been doing a lot of stir-frying lately. I see a bunch of vegetables and immediately drag out a big pan. Well, here's beef & broccoli stir-fry, which is held in check by some baked Japanese sweet potato. On the other side, a fruit salad made with strawberries, kiwi, blood orange, and yellow raspberries.
Is it my imagination, or are the blood oranges darker this year? Last time Kroger had blood oranges they were light orange shading to red inside. This time there's only a touch of orange, with a lot of red shading into a dark wine, almost purple color.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 633: A-Positive Orange |
[Mar. 2nd, 2009|09:26 pm] |
 Here's some good cold-weather food: beef & broccoli stir-fry and baked Japanese sweet potato. On the other side I have some tamarinds, almond cake, and a fruit salad made with persimmon, kiwi, baby bananas, and blood orange.
Blood oranges, in case you don't know, are oranges that look normal on the outside - or may look like someone dropped them in some red dye - and when you peel them the segments are orange, red, purple, or all of the above, as is the case in the photo on the right. They taste slightly berrylike. As some of you may have guessed, I am fond of weird-colored food, so when I saw that Kroger had a sale on these I hustled on down to the store and grabbed a big sack of 'em.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 580: Narrow but not skinny |
[Sep. 8th, 2008|08:18 pm] |
 I'm back! Sorry about the month-and-a-half-long absence, but my work situations and personal complications sapped my will to cook and post for a while. I was still making bento lunches, but didn't pack food that I considered worth posting. You can only take so many "this is a sandwich" shots, you know? Anyway, I'm back now.
So, here's a new bento box, or, rather, a set of "men's bento boxes," so-called because they're adult-sized and black, I guess. They're filled with beef & broccoli stir-fry, udon noodles, blue country cornbread, orange segments, and chunks of mango.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 543: Kahunmi |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|08:32 pm] |
 Spring is here! In Japan one of the Springtime events is hanami, a flower-watching party, when people picnic under cherry trees in bloom. They eat, among other things, sakura-mochi, which are pink rice cakes filled with sweet red bean paste. Well, down here in Georgia we don't have many cherry trees. What we do have is dogwoods, and they're blooming right now. And so are lots of other varieties of trees, releasing a lovely saffron mist which tints everything yellow, including our lungs. So, I've made sakura-mochi for a new tradition I'm starting right now: kahunmi, the pollen-watching festival. Sit under the dogwoods, gaze at their flowers, and take your Claritin.
What I'll be eating as my lungs fill with microgametophytes includes takoyaki; beef & broccoli stir-fry; steamed squash, carrots, and purple potatoes with lots of butter; and sakura mochi (Easiest version). This is a new recipe for sakura mochi, my fourth, and the easiest one so far. I basically adapted the dough from my kushi dango recipe, since it's so easy to handle and shape, and found that I could whip out a batch very quickly and easily. Why haven't I been doing this all along?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 541: Stuff to eat |
[Apr. 16th, 2008|07:43 pm] |
 Hmm. What clever things can I say about beef & broccoli stir-fry, baked purple potatoes, and chocolate chip melon pan? Well, purple potatoes are plenty nifty, but they kind of stand on their own and speak for themselves. Broccoli beef isn't particularly amazing, but it tastes really nice and stuff. As for the melon pan, I cut it because I would have had a hard time fitting it all in without squeezing out some of the potatoes. I have no idea why I didn't put the cut edge against the top of the box.
Completely off-topic, if you just happen to find yourself at a screening of a movie titled Nerdcore Rising, look for me. I'm the woman in the denim jacket and red MC Frontalot T-shirt at the sale table in Atlanta. I'm on the right side on the screen, right in the front, for all of 5 seconds. My name is also in the credits. Anyone want my autograph?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 523: Broccoli beef |
[Mar. 4th, 2008|07:39 pm] |
 I likes me some beef & broccoli stir-fry, which is why I packed it for lunch. Nice how that works out, isn't it? In fact, a lot of the things I cook just happen to be things I also like to eat. Among them are rice, simmered shiitake mushrooms, baked purple sweet potato, and an manjuu.
An manjuu are steamed sweetened things, somewhere between bread and cake, with anko (sweet red bean paste) in the center. Out of the last batch I made I brought most of it to a get-together with some friends. They compared them to fig newtons. Now that took me by surprise.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 489: Beef with a side of beef |
[Dec. 28th, 2007|08:46 pm] |
 I haven't made beef & broccoli stir-fry in a while. Why's that? Well, here is a batch of it. The sauce thickened up a little more than expected, making it look a little swampy, but that's a cosmetic issue I could have overcome by thinking to lay a piece of broccoli over it before taking the photo. Oh well. On the side I have sukiyaki soba noodles, which is your basic soba boiled in some of the copious amounts of broth left over from my most recent batch of sukiyaki. That off-white color is beefy deliciosity cooked right into the noodle. And finally, I have a piece of sesame mochi, which I didn't make myself and thus can't say anything about except that it tastes nice.
(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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| Lunch Box 193: Fruit Monster |
[Aug. 2nd, 2006|10:08 pm] |
 I made beef & broccoli stir-fry. I loves that stuff! This time around I added a package of mushrooms that I needed to use up, and they worked out quite nicely. Not only did the flavor and texture compliment the dish, they also contributed some liquid to help steam the other vegetables. The noodles are lo mein noodles that I let soak in the excess broccoli beef juice and a touch of soy sauce after cooking to give them a bit of flavor. The other side is full of fruit salad, with peaches, kiwi fruit, and grapes; an an manjuu, and a drupe manjuu with a chocolate covered macadamia in the center.
Why do I feel like I should have put something on the manjuu?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 150: It's a fruit! It's a bun! |
[May. 17th, 2006|08:58 pm] |
 Today I have beef & broccoli stir-fry with lo mein noodles - in separate compartments, but mixed together when I ate them - edamame, and orange segments. The real star, however, is the melon pan (melon bread) in the separate container.
I've been wanting to make melon bread, but all the recipes I've found for it either have directions that make no sense to me, measurements in grams (I don't have a kichen scale), ingredients like "hard flour," (which, I suppose, is bread flour, but I'm not sure), or other obstacles. So, I thought, why not backwards engineer it? Melon bread is basically a bun with a thin cookielike outer coating. So I made a batch using cafeteria roll dough covered with Pillsbury sugar cookie dough. The result was much less dense than the melon pan I've bought from bakeries, because cafeteria rolls are quite light and fluffy, but other than that it looked and tasted just right to me. So, my melon pan may be totally inauthentic, but I'm satisfied!
BTW, check out that braided loaf I made with some leftover cafeteria roll dough. Ain't it funky? It's very soft sandwich bread, and great for toasting.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 81: Untitled |
[Dec. 2nd, 2005|02:32 pm] |
 Today's lunch features beef & broccoli stir-fry, with a side order of rice, some baby carrots, and some pomegranate. I've posted the beef & broccoli before, but this time I tried something new and it came out nice, so I've updated the recipe.
Dang, wish I could think of anything clever to say about this lunch.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 37: Grain |
[Aug. 14th, 2005|03:40 pm] |
 The beef & broccoli stir-fry and lo mein noodles in today's box are a dedication to... well, what I get in restaurants. Except in restaurants the noodles are round like spaghetti, not flat like these. Ah well, no biggie. The broccoli beef is tasty, though it's not in a thick glazy sauce like in restaurants. (I like the sauce in small doses, but it tends to smother stuff, and it's probably hideously caloric and MSG-laden.)
Remember public school cafeteria food? Overall it was pretty blah, but I remember my high school having the best bread rolls. All soft and fluffy and so tasty. While Googling around I found that other people remember those rolls fondly, and furthermore that a recipe existed. Huzzah! I got the ingredients together and broke in my bread machine to make the dough. (I just got a bread machine. If you like making breadlike things but find that mixing and kneading dough is drudgery, a bread machine is an excellent investment.) The result was very close to the rolls I remembered. A little on the bland side, but I used unsalted, sweet butter. That might have made the difference, as that stuff has made other things taste bland in the same way.
And for dessert, an manjuu and a chocolate chip manjuu. Yum!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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