| Lunch Box 638: Revenge of the Purple Taters |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|08:28 pm] |
 This lunch starts out with a perfectly ordinary hot dog on a cafeteria roll bun and steamed broccoli. Hey, for me broccoli is normal, okay? But then I have some purple microwave potato chips. Potato chips made in the microwave from a purple creamer potato. There's no way you can claim that that's not awesome.
Oh, and then I have a piece of mochi, which is both ordinary and awesome. I wouldn't have them all the time if I didn't like 'em.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 635: Taterlings |
[Mar. 10th, 2009|08:10 pm] |
 Today I have Greek chicken, roasted potatoes, steamed snow peas, marinated & stir-fried tofu, and mochi. Like the potatoes? I got a big bag of fingerlings at Costco - some of them were so small I was tempted to call them "grape potatoes" - and roasted up a whole bunch of them. As you can see, some of them are purple potatoes! Not that that influenced my decision to buy them, oh no.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| My chips can beat up Lay's chips |
[Feb. 27th, 2009|10:33 pm] |
 Today's lunch, which looks terrible because of my lack of photography skillz, starts with obimake enoki,  AKA mushrooms wrapped in bacon. Ah, bacon - even when not dipped in chocolate it's still awesome. I have steamed broccoli, which is not awesome but I consider to be quite good. Baked purple sweet potato, and it's an undeniable fact that purple food is its own justification. Mochi, which is quietly excellent, and finally microwave lotus chips. That's like potato chips, but made with lotus root in the microwave. I made them with a microwave potato chip maker, seen at left, and I double-dog dare you to tell me that that's not awesomeness defined.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 631: More fun with chocolate |
[Feb. 24th, 2009|09:08 pm] |
 I have another glorious hodgepodge for lunch. Here you see the evidence of a walk through my fridge, or perhaps I should describe it as a drunkard's walk: okonomiyaki, yakisoba, steamed broccoli, baked purple sweet potato, grape tomatoes, mochi, and chocolate soybean clusters.
That last item is an aftershock from last week's chocolate covered bacon. When I ran out of bacon I had some melted chocolate left over, and the heck I'm going to wash that down the sink! So I poured in some of the dry roasted soybeans that I keep around as munchies, and lo and behold, a new treat was born.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 630: Yes, that's bacon. |
[Feb. 20th, 2009|10:04 pm] |
 Check this out, yo. Iridori, rice with ume koume, mochi, and... chocolate covered bacon.
Yep. Bacon covered in chocolate. And you thought battered, deep-fried bacon and chocolate chip bacon cookies were over the edge? They had to make a new edge for me. Did I say yo already?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 626: Saved by the Chicken |
[Feb. 4th, 2009|08:16 pm] |
 It's been nasty down here in the southeastern US. One day the low will be zero degrees Fahrenheit after you figure in the wind chill, and a few days later the high will be in the sixties. I just can't get used to this yoyoing around. It saps my energy, so when I drag myself in my front door I'm rarely in the mood to get creative in the kitchen, which is why I haven't been posting as frequently as usual lately. I've been packing bentos, but who needs to see my sandwiches day after day?
Last time I went by Kroger after work they had some rotisserie chickens on sale. It was cold and drizzly outside, I was tired and cranky, and tender hot herbed chickens for less than a fiver each appeared before me. I didn't even try to resist. So - here I have some roast chicken, light-fried plantain; a cafeteria roll, strawberries, pink grapefruit, and mochi. The plantain was from a batch I cooked over the weekend, and the roll was intended to be a hot dog bun, but it ended up kinda runty.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 621: Guard octodog |
[Jan. 13th, 2009|08:21 pm] |
 Lookit that hot dog octopus. He knows that steamed broccoli and baked Japanese sweet potato are good food, and he's getting all covetous. However, he doesn't seem too sure about the yaki onigiri, and he seems to be ignoring the roasted chestnuts and mochi.
By the way, the last time I went to the Buford Highway Farmer's Market I looked for Nishiki rice. I couldn't find any in bags smaller than 25 pounds, and as I had to take my groceries home by bus that wasn't an option, so I got a 5-pound bag of Sho-Chiku-Bai Sweet Rice from Koda Farms. Let me tell you, I'm not pleased with that brand. It is not just sticky, it is gluey. You can't make fried rice out of it because it refuses to mix with the other ingredients. The texture is... not pleasing to me. Washing it before cooking doesn't help. Hmm, maybe all this has something to do with the fact that second ingredient listed on the bag, right after short grain rice, is corn starch. At least onigiri and sushi made of it won't fall apart.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 595: Candy-box Bento |
[Oct. 17th, 2008|09:45 pm] |
 Normally when I pack a lunch I make patterns with the food. No real reason why except that I like pretty, symmetrical designs. This time I decided to avoid that, and instead pack it so it looked as chaotic as possible without being a true mess. The maki sushi, steamed sugar snap peas, baked Japanese sweet potato, baked purple sweet potato, simmered shiitake mushrooms, and mochi are integrated to make a delicious little mosh pit.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 594: Odd things |
[Oct. 13th, 2008|06:59 pm] |
 For some reason I found my fridge blessed with an abundance of fruits & vegetables but very little in the way of protein. It took a few minutes before I hit on a solution to this problem: a boiled egg. Whew, saved from veganism at the last minute!
(You know I'm just kidding. I have nothing but respect for vegans. Please don't hurt me.)
And I also have steamed, butter-fried breadfruit, light-fried plantains, strawberries, almond jelly, fresh longans, and mochi. That's a pretty exotic meal, except for the egg, isn't it? If you live in Atlanta, I recommend you check out the Buford Highway Farmer's Market; lately they've been selling boxes of fresh strawberries for 99 cents. Now you know why they keep turning up in my lunches.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 592: Stir-fry |
[Oct. 6th, 2008|08:52 pm] |
 What do you do when you are making my mom's pork chops and you find you have one more pork chop than will fit on the baking sheet? Simple - make pork & vegetable stir-fry the next day. This batch of stir-fry has shiitake, carrot, lotus root, onion, zucchini, broccoli, and maybe a few other things I'm forgetting right now. I basically wandered through my fridge until I had enough stuff to cook up.
On the other side I have baked purple sweet potato, a strawberry, and a mochi.
By the way, this past weekend I went to my sister's house and introduced her & her family to yakiudon and melon pan. Both were a hit, the former more with the adults and the latter especially with her kids.
(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 567: Sushi or not |
[Jun. 12th, 2008|07:49 pm] |
 When is sushi not sushi? When it's Spam musubi. Technically, the difference is that sushi rice is seasoned with vinegar, salt, and sugar - "sushi" (鮨) means "vinegared rice" - but I often get lazy and use unseasoned rice to make sushi. (Shh, don't tell anyone.) Anyway, here I have three pieces of Spam musubi and two pieces of unagi-zushi, the latter made with some of the recent batch of unagi no kabayaki. Then there's steamed snow peas, simmered shiitake mushrooms, spaghetti squash with a little container of yakisoba sauce, and a taro mochi.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 564: To-may-to, to-mah-to |
[Jun. 6th, 2008|07:45 pm] |
 Today I have some fried calamari. Or some squid tempura; six of one and half a dozen of the other. Some were single-breaded and some were double-breaded, hence the two different colors. Then I have an onigiri, some steamed sugar snap peas, a clump of carrot & raisin salad, and a taro mochi.
That onigiri looks like a ReBoot icon, doesn't it? I assure you that that is purely coincidence* and has nothing whatsoever to do with the ReBoot revival and webcomic.**
* No, it isn't.
** Yes, it does.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 559: Chicken noodle curry |
[May. 23rd, 2008|08:28 pm] |
 Once again I have some yakisoba curry, which is exactly what it sounds like. I didn't want it to slop over into the other items in the box, so I used less water than I would normally, resulting in a thicker sauce that won't splash around. The curry has chicken, carrots, onion, broccoli, and shrimp noodles. Which technically makes it non-yakisoba, but that's splitting hairs and I'm not going to post a whole new recipe just for a noodle change.
And then there's baked purple sweet potato, which is practically crowding the edamame, out of the box, some takoyaki (with takoyaki sauce in the blue container), and a taro mochi.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 555: Line up! |
[May. 14th, 2008|07:48 pm] |
 This is one seriously orderly lunch. I don't know how that happens, as I'm a clutter queen. Oh well, I know that after being carried around on my two-hour bus-train-bus commute it'll look like the inside of a three-year-old's toy box.
Anyhow, left-to-right, there's smoked salmon sushi, tamago sushi, baked purple sweet potato, steamed long beans, shelled edamame, longans, and a piece of taro mochi.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 503: Secondary colors |
[Jan. 23rd, 2008|11:40 pm] |
 Yesterday I mentioned cooking up a big batch of My Mom's Pork Chops - well, here's some more of that, with baked Japanese sweet potato. I thought I was being original with the stir-fried red cabbage, but then I saw that I've cooked that once before. Sheesh, I forget my own cooking! Then there's some edamame, san bai zu carrots (sorta), and mochi.
Regarding the carrots... this was a recipe I got out of a book, and the whole recipe was called "san bai zu," but looking elsewhere I find that that's just the name of the sauce, or marinade, or whatever you want to call the liquid part. And the book's recipe doesn't match up with the other recipes I've found - it lacks sugar, for one thing - and the result I got was very vinegary carrots. So, no recipe for that yet. I'll post a recipe when I find one I'm happy with.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 501: Purple and filling |
[Jan. 18th, 2008|09:18 pm] |
 I can't go for too long without some funky-colored food. Here I have some okonomiyaki made with purple cabbage, which gives the batter a lavender tint. Well, I think that's cool, anyway. And there's marinated, stir-fried tofu, baked Japanese sweet potato, and steamed broccoli, and a piece of mochi for dessert. None of them are funky-colored, but the anko inside the mochi is an unusual pink color, if that counts.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 500: 111110100 in binary |
[Jan. 17th, 2008|09:54 pm] |
 I might have done something special for my 500th bento lunch, but nature precluded that by dropping snow on Atlanta, causing its commuters to completely forget how to drive and ensuring that I got home late, cold, and hungry. So, here's a box full of Nothing Special! Crab & cucumber sushi, rolled inside-out and sprinkled with sesame seeds, and spaced with grape tomatoes. Boiled spinach the way I like it, which is with a big glob of mayonnaise. Marinated, stir-fried tofu, which kind of looks like cubes of chicken but tastes nothing like it, believe it or not. And a piece of mochi, which is filled with anko.
(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 441: Egg & not egg |
[Oct. 1st, 2007|07:47 pm] |
 This weekend was a total cooking blitz time. I started with oyakodon, which I made once before and was not too thrilled with the swampy results. Well, a friend smuggled me another recipe, and that turned out really well, with just enough liquid to season the rice without swamping it. I've updated the recipe on my site, naturally. Also, for the first time I cooked baked eggplant slices. Since I'd never made eggplant before (successfully - my one previous attempt was so lame I don't count it) I was flying blind, with no idea of how it was supposed to taste. Well, it tastes good. I also have some steamed sugar snap peas, the cooking method of which is ordinary for me, but I'd never tried sugar snap peas. They're nice and crunchy. And finally, for dessert I have banana bread and a mochi.
The cooking blitz continues with tomorrow's lunch!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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