| Lunch Box 637: Say cheesecake! |
[Mar. 17th, 2009|07:10 pm] |
 Today I have some more Greek chicken, rice, and steamed broccoli. The last time I bought chicken I made a big batch of the Greek stuff. I also have some blood orange segments - Kroger has them again this week for 50 cents each, yay! - and a slice of low-calorie cheesecake. Now, that last item may not sound so good, I know. Low-calorie foods tend to be hit or miss. But I got this recipe from my sister, who is not a foodie but was taken by how easy and good-tasting it is. I tried it myself and deemed it worthy to pass on to those discerning souls who visit my website.
(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 628: Watchful Rice |
[Feb. 10th, 2009|10:49 pm] |
 Today's lunch starts with iridori, which is kind of like chicken stew, but it contains bamboo and konnyaku and other neat stuff. For this bento I packed just the munchable stuff; I'll use the broth left behind for couscous. Then I have rice with ume koume, which is something like umeboshi but hard instead of mushy, and edamame.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 606: Foursquare |
[Nov. 20th, 2008|10:02 pm] |
 Here's a recapitulation of my favorite meal from Benihana: stir-fried beef, zucchini & onion stir-fry, rice, and sauteed mushrooms. And naan, which has nothing to do with Benihana and everything to do with deliciousness and I encourage you all to try making it yourselves.
The night before I made this I put some beef on the fridge to defrost. When I went to cook it I found that I'd defrosted some sukiyaki beef instead of regular stir-fryin' meat. So, oh well, I cooked what I had, and it tasted just fine, though it was kind of strange to have such thin-sliced beef by itself as opposed to mixed in with other items or in pseuki yaki.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 605: Meatcupcakes |
[Nov. 19th, 2008|08:18 pm] |
 Why have I never made mealoaf cupcakes with silicone cupcake cups before? Besides not having any silicone cups, that is? They are the perfect way to make little bento-able protein packages. These ones have ketchup "frosting," of course. For trivia's sake, the recipe I used, which is on my site, makes an even dozen meatcakes.
I also have the usual: steamed broccoli, baked Japanese sweet potato, and rice, plus carrot & raisin salad made with golden raisins. While making these I accidentally opened a cup of plain yogurt instead of vanilla, which meant that I have some leftover plain yogurt to use up, and the only recipe I know that uses plain yogurt is naan, so I guess I'm obligated to make some flatbread in the very near future.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 604: Soy 'n' dumplings |
[Nov. 14th, 2008|11:15 pm] |
 Now this is a proper bento box! I have chicken & vegetable stir-fry, rice with ume koume, steamed broccoli, and kushi dango. The last item is basically balls of steamed rice dough on a skewer and covered in a thick, sweet sauce made with soy sauce. That may not sound too appealing to you - it didn't to me, at least - but it's actually quite good.
(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 597: Broiled goodness |
[Oct. 23rd, 2008|09:40 pm] |
 You may think you see broiled steak here. You may think so, but actually that's My Mom's Pork Chops, with beef substituted for pork. In other words, I've never broiled steak before, didn't have a recipe on hand, and I figured there are worse things I could do than adapt a recipe I already use. Guess what - it turned out goood. Nice 'n tender. This is served over rice, with the mushrooms chopped up a little and mixed in. Did I mention that this tastes good? And on the other side I have baked purple sweet potato and steamed snow peas.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 581: Stuck Pig |
[Sep. 11th, 2008|10:47 am] |
 Necessity is the mother of invention. In this case the necessity is my need to use up some meat left over from a recent batch of my Mom's pork chops, and the invention is pork yakitori, in other words strips of pork chop stuck on bamboo skewers and grilled on a George Foreman grill. That doesn't sound like much, but surprisingly they turned out really delicious. I didn't bother seasoning them; they were good right off the stick.
Hiding underneath the meat are zucchini & onion stir-fry and rice, and there's a piece of an pan for dessert.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 569: Bedtime bento |
[Jun. 18th, 2008|08:02 pm] |
 I've seen bentos in which a wet item is covered with a "blanket" of rice to keep any excess liquid from slopping onto the rest of the food. This lunch was as good a time as any to try out that principle, so here I have pseuki yaki with a rice blanket. I took the photo when the pseuki yaki was only half covered; I put the rest on before sealing it up. On the other side I have some edamame, and a fruit salad made with mango, cherries, kiwi fruit, and blueberries.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 563: Non-subliminal message |
[Jun. 5th, 2008|09:13 pm] |
 Today I have unagi no kabayaki over rice - that's grilled eel to you. Which isn't that weird, since an eel is just a long, thin fish. Eel is to fish as snake is to lizard. Hmm, maybe that isn't the best way to put it...
There's also some steamed sugar snap peas, and dorayaki made with corn pancakes. Those are basically pancakes made with cornmeal instead of wheat flour, or, looking at it another way, cornbread pancakes. The recipe I have isn't that sweet, so it needs honey or sugar. Or, in this case, the anko in the middle of the dorayaki, which actually goes quite well with cornbread.
I just now noticed how much the dorayaki resembles the icons from ReBoot. And, by an amazing coincidence, the ReBoot Revival has finally taken off, with the first issue of the webcomic now live! What are the odds, huh?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 557: I'm a spice girl |
[May. 21st, 2008|07:19 pm] |
 Our of the blue I got the urge to make my Mom's Greek chicken. The problem is, I don't know how, and the recipes I find on the 'net don't match hers. So I did what I always do in said circumstances: hybridize a few recipes and muddle through. I was surprised at how well it turned out. I can't call the result Greek chicken because I used Italian seasoning, but what the heck, it looks like the stuff Mom uses.
So, anyway, here I have sliced up baked chicken breast over rice, zucchini & onion stir-fry, and carrot & raisin salad. When I find out how to make Greek chicken for real I'll post that recipe. Wish me luck, though, as Mom doesn't use recipes or measurements, making it kind of hard to get the info I need.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 542: My Mom's Bento Lunch |
[Apr. 17th, 2008|08:26 am] |
 I almost feel like I'm cheating here, although I don't know why. I've got my Mom's pork chops over rice, with the pork chops cut up into bite-sized bits so I won't be hauling a whole pork chop around with my chopsticks. I don't know why that should seem like it's cheating, as I will happily do that with other foods. (Er, cutting them up, not wrangling big chunks of food with my chopsticks.) Maybe it's because it's such a non-Japanese dish. Maybe if I called it 母のポークチョップ it would seem better.
Anyway, on the other side there's some zucchini & onion stir-fry, and orange segments. Those are both fair game for bento, although it would be more authentic if the orange was a mikan.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 540: Nuclear rice |
[Apr. 11th, 2008|08:08 pm] |
 Today I have some yakitori over rice, steamed broccoli, a fruit salad made with pineapple, grapes, and coconut gel. And none of the food was bizarrely colored, and the rice did not shine with a light of its own. I think that my camera has been having freak-outs because of my kitchen lighting. If you think this is bad, you should have seen it before I massaged it with Photoshop.
This time I grilled the yakitori up properly, with the wire rack from my wok on top of a large skillet. The result was great, but I don't know if I'll cook it that way again, as the sauce I repeatedly brushed onto the chicken contained sugar, which dripped into the skillet and stayed there... you can see where this is going, right? Thankfully, I was able to save the skillet.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 531: Another big batch |
[Mar. 26th, 2008|09:27 pm] |
 I made a big batch of pseuki yaki, which is like sukiyaki except not. (It's a family recipe which has been called sukiyaki, but is more like a Japanese beef & vegetable & stuff stew. I've tweaked the recipe on my site just a little. I think it's just about perfect now. (Perfect meaning it matches my memories of deliciousness.) It's served with rice, strawberries, and cherries because what else could stand up to it?
No, I have no idea what I meant by that either.
(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 520: Crimson flower |
[Feb. 28th, 2008|08:11 pm] |
 Here we have a recapitulation of the very first bento I ever blogged: my Benihana Ripoff Special. Marinated stir-fried beef, zucchini & onion stir-fry, rice, and sauteed mushrooms.
This, to me, is the classic make-it-yourself Japanese meal, plagiarized from my favorite teppan-yaki house. I don't usually make it with lavender rice, but, hey, why cook up another batch when I still have leftovers? Anyway, this is the first stuff I really figured out how to cook as opposed to just boiling or microwaving or, in extreme cases, actually reading directions and mixing things together. Those old spaghetti-and-ragu days. I might still be in that rut if I hadn't tried the bento thing out of curiosity, and then set up a website when I realized how well it worked for me.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 518: Back on the grill again |
[Feb. 26th, 2008|08:14 pm] |
 I'm recovering from my recent double-match with the cold, so now I'm doing some decent cooking. Here's some grilled chicken, which I cooked wrapped in tinfoil. That keeps it juicy and tender, but it almost eliminates the grill marks. It's served on mustard greens ohitashi, which is basically mustard greens rolled into cigars and sliced into maki-sized cylinders. To the side is a little container of mayonnaise because that's how I eat my greens, especially mustard greens, which taste like a condiment that I don't keep in my kitchen. Then there are some simmered shiitake mushrooms and lavender rice, the latter of which is made with water left over from my recent purple sweet potato pie. (It's made with water reserved from the potato-boiling stage, and thus tastes slightly sweet.) Finally, I have some orange segments, grapes, and pomegranate seeds.
My, it feels nice to once more have the energy to do real cooking!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 515: Try it all |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|07:00 pm] |
 I have too many veggies in my fridge. Well, not really; I'd rather have lots of vegetables than not enough. And having a good variety means I can grab whatever I have, cut it up, and make stir-fried vegetables. On the side I have a bit of yakisoba sauce. Then there's some rice, a pair of hot dog flowers, and a miniature purple sweet potato pie, which I made by following the regular recipe and baking it in miniature pastry shells instead of a big pie crust.
Those hot dog flowers turned out weird. They look like... upside-down hot dog octopi. I have no idea how that happened.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 498: Actually nontoxic |
[Jan. 15th, 2008|07:09 pm] |
 When people have suggested in the past that I cook curry, I've firmly refused on the grounds that 1) I hate hot spices, as they render food inedible to me, 2) all of my memories of curry were of meals that my parents loved and I could not eat, so 3) why in the world should I bother with that crud?
I eventually decided that, what the heck, I've cooked jellyfish before, so I could take a chance on curry. I bought a package of the mild stuff. Then, a few months later, when I had a fridge full of leftovers to fall back on should it turn out as bad as I remembered, I made it. And... amazingly, it was good.
So, here's some of that batch of chicken & vegetable curry over rice. It is flanked by my everpresent baked purple sweet potato and steamed broccoli, and I have some carrot & raisin salad for dessert.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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