| Lunch Box 643: You can get anything you want at Dot's Diner |
[Apr. 14th, 2009|10:52 pm] |
 Sometimes I have a theme to my lunches. It may be an image, it may be a color or a type of food. Today it's a shape. Seems everything I have today is round, so it looks like Little Dot packed my lunch. (Please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers that character.)
Anyway, here I have a mini-hamburger, or perhaps a very large nanoburger. Then there's a big helping of steamed carrots & squash - zucchini and crookneck - with butter. A single broccoli stem star snuck in, so I guess that clears Dot. Lastly, there's dry-roasted edamame and sakura mochi (onigiri type).
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| 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 544: No time to cook |
[Apr. 21st, 2008|08:43 pm] |
 I spent most of this weekend with my family celebrating the fact that I've managed to survive 40 years. (Almost, anyway. As of this coming Friday.) By the time I got home I had no time to cook stuff, and, wouldn't you know it, I was out of leftovers! So here's what I threw together: a turkey-bacon BLT on French bread, baked purple sweet potato, some pickles, some baby carrots, and a sakura mochi (easiest version).
I promise I will cook tonight. I have a fridge bursting with neat stuff from the Farmer's Market - one of my b-day presents - so I'll be doing some intense - nay, hardcore - cooking this week.
(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 352: Colors + shapes |
[May. 1st, 2007|06:51 pm] |
 When I write up these lunches I always notice things that didn't occur to me when I packed them. With this lunch, it's the assortment of colors and shapes that reminds me of an "educational toy" - you know, the ones that parents buy so they can teach their prodigies what pink circles and blue squares are. Well, with this lunch you get an assortment of brown triangles and a pentagon (crab rangoons), some purple half-oval baked purple sweet potato, a yellow oblong (baby banana), and, hiding half out of sight, a circular tan takoyaki and a pink, semicircular sakura mochi (mochiko version). Oh, and there's the green steamed broccoli, which has no nameable shape, but that's to teach the kid that not everything fits into nice neat categories, which is an important life lesson right there.
(Blogger's Choice Awards! If 50 people vote for me I'll cook blue food. And, hey, why not vote for other bento sites like Ss-biggie's blog? Bento needs more exposure!)
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 332: Shrimp on the sand |
[Mar. 28th, 2007|07:42 pm] |
 To follow-up on yesterday's garlic butter octopus, today I have garlic butter shrimp. I didn't bother looking around for recipes; I just threw some shrimp at some melted garlic butter and it happened. (Do not ask about the peeling, and especially do not ask about the deveining. Yuck.) The shrimp are curled up like sleeping kittens on a bed of couscous made with "pseuki yaki" broth, and I promise I'll post a recipe for pseuki yaki very soon. I'm still fine-tuning it.
Clockwise from the shrimp, there's also a baked Purple Peruvian potato cut up into chopstickable chunks (Purple Peruvians are firm enough for that), edamame, and a pair of sakura mochi (mochiko version).
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 330: My noodles are hardcore |
[Mar. 26th, 2007|08:51 pm] |
 Another weekend, another adventure in cooking. What'd I make to dazzle all and sundry? Octopus & vegetable yakiudon. The octopus is neato enough, I think, but this yakiudon is made with homemade udon noodles! Nope, I haven't bought a pasta maker; I did it all with my hands and a rolling pin. And if you go to the recipe page you'll be able to tell; those noodles are pretty irregularly cut! Homemade noodles may seem like a lot of effort to save a few cents on prepackaged noodles, but you can cut them any way you like, and that includes putting your cookie cutters and vegetable cutters to use.
And on the less hardcore (but no less tasty) side, there's a pumpkin cookie, sakura mochi (mochiko version), and grapes.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 329: Skins |
[Mar. 23rd, 2007|07:40 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | box, fried potato skins, grapes, mochi, sakura mochi, sakura mochi (mochiko version), smoked salmon sushi, southern-fried potato croquettes, steamed broccoli, steamed kabocha, sushi | ] |
 Today's Brilliant Innovation™ is fried potato skins. These were a byproduct of the potato croquettes, actually. I was frying up stuff anyway, and... hmm, why not throw in some potato peelings when I'm done? And, hey, they turned out well! Some even puffed up into little pillows. Now, do you have any idea how hard it was not to eat them all while they were hot?
The rest of the stuff is the usual end-of the-week medley. There be, in no particular order, smoked salmon sushi made nigiri-style (meaning I was lazy and just shaped a few slugs of rice with my hands rather than busting out the rice mold), more southern-fried potato croquettes, steamed broccoli, steamed kabocha, sakura mochi (mochiko version), and some grapes.
If humans were filter feeders, and if pollen had much nutritional value, I would not have to pack lunches for the next few months. If you're in Atlanta you know what I'm talking about. *achoo*
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 328: Green eggs and Spam |
[Mar. 22nd, 2007|07:43 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | blood orange, fruit salad, grapes, persimmon, pumpkin cookie, rainbow rolled omelet, rolled omelet, sakura mochi, spam musubi, steamed broccoli, steamed kabocha | ] |
 This isn't the first time I've planned a lunch around a goofy title, and it won't be the last.
So, today I gots some Spam musubi and a rainbow rolled omelet, this time shading from yellow to green. Hiding underneath the eggs are steamed broccoli and steamed kabocha. On the other side, there's a pumpkin cookie, a sakura mochi, and a fruit salad with grapes, blood orange segments, and persimmon.
Food coloring is fun!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 326: Chewing gum? |
[Mar. 20th, 2007|07:44 pm] |
 Hooray for Spam musubi! Without it, how would you know that the trains were so fouled up that I got home an hour later than usual and was starved and in no mood for fancy cooking? Most of the other foods were made as fast. Certainly the baked Purple Peruvian potato (hi, Laurie!) took little time - three minutes in the microwave - and the steamed broccoli came right out of a leftovers container. In among the spam and spud are some "Dan-D-Pak Sushi Rolls," an item I bought because of its sheer silliness. You know those sticklike rice crackers, the ones with the pretzel-like crunch and the nori wrapping? Now imagine a hollow version that you can stick sushi fillings into. So I did just that with little bitty bits of crab sticks, and amazingly enough it tastes just like a rice cracker with a tiny bit of crab stick through it!!
After I ate dinner I was feeling a little more patient, and in honor of the first day of Spring (well, part of the day; Spring officially begins sometime this evening) I made sakura mochi. This is the easiest recipe I've found, and is basically anko wrapped in a mochiko crepe. I don't have a cherry tree to sit under as I eat this, but I do have a picture of a dogwood on my wall.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 298: I'm pink, therefore I'm Spam |
[Feb. 6th, 2007|08:44 am] |
 Spam is not a regular item on my menu. I rarely think, "You know what I'm hungry for? Canned, hugely-processed meat product." But every so often I get the urge to make Spam musubi - which I first made because the idea of Spam sushi was so amusing - and it's actually pretty good. I use Spam Lite - no joke, it's part poultry, so it has less calories, fat, and sodium - fried up teriyaki-style, set on top of a brick of rice (made with a special Spam musubi press, of course!) and wrapped in nori. What got me thinking of Spam this time around was a party this weekend in which I re-met an old friend who had been living in Hawaii. We of course started talking about Hawaiian cuisine, and she assured me that, yes, Spam musubi is the all-pervasive food item it's been described as.
And then there's some edamame, steamed broccoli, a French bread mini-baguette - actually, it's more like an extreme breadstick - with butter in a little container, and finally a sakura mochi (onigiri type). Yes, it's still not Spring, but seasons take a back seat to desserts.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 122: It's officially Spring. |
[Mar. 27th, 2006|07:08 pm] |
 I don't like cold weather. I have very little, shall we say, insulation, and I have to wait out in the weather for buses and trains. The coming of Spring heralds the end of the wearing-a-heavy-coat-to-and-from-work season. This is very good. So, to commemorate the official beginning of Spring, I made sakura mochi. Sakura mochi are eaten during Hanami, Japanese cherry blossom viewing parties. However, true to the nature of weather in Atlanta, it turned cold and rainy on the first of Spring, so all I could do was look out my window as the rain pounded petals off the dogwoods.
This batch of sakura mochi are made with a different recipe from the two I've previously posted, and this is, IMO, the easiest. Basically it's anko-stuffed onigiri made with sweetened colored rice, wrapped with a salted cherry leaf. Or, in my case, a celery leaf, as my condo complex doesn't have a cherry orchard.
Here we also have some okonomiyaki, edamame, baked plantain, and carrot sticks. I have testified to their tastiness before!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 80: Refried rice |
[Dec. 2nd, 2005|02:32 pm] |
 This meal is made entirely of leftovers, and yet I still did some cooking for it. The cow in blanket, boiled egg, and sakura mochi (mochiko version) were made in previous batches of cooking. The edamame is from a bag in my freezer. The ham fried rice, however, was made the night before, out of leftover rice and some thin sliced ham bought for sandwiches. I bought a pound of ham, and didn't realize how far it would go. I'm determined not to waste any of it, so I'm using it all over the place! And, guess what, it's quite tasty in fried rice.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 53: Free Association |
[Sep. 22nd, 2005|10:27 am] |
 More steamed beef buns - gotta use 'em up; they don't last forever! And since hamburgery meat in a thick matrix surrounded by soft white bread is kind of sloppy joe-ish, why not serve that with onion rings? Actually, I made the onion rings at the tail end of a batch of tempura, but let's not get technical. 'Sides, you don't eat tempura with ketchup.
And of course I have steamed broccoli (I liked the stuff even as a kid) and sakura mochi (mochiko version). The latter was made some time ago, and keeps for quite a long time in the freezer. The freezer didn't turn it that unearthly hot pink color; that's a trick of the odd lighting in my kitchen.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 35: Nature scene |
[Aug. 11th, 2005|01:34 pm] |
 After that last box, with its oh-so-noncultural burgers & chips, I felt the need to compose something subtle and meaningful. Or, to put it another way, I got artsy-fartsy.
I started out with a cabbage-and-egg nest, which is a boiled egg, cut in half, on a bed of stir-fried cabbage. The photo colors aren't distorted; before I cut it I let it sit for a few minutes in a glass of water with a few drops of blue food coloring. The result is sort of robin's egg blue, get it? It looks like eggs in a nest.
I put in the rice next, and as you may or may not know the umeboshi (pickly thing in the center) is supposed to symbolize the rising sun of Japan. Bird's nest, rising sun. Got a theme here. After that I put in the edamame - soy beans in pods, the name of which literally means "beans on branches" and the grapes, which are for fruit that grows on trees. (Yeah, I know grapes grow on vines, not trees. This is a vine that grew on a tree, so there.) Finishing it off is a pair of sakura mochi (mochiko version), which are traditionally eaten during hanami parties, when people picnic under cherry trees to view the blossoms.
Wow. All that imagery, and it's a pretty nice color scheme and nutritional balance too. Go me.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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