| Lunch Box 648: Let Me Eat Cake |
[May. 28th, 2009|07:21 pm] |
 It's been a while since I made salmon saka-mushi. It still is, as I didn't have salmon, but the tilapia I substituted tastes just fine. Basically, this is fish and mushrooms and spring onions and carrots and snow peas, all steamed together in a tinfoil package until they're nice and juicy. Up above it I have avocado maki and, joy of joys, baked purple sweet potato. However, the market only had these skinny little things. "They're taking the babies!" I thought when I saw them. But I still got a few because I've been suffering from purple potato withdrawal.
On the other side I have a mandarin orange, strawberries, a few cherries, and a dried persimmon, which is more or less a persimmon that's been raisined, but instead of wrinkling up it is squashed into a flat ring. And I have a slice of pound cake made from a recipe my sister gave me. It's awesome, and easy to make if you have an electric mixer. If, like me, you don't, your arm will get a workout.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 647: Polyglot lunch |
[May. 21st, 2009|08:55 pm] |
 Some months ago my coworker Maria brought a bunch of mantecados - Spanish cookies - back from her visit to her hometown. They were delicious and shortbready and almondy and lemony and created an amazing amount of crumbs. I vowed to try to make them myself. I wasn't happy with the recipes I found on the web; most left out the lemon and almonds, and the one I tried was messed up, the proportions wrong, so I ended up with a swamp on a cookie sheet. After that I backward-engineered it based on Scotch shortbread, and Maria gave it a thumbs-up, so I packed it in my bento and posted the recipe to my site so everyone can make some. It's really easy - if you can chop nuts and zest a lemon you're good to go.
So! Here we have free-form maki - which is sushi with whatever I have handy, in this case shiitake, cucumber, crab stick, and smoked salmon - stir-fried vegetables, light-fried plantains, and mantecados.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 645: Patchwork Lunch |
[May. 14th, 2009|01:45 pm] |
 Since the beginning I've avoided making character lunches. Not because I disdain them in principle, but because I simply have no inclination to cut Pikachus out of cheese. However, a book I just finished gave me an idea... and now you see another reason I don't make character lunches: I'm not very good at it!
So, anyway, here's some chirashi-zushi, strawberries, mango, and lychees. For those interested, the image on the right (and you get 5 points if you recognize her) is made out of egg, smoked salmon, cucumber, simmered shiitake mushrooms, crab sticks, and ume koume, with soba noodles for hair. On the right, above the fruit, I have more of the aforementioned toppings to add to the sushi.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 620: Bacon abuse |
[Jan. 12th, 2009|10:05 pm] |
 Mary Schmich wrote "Do one thing every day that scares you." Today I took her advice and packed a lunch featuring bacon tempura. That's deep-fried, breaded bacon. Not no fool turkey bacon either - real, greasy, swine-type bacon. I got the idea from something I saw on TV about a place that sold dishes of deep-fried bacon. At the time I screamed in horror at the sight of those plates of greasy death. But, a few months later, I had the urge to make tempura, and after the bacon chocolate chip cookies, I could hardly resist battering a few slices of bacon.
Surrounding is are relatively-healthy avocado maki, edamame, roasted chestnuts, and persimmon.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 603: Hot dog dragon |
[Nov. 13th, 2008|08:35 pm] |
 Sometimes a hot dog octopus isn't enough. Sometimes I just have to take a fruit knife to a hot dog and see what happens. This time around my mutant hot dog turned out something like a Chinese dragon, or maybe a sunburnt eel wearing a skirt. Um. Anyway, whatever it is, it's cavorting around in a field of inari-zushi, steamed broccoli, and baked Japanese sweet potato, protecting the golden raisins and pomegranate seeds.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 596: One Order of Disorder |
[Oct. 20th, 2008|07:42 pm] |
 It was clean-out-the-fridge day, but then every day is clean-out-the-fridge day. I just have to decide which part to clean out. Some of you know what I'm talking about.
Anyhow, here's some maki sushi, baked purple sweet potato, simmered shiitake mushrooms, spinach, orange segments, golden kiwi, and craisins. I tried to make it look kinda jumbled and funky, but now I see that it has my usual semi-pathological, art-college-grad set of patterns and rhythms. Sometimes I think my lunches would come out that way if I put on a blindfold and threw stuff across the room in the general direction of my lunch box. But - hey, look at the sweet potato. Some odd colors there, huh? Parts of it were purple, and parts were whitish. Usually they have some shading on the inside, but it's rarely this pronounced.
(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 593: Manly! |
[Oct. 9th, 2008|08:22 pm] |
 Today's lunch is manly. For starters, it's packed in a men's bento box. You can tell it's for men because... um, it's black. Pastels are so womany, you know? And it contains chirashi-zushi, which may or may not be manly, but I'll say it is because otherwise the theme collapses and I get all confused and start writing nonsense.
Um.
There's also flavored lotus slices, which I simmered in some juice left over from a recent batch of niku jyaga, some edamame, and almond jelly. As I forgot to pack anything to eat that slippery jelly with, wish me luck. If I can't manage it with my chopsticks I'll be picking it up with my hands.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 2nd, 2008|12:58 pm] |
 Have I mentioned that I like chirashi-zushi? It's so easy to make. This time around I was a little lazy and just used shrimp, simmered shiitake mushrooms, and pickled plums as toppings. These plums aren't umeboshi, though - they're crunchy, and the name is different, and I forgot to write it down. I'll get it later. Anyway, they still taste pretty much like umeboshi.
And there's also edamame, almond jelly, cherries, and mango.
(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 582: Orange blossom |
[Sep. 15th, 2008|11:20 pm] |
 This lunch has futomaki stuffed with egg, cucumber, and crab sticks. It has steamed pole beans. It has a whole roma tomato given to me by my garden-having coworker Maria. (Garden-grown food is automatically cool. Don't even try to deny it!) There's some banana bread. And there's a clementine blossom, made simply by peeling a clementine and separating the segments except at one end. It's so easy, and on retrospect that seems an obvious way to prettily package clementines (or mikans, or tangerines), yet I haven't seen it elsewhere.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 577: No discretion |
[Jul. 14th, 2008|07:33 pm] |
 Today's lunch includes a pair of hot dog octopi that appear to be in the middle of an intense discussion, and some smoked salmon sushi with cucumber, which is to say I just strapped a thin slice of cucumber onto the top of the rice block with the fish. Then there's edamame, baked Japanese sweet potato, carrot & raisin salad, and banana bread.
(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 558: Garden of Lunch |
[May. 22nd, 2008|09:53 pm] |
 I had just a little too much fun putting this lunch together. I won't give you the background because it might put some of you off your food; let's just say that I was never afraid of creepy-crawlies. So, here's a millipede-like mutant hot dog patrolling a garden of inari-zushi, edamame, steamed broccoli, baked purple sweet potato, mandarin oranges, and grass jelly.
I cut the grass jelly into cubes and soaked them in the syrup from some coconut gel overnight to give them a bit of flavor. It worked, but not as well as I'd have liked - the jelly is still kinda blah - and that stuff is hard to eat with chopsticks!
(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 554: Secondary colors |
[May. 13th, 2008|07:35 pm] |
 I've hardly made any sushi in, what, a year? Now all of a sudden I decide I want lots of it. So, here's some smoked salmon sushi and hantako sushi, the latter of which is my fancy way of saying I strapped half a baby octopus to a rice block. I mainly do that because the tentacles curl up so pretty and spirally, I want to find a way to display them. Then there's some baked purple sweet potato arranged in a way that I thought was artistic, but now looks kind of corny to me. Finally, some zucchini & onion stir-fry and carrot & raisin salad.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 553: Bobbed beans |
[May. 12th, 2008|09:15 am] |
 Sushi time! I don't often make California rolls, not because I don't like them, but because I can't seem to get the hang of picking out decent avocados. They may feel right, but when I slice them open they're either hard or browning. This time I got one that's acceptable at least, so here's the sushi.
I made this batch of zucchini & onion stir-fry with tatumas, AKA Mexican zucchini. I don't know if they are actually zucchini or just similar, but they're close enough that I deem any difference insignificant. By the way, I cooked this batch in a cast-iron pan that I seasoned myself. Have you ever seasoned a pan? If you ever need to do that, make sure your kitchen is really, really well-ventilated.
Finally, I have steamed long beans and fresh longans. I always feel bad about cutting long beans - if they aren't long, then... they aren't long! But it does cut down on the unwieldiness and splatter factors.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 546: Nuclear sushi |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|09:05 pm] |
 Today I have some chirashi-zushi, which is sushi rice in a box with stuff arranged on top of it, rather than shaped into discrete rolls and rice blocks. I made it with shrimp, egg, cucumber, smoked salmon, and shiitake, some of which you can actually see in that photo and some of which you can't. On the other side I have a small forest of steamed broccoli, some corn bread (note to self: when testing recipes, make half batches!), and a chunk of purple imo-yokan.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 545: Insert title here |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|08:21 pm] |
 I have nothing clever to say about this lunch box. It's futomaki (with tamago, cucumber, shiitake, and masago), baked Japanese sweet potato, steamed broccoli, oranges, and coconut gel. Sorry about the potato border thing - it didn't look anywhere near that tacky in my mind. I just had to do something to keep the sushi from rattling around in there.
One day I'll learn the secret of photographing lunches without having to choose between nearly everything being dark and dingy, and one part being eye-hurtingly bright.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 525: Bacon & Kale |
[Mar. 11th, 2008|07:18 pm] |
 Today I have yakiudon-style vegetable noodles with bacon & vegetables. Recently I posted bacon & eggs fried rice, and how delicious that was. Well, bacon is also delicious in yakiudon and similar dishes. Is there anything bacon does not make delicious? Bacon cake, mmm.
Then there's some kale ohitashi. That's boiled kale wrapped into little maki-style cylinders, with a cup of dipping mayonnaise because that's how I eat greens. Kale is... well, okay. Edible but not impressive. After trying all the greens I can regularly find at Kroger, I have to say that spinach remains my favorite, for flavor if not for price.
Then there's futomaki, and a miniature purple sweet potato pie. Trust me, it's purple under that brown top. It's also delicious enough to compete with bacon.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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