| Lunch Box 578: The dark side of tofu |
[Jul. 18th, 2008|09:25 pm] |
 This lunch is almost an outtake. I present it here so you can learn from my misfortune.
The stir-fried teriyaki chicken and zucchini & onion stir-fry are both perfectly all right. However, the marinated, stir-fried tofu - which is below the soy sauce bottle - came out weird. My fridge occasionally has localized ice ages, and the block of tofu was frozen solid. I thawed and cooked it, but the freezing had made the texture strange and spongy. That wouldn't be a problem, except the sponginess allowed it to soak up way more of the teriyaki sauce than I had expected, making it a bit stronger-flavored than I like. So - don't let your tofu freeze, and if you do don't marinate it for very long.
On the other side I have mango and jackfruit, the flavors and textures of which differ more than the colors, and banana bread.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 414: Dice |
[Aug. 7th, 2007|08:36 pm] |
 I haven't made okonomiyaki in a little while, so here we go with some crab & mushroom okonomiyaki, colored purple because I used red cabbage, and okonomiyaki sauce in the little container. There's some steamed broccoli and marinated, stir-fried tofu packed nice and cozy together. Above that are chunks of baked boniato, which was a bit dry so some of the chunks split apart. Finally, more banana bread. Have I mentioned that banana bread is delicious?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 406: Green and fishy, green and fishy |
[Jul. 25th, 2007|08:33 pm] |
 If that title makes sense to you - hello, fellow Rocky Horror fan!
Today I have a pretty eclectic lunch. There's a pair of small fish fillets with a container of tartar sauce. Some zucchini & onion stir-fry. Marinated, stir-fried tofu, which I just threw together by cutting up a block of extra firm tofu and soaking the resulting cubes for 15 minutes in some teriyaki sauce left over from another recipe and then pan-frying it on medium heat, and let me tell you it turned out good! Some green French garlic bread, which is like regular French bread, but toasted with garlic and butter. And it's green. Finally, some more chocolate dipped cherries.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 388: I cooked things. |
[Jun. 26th, 2007|09:09 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | baked purple sweet potato, box, furikake, marinated stir-fried chicken, marinated stir-fried tofu, mochi, peanut mochi, rice, sesame crunch, steamed snow peas, tofu | ] |
 This weekend I was ill and not in a mood to cook. Well, I was sure feeling better when I cooked all this! None of this is leftovers, except that, being a bento lunch made from what I had for dinner previously, it's all leftovers.
Anyhow, from right to left (because I'm feeling ornery, that's why) there be: steamed snow peas; marinated, stir-fried tofu; baked purple sweet potato; rice with shrimp furikake; marinated stir-fried chicken; peanut mochi, and some Chinese sesame crunch things. Although I have recipes for everything I cooked, I didn't really bother with them. I just slung some mirin and sugar in soy sauce for the tofu and chicken, and steamed the snow peas until they seemed right. OK, I did measure the water and rice, but I wasn't very exact about it.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 308: Pink eggs? |
[Feb. 21st, 2007|08:42 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | box, edamame, food coloring, fruit salad, grapes, lychees, mango, mochi, rolled omelet, stir-fried teriyaki tofu, takenoko no sato, tofu | ] |
 Ah, food coloring. There is so much fun contained in those four tiny bottles. It allows one to make things like the shading in the rolled omelet here. I started with a cup of beaten eggs, and made the first layer without coloring. I added a drop of red and made the next later, which was orange. Another drop for a pink layer, and another drop for brighter pink. For contrast, the omelet is resting on a bed of stir-fried teriyaki tofu. Below it is some edamame fresh out of the freezer. On the other side, we got a sesame-seed-covered mochi, a grove of takenoko no sato (chocolate covered bamboo-shoot-shaped cookies), and a fruit salad with mango, grapes, and lychees.
Just for the record, I went to Tomato - another of Atlanta's Japanese groceries - right before making this, and somehow I didn't use a single thing I just bought. Go figure.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 266: Miscellaneous sushi |
[Dec. 11th, 2006|08:41 pm] |
 This lunch started out with free-form sushi. I didn't have a lot of the traditional sushi ingredients, so I used what was on hand: shiitake mushrooms, avocado, omelet strips, and ikura. I mixed up some teriyaki sauce from the stir-fried teriyaki chicken recipe and used it for marinade to make stir-fried teriyaki tofu. Then there's some more steamed green beans, some baked plantain, edamame, and longans and persimmon slices.
I brought a persimmon to the office and gave it to a coworker (the one I've mentioned several times before - she named this site's shrimp mascot and gave me Spanish cheese). That persimmon got a lot of attention from various people in the office. It was like show and tell!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 216: Got soy? |
[Sep. 15th, 2006|08:56 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | box, chicken fried rice, edamame, fried rice, fruit salad, kiwi fruit, melon pan, orange, palm hearts, peach, stir-fried tofu, tofu | ] |
 Soybeans are just about the most flexible food in the world, it seems. From them you get edamame, soy sauce, tofu, natto... well, I'm not sure if that last one can be considered edible, but never mind. Only as I was packing this, after all the cooking was over, did I realized how many forms of soy I had. There's chicken fried rice, which is flavored by soy sauce. On the upper right are edamame (soy beans still in their pods). Below that is marinated stir-fried tofu, which I'd soaked for a few hours in water I'd previously used to soak dried shiitake mushrooms to add some earthy flavor. On the right is another fruit salad with peach, orange segments, kiwi fruit, and palm hearts, and a cut-up-to-fit melon pan.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 161: Tako o Taita! |
[Jun. 6th, 2006|09:30 pm] |
 I wish to impress upon the many and sundry the fearsome degree of my hardcore-ness. For this lunch, I have cooked octopus! Not storebought packaged cooked octopus, but real baby occies cleaned and cooked all by myself, with not even a recipe to help me!
Are you impressed yet?
Cleaning octopus is not a difficult task, but it does remind me of high school biology class. If you've cleaned a chicken or fish you know what I mean. I used baby octopi because I heard that the adults are tough, and you have to beat 'em with a hammer if you don't want to be eating rubber. Baby octopi are tender and require no pulverization. Well and good, but if you have one large octopus you only have to clean it once, and the bits are large enough for you to distinguish easily. Baby occies, you have to clean ten or however many of 'em you have, and guesstimate where the guts end and the regular body begins. Still, it wasn't that much of a task.
Another neat thing about cooking octopus: the tentacles curl during cooking. I knew that, but I was still startled when I put them in the pan and they started writhing! It's a good thing I'm not squeamish. I only wish I could have made a video of that.
Wow, that's appetizing talk. It was worth it in the end. The octopus - which I sauteed in butter on the principle that you can never go wrong with sauteeing seafood in butter, and served with some konnyaku noodles* that came in cool little bundles - was tasty and neato-ish. Not hugely filling, as they shrunk during cooking. But that's what we have things like steamed green beans, baked Japanese sweet potato, boiled egg, stir-fried teriyaki tofu, and fruit salad with strawberries, kiwi fruit, and rambutans for.
Click on the photo if you'd like to see a larger image in which the tentacles are clearer and more glamorous.
* Yeah, I know that konnyaku in noodle form is called shirataki, but the package said konnyaku, so I'm sticking with that.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 153: How very decorative |
[May. 26th, 2006|07:45 pm] |
 I got in the mood to cook one day - "I better use all this stuff in the fridge it before it turns to the dark side" - and this was the result. On the left there's a storebought steamed pork & veggie bun, obimake enoki, skewered stir-fried teriyaki tofu, and smoked salmon sushi "sandwiches". On the right, strawberries and lychees, tamarind, and 3/4 of a sesame rice cookie.
The cookie is really cool. The rice is all puffed up like a rice cake, crunchy as opposed to chewy, and there's something chewy and sweet sticking the sesame seeds to the cookie. I need to find the brand name so I can recommend this. It was just bigger than the compartment, so I had to cut it. The inside looked like a packing peanut.
I recently introduced my mother to tamarinds. She thought the same thing I did when she saw the seed pods, and had some things to say that I won't repeat here when I broke it open and showed her the pulp inside. (I can't blame her, as I thought the very same things.) And, like me, she was surprised and pleased when she tasted them. Isn't this a bit of a reversal, a daughter getting her mother to eat new foods? "It's good, trust me! Just try it!"
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Box 94: Not health food, honest |
[Jan. 23rd, 2006|10:56 am] |
 got a little experimenty in the kitchen this time around. We have thin strips of cabbage-wrapped beef strips, which are tastier than you might guess, and grilled tofu, which I marinated in the juice from the recent batch of gyuudon and which is also tastier than you'd think. Up above is rice with shrimp furikake and palitaw.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 50: Stir-fry for the lazy |
[Sep. 15th, 2005|04:13 pm] |
Lunch Box 50: Stir-fry for the lazy
 Another day, another walkthrough of the fridge while wishing I had done my grocery shopping. The stir-fried chicken & broccoli is based on a super-simplified version of the stir-fried beef & broccoli, made with chicken & mushrooms & yakisoba sauce because that's what I had on hand. It turned out surprisingly tasty. While cooking that I realized I had nothing to serve with it, and I didn't have the time to make rice or soba because I was making dinner and I was freakin' hungry. So, I took out a half a tofu brick left over from another recipe and made quickie marinated stir-fried tofu. (I skipped the pressing-the-water-out step, and instead of marinating it in soy sauce I went straight to frying it in the stuff. It tasted fine, and actually it was a nice counterpoint to the strong flavoring of the yakisoba sauce.)
The other bits - French bread and ichigo daifuku - were, again, from previously-cooked batches. Hooray for freezers.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 49: Bad Hair Day |
[Sep. 15th, 2005|04:13 pm] |
Lunch Box 49: Bad Hair Day
 I was in an experimental mood this day. The yakiudon has broccoli, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, and marinated tofu. Tasty stuff, and quite different from the usual seafoody recipe. On the right are steamed broccoli and steamed buns from previous batches o' cooking, and on the upper left are chocolate-wigged manjuu.
I have to explain how I got to that last one. I wanted to make chocolate-coated manjuu. So, I bought some dipping chocolate that was supposed to get all liquidy when microwaved. Well, it didn't. It got soft, and then started hardening again. Dipping was not an option. I was determined to get that chocolate on the manjuu somehow, so I smeared it on the top with the fork I'd been stirring the chocolate with. I was going to smooth it down, but then I realized that the tines made the chocolate look kind of like wigs. So, I went with that.
By the way, if you tried the manjuu recipe before and they came out brown and icky-tasting, that's because I put baking soda in the ingredient list instead of baking powder. That's how I found the recipe on the web. When I've cooked them I've used baking powder, but for some reason I forgot to put the right version in the recipe here. My apologies.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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