| Lunch Box 579: Snails |
[Jul. 21st, 2008|08:57 pm] |
 Molluscs for lunch today! But not my usual molluscs (octopus and squid). Today I have periwinkles with garlic butter, the periwinkles being the odd bits at the lower left and the garlic butter being in the blue-lidded container next to 'em. Above that I have edamame and baked Japanese sweet potato. To the side, some more of my weird, frozen-and-thawed marinated, stir-fried tofu; and finally some blue country cornbread.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| 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 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 576: Foodstuffs |
[Jul. 1st, 2008|07:30 pm] |
 Some of my lunches are more leftover-ish than others. This is one of those. I have chicken & vegetable yakisoba,with a little yellow container of yakisoba sauce. (the wheel-like thing is lotus root.) On the other side I have baked sweet potato - the regular kind, not the purple kind, for once! - steamed green beans, and purple imo-yokan, which is a dessert made with purple sweet potatoes.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 575: Pride in my lunch |
[Jun. 27th, 2008|07:15 pm] |
 I will eat the rainbow today! Red cherries, orange & yellow steamed carrots & yellow squash, green edamame, blue country cornbread, and baked purple sweet potato. And lest anyone forget the earth tones - representing the end of the rainbow or something - some mushroom turnovers.
How about that, I packed a vegetarian meal. Not vegan, however, as there are dairy products in the cornbread and turnovers. I'm not quite that hardcore.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 574: Pseudo-escargot |
[Jun. 26th, 2008|09:30 pm] |
 When I go to an Asian market I try to find at least one thing each trip that I've never tried before. This time around I came home with a bag of frozen periwinkles. Winkles, a kind of snail, are commonly eaten in Britain and Ireland, but I've never seen them here. So, I guessed that they'd go well with garlic butter, and simmered them at a low temperature in just that. The result: escargot-like garlic butter periwinkles. Then there's edamame, zucchini & onion stir-fry, mushroom turnovers, and cherries. Can you tell I bought a BIG bag of cherries?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 573: Poutine on the ritz |
[Jun. 25th, 2008|08:37 pm] |
 A friend of mine has been lusting after poutine. His blog has chronicled his ever-thwarted attempts to consume this substance. He got me curious, and when I discovered it was close to the gravy fries I used to love years ago, I decided I wanted some too. So I found out how to make it. In fact, that recipe is a two-fer, because to make poutine I had to learn how to make farmer cheese.
So - here we have meatloaf, poutine, edamame, cherries, and persimmon. I feel Canadian all over!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 572: In memory of George Carlin |
[Jun. 24th, 2008|10:37 pm] |
 By now everyone in the continental US knows that George Carlin passed on this past weekend. What can I say, he was a funny man and the news made me sad. So, here I am, making a bento lunch that is a salute to him, sorta-kinda. It includes meatcake, AKA meatloaf, and blue country cornbread, which is classic blue food. Blue food, man.
There's also steamed sugar snap peas, some mushroom turnovers I bought at Trader Joe's, and cherries, but I can't tie those in to Carlin because they weren't going bad in the back of my fridge.
Tomorrow: The seven foods you can never use in a bento!
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 571: Scrounge |
[Jun. 23rd, 2008|09:27 pm] |
 I wanted to do some cooking this weekend, but Saturday was taken up with helping some friends move into their new apartment, and on Sunday we went out to eat, so today's lunch is whatever I could scrounge up.
For dinner on Sunday I had a basket of fried food. Onion rings, mozzarella sticks, and fried chicken fingers. Shame on me, but once in a great while I want a sampler basket! I brought home some of the chicken, so here are cut-up chicken fingers with baked Japanese sweet potato and steamed sugar snap peas. On the other side I have cherries and a fruit salad made with persimmon, grapes, and jackfruit.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 570: Shout out to my workies* |
[Jun. 20th, 2008|07:56 pm] |
 Maria, one of my coworkers, has a garden. Recently she brought me some zucchini, yellow squash, and green beans she picked. One pass through the kitchen later, here they are! I have vegetable & seafood stuff, which is basically whatever veggies and stuff I have on hand (shiitake, carrots, squash, broccoli, and scallions) plus some crab sticks. Above it is a pile of satoimo noodles, which are naturally purple, which makes them cool. Then there's some steamed green beans. On the other side I have a container of yakisoba sauce to mix into the stir-fry and noodles, a bit of melon pan, and a fruit salad made with cherries, persimmon, and jackfruit.
* A workie is like a homie, except we see each other in the office.
(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 568: Return of the purple spuds |
[Jun. 16th, 2008|08:18 pm] |
 Today I have some chicken & vegetable curry, which is always a quick and tasty meal. Ya gotta love something you can make out of whatever's in the fridge, stir-fried a little and then curried up. Then there's a pair of baked mini-potatoes, one regular and one purple one. (The apparent discoloration on the purple one is actually melted butter.) I used edamame as packing material. Finally, I have blue country cornbread, which is sweet enough to be used as a kind of dessert.
(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 566: Extra tentacles |
[Jun. 10th, 2008|08:03 pm] |
 The main part of today's lunch is one of my favorite easy-to-make dishes, okonomiyaki. If you zoom in on that picture you can see what looks like earthworms on top of it - those are squid tentacles. When making the recent batch of calamari I cut the longer tentacles off so they wouldn't tangle when I cooked them, and they ended up as a topping here.
I also have calamari, simmered shiitake mushrooms, steamed broccoli, and dorayaki. The dorayaki - a pancake sandwich with sweet red bean paste in the middle - was made with regular Aunt Jemima pancake mix. So inauthentic, but also so quick & easy to make.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 565: Much Miscellania |
[Jun. 9th, 2008|08:11 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | box, coconut gel, cucumber maki, fruit salad, grass jelly, greek chicken, mandarin, simmered shiitake mushrooms, spam musubi, steamed snow peas, sweet potato tempura | ] |
 I rarely pack lunches like this, with lots of different little things, because that would involve cooking a bunch of various things and after a hard day at work I'm just not up to that. But when I end up with a whole bunch of small plastic containers in my fridge, well, then I get lunches like this. They aren't pretty and organized, but they sure taste good.
So, here's what jumped out of the plastic: cucumber maki, Spam musubi, sweet potato tempura, Greek chicken, simmered shiitake mushrooms, and steamed snow peas. The fruit salad made with mandarin orange, grass jelly, and coconut gel came out of a peel, plastic, and glass, respectively. I'm sure you wanted to know that last part.
(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 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 562: Beach chicken |
[Jun. 3rd, 2008|06:58 pm] |
 Mmm, I do like me some Greek chicken! So, here's some more over couscous, which I made with some pseuki yaki broth from my freezer. That's an odd combination, but it tasted fine. Then there's blue country cornbread, which one of these days I will photograph decently so you can see the actual color, and a fruit salad made with kiwi fruit, grass jelly, and coconut gel. Hmm, only one of the three is actually a fruit, but what else am I going to call that?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 561: We have arrived in Greece. |
[May. 29th, 2008|07:54 pm] |
 My mother finally told me how to make Greek chicken! It turns out that I got pretty close when I cooked baked chicken breast last week; I just needed to add a few steps. So, here at last I have my Mom's Greek chicken. It's accompanied by ohitashi (with a little container of mayonnaise), blue country cornbread, a mandarin orange, and some fresh longans.
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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| Lunch Box 560: Steak, potatoes, and cornbread |
[May. 27th, 2008|09:18 pm] |
 I realized after I made this that I had a weird twist on the Southern American steak 'n' taters 'n' cornbread dinner. I've got niku jyaga, which is Japanese for meat & potatoes, and blue country cornbread (made with cornmeal from blue corn). The fresh longans aren't American at all, but persimmons are out of season.
I baked this batch of cornbread in an iron skillet. It cracked in a weird but amusing pattern. Who watches the cornbread?
(Website post, with links to recipes.) |
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