Archive for August, 2007

Strawberry tree fruit & curry lunches

I packed number of unusual fruits and vegetables in our meals today, the most interesting of which is the striking red fruit of the strawberry tree (”arbutus berries”). I haven’t seen this fruit in stores, but our friend Vincent from the African island of RÃ©union picked them from trees in the neighborhood with Bug. I find them faintly sweet and a bit mealy when eaten out of hand, but they make a very nice jam or couli. We didn’t have enough strawberry tree fruit to cook up into anything much, so into the bentos they went, to be eaten out of hand. Suite 101 tells us they can also be made into “jellies, syrups, candied fruit, distilled and fermented drinks, such as wines and liqueurs. In Spain, they’re made into a highly flavored wine, called medronho.”

Contents of preschooler lunch: Honeydew nectarine, strawberry tree fruit (arbutus berries), sliced cucumber with herb oil from marinated bocconcini (we shared this), and a curry that Vincent made with chicken, potatoes, banana squash, tomatoes, mushrooms, chili, coconut milk, peanut butter, lemongrass, and keffir lime leaves, simmered with Parmesan cheese rind for flavor complexity. This particular honeydew nectarine was disappointingly mealy, but another one we had a day early was sweet and medium-firm with (not surprisingly) a hint of melon. There’s an interesting article on fruit hybrids here.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, to reheat leftover curry that Vincent made, and cut the nectarine and cucumber.

Packing: I pre-heated the thermal food jar with hot tap water before packing to maximize heat retention, and dipped the nectarine in lemon juice mixed with strawberry banana juice to prevent fruit from browning without making it sour. Packedin a 560ml insulated bento set (240ml rice jar and 160ml side dishes).

My meal is the same, minus the cucumber. Packed in a 300ml thermal food jar and a 190ml metal side dish container.

Contents of husband’s lunch: The same curry, pre-frozen gemelli pasta, plum tomatoes, broccoli and orange cauliflower florets with red wine vinaigrette, and a mini pudding cup. The orange cauliflower tasted just like regular white cauliflower to me; I bought it at Safeway so it should be widely available. (Pasta is pushed to one side for the photo only; I re-covered the curry with pasta after the photo was taken.)

Morning prep time: 10 minutes of mostly microwave time, to warm the curry, defrost the frozen unsauced pasta, and quickly cook the broccoli and orange cauliflower in my microwave mini steamer (speeds cook time by 50%).

Packing: This lunch features a variation of the “rice lid” technique that I first described here, where you pack a container mostly full of your stew or curry, and cap it with a layer of rice to keep things warm and intact until eating. We were out of cooked rice, so I pulled out a little packet of pre-frozen pasta and microwaved it to use instead. I had serious doubts that pasta would work as a lid, so we purposely tipped it on its side in the car to really put it to the test. Result: it actually kept the very thick curry in place without leaking out of the loose rice container lid, but this definitely wouldn’t work with a thinner broth. The top tier is divided by a little plastic gelato spoon that I kept from a gelato takeout shop. It did double duty as both food divider and spoon for the pudding; it’s the perfect size for box lunches so I wash and reuse it. Lunch packed in a cheap Chinese thermal lunch jar, bought locally.

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Published by Biggie on August 17th, 2007 tagged bento, curry, food jar, for kids, glutenfree, lactose free, pasta or noodles, potatoes, poultry, thermal lunch jar, tips | 7 Comments »

Back to school bento in the news

With the school season upon us, packed lunches are in the spotlight. It looks like the media is starting to pick up on the bento-style lunch trend.

1. Kids’ bento-style lunches in Texas

The Dallas Morning News ran an article about bento-style lunches for children, with food ideas and shopping resources that readers might find helpful. Pictured is Shannon Carino (and her children), a contributor to the online Bentolunch community on LiveJournal, with a bento blog at bentolunch.blogspot.com. Congratulations on the article, Shannon!

2. The latest gear

The Associated Press also has an article about the latest lunch containers for the back-to-school season, with information on all of the different gear out there: food jars, lunch boxes, insulated lunch bags, thermal lunch jars, bento boxes, Laptop Lunchboxes — you name it. Have a look.

3. Bento in general

Texas newspaper The Monitor tells us about bento lunches in this article quoting Kim McFarland of My Lunch Can Beat Up Your Lunch! blog fame (and co-moderator of the Bentolunch community on LiveJournal). Way to go!

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Published by Biggie on August 16th, 2007 tagged admin, equipment | Comment now »

Homemade gnocchi box lunches

Bug and I made homemade gnocchi for dinner last night, which he really enjoyed as it was like playing with play dough (modeling clay). Involving your kids in meal prep can be a fun way to get them interested in their food, as well as being rewarding family time if you don’t stress about the meal being fast or perfect. Check out the James Beard Award-winning website Spatulatta.com for videos of kids teaching kids to cook; there’s a lot of quality material there, including the Spatulatta Cookbook.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Homemade gnocchi with pesto sauce, Bartlett pears, Concord grapes, pluot (plum apricot hybrid), and kiwi. The grapes turned out to be unpopular with Bug because of their seeds and thicker skin. I love their complex, almost wine-like flavor, though, so Bug fed them to me.

Morning prep time: 7 minutes, using leftover sauced gnocchi. In the morning I just microwaved the sauced gnocchi to restore texture, and cut up fruit. (I boiled uncooked gnocchi for my meal to see how the two differed.)

Packing: Everything is cut into bite-sized pieces for easy child eating. I dipped the cut pears in lemon juice mixed with strawberry banana juice to prevent the fruit from browning without the sour taste of straight lemon. A little pink Shokupanman pick was supposed to help with the pears, but they were so soft that a fork was a better utensil (they fell apart with the little pick). Packed in a cheap three-tier 495ml box from Daiso, closed with the elastic bento band shown here.

Cooking: We made the gnocchi with potatoes and flour — that’s it. Marcella Hazan, the Soup Nazi of Italian cookbook writers, gives good guidance on making gnocchi in her definitive cookbook Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Boil 1.5 lbs of boiling potatoes (I used Yukon Golds) with skins on, put them through a potato ricer or mouli while still warm, and work in about 1.5 cups of all-purpose flour until it gets to a soft Play Dough consistency. Flour the work surface and roll into long ropes of one inch in diameter, then cut ropes into 3/4-inch segments. Use the concave tines of a dinner fork to shape the gnocchi (or just poke them with your finger to make an indent that’ll catch the sauce). Cook the gnocchi in small batches in salted boiling water — pull them out 10 seconds after they float to the surface. Gently sauce and eat. Check out the gnocchi recipes and tutorials by Simply Recipes and Cook (Almost) Anything Once.

My lunch: I set aside some shaped but uncooked gnocchi last night to test the difference between leftover cooked/sauced gnocchi and freshly cooked gnocchi in our box lunches. Result: the gnocchi I boiled this morning had a nicer texture but lost a little of their defined shape through the overnight rest in the refrigerator (next time will try freezing them). The refrigerated cooked/sauced gnocchi was fine but not optimal, and needed to be tossed with a little fresh pesto sauce in the morning before packing.

Morning prep time: Because I boiled my gnocchi fresh this morning in a small pot, it took about 15 minutes to make this lunch.

Packing: Packed in two 350ml tiers of a Lock & Lock lunch set, with the drink container holding banana-strawberry juice cut with water.

(Edit: After making this, I discovered that Donna Hay’s blog was having a gnocchi roundup, so I submitted it forÂ HHDD#14, hosted this time by Cafe Lynnylu. You can see the full gnocchi roundup here, posted Aug. 25, 2007.)

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Published by Biggie on August 15th, 2007 tagged bento, dumplings or buns, for kids, lactose free, parenthacks, pasta or noodles, potatoes, recipe, vegetarian | 24 Comments »

Cassava & wild salmon box lunches

I’m gearing up for preschool to start in September, when I won’t be right there to help my son with frustrating food in his meals. This means putting myself in his shoes when I’m packing his lunch, trying to imagine what’d give him problems if he were eating solo. Kids this age are still perfecting utensil use, so it’s important to either cut things small or pack finger food. This month I’m going to try to pack his lunches as if he were already eating on his own, to get both of us into the swing of things.

We did have an eating milestone today, though: Bug successfully used real chopsticks for the first time! I’d packed both fork and chopsticks for him and figured he’d go for the fork, but last week he saw his little friend Maya using little chopsticks and wanted to be like her. He polished off all but a couple pieces of salmon using only chopsticks — I was floored. I guess I should enjoy positive peer pressure while it lasts, right?

Contents of preschooler lunch: Mango and romaine lettuce with homemade vinaigrette, grilled wild salmon with a mustard seed glaze, and boiled cassava root (a.k.a. yuca, manioc or casava) with salsa Criolla (Creole sauce: a vinegary fresh salsa often served with grilled meats or vegetables). My husband and I had some outstanding roasted cassava and salsa Criolla last month at a local Peruvian restaurant, so I made a note to duplicate it at home. I took a shortcut by boiling the cassava instead of roasting or grilling it, but the vinegary salsa complemented the potato-like cassava nicely.

Morning prep time: 8 minutes, using all leftovers from dinner.

Packing: Bug isn’t a fan of mixed salads, so I separated out the lettuce from the mango and put his dressing in a cute sauce container. I cut the salmon and cassava into bite-size pieces and removed the salmon skin to head off eating frustration. There’s a tough little stringy bit that runs through the very center of the cassava, so I removed that as well. Packed in a single 350ml container from a Lock & Lock lunch set.

Cookbook: I found the Creole salsa recipe in award-winning cookbook The Book of Latin American Cooking by Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz. From the book jacket: She “describes how the Spanish, Portuguese, African, and Middle Eastern influences have combined with the indiginous cooking of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations.” An interesting read with extensive commentary on each recipe.

My lunch: Contents are the same as Bug’s, but the grilled salmon is intact, the salad is mixed up, and the cassava is in larger pieces. Because I didn’t have to cut things up, I was able to pack this in 5 minutes.

Packing: I rotated the cassava chunks in the box to create gaps in the corners for the fresh salsa. This saved me from using sauce containers or condiment cups, and the salsa was dry enough that it didn’t leak sauce onto the salad. But if it had leaked, the vinegar of the salsa would have complemented the vinaigrette for the salad, so I didn’t worry too much about it. Of course, after I packed this up, I shoved it unceremoniously into the diaper bag sideways, cassava-side first. Yes, I know Japanese books say you should carry your bento flat, but that’s just not practical for our lifestyle. So our lunches are packed to survive rough treatment. Packed in a 500ml Leaflet bento box, which is actually a little small for an adult woman my height, according to the bento box size guidelines.

(Cross-posted to The Daily Tiffin parenting and lifestyle blog’s Tiffin Tuesday column.)

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Published by Biggie on August 14th, 2007 tagged bento, fish or seafood, for kids, glutenfree, potatoes, salad | 16 Comments »

Portobella chicken burgers in collapsible sandwich cases

Contents of husband’s lunch: Portobello mushroom chicken “burger” on a focaccia sandwich roll with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and chocolate chipotle-flavored mayonnaise. Side dishes of homemade chili and a shelf-stable mini pudding cup.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, using ready-made chicken patties by Aidell’s (review below) and leftover frozen chili.

Packing: I picked out some of the soft bread from the focaccia top layer like this to make room for the sandwich filling, so that tomatoes didn’t squirt out of the sides when eating. The lettuce and cheese acted as moisture barriers to keep the bread from getting soggy. The sandwich is packed in a collapsible sandwich case (first reviewed here), and threw in a lidded Solo condiment cup with leftover chili that I had frozen as a savory variation of the edible ice pack. These are the same condiment cups that I used for the fruit jello cups, and are widely available (you can even save the ones you get from pizza delivery with Parmesan cheese or pepper flakes). Packed in a US$1 sandwich case from Ichiban Kan (online store coming soon). My lunch is in the blue Feel at Ease sandwich case (below right).

Cooking: We had extra chocolate chipotle wet rub leftover from making the chocolate chipotle babyback ribs last week, so I made a quick flavored mayonnaise by mixing mayo with the wet rub. You can quickly jazz up regular mayonnaise with simple add-ins like pesto, hot sauce, pureed garlic, etc.

Product: I tried Aidell’s portobella mushroom and onion chicken burgers for the first time after spying them at Costco. I’m a big fan of other Aidell’s products (especially their teriyaki & pineapple chicken meatballs), and was hoping that the patties would be a tasty shortcut to a burger lunch. Sadly, we found the texture to be overprocessed and greasy, and the flavor to be one-dimensional (mushroomy, but not much else). Whereas the meatballs have clearly identifiable pieces of chicken and pineapple in them and a nice meaty texture, the portobella/chicken patties were rubbery and spongelike. Thinking that microwaving might have been the culprit, I pan-fried a patty this morning until it developed a nice crust, and tasted it side by side against their teriyaki and pineapple meatballs. No improvement — I can’t recommend this product and am trying to figure out what to do with the other six patties in the freezer. I could always cut them into strips, bread them with flour/egg/panko and fry them (frying it and dipping it in sauce might mask the texture, albeit at the cost of my arteries). Anyone have any ideas? (I really hope that this is a new product that’s still in development, so they can work out the kinks.)

Contents of Bug’s lunch: Chicken salad sandwich with cheese, a wrapped Babybel cheese, and a condiment cup of leftover zucchini with tomatoes and onions (recipe from Marcella Hazan’s definitive cookbook Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking).

Equipment: I picked up a child’s Snoopy collapsible sandwich case that’s much smaller than the adult boxes that I have. I’m thinking this’ll come in handy when Bug starts preschool next month — I won’t need to use a regular bento box or pad out an adult sandwich case with food he won’t eat. Extra bonus is that it’s Peanuts and gender-neutral. Bought at Moritaya in San Francisco’s Japantown (see the SF Bay Area shopping guide) for about US$9, which was pricey, but I haven’t seen the child versions anywhere else and preschool starts soon.

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