Archive for January, 2008

Menu for Hope results

Chez Pim has announced the results of the fourth annual Menu for Hope raffle, which wound up raising $91,188 to benefit the United Nations World Food Programme, the world’s largest food aid agency. This is 50% higher than last year’s total, so way to go! A big thanks to Pim and all the organizers, the other food bloggers who offered prizes, and especially to everyone who bought raffle tickets. It’s an excellent start to the new year, and the school lunch program in Lesotho, Africa will benefit from your generosity.

Evidently the Lunch in a Box bento prize was a popular one with lots of bids, and the lucky winner is Mrs. Nicole A. H. Congratulations Nicole! Drop me a line and let me know where to send your bento starter kit, and see if we can line up a time to get together for your personal tour of San Francisco’s Japantown.

Published by Biggie on January 11th, 2008 tagged admin | 4 Comments »

Side dish containers in action

Today’s lunches show how you can add variety to a meal with a small container of fruit for a healthy dessert. This gives you the flexibility of using main dish containers that might be too small for you or your child on their own, and the ability to microwave one container but not the other (see my post on hot vs. room temp lunches). You can also turn these little side dish containers into edible ice packs by freezing fruit in the side containers (don’t overfill them!), or even just freeze the mini puddings on their own. The edible ice pack how-to is here.

Looking at this lunch, I only now realize that I messed up by packing a yogurt & sour cream-based dipping sauce — going against the “no liquid dairy” lunch restrictions at my son’s preschool. D’oh! Bug did play with the lactose-allergic kid for hours at the playground after eating this lunch, and there didn’t seem to be any issues. Good thing the kids clean their hands after eating lunch — close call! I hang my head, and will put a note to myself on the refrigerator: NO NUTS, NO LIQUID DAIRY.

Contents of preschooler lunch: Kiwi fruit, tiny container of pudding (Kiku Petit Pudding, like a mini creme caramel or flan), Bing cherries, steamed broccoli, crab cakes with lime chipotle cream dipping sauce (sauce recipe here), and fusilli pasta with tomato sauce, pureed garbanzo beans, sauteed eggplant, zucchini and onion. The little pudding cups are shelf stable and don’t need refrigeration; you may be able to find them in your local Asian market. They’re sold in bulk here, but I haven’t located an online source that sells just one package of twelve at a time. Anyone know of a source? Let us know in comments! (EDIT: Reader Patti saves the day with not one, but two online sources for the little pudding cups: here and here. Reader LoriAnn points out that Cost Plus World Market sells them in their retail stores as well.)

Morning prep time: 5 minutes, as I packed the leftover pasta in the bento box and put the dipping sauce into the little container when I was cleaning up from dinner the night before. In the morning I microwaved the frozen crab cakes (review below) and broccoli in my microwave mini steamer, and cut up the kiwi. Very fast! If I had my act together I would pack more lunches the night before…

Cooking: The fusilli dish actually started out as an Indian ratatouille-like dish that I changed direction on partway through. So what if cumin’s not your usual pasta sauce ingredient, it was tasty! I’ll try making Garlic-Braised Eggplant, Chick-Peas, and Tomato Casserole (khatti bhaji) from Moghul Microwave another day. I boiled extra fusilli when making dinner, and froze the excess unsauced pasta for use in future lunches.

Product Review: A friend served Handy brand mini crab cake appetizers at a Christmas Eve dinner last month, and I remember thinking that they were actually quite nice, especially with dipping sauce. I picked up a package of 45 from Costco’s frozen section the other week, and was pleased to find that they came in three plastic containers wrapped in reusable plastic wrap. That made it easy to take three out of a package, heat them up for lunch, and rewrap the rest for the freezer. The manufacturer recommends heating them in the oven for 16 minutes if frozen, but one minute in my 1100W microwave did the trick for three. Lightning fast!

Packing: I tucked a small Anpanman pick and a tiny spoon into the side dish container for the kiwi and little pudding, and the dipping sauce went into a wide-mouthed mayonnaise cup for easy dipping. Packed in a 360ml Disney Cars bento box with one sub-container removed to hold more pasta, and a 100ml side dish container from Daiso (Japanese dollar store with branches internationally).

Verdict: Not bad. Bug finished everything but the broccoli and kiwi at preschool, and ate the kiwi after school as a snack. I can’t complain about that. (Stay tuned — I’ve got photos of a largely uneaten lunch coming up later this week…) (Click to continue reading the full post with an additional lunch…)

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Published by Biggie on January 9th, 2008 tagged bento, dumplings or buns, eggs, fish or seafood, for kids, lactose free, onigiri or sushi, pasta or noodles | 40 Comments »

Korean hotpot bento dinners

Once a week I pack bentos to eat for dinner while we’re out at our running club. I started doing this when my son graduated to solid food and I realized that we might have to stop going to this event that happens at Bug’s dinnertime. My son has become so attached to this weekly ritual that even when we’re off schedule and I offer him dinner at home beforehand, he tells me that he’d rather have a bento there instead. Of course, his eating alone isn’t much fun for any of us, so I started packing meals for myself and my husband too. Our friends are always curious to see what this week’s meal is, and it’s always more satisfying and better for us than the chips and cheese puffs that are there (okay, okay, I eat some of the snacks too).

Contents of my husband’s dinner: Korean vegetable hotpot (with carrots, daikon, zucchini, bell pepper and greens), white rice with wasabi furikake and seasoned Korean seaweed, yellow plum tomatoes, assorted banchan (ggakdugi daikon kimchi, spicy fish cake, sweet/spicy tiny crabs) and daikon and spinach namul (Korean seasoned vegetables served as a side dish). This meal was an antidote to all of the barbecue and fried food we’d been eating in Oklahoma when we were on vacation in December — I came back with a serious craving for fish, vegetables, and rice (nothing oily). Kukje Market’s big panchan bar and fish hotpot packs saved the day when we were still unpacking.

Morning prep time: 10 minutes, using all leftovers from a previous dinner. In the morning I preheated the thermal lunch jar with hot tap water while I microwaved the soup and frozen rice.

Packing: I chose a thermal lunch jar (mine’s a Nissan Stainless, often cheaper than the Mr. Bento) because of its ability to effectively hold warm soup, but left out one inner container because it was just a bit too large for this meal. The soup was originally a fish hotpot at dinner, but I left out the actual fish when packing as I was concerned that the fish would become hard and rubbery when held at higher temperatures over time. Draining the side dishes helped keep flavors from mingling, and packing the daikon kimchi in an aluminum food cup kept it from staining the inner container. I added extra hot pepper paste to the soup, basically giving up on containing strong smells, and the whole family reveled in the garlicky spice (food smells are less noticeable if you all eat the same thing, right?). (Click to read the full post with two additional meals…)

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Published by Biggie on January 7th, 2008 tagged fish or seafood, food jar, for kids, lactose free, rice, soup or stew, thermal lunch jar, tofu | 20 Comments »

Avoid airline food, pack your own bento lunch

My husband, my three-year-old son and I went on a multi-city vacation in December, so of course I brought along gear to pack bento lunches for our flights and day trips. Nowadays airlines in the U.S. are offering less and less in the way of meals, instead selling nasty carb-loaded “snack box” meals full of pretzels, crackers and processed cheese. Those things are loaded with preservatives and aren’t particularly delicious or satisfying — better to bring your own food and be in control of your own destiny. I get a kick out of pulling a proper meal out of my carry-on bag, quieting my son while making my seatmates and the flight attendants jealous. But there are some tricks to packing an appealing airplane lunch that’ll pass through airport security and still taste good. (Click to read the full post…)

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Published by Biggie on January 3rd, 2008 tagged bento, equipment, sandwich case, tips | 93 Comments »

Ask Biggie in the New Year

First off, Happy New Year! In keeping with our general cultural mishmash (and my culinary A.D.D.), we saw in the New Year with Korean-flavored toshikoshi soba before midnight, and ate Puerto Rican-style black-eyed peas and Italian greens on New Year’s Day — all good luck dishes for the new year. Football’s over, so now I’m wading through five hours of Kohaku (Japanese Red & White Singing Festival) on Tivo as I write. It’s kind of like watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve — a tradition that makes it really feel like the old year has come to a close.

I’ll be trying out all kinds of new speedy lunch tips and recipes this year, so don’t be shy about letting me know if you’d like to see a post on something in particular! E-mail your requests to me at askbiggie (AT) gmail (DOT ) com and I’ll start up a regular “Ask Biggie” column.