Codfish with eggs and potatoes

A traditional portuguese dish that is quite fast to made but very high caloric. I hadn't made it in months and since I've been running short on ideas, I had to cook something.

 

In the end, it came up quite funny. I cut the tomato and blanched the greenies there. For more color I cut some carrot and started making a little garden. I know it's autumn, it was something spontaneous.

Sausage rolled in cabbage

Not much to say about this one except I enjoyed cooking it, rolling the sausage in the cabbage and assembling it all in the tupperware. This was actually the first time I packed one for me too and took it to school. It feels quite good eating what you've made outside. ^^

Chocolate Cupcakes

I had to do something on the weekend since I'm having a little trouble on deciding what to do for the next weeks on food. I've never put thought to it, but when you try to do new things, you notice how quickly you run out of ideas. So, to fight that, I grabbed a recipe and made these!

The cakes ware still warm when I took them out because I completely forgot I had to leave home yesterday, so I had to "hurry" the process to bake a 2nd batch and had no time nor extra cupcakes to let them cool. The result? They "fell down" a little but are were quite tasty:

Maybe the reason they did this too was that I didn't fill the cupcakes enough and I thought a little weird the recipe included water, but gave it a try.

I'll be posting soon, so stay tuned. ^_^

Octopus rice

Good morning!

Today's cooking wasn't that much of a great choice but it was done already, so I used it.

I added some carrots and green peas on the side, and an apple for dessert (usually the whole apple goes in the bag along with the tupperware so it doesn't darken. The octopus on the rice shrank a LOT so it's mostly rice and no octopus

Beet root Cannelloni

I saw this recipe on a magazine and tried it out. Usually I try, weekly, to have at least 1 vegetarian/without meat or fish meal since I can get tired of fish and meat overtime, so it's a little "experience day" where meat and fish are not allowed in the pot.

I had a lot of fun assembling this one, tho I didn't take pictures at bf's lunch because I couldn't wake up z_z too sleepy. I did take some to mine but if you don't stuff the tupperware while the cannellonis are hot, it will look very ugly and messy like this:

I put some extra cheese on it, since i ate at home. Didn't really care much for the looks but for the taste.

Here's some pictures I took while making them (which look a lot tastier than that thing!)

This is the mix I filled cannelloni with:

- Diced onion

- Diced garlic

- Cottage cheese (from cow milk)

- Diced beet root (gives the nice pink colour to the cheese)

- 2 ts grated lemon peel

In the original recipe it said one whole lemon's grated peel, but i came to doubt that when I grated half a lemon, so I put 2 tea spoons and tasted to check. If I had used more than a quarter lemon's peel I probably wouldn't be able to eat it.

So, here they are stuffed and pinkish!

Let's take a closer look:

After this, I put white sauce on top of them to cover slightly and some cheese on top to gratin.

That's all for today! Happy cooking!

Japanese Curry

I've been wanting to do this for a while now. I tried it once made by the chef of the restaurant I worked for as the staff's dinner. I was delighted with the taste, the texture, everything. Later I found a chinese supermarket which sells japanese curry cubes, "why not try it?" I thought. After a month of thinking and a few days researching, I cooked it last night and added a few more vegetables than the usual. The only thing that didn't go so well was the meat. I had to guy ground meat because the supermarket was out of cut meat T_T So it's weird finding these little pieces of meat on the sauce.

What I put in there (since it's a bit hard to see all of it)

- Ground meat;

- Carrots;

- Potatoes;

- Eggplant;

- Zucchini;

- Onions;

- and the curry cubes with the right amount of water.

For the rice, I usually cook Japanese rice by kilos. I grab a big pan and cook 1kg at a time. Then I make small portions, let them cool and freeze it. Anytime I need rice, I open up the freezer and there it is, ready to use!

Fish & mashed potatoes

Yesterday the bf asked for fish (he's a meat-lover person) so i gathered up what I had around and made this. Since we had family over, we didn't organize the shopping so much because they always bring things over, so today and tomorrow there's not many vegetables/fruit in the house.

From right to left we have:

- Mashed potatoes with olives on top;

- Saute red bell peppers (with garlic, parsley and basil);

- Boiled fish;

- Cucumber;

- Blanched turnips with oregano and vinegar (and an olive);

The bell pepper and the turnip were turned down by the bf but he ate it. I personally loved the bell pepper. If you turn the tupperware counterclockwise it looks like some kind of monster xD

Comments/Ideas

I thought I'd give it a try asking readers' to feedback what I've been blogging so far. I have read various blogs but when it comes to making one, sometimes you need to be told a few things to notice them. So, if anyone has any opinion or idea that could help me improve the blog and make it more pleasant for the readers, they're all welcome!

Also, if you'd like me to try cooking/photograph/write a recipe of something, just post here or beneath the lunchbox correspondent to the recipe you'd like to read more of. All ideas are welcome and very appreciated.

Íris

Leftovers #1

There's a little problem when family comes visit you, there's not much of a chance to assemble a lunch box either because you don't cook at all or because what you had saved for lunch was eaten already!

This is what lunch ended like after I searched the whole kitchen:

It's not all that healthy, but the bf loves it.

There's baby sausages pan-fried in olive oil and bell-pepper sauce, underneath it sauté onions and Zucchini or Courgette and on the right corner fried potatoes.

Chicken Omelet

I am  not proud of me today. I fell asleep after turning the alarm clock off and woke up 20 minutes before my bf goes to work!! Luckily there were some leftovers that i could use (chicken) so i mixed half an onion diced, an egg, some parsley and salt and made it within 10 minutes. Since it's friday, we're running out of vegetables in the house so I couldn't find much to put in there. I had the same for my lunch and didn't complain =P

Tomato sauce fish fillet

This was an experiment which went quite well, with little ingredients yet tasty and healthy!

I also tried something I'm not sure if it'll go well. My bf hates turnip: see those little white squares on the silicone cup? Blanched turnip and some carrot. I wonder if he'll eat it or not.

In the middle there's couscous with some sesame seeds on top (it looked too plain so i added 2 tbs) and on the left i put the fish with tomato sauce, onions and coriander. Takes about 10 minutes to make after the fish is cooked.

How to make Lasagna

The quantities specified below are for the pyrex I use, I must warn you it's quite big, so you can adapt it by ratio to your containers. This works well for about 8 meals. I have done it bigger, but i wouldn't advise you to since I had to eat it for 4 days with 2 more friends.

Ingredients:

900g grated cheese

700g minced meat (in this case I used cow meat, but you can also make it with minced pork or chicken)

1 large onion

2 garlic cloves

2 large grated carrots

Salt, olive oil and spices

Tomato pulp, or 2 fresh tomatoes peeled and diced

Mushrooms (I used canned)

500ml of white sauce

Lasagna pasta

How to prepare it:

Grab a big frying pan or a pan and put about 2tbs of olive oil. Turn on the heat and let it warm up, but not too much. Put the garlic and let it fry a bit.

Add the onion and 2tbs of soy sauce and stir fry until the onion is half cooked.

Add the meat and let it cook, crushing the largest pieces of meat.

When the meat is cooked, add the grated carrot, the tomato paste, some spices, salt and in the end the mushrooms.

Let it cook for 3 to 5 minutes and set aside. Grab the pyrex and the fun part begins! This is my favorite part of making lasagna: layering. My oven is very old so I can't regulate exact temperatures, so as a means of precaution I start with a layer of White sauce, then cheese and only then pasta.

Then I add a layer of meat, then white sauce, cheese, pasta, meat, white sauce, cheese... You get mypoint. For the cheese lovers: You can put an extra layer of cheese between the meat and the white sauce, it'll be even more delicious ^^. When you're almost reaching at the top, end with a layer of pasta, then cheese and white sauce (you can put more cheese on top of the white sauce if you want). It should look somewhat like this and the initial picture:

Let it cook in the pre-heated oven, medium-heat, for about 40 minutes or stick a fork into the lasagna and when the pasta is cooked you can take it out.

Have fun cooking! =3

Lasagna

My bf was asking for lasagna for a long time, so we decided to make some this week.(I'll post more about that tomorrow!) There are also some other fans of my lasagna but unfortunately they're too far to taste it. *grin*

I still had to finish some grapes and sweet potato we had, so I put them on the tupperware.

Japanese-like lunch

I was so sleepy this was the best photo i could take

This was quite easy to assemble. I had some vegetable left overs from the night before so i used them up (broccoli, pumpkin and sweet potato puree. Then we have Japanese rice which was cooked in a large amount and then frozen in portions and above it a recipe (which I do not own) which made me curious to try cooking it myself: Soboro. I had tried this once at the japanese restaurant I worked for, the chef let us bring food home but i didn't like it much, the flavor was too strong to be eaten alone. Of course I only found out that it's not meant to be eaten just like that much later.

Spinach Quiche

This took very little time to assemble, i just cut the quiche slices and wash up some tomatoes, cucumber and carrot and slice/arrange them.

The whole quiche

sideways 

It's a pity it doesn't last much in the house. Me and my bf keep sneaking into the kitchen to grab a slice until it's over!