Cooking for Fun

Mango & milk jello

2010-08-18T13:43:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone!

I'm currently experimenting with agar-agar jelly on various things: milk, kiwis, chocolate, and so on.
It's an easy way to make a dessert that is sweet and refreshing at this time of the year.
Yesterday I tried not to make the jelly so stiff. Agar-agar is a lot "harder" than normal jelly, I'd been experimenting the amounts so as not to make it too hard nor too soft.

I ended up with this:

For 12 silicone cupcake cups:
- 250ml boiling water with 1/2 tsp agar-agar flakes;
- 50ml milk;
- 1 sweet fresh mango.

I blended the milk with the mango, then slowly mixed in the boiling water with agar-agar and poured it onto the cups. Put them in the refrigerator and they'll be done in about 1h.

Nothing else to report, neither me or my bf need the lunches to go, but I'll be gathering some new recipes for when we do need them :)

Too hot to cook?

2010-08-05T17:52:00.001+01:00

It's been a while since I made something to take pictures of. It's too hot to cook and whenever I cook I completely forget grabbing the camera.

This past week I made skewers with chicken, mushrooms, bell pepper and green onion which were awesome but I was in such a rush I didn't get the camera.

I used the mushroom stems for something else. I cooked some black beans (which I haven't eaten in about 2 years by now, because the bf doesn't like beans) added some chopped onion, tomato and the mushroom stems and put it all in a pan.

The final result: super tasty! I missed eating beans!

Currently I'm experimenting certain types of food, keeping a food journal to see what makes me constipated and what helps me with it. So far, water and avoiding bread has helped with it. Exercise usually helps with it, I'm slowly working on that.

Sesame beef bento

2010-07-26T21:37:00.000+01:00

I woke up at 6am determined to get used to assembling bentos in the morning. They taste much much better (the rice and fruit) and there's no mushiness. This week I planned my food and chose to follow a recipe from Bento Love cookbook of sesame beef.

At first I thought I wouldn't like it because sesame oil is a bit strong for me but in the end I was sad I didn't get to eat any (I made it specifically for the bf)

The recipe is very simple and it was done in under 10 minutes (serves about 2 portions) which is a plus for when I'm still sleeping :) not too many ingredients, just toss in the pan and voilá! you have a delicious tasty meat done.

I used japanese rice topped with some sesame seeds, a kiwi (almost whole *munch munch*) broccoli and raw star, flower and clubs shaped carrot. All of it assembled in about 30 minutes, from scratch.

Pea Stew - Defrosting pt. 2

2010-07-22T09:30:00.002+01:00

This was more of a mix-in-the-pot thing than a proper recipe. My grandma used to make something similar, I just tried figuring the ingredients by memory.

Also, I made use of the tripod we bought for the camera. No more asking love to take pictures while I cook so I don't get the camera dirty.

Here's the recipe (serves about 6):

- 3 table spoons Olive oil;
- 2 onions, diced;
- 3/4 sliced chorizo, peeled;
- 2 bay leaves;
- 600g of diced meat;
- a splash of white wine;
- 3 chopped tomatoes;
- 3/4 kg of peas;
- 1 farinheira (Optional, I only used it for the defrosting purpose);
- Enough boiling water;

- Salt and pepper to taste.

This is a VERY caloric meal, used to be made for farmers who work all day long and need them, so if you're trying to lose weight, I'll advise you not to eat it :)

Grab a big pan, and heat up the olive oil. When it's hot enough, drop the diced onion in the pan.

Add some salt and stir until the onion is translucent. Add the sliced chorizo.

Add the bay leaves and let the chorizo cook until lightly fried, then remove it. It should look somewhat like this.

At this point, add the meat.

Add the wine and let it cook for a few minutes.

Add the diced tomato and be patient.

This next part will take about 15 minutes. I hate waiting while stirring but it pays off, really.

It should look like this:

Add enough boiling water to the mix and put the chorizo back. Add the peas:

Put the lid on and let it cook. At this time I prepared some rice and 5 minutes before the rice was done I set this aside and added the farinheira pieces.
Instead of the rice, you can put some small sized pasta in the pan along with the peas. Grandma also used to put some beans but love doesn't like them.

Only a few things to go from the freezer. Stay tuned I'll be posting soon.

Defrosting: when the freezer resembles the north pole!

2010-07-20T10:36:00.001+01:00

It's that time again, when I have to think of various dishes to put together what's in the freezer.

This time I'd like to share the process (last time I only showed the freezer's pictures) and start by telling you what I have in there:

Veggies:
- Frozen tomatoes; Corn; Peas; Brussels Sprouts; Red and green bell peppers;

Meat & fish:
- 2 chorizos and 1 farinheira;
- 3 random beefs (I'm almost sure they're all pork);
- Turkey breasts;
- Crabsticks;
- White fish filetts;

Bread:
- Corn bread;

Adding to the freezer stash, I have some other things I need to use from the fridge like tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber and more bellpeppers that came from my grandparents' farm.

For the next few days I'll be showing how I'm going to use all of these ingredients in delicious plates! They're probably not so apropriate for bento but I'll put them in bento boxes because I am watching my portions and it's the easiest way to do it.

So, here's today's meal:

Whitefish fillets with onion, frozen tomatoes, frozen bellpeppers, 1/4 of sliced chorizo for taste and some spices sided with plain white rice and brussels sprouts.

I am stil dwelling with the new camera on food photos, they all come out a little grainy but I'm getting there :D

In my previous post, I mentioned this bento box, I'm not sure how much I can fill the lower tier with, remember? Well, That's why the brussels are all squished and have the upper tier's print on them, it looks big but I can't fit much in it... I wonder if it's for rice only?

Bento gear

2010-07-19T21:12:00.001+01:00

I found it! In my country! It was an accidental finding but I got a bento book and acessories in one pack in Fnac. Even though the book is in french, I was shooting stars through my eyes with the gear

Sorry for the grainy picture but this is what came with the book:

A 2 tier bento box (i still haven't measured how many ml go in it) with an elastic band, a star-shaped egg-mold, a plastic fork and spoon, a sushi rice mold, a star shaped cutter, 6 picks in the form of fish and seals in 3 different colours, soy sauce bottles in the shape of a duck and of a fish.

I was so delighted with it, I couldn't wait to put all this to use. Still missing some nori punches :)

Since I have a little ammount of things, I bought an Ikea storage box to organize them all :)

I also used some space for other things like chopsticks, skewers, my old soy sauce bottles, a cup to measure rice, and a small one to measure liquids, my silicone cups and my cookie cutter box. Since I'm putting this inside a drawer with the bento boxes, I don't need to close the lid, so here's a bit more vertical space.

From right to left: star-shaped egg-mold, sushi rice mold, 2 small plastic forks, foodpicks, 3 different soy sauce bottles and a salad dressing bottle. This last one is useful because of the large opening because it allows me to put oregano inside for example, along with olive oil and vinegar etc.

I almost forgot to show the inside of the cookie cutter box and my heart shaped silicone cups. I'm glad I got 2 different sizes of star cutters, it made me curious what can I do with it.

Last but not least, the bento box!

The top tier is a bit strange, it squeezes the bottom tier, I'm still figuring out how much I can pack below so that it doesn't get too squeezed. I still have to check the capacity, will edit when it's empty :)

EDIT: The capacity of this box is 250ml on the top tier and around 150ml on the bottom tier. Because the bottom tier is tricky I only measured up to half and even just half, the top tier was already pushing the water. So i'd say between 100ml and 150ml is the limit to fill it.

Bento Cookbooks

2010-07-18T20:07:00.001+01:00

I have been acquiring some literature to better understand how to improve my bentos. Of course I can look for so many things on the Internet, but there's that something about it being a book and not a screen. I know of no one in my country that makes bentos.

Kawaii Bento Boxes and Bento Love are written in English and were ordered. Mes petits bento was a gift with some more bento things :) I am currently waiting for Makki's book from Just Bento to come out so I can order it together with some other. I'll post more books when they get here!

Bento for a long trip

2010-07-17T17:17:00.008+01:00

I've been sooooo busy running around town and other towns over bureaucracy I haven't posted much, but it'll soon be over!

Last week I packed these bentos around 2 am to get up at 6. Due to some paperwork, I had to travel to Porto, one of the major towns in Portugal. It was a 7 hour trip. Just for paperwork you might ask?

Nope! The only store that sell bento related items is located there, by coincidence :) ~~not like I planned it on purpose~~.

My lunch consisted of peach, kiwi, hard boiled eggs, broccoli, carrot and rice with flavours and nori.

His lunch: same thing except instead of eggs he got some teriyaki salmon with a pinch of miso.

For the onigiris I bought 3 different flavour packs:

- wakame and salmon;

- arame and shiitake;

- nori, bonito and ume.

I enjoyed them while the onigiris were warm, but while cold, I couldn't eat it.

I was very excited to go to the store because they sell tamagoyaki frying pans and powdered green tea, had actually saved up some money for wasting at the store but they had ran out of both things and the variety was a bit limited. The owner had one of those furry rabbits walking around the store, it was so adorable!

I ended up buying...

Strawberry flavoured pocky~ There was one "for men" with dark chocolate but the price wasn't worth it.

I loved the inside package :D it has a dog, a cat and a hamster.

and here's the back side:

I guess there's no other way than to order on the web.

Salmon filled Onigiri

2010-07-05T22:27:00.001+01:00

Now that I have a rice cooker, making onigiri has been so much easier! I used to make it in a normal pan but since it took so much time and timing it, waiting,washing, I used 1Kg of rice and froze in batches.It was okay but sometimes the rice would over-cook and there'd be a LOT of overcooked rice to eat because I couldn't just throw it away.

So we finally got a little extra money and bought the rice cooker.

It comes with another section to cook veggies so that helped a lot as well and it's super easy to wash. Thus meaning I don't feel so lazy to wake up in the morning and make/arrange lunch, it actually motivates me because I can concentrate on the rest while the rice and vegetables cook and it's 2 pans less to monitor.

I usually make onigiri in the morning but it was our dinner too so I had a little more time to grab my camera:

I am so happy for being able to photograph white food! It was impossible with my old camera...

I'm still getting the hang of the size of the onigiri... Sometimes they come out too small, others too big. What would be your advice for finding a good size for them? I' ve seen a japanese friend make them very big and smaller so I'm not sure what the "regular" size is.

This time I filled them with this:

Salmon, green onions, some salt, mirin and soy sauce. I've also tried i with canned tuna and it works great. Maybe next time I'll try putting some meat inside. For now *nom nom nom* these are just wonderful :D

The Mother of Zucchini

2010-07-02T17:04:00.001+01:00

OR the father? My grandparents have a fair-sized piece of land where this year they decided to plant a larger variety of vegetables, including zucchini. The green beans were also big but when I got home and found 2 of these in the kitchen counter, I thought they were pumpkins!

I have had a bad experience with big zucchini before, and they WERE actually pumpkins, I couldn't pierce through the skin. So I was a little drawn back by the size. The result? The skin is so thin I almost couldn't believe it, and they're not sour like most supermarket ones.

One of them went to some rice and a soup. I'm still thinking what I'll do with this one considering it's size (it weighs 2,1 Kg) ... Maybe I'll stuff it? or just slice it into some dish?

For a better notion of the size: I placed a normal sized pencil next to it.

Now I'm waiting for the tomato season which should be in a few weeks to see how big they'll turn! If I get a chance to go to their farm soon, I'll show you what other things they have planted there.

Exam time is almost over!

2010-06-27T16:38:00.001+01:00

In two weeks I will be able to restart posting properly, for my examination time will be over :) I will be ordering some bento cookbooks soon but I'll talk about the ones I have when the exams are done and also my new acquisition:

And it's not a new pet :D it's decent camera at last! I still haven't tried it on food because I'm slowly learning how to work with it and make the most out of the manual options :D if you have any suggestions/advice for that leave a comment.

Back in a few days!

Taking a break...

2010-05-13T11:41:00.001+01:00

Exam time is close and I won't have much time to pack bentos, I've been packing them but they're quite clumsy and more to eat than to look so I haven't posted any. If I do anything interesting I'll certainly post but for now, exams are my priority.

Thanks for reading!

Unfinished bento

2010-04-20T14:39:00.001+01:00

I wanted to make more of this but I was too sleepy.

I have discovered the wonders of boiled eggs again. :D I have never really liked boiled eggs, scrambled with anything are my favourite but they always leave me hungry for more. It doesn't happen with boiled eggs. Last week, I did the same thing and I felt "fuller" with 3 eggs than I would with a handful of rice. It makes me rather happy because I have a BIG appetite which doesn't go along with my not so big body. I can eat as much as my bf does if I want to, but I don't have his metabolism, so instead of using it, my body stores anything it can get, thus making me grow round (someday).

If you pay closer attention to the eggs, I wanted to make the right one a Daruma doll and the middle one a bunny using the broken one's pieces, but I was simply exhausted. I still managed to put the nori on the onigiris but that was it for decoration.

On the top tier there's a slice of pudding some cut carrots and the tasty brussels. I still haven't gotten the hang of planning the vegetables I'm sure I'll get there one day.

There's something that's been bothering me a bit: I'm posting weekly... and I really didn't want to do that! It's just the time is a little off I need some thinking and focusing on myself. Once I'm done with it, I'll start posting more often and more wonderful food so keep watching from time to time. At least I'll post weekly (I won't allow any more laziness than that :) )

Egg pudding

2010-04-19T14:18:00.002+01:00

This was my weekend experiment!

I know, it doesn't look like an egg pudding at all.. that's because I used brown sugar instead of refined sugar. I have tried in so many ways to replace sugar with fructose or another kind of sugar that is not so harmful, but the cakes and puddings fall a lot as you can see. The recipe I used contained sugar,eggs,milk and lemon zest, nothing else, the only change I did was on the sugar.

A little note to anyone who uses brown sugar, it is sweeter than normal one! Lucky me, the pudding mold I have is small so the top less sweet part of the pudding mix went first and I used a pan for the rest.

This is how it looked in the middle of cooking. It's a very handy mold that came with the pan so I can just pull it out and it fits perfectly. As for the pan cooking.... It didn't go so well

I managed to make the upper pot not touch the lower one and stay in place like this, but the heat didn't go through and it still looked the same after two hours. I gave up and as soon as it cooled off we ate it, and at the first bite... ugh too sweet for me! I was so sad because I love egg pudding but it was horribly sweet and just thinking I had another one in the fridge waiting to be eaten :( My bf loved it which made me a bit relieved because at least I wasn't going to waste too much food. The next day, we tried the pudding that actually cooked and it wasn't that unpleasant, I guess the sugar stayed on the bottom of the mix and all of it went to the pot mold.

It shrank but it was tasty and consistent with no bubbles inside :) Next time I'll simply adjust the sugar to 1/3 of what I used.

Bon apetit!

Springy bentos

2010-04-12T09:58:00.002+01:00

Oh lovely spring! And sweet tasty strawberries! These were my first strawberries of this year, I was dieing to get some strawberries :D

This bento was unexpectedly fun to make. I boiled a few eggs because usually either I break one, ruin them pealing or they weren't so okay. My grandparents brought SO MANY eggs I don't know what to do with them! Maybe cake or pudding?

Anyway, when I peeled them one of them got ruined so I used the egg yolk only. It suddenly occurred me, why not make chicken ou of the eggs? I've seen it made, I can always try and hope it'll go okay. Usually when I learn something I like to watch people make it and then I can recreate it much better than from reading a recipe alone. And it turned out the way it did.

Some couscous with nori on top, decorated eggs with carrot and nori and a little green to add colour. And of course, the strawberries!! I did get hungry in the afternoon but it's okay :P

I also packed one for my dear with roughly the same things:

Omelet, strawberries, carrot, couscous and meatloaf (or i think it's called that)

I thought the chicken wouldn't be such a good approach to his lunch. It's quite nice to make 2 bentos because I can make one a bit more childish and the other one a little elegant.

Also, this last weekend I made gyoza but forgot to take pictures at he final product. When I use them I'll make sure to show you ^_^

The Inarizushi experience

2010-04-07T11:17:00.001+01:00

The title says it all:

I found them by accident in the Asian store I buy most of the things, and just because I always fear for not having enough I bought 2 packs.

It seemed like something fun to do and not too messy to eat because I was gonna eat in public the next day, (this was done on the 30th March but I'm only posting now because I was unsure to do so) therefor no messy food that could dirty my clothes was allowed.

I opened the package and the ones inside and tasted a bit of the liquid that protected the inaris. I took one out carefully because from what I read they're very delicate.

Gently opened it and started filling with rice and then half with tuna and onion filling, half with fake crabmeat. After I filled them all, and packed them, I remembered to give a bite on one of them...

The result was... very unexpected. The sweet taste of it just made my stomach twitch and turn. I'm not sure if I did something wrong by not washing it from the pre-packed fluid or something but it tasted horribly. Luckily the bf managed to eat around 8 of them before he had enough.

I really dislike wasting food and trashing it but this was a bit too much for what I can stand. After that I have been refusing to cook (actually getting excuses) because a few days later I had terrible stomach pain followed by nausea and remembering the inaruzushi or any kind of food on that day was plain torture.

I did make Teriyaki chicken on Monday but the camera didn't have any battery and I was too lazy to bother with the pictures. It was quite delicious.^^

Birthday food (and more)

2010-04-01T12:19:00.001+01:00

Yesterday was my birthday and as always, I had to take a few pictures at the cute foods I found near the cake before dinner :D

Aren't they just CUTE?! They're sweets with some sweet liquid filling on the inside. I tried getting all the different types in the bag but I might've missed one or two.

I spent all morning in a voice casting so I didn't plan the rest of the day. Thanks to my mum, I was able to have cake and dinner :D

Woops, there's a piece missing already. All the full cake pictures had me staring at the cake like I'd eat it with my eyes so I put this one :)

When we're done eating cake, I completely forgot what I wanted to do this year with my birthday cake, but.. I did it anyway!

For those who have seen house M.D.'s latest season you probably know what I'm talking about: I dug my face onto the cake just like in the series. The cake choice for this was bad tho. All the chocolate sprinkles stuck to my face and I didn't hurt the cake too much. I got cake on my hair too!

It didn't get too damaged and I dont mind eating the part where I put my face in :D

I'll be taking a trip this long weekend, I'll be sure to post something here later :)

OH, and you know... just to make it clear... the cake is a lie (from Portal, I loved the credits song)

Napolitan spaghetti

2010-03-30T13:38:00.002+01:00

It's been a chaotic week! I'm enjoying this more and more every time I make bentos :)

On the top-tier there's, kiwi, tamagoyaki (a little burnt because I used the round frying pan and mirin makes it turn brown a lot faster) some cucumber slices,cheese and ham rolls and spinach with cheese.

On the bottom tier there's the spaghetti, which I made following a recipe from a bento cookbook. It has grated carrot, onion, bacon tomato sauce and red and green bell peppers. The bf said it was like what his mum does at home :D

Since I'm not fond of bacon, I threw it to his bento and kept mine with 2 pieces of it somewhere:

My bento has exactly the same thing but instead of the spinach cheese and the cucumber, I put brussels sprouts (because I love them and he hates them).

I enjoyed making this very much, and feel like I'm starting to get the hang of it my way. I am thinking I should buy some more bento related books or japanese home foods, Do you have any suggestions?

The colour distribution wasn't all that balanced but I ran out of red things to put on the top tiers so, there's green and more green!

Cupcakes #2

2010-03-22T21:39:00.001Z

Here's my little Thank-you experiment of the weekend!

I don't know where to start writing this... After I got my bento boxes, I realized the trouble a couple friend went to get them and I can only imagine the hours wasted traveling from one place to another, so I thought of making something to show my gratitude because some may thing "but it's just 2 boxes!" Well, I've been wanting to get those for 2 years almost 3 now and had no luck.

I picked these cupcake liners because they were subtle and yet colourful, something I would like to receive if it was for me.

Then I started mixing the ingredients first for the chocolate cupcakes, which were the only ones I took a good picture before baking.

The recipe said to fill these up to 2/3 of the way and 2/3 I did. The orange cupcakes said to fill the liners 1/2 of the way and well... compare the results with these baked goodies:

The chocolate ones didn't change much in size but the orange ones are spilling on the outside of the liner! They were very different in consistency too. The chocolate cupcakes were a bit more gummy and the orange ones light and puffy.

The hard part started with the frosting: First of all I forgot to take pictures because i was too busy whisking because I had to do it by hand, or by arm :D I don't have a machine to beat the frosting so I thought it'd be easy to do it by hand... I don't know what I had in mind... I started mixing the chocolate frosting and after I couldn't feel my arm, I called the bf to come mix it for a while. As soon as he did, the mixture started blending and 3 minutes after it was good to frost the cupcakes! I was so happy I did the vanilla buttercream frosting in a few more minutes (still with the bf help for the last minutes) and stuck them in the fridge.

I let the cupcakes cool overnight and woke up very early to frost them. I had never frosted a cake nor used a piping bag EVER in my life. Just tried following what I saw on videos, guides, etc, and experimented with a few tips for the piping bag. After the 3rd try I found the one I wanted and then it was pretty simple. After doing the vanilla frosting, I gained trust to make the chocolate and you can see the difference on trying new stuff. I topped them and carefully packed them for a long trip to school to my couple-friend's hands.

I hope they liked the flavour of the cakes and the frosting. I didn't try any with frosting but the bf offered to serve as test subject to try them out. He said the vanilla one was too sweet but the other one was okay.

I'll wait for their review of the cupcakes :)

Roasted Salmon bentos

2010-03-16T20:22:00.001Z

I said I would try not to post both lunches but I was inspired so I made them differently.

Top tier:

in the silicone cup there's spinach with fake crabmeat. Next to it there's some carrot bits, a shiitake mushroom and a cucumber and tomato salad.

Bottom tier:

Roasted salmon mixed with rice and pieces of nori. Decorated with nori and cheese hearts and on the corner chopped coriander.

There's the same thing on the top-tier as the first one but I didn't mix the rice with the salmon here. I separated the rice and topped it with furikake. With the salmon, I put along a slice of roasted onion and some coriander. The lettuce was just for a little colour.

I've been feeling extremely tired lately, so it's very unlikely I'll do anything else this week.

I'm going to bake something for a friend and his wife in thanks for bringing me the bento boxes, I'll try to post it when it's done.

First use of my bentos

2010-03-15T02:20:00.001Z

Made from dinner's leftovers:

It's not the healthiest but we had people over for dinner and I didn't have a vote on the matter (the deep fried thingies). This is my box and on the picture it does look huge to me, not in real life. Most people whom I've shown the boxes to say "it's so small!" and "you'll be hungry!" and many other related things to small and not enough food. Bento boxes are not known in my country (at least not by 98% of the population) and portuguese, the most traditional, don't rely on food measurements but on making sure no one at their table will get hungry. This is a reason why when I'm with my grandparents (and having been taught to always clean the plate) I put on weight. It's not that the food is unhealthy; they just put too much food on the plate and then we "can't leave anything to waste"

My love's lunch box. He didn't want eggplant so he got some empty space on the bottom tier. We'll see if he gets hungry eating this, I doubt I'll be hungry with mine.

From now on I will post only 1 of the 2 bento boxes depending on how good they look, (if they both look good, I'll put them both :D) some things fit better on the rectangular, others on the oval bento box, simply the rectangular one belongs to my love, the oval one to me.

I'll leave you with a scenery of Portugal - Setúbal, Arrábida.

Emptying the refrigerator (and some rambling)

2010-03-09T16:08:00.001Z

It's been a long time! O_O

I haven't posted much lately because our freezer looks like the north pole and for that I've been using up stuff to be able to clean it. Not much shopping and not pretty pictures of what we eat, just plain boring but tasty meals. Its a shame you can't photograph tastyness!

Also, major house cleaning project has been initiated so if I didn't have anything interesting to show in the beggining, I don't feel like cooking until everything is clean. It's the longest setback I have had since I started blogging but it will probably be worth it.

On my next To-do-foods I want to try some inarizushi and the tamagoyaki again with or without square pan. I did find a way to maybe get the pan: one of my classmates lives in that town and she does over there for the weekend. It's a shame I can't go see it with my own eyes but just the trip would be more than I can afford right now (around 45€ which could be spent getting uhm, bento gear! or anything else at all)

School isn't going all that great either... I am running out of options to make a good exam at the end of the year simply because I'm tired of begging people to play with me... I want to get at least a decent mark which for me is quite high and I'm stressing because we're 3 months from the exam and I still haven't done half of what I need and the worse part: It doesn't depend on me...

Enough rambling about bad things!

I have plans for when the freezer is clean and all set, and I'll have plenty to blog about at that time. Until then please bear with the lack of posts, they will come sometime later.

Oh, I almost forgot. If you're looking for bento giveaways check Adventures in Bento making and Bento zen !

My bento boxes are here!

2010-03-02T17:15:00.002Z

I was so happy to receive this! :D This is a first view of my box:

It's a 2 layered bento box with the capacity of 610 ml (top tier 380, bottom tier230) microwaveable and adorable to my eyes. I couldn't have been happier with it. Here's a better image of the tiers:

I didn't just get one for me tho. Here's the one for my bf:

It doesn't have bunnies but it comes with a casing with a pair of chopsticks inside. Also microwaveable and with 2 tiers, it's a bit bigger than mine of course, total value being 830ml ( top tier 390ml, bottom tier 440ml). He liked it a lot, now I just have to put them to use!

* on a sidenote I was happy to be able to read and identify from the boxes the "top" and "bottom"so I could specify the capacity of each one, I know it's just 2 kanji, but it still made me happy.

One downside of this was, I realized how much I need a tamagoyaki frying pan and I'm still not sure where to get it, so I don't think I'll be using the bento boxes much for now. I know I could put other things in there, but I'd like to try the more traditional ones and then, drift to my own imagination. Expect to see the old tupperwares sometimes when there's food that can stain the bento boxes or food that is a mix of one thing like the stir-fry I made yesterday.

*goes off to her new adventure in search for the tamagoyaki frying pan*

Stir-fried noodles

2010-03-01T16:18:00.002Z

I was hoping to post something on the weekend but house cleaning took over and I have been desperately waiting for my bento boxes:

Emptying the refrigerator/freezer for a clean up has started! I try to use all that's in there or at least 80% of it. For this I used the rest of frozen veggie mix, fake crabmeat, noodles, carrot, tomato an the last slices of chorizo.

I didn't expect it would make that much but I was sure he wouldn't feel hungry after this. Unfortunately he hasn't been too well with his stomach so he couldn't eat it :(

I don't really have much to say, except "I want my bento boxes!!"

Until then! :)

Meatballs & mashed potatoes

2010-02-24T22:09:00.002Z

One of my experiments that went great!

I always do meatballs with tomato sauce but I wasn't much into tomato sauce today. We've eaten Ikea's meatballs with mashed potatoes and they're tasty and no tomato sauce, that's where I got the inspiration for this try out.

You can't see from the picture because of the sauce but I made a little "fence" for the meatballs putting them in the center with mashed potatoes around it and sauce on top. on the left there's oven baked sweet potato, carrots and broccoli. Mine had spinach purée instead of the carrot.

The taste turned out great, tho next time I'm going to stir-fry the meatballs alone first so they get a little golden brownish colour.

We dined out today so I don't know if I'll make something for tomorrow. *craves for her japan stuff*

Salmon Teriyaki #2

2010-02-23T17:50:00.001Z

I just finished the big stock of teriyaki sauce I had in the fridge:

We bought a more expensive salmon and I was worried it might be just that, but it was of great quality and tasted wonderfully. I had to bathe my cat so I didn't do anything fancy but the salmon teriyaki was simply delicious!

Not being able to heat my food is a bit of an issue to me, specially with fish because I hate cold fish. Even so, I took lunch for me too and by the 3rd bite I got used to the room temperature fish.

After I took the picture, I put some teriyaki sauce over the rice, the bf loves and I don't argue with that.

Lately we have been playing an MMORPG which makes us sit at the computer until bedtime :D

On another issue, I am almost positive I'm cursed (or doomed)! The friend who brought me stuff from Japan met with me on Monday, but things were still packed so, he said he'd go home and be back later with them. By then I couldn't care less what he gives me; been waiting on this for 2 years now and seems I did not get any luck. I ended up not meeting him thus not getting my stuff and not being able to take pictures and blog about them. I will do it when they're in my hands!

Two meals

2010-02-20T14:26:00.002Z

It's been a long week and too many things to do/places to go. I did some cooking but nothing too complicated:

Thursday's lunch

I had to use up the eggplants on my fridge but I didn't expect to suddenly have my bf say he wanted the ones I made for myself. I added the furikake because it had no colour but still... It has been awfully cold here (for me of course, it's about 2ºC and I think I'm going to die already) and the problem of having a big kitchen is the cold. No matter what I put there, it'll get me freezing and running back to the very warm bedroom. So I avoid cooking too much at this time.

The lunch consists on eggplant with turkey sauté'd, plain rice topped with furikake and the eggplant I showed the recipe on a previous post. This time I put the chili peppers and it was wonderful. I never liked eggplant because my mum didn't know that the sour flavour could be removed and it was always so yucky... Now I love it and I can cook with it with pleasure.

Friday's lunch

Friday was also a rush thing... I only remembered to make next day's lunch at midnight and by then I was in bed, ready to sleep. This was one of the few I made in the morning; I find it too hard for me to wake up and start going at it in the kitchen. Took me around 5 to 7 minutes to scramble the eggs, warm up the rice, slice the tomato and fry the korokke. After cooling/packing, I went right back to bed with my cats.

This week I didn't put much veggies because the supermarket's veggies were in very bad shape. It annoys me a lot to have to go through 30 zucchini to find that 29 are rotten or almost there and 1 is old but still not rotting. I have tried finding other places to get my veggies but they don't really change much. It depends on the week I guess.

If I'm lucky, I'll get a few things from Japan on Monday so I'll save the rest for when I can talk about those ^^

Have a wonderful weekend!

Yakitori

2010-02-11T13:12:00.001Z

First skewered try:

: I really like the blue tupperware but I'm not sure why.

It was a shame I didn't have fresh leek to add here. Even being breast chicken meat, it didn't get dry or chewy because I cooked them very slowly. This is a great thing for parties because it looks and tastes good and it's easy to grab. The rest was just some quick assembling and it's done! There's couscous, carrot, broccoli, cherry tomatoes and cucumber. It had to be fast and simple because I've been avoiding the kitchen a bit: I have washed the dishes for 3 weeks straight now *cries* and I really hate it. Hopefully I won't have to wash them today (since I begged my bf to wash them for me)

I've been wanting spring to come for a while now, I miss the colorful fruits and bigger variety of vegetables. I'll be taking a trip on the weekend and borrowing the car again! (no more 2km of walking with shopping bags YAY!) Hopefully I'll be able to take some "springy" photos of the scenery and maybe some typical food.

Omurice

2010-02-10T12:32:00.001Z

I've done this before but not for lunch ^^

I messed up the ketchup but didn't have time to re-make it :P

For veggies, there's cucumber, carrot, broccoli and cherry tomatoes. For the omurice I followed another Cooking with dog recipe which works quite nicely. I messed up at first, forgot to mix the rice >.< with the rest.

There's something I want to try for a bento but I'm not sure how to get blue colouring, not using artificial food colouring. Do you have any advice about how, and what to colour to get a nice blue colour?

Thanks for reading :D

Ponyo

2010-02-08T10:32:00.002Z

We saw "Gake no Ue no Ponyo" this weekend and I really wanted to do something related to the movie. This is what it turned out to be:

Red bell pepper for the body with a hard-boiled egg, turkey ham for the face, carrot for the hair and tongue, nori for the mouth, nose and eye. Underneath it there's shrimp rice. I found it funny to stuff the cherry tomato with broccoli inside :D

At first I wanted to do the girl version but I wasn't sure how to but after scrolling through the movie a few times, I came across one of the parts where I wanted to squeeze the screen.

I was planning to make something for Valentine's day and join the valentine's with red colours to try and enter this month's B.O.M.B Challenge, but something came up and I won't be able to do anything for Valentine's, so I made this. Hopefully you'll be able to recognize it as Ponyo xD.

This was my second attempt on making a character and I will remind myself to either get a surgeon's knife next time, or never cut things out of bell peppers again. It took me about 40 minutes because I messed up the bellpepper and cut it in the wrong direction (the hand should be on the upper part and the eye on the lower part, not the other way around. Then the ham on her face ripped about 2 times so I put 2 slices instead of one and I could go on complaining more but it's pointless. Before posting this I asked 2 friends of mine to tell me what it was, and they guessed it right, so it can't be THAT bad.

I've got the rest of the week planned already so I'll be sure to post some more foodies ^^ Have a nice week!

Torihamu & Eggplant

2010-02-04T11:15:00.001Z

There are two items I have done for the first time here:

I had two eggplants sitting in the fridge for about 3 days and I wouldn't be able to use them this week so, I used a recipe from Just Hungry which turned out delicious (even though I messed up by forgetting the chillis). My bf didn't like ti so much, so I only put a little bit on his luch (just to tease him :D) it's the little dark thing on the lower right.

The other first try is the Torihamu I made a few days ago. I will try this recipe again sometime soon because I let it dry too much/cook too much and since my oven doesn't measure ºC, only "max" and "min" I will re-adjust the temperature with special attention.

The rest: some plain rice with furikake on top, snowpeas (I always mess these names up), carrot and oregano for aroma. I added the carrot because it lacked colour and I have still to find decent tomatoes at the supermarket :(

Here you can see the difference without the carrot:

I also put some brussels sprouts on mine because I LOVE them and the bf hates them but I refuse to not eat them. Also you can have a better look at the eggplant.

Rolled pork with apple

2010-02-03T10:02:00.001Z

Something I've been wanting to try for a while now:

I put some steaks to defrost the night before and was convinced they were turkey, so when I read that sweet goes well with pork, I was a bit sad I didn't have pork to use the mountain of apples on my fruit basket. when I went to make them, i was surprised we still had pork at home, because none of us is a fan of pork meat. Good thing was, I could use my knowledge and stuff them with apples. I pan fried them and then, after roasting the potatoes I let them in the oven for a bit.

I just love small potatoes, and can't stop eating them! but they don't give that great of a picture like this, it's better on a plate :S

I was too hungry to cook any veggies so I took cucumber and carrots out of the fridge (see how potatoes blind me? :D) and sliced them.

That's all for today, more tomorrow!

Korokke lunch

2010-02-02T22:18:00.001Z

Continuing with the spree! It's lasting more than usual:

There's 2 korokke with raw finely cut cabbage, carrot "fingers" 1, 1/2 tangerine and some white rice. The bf said it was wonderful, he didn't even complain about the raw cabbage.

It all went fine until the evening, when I was supposed to cook the Torihamu from Maki's recipe on Just Bento after marinating it. I got distracted with studying for my exam... resulting in slightly burnt torihamu. It's still good tho, but I'll give it another try sometime later:

And there's a little something from yesterday night. It's been rather cold here so I tend to sleep with 3 cats on top/ below me. I was reading before bed time and one of them cuddled with me under the bed covers:

Cooking Spree

2010-01-31T20:59:00.002Z

It's been a while since I had that feeling of wanting to cook something new!

Korokke! I used a youtube's recipe ( i love cookingwithdog) and made some soboro for emergencies (Recipe from AnnaTheRed)

This should be enough for 3/4 good lunches. Everything worked perfectly in the kitchen! The soboro's sauce evaporated nicely, the korokke got golden brown and i managed to make about 18 of them, for rushed evenings/mornings. Here they are just before being frozen:

I had never tried panko before and I must say it was wonderfully crunchy! Something you can't get with normal breadcrumbs, or at least me. I'm not a fan of deep fried things, specially the smell of hot oil and mushy, greasy food, but most of the oil was gone from these and none of it got inside. I was so pleased with this, specially because it fills me up quite fast, and I've got a bit stomach.

We went for a walk on a different place, the tide was very high, cold but sunny. I miss seeing the sea everyday like in Madeira, this was the best I could get (it's Tejo river).

For dinner, we ate out and I took a picture because most people out of portugal have no idea you can cook this "thing" like this:

Can you guess what it is?

Fried eel! How does that sound to you? These weren't the best ones I've eaten but when well fried they're really good. Not so good for health but I eat them once a year, if lucky. Usually is eaten with tomato rice and saute'd bell pepper salad.

Do you know some unique foods from your country?

Pan-fried Shrimp, Garlic & Lemon

2010-01-21T12:13:00.001Z

I'll be talking about a giveaway at the end of the post, stay tuned!

I forgot to take a picture at the bento box (tupperware actually) but I took one at my plate:

It took a bit to make this because I had to peel the shrimp and save the shells for stock. Underneath there's plain rice and the vegetables came from the freezer and sauté'd.

: Shrimp with skin on, defrosted.

: I decided to leave the end of the shell for better presentation.

For the shrimp, what I did was:

- Heat a pan with a little olive oil and put a small dried red pepper along with whole (slightly mashed) garlic. Let the flavour come out a bit and then start putting the shrimp (which had salt and some lemon juice) gently and flip it over until it's nearly cooked. Don't overcook shrimp or it'll feel like chewing gum.

: Here's the shrimp just cooked.

As you can see, I didn't peel off the garlic because I like the flavour that it adds to the rest and prevents the garlic from burning too quickly. It's a shame whole shrimp can be so expensive. We can't really afford buy this, and this one we got was from relatives that were really nice in sharing some :D

Yesterday I was running through my RSS feeds and one of them had a "Win a Tamagoyaki pan"! I immediately read the whole post and wanted to enter the contest. I have been looking for a tamagoyaki pan for a while now and there are none available in my country :(

So, if you want to join the competition and give it a try, here's a direct link to the post. Thank you Sarah for hosting this event!

Inspired meals

2010-01-18T10:53:00.001Z

I had a wonderful weekend on an ongoing project of mine, I guess it reflected on the kitchen. I even made my lunch!

: My bf's lunch.

There was some chicken leftovers (I was so happy when I saw I didn't have to cook meat!) which I de-boned and but into bite-sized pieces and put then on a lettuce bed. Next to it there's some broccoli, sliced tomatoes, cucumber and couscous. The problem about having couscous at home is that since it's so fast to make, we make it until there's no more. I just put some couscous on a pot and cover it with boiling water (about 1 finger above the couscous) put the lid on and go finish other things. When I'm done with all of the preparations, I uncover the couscous and it's done!

Surprisingly I wanted to make my own lunch too but didn't want to eat any meat so I experimented a little:

: My lunch.

From left to right there's cucumber, hijiki with lettuce underneath, some cheese rolled, olives, sliced tomatoes and broccoli. In the silicone cup underneath the tangerine was a little treat for after my exam :D some pumpkin home-made sort of jam. I don't know the name of the pumpkin in English but in Portugal we call it Gila. It's very stringy and I love the sweetness of the pumpkin itself. It's one of my favourite things to eat since I was a little kid.

While I was eating it I realized these tupperwares are perfect for salads, I've tried eating other things here but I get too full and end up eating more than needed.

I haven't posted so much recently because well, I'm kind of waiting for my things to arrive (which should arrive next month by the 22nd) so I can start improving. I am also waiting for another bento book and when I have it I will post about the books I got on X-mas all at once. Until then, I hope I keep my inspiration up and will to cook wonderful meals!

Some news

2010-01-16T22:10:00.001Z

I am finally back in shape from a nasty flu! It's been a hard week with so much to wipe from my nose and trying to sleep that I didn't make anything worth taking a picture. I did however take a picture of what my bf did for me on one of the days:

Don't you miss anything here? No matter how hard I try, if he cooks, he will never put vegetables in it!

Yesterday I made some lunch for me for today because I had classes all day. I guess the kitchen was angry at me for not using it for nearly a week and so, it punished me: First the eggplant i was saving to try out a new recipe was rotten from the inside -_- this is the 2nd time this happens; I buy rotten-on-the-inside eggplants...

Lucky for me I had some zucchini so I changed he eggplant with it. Then I forgot to defrost the meat and ended up burning it a bit when I stir-fried it. If that wasn't enough, when I cut it to bite-sized pieces one of the pieces fell to the back of the oven, then the rice would refuse to cook, I cooked a sweet potato (never cook them, they taste awful when cooked), I cut myself and to end the night beautifully me and my bf started a long fight (until 3am).

The food however tasted so good today, it felt so warming to eat my own food at a public garden even though it was cloudy. I should cook more for myself!

And finally the last news: I decided to upload a song I sang on youtube - Hallelujah the Jeff Buckley version. If you're curious, give it a little try on your ears it won't hurt (much) :D

Farfalle with bell pepper sauce

2010-01-07T00:01:00.002Z

Today I looked at BookDepository to find that they're giving away free ebooks! I looked through some, searched on something I'm planning on doing (and I'll be sure to post!) and got to some Italian recipes of pasta. All of it combined, got me to make a little experience, and a well succeeded one:

I'm almost finishing the chickpea burgers staple and those fish fingers have been on the freezer for more time than I wanted them to, so this time I tried a different approach: instead of pan-frying and deep frying the fish and the burger, I baked them. The burgers were brushed in a little olive oil because they had no fat in it but the fish fingers didn't so I added nothing. Baking is a bit more useful to make 4 meals at a time than frying because you do it all at once plus you have the fat amount reduced which is a plus.

With the farfalle, I cooked it but there was colour missing (there still is, it's all golden brown green-ish but) so, inspired by the Italian food videos/articles, and the lonely bell pepper in the fridge, I made a little invention which turned out nice. Here's the recipe of it:

- 1 green bell pepper chopped in small pieces;

- 3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped;

- Olive oil;

- 1/2 teaspoon of fine chopped basil ( I didn't have fresh basil but I bet it would taste a lot better);

- salt, pepper and a little sugar to taste;

- 4 tbspoons tomato sauce (or if you can, replace it for a fresh medium-sized tomato);

Heat the olive oil and when it's hot enough, put the garlic and be careful so it doesn't burn! Don't mince it or it'll burn really fast. When the garlic is golden brown, put the bell pepper and wait for it to cook, remembering to steer it. When it looks cooked, add basil and the tomato sauce and stir frequently until some of the liquid evaporates. Taste it and season to your liking. I had to put a bit of sugar because the tomato sauce was too acid, I use this trick on tomato soup as well to reduce the acidity. After seasoning it, turn off the heat and pour it over the pasta and mix it until all of the pasta has a little of the sauce. Serve warm and it'll taste heavenly ^^

Oh, and please ignore the background, this is something I have to improve because when I take pictures of the food, I usually forget where it is and there were some dishes/silverware drying where I took the pic.

Pan-fried tofu & couscous "gratin"

2010-01-05T21:58:00.003Z

It's been raining for about 2 weeks (or maybe 3 I'm not even sure anymore) without a sunny day, and yesterday afternoon I found myself in an enjoyable experience: under the rain. I always try to leave school at the time my bf leaves work so we can go back home together. Here's his lunch for today!

There is a pile with couscous underneath, fresh tomato slices, cheese and oregano. On the lower part I put some snow-peas and some stir-fried tofu "steaks" (slices).

The tofu is an old recipe from my mum (or at least one of my favourite ones she made a long time ago).

She always uses extra-firm tofu (something like cheese tofu) boils it until nearly cooked. Then grabs a frying pan, slice sthe tofu, some chopped garlic, a bit of olive oil and some soy sauce. She Pan-fries it until golden brown on each side (or at least make sure it's stiff on each side because you might not be able to see the golden with the soy sauce). When it's cooked, just eat it warm and it'll be delicious.

Since it's been cold, my bf's been warming up his food in the microwave from work so I made use of that aspect to plan the food.

The tomato-cheese-oregano idea came from something I made in summer called "pan pizza" which is made of bread with tomato slices, cheese, salt and oregano on top, then slightly grilled or baked in the oven until the cheese melts, making it look like some sort of pizza.

I was quite surprised when he actually said he LIKED the tofu, usually he says "mm" or "it's okay". I might be doing some more tofu recipes because it's cheaper than meat and this month's budget is super tight for me at least, having to pay school and some workshops.

I'll leave you with the little adventure "underwater" :D stay safe and warm!

Yesterday, instead of taking the bus from my school to my bf's work, I walked half the way with a classmate, went through a shopping centre, did some quick shopping and went out. It was raining quite a bit when I left the centre but I would never expect the rain to get THAT worse... in 3 minutes I was on the tips of my toes avoiding giant puddles and when I reached some stairs, they had turned into small waterfall. In 15 minutes (which was the time I took door to door because I stopped for about 5 in the rain jut looking around and listening, I love rain ^^) the main road was a river, and I am not exaggerating.

At some point I regretted waiting on the rain because it got so hard even the umbrella couldn't stop it from dripping on me.

When it stopped raining, my bf went out of work (lucky bastard, he never gets the heavy rain) and we had to cross the road to get the bus, the problem was on the "crossing" part... We tried thinking of different paths but we'd always have to cross the road with half a meter of water on each side. We reached a point where half the zebra crossing was covered in water. At that moment, the bus came and we ended up running in water, to catch it, which reached to 1/4 of my legs. With all that water, the result was 1h and a half ride home of really slow buses and flooded streets.

How to cook farinheira

2010-01-02T22:52:00.002Z

First of all I'd like to wish you all a Happy new year!! As promised, here is the farinheira with scrambled eggs:

This is one of the various versions you can cook farinheira.

We were so hungry this was the only picutre I remembered to take before eating it.
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For those who don't know what farinheira is here's a rough explanation of how it's made and what's in it:

Mix in a bowl: wheat flour, corn flower, garlic, melted lard, paprika, ground pepper, orange juice, vinegar and water until the consistency is right. Then you grab a pork's dry intestines (used for home-made farinheiras) or plastic that resembles the same texture elasticity of the pork's intestines (use in d Industrial) and fill it to 2/3 of the total size. After separating and closing them up, they are smoked for 2-3 days and end up drying in the sun. They're still not cooked at this point, just smoked, you should cook them after this or rub in olive oil and they preserve for a year. I prefer to freeze mine since I don't have a dry dark place to put them. I do not make my own because it's a very big mess and the amount of lard is not so healthy at all.

Since mine was frozen I put it in the microwave (after cutting the metal clips on each tip) for about 2 minutes until I can remove the skin.

You should carefully remove it with a sharpen knife or rip it with your fingers. Don't try to squeeze it out or you'll lose half of the content that glues to the skin. Remember, the skin is NOT edible so make sure to remove it.

When all of it is removed, mash or cut the farinheira into chunks. Don't worry if they're too big, you'll be crushing them almost until it's ready sothe bits will get smaller.Turn on the heat. You won't need oil, even with a sticking pan like mine,because of all the lard the farinheira has.

Keep it on medium-high heat until the bits are small and it looks like this. As you can see, I did not add anything else to the pan and you can see the lard. At this point, drop some eggs inside. I used the ones I had at home at the moment but you can use more or less depending on your taste.

You can beat the eggs first if you want an even colour or put them in like this for yellow/white chunks in the middle. I didn't have time to beat them beforehand so I dropped them inside. The different colour of the egg yolks is because the large yolks were from the supermarket and the smaller ones from my grandparents' chickens which are from a smaller race, therefore lay smaller eggs.

Keep the heat on medium-high and mix it well until the egg is almost cooked. You can leave it moister or dryer by adjusting the cooking time here. I like mine well cooked. And the final version is on the top (the first picture I showed) since as I said before, hunger was stronger and soon after it was all gone.

Farinheira can also be boiled or put in a stew, but I don't use it like that so, if I eat it at some relatives' house, I'll be sure to take pictures!

Enjoy your kitchen time!

And if anyone wants the recipe for how to make the farinheira by themselves, leave a comment and I'll e-mail you with the values. I do not own the recipe but I'll translate it for you if asked.

Fast and simple

2009-12-30T12:40:00.002Z

Since X-mas we've been trying to reduce protein and sugar incomes so our bodies don't suffer anymore than they already did.

This was a fast to cook and assembly meal and I just added the carrots for extra vegetable/color

There's beef with onions and tomato sauce on top of a leaf of lettuce. Then there's broccoli carrot and rice. We had the same thing for dinner along with a tomato soup bowl.

I'm looking forward for next year's experiments. I hope I finally get my bento boxes (you have no idea how many setbacks I had on getting these >.<) and might buy some bento books. Where I live there's not one single store that sells anything bento related in the whole country.

So, some of my year's resolutions will be:

- Assembling proper bentos;

- Improving my photos of food & background;

- Losing the extra weight from christmas;

- Getting my cat fully healed (she's getting better really slowly and I'm stating to worry if her belly's fungus will ever disappear);

- Get the car back!!;

- Finish my degree so I can get another one;

and some more I just don't feel like writing for now ^^ Wish you all a Happy new year and hope all your resolutions come true!

Snowman

2009-12-28T20:36:00.001Z

I still haven't given up! Turns out I looked at the ingredients and by instinct did it:

There's not much to say to it, but the fact that made me happy to create something out of nowhere. I steamed the veggies, cooked some couscous, fried a chickpea burger and put some fresh cheese on top of the couscous.

Unfortunately my bf couldn't eat it all because of X-mas excess of food. His body is refusing any more to get absorbed.

In the meantime, since the year is almost finished I thought I'd start thinking of next year's resolutions and To-do's. Do you have any you'd like to share? I'd love to see what resolutions you have for 2010. I'll post mine a little later on the week ^^

X-mas meals

2009-12-26T22:37:00.002Z

And here is most of my meals for X-mas eve and day, I thought I'd share them because even for me, it was a different kind of X-mas meal than I'm used to at my home town. In Portugal there are variations of what should go to the table according to the region: some cook turkey, some lamb, salted codfish, cow meat marinated in whine and garlic, and so on... This was my grandparents' version:

There were some home-made olives, salad, cooked shrimp, whine and the seafood soup at the center

- For x-mas eve, we had seafood soup, salted codfish cooked and then baked with mashed potatoes and a few more treats on an extra table (because the dinner table was just too small (or full?:D)

The seafood soup

I forgot to take a picture at the codfish and mashed potatoes at the beggining, but I still wanted to show you (If I could I'd get you to taste a bit, it was really good) This is what was left when I remembered:

And this was the worse part, or the best:

"The extra table"

Back row: a sweet my grandma made out of almonds and sweet potato, dark dry figs, almonds and raisins, white figs.

Bottles: 2 different home-made liquors, one out of goat milk and the other one out of figs.

Front row: 2 types of olives, bolo-rei and pumpkin puffs. I couldn't find a better translation for the puffs but in portuguese it's called "filhoses".

By X-mas morning the puffs were gone and for lunch we had roasted chicken with potatoes:

We could only eat one for lunch (5 people)

I took this one just for reminding myself how I should roast mine:

This next week I'll have soups and very little or preferably no sugar and minimum amounts of food so I can burn the weekend's.

A few words/news

2009-12-23T19:54:00.001Z

I'm sorry I haven't written any posts but this while Christmas time and my sudden too short budged until the end of the month kind of gotten my mood down. It is very complicated for me this time of year because I love my family but I also love my bf and for reason's I can't specify, I can't have them both. Also not having a car anymore... Well, let's say it's been a chain of turn-off events that have succeeded in preventing my posts. I did try something a few nights ago but it didn't taste as I expected and I only took a picture at it after it was cut:

I had leftover curry from the day before and my failed attempt to make gyoza dumplings frustrated me so much I went insane and tried making a big gyoza. (I just divided the dough and put half on top, half on the bottom, like a pie!) Turns out the dough gets really hard to chew after baked, but the curry was still nice.

I'm not sure I'll post much for a while, but I'll make sure to take pictures at Xmas' foodies, not made by me but grampa doesn't really mind I take pictures of his doing.

Also, I'm expecting a book I won (Special thanks to Pikko for hosting the event) and some goodies from Japan which should arrive around February! Let's see if I finally dive into Bentoing more seriously and make sure to include meals for me too!

Oh, and whenever I make Farinheira again, I'll make sure I make a How-to post for those who keep looking for it, or you can just leave a comment and I'll tell you everyway I know to cook it.

That should be all thanks for reading and Merry Christmas and a Happy new year!!!

Leftovers & Veggies

2009-12-09T19:36:00.001Z

I thought I'd be able to get creative after a great day in the kitchen, but I ended up just caring for the healthy rather than the cute.

This is the first time I've ever put peas on his lunch because he said he hated them 2 years ago :P I guess that's changed because he didn't complain. When I made this, I wanted to put some kiwi on a cup but since he wanted to microwave his lunch, I put it on a small tupperware aside. Maybe I'll get this solved after I get a little something I'll be sure to show here and talk about it! Until then, we'll just have to wait and stick to the tupperwares and separating microwaveable from non microwaveable.

Spinach Ricotta Cannelloni & Miso Tofu

2009-12-08T18:17:00.001Z

I finally got my hands onto Ricotta cheese!

I haven't done much cooking lately because the bf was away and then we had visits, so I finally got a chance to do something.

I finally checked on the ricotta cheese price and decided to buy some to try this recipe. I have tried it in several vegetarian restaurants and was always curious to make them.So I grabbed the cheese, some spinach, an egg, mixed and seasoned it:

The challenge on filling the cannelloni came when I tried to do it with a spoon. It wouldn't go in as I expected and had some air bubbles inside the pasta. To fight that, I grabbed a freezing bag what wasn't gonna be used ever again due to sealing problems, filled it with the spinach-ricotta mix, cut a small hole on one of the corners and squeezed this inside the cannelloni. It became a lot faster and fun! I was hoping the mix would never end and I'd keep filling the pasta :D

I would recommend using also tomato sauce on top of the cannelloni, I found it kind of boring after the 4th bite or so. It had a very soft taste and i missed some surprise in the middle.This is something you can make a lot you can freeze it in individual portions for when you want to bake it. I made 2 layers of cannelloni but they always stick and I couldn't take them out without ruining the presentation. You can just prepare it in one layer with individual portions, that way it'll look very pretty even after on the plate.

Also, this week my mum bought some hard tofu for me.I was raised eating hard tofu but recently I had 1 year of eating fresh made tofu so I was very surprised by the hardness of the tofu. I'm not really sure how they process it nor the original name of this type of tofu but the store names it "Tofu cheese".

I wanted to mix the soft taste of tofu with something strong so I'd have a mild flavour, so I went with miso. I found a recipe in here and followed it, except for the rice vinegar, I couldn't get any.

The miso marinade was too strong and I ended up having to remove some of the paste on top of the tofu when I reheat it.

It was a very pleasant day in the kitchen and I even organized a shopping list with articles I can only get at a small chinese supermarket. I hope they still have those fried tofu skins (aburaage)!

Onigiri

2009-12-01T00:00:00.001Z

As I was making dinner for myself, I entertained myself doing tomorrow's lunch, about the third one I make for myself:

half an egg, some sauté'd vegetables, fried shrimp with garlic and the last piece of japanese rice I had in the freezer. It was kind of...not cute whatsoever so I shaped the rice and cut some nori. Next time I'll remember to cut the nori but not to put it in there before morning! But now it's done, I guess I was in a rush to take the picture and forgot that part. I didn't fill up the tupperware because it's quite big (about 1000ml) which I don't fill for my bf, so I put in a little less for me than his usual.

Let's see if I keep the "cooking for myself" mood :D I'm quite enjoying it.

Little Nest

2009-11-28T19:22:00.001Z

I am pretty bored today, and my attempts in the kitchen have been a failure because I'm alone. It seems I can only cook well when I have someone else to eat what I'm making. So I decided to contradict that and tried this out:

I'm not really sure why it came into my mind but I made a list of things I had home and the idea popped into my head. Why not? So, this is my dinner with a couple more things, but I wanted to cook this in specific.

It actually turned out differently than I expected so I had to put the peas by the side instead of in the egg because I used small eggs which have almost no white part.

Burger Cooking

2009-11-24T13:37:00.002Z

Remember those burgers I made and froze? Already made use of some of them:

The left one is mine, the right one his. This was about the second or third time I cooked for myself but ended up not eating this time.

Both types of burger tasted heavenly!And looked quite good too.

Of course the meat ones got a bit too small, I hadn't tasted a juicy meat burger in a long long time, tender meat, onion flavour... I'll try making them a bit bigger next time!

I am never ever going to buy hamburgers again after making these. They consume some time but the taste and to know what's in there compensates for the time used.

Until then, I'll try not to devour these while my sweet is away :P

Garlic Chicken

2009-11-23T00:35:00.001Z

This was based on grandma's recipe:

This is a very tasty dish and quite cheap (if you can get cheap chicken) due to using very few ingredients: Garlic, olive oil, lemon and chicken.

Portuguese really like sauce on top of the rice and even tho it looks a bit less organized, it tastes really good. As I had to put some vegetables there, I decided to go with a salad since I want to use up all of the lettuce as soon as possible. It's a shame this is already gone. I managed to brown the chicken so well (I was so proud!) and not burn any garlic that I couldn't get enough of the rice and garlic.

This week my sweetheart is going back to the island for a week so, maybe you'll see a few less posts (or maybe more, who knows) of his lunch.

Hamburgers & Chickpea burgers

2009-11-22T23:32:00.001Z

Another crazy idea for the weekend experiments:

I kept on complaining about the huge hamburgers that take too long to cook on the inside and they don't fit well in the frying pan! So I decided to fix it, as always, if I can't get it the way I like, I'll make it myself.

This was quite the challenge because I had never made anything close to these and cooking a batch of things scares me a bit because if one goes wrong, all of that will. I spent some time giving it some thought and my aunt, who is a vegetarian, suggested I made chickpea burgers too because she wanted to eat some of my food without meat in it.

Again, I have to thank JustHungry for the hamburger recipe. I changed it a bit since I fear the use of flour on hamburgers. I hope they still come out okay without it.

For the chickpea burgers I replaced the meat and milk, for ground chickpeas and soy milk. All the rest is the same. Oh, take a look at my homemade breadcrumbs xD

I just finished freezing and bagging them but I haven't cooked them because we had something else for dinner. It is a very entertaining process and I ended up making a lot of hamburgers without realizing. I made 33 meat burgers and 23 chickpea burgers. I hope it saves me more time than usual to make lunches ^^

Fishfingers

2009-11-19T10:23:00.001Z

Again the kitchen panic of "Where's my..." "Why's this here?" I ended up making something simple:

Some salad, fish fingers and the japanese rice from the freezer (still kind of onigiri shaped)

When I start seeing too many dishes to wash I prefer defrosting to cooking because it'll only add more to the pile and i dislike washing dishes.

I don't have to cook tomorrow because my bf is having lunch with his colleagues so I wont be posting tomorrow.

Enjoy your cooking ^^

No veggies

2009-11-17T12:03:00.001Z

My boyfriend was saying for a while (almost everyday) "please make me a dish without veggies" and since this week's been chaotic in the kitchen I made something simple: beef with garlic spaghetti.

I have too many things that don't belong or I don't use, that were brought up home (I am thankful for having free food, but I start panicking because I don't like throwing food away) so I couldn't plan for this week and thinking up of a dish on the day is not my idea of making healthy meals, I'm sleepy tired and just want to cook something fast and simple.

I'm not sure if I'll post something else this week but I'll try!

Cabbage leftover

2009-11-16T11:57:00.001Z

Yes, we did have too much cabbage left from saturday and I didn't know what to do with it. This is what I turned out to make:

I sauté'd it in a pan with sausage added some soy sauce and voilá. I was too sleepy and my fridge was a mess! (It wasn't really, but the things were not on my usual places so I got lost. Never mess up a woman's fridge, it'll give her headaches!) I defrosted some japanese rice, cut some carrot slices on top and tried making a tomato flower, which didn't work but I still put it there.

We still have cabbage leftovers >.< We'll see what I can used them in.

Portuguese dish #2

2009-11-15T11:47:00.001Z

We went out for lunch today and I couldn't resist to take pictures.

It's called baked cod with punched potatoes. It's served with olive oil, which is fresh on this season and minced garlic on top. This is one of my favourite dishes, not because of the cod, but because of those potatoes *drools* I can still taste them in my mouth.

I had that with 2 more people and the bf had this:

This was a huuuuuuge steak as you can see, I'm not sure if you can realize the dimension of this. Some of the rice and potatoes were already on his plate when I remembered to take a picture. Of course he didn't manage to eat it all, so I was able to taste a little bit of that delicious tender meat.

Of course, again, we couldn't eat anything for dinner, so we had some soup and a little salad.

Portuguese dish

2009-11-14T22:58:00.002Z

What we had for lunch today with some visitors:

This is something my grandparents used to eat on their childhood, after going to church on Saturday morning, for lunch. They're usually served with cabbage leaves and some potatoes, carrots or just bread (due to the lack of resources back then) topped with olive oil. It's not very common to see people eating these blood and rice sausages because they're very high on calories and have a lot of fat content. I personally love them but it's something I eat once a year or less.

This is how it looks on the inside:

We also got fresh olive oil, homemade, and I love it when it still hasn't settled so I thought I' show you how it looks like.

Even with the flash, you can clearly see it's not clear and in cold weather it tends to coagulate and look really bad. If i can make it freeze I'll make sure to take a picture.

This year my family got 40kg of olives: 12kg to eat and the rest to make the olive oil. Here's a little sample of the olives already sliced, cooked in garlic, salt and bay leaf. They're stored in the cooking water with all the other ingredients in.

The sausage with potatoes and cabbage is a very heavy dish. We ate about 3/4 of one of these sausages and refused to dine anything other than a light salad and an (smaller) egg. Sometimes the egg I use is smaller than most eggs. It's not a quail egg. There's a variety of small chicken that lay eggs half the size of normal chicken eggs, but they're nearly double the size of quail eggs. I got some fresh ones yesterday so we used them as they're from family members.

I might show you some more Portuguese cuisine tomorrow so stay close ^^

Meatballs

2009-11-11T12:08:00.001Z

I was dieing to try out basmati rice so I made something with a delicious sauce to go with it:

We hadn't eaten meatballs in a long time, mostly because they're a bit more expensive and I can't do much with it except for tomato sauce with them. Maybe next month I'll try to make my own, since I will probably get a little "gift" supply of meat soon.

What I really like about the basmati rice, is it's lightness. It has no stickiness and it feels so soft and light in your mouth and stomach. Despite eating a lot, I don't feel bursting like with japanese rice. I love them both, for different purposes, but 'm not sure wich one goes best with curry.

I ran out of "to-sauté" vegetables and the bf (I still have to find him a nickname because he doesn't like reading "the bf") is getting tired of carrots and green peas. It's a little hard to find vegetables to go with the food because he doesn't like beans nor peas. I can live without beans but peas... I love their sweetness.

Is there any way I could maybe mask these vegetables on something? I already did on soup, but after eating soup for a meal, he'll complain he doesn't want soup everyday.

When I was loading the pictures to my pc, I found some that I had no idea were they were and I just have to post one of those:

That's err... me sleeping with the cat on top. There probably was one underneath my legs like usual. I sometimes get these on my camera because the bf loves to take random pictures whenever his mind says so. It was probably 5 or 6 am I'm can't be sure (I was sleeping)

I might post something on Friday, tho not really sure. Thursday is hard to make something look good on any plate.

Oven baked lunch

2009-11-10T10:05:00.002Z

Good morning everyone!

I didn't know what to call it because it doesn't really have a name:

It's true, I could've made it prettier but it tastes so good I slacked on the presentation a bit.

When I got home yesterday, it was very cold, specially in the kitchen... I just washed and cut the veggies, put them in a tray and oven baked everything with a bit of olive oil and salt. I usually add 2/3 garlic cloves to the olive oil for flavor but you have to be careful with garlic, if it burns the food will taste bitter. So here we have:

- Potatoes and carrots;

- a bit of sweet potato;

- whitefish/hake;

- Zucchinni;

It's not that fast to cook, but it's fast to assembly and gives me the time to run back to the bedroom to warm up.

Hamburger & Tonkatsu

2009-11-09T00:00:00.001Z

I couldn't help playing around with the food:

I had to use up the corn I had on the fridge (next time I'm buying frozen corn it lasts longer and I don't have to "use up" on everything I eat until it's gone)

Since the bf wanted hamburger, I just put some veggies with it and I really lack the abundance of veggies on fall. Squash is expensive and we can't eat it that fast. Plus, this week the supermarket's veggies were really really bad so I didn't buy any! I have no idea how they can present food that's rotten, or dried out, it's a lot different than back in Madeira. (I had fresh veggies T.T)

I made an apple pie again, this time with a different crust than the first one and a double apple-layer:

We spent the weekend going out to either buy things or for classes so I didn't cook much, but I'll show you my lovely cats gathering with cold weather. One of them has a small problem being solved so she has that around her neck, but she'll be fine with another 2 weeks treatment.

The white and black one is a male and the other two female.They're between 5 and 8 years old.

Chicken Teriyaki

2009-11-05T00:00:00.001Z

And the teriyaki is here again!

Apparently I made way too much teriyaki sauce and I don't know how to store it other than in the refrigerator >.< so I'll be making a lot!

On this one, I had to defrost rice because I ate all of the oven baked potatoes, I don't usually eat out of gluttony but I can't resist to those potatoes, specially while they're warm...

We also ended the veggies that were baked with the potatoes so I had to cut up some emergency veggies. We then have:

- Japanese rice with teriyaki sauce on top (bf loves it like this so I don't argue);

- Chicken Teriyaki;

- Cucumber (probably the last one of the season), carrot and corn.

It's not much, but I think it's only fair to show successes and failures when you're in the kitchen having fun.

I really did great with the teriyaki sauce today, it was the perfect texture, just like the one I was used to last year and those potatoes, oh the .... Where did they go? =D

Don't think I'll be putting much more this week, Thursdays are always hard to take a picture at something.

Oh, I forgot to take a picture, but on Tuesday the bf took the rest of the salmon teriyaki (he must really love teriyaki so much) with some rice and veggies.

Gyoza dumplings

2009-11-02T00:01:00.001Z

I had this lurking on my "to do" recipe and I made it from scratch, meaning, wrappers too!

It was quite time consuming but to see the results at first try was overwhelming and they taste great.

The rest was a little color adding to the tupperware and I have no idea what goes well with gyoza but the bf wanted more than just vegetables, said he'd get hungry after a little bit.

So we have:

- Japanese rice with corn on top;

- Gyoza with cow meat and cabbage filling;

- Baby carrots and round green beans.

I made a lot of them and we ate some before we froze the rest.

These are the ones that got frozen and tossed in a bag afterwards.

The ones we ate, I remembered taking a picture on the frying pan but not on the plate, because the bf was too hungry to remember pictures

For the gyoza wrappers I used this recipe:

http://www.lafujimama.com/2009/08/time-to-wrap-things-up-homemade-gyoza.html

For the filling I edited Just Hungry's recipe:

http://www.justhungry.com/2004/08/is_my_blog_burn.html

Thank you both for sharing these recipes!

Salmon Teriyaki

2009-10-29T12:39:00.001Z

This is something I really liked to eat at the restaurant I worked on, but had never tried it at home. My first try has a bit too much soy sauce but the bf loved it.

I packed a furikake pack to go on top of the rice. Then some saute'd vegetables because the bf was super hungry and I usually cook both dinner and lunch at the same time to let the lunch cool down and then store it.

This was just for the picture to show the wasabi furikake pack.

I made something the day before but it had been a complicated day and the food was the one thing who had to pay for the bad day unfortunately:

There's couscous, broccolli/cauliflower and fishfingers. I did not have the head to put anything else in it, went straight to bed afterwards.

I'll be cooking some fun things next week so check by soon ^^

Bunny & it's Carrot

2009-10-27T08:52:00.001Z

No, I did not cook rabbit. But it's probably gonna be embarrassing for a 20year-old bf to take for his lunch!

This came out of nowhere I hadn't planned for the bunny. When I thought about adding color to this, I found this little carrot in the refrigerator and the bunny idea came to mind. I looked over the web for various drawings of bunnies and ended up making my own cute bunny.

It's made from:

- Cheese;

- Turkey ham;

- Tonkatsu sauce and ketchup;

Underneath it there's:

- Japanese rice;

and under the raw carrot there's

- beef with tomato, onion and zucchini.

Blue!

2009-10-26T00:08:00.001Z

Yesterday I was on a cooking spree! I even decided to dye an egg and some cauliflower blue ^^

Tho, I forgot to and used the blue tupperware, which makes it a lot of blue for the eye, more than I expected when I started taking pictures and noticed.

We have:

- Hard boiled egg dyed with red cabbage;

- cooked cow ribs;

- Broccoli and cauliflower;

- Japanese rice with sesame seeds on top.

I started the spree with the pie, followed by a big pan of rice:

I don't have a rice cooker and I know it doesn't taste the same, but I really like short grained rice and the restaurant I used to work in made rice this way and only used the rice cooker to keep it warm. It turned out really well, much better than the last 2 times so we used up some wamr before freezing the rest. Here is the rice in the freezer (I forgot to take pictures of it outside the freezer)

1kg of rice gave about 26 portions of rice (I shape them in onigiris because it keeps the rice from getting squished and looking like purée. Whenever we want rice, we grab some and defrost it so it saves up a lot of time.

Apple Pie

2009-10-25T22:03:00.001Z

So, it's apple season and I was dying to make one of those! I happened to talk to a very special friend who gave me some tips on this one, so she's the one to thank for how it turned out:

I bought the crust from the supermarket and used up what I had bought for home on friday, I had lots of apples (still have lots!) and added a cream recipe that doesn't need any expensive ingredients.

For the filling there's:

- Sugar;

- Flour;

- Eggs;

- Milk;

- Vanilla extract or cinnamon stick;

On low heat mix it until it looks consistent. It takes a while but don't turn to high heat or it won't work.

After cooling, I put it over the crust and started slicing some apples.

There are various ways to keep fruits from turning brown but I use the dip in lemon water way. It works quite well and adds a little flavour. I peeled the apples, sliced them and dipped them right after cutting into the lemon water. When I finished cutting, I dried the apple slices and gently placed them on top of the cream in a circly way. I wanted it to turn out a spiral but the slices didn't go my way.

I finished to put the slices and I thought "something's missing" Of course! Cinnamon!

Much much better. I turned the oven on, waited a few minutes (I always forget to pre-heat before I'm done with the food) and put it in the oven until the apples were golden brown.

Next time I'll make the crust myself because the pie is so tasty that the crust doesn't match the filling's flavour. I now have to store it in my secret secret stash before the bf steals it away in a bite!

Turkey sausage rush

2009-10-23T14:31:00.001+01:00

I came home really late last night but I didn't give up to laziness and before it overtook me I managed to cook this because we're still trying to save up some money and eating out should be out of the question.

I wanted to add some more color but I was making a different dinner and sleepiness hunger and laziness was too much at the same time. This time we have:

- Fusilli pasta;

- Cooked broccoli and cauliflower;

- Pan-fried turkey sausage with some spices.

Again, the multi-tasking really makes me feel good I'm not sure why. But today is the critical day again: I have to decide what to cook for next week before we go shopping and I still haven't come up with anything new.

See you next week! (Unless I decide to bake something in the weekend worth posting ^^)

Farinheira with scrambled eggs

2009-10-22T11:07:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone, it's finally starting to rain! I really love the rain and it's started to cool too. I don't usually buy farinheira but my grandparents offered me some and they were calling for me from the freezer so I used them up.

This is a VERY high caloric dish, traditional from my country Portugal. I usually do it when I need something done quickly but only when someone brings the farinheiras for me, or else I just don't do it (last time i did this was on Spring). Farinheira with scrambled eggs is usually an appetizer and people don't make meals out of it (at least not traditionally, I know a couple of people who cook this for meals).

You can see in the picture that the balance is completely off: I made too much protein and too little vegetables. Well, the veggies shrank as I sauté'd them and the couscous was put in there in a hurry. So from left to right we have:

- Sauté'd vegetable mix;

- Couscous with 2 olives on top;

- Farinheira with scrambled eggs.

I was satisfied with how fast I could assemble this and how much I enjoyed multi-tasking in the kitchen while the bf washed the dishes. I have to start thinking of next week's dishes >.<

Curry again

2009-10-20T18:12:00.001+01:00

And I'm back to the boring food presentation:

This time I didn't put any meat on because I intended to save it for something else I made, but it's not presentable enough for me to post it, so it's made the same as the last one with the exception of the potatoes and the meat. Underneath it there is Udon, a very thick japanese "pasta" which is very good, specially in soups, stir fries and curry. I must say the rice is more practical when eating curry, because the rice mixes with the curry, rather than the pasta who leaves a lot of sauce in the end.

It's been some frustrating days because I had too much food in the fridge that had to be used and I had to throw some chicken away because it spent too much time in there, I tried using all the vegetables I could and there's still more! I know it's always good to be able to have food income from family but sometimes it's more of a problem than a blessing. Plus, yesterday's dinner was too watery and I ended up not wanting to take a picture at it. Probably just a little cooking crisis that I'll have to figure out how to use the remaining things like tomatoes and turnips that I don't usually buy by myself. If you have any ideas on how to use these, specially the turnips since they're hated by the bf and he won't eat soup either. I thought of putting it on the curry but he'd notice.

Hope I'll be posting soon this week ^^

Kirby

2009-10-14T01:05:00.001+01:00

Something I do not own but tried to make it out of an image:

First of all I had no idea what I was going to do because since last week was a bit busy, I couldn't manage to get all the ingredients for what I planned, so I had to adapt something and remembered this image I wanted to do some time ago. You can still tell I was missing stuff like the nori. I tried making Kirby's eyes with some egg but they looked too weird so i grabbed some Tonkatsu sauce and a fork and "painted" them on the ham.

Here we have:

- Pasta;

- Turkey strogonoff;

- Egg for the stars;

- Turkey ham, carrot, tonkatsu sauce and ketchup for Kirby;

- Cucumber.

That's all for today!

Seafood Pasta

2009-10-14T00:31:00.001+01:00

There were some leftovers of fish in the freezer that were occupying too much space so I thought of using it this week. This is how it turned out:

I decided to do the seafood cooking aside from the pasta and assemble them at the end.

I used:

- fake crabmeat;

- shrimp;

- hake fish;

- Green bell pepper;

- Onions and garlic;

- (hidden) Turnip (shhh I don't think the bf noticed that or he would've complained)

I put it over the lettuce. I don't buy lettuce, this one was offered so I have to spend it somehow and the green looks good. I didn't have much time for the vegetables and since there were some hiding in the pasta I just added some cucumber. Then I made carrot flowers, which I have to thank AnnaTheRed and her blogging (http://www.annathered.com/) for her "How to" on that, and put the carrots on top of the pasta.

Bento lunch

2009-10-12T17:57:00.002+01:00

I've been wanting to do this for a looong long time, and I didn't do so bad.

Please ignore the yellow broccoli, I completely forgot about it while I was cooking the rest so it overcooked

From left to right we have:

- Shrimp with tomato sauce and lettuce underneath to make a change of color from the silicone cupcakes;

- Red cabbage with a pinch of salt and vinegar;

- Tamagoyaki (without the dashi because I haven't found it in my city yet)

- Broccoli;

- Rice with carrot on top.

Also, this week I have planned all week days with food so you should expect some new posts this week. (last week I completely forgot to plan, so i had to think on the clock, it didn't turn out well)

Hamburger and Udon

2009-10-06T12:14:00.001+01:00

It's been a while since I last posted, but lately the lunches haven't been all that presentable plus I've had some failures last week on food with a green onion quiche and some other things.

From left to right we have a hamburger cut in pieces and 2 pieces of fresh sausage, a little bottle with Worcester sauce (which we both love with udon) baby carrots, round green beans and on the extreme right the udon. I'm not quite sure where udon should be used other than soup and yakiudon (sauteed with vegetables and chicken) but I like it like this too.

Although the quiche was a failure I'll give out one picture that was okay. The biggest problem was that I didn't dry green onions properly so when I opened it, it looked like soup, too watery i had to put it under some paper to absorb the excess water. It was very tasty tho.

I hope to post soon and always better plates/recipes/presentation!

Codfish with eggs and potatoes

2009-09-29T13:46:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-29T00:17:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-27T15:23:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-24T12:09:00.002+01:00

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

2009-09-23T19:24:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-21T11:29:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-17T14:38:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-16T14:03:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-16T10:13:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-11T17:39:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-10T11:57:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-10T00:20:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-08T22:08:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-07T13:16:00.001+01:00

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

2009-09-01T22:10:00.001+01:00

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!