Napolitan spaghetti

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!

Farfalle with bell pepper sauce

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.

Spinach Ricotta Cannelloni & Miso Tofu

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)!

Little Nest

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.

No veggies

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!

Turkey sausage rush

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 ^^)

Kirby

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

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.

Beet root Cannelloni

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

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

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

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

This is the mix I filled cannelloni with:

- Diced onion

- Diced garlic

- Cottage cheese (from cow milk)

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

- 2 ts grated lemon peel

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

So, here they are stuffed and pinkish!

Let's take a closer look:

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

That's all for today! Happy cooking!

Lasagna

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

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