Showing posts with label Rice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rice. Show all posts

26 July 2010

Sesame beef bento

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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.

22 July 2010

Pea Stew - Defrosting pt. 2

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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.

20 July 2010

Defrosting: when the freezer resembles the north pole!

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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?

05 July 2010

Salmon filled Onigiri

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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

07 April 2010

The Inarizushi experience

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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.^^

16 March 2010

Roasted Salmon bentos

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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.

15 March 2010

First use of my bentos

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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.

23 February 2010

Salmon Teriyaki #2

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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!

20 February 2010

Two meals

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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



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!

10 February 2010

Omurice

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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

19 November 2009

Fishfingers

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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 ^^

16 November 2009

Cabbage leftover

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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.

11 November 2009

Meatballs

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

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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:

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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.

09 November 2009

Hamburger & Tonkatsu

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I couldn't help playing around with the food:

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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:



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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.

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

05 November 2009

Chicken Teriyaki

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And the teriyaki is here again!

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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.

29 October 2009

Salmon Teriyaki

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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.


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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.
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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:


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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 ^^

27 October 2009

Bunny & it's Carrot

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

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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.

26 October 2009

Blue!

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

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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:

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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)

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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.

12 October 2009

Bento lunch

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

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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)

29 September 2009

Sausage rolled in cabbage

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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. ^^

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