Oh, hello there. I'm still here. All of my relationships are going much better. So, let's get back to my relationship with food. Above is a winter squash and buckwheat flour gnocchi. I am now in charge of cooking for lunchtime and dinnertime most days. I have to get creative as I love some picky picky eaters. The recipe was an amalgam of recipes I found using Pinterest (which has so many recipes yay). They came out o.k. but not as light due to I suspect the buckwheat flour which likes to drink up moisture and be dense. Gnocchi are usually a fancy special on restaurant menus; but guess what you're being fooled. My grandmother made these for Sunday brunch as a sweet cottage cheese version and called them "Lazy Dumplings" because they are so easy and quick to throw together.

Year Two Bento

Year Two Bento

There is no evidence but I have been packing more bento than ever! I'm not just eating lunch on the go once a week anymore. I now have to have lunch ready 5 times a week for my externship. There is plenty of inspiration, working with kidlets, just not enough time in the day to realize my bento aspirations. In fact pictured is one of the more colorful and put together lunches. Perhaps as I settle in to the enormous amount of work year two of grad school entails I will find time to pack more attractive bento..

Summer Term Bento

Summer Term Bento 00.31.41
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

Year one of grad school is ova! Here comes summer one and with it a whole new batch of bento. This bento is mostly freezer items, what with the gyoza and edamame. The rice was hanging around my pantry.
The standouts are the berries. Cherry prices have finally dipped below 6/lb and the strawberries come c/o our postage stamp sized garden patch. If all goes swimmingly well later summer bento should be graced with our own tomatoes and basil.

Grad School Breakfast+ Lunch

Grad School Breakfast+ Lunch
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

I was so tired, I didn't think I'd wake up to eat. Solution? Pack breakfast in the bento!

They just came out with these adorable greek yogurt 100 calorie packs in flavors like coffee with dark chocolate chips. Num! Plus a few crepes. When I eventually awoke in the middle of my morning class I was in a peckish mood.

To be honest this wasn't all I had for lunch, I brought along an avocado and apple chips. What? I had a midterm that day and needed a lot of brain food. Yeah!

Wow! Almost done with Year 1!

Pre-fab Grad School Bento

     This is a "chicken parm" grad school bento. I put that in quotation marks because those are chicken nugget things that come pre-cooked and frozen. I put them over whole wheat rotini with a packet of marinara left over from mozzarella sticks. The two little containers are mozzarella and parm. There's a snack sized granola bar on the side. In the background you can see my lovely insulated lunch bag, bought on a whim at Marshall's. I pack lunch every Sunday but only find a few photo worthy and out of that I rarely take time to update.

A very orange December Grad School Bento.

A very orange December Grad School Bento.
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

The problem with having a blog about the food you eat in grad school is how busy you are with school! I've sat down to a few bento lunches since my last post....but have been so frazzled with classes that I always forget to take a picture. Except this one from back in December. It came out beautifully orange without planning on my part. The pasta and squash were left overs and the tangerines were in the house. Ok, I did pick out the chewy bar with the orange wrapper to match the rest of the food.

Bento for grad school

Grad school bento one
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

This may not look like much but its the beginning of a new chapter in my life. I'm in school all day Sunday and there isn't much for food either in the cafeteria or surrounding environs. Besides, who wants to pay premium for sub par food?
So now every Saturday night or early Sunday morning I will be packing a bento meal. I even purchased a little wide mouth thermos for when the path to the microwaves gets snowy! But for now it's been cold lunches like the one shown or some ravioli that I trekked to heat up in the student lounge.
I do diligently snap a picture of every bento they just have a tendency of not leaving my phone...

Salad Days Are Here Again

Salad Days Are Here Again
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

The temps are in the unseasonable 70's and 80's. For some this means an early start to beach season. For me it means that salad days are here again.

Back when it was cold outside, and cold in the apartment, I wanted piping hot food in my belly. With the change of temps I now crave the cooling crunch of vegetation with the breezy tang of dressing and vinaigrette. Pictured are cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, cucumber, mushroom, and Swiss cheese on a comfortable bed of baby arugula drizzled with Ranch dressing. This is salad #2, not pictured is yesterday's salad with fresh mozzarella, cherry tomatoes and walnuts over baby arugula tossed with EVO and balsamic vinegar.

I type this while noisily munching on my creation. Hopefully salad weather is here to stay. Happy Salad Days everyone!

Miso Soup

Miso Soup
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

On a blustery day, when I had off from school, I decided to make my own miso soup. I bought a couple of store made sushi rolls to make a great lunch. This is how the soup turned out, I didn't feel the need to post the sushi pics.
I like my home made version of the soup much better than your typical Brooklyn Sushi place. It's still mostly made up of dry and pre-packaged ingredients but just tastes so much richer!

poached egg in soy ramen

poached egg in soy ramen
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

My latest fad is doctoring instant ramen packets. This is a very bare bones rendition as I had very little in my home. Just my second time poaching an egg, ever. Big ups to Ehow!
Doctored ramen all the way would probably also have fresh mushrooms, wakame, negi, kamaboko...and maybe a few other yummies. This is about as complicated as I've gotten with cooking lately as BF really enjoys cooking himself and has taken over.

Ghouribi (Moroccan Sugar Cookies) – Forward.com

Edit: 1.5.12 Here's the remainder of BF's 2nd tin.

Select folks will be getting some of these for Christmas/Chanukkah.
Ghouribi (Moroccan Sugar Cookies) – Forward.com

Hopefully I don't get lazy and actually post up some pictorial evidence later.

Happy Holidays!

Italian Style Steak

Please forgive this bare naked post. My computer is not feeling well and no longer letting me upload photos :(
I thought November's dish was going to be Thanksgiving day themed but then I pulled out my Food & Wine Mag again early in the month and realized there was one more 60 minute (not 30 min as I stated previously) meal I wanted to try making. This one was called, as per the title, Italian Style Steak Dinner. The star of the show was a lightly marinated flank steak; with garlic, thyme, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The supporting characters were a buttery polenta and roasted shiitake and red onions.
This meal I made several "Doh!" mistakes that ended up causing the parental approval index to go way down.
First, despite my parents not being big steak eaters, I decided to stick with the suggested flanken meat instead of upgrading to a more tender hunk of beef or even switching to chicken. Second, I tried to cut down on sodium for health reasons but felt that the strong blue cheese that should have graced the shiitakes would more than make up for the lack of salt sprinkled onto the veggies and into the polenta. The operative word is should, the darned hunk of cheese sat silently in the refrigerator all evening.
All in all this was not a success in the eyes of the parental units but the leftovers were honorably (and in my opinon successfully) repurposed as Monday's lunch. This time with the cheese proudly sitting on top of everything.

Food & Wine

Food & Wine
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

One of the fringe benefits of working for a newpaper is that we get tons of reading material in the mail; much of it goes completely unclaimed. So it was that I got a perfectly good Food & Wine Magazine a couple of months ago. This dinner was a 30 minute deal that was part of a series, I haven't gotten around to trying the other two dinner ideas.
This was the first time I've cooked chicken, and my mother was impressed that I was finaly handling raw meat (a previous no go zone for me). The green beans were easy enough, just some carmelized garlic and ginger to dress them up a bit. The potatoes were a straight affair of cutting and frying. Final touch that wasn't part of the original recipe was that bottle of Bull Dog Katsu Sauce which went very well. Perfect weeknight dinner for my little family.

April Dish

April Dish
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

This is an adaptation of a Martha Stewart recipe. I don't get to make fish often because of Mom's aversion to fish but I had a craving that day. The kumquat glaze didn't exactly glaze, I think I didn't add enough sugar or something. The kumquats themselves were really tasty and candied. The choy was sauteed with some garlic. This whole recipe took no time at all and it provided lunch for me and dinner for the parents. Love cooking fish.

March dish

March dish
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

Look I finally used the curry packet I got at Mitsuwa all the way back in January! He loves Japanese Curry, if I knew this was so easy I would have made some for him. But of course he won't enjoy any of it now, but I will.
I'm still unsure about cooking with meat so I decided to take the easy way out and do a tofu dish. I've come to the conclusion that anything smothered in Japanese curry will taste good. It's like the frying effect. Not shown, but I did the same thing using just shrimp over rice, and wouldn't you know I think I overcooked the darn critters and they STILL tasted good with the curry sauce over it.

Mushroom ragu with cream sauce over crispy polenta cake.

Mushroom ragu with cream sauce over crispy polenta cake.
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

This past weekend I totaly won my parents over to my cookery. All it took was making something Italian inspired and they were singing my praises and bestowing compliments on me. This was just an appetiser of crispy polenta cake topped with a white beech and maitake stew or ragu not sure what the technical term is, The mushrooms got treated with rosemary, a cream sauce, and a final sprinkling of freshly grated parmigiano. The main course was another cross cultural melding in the form of Chinese eggplant parm. Another hit. What I've really been missing was the way the ex would appreciate the food I made, but finding new fans is a great way to get over that feeling.

Roasted Kabocha soup

Roasted Kabocha soup
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

This was inspired a bit by Kathy Erway and her hapa recipe for simmered kabocha. I simmered half of the kabocha for my bento. But roasted half and turned it into this wonderfull soup. It's kabocha, carmelized onion, soy milk and vegetable stock. I seasoned it with rosemary and sea salt. The result was very velvety, an even better texture I'd say than butternut squash soup, no strings attached (harhar). So glad I tried it.
Of course for all my fangirl adoration of Ms. Erway I totaly blanked on the title of her upcoming book at the "In the Flesh Reading Series" and missed on the opportunity to win a copy of "Eat Your Feelings; recipes for self loathing" which I of course need right now to properly loathe myself post human relationship.

Carrot Cake

This is the only cake I've attempted to date. It was another attempt at impressing the ex.

Carrot Cake
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

Since my take on Asian food wasn't sending the message that I'm awesomer than his new girl I switched track to try to appeal to ex's American identity. We were both fans of Alton Brown's Good Eats and the carrot cake episode was on the night before. Ex always laughed that I only watched and never put any of the lessons to use. If only he saw me following through surely he would take me seriously.

Well at least the cake came out good.

Avocado Shake

Avocado
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

This was the same weekend as the guava sorbet. That was the weekend I cooked up a storm of Asian influenced recipes. I was hoping the good looking food would win the ex back. He was not impressed. His new love interest, fresh from Taiwan, has been drinking avocado shakes her whole life and he adored her for that but still preferred his avocado the all American way, savory rather than sweet. My feeling about his adoration of her was the same color as the avocado fruit.

Guava Sorbet

Guava Sorbet
Originally uploaded by rbsb1999

Some guava popped up at the gourmet market near home. I had been wanting to make sorbet all summer long. Technicaly summer was over but the guava presented a perfect opportunity I couldn't resist. It would taste just like summer.

I called up the ex very excited about my find. He excitedly told me about the girl who just asked him out. The warmth of summer seeped out of my plans.