Friday, October 19, 2007

Japanese Baked Fish Cakes

This is something that I feel in love with while in Japan. Each one is a baked fish cake and can be eaten alone or in a nabe (soup). We love them in our house for udon and to eat plain. If you can find them, I suggest putting them in the freezer and they will last for about one year!
Kamaboko

Two Bento Staples

Bentos are wonderful for any busy family that wants to use up leftovers. There are some items that can be made ahead though and frozen to be thawed out later in the week to spice up the leftovers. Here are two of our most recent items:

Chicken Balls with Nori strips.
Frozen Shumai's. You can see these in a few of our bentos in the next pictures. This is what the shumai's look like when frozen. We freeze everything individually and then place them in a bag all together. Perfect for about two months!

The Pleasure of Homemade Pies

Since we went to the apple farm a week ago we decided that it was time to use the apples and make lovely homemade apple pies from scratch. Yes, that does mean no fake pie crusts from the store. We used the America's Test Kitchen Recipe.This is the pie that my husband decorated.
This is my creation.

Pumpkin Bentos

This is obviously before we had our bentos. We placed our bento materials in simple plastic containers. That is okay though, it still works. These were our first attempt to make a decorative bento.


Contents: Orange Rice Ball Pumpkins wtih Carrot face features. Cucumber cutouts with carrot strips. Bottom: Umeboshi Cabbage. Top: Cutout Seaweed Bugs.


Some contents as above except we placed nori over the top of one of hte pumpkins with a cucumber stem. Also, in the left hand corner there is a homemade shumai.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

What's for lunch?


One of the many things that I learned while in Japan was to cook. Not only did I make meals however I also learned how to pack my own bento. I have to admit I was never very creative at it however I try. After a recent trip to a Japanese grocery store in Chicago, I found two little bentos. A bento is basically translated into "lunch box" in English. Some people do basic ones like me but then other people get crazy with making art pieces. There are even competitions around the world to decorate bentos - I am not in that category just yet though. Here are the new bentos in our lives!My cute yellow and pink bento came with a travel bag, bento case and a small case with a fork.
This is the bento all opened up. It is actually a small bento however there were only three choices at the Japanese store and I wasn't about to pay $30.00 online. Mine was $6.00!!This is my husband's bento. It is so sophisticated and "manly".

Apples apples

So, I live in the Midwest which means it is apple season!! I love the fall because not only do we get delicious orange pumpkins to eat but also fresh apples. There is nothing like going to an apple orchard in the fall and picking your own produce on an organic farm!
Our Puppy who decided to check out our apples when we got home. This one peck.
Our cat didn't want to eat the strange red thing however she did want to play with them for a while. I'm sure if she knew what it was, she would take a bite out of one.

Thursday October 18, 2007

Hello everyone, I am so sorry for taking such a long break from writing on this site. My life has been changing the last few weeks so I have had to deal with some things. Now I am back and ready to get back into the swing of things. To tell everyone the truth, I have moved on from raw vegan food. It was a fantastic diet for the summer and fall however it was getting to my husband. There are only two of us so if one of us does not like the food, it can be difficult to cook and save money at the grocery store. My husband who is very skinny in the first place (my darn metabolism) started to lose more weight. So, in fear that he was losing too much weight, we had to start eating more foods again. The raw vegan diet is amazing, just not good for my husband; hence it was not good for me and our tight grocery budget. We are still eating healthy though and there are many raw vegan foods in our diets along with other foods to back up our complete diet. So, I hope that everyone sticks around to hear about these new changes in our lives.