Showing posts with label cantaloup melon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cantaloup melon. Show all posts
Crêpes salées aka savoury crêpes bento
Labels:
apple,
bento,
brocoli,
cantaloup melon,
carrot,
coleslaw,
crêpes salées,
grapes,
ham,
kiwi,
nectarine,
orange,
ramiro pepper,
strawberries,
zucchini
·
I had crêpes salées at my parent's last week and as it had been a while since I last ate them, I kind of had forgotten how much I love them. So yesterday evening I decided to make some and then a few extra to pack in our bento. Moreover these are extremely simple to make, which of course is a lovely bonus :o)
So my bento has, the leftover savoury crêpes containing ham and zucchini topped with some cheese flowers, some carrot sticks, steamed brocoli and a cup of coleslaw. The fruits are the usual apple, orange, cantaloup, Belgian (!) strawberries, black and white grapes, nectarine and kiwi slices.
How to crêpes salées :
Ingredients :
- 8 savoury crêpes (bake them as you would sweet crêpes, just omit the sugar)
- 3 zucchini
- bechamel sauce (I used storebought one, because I ran out of milk, but with just milk and flour you can make your own)
- 200g diced ham
- 100g grated cheese (preferably gratin cheese because it melts evenly and colours nicely but any grated cheese will do)
Preheat the over to 200°C
Wash the zucchini, cut it into thick slices and cook them until tender with some water in which you have diluted a stock cube (elminates the need for more salt or spices down the line). Once cooked, drain.
Mix the zucchini and the ham dices in the bechamel sauce. If you like you can keep some of the sauce aside to pour on top of the crêpes before adding the cheese, but I didn't this time.
Grease an oven dish. Spoon some of the zucchini mix in a crêpe and fold it up (I just make rolls) and put it in the dish. Repeat until the dish is full. Sprinkle the grated cheese on top of the crêpes and put the dish in the oven for 20 minutes. And there you go ... bon appetit :o)
Sweetie's bento has the same ingredients, minus the broccoli and with some diced ramiro pepper. The ramiro pepper should have been in my bento as well, but as I don't like raw peppers that much, I tried grilling them. Tried being the keyword here. But cooking and watching Cold Case on TV at the same time isn't really a match made in heaven (multitasking fail). The carbonised pepper ended up in the bin instead of in the bento ... Lesson learnt? We'll see :o)
Back to bento
Labels:
apple,
bell pepper,
bento,
cantaloup melon,
eggplant,
grapes,
kiwi,
nectarine,
orange,
orzo,
souvlaki,
strawberries,
zucchini
·
Due to some family issues (I don't want to get further into), the last two weeks have been kind of an emotion rollercoaster, draining all our energy and leaving us mentally and physically exhausted every single evening. Not the best circumstances to put a bento together. So both our lunches have consisted of sandwiches from a nearby snackbar for the last 10 working days. And although the snackbar near my office makes a delicious "boursin méditerrannée" sandwich, after eating those for such an extended period ... you can indeed have too much of a good thing. :o)
Now that things are looking up on the family front, I felt the urge to make a bento again for lunch. For my first day back "on the job", I didn't strain myself : orzo, grilled veggies (eggplant, zucchini, bellpepper) and some souvlaki skewers I had to take off the skewers to get into the box. The dessert section has lots of different fruits today, as the return of sunny days (24°C yesterday !) calls for this colourful sweetness : cantaloup, orange wedges, apple, black and white grapes, kiwi, strawberry, nectarine and plum. I am really longing for some blackberries but haven't seen them in ages. I wonder when they'll be in season again.
My "back in bento" will be relatively short by the way, because I will be on a plane to sunny Turkey for a week on May 5. I just hope that Icelandic volcano with the unprounceable name doesn't act up and doesn't spit out another ashcloud in my direction, because I am really looking forward to this break and don't want to be grounded like so many other travellers last week. This is a new hotel we'll be staying in, but if it is anything like the one from last year, many food pics on my flickr will make up the lack of bento pics. :o)
I am also seizing the occasion to show off my new round two tier box. I found this one at a discount (8,99 EUR) the day I made my last bento and I couldn't pass up on this purple goodie. They had a few other colours as well (included a hot pink one), and if they still have them when I come back from vacation, I might be tempted by an additional box. I like the metal handle, which makes it rather sturdy and very picknick-like. It makes me feel like a schoolgirl, instant rejuvenation minus the pimples :o)
Peas & ricotta moelleux bento
Labels:
blueberries,
brocoli,
brussels sprout,
cantaloup melon,
cherry tomatoes,
cordon bleu,
grapes,
green asparagus,
moelleux,
nectarine,
orange,
white rice
·
Another day, another bento ... and we're Thursday again already. The weekend is almost there ... I can smell its sweet scent, beckoning me :o) But I still have to more working days to go, which will need lunch-boxes.
Today's bento has a moelleux as center piece. I looked for the correct English word, but couldn't find it. A moelleux is in fact a cake with a soft core. The most famous example would be a moelleux au chocolat, a chocolate cake with a gooey centre. The cake in the bento is a savoury variation of that concept, although the core is clearly not runny like the chocolate version. The recipe for these cakes can be found below.
My bento has white rice with green asparagus layered on top, brussels sprouts, steamed broccoli, a moelleux with ricotto and peas, and some cordon bleu pieces (breaded veal scallop with gruyère and ham in the centre). The vitamins can be found in grapes, blueberries, nectarine, oranges and cantaloup balls.
The second bento has the same ingredients except for the veggies, because brussels sprouts are a no-no in my other half's bento and Sweetie isn't too fond of broccoli neither. So I replaced those by green beans, snow peas and sugar snaps ... also green greens, but different ones.
Ingredients :
* 100g (frozen) peas
* 140g ricotta
* 3 eggs
* 20g grated cheese (gruyère)
* 60g all purpose flour
* 25 cl milk
* 40g demi-sel butter (i.e.lightly salted butter)
* salt & pepper
Cook the peas in salted boiling water for 10 minutes. Drain and mash them and mix with the ricotta.
Preheat the oven to 210°C.
In a bowl, wisk the eggs as it to make scrambled eggs. Add progressively the sifted flour, while mixing with a fork.
In a pan heat the milk with the diced butter. When the butter has melted, pour the warm milk in the bowl with the egg/flour mixture. Mix and add the peas/ricotta mash. Mix again and season with pepper.
Pour the dough into 9 individual recipients, sprinkle with the grated cheese.
Bake for approximately 20 minutes (according to the size of your molds).
Let them cool slightly before taking them out of the molds.
My talented bento friend Lia from MyBentolicious surprised me yet again by passing on two awards to me. I'm paying it forward to all my fellow bentoists whose blogs are such an inspiration to me. Feel free to grab the badges here :o)
Empanada de atún bento
Labels:
bento,
blueberries,
cantaloup melon,
cherry tomatoes,
cucumber,
empanada,
grapes,
lettuce,
mozarella,
nectarine,
olives,
orange,
radish
·
Spanish flavours in today's lunch, as I decided to make empanadas de atún last night to pack in our bento boxes. As it was a kind of a "spur of the moment" idea, I didn't have the time to make it completely from scratch as my MIL used to do. Luckily for me, the "organised business woman" I am, has everything she needs in her fridge and cupboard to produce these savoury pastries in a relatively short time.
As my (Spanish) Sweetie grew up with these flavours and with MIL's comida casera, cooking up a Spanish dish is always a bit tricky. No matter what I do, I'll never make things exactly the way she did. And as she sadly passed away a few years ago, I can't ask her for advice anymore neither. Nevertheless, I had to shoo someone out of the kitchen last night, who had picked up the familiar scent, trailed it back to the kitchen and was intent on stealing a few scraps out of the hot pan. I guess I can consider that a compliment :o)
So both our bento have an empanada de atún on a bed of young lettuce leaves, radishes, cucumber, tomato/mozzarella skewers and a green olives skewer. It's nice to include raw veggies again, it reminds me that sunny days are on their way and that it will soon be BBQ weather again :o)
The dessert section has grapes, cantaloup balls, orange parts, nectarine and blueberries.
How-to speedy Empanada de Atún :
Ingredients for 8 empanadas:
* 3 garlic cloves (or less, if you're not a garlic fan as we are)
* 2 red onions
* 400g of canned tuna (I used tuna in olive oil, but on brine would work too)
* 2 (bell) peppers (traditionally you'd use green ones, but I used the two red ramiro peppers I had in the fridge)
* 1 jar (400 ml) of tomate frito (my fave brand : Solis)
* 2 hardboiled eggs
* 1 egg
* 2 puff pastry sheets
Preheat the oven to 200°C.
Dice the onions and peppers and finely chop the garlic. In a skillet, fry the onions and garlic in a bit of olive oil, and add the peppers when the onions have glazed over.
Once the peppers are starting to tender, add the tomate frito and let it simmer for a while on low heat.
Meanwhile, drain the tuna and crumble it. Chop up the hardboiled eggs and add them together with the crumbled tuna to the tomate frito. Stir all the ingredients together and let it simmer a while longer. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Remove from heat and let cool a bit. The filling should now be rather consistent and not watery or liquid.
Roll out the pastry sheets. The ones I had in the fridge were round ones, which aren't the easiest to use. If you make your own pastry dough you can make roll it out in a sheet, cut out round shapes, reshape the remaining dough into a new flat sheet, cut out again, etc. (empanadas are normally presented as half circles, like goyza)... But I just cut the round doughs in four, filled them and then (painstakingly) tried to close them.
Whisk the egg and brush it on top of the empanadas, before putting them in the oven for about half an hour (depending on your oven).
The empanadas are delicious hot and cold, which makes them ideal for bento.
Fried rice with shitake bento
For some odd reason, I never made fried rice. Come to think of it, even back in the days, fried rice never came out of my mom's kitchen. I used to get some from a good Chinese take-away nearby but when that place closed down more than a year ago, I never bother to look for a replacement supplier. All the more reasons to dive into my favourite cookbook (aka internet) and see how to reproduce the yummy dish in the privacy of my own kitchen.
So yesterday I decided to throw myself in at the deep end ... until I realised that I wasn't at the deep end at all, rather in the toddler's section. This is such an easy dish to make, why didn't I give it a try years ago?
Anyway. I had some leftover brown rice in the fridge and turned that into fried rice together with some sliced shitake, scallions, smoked ham strips and a diced omelet. The fried rice took up almost the whole bento, but for some extra veggies, I added a little cucumber baran, two cherry tomatoes and a few green manzanilla olives.
I spotted some strawberries at the store yesterday and although they're still expensive (almost 3 EUR for 250g) because out of season and therefor imported (from Israel this time), I couldn't pass up on the juicy red sweetness. My fruit section has strawberry (of course), kiwi and apple slices, some orange wedges, a piece of yellow plum, two lonely black grapes and some cantaloup melon. It was a pleasure to encounter a cantaloup, it's a telltale sign that spring finally getting here :o)
As always the main ingredients of Sweetie's bento are the same as mine. Besides the fried rice, I added 2 slices of manchego cheese, boursin (garlic & herbs) balls, a tomato & oliver skewer and some carrot sticks which I attempted to cut into flowers (attempted being the key word!).
The fruit sidecar has again strawberry, kiwi slices, a piece of apple, some orange wedges, a piece of yellow plum, black grapes and some cantaloup melon balls.
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