New: Kraft Food Magazine and a few interesting links

The latest Kraft Food magazine arrived in my mailbox today. This time around is all about BBQ and grilling - with lots of great potluck ideas. New Potato Summer Salad is very similar to a recipe they published a couple of years ago, and its VERY good!! For 2 years solid it was all I took to potlucks, I’m thinking about trying this new one out the next time I have one to go to. I have also made it with Yukon Gold potatoes - and those too are fabulous in this recipe!

And the Chocolate-Peanut Butter Candy Dessert sounds AMAZING and SWEET!! I’m going to have to give it a try as soon as the opportunity presents.

Next up a few interesting links I stumbled on (literally - I found them using Stumble Upon):
Jacket Lunch Box - Rock Album covers as Bentos
Xorsyst - a selection of bentos from Jacket Lunch Box above

 

Bento #34: Bratwurst, Couscous & Bread Pudding

A bed of couscous topped with a leftover sliced bratwurst and frozen carrots on the side

An orange that’s been sectioned for easy eating at my desk

Bread pudding (recipe to be posted tomorrow!!)

 

Exploring Cookbooks: 1968 Time Life Foods of the World - The Cooking of Provincial France

I’ve already written the (semi) complete history of this series of books. This happens to be the first one released in the series and was written by the illustrious M.F.K. Fisher.

Each spiral bound book measures 9 inches by 6 inches and is about 1/4 inch thick.
More after the cut including full photos of select pages.

 

Quotes: Something for Mondays

Laughter is brightest where food is best.
~Irish Proverb

Cooking is at once one of the simplest and most gratifying of the arts, but to cook well one must love and respect food.
~Craig Claiborne

The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living
~Dione Lucas

The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.
~Julia Child

I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work. Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm.
~Robert Farrar Capon

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
~Virginia Woolf

My kitchen is a mystical place, a kind of temple for me. It is a place where the surfaces seem to have significance, where the sounds and odors carry meaning that transfers from the past and bridges to the future.
~Pearl Bailey

 

Recipe: Sweet Onion Hot Dog Topping

This recipe is actually called Warm Springs Vidalia Marmalade and its from the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. But I don’t like the rosemary. It detracts from the overall recipe in my opinion and I’ve found you can use any onion you want. Vidalia is very sweet and nice but you can use any variety of sweet onion - Maui, Oso Sweet, Rio Sweet, etc. or even just regular yellow or white. But the sweet onions definitely give it a nice kick.

I have put this on burgers, hot dogs, bratwurst, sausages, etc. Anything I would want to have cooked onions on.

 

Bento #33: Crab and Eel Sushi

Eel and Crab sushi rolls with ginger and soy sauce (in a fish bottle) behind the sushi grass

Shrimp Balls

Caramel marble Pocky

*I made this dinner so that a co-worker could sample sushi (specifically with eel). She had never tried it. She ended up hating it, but at least she attempted to taste it!

 

Bento #32: Couscous & Shredded Pork

The couscous was made using a speedy tip I found: put the dry couscous in the box tier, pour the hot water (or chicken stock) over top, put on the lid and let it sit until its “done”. Easy and quick. And I have a microwave at my disposal at work to do this with in the future.

Leftover shredded North Carolina BBQ Pork - why left over? Turns out with some guys at least that the easiest way to their hearts IS through their stomachs. Actually I made this for my boyfriend and he loved it!

Frozen carrots

Mandarin oranges

Marble Pocky - Kaoru Rum Raisin flavored

 

Recipe: Easy Shortbread Cookies

This recipe is so incredibly easy and quick and with only 3 ingredients!

1 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
2 1/4 cups flour

 

Exploring Cookbooks: 1968 Time Life Foods of the World - American Cooking

This has been called the cookbook series that any cookbook collector MUST own, or they aren’t a real cookbook collector! The reason these are so highly sought after is the amazing depth and range of recipes in them, extremely remarkable and noteworthy for 1968. They were discontinued in part due to complaints that ingredients were hard to acquire for the home cook. Not so anymore. And these recipes are just fantastic! I cook out of them all.the.time.

First published in 1968 by Time Life there are 27 of these books in the series…I only own 6. I eagerly seek them out whenever I can find them at thrift stores, garage sales and the like. I don’t do Ebay anymore for personal reasons so I have little recourse. But I will continue to find them I’m sure. I have heard that they are both easy to find as well as difficult. For me personally they have been difficult to track down for some reason.

So sadly for me I only own the wire bound copies that feature just the recipes - also called the kitchen copies as they are just the recipes to be used in the kitchen instead of the beautiful photographic hardbound editions. I do not own any of the hardbound editions at this time. I’ve been meaning to complete this particular collection but have never gotten around to it for whatever reason.

More after the cut including the complete list of books and full photos of the American Cooking edition.

 

Quotes: Something for Mondays

Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.
~Lin Yutang

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.
~Laurie Colwin

If your regrets linger, if you cannot find inspiration in solitude, then you still have much to learn from the writers and poets and the cooks on becoming the artist of your own life… you can never re-create the
past. But you can shape your own future. And you can make a cake.
~Jacqueline Duval

If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony.
~Fernand Point

Happy and successful cooking doesn’t rely only on know-how; it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life.
~Georges Blanc

Food, like a loving touch or a glimpse of divine power, has that ability to comfort.
~Norman Kolpas

Cuisine is only about making foods taste the way they are supposed to taste.
~Chef Charlie Trotter

 

Recipe: The Best Ever Cheesecake

This recipe is literally the best recipe you could ever need for cheesecake. I’m serious. It produces such a rich, tasty product that you don’t actually need to put anything on it or with it. A good cheesecake should always be able to be consumed on its own without all the “frills”. Don’t make this unless you have time to “babysit” it. The cooking method is what makes a cheesecake a cheesecake.

Beautiful isn’t it??

For the crust:

1 1/2 cups finely ground graham cracker crumbs (or digestive biscuits if you happen to have those on hand!)
1/3 cup white sugar
6 tablespoons butter, melted
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (it gives it a nice kick but isn’t needed)

For the filling:

(4) 8 ounce blocks of cream cheese, softened
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup evaporated milk (sometimes I replace 1/4 cup of the evap. milk with buttermilk)
1 tablespoon vanilla

 

Bento #31: Rice and Crab

A completely boring and terrible meal. I was in a big rush and already late to work when putting this together. Not to mention I was trying to find something low in fat and calories as I made CHEESECAKE for my co-workers birthday.

Its just rice with with Katsuo Fumi furikake (bonito & sesame seeds furikake), imitation crab meat and frozen green beans. I also tossed in some marble Pocky - Kaoru Rum Raisin. I ended up not eating them, there was plenty of cheesecake to consume.

 

New: Target Dollar Spot Purchase

I found these at my local Target Dollar Spot. The only kind I found, no other styles or designs or characters. Guess its a good thing I still like Strawberry Shortcake! They fill up very nicely and will fit (2) Lock & Lock sandwich boxes with room to spare, so they are very roomy. Definitely bigger than a traditional Japanese kinchaku. Its made of nylon and has a narrow strip of velcro keeping it closed. They do have flat rectangular bottoms to allow for a flat transport of your boxes or containers.

Worth every penny of the dollar I spent!

 

Odd Find: Warning on Coffee Cup

So I had to buy a new travel coffee mug to take coffee to work. I ended up buying a perfectly boring and normal one, except for where the warning is regarding “hot product inside”:

Yup, the INTERIOR of the lid? Does that even count as a warning then??

Yeah, not really food related but bizarre to me none-the-less.

 

Bento #30: Waffles and Fruit

Sliced strawberries and applesauce

Caramel marble Pocky (it was a “chocolate needed” kinda day)

Dried apricots, slice of butter, strawberry preserves (I prefer to melt it and put it on my waffles as opposed to using syrup), frozen Belgian waffles