2 Sukiyaki beef bentos with fresh fruit dessert

I'm not one for red meat, normally.  But now that fall is here and it's starting to cool down at night, I feel a desire to have a taste of beef.  That's exactly what this meal is.  Beautiful white rice, veg boiled in dashi (which I then used to make the beef sauce) and sukiyaki beef.

It was fantastic!

I only needed a small amount of beef to make this bento and loosely followed the recipe in the The Just Bento Cookbook .  I love the added depth the leeks give the beef sauce.

For dessert I cut up a nashi pear and soaked the pieces in salt water for a few moments, then dried them with a paper towel before packing them in the box.  They didn't even think about turning brown.  The grapes are the last from the garden and there is a small amount of blue cheese tucked away in the corrner.

A very satisfying and simple to make bento.  The Captain's bento box had about 75 grams of beef, mine only needed 50 grams.  Bulking it out with veg was a good idea, but I don't think I'll use daikon again.  Very affordable, very yummy.


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Dolsot cooking adventure continues - cooking in a Korean stone pot

We have enjoyed lunch cooked in our new stone pot almost every day this week.  I love how easy it is to cook rice from scratch in the pot.  It's almost as easy as my electric rice cooker.

Clockwise from the top: Leeks lightly fried then cooked in sake, chard namuru, bacon fried with chard stems and carrots, nuka pickles cucumber, carrots and daikon, and dry fried canned tuna.

Hiding underneath all this is a bed of chestnut rice.   I actually found the toppings to be a bit of a draw back as they hid the delicious taste of the rice, so the next day I made...

Much simpler toppings today: leftover shio koji chicken breast  and carrots fried with bacon (because everything is better with bacon), all on top of chestnut rice.

These are also perfect flavours for the changing season.  There is a cold nip in the air, fall is approaching  the body wants to eat more fats and root veg.  I think I need to dig up the last of the gobo tomorrow and make something extra special for myself.



Here are some things I've learned about cooking with stone:

• It's surprisingly easy to burn food in this dish.  Medium heat is the absolute maximum temperature needed for this.
• Scrubbing the pot with coarse salt takes very little effort to get the burnt crap off the bottom of the pot.
• This is a very low fuss way to make rice.  It's right on par with my electric rice cooker for ease of making - so long as I keep the temperature low.  It isn't as fussy with the amount of liquid or cooking time as my electric cooker and I find myself experimenting more by adding different stuff to the rice.  But when it comes to cooking simple old white rice, the electric cooker wins hands down.
• It gets hot enough to burn through one cotton heat pad, and to heat up one cork ceramic trivet enough to damage the table underneath!

How to Cook Rice in a Korean Stone Pot (and how to season it)

A dolsot or Korean stone pot is the latest addition to my kitchen.  A Korean friend of mine taught me how to cook rice in it (from scratch - instead of just adding cooked rice and heating like most people do) and after hearing her passionate description of how delicious it is, I just had to have one.

The pot is made of a single piece of stone, hand turned on a massive lathe.  It's a heavy blighter so you don't want to be dropping it on your finger like I did.

Before the first use, it needs to be seasoned.  You only need to do this the first time or if it's been sitting for a year or more.

How to season your Dolsot

Wash the pot with water and half fill with tepid water.  Add a couple of tablespoons of sea salt to the water and swish around with your fingers until all the salt is dissolved   Leave for a few minutes so that the temperature of the water and the pot can even out, than bring to boil on medium heat.  When the water is boiling vigorously, take the pot off the heat and carefully poor off the water.

When it has cooled a bit, poor some sesame oil on a cloth or paper towel and rub the inside of the pot and lid.  Lave it to cool completely and the oil to seep in.

How to Cook Rice in a Dolsot

1 cup rice
water
salt
Kombu (kelp) - optional

• Coat the inside of the pot with sesame (or any cooking) oil.  Do this every time, just before you cook in this pot.
• Wash the rice really well.
• You can add other grains with the rice.  I often replace one Tbs of rice with  Naked Oats.
• Once it's well washed, add the water.  You can follow the amount of water on the back of the rice package or you can put the washed rice in the pot and cover with water so it's about 1.5cm above the level of the rice.  Or, you can do what I did, and measure the water in the rice-cooker then poor it into the stone pot.
• Add a pinch of salt to the rice (swish it around to dissolve) and if you like, add some kombu.  
• Let the pot stand for about five minutes before you start cooking, this allows the temperature to even out and reduces the chance of the bowl splitting or cracking.

• Bring the rice pot to a roiling boil on MEDIUM HEAT!  

• I repeat: MEDIUM HEAT!
• Once the pot heats up, you can increase the temperature, but the important thing with these pots is not to change the temperature too rapidly one way or another. 
• When the water boils, turn down the heat.  You can tell when it boils as some steam will escape through the lid.  You can even check it from time to time and stir it if you like, but I didn't bother.

• When it's finished cooking (how long this takes depends on your stove and rice/grain - but basically it's when there isn't much steam escaping any more), you can eat it as is or put toppings on the rice, increase the heat until the rice starts to make a crackling sound and goes all crunchy and brown around the edges.  The latter is called Bibimbap in Korea and is extremely yummy.

Clockwise from the top:
 Leaks lightly fried and then simmered in Sake,
Salted Salmon, Cucumber nukazuke pickles, and Kim Chi.  

Of course, mine isn't real Bibimbap, I don't have the correct ingredients or sauces.  Basically I put a collection of things I like to eat on top of the rice.




After you finish eating the rice (toppings or no) there will probably be a layer of crunchy rice around the edge.  Before the pot cools down too much, add some HOT broth, hot water, or dashi.  NOTE: Please try and keep the liquid as close to the temperature of the pot as possible when you poor it in, when it doubt err on the hot side.

Adding the liquid makes a really nice soup (and makes it easier to clean later on).

Tips for Caring for your Dolsot

• Do NOT use soap to clean this pot.  If you are having trouble getting it clean either scrub with coarse salt and water or boil up some water in the pot then allow to cool completely before cleaning.
• Always allow to cool completely before cleaning.  Even though you may be able to handle the outside, the stone retains a lot of heat inside.
• Always coat the inside with cooking oil prior to using (this includes the lid)
• Do NOT change the temperature too rapidly   This includes putting cold water in a hot pot, or hot water in a cold pot, or cooking on too high a heat.  Sudden changes in temperature will crack or even shatter the bowl, and that's the last thing we want.

Some useful dolsot links
Korean Stone Pot Care and Seasoning
Dolsot Problems?
Yeongyang dolsotbap Dolsot Bibimbap recipe

A lunch for my first Transition

There is a group of people in town who are learning skills for what they call the Transition.  Basically their idea is that the way of life we have is heavily dependent on limited resources like oil.  Eventually these resources will start to run out and the way of life as we know it will drastically change.  Everything from pre-fab food shipped from long distances to fancy cell phones, to fuel for our cars, to readily available clothing... all these things will be gone!  Poof!  Or, more likely, fizzle.

To make this change easier, this Transition group hopes to acquire skills we need for our community to be (more or less) self sufficient.  They want to help people learn to grow their own food, save their own seeds, find methods of transportation that rely on as little petro as possible, and even make their own clothes.

Transitions group exist all over, and are a 'global grassroots movement supporting citizen action toward reducing oil dependence and building local community resilience and ecological sustainability' (Transistion Victoria).  Pretty cool eh?

And right up my ally.

So I've been helping to pull flax.  This is part of The Linen Project  where members of the community make linen from scratch.  Using mostly hand tools at this point, they do tend to complain about how much work it is - obviously they aren't homesteaders at heart - but in my opinion, learning that a way of life not dependent on a big industrial complex is hard work, the sooner they stop dreaming and idealizing the future, the better. (end of rant)

If pulling flax is hard work, I'm going to need a lunch!

First thing I did was run out to the garden and pick some grapes.  Delicious.  It is a Transition event after all, I should at least have one food in my lunch that I grew myself.

Two ume onigiri, one wakami furikake onigiri (they are the rice balls), home grown grapes (the best kind in my opinion), and a soy-free chocolate pumpkin made by Denman Island chocolate (a local company and my guilty little pleasure)

I warped my drink container in the cloth so it wouldn't sweat too much in my bag.

The wrapping makes it so that there is a handle on the other side.  It's very cute and convenient 

I also made a mini-bento for when I got home in case I was too tried to make a snack.

Wakami furikake onigiri and nukazuke carrots.



As a side note: I like the idea of Transition and will be looking into this further.  What Whole Wheat Pastafarian wouldn't?

But I worry that the people I met who are engaging in Transition activities are too firmly set in their middle class capitalistic mind set.  Living a life without oil is going to take more than a few mornings volunteering in a picturesque setting talking with your friends, complaining about how much hard work it is.

If things are really going to hell in a hand basket, maybe they should look to the past instead of spending all their free time reading books about the impending doom.  The idea of free time being another luxury that they would be wise to transition away from.

There are still people alive (I live with two of them) who remember harvesting in the fields by hand, know how to properly tie grain sheaths, &c.  There are also enough manuals and writings from the last two hundred years to provide the basic understanding.  There are also people like me who are already more than half way transitioned - I sew on a treadle sewing machine for goodness sake.  Relying on info from a couple of core books over those who have lived it and are living it now... that seems like a steady road to folly to me.

But simply my opinion.

Maybe transition needs to start like this?

I hope to participate more in this project, if only because I love textiles so much.  But as a first expierence, I'm a bit underwhelmed.

Yummy Bento Lunch shared on:

Home made hummus with Sourdough Bread Bento

This is a real quick bento lunch which is basically an excuse to try out my new box set from Bento&Co.  The small fish contains home made Hummus and the large fish has some home made poppy seed sourdough bread.  It's quite a refreshing combination.

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