The Food Pornographer

Jac’s bento lunch last Friday consisted of a panfried lemon pepper-rubbed chicken thigh, salad (cos lettuce, homegrown cherry tomatoes, snow peas, cucumber) with creamy ranch dressing (the sachet of dressing was left over from a pack of Chicken Kickers, from a previous Dominos Pizza meal), bread and butter, watermelon, mini havarti cheese and a Bertie Beetle.

And here’s a close-up of the note I wrote for Jac.

Last Thursday, Jac didn’t need lunch, but I did - so I packed myself a similar lunch to the one I made for her on Wednesday, when I didn’t need lunch. More sliced chicken sausage, mixed salad greens, homegrown cherry tomatoes, snow peas and green beans, a chunk of buttered French-style loaf, mini Babybel tasty cheddar and some sliced orange.

The note I drew/wrote for Jac’s bento last Wednesday said it all…

I didn’t need lunch, as we were going out to lunch to farewell our workmate L, who is moving on to a new job. For Jac, I packed sliced chicken sausage, salad (mixed greens, our homegrown cherry tomatoes, blanched snow peas and green beans), bread and butter, a pack of mini sesame snaps and Babybel cream cheese. In the “tasty” container is smokey barbecue sauce to go with the sausages. The bread is “Four Seed Loaf” from Woolworths, made with linseed, kibbled soybeans, canola, and kibbled wheat. I find this bread too seedy and grainy, and too savoury in flavour to eat with my favourite sweet spreads like strawberry jam, or kaya, but Jac loves this bread - we buy it for her, rather than for “us”. We often buy separate bread products for her and for me - I like multigrain bread, plain bagels, fruit loaf; she likes four seed loaf and many other large heavy-duty seedy, grainy breads which I find too bitsy and savoury. Are there particular foods that you buy when you go grocery shopping, but only you eat, or only your partner eats?

Having been away for two and bit weeks, Jac couldn’t wait to get back into the kitchen and start cooking. This is what she made for dinner on the day after her return - pasta spirals with bolognese-style sauce. I prefer spaghetti, but we were all out - spirals were the only pasta we had. She made the bolognese using lamb mince for a change, and tinned tomatoes. Since we were also all out of mushrooms, she used tinned champignons. You may see in this photo that the pasta was a little overcooked, but the sauce was fantastic. I just love the flavour of lamb! It really added something special to the bolognese sauce. I ate this great bowlful and felt most content.

We picked these homegrown cherry tomatoes off our plant last Tuesday. Perfect for bento!

I mentioned last week that Jac bought a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts from Sydney Airport - she knows how much I love these, and my younger sister Juji and her boyfriend Jay love them too. She bought a dozen doughnuts so we could all have some (she and me, Juji and Jay). She couldn’t, of course, store them in the overhead compartment in the plane and didn’t want to keep them on her lap the whole way home, so she placed the box at her feet. She had to be careful not to forget and kick the box - thankfully, she didn’t forget.

In the box are six Original Glazed, a Choc Drizzle Strawberry Ring, Strawberries and Creme Filled, a caramel glazed (not sure of its proper name), Chocolate Iced Creme Filled, Chocolate Iced Custard Filled, and a Chocolate Iced with strawberry drizzle.

We shared three for breakfast with a hot cuppa on Tuesday morning - an Original Glazed, Chocolate Iced Creme Filled and Choc Drizzle Strawberry Ring. I just love the texture of the doughnuts - they’re more chewy than cakey, and even though they’re on the verge of too sweet, I find them utterly pleasurable to eat.

Jac also bought me this milk chocolate cat and dark chocolate mouse. I can’t decide which to eat first. What do you think? Cat or mouse? Milk or dark?

I threw together this quick and easy stir-fry for my dinner on Monday night as I waited for Jac to get home. Sliced cocktail frankfurts, potato, green beans, onion and garlic with oyster sauce. As I’ve doing a fair bit lately, I pre-cooked the potato using a potato microwaver before adding it to the rest of the ingredients in the wok.

In fact, my bento lunch was pretty much exactly the same as my dinner the night before. I made fried rice with turkey SPAM, green beans, corn kernels, carrot, onion, garlic and oyster sauce. I thawed a couple of pieces of fish we had in the freezer, coated them lightly in seasoned flour (just seasoned with salt and pepper), then panfried them in a little olive oil. As it happened, there was enough fried rice and fish left over for me to pack in my bento the next day.

To go with the fish and fried rice, I blanched some broccoli, a leftover piece of French toast, a single-wrapped Tim Tam and a few prunes.

Last Sunday I woke up around 9am, walked to the local deli to buy a copy of the Sunday Times, then came home and cooked myself breakfast - three rashers of bacon, really eggy French toast made with multigrain bread, and panfried golden tomatoes. I poured maple syrup over the French toast (a little maple syrup may have ended up on the bacon too ) and cracked plenty of fresh black pepper over the tomatoes. It was sweet, it was salty, it was simply delicious.

The tomatoes were too old to eat fresh in a salad, but they tasted great panfried.

I got a teriyaki fish (AU$5.30 small)…

…and potato cakes (AU$5.30 small). Jac ate this potato cakes meal once before when we ate at Taka on a Friday night after work. That’s barbecue sauce on the potato cakes.

I ate the teriyaki fish and rice and one of the potato cakes for my dinner while talking with Jac on the phone. I left the rest of the rice and the other potato cake for another meal, breakfast on Saturday morning.

The mashed potato filling had carrot and corn kernels in it. The potato cakes would’ve been really crispy if I’d dined in at the restaurant or eaten them on the way home, but I still enjoyed the fluffy well-seasoned mashed potato filling. I think I’ll be grabbing takeaway dinners from Taka a lot more from now on.

You know what’s better than knowing the weekend starts as soon as I finish work today? Knowing that the weekend starts as soon as I finish work today… as I bite into a bacon-laden toasted sandwich.

Yes, I know McNuggets aren’t the healthiest food item. But I packed lots of vegetables to eat with them, so it wasn’t all bad!

I packed blanched broccoli and sugar snap peas, rocket, spinach, baby roma tomatoes and panfried mushrooms. I added tinned corn kernels for a little extra colour and texture.

I was out of fruit, so I decided to fill the last compartment in my lunch box with a quick potato salad. It was pretty much an impulse lunch box item! I simply cooked a potato using a potato microwaver. I then chopped the potato into chunks and mixed them with Kewpie mayonnaise and a little wholegrain mustard, freshly cracked black pepper and chopped spring onion. I then thought a bit of carrot would be good in the salad, so I microwaved carrot in the potato microwaver. The spring onion made this potato salad really delicious. I was pleasantly surprised as it was very old spring onion that I found at the bottom of the vegie crisper in the fridge.

Good teriyaki chicken - a small teriyaki chicken and rice from Taka (AU$5.30, Barrack Street, Perth) - tender, moist skin-on chicken with perfectly clumped rice that was a pleasure to eat with chopsticks. Eating this was sheer pleasure. I just wished I’d bought the large size.

Bad teriyaki chicken - teriyaki chicken and rice from Sushi@Royal (AU$8.00, Royal Street, East Perth) - disappointingly dry chunks of chicken with rice that refused to be picked up with chopsticks. Eating this was… frustrating. I wished I’d packed a bento lunch that day.