Friday, October 2, 2009

ECHOES #4



Lots of different textures, and repeating ingredients in different forms.

The main dish (all compartments are equal) is Hillshire Farms turkey keilbasa, with sauted potato slices, onions, cortland apples,  finished with sauerkraut and Cabot Monterey Jack.  As with bento 3 there are both blueberries and concord grapes - they look very much alike except for size.

There are fresh cucumbers and pickled cucumbers (Alton Brown's kinda sorta sours recipe), cooked onions and pickled onions, cooked apples and a fresh apple, melted monty jack and a star of monterey jack in the fresh apple, cut with a linzer cookie insert.
 
The fresh apple is honeycrisp, which is quite possibly the best apple in the world, despite my fondness for the apples of my youth.  It's a great apple to carry already cut because it doesn't brown. The honeycrisp and cortlands are both from Hacketts' Orchard in South Hero, one of the islands in Lake Champlain connected to the rest of the state by a causeway.

The bento box is a tin that held L.L Bean milk chocolate coated blueberries.  The plastic insert probably won't last for very many bentos, and I'll have to remove the keilbasa mix if I want to heat it, but it was just what I needed for this morning.

This bento: keilbasa melt, broccoli, blueberries, concord grapes, cucumbers, homemade pickles, honeycrisp apple, monterey jack star.

Local foods: onions and pickles from my garden. cucumber from Sam Mazza's, apples from Hacketts, Cabot cheese.