Okay readers. I'm back! It's been about a week since my last post. It hasn't been a good bento week with continued kitchen revamp work and some overtime at my real job. So, here's everything that I want to report. Get ready, it's gonna be a long post! Plus, I'm not showing off the bento until the very end. Don't cheat! Don't scroll down to the end first. Stick around and ready my woeful adventures in kitchen cooking first!
First, Lunch Buckets asked how the kitchen renovation was coming along. My answer is: slowly, but surely. I have gotten myself back to a point where I can cook. I still have some painting and other work to be done. It's taking a bit longer than I expected, but I'm happy with the results so far. No complaints on the diy renovation end.
Here's a picture of one section of the kitchen basically done. The cabinets have been painted white; the doors, a sage green. The new cabinet hinges and pulls are a pretty oil rubbed bronze finish. Some cabinets are getting back their doors; some are not. Whatever you do, DON'T LOOK DOWN! The floors look bad as does the kitchen countertop. Those are the next phases of this renovation (read that as sometime next year).
With this kitchen update, I decided to update to a newer stove. It arrived Saturday. Wheee! It is a ceramic glass stove. Just when I was feeling fairly good about my cooking, I've gone and changed my stove. I'm back to not being able to boil an egg! ACK! We will persevere though.
One of the most exciting things to me about this new stove is the oven window. Look at that! You can see those ready-to-bake rolls browning! I couldn't see anything through the previous stove's window. I find this to be the best feature of this stove. Well, maybe not the BEST! But it definitely ranks in the top 3.
While cooking dinner, I realized I didn't want to just move a pot from one burner to another like I did with my previous coil stove. Okay, I'll move the pot to this little table I put next to the stove just for that purpose. Uh oh! What do I put that hot pot on? I don't want to burn the top of the table. A trivet. I need a trivet! Uh oh! I don't even OWN a trivet. What is a culinarily challenged gal to do? Out comes the mini cast iron skillet I normally use for decoration. This cast iron skillet once led a wonderful life. It was owned by my grandfather who used it to cook. The man was an awesome cook. Now it is owned by his granddaughter, who uses it as a trivet. Poor little skillet. It has come down a few notches in its culinary prowess.
Now that I have properly bemoaned the poor fate of the skillet (as I promised it I would), here is some really exciting news! The items in this post were prepared in part with the help of a new set of kitchen knives! Wheeee! I had a gift card to a local department store. I decided this gift card was destined to become something kitchen related. I looked through the store not seeing anything that caught my eye until I came to the knife area. "Eureka," I thought. I could use some more kitchen knives. My current collection consists of an odd assortment of paring and steak knives. One knife that is sort of longish but not real wide that looks like a paring knife on steroids with a pituitary problem. My other knife is a large chef's knife I suppose. None of them cut especially well, despite my attempts at sharpening them (I'm most likely doing something wrong). There sat two great looking knives by Calphalon that promise to be my best kichen friends. Folks, they slice, they dice, they mince. They pick up your food like a spatula and transfer it to the skillet. (Or so the packaging says). I love my new knives. Run out a buy yourself a pair today.
Now to the dinner that will become the bento of today's post. Not only did I work on the kicthen today, I also hauled off 2 car loads worth of stuff to a local charity. Clothes, furniture, and house goods went. I'm in a purge-this-house phase. It was a long day. By the time I thought of dinner, there wasn't much time to cook before I knew my body would collapse. Out came the turkey sausage. Sausage is my quick-cook meal when I don't have alot of time. I learned a recipe from my cousin Tammy, who I shared a rental place with when I first came out of college. She would take sausage, cut it into slices, fry it up quickly in the pan, add some bbq sauce at the end, and slap the whole thing between two pieces of bread. Very tasty.
Tonight, I decided I would cook sausage, but use my grill pan instead and not slice up the sausage. It turned out to sort of be a faked bbq sausage, with grill marks and everything without the mess of firing up the bbq pit!
Here are my links of sausage nicely grilled. Next step is to just brush on a bit of bbq sauce and cook a little more to heat up the sauce.
Then serve! Leftovers from this dinner became...
tomorrow's bento. In tomorrow's bento we have:
- Faked BBQ sausage with sweet potato chunks.
- A small navel orange, blueberries, boiled egg.
- The container has a bit of butter for the two pieces of bread (not shown) that will go with this bento.
