http://www.tastespotting.com/ is described as...

Founded in January 2007 on the idea that we eat first with our eyes, TasteSpotting is our obsessive, compulsive collection of eye-catching images that link to something deliciously interesting on the other side. Think of TasteSpotting as a highly visual potluck of recipes, references, experiences, stories, articles, products, and anything else that inspires exquisite taste.

We don’t use the term “potluck” for the hell of it. Everyone brings something to the party here: the user community submits images/links from around the web and the editorial team reviews the submissions. What finally gets served up on the site is a beautifully refined set of the community’s contributions.

...and is a collection of frankly beautiful images of food that I would love to cook. The recipes are pretty well done, but it's the photographs that are inspiring. I can't gush about this site enough--and I'm not even the cook of the duo!

You need a crock pot, a stove, and a pan (preferably 2). There are three primary elements to the meal. The onion-and-tomato topping, the steak itself, and the pepper stuffing.

The steak should be thin-cut raw sandwich steak, or thin-cut pieces of beef intended to be quickly cooked on the stove. This kind of cut is usually relatively tough, so it needs to be marinaded. A simple marinade of steak sauce and lemon juice for a few hours should be sufficient, but it depends on the quality of the meat you purchase.

• steak sauce
• 2 standard-size packs of thin-cut sandwich steak
• lemon juice

Put the steak into a gallon plastic bag, dump in enough steak sauce and lemon juice to coat the steak. Zip and fold up the plastic bag around the steak, then refrigerate on a platter to prevent leakage.

Then make the topping.

Put 1 tub of margarine into a microwavable bowl. Add worchestershire sauce, hot sauce, lemon juice, paprika, old bay^*. Melt in the microwave, stir. Taste, adjust ingredients to taste. Pour into warmed crock pot (on the hot setting).

• 2 baskets of cherry tomatoes.
• 2 onions

Quarter the onions into a petal shape, then peel apart. Place into crock pot. Stir. Cover.

Depending on your crock pot's settings, times may vary, but around the time your onions taste sweet and your tomatoes look wrinkled, it's time to prepare the stuffing.

^{* If you aren't from the Maryland area, this may be difficult to come by. However, you can google a recipe to make old bay yourself with relative ease. It's just a spice mixture popular in the region.}

• 1 sandwich baggie full of cut bell peppers^*
• 1 carrot
• 1 cucumber

^{* My family is friends with farmers, so we have a lot of bell peppers and tend to slice them, then freeze bags with mixes of the three main colors mixed in. I used 1 sandwich bag worth, which was probably about a pepper and a half.}

Cut the vegetables. Use a julienne cut--slices should resemble match-sticks and be about 1/4" wide and about 3" long (I cut the cucumber and carrot in half, to be about the size of my bell pepper slices).

Warm a skillet or pan on your stove, wiped down with olive oil to prevent sticking. Add your vegetables. Season with standard green herbs: oregano, basil, parsley. Also add paprika. Stir and flip until vegetable juices begin to accumulate in the bottom of the pan.

Remove the steaks from the fridge and cook on the stove in another oiled pan (I used a griddle because they're bigger and it's a lot of steak in terms of surface area).

Take a finished steak and place on a plate. Using tongs (or normal utensils, but the tongs make it much easier), place julienned vegetables in the center of the steak, crossing the thinner section of the steak. Wrap the steak around the vegetables and secure with toothpicks (I recommend using two). Repeat until plate is full or you're out of steak. Then spoon the onion/tomato mixture from the crock pot on top of the vegetables and serve with a knife and fork.

This was enough to feed three people, but they also work as hors d'œuvres though they aren't bite-sized. Perhaps tapas would be the better term?

Then an article in the New York Times covered a method that has been catching on recently: the bento box.  I won't get into the history of bento, but one of the interesting ideas behind bento boxes is that if you fill your box with normal food (for example, not with chocolate fudge), the size of the bento equals roughly how many calories you are eating.  It's an interesting way to control caloric intake.

Another thing that a bento does well is food separation.  Why carry three tupperware containers of various sizes because you don't want to mix strawberries with chicken teriyaki?  A bento box with dividers will keep your food separated, either in different sections on the same "level", or in a different tier if you have a multi-tier bento box.

Personally, I use a two-tier bento box that fits approximately 580ml of food, or just shy of 2.5 cups worth of food.  So, my meal each day is about 580 calories.

What do I put into a bento?  I generally go for laziness over creativity - I make a little extra for dinner the night before, pack the bento and let it cool on the countertop, then refrigerate it overnight.  I try, however, to pack foods that will do well in a bento: small pieces of chicken, miniature burgers (I love Just Bento's meat and tofu recipe), small-cut vegetables, small fruits, etc.  Liquid-based and very heavily sauced items can leak out if your box isn't water-tight; extra sauce can be kept in little bento sauce bottles.

Despite this, I love to grill. Most of my parties are outside, where my family has a big, elevated fireplace that we made out of cinderblocks and firebrick, a brick oven (made by us of the same material), a nice big cinderblock grill with two heights for the coal, and a smoker (which we didn't make, but it's still awesome). In my family, we take grilling seriously. Hotdogs and hamburgers are not allowed at my parties; I grew up on venison bites, made from deer shot by the next-door-neighbors who came to the pitfires my dad hosted (which were the center of the neighborhood). Nothing compares to the baked beans my mother makes on the grill, and the best apple pie I've ever had was made in the brick oven right beside it.

Now that I'm older, I host my own parties out on that patio. It's not the neighbors who come, but friends of mine (though neighbors are always welcome, we tend to stay out later than the retired folks who live where I grew up), and we don't cook my parents' food. We cook mine. There still aren't hotdogs, though, and I'm not the kind of person who cooks with a recipe; I cook by eye. On the grill, it's the only way to be sure.

I had never really cooked before I hosted my first party, but I had a friend who was vegetarian and I love(d) chicken, so we started from there and raided the garage cabinets for stuff to season with. Here's what we use:

• Olive Oil
• Montreal Steak Seasoning
• Lemon Pepper Seasoning
• Old Bay*
• Honey
• BBQ Sauce
• Hot Sauce

Light up the grill and get it going. Then break out the tin foil and cover the hottest section of the grill with a piece of foil.** With a clean paint brush, brush the foil with olive oil, then put a pack worth of chicken tenders down on the foil and brush the top of the chicken with oil as well. In your mind, divide the foil into quarters, and drizzle honey on all of the chicken in the top right hand corner, BBQ sauce on the chicken in the top left hand corner, Old Bay on the chicken in the bottom right hand corner, and lemon pepper seasoning on the remaining chicken. Obviously you don't have to be that specific, but make sure you keep track of which section is which.

I've heard that the proper way to cook on the grill is to only flip the meat once, but I don't think that's as fun, so flip whenever you feel the urge to check and make sure your meat isn't burned. Every time you flip the meat, add more seasoning. Don't worry that the seasoning is sliding off and mingling with the other seasonings on other pieces of chicken because of the oil and fat; it's supposed to do that, because it adds a nice flavor under the primary taste (which is why we don't just mix them all together on all the pieces).

When the meat starts to brown, I usually slice a piece in half to make sure that the middle isn't pink (because I tend not to be super confident in my cooking, and my mother almost died from salmonella and I'm paranoid). If the meat is done, I eat that piece, since I've already cut it, take the meat off of the grill, put it on a paper plate, and hand the plate off to someone. They pass it around, and if it gets all the way around the group without being finished off, it gets sat down on the table.

Then I open up a second pack of chicken, and make half of it plain and half of it with the Montreal Steak Seasoning, which tends to be the most popular in my group of friends. I use the same piece of tinfoil and cook it the same way. At this point, people's appetites are usually dulled, which is good because vegetables tend to take awhile on the grill, the way I cook them.

First, a basket of cherry tomatoes. They go onto the chicken foil, which is then shaped into a bowl-ish shape. Pick the foil up and put it onto another piece of foil, because the original foil is probably punctured and worn in places. Then the tomatoes are drenched with olive oil, hot sauce, old bay and steak seasoning, then the foil is wrapped around them, with the excess foil twisted into a kind of handle at the top.

Next, chop two or three onions (this is the most popular dish by far at my parties) into bite-sized pieces, roughly the size of a half-dollar. Think onion petals, not rings. Brush a piece of tin foil with olive oil, put some hot sauce, butter, old bay and steak seasoning on top of the onions, and them wrap it up the same way you did the tomatoes.

You can cook green peppers the same way.

While those cook, take a couple of big tomatoes (we get ours from a local farm owned by the family of my neighbor's son-in-law. I used to pick peppers there as a kid) and cut them into quarters. Lay them out side-by-side, skin-side down on a sheet of tin foil, then pour about half a jar of salsa on top.

Cook the tomatoes (both sets) until the skin wrinkles. Cook the onions until they taste sweet. You can cook them longer (and they'll taste even better as long as the heat isn't too high. Don't burn them!), but that's the soonest you should take them off.

While you're waiting for the vegetables to cook, take a tinfoil bowl (don't make it; buy the little foil containers like they make pot pies in, it's worth the dollar or so) and fill it with butter. Then add fresh-mashed garlic and let it melt down and goo. Slice some fresh french bread (from the store, or you can make it yourself if you're brave and talented. I never have the patience to bake bread in the brick oven), brush it with the garlic butter, and toast it on the grill. Directly on the grill is fine this time, but make sure you watch carefully to make sure the bread doesn't burn. Flip frequently.

Make enough for everyone. Let people help. Have a good time while you cook. Between the fire and the food, we always have enough fun that it's never necessary to break out desperate measures like cards or beer pong, which suits me just fine.

_{* If you aren't from Maryland, you may have a hard time getting your hands on Maryland-style crab seasoning, but it's relatively easy to make. Google old bay seasoning and you'll see a bunch. Here's one that seems reliable.
** I catch a lot of grief for doing this, but I'm not really a fan of burned meat or the taste of charcoal. Besides which, if you put the foil down, the chicken cooks in its own juices and tastes more like the seasonings, and you don't create sparks when oil and fat drip down into the coals.}

Ingredients

1 large chicken breast, cut into bite size pieces
1/3 lb short pasta, such as penne or farfalle
2 cups chopped vegetables of your choice - I like to use carrots, broccoli, red peppers and cauliflower or asparagus
4 large sundried tomato slices, julienned
1 shallot, chopped fine
2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
2-3 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup prepared pesto sauce, or 5-6 Tbsp homemade pesto
A few pinches of salt for the pasta water
Salt and pepper to taste
Grated Parmesan or Grana Padano (optional)

Instructions

Heat a large pot of generously salted water, and add the pasta when boiling.  Heat a nonstick frying pan on medium, and sautee the chopped shallots and garlic, then add the chicken and sautee until almost cooked through.  Add the vegetables and sundried tomatoes; cook until tender.  When the pasta is al dente, drain, rinse, and add to the frying pan, then pour the pesto sauce or homemade pesto on top and mix thoroughly to combine and heat the sauce.  If using homemade pesto, add a few tablespoons of chicken broth to keep everything moist. Add salt and pepper to taste, and top with grated cheese.

Vegetarian?  Substitute very firm, well-drained tofu for the chicken, use vegetable broth, and a Parmesan with vegetable or microbial rennet.