HAPPY BOXING DAY~

Merry Xmas with love from the both of us... =)

Xmas dinner was Curry spiced roasted chicken, baked potatoes n warm garlic mozarella with tomato salad the beauty of petit cakes.... was being able to have 3 different xmas cakes in one night

Breakfast this morning was late cos J couldnt wake up on time.

so i baked sesame n cream cheese pound loaf while he was snoozing.

Otsukaresama! (means Its been a hard day!)

For most people, todays the last day at work.

And in the spirit of the Japanese drinking culture, i made dinner with dishes one would eat at the pub in Japan. Basically, today was Tendon (tempura chips with egg sauce on rice), Vegetable sticks with miso dip, burdock salad, consomme soup with baked rice cake and...

for the first time i tried stir frying squid inerts (which i usually throw out), with some spicy miso paste and garlic... yummy! goes well with beer~

Tomorrow is the start of our year end holiday!~

Home grilled yakitori

we had Yakitori today!!!

Yakitori (BBQ chcicken on bamboo sticks) grilled in the home oven!

I am very surprised at how pretty the grill marks were created just by popping it into my steam oven. =) ah~ the power of the latest technology!

served with mashed potatoes, seaweed salad, miso soup and rice
I simply love the crunchy and chewy combination of the seaweed salad mix i bought from a Hokkaido fair last week. Yes MUM, this was what i was shopping for when you called.
This kind of seaweed is very commonly found in the supermart in the dried form, but these fresh ones i bought came packed in a lot of salt so they last in the fridge for a few months.
Simply tossed it in some Japanese light soya sauce dressing and sesame oil and topped with some crabsticks, this salad was light and refreshing!

I soooooooooo wanted to eat the dutch spiced cake that i had a year ago in Amsterdam. Around this time of the year i usually crave gingerbread cookies, but last year when i had this spiced cake called Ontbijtkoek that the Dutch commonly have for breakfast, i just fell in love with the gingery cinammon flavour.........

I decided to bake the richer version Kruidkoek today using this recipe that i got online from a Dutch lady

replaced the molasses in the recipe with Okinawan dark brown sugar though. The effect is about the same.

Dinner tonight was supposed to go with beer as requested

So i made Nikujaga which is a simmered dish with thinly sliced pork or beef, potatoes and carrots. On the side were, egg drop vegetable soup, baked white cabbage with melted cheese and crabsticks and steamed rice with added strips of daikon


Dessert these few days have been extravagant.

Since it is strawberry season..................................

we have been having looots of them

have you heard of white strawberries?

nope, not the unripe ones.

these are ripe, white but very sweet.

very expensive though. i heard about them on TV this morning. On sale for 5250yen (about USD50) for 9 to 15 pieces in each box.

oden weekend

I made oden on fri night and it lasted us 3 dinners...

J says he can eat oden for 1 week!
Here is fridays oden...
And when the soup was thicker the next day, it looked mirkier, but it was even tastier.
Basically Oden (おでん) is a winter dish consisting of several ingredients such as boiled eggs, daikon radish, konnyaku, and processed fish cakes stewed in a light, soy-flavoured dashi broth. Ingredients vary according to region and between each household. We usually add sausages and baby octopus in too. this time, i added taro too. Add anything into the pot, and it becomes really really tasty when eaten a day or two later.


Anyway, this was fridays J obento

Eggs wrapped in simmered soybeancurd skin and suteed white cabbage with minced pork

Today was so so cold and rainy, we decided to hibernate at home

For lunch, i made a simple dish of baked spinach in bean omelette, topped with cream cheese bits and parmesan

and we had it with varoious breads we bought yesterday.


I hope it will be warmer tomorrow...

craving korean food

i was craving korean food today.

dont know why, but just wanted to have kimchi soup and korean seaweed....

this time i tried to make the seaweed on my own though using a brush, i spread a thin layer of sesame oil on each layer of seeweed, sprinkled rough salt and toasted sesame seeds, and pressed a few layers of these seaweed between pieces of kitchen paper before toasting them in the oven for 1 min.

=) craving satisfied.

oyster kimchi chige (chige=thick soup in korean)

this was dinner last night.

Main was Olive oil and white wine steamed Mekajiki (a kind of sword fish commonly eaten in Japan and Hawaii), with white cabbage soup, and pink daikon mayo salad with thinly shredded cheese topping

Since JLPT is over, i am super genki (full of energy) everyday. i baked tomato yoghurt scones in the morning yesterday for breakfast.

(notice the chopsticks on the right. yup, that is so J. having western breakfast with chopsticks)

This was J obento. Simmered fried potatoes and pork slices, spinach salad and ham omelette.

Pink daikon

Winter is the season for daikon (Japanese white radish). Well, usually white. But today i found this at the local vegetable seller.

Pink daikon.

No, not genetically modified.

We had it with grilled fish for dinner.

It is common to eat salt grilled fish with grated daikon to balance out the saltiness.

This was our tonjiru (pork miso soup) tonight.

Tonjiru is the more extravagant version of miso soup. So along with slices of pork, there was thinly sliced burdock, carrots, daikon, shiitake and konnyaku. Since it is taro season, i added taro in too.

This was bento yesterday. Sukiyaki style pork with tofu, simmered taro and carrots from the previous night dinner.

The first time i made pasta with home made bechamel sauce.

This was dinner on sunday night. I cant emphasize enough how cold it is getting day by day. So on a super cold sunday night, we had this nourishing white soup based hot pot. The soup colour was basically a result of many hours of boiling chicken collagen. We added loads of mushrooms, white cabbage, grilled tofu and meat balls in there. and the 2 of us finished it all. On my side, i was basically very relieved the JLPT (annual Japanese Language Proficiency Test) is over, hence the huge appetite. J was probably very hungry. No wifey in the house for lunch equals cheesecake and crackers for lunch for the hubby.

Today was really really cold.
just going out made my head hurt a lil.
i guess i just have to go out more often to get used to the chill.

to warm us up,

lunch was kimchi natto yakisoba

いか塩辛入りのキムチ納豆やきそば

焼そばといえばやっぱりキャベツが入ってるものですが、今回はキムチと旬の白菜を入れました。

Dinner

simmered squid with taro and carrots in scallop broth

Chinese style wok fried white cabbage with 6 treasures

(usually called 8 treasures wok fried cabbage, but today, i added just 6.) i got those lovely gingko nuts from Okaasan’ s friend’ s garden.
Simmered winter pumkin

soyabean steamed rice

I heard it is going to be colder tomorrow...

J obento

Sardine burgers wtih miso meat sauce and burdock salad from last nights dinner

For Friday night special...

pumpkin soya bean gratin

with stewed daikon and daikon leaves steamed rice

Stewed daikon in yuzu broth with mini sausages

I made yoghurt scones today~
Again, using yoghurt cream (super creamy leftover of yoghurt left on a coffee drip overnight)

the resulting texture was a cross between hard scones and fluffy bread.
those polka dots are rum infused raisins topped on top of the dough before baking.
didnt want to mix them in this time =P
i had them with cream cheese and ham for lunch.

J had this for lunch...

J obento

Sautted chicken in pizza sauce, macaroni salad, butter rice with smoked cheese bits topping

For dinner today, i used yuzu (Japanese citrus) that i bought from somebody’ s garden.
In Japan, it is common to find small packs of vegetables, fruit, or anything that can be grown in the garden, sold outside the home entrance. Just drop in the into the coin box usually provided next to the produce.

I dropped the yuzu slices into the pot and broiled this pregnant flatfish in sweet soya sauce for 15minutes....
we had the fish with a side burdock salad and pumkin and onion milky miso soup

spicy burdock salad made with korean miso

daikon and daikon leaves steamed rice
Daikon (Japanese white radish) is in season now and the local vegetable seller is selling a few varieties this season. This is the standard white daikon that came with the bunch of leaves sprouting from the daikon top. I sauteed the daikon strips and leaves in soya sauce and wine and popped them in the rice cooker.

The frangrance was amazing~

Oh, remember the orange cauliflower?

Apparantly, it was dicovered in some Canadian marsh 30 years ago

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-06-14-orange-cauliflower_x.htm
This variety has more Vitamin A and B carotene compared to the white one.

yoghurt cake

I made yoghurt cake today~

freshly out of the oven, it looked like baked cheese cake

we had this for dessert after 3 hours of refrigeration...

creamy yoghurt cake topped it with waffle rusks

Without the addition of cream cheese, i was surprised by how creamy and cheese like the cake tasted like. Point was to drain the water off the yoghurt until you get less than half the original weight of the yoghurt. I whipped 200g(from 500g) of yoghurt with 2 eggs, 90g sugar, added some vanilla essence and 2 tsp lemon juice and folded in 25g of flour. Baked it at 170degC for 30min.

J Bento

Fried sesame crusted chicken cutlet, sausage and nori salad, sauteed spinach and corn

Dinner today

Big scallop mapo style, mini minestrone, white cabbage pickles

Mapo style scallops topped with bonito shavings on a hot bowl of rice~