7.01.2009

XIV

So this update is all about....FOOD! Japanese food to be exact. I did say I'll do posts on food from my description *points up top* And here goes.

Today, I'll be talking about my long over-due blog post about Japanese food XD; Since my cousin came back from Japan in April, or May, she brought back some yummy instant stuff hah.

Here's a picture of our Japanese instead food cupboard before her arrival.


The stuff that we got. I X'd out what we already ate.



This next section are my creations. It's a simple Japanese meal that can be cooked by ANYBODY :D


First up is Miso Soup:


Quite easy really. All you do is boil a pot of water and for every small packet of miso, you put in one packet of dashi!

I used one packet from this box:


And a packet of this:


picture credits to http://www.tokyokan.fi/miso07.jpg and http://musable.com/images/dashi_02042007.jpg


Next up is Onigiri! Or Rice Balls.


All I did is cooked some rice. Then you need to have 2 bowls with you. One bowl is filled with water and salt. The other bowl is for where you put your chunk of rice. So this is how it goes:

Scoop out some rice to your desired size.
Wet your hands with the water and salt mixture.
Take the rice into your hands and start shaping it to whatever shape you want.
Then you're done!

You can add furikake (dried up vegetables. it's the colourful stuff you can see in my rice balls. and it comes in packets or little bottles) to your rice balls or put stuff in the middle like corned beef, canned tuna, preserved plum or whatever else you want. You could also cover it with seaweed or cover just a bit. Be creative! ^_^


And the main course is Chicken Karaage. It's really yummy hehe.

So I marinaded the chicken wings overnight. Two parts cooking wine to one part soy sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste and you NEED ginger juice. I kind of just eye-balled all these so you might have to as well. I didn't use that much ginger juice though but you realllly need it.

Wash the chicken and then put it in a biiig Ziploc bag with the marinade inside and leave it in your fridge overnight. Then it'll come out like this!


Then you need two bowls. Fill one bowl with alot of cornstarch and dust the surface of the other bowl with cornstarch as well. See, like so:


And then you need to have a small pot ready. It needs to be filled with oil halfway through and must be very hot. I suggest you set this up before you take the chicken out of the fridge so it's really hot by the time you put your chicken in. After you put your marinaded then coated chicken in the pot of super hot oil, take the heat down to medium. This allows the inside of the chicken to be cooked while not burning the outside.


You have to poke it halfway through to let some oil in to help cook it inside as well. And don't forget to turn the chicken over!

Then after all this hard work, you get chicken karaage! Yum yum yum.



I hope you guys enjoyed this insanely long post -_-; But yeah. :) Comment and share your experiences!