Did I hear somebody say meat? Probably.

Last week I wanted yakiniku, as I always do, and was trying to think of a way to get X and her friend (who was visiting) to go to Aeon so I could suggest we eat yakiniku. Instead, X suggested it first and I was happy.

The meat at the top of the picture (the really fatty stuff) is called "karubi", and the slices at the bottom are "rosu." Karubi is considered to be the best cut of beef for yakiniku. We got the "yaki yasai" tray, which comes with onions, bell pepper, mushrooms, pumpkin, corn, and lots of cabbage. Yaki yasai basically means grilled veggies, except you get to grill them yourself. What kind of place makes you cook your own food? I like my meat black on the outside, but I usually can't wait that long. The best parts come at the end when the grill is covered in fat and leftovers that stick to the last pieces of meat....mmmmmm, soooo gooood. The pumpkin is also best when it's covered in black bubbles. As is the onion....I think it's safe to say I like everything blackened.
And that was all she wrote.

...

Anyone catch the movie quote?

Dinner Delight

So dinner on Wednesday was spectacularly good. I made fried chicken salad with honey mustard dressing. Nothing like some fried chicken to make life complete. This dish was actually a lot easier than I expected it to be. So, first I got all my ingredients together.
For the salad, I used lettuce, tomatoes and some cheese. The honey mustard dressing uses honey, rice wine vinegar and mustard. For the fried chicken, I used panko, which is like the Japanese version of bread crumbs, paprika, salt, 2 eggs, and of course, chicken.
So I quickly threw the salad together. Chop the lettuce, cut the mini tomatoes in half, toss in a handful of cheese. Then I set it aside to make the honey mustard dressing, which I got from Alton Brown off the Food Network. Actually the only thing I took away from that recipe was the ingredients: mustard, honey and rice wine vinegar. Japan has yet to discover yellow smooth mustard, so I used dijon mustard. I also didn't follow the measurements. I used two spoons of mustard, two spoons of rice wine vinegar, and about 3 spoons of honey. And then I mixed it and that was that. So, I set that aside to start the chicken. So, I cubed my chicken, and then cracked two eggs into a bowl. I used two eggs and I had a lot left over, so maybe one would be good enough. In another shallow bowl, I combined the panko, paprika, and a little salt.

The easiest way to bread something, for me, is to use one hand for the eggs, and one hand for the bread crumbs. I tossed some chicken into the egg mix, and shook off any extra egg. If you have too much egg on the chicken, it will just make the breading mix clumpy.

After shaking off any extra egg, I dropped the chicken in the breading mix and rolled it around a bit. I don't think there is a need to pack it on. I think if you add too much breading, it doesn't get crispy when you fry it, just kind of soggy and mediocre. Since it's so hard to get rid of oil here, I don't deep fry anything. I just added a little more oil than I usually use. And since I'm also really lazy, I packed all the chicken into the pan at once. I recommend putting the chicken when it starts to get hot so you don't burn yourself on accident when the oil is really hot. When the chicken started turning white on the sides, and the bottom turned a crispy golden color, I turned them over to cook for another minute or two. After it was finished, I got a plate and put two paper towels on it and put the chicken on it to get rid of any extra oil sticking to the chicken. I also used another paper towel to pat the tops too. So once the chicken was finished, I grabbed my salad and the honey mustard dressing. I put the dressing on the salad before I added the chicken, because I didn't want the dressing to over power the crispiness of the chicken. After that, I just added the chicken and I was done. This was the first time I had made this and it only took me 30 minutes, which was great, because that means the next time I make it, it will take even less time. And it was DELICIOUS. Hmm,after posting this, I just want to make it again tonight! Well, I'm off to the store to find some food. If you have any good recipes or suggestions let me know and I'll try to make it!

Real Food Dinner

Lately, I've really been craving the kind of food I would normally cook back in America: baked chicken, corn, salad, rosemary potatoes, frittata. So today I decided to make mashed potatoes, sauteed chicken strips and some veggies. I usually dislike mashed potatoes, but I find them a lot more enjoyable when the potato skin is also in the mix.

I went to the store to buy ingredients and ran into Guild Leader X. We decided to make dinner together, as we sometimes do, because we share a love of all things food. I forgot to take a picture of everything this time, but we used about 6-8 baby potatoes, one pack of chicken strips, one clove of garlic, about 4 -6 stalks of aspara, one small head of broccoli, butter, milk, and some olive oil.

So the first thing we did was prep and boil the potatoes. First, we set a pot of water on to boil. X scrubbed the potatoes clean, and I chopped them into about 1 inch squares. After we used a ladle to drop them into the boiling water, because the water splashed a lot when we tried to plop them in. Unfortunately, these two didn't make it. RIP potatoes.

So then we let the potatoes boil for a while. During this time, X and I searched Craigs List, looking for lvl 8 Norwegian brawler warriors to complete our circle of luv~. Alas, all those we found were allergic to cats. Better luck next time.

So, after the potatoes were done boiling, X got started mashing them up and adding milk and butter as she saw fit. Btw, you can tell when the potatoes are done when you stick a toothpick or knife in them and it comes out easily. These were pretty small pieces so it only took about 10 minutes for them to boil.

While X was doing that, I got started chopping the aspara and boiling the broccoli. I put another pot of water on the boil, and chopped the broccoli up and tossed it in. I let it boil just long enough to let the broccoli turn a nice bright green, then drained them. I diced the garlic and chopped the aspara. I got a pan, put some oil in it, added the garlic and turned it on medium heat.

After the garlic flavors the oil for a but, I put the chicken strips in and didn't touch them until it was time to turn them. They didn't get as brown on the outside as I had wanted, but I think it's because I didn't have the heat up high enough, but any higher and the garlic would have burned.
So after I flipped them, X and I decided that we should toss the broccoli in too. And that pretty much completed the dish. We got some plates, used complex physics equations to split the meal in half, and dug in. It was exactly what I was craving. Good stuff!

ughhh...

I stayed up all night watching Fantasy Couple and only got 2 hours of sleep. ugghghuughhgh...not capable of intelligent thought....

Fantasy Couple is a total knock-off of Overboard, the movie with Goldie Hawn where she loses her memory. I like the korean drama a lot more than the movie. I should go to bed early tonight, but I'm totally going to finish the series instead.

Lazy Sunday~

I had an office party last night, and didn't get in until midnight, which has become what 3am used to be for me. So I slept in a bit this morning. I've actually been really lazy all day. I'm addicted to poupee girls and I can't seem to tear myself away. Well, finally my hunger could not be ignored around 3:30, so I went to my little fridge to see what wasn't growing it's own colony.
Hmm, well not much was in there. I decided to use the rest of my eggs and lettuce to make a salad and scrambled eggs. I tossed some cheese into the eggs as they were cooking, but honestly, I couldn't taste the cheese. Probably because it was that really nasty square processed cheese. Oh well, I guess you take what you can get. The eggs were still good.
The salad was the same as usual: lettuce, tomato, balsamic vinegar. Normal stuff. The lettuce was really dirty, which was annoying. I hate washing lettuce. Wet leafy greens are disgusting. The second I return home, I will be buying a salad spinner.
It was pretty good. Normal. I really need to go to the store and get some groceries, but I'm feeling so lazy and I don't really have anything to wear, since EVERYTHING I own is dirty. Haha. So I think I'll stay put and do a little cleaning. Maybe snack on a yogurt....

Le sigh~

I have recently started to eat yogurt, mostly as an alternative to bread and snacky type foods. And I had thought I had found my favorite in a mixed berry yogurt sold at the Shiroyama, but today I had the BEST yogurt ever. It was a mixed acerola and apple yogurt.

It was so good and surprisingly sweet and it had little bits of crunchy apple in it. I think I bought it at Lawsons, but since all their stores don't carry the same stock, it doesn't really matter.

It's Dinner Time!

Well, I've been feeling pretty tired recently and for now, meat is off the menu. Well, most meat. I don't think I could go cold turkey. So, tonight I decided to make a nice basic salad.

I used green lettuce, mini tomatoes, onion, avacado, a little cheese, and some nama ham to munch on while i cut everything up. So, salad is pretty easy to make, so I'm not gonna insult anyone by telling you how to cut stuff up. The only thing that might offer some difficultly are the avacados.

Avacados are one of the most delicious foods ever, but they are a little tricky to figure out when to eat. I buy them green and hard. I let them sit in a bowl on the counter until they turn black and get soft to the touch. Not too soft though, becuase if you let them get mushy, then they start to grow and go bad inside. When mine get ripe before I want to eat them, I stick them in the fridge and they last forever, well, for like a week at least. To get the seed out, I thwack it with a big knife and twist it out. To get the seed off the knife, bang the seed on the cutting board with the knife flat.

Then toss all the ingredients together. I season it with dried garlic chips, a little black pepper and a little salt. I made a balsamic vinegar dressing. I use just a tiny bit of oil and tons of vinegar. I like it to make a hole in my stomach when I eat it. Sooo good. You'll also notice that the vinegar will start to break down the avacado and your dressing will get nice and creamy. All in all, a good dinner.

The King's disease...or shall I say Queen's...

So, considering what a complainer I am, I'm sure everyone who reads this blog (all 5 of you) knows that I may or may not have gout. In my poor lil foot. The doctor's are convinced after poking my foot for 10 seconds, with no actual tests to support their beliefs, that I have gout...or maybe a bacterial infection. Or maybe aliens planted their spawn there. I'm still going with the fractured bone theory myself. Either way, I won't be doing any shopping for some time.

Because of my injury, I needed to re-stock a few things, like heating pads and calcium pills. So after work, I headed to the drug store. First I went looking for heating pads. There was half an isle of all kinds of pads and the only one I could interpret that said "hotto" was sold out. So I asked some worker guy to help me, and I said, which of these things is hot? He hmmmmed and sssssed for a while and then reached down and handed me a package that said "cooling." Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know you couldn't read. So I was like no, I want HOT. He hmmmed and ssssed again and finally ran away to find another person to help me. The next guy walks right up, hands me a box and says that's the only one they have that is hot. I was like, great, thanks for your help, moving on.

Next I bought a bottle of calcium. Holy mother of god, that stuff is expensive!! I spent 12$ on a small bottle of "Nature's Own." I almost bought the big 20$ bottle b/c some jackass had put rose hip in front of the small bottles. But I still thought that maybe they had some 5$ bottle hidden somewhere on the aisle, so I stuck around and perused a bit. And that's when I found this little jem.

My first thought was F-cup? Then I wondered if the girl featured on the box was still in the stage of using the products because she def. hasn't reached the guaranteed size. And then I wondered if they didn't mean a Japanese F. And it's only 10$. What a find!

(Btw, I've fixed it so that non-blogspot ppl can post a comment. Sorry about that!)

Dinner

This is my sweet kitchen. Obviously, there's lots of room to move around. Tonight I made a sweet chili couscous with chicken and shrimp.
I used chicken, shrimp, couscous, snow peas, onion, and sweet chili sauce. I used mirin, bay leaves, and saffron for seasoning. There are asparagus in the picture, but I decided to not use them, last minute.

I started out by dicing half an onion and a handful on snow peas. Before dicing the peas, I washed and peeled the peas. Then I chopped up the chicken into cubes. I like to peel, devine, and chop the shrimp last because they can be really smelly and I don't like it when the shrimp flavor overpowers everything else. So, first I peel and devine the shrimp and then I rinse them under some cold water and pat them dry. If you really wanted to kill the smell, you could rinse them in salt water and then rinse them again in plain water and pat dry, but I'm lazy and that's just too much work for me. After that's done, I chop the shrimp up into cubes.

After all my chopping was done, I got started cooking. Cous cous cooks reallllly fast, so I didn't start on that until after cooking most of the other ingredients. I added a little olive oil to my pan and when the oil was just starting to pop I added the onions and peas. After a minute or two (I was really hungry) I pushed the veggies to the sides and tossed the chicken in.

Around this time, my water for the cous cous was boiling so I poured some cous cous in and added the bay leaves and saffron. I ended up draining the cous cous because I added way too much water, but it came out great anyway. I think the trick is to watch it and make sure it doesn't over-cook.

After draining the cous cous and finishing the chicken and veggies, I combined them in the cous cous pot, so I could cook the shrimp. I tossed the shrimp into the pan and let them cook without stirring them. To get them unstuck from the bottom of the pan I added some mirin. After I added them to the pot (minus any liquid that the shrimp and mirin created). I also added a spoon of minced garlic. Last minute, I decided to add sweet chili sauce. You can really add anything you want--good salsa, butter, herbs, cheese, whatever. The sweet chili sauce gives it a nice hot sweet taste, which I love. Lastly, I mixed it all up and that was that. Oh, also don't forget to remove the bay leaves. You don't want to eat those.

It came out really well. I was even kind of surprised. I expected it to be a little bland, but it was perfect. I stupidly had seconds and now I'm overfull. I expect I'll be eating the rest for lunch tomorrow. Yay!

Side Note

On our way home, Xing and I saw this creepy haunted apartment and then decided to walk through the park to see the sakura.

It's all green lights

After getting in late last night, I have been dead tired all day. Got up for brunch with some friends, which was nice. Then we all popped into the best (and my favorite) bread store in the city.

They didn't have any berry berry bread today, which I was cool with because I think I have a new favorite. It's a semi-dense sweet bread with nuts and caramel that has been baked to smokey perfection. Smokey's not the right word, but the only other word I think think to describe it would be burnt, but it's not burnt either. Any suggestions?

I watched Penelope when I got home, and it was a really good movie. They promoted it here, but I never actually saw it in any theaters. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. I also got 16 rejections from one job when I checked my e-mail today. That was encouraging. I think my mood matches the weather today.