Finally...Something New

This may not be japanese cuisine but it is still a tasty dish.

Irish Cabbage Rolls
Inspired by Diners, Drive-ins and Dives segment on Galway Bay Pub

Pickling Spice added to pre-corned (spiced) packaged beef

Spice amount can vary due to number of beefs you're working with. These amounts work well for 2 point cuts and 1 flat cut corned beef.

Ingredients
Prepackaged Corned Beef, point cut or flat cut (your choice)
3-5 lbs russet potatoes (Adjust amount to size of beef. Figure about 1-1/2 lbs of potatoes to 1 lb of meat. Do not substitute red or yukon gold! You need the high starch found in the russets.)




Pickling Spice
Dehydrated Onion                          2 TBSP
Mustard Seed (Yellow)                   2 TBSP
Black Pepper, Ground                    2 TBSP
White Pepper, Ground (or whole)    2 TBSP
Chili Pepper                                    2 TBSP
Allspice (whole)                              2 TBSP
Granulated Garlic                            2 TBSP
Cloves                                            2 TBSP
Black Pepper, Whole                      2 TBSP
Coriander                                      2 TBSP
Crushed Red Pepper Flakes           2 TBSP
Bay Leaves                                    4-6 Leaves

Dipping Sauce
2 cups Mayo
4 oz Stone Ground Mustard
3-4 oz Heavy Cream
Salt & Pepper
2 Tbsp Ground Yellow Mustard
2 Tbsp White Vinegar (or add to taste)

Boil 5-1/2 to 6 hours. Let cool to room temp than strip fat from meat. Chill stripped meat several hours or overnight.

Clean and boil potatoes till soft. Mash with butter.

Cut out core from cabbage and boil for 15 minutes. Let cool.


Mix up dipping sauce. NOTE: The more liquid in the dipping makes the beef and potato filling softer and more difficult to cut through the cabbage leaf without it forcing the contents out of the roll and all over the plate.

Chop cold corned beef and mix with mashed potatoes. Mix beef and potatoes with the dipping sauce. Add just enough sauce to bind the meat and potato mixture together.
Gently work cabbage leaves apart from the head. Fill leaves each with a portion of beef and potatoes. Roll up filled leaf, folding in edges as you go.

Steam for 10 minutes.

Lazy Tonkatsu

Aka...breaded pork cutlet. Usually I purchase boneless pork chops and butterfly them to make tonkatsu. Well...I just made a batch using pork cube steaks. The first main benefit of using the cube steak was not having to butterfly the meat. I was able to open the package and start breading the steak. Time saved there. The only real difference was the texture and my hubby felt that it was slightly better than the normal butterflyed chop.

Result: I'd rather save time so I'll make this again using the cube steak.

I did it!!!!!

I have been attempting on and off over the last couple of years to replicate the garlic sauteed mushrooms that can only be purchased at the Bristol Renaissance Faire. Since I tend to visit the Faire every other year, at best, I've been trying to make that mushroom dish at home. I have finally come close. You see, I found a recipe on the fatfreevegan.com for a mushroom and lentil stew. The flavors of this stew is, I think, very close to that mushroom dish offered at the Faire. So I tried it minus most of the non-mushroom ingredients and I feel I got close.

Resturant style pasta

This post isn't about the sauce. You can find those recipes or tips elsewhere. No, what I want to talk about is the actual pasta itself. You see, while I worked for a brief while in a corporate kitchen, I noticed that the spaghetti always seem to cook up into much plumper noodles than what I could cook at home. Well...that corporate kitchen used a steam oven in some way to cook their spaghetti.

To achieve the same affect, try this technique: Cook your pasta in the normal manner for the minimum amount of time. Drain off all the water and immediately pour your cooked pasta into a 2 gallon storage zip top bag. Add enough cool water to come close to covering and seal the bag. Let it sit for a while, try 20 -30 minutes and then drain off the steaming water. If the pasta has cooled too much for your liking, reheat it by dropping into boiling water for a few minutes or, much easier, microwave it.

Beef and Potato Croquettes

Ingredients
1/2 lb ground beef
1 lb potatoes
3 eggs
bread crumbs, unseasoned
oil for deep frying

Cook ground beef. If beef is too fatty, drain off half of the grease. Boil potatoes until soft then mash them until they are free from lumps. Mix cooked beef with the mashed potatoes. Scoop a handful of the mixture and compress into a patty. Beat the eggs with a bit of water to make a egg wash. Coat all sides of the patty with the egg wash, then into the bread crumbs. Heat the oil til hot. Deep fry the breaded patties until golden brown. Drain on paper towel.

Note: The grease is needed to help bind the potatoes together. An 80/20 blend should work best without draining off the grease. Also, you should be using regular old breadcrumbs, not panko breadcrumbs. This is because you can not get an even coating with panko. They are too flaky to coat the patty very well.

Note: 7-21-07: Used 85/15 ground beef and added all of the beef and grease to the potatoes. Potatoes were also mashed fine. I also used a hamburger press to even out the thickness of the patties. It worked out real well. However, the mixture is very soft and crumbly. So I put the patties in to the freezer until I could work with them without them falling apart. It worked but some still fell apart as I dipped them in the egg and breaded them. Perhaps next time, I’ll add a few eggs to bind the mixture better since just the beef grease alone isn’t enough.

Something different to add to your bentos

On impulse, I bought some fresh brussels sprouts the other day for dinner. I decided to cook them with some garlic, ginger and turkey bacon. The result....well, since I was trying to only dirty one pan, it wasn't the success I had hope it would be. You see I choose to steam the sprouts, which were quartered, after I had cooked the bacon to a crispy texture. The water needed to steam the sprouts softened the bacon. Oh well...guess I'll have to steam the sprouts separately before adding them to my bacon next time.

And for an FYI: I tend to pick up turkey bacon mainly for the reason that it's ALL meat and there is little grease to clean up afterwards. Feel free to use regular bacon if you want.

Brussels Sprouts with Garlic, Ginger and Bacon

Indgredients
1/2 lbs Brussel Sprouts, quartered
3-4 slices of turkey bacon, sliced in to strips
1-2 cloves garlic, mashed and chopped
1/3 inch ginger, minced fine
vegetable oil (if using turkey bacon)

Quarter and steam brussels sprouts. Slice bacon into thin strips. Add bacon, ginger and garlic to fry pan along with a bit of vegetable oil. (omit extra oil if using regular bacon). Once the bacon begins to get crispy, add the steamed brussels sprouts. Cook until bacon is done and serve.

Personally, I'm not too sure how this dish would work cold with regular bacon. I would think that the grease would make the dish unpleasant cold. Your call.

Fillers

Lately, I've been running more than a bit behind on a few things, like blogging and cooking up a variety of stuff for my lunches. It's not that I've given up on the healthier lunches but I've been cooking less Japanese foodstuffs and more from other cultures like Indian. Yeah...Curries are popular in Japan but I've been slow to try them. So that means most of my current cooking attempts have been undocumented.

I'm currently hooked on working with fresh cabbage (it's pretty cheap). I continue to make the sauteed cabbage with balsamic vinegar, garlic and cranberries on a regular basis but I tried a new recipe that said you could substitute cabbage for leeks. Well, I had bought the leeks but I forgot to read the recipe and didn't purchase enough so that's when I added the cabbage. And the rosemary (one of my favorite herbs for cooking). Big mistake. It doesn't really go together...rosemary and leek. Rosemary and cabbage might not be a good combination either. The final product wasn't completely inedible but it doesn't really work. I won't add the rosemary again when I retry this recipe.

I will admit that I made a cabbage soup this past weekend and I'm mostly happy with the result. It was very filling but slightly tasteless. I suppose I could have added a bit more salt to the pot but I hesitated to do so because the chicken base I use is salty in the high concentrations needed to really give a soup a pronounced chicken flavour. Oh well....it wasn't like I had an actual recipe for this soup. It was one of these experimental soups that shows one if one should proceed and refine the recipe. I think I will try this one again as well.

Bacon wrapped tofu

Wellll....not really. Wereas the original recipe calls for bacon to be wrapped around a cube of tofu, I used prochutto (sp?) ham instead. I have to say that this substitution was a very tasty one with out having to deal with the excessive grease produced by normal bacon. The very thin ham allowed the heat to warm through even a half inch thick piece of tofu. As for the tofu, I had the extra firm aka cotton style tofu in the house. I'm beginning to favor this type of tofu over the silken style which is softer even in a firm version. For me, the extra firm cotton type is much more versatile that the other type and I'm inventing new dishes (or adapting old ones) to work with this product.

Sweet Stewed beans

Found the recipe on JustBento.com and decided to try it. I hoped that my end result would be similar to some that I had eaten in a bento that I had bought. Well...my result from their recipe wasn't quite as sweet nor quite so tender. In my defense, it was my first time ever cooking beans from scratch so I'm not familiar with what is considered cooked through for beans. I also found the recipe a bit lacking on clear direction.

This is still a good recipe despite my difficulties with it so I will try it a second time.

Teriyaki Noodles

This is based on a meal that I once at a local japanese style fast food place.

Indegredents
precooked udon noodles
thin sliced carrots
thin sliced mushrooms
fresh bean sprouts

In a fry pan with a cover or a griddle, place the noodles to heat on a bit of butter or oil. Let the noodles heat for a bit then place the carrots, mushrooms and bean sprouts on top with a bit of water and then cover for steam. After steaming for a few minutes, drizzle some teriyaki sauce on top and stir to warm the sauce. Serve with more teriyaki sauce if desired.

Assemble your own Rice Noodle Soup

Ingredients
1-2 packages Spring Roll Wraps or rice or bean thread noodles.
2 large or 1/2 lb baby carrots julienne
1-2 packages Noki mushrooms
2-3 boneless chicken breast, shredded
1-2 cans whole water chestnuts, julienne
1-2 can bamboo shoots
3-4 stalks green onions julienne
fresh bean sprouts
Chicken broth

Prep the vegetables and place them in separate containers. Heat up the chicken broth. Cook the chicken breasts and let cool enough to handle. Shred the chicken breasts. Once ready to assemble, lightly damped the spring roll skin then chop the skin into strips. Place strips into your bowl. Add chicken and chosen vegetable in to your bowl and cover with chicken broth. For using rice or bean thread noodles, cook according to the directions on the package.
First attempt: cut up the vegetables while I had chicken tenderloins cooking in boiling water. Once the tenderloins had cooked through, I fished them out and put aside to cool. Using the same water I’d cooked the chicken in, I blanched my chopped vegetables separately and placed them in microwave safe containers. Now with the chicken and veggies out of the way, it was time to cook the bean thread noodles. I added chicken and vegetable base to the water I still had left over from blanching the chicken and veggies. Bean thread noodles have no flavor of their own and so take up the flavor of the water they are cooked in. It took about 6-7 minutes to cook a small bundle of noodles. I had to add more water and bases to the pot while cooking the 8 batches of the bean thread noodles. Each batch of noodles were placed in individual containers. I made the final stock with the remaining cooking water added to more water and soup bases. Now back to the chicken and veggies. With the chicken cooled, I chopped it into strips. I used the microwave to reheat all the veggies and chicken before serving.

Notes: The enoki mushrooms didn’t seem to work real well for this recipe. They turned slimy. Will try sliced white button mushrooms for the next attempt. Green onions too, didn’t fair real well with the blanching and reheating. Perhaps I should just julienne them and not blanch them. Overall, this first attempt went over pretty well. I offered plain egg noodles in addition to the bean thread noodles. I had plenty of bean thread noodles left since I forgot to announce their availability to the late comers.

Tofu Noodles

House Foods produce a new product that combines yam starch and tofu to create noodles. These noodles are real easy to fix; you just rinse them thoroughly and microwave them for 2 minutes. Once you’ve done that and pat them dry, the noodles are ready to be tossed into any dish you would use noodles. I happened to eat them lightly seasoned with the soup base from a package of ramen noodles. Even with the inital heating, if you eat them the way I did, you’ll have to heat them for an additional 2 minutes or so. They have 3 different noodle types availble, angel hair, spaghetti and linguini

Rice has multiple uses

Onigiri aka Rice Balls
3 cups rice, cooked

The trick with this receipe is how you wash your rice. Short grain rice has a lot of starch that should be washed out before you cook it. If the wash water remain just a little bit milky, the rice will be stickier than normal. Cook the rice whatever way you have available. You will be making your rice ball while the rice is still warm from cooking. If you rinse your hands in salty water, you can mold the rice balls without having it stick to your hands. You scoop up an amount that you can comfortable compress in your hands. While squeezing the rice together, you can mold it into whatever shape suits your fancy, like disks, barrels, or triangles. If you are using a filling, make a cavity in the rice you've just pulled from your cooking pot and stick a small amount of filling inside. You don't want too much filling for several reasons, it will escape as you compress it or the rice ball won't stay together because of too much filling. You can just season the rice before making your ball. There are several available at your local Japanese supermarket, many of them fish flavoured. Personally, I looking for the ones that has the word "Ume" among the first few ingredients. That means it's a pickled plum flavored seasoning.

For Fillings try: tuna, pickled plum, pickled diakon radish, leftover chinese food (without the rice, obviously), leftover beef stew, leftover stir fry, etc.

Note: Rice balls can be eaten hot or cold. I warm them up by steaming them but microwaving them should work just as well.