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.

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.

A great bento staple - Carrots, Hijiki and Shirataki Noodles

JustBento.com has a great recipe for stewed hijiki seaweed and carrots supplemented with some fried tofu cake cut with a cookie cutter. I've done taken this recipe and made my own version of it.

For me, I decided to add shirataki noodles (also known as yam starch noodles)to this dish. You see while my hijiki is re-hydrating, I rinse and par-boil the noodles AND julienne my carrots using a mandolin slicer with a julienne insert. Once the seaweed is hydrated, the noodles should be drained and chopped into shorter lengths. Put the noodles, carrots and seaweed back into the same pot you parboiled the noodles in. Add fresh water and vegetable stock soup base. Or if you have if add some canned/boxed premade stuff. Personally, I prefer using a stock base as I have more control over the intensity of the flavor since it will generally be eaten cold which dulls flavors. If at all possible, I suggest using the Better than Bouillon brand of soup base as the manufacturer tends to roast the veggies which gives greater depth of flavor. That being said, add a good heaping tablespoon of base to the water in the pot with the noodles, seaweed, and carrots. Bring your pot to a boil and maintain it for approximately 30 minutes. This should be enough time for the noodles to take up the flavor of the vegetable stock. Drain off your vegetable stock and let things cool before storing it away.

I have had this bento staple last for two weeks in my fridge before going bad. I find that this dish can taste equally well cold or reheated. And you rarely need to add any extra salt to it as it draws the salt from the vegetable base.

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.

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.

Some Success..

Well, I made my second batch of sweet stewed beans and I'm pretty pleased with the result. This time around I only used 1 cup of beans (two cups worth went bad before I could eat them all) and switched to Lupini beans versus the white navy beans. It gave me about 3 cups worth of finished cooked beans. I initially started using these beans as a desert item in my bento lunches. I found that I really liked the more complex sweetness that the beans bring versus the processed sweets. But that's really only for lunches, I've still got a sweet tooth for the normal candy and snack cakes. So I've not made any healthy ground there.

I must admit that by making bento lunches with the oriental vegatables/foodstuffs that I'm getting better nutrition (and less preservatives) than I had been. This I think is the primary reason for me NOT getting sick this winter. Plus, I'm finding it fun to learn how to cook these exotic foods. That is really my primary goal, expanding my cooking skills, in this hobby. It does, however have a major downside to it....there are more pots and pans to wash up when I get done. That, and the constant nibbling you need to do to see if you've got the seasonings just right.

On the subject of nibbling or rather tasting, I did make the seaweed salad again using the water / sugar / vinegar combination that I noted down some posts back. It was just the right sweetness to tartness that I had been looking for. I'm thinking on trying the same dressing and pickling some cucumbers and onions with dill.

Something different

I picked up a sweet potato the other day because I had picked up fresh ginger at the same time. Yeah, I know...it's not really a memorable combination but I figured that if ginger, onion and garlic could make regular white potatoes taste real good, it could do the same with sweet potatoes. Most recipes for sweet potatoes accent its sweetness by making them into pies and sweet breads. I did find a few recipes that suggested frying the darn things. Thus emboldened, I decided that I could slice my sweet potato and chose to fry it up with the garlic, onion and ginger. I must admit it did smell good while frying. Flavour-wise, the sweet potato medallions didn't quite soak up as much of the flavour I had hoped but I think it's worth trying again.

Seaweed Salad -- an update

Well...Sunday I made a new batch of seaweed salad with some changes that I noted from the last batch. I rehydrated my konbu with hot water and let it set for nearly 30 minutes before working with it. I couldn't say what made the difference. For all I know, it was my chance selection of those particular pieces of kelp that kept the seaweed from becoming slimy. At any rate I'll try the hot water again and hope that was what made the difference.
In addition to making changes to how I prepped my seaweeds, I also added another type of seaweed called hijiki that looks like little black sticks. It has a crispness that contrasts well with that of the flat leaves of wakame and konbu.
The dressing changed a bit as well but I forgot to write down the amounts of sugar, rice wine vinegar and water. I'll figure it all out again the next time I make this salad but I think the amounts were: 1 cup rice wine vinegar; 9 heaping tablespoons sugar, and approximately 1/3 cup of water.
Those amounts seemed to make the pickling liquid lightly sweet and not overpowered by the tartness of the vinegar.

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.

Rice ball (onigiri) press

To speed up the process of making rice balls, the Japanese have developed several molds in varying sizes and designs. I currently have one that's about 6 inches long and is triangle shaped. I have seen diamond and heart-shaped ones at my local Japanese grocery store.

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.