Home Made Pokky -- an update

Ok...this one should have been posted ages ago but I kinda forgot about it. So here it is now.

Well...the chocolate chips melted fairly easily using a glass jar and a pot of water. Why a jar, you ask? Well...the breadsticks are longer than 6 inches and if I used a regular bowl, I'd have more difficulty in coating the upper portions of the breadsticks. So by using a relatively tall narrow jar, I would be able to coat more of the breadstick with much less effort. It also gave the added benefit that when I finished, I could cap off the remaining chocolate and store it in the fridge until the next time.
I must admit that while the chocolate firms up upon placing it in the refrigerator, it does not stay that way when it sits out. In other words..the chocolate is not tempered or not tempered properly. I can only hope that as I repeat this experiment again and again, I learn what I need to do to achieve that state. Until then...I geuss I can enjoy the fruits of my labors even if they are not perfect. After all, who can resist a sweet, salt crunchy treat. ;D

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.

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.

Found a nice bento site

I must confess that I stumbled across a really nice bento site called: Just Bento. It's affiliated with the Just Hungry website. Oh...boy is it a nice site. I made a ton of pdfs of various recipes so that I can fill my bentos with something different. It also has some very informative descriptions of the various Japanese food stuffs. Check it out.