I cook dinner for myself every night, so in order to keep the blog elite-ish I'm going to try and avoid stir frys and other "easy" dinners no matter how delicious they are. Still, I decided to include these dinners just because they're the first Japanese things I ever made and I got the recipes from my Japanese cookbooks. Part of the accomplishment here is just figuring out how to read the recipes in Japanese. I don't have a problem reading them now, I've learned a lot of the vocabulary and grammar patterns used so that I almost never have to look anything up anymore when I see a new recipe, but trust me when I say my first few months of using Japanese cookbooks generated a lot of self esteem.
This first recipe highlights exactly how delicious something simple can be. It's pork and shimeji mushroom stir fry. When you're finished however, you drop it over raw cabbage and mix it up with a tablespoon of mayo. It makes something so delicious and so simple. The recipe is from Orange Page Cooking magazine.
(serves one person, 247 calories)
1 pack shimeji mushrooms
100 g pork, sliced
120 g cabbage
1/2 tsp grated ginger puree
1 T each sugar, sake, soy sauce
black pepper, sesame oil, mayonnaise
1. Break apart shimeji. Shred the cabbage and place in a bowl off to the side. Cut pork into 1-2 cm pieces and pepper it to your liking. In a small bowl, mix together sugar, sake, and soy sauce.
2. Heat some sesame oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Add ginger and pork. When the pork begins to change colors, add the shimeji and the bowl of sugar/sake/soy sauce. When everything is cooked, turn off the heat and add a dollop of mayonnaise to the pan. Mix well. Serve the contents of the pan over the cabbage.
From there, even though the recipe doesn't say to do so, I like to mix the cabbage up, it ends up cooking it ever so slightly with residual heat.
The second dish I wish I had labored to take a better picture of. It looks ugly as hell but was actually quite delicious. Pork meatballs, bean sprouts, onions, and eggplant stir fried in a sauce of equal parts miso and soy sauce, with some sugar for sweetness. I made this recipe up based on fancy versions of it that I've had in restaurants. Go me! Not that it's hard, most sauces in Japan are some mixture of soy sauce, miso, sake, mirin and/or sugar. It did, however, take a few tries to cut the saltiness of the miso.
Finally, chili shrimp with tofu (ebi chiri as it's so commonly called here). Chili sauce shrimp and tofu thickened with corn starch. It was surprisingly zippy and satisfying.
(Serves one person, 255 calories)
150 g shrimp, peeled and deveined
150 g momen tofu
1/4 of an onion
one clove garlic
a small ginger root
1/2 tsp spicy toubanjian sauce
ketchup, sugar, sake, soy sauce, salt, flour, vinegar, and vegetable oil
1. Cut tofu into 1.5 cm blocks. Peel and mince ginger, garlic, and onion. In a small bowl, mix 1/2 cup water, two tablespoons of ketchup, two teaspoons of sugar, 1 tsp of vinegar, 1 tsp soy sauce, and 1/4 tsp salt. In another small bowl mix 1 tablespoon of water and 1 teaspoon of flour and mix well.
2. Put shrimp in a bowl with 1 teaspoon of sake and add salt to your liking. Next add 1 tablespoon of flour and coat. Heat a tablespoon of oil in a frying pan over medium heat and add the shrimp. Cook for 30 seconds. Remove it from the pan when it's finished.
3. After the shrimp is removed, add onion, ginger, garlic, and cook over medium-low heat. When you can start to smell the ingredients cooking, add the toubanjian along with the ketchup sauce you made in step 1. Mix well, add tofu, and cook 1-2 minutes. Add the flour mixture from step 1 and stir. When the sauce begins to thicken, put the shrimp back into the pan and cook everything together for an additional minute.
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