Friday (two weeks ago): Japanese
I made a lot of Japanese food this night, or should I say the regular amount. This number of dishes is what I usually prepared when it was my night to cook at my old place. Usually I would prepare two or three side dishes and one or two main dishes. On that night I made tamagoyaki, kimpura, a tofu mushroom dish, and ebi chili (chili prawns).
Tamagoyaki is basically a square rolled omelet. It is usually egg, soy sauce, dashi (japanese fish stock), and some sugar. It is possible to put items in like crab, or maybe even some veggies, but I usually see it done plain. If you have gone to a sushi place and ordered egg sushi, not fish eggs, this is probably what you got minus the rice and seaweed. For me, this is by far one of the most difficult dishes to do correctly in Japanese cooking. The problem lies in how your supposed to layer the eggs. There is a special pan that you use that is rectangular in shape. You pour a little bit of the mixture into the pan let it cook and then begin to roll. You need to repeat this step several times to get enough layers going. The biggest problem I have with this is how long the eggs need to cook. Sometimes I end up with a little bit of raw egg, or maybe even more then that. My first attempt at this about two years ago actually turned out pretty good, but I seem to have gone down hill since then. This is one of my better attempts recently. Usually it becomes all deformed looking with breaks in the omelet everywhere.
Kimpura, another side dish is basically carrots and gobo (burdock root). Thinly sliced and then fried with a little bit of soy sauce, mirin, and some red pepper flakes. Its one of the simplest dishes to make and hard to mess up. The biggest thing is cutting the carrots and gobo, which can take some time if your not use to it. There are of course tools available to make cutting them simpler.
The next dish was something I randomly put together. I was trying to simulate a dish I had at one of my favorite Japanese restaurants in the San Francisco. I came kind of close in the sauce at least, but the tofu didn't turn out as expected. I think i fired it too much with too much oil. It became like tofu-age (deep fried tofu).
The meal was okay minus the tofu dish, which i felt was bland and the thickness of the tofu didn't work, partially why I think the dish was so bland.
