The beef has been wheeled out for the third and final night in a very convincing disguise.
It managed to find its way into a stick of french bread with some salad, mozzarella and Kewpie Thousand island dressing. The real motivation behind this dinner was the fact that I wasn’t about to start up the stove for anything tonight. It is just too hot so it is cold food or no food as far as I am concerned.
Yesterday I had a load of leftover very rare beef. Today I am having pasta.
I put a handful of the beef slices in the fry pan with a tin of tomatoes, some garlic, onion and olive oil.
This is served up on top of thin spaghetti along with a green salad with balsamic vinegar and olive oil ( and a cob of very average corn). The slowest part was cooking the pasta, the quickest was eating it.
When I am cooking for one, the main thing on my mind is “How am I going to get out of this with as little work as possible?” A very important part of this is washing up. In other words, the less pans you use to cook, the less washing up to take care of.
This is a quick one pan wonder. All I did was take a weird shaped piece of beef and sear it on all sides with a slosh of ponzu sauce while it sizzled. Then it came off the heat to cool slightly. I threw in a packet of fresh udon noodles and some vegetables to stir fry for about 5 minutes. The noodles and vegetables went on the plate, quickly followed by some slices of very rare beef on top．I tossed on some shichimi spices but what ever you have at hand will be just as good. The best news about the beef is that there is plenty of leftovers as you will see in the next post.
Low on inspiration to cook myself dinner tonight, I cruised the supermarket aisles looking for an idea. There it was…udon.
A bag of fresh udon went into my basket as did some frozen prawns and the rest was already at home.
Some green onions, some enoki mushrooms some leafy green buk choy and off we go.
I mixed up a big glob of miso paste with a slosh of sake and some honey and stirred it all through the frying mass of good things. Could this be the next masterpiece from my kitchen? Could this finally be the recipe that brought me fame and fortune? Perhaps I would have to cook up another batch because it will taste so good that I will immediately need some more?
Unfortunately it was very disappointing. Maybe too much miso, maybe not enough honey, maybe just a bad idea. And the worst bit is that I have left overs.. Don’t bother trying this one at home.
It is hot here right now. Very hot and humid. I spent all day dreaming about cold somen noodles and here they are. A bed of cold noodles with some heavily gingered pork (pork fillets, a grated knob of ginger, a couple of spoons of sake, a spoon of mirin and a spoon of soy) all served up with salad steamed buk choy and beer.
My friend Jon was staying over on his way to America so technically this wasn’t cooking for one, except that both our wives were absent so it was sort of bachelor food anyway.
It has only been a week or so but I find myself a bachelor again while my wife is in India. The deal I made with her was that she could go as long as she brought back some pictures of Indian dishes for me to post here. We’ll see how she goes.
Anyhow, I am cooking for one again and so here goes a string of very quick and easy dishes. Ten minutes max that will keep me well fed and healthy without a lot of effort.
This one is loosely called octopus salad.
In the middle, unseen, is a big cake of my favourite tofu (round and tough) surrounded by cold soba noodles. On top are some salad vegetables and sliced octopus legs (bought pre-boiled and ready to eat cold). I drizzled some Kewpie thousand island dressing on top and finished it all off with a suika bar ice block. These ice blocks are exceptional and not just because they look so cool. They actually taste a little bit like real watermelon (only sweeter) and the seeds are actually little lumps of chocolate. Very cold and very nice in a hot humid summer.
Japan has been known as the land of the umbrella, the land of miniaturisation and the land of overwork but really we all know it is the land of the pudding. Not that Japan has the patent on too many pudding designs, most of them are imported from other countries. It is just that Japan has taken so strongly to them and changed them into a visual art in a way that never ceases to amaze me.
These two came from near Ueno station in a massive department store basement food hall. One is mango and tapioca and the other is a kind of chocolate nutty creamy thing. And yes they did look better before they were transported home to my place but that is not the shop’s fault as you can see from the packaging
Japanese food companies do their best to make it easy to open anything. There is always a way to tear or open a package that often seems kind of over-engineered. Off the shelf onigiri (rice balls) are the perfect example.
If you walk into any convenience store you will see a shelf in the fridge full of varieties of triangular rice balls wrapped in nori and then wrapped in plastic. If the nori touches the rice for any length of time it goes all soft and looses a bit of its appeal. So the plastic first wraps the rice, then the nori wraps the plastic and then the plastic wraps the nori.
In order to open these little parcels they packaging is printed with a “1″, “2″, and “3″ telling you which to deal with first.
Step one tear down the strip labeled”1″ until the package is separated into two halves.
Step two wiggle and jiggle “2″ corner plastic gently off of one half taking it away from under as well as over the nori. (this takes finesse or it doesn’t look too good when you finish.
Step 3 do the same with the other corner marked “3″
tuck the nori back in again and hook in.
Alternatively, just ignore the numbers and rip open the package which ever way you can then pick up the pieces of torn nori and dropped rice and learn the hard way why sometimes it is good to follow the rules.
Shaped like half a lemon but with an extremely light and airy texture, these almond cakes are one of those things that you either love or get extremely bored by. There is very little almond flavour there and in fact not a lot of flavour at all. It is simply a very light cake that leaves me wondering “Why bother”. In my opinion it is not one of those so-subtle-it-is-sublime sort of things. It is more like so-subtle-it-bores-me-to-tears.
We always make rice paper rolls with whatever is available, as I’m sure you do. These ones include yakisoba noodles, rice, salad vegetables, beef with sesame, mint, sesame sauce and a little shiso sauce.
What do you put in your rice paper rolls?
A Child Chosen
A Creative Journal
All Holiday Cafe
Babylune
Baking Delights
Behind The Vines
Blog Fabulous
Brew Ha-Ha
Busy Family Meals
Career and Kids
Chocolate Bytes
Cooking Gadgets
Dating Dames
Declutter It
Drinks after Dark
Foodie Obsessed
GenBetween
Hankering for Yarn
Inside Fatherhood
Inside Motherhood
Jewelry and Beading
Junk Creation
Keeping the Castle
Kettle and Cup
Layers Upon Layers
Macro Cats
Mad Cropper
Marriage Actually
Mom Gadget
Mother Earth's Garden
MyCrimeSpace
Noodles and Rice
Offbeat Homes
One Book Two Book
Our One Heart
Parenting Tweens & Teens
Parents Behaving Badly
Play Library
Psycho for Love
Quilting and Patchwork
Robust Cooking
She Knows Parties
Simply Home Remedies
Simply Thrifty
Solo Mother
StampingMad
Supernanny Rules
Tangled Thread
The Food Bowl
Thrifty Mommy
Toolbelt Tips
Tree Hugging Family
Unplugged Living
Widows Quest
Recent Comments