Asian Cooking: Yum!
The last two nights we treated ourselves to some fine, homemade Japanese cuisine. Well, the incredients and dishes are Japenese, but we sprinkled them with a little bit of our own flare to make things more interesting.
Monday night we started by making sushi. Makizushi, to be more accurate (maki = roll). Makizushi is made by placing a sheet of nori (dried seaweed) onto a bamboo rolling mat (also known as a makisu). Then you put a thin layer of sushi rice on it in the middle, and then add some fresh fish, fruits/vegetables, or whatever else you want. We used crab meat and fresh avacado. Once you get the ingredients on the rice how you want it, you use the makizu to help roll the nori to create a “log” of sushi. Then you use a very sharp knife to cut the roll into about 6 pieces (the nori can become quite hard to cut when it is moist).
We also made some temaki (hand rolls, or temakizushi) with the same ingredients. Yum! Temaki is prepared by rolling the nori into a conical shape instead of a tube. It looks like an ice-cream cone when you’re finished preparing it. You can see a rough picture of our creations on my moblog.
Along with the sushi Lori made some pork tonkatsu, which is pork loin cutlets beat thin, battered in special bread crumbs called panko, and deep fried. We served it with ponzu sauce, which is like soy sauce with a citrus taste. Normally its served with a special tonkatsu sauce, but we didn’t feel like making it.
Yesterday we made shiro miso soup, soba noodles, and chicken tempura. The miso soup was made from the dried “instant soup” packages you can get at Wal-Mart in the Asian food section. For the soba noodles we just boiled the noodles like spaghetti and served them with soy sauce and wasabi. The chicken tempura was just like fried chicken.
For dessert we had chocolate pocky, one of my favorite treats. I like to dip the sticks in peanut butter for an added taste.
That’s it for our Japanese cooking for a while. Later this week we’re going to switch gears from Japan to Thailand and cook some pad thai. Aren’t we cultured? 