Curry from package

After moving in for a whole month I finally felt settled enough and decided to do some cooking. Well, some of you would probably call it...er...something else, but I think it's good enough to be cooking if some people called their microwavable TV dinner cooking for them...

So the ingredients are as follows:

1. Bag of carrots
   
2. bag of pre-diced mushrooms (gotta love the modern convenience...I used to dice them by hand myself...)
3. 1.5 lbs of chicken or more...whatever...depends on how much meat you like...as long as it fits your pot

*note: meat can be replaced with pork or beef. I just don't have any cravings for meat



4. 1 Onion
5. 2 potatoes



6. a box of Vermont Curry or whatever, I got it because it was on sale. As long as they are blocked curry...the portion should be right. Don't get the small kind...

So...the damn directions:


Peel the potatoes! Just...you know...get rid of the skin... Make sure you rinse it after you peeled them. Sometimes when I peel I notice a lot of dirt on the skin and it might get into the peeled part when I rotate it to peel.


Dice them and put them in pot.
I recommend using non-stick pot for this, because once everything is in, you don't need to put too much efforts in stirring because things tend to settle and burn on the bottom. It not only put a coffee flavor into your cooking, it is also a nightmare to clean.


Dice the onions and saute them. Well, just fry them till the smell comes out...
I never get teary from dicing onions...but this one I used was strong... I should sneak these little bastards to funerals where I felt like I should but can't cry.


Strip the chicken. If you had beef or pork, cube them, because they don't fall apart while you boil them like chicken.


Put chicken and onion into the same pot and fry them.
The reason why I do this is because onions cook faster that way and it brings out the smell in the pot of curry.
Also, the cooked chicken will fall apart slower than raw chicken in boiling water. (I think...)


After the surface of the chicken turns white, dump everything in pot, add enough water to cover everything and BOIL!
Boil for many, many hours until you think the carrots and potatoes soften.
then......


Add water to a saucepan or some small pot, bring it to boil, and break the packaged curry apart and drop them in.
Stir them till it turns into liquid and slowly mixing them to the pot. As you pour, remember to stir.

Put the heat on simmer for 40 minutes until the taste of curry gets into the ingredients.
It's critical to stir occasionally if you did not use it non-stick pot, because things will burn in the bottom since curried soup does not allow heat to escape from the bottom as easily. So stirring prevents things on the bottom from getting burned.


add rice and enjoy.

*note 2: I forgot to take a picture of the food, so I stole a picture from Internet. They all look pretty much the same anyway...

This is pretty much the only other decent dish I could make besides turkey...
My sister taught me how to make this, and I usually make a large pot and eat it for 5 days. I have to say, the later it is when you eat it, the better it tastes because the potatoes eventually breaks down, and the meat gives it a better broth.

Sweet & Sour Spare Ribs

1lb pork baby back ribs (sliced thin as you'd like)
5 tbsp water
4 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp vinegar (white or rice)
1.5 tbsp rice wine
1.5 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp = chinese soup spoon

Cut up spare ribs
combine rest of ingredients in small bowl - mix well (until sugar dissolves)
double proportions if you need more sauce

Put sauce in pot. put spareribs in pot. Bring mix to boil - turn
down to medium heat
Boils spareribs until sauce is a little gooey (but not burnt). Ready to serve.

Oyakodon

I've been craving oyakodon lately, but I don't feel like going to a restaurant and getting charged $8 for an oyakodon. At $60 to $70 per application, applying for all the grad schools and realizing how much I would be spending for tuition makes me want to tighten my wallet and start cooking everything I crave at home. (Sigh...)

Since I've been down, thanks for my professor's insult on my chances of getting into grad school and a friend's insulting comment, I've decided to make an escape by cooking. So I went online, and luckily found this recipe that makes oyakodon that tastes like it is from a restaurant!

Here are the ingredients:

• Boneless-skinless chicken legs & thighs - (thanks to modern wonders, the lazyman can cook with ease. Ranch 99 has chicken thighs de-boned and skinless! Each piece of leg and thigh comes boneless and skinless! Yay! I would give up if I had to debone these thighs myself...)
  

• 7 large eggs
  

• Onion - cut into strips
  

• Scallion

• 1 cup of dashi tsuyu
• It usually comes concentrated, so you want to dilute it
• The mixture of water and tsuyu should be about 1 cup altogether
• basically dashi tsuyu is what people use to dip soba in or tempura, but find one that has fish/mushroom/seaweed soup stock, because it really matters what kind of tsuyu is used
  
• It's basically made of soup stock (of seaweed, mushroom, or fish), mirin, soy sauce, sugar, water. I use it because I am too lazy to concoct it from scratch when it already tastes so good in a mix. Come on, I have hard time as it is to control the amount of this to put in, why add to the level of difficulty?
  

• 1 table spoon of soy sauce
• Steamed rice
  
• Also a flat pan, spatula, and a ladle
  

Here are the instructions:

1. Cut the chicken into strips
• About 1.5 inches or bite size
2. Fry the chicken strips in pan
   
• I would carefully lay them down into the pan instead of throwing a glob into the pan because the chicken would come out cooked in nice strips
• fry it until slightly golden on the outside
  

3. Add in the onion and cook until it's slightly transluscent


4. Add the dashi tsuyo and soy sauce, simmer for 3 minutes

5. In the mean time, beat 6 eggs until it's 70% mixed

• What is means is most of the eggs are mixed, but there are still some whites not totally mixed in. When cooked, it has a more dense texture instead of fluffy like scrambled eggs

6. Pour the mixture into the pan, do not stir, add scallions on top, cover, and simmer

7. When you notice the eggs start to partially harden, turn off the heat, and let it sit for 5 minutes


8. Beat 1 more egg, pour it onto the top of the pan, cover again, and let it stand for 1.5 minutes

• I like runny eggs on top, but if you didn't, just serve without this last step
  

9. Carefully ladle the content of the pan onto a bed of rice in a bowl and serve!



This is one of the easier recipes I found on the Internet. I think I've added another dish to my cookbook. Maybe one day I can publish it. Maybe I could call it... "No Big Knives Please!"

I know this dish came from China. My grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles all know how to make them. They just don't know what this is called. After I moved to Los Angeles, I discovered a Japanese dish that is quite similar to it, but slightly sweeter. The flavor of it is quite nostalgic and I do prefer to sweeter taste of this thing. I think this is by far the most complicated thing I have ever attempted, because most of the things I've done are all mix up the ingredients and throw it in the oven/pot/etc.

So here are the ingredients:

1. 1 Lb of pork belly - I used short ribs because I am in SF now, and the mean Cantonese people didn't want to listen to my explanation or attempt to understand what I was saying in Mandarin...
2. 1 Potato
3. 4 table spoon of soy sauce
4. 2 table spoon of mirin
5. 4 table spoon of sake
6. 4 table spoon of sugar
7. A little bit of ginger, no bigger than 2cm^3
8. 1 stalk of scallion

And the instruction:

1. Fry the pork in a pan until it's browned on all sides (so it doesn't fall apart)
2. Cut it in large cubes (I cut the 1.3lb piece into 2 large pieces) and place it in the pot, cover it with water (literally, the water needs to be higher than pork)
3. Boil in water, add sliced ginger and the stalk of scallion, then turn it down to medium heat to simmer for 90 minutes
   
4. To be sure it's done, stick a skewer/chopstick through it to see if it could easily be poked through
5. Remove the meat from the pot, place it on the plate until it's cooled, and pick off the fat
6. While the meat is cooling, let the soup cool and skim off the fat as well. I put it inside the fridge to make the cooling process faster. The fat will solidify and become easier to pick off
7. Mix the mirin, sake, and sugar
8. Add the solution to the now skimmed soup, and put the meat in it
9. Bring it to boil, then turn it down to medium heat and simmer for 70 minutes - becareful not to let the soup dry up, it will caramelize...then it turns into an entirely new dish XD
   
10. In the mean time, add the soy sauce gradually (2 or 3 times)
11. Now boil the potato for 10 minutes, and consult waitless.org for fast peeling action XD
12. Cut the potato into 6 cubes and add it in for another 20 minutes of simmering, then serve! (add water if necessary, because potatoes soak up the soup)

Stir fried chicken with onion

It's been a 6 year hiatus from cooking for me, ever since I moved to LA. Reason for the first five and half years was because I've been renting a room in someone's house, therefore, there was no access to the kitchen.

Ever since I moved to the new apartment, I've been wanting to give cooking a try. So, after putting it off for half a year, here comes some cooking...



This is actually the second dish I made.
It's onion stir fried with chicken strip.

I used:

1. Chicken - 1 lb
2. 1 onion
3. 3 table spoons of soy sauce
4. 1 table spoon of rice wine
5. 1 table spoon of sugar
6. a little bit of corn starch
7. 3 table spoons of oil
   

Direction:

• Slice chicken into strips, as thin as you like
• mix soy sauce, rice wine, sugar
• Marinate the chicken in the mixture, sprinkle a bit of corn starch on top, and stir
• Let it marinate for 10 minutes
• chop onion into strips
• Heat up the pan and add 3 table spoons of oil
• I used canola because it doesn't add any flavor of its own flavor into the food like olive oil
  
• stir fry the marinated chicken, dump the whole thing in there
• stir sparingly until the surface of the chicken is cooked
• add onion
• stir fry until the onion is half transparent and the chicken is done
• serve

That's it. It goes down pretty well with rice. The portion is probably big enough for two. Even I couldn't finish mine...



So another reason why I put off cooking most of the time is because there would always be left over rice. Usually I'd just leave it in the rice cooker and forget about it. By the time I rediscovered it, it probably has its own civilization growin in it. This time, however, I thought about making onigiri. It's perfect for a bento box the next day.