Things with Sauce: A Thematic Dinner

Wednesday nights tend to be my least busy. So, I often go to a friend's house, or a bar, or consider going for a run before I ultimately decide not to. The previous Wednesday I managed to do all those things and still cook dinner.

First up is hamburgers. They're comprised of beef, tofu, lazily-chopped carrots, and other things. The store didn't actually have buns, so the bread is some roll filled with mayo and corn. As suggested by the title of this post, I made sauce!

Part 2 was supposed to be on the same plate, but I accidentally ate the hamburgers while the eggplant was cooking. Anyway, this is roasted eggplant (with miso sauce!)

I wish I could get a real pumpkin here. I really want some pumpkin.

Martin

Cereal, French Toast, Miracle

Sometimes you just miss the old country. Today was one of those days. So, I decided to reward myself in advance for all the cleaning I'm about to do.

I swear those eggs looked better in real life.

Possibly the only brand of cereal in all of Shimabara. It says "corn flakes." Apparently it's also good in salad. Nifty.

Martin

A Touching Story for All Ages

The other day I was at the supermarket, and there was a saleswoman trying to sell some sauce and noodles or something. And, suddenly, she called me over (!).

 I was very touched because it must have been scary for her to talk to a random foreigner who may or may not speak Japanese. But she did because she's very nice and she wanted my money.

 Long story short, we had a nice chat, and she showed me how to make food with the above-mentioned sauce and noodles. I felt joyful then so I bought them. And now I make them at home and it's delicious ever after.

 Don't laugh at the noodle-vegetable ration, 'kay? It tasted fine.

Martin

(Pie)ce of my heart

Kristin thinks she's so housewife-cool with her instagramed pie shots. Get out of town, gurl. I whipped this baby up with only a cake pan and a microwave. And a little love.

How about a Pie Throwdown next time we hit the lake?

Martin

Stir Fry Me to the Moon

So here's the deal. I'm obsessed with stir frying. You buy whatever the you want, put it on the stove, and BAM. It's fool-proof delicious. I love throwing stuff in the hot pan (no measuring), smelling my genius cooking, and feeling like a chef. Several of many minor variations below:

The basic blend: veggies with meat n' tofu. Martin's Kitchen Secrets #1: salt and pepper (and I think here some soy sauce and sugar) make everything good.

This is from the website "The Stone Soup," which provides easy and healthy recipes for the incompetent. It's zucchini and beef with some yuzu something substituted for the lemon. 

 Getting feisty here with some tumeric, chili powder, and cumin.

God I hate chopping. But I love when it looks profesh.

Martin

No Fridge No Problem

It's official! I have ordered my new fridge and it's on its way. At first my supervisor couldn't figure out why I wanted a bright orange fridge, but now she's jealous of how superficially quirky I am (she told someone so!).

Anyway, the intervening period has not been totally devoid of self-cooked food. It just might not have been the best food. The need to cook started when I was looking at pictures of french toast, and had a minor breakdown. I wanted it SO BAD. Just not 6 eggs and a carton of milk's worth of it.

My solution was to go to the supermarket, buy individual sized portions of various vegetables and nonperishable items, cook them all together in a pan, add some soy sauce, sugar, and mirin, and voila! The best tasting pile of vomit I've ever eaten.

Taste: 7/10 (can't go wrong with onions, garlic, mushrooms, and beef)
Difficulty: 3/10 (looks terrible, but was very easy and just my size. Maybe should've made some rice for it to go on top of....)
 
Next one up is all thanks to Jen Graham. She passed along a recipe for cup brownies you can make in the microwave. I kept it slightly undercooked cuz that's the way I like it uh huh uh huh.

Taste 10/10 (When I get my fridge I'll add ice cream!)
Difficulty 2/10

As a side note, through the brownie-making process I learned my microwave is also an oven. So much cake in my future. So many feelings to eat.

Martin

The Ketchup Game

Hey!

Kristin wasn't lying. I did arrive safely in Japan! And I even have internet now. Well, sort of. Long story. Anyway, it's time to play catch up! One would think this post would be really long, but I kind of suck at cooking. I also blame:

 1) My fridge. It has been broken.
 2) People that keep making food for me. Japanese people are too nice. Really. I wish they were less so.

Anyway, here's a quick play-by-play of my culinary endeavors. All the recipes are from this (kinda mediocre) Japanese cookbook I found for my kindle. Fortunately, all the recipes are easy, have few ingredients, and produce good portions for someone living on his own. Thank you "Simple & Easy Japanese Summertime Recipes," and Kyoko Tanaka, for giving me food that is always perfectly good enough!

Firstly:

This is corn soup, cucumber salad, and rice. How healthy! It is fun to check out at the supermarket with a bunch of Japanese ingredients and see the cash register lady look impressed. Everything is cold, so it's perfect for summer!

Taste: 7/10 (good enough!)
Difficulty: 4/10 (the most difficult part was finding a blender in the countryside)

Next up!

  

This is cold udon noodles with some sauce, as well as cold simmered tomatoes! I love these two. The udon was supposed to be soumen (thinner noodles) but I don't like them as much. The tomatoes taste so summery and good. Both the tomatoes from this dinner and and the cucumbers from the last one were welcome gifts from my landlord!

Taste: 9/10

Difficulty: 6/10 (had to take the skins off the tomatoes ah!)

Both of these meals lasted several days, and I've made them multiple times. Lastly, here are some random, stand-alone things that I made:

The top is cold tofu with some simmered tomatoes. The best!

Taste: 10/10

Difficulty: 6/10 (it's really very very easy,  but I was impatient with waiting for the tomatoes to cool in my lackluster fridge)

The bottom is kind of a joke. It's meat-wrapped asparagus. So weird. I didn't have enough meat so it looks super stupid. 

Taste: 8/10 (surprisingly good considering the bad proportions)

Difficulty: 8/10 (obviously this was a challenge for me)

Woohoo all caught up! Soon I will be going to purchase a new fridge and the adventure will continue!

Martin

PotLuck

Martin and Debbie have arrived safely in Japan, and wont have internet for a little while, and I am on a month break from school and get to avoid preparing anything more difficult than a bowl of cereal! :D :D

I guess the blog's going to take a couple weeks hiatus. In the meantime, I leave you with some pictures from the potluck party I threw in my dormitory.

The good thing about potlucks is a lot of people bring food, and so you don't have to eat the food you yourself prepared for the potluck. The other people get stuck doing that. Ha ha! Plus, the added advantage of actually throwing the potluck means that you get to keep all the delicious leftovers.

Other people prepping food. That's what I like to see! Here we have pasta, egg plant, melting chocolate, and something green.

Mac prepares a spinach, strawberry, and fetta salad. OMG YUM.

Gorging on food. Sipping wine. Enjoying the Olympics. 

Kristin

why hello there

I'm Debbie, the third (and mostly invisible) contributor to this blog. I'm 21 years old, and up until now have never really had to fend for myself in the kitchen. Someone was always around to feed me, or at the very least stand over me to say It's so simple what is wrong with you just keep stirring. Now that I've graduated from college and am leaving my parents' home for a teaching gig in Hokkaido, for the first time in my life I'll be in charge of nourishing my body!

This coming year can only be a win-win situation. I will either a) discover an innate talent and become the goddess of homemade cooking or b) lose a lot of weight. Be prepared for my epic culinary exploits, guys! 

My real posts will begin in August. But here's a picture of what I ate last week. I didn't make it. I didn't even buy it. My mom bought it and fed it to me. When left to my own devices I tend to stick to cereal.

Kimchi jjigae (soup), seaweed, sausages, rice.

Okonomiyaki Dinner Party

For those of you who don't know, okonomiyaki is a sort of cabbage pancake eaten in Japan. Okonomiyaki is relatively healthy, cheap, and ooo so delicious. Hands down it was my favorite food when I lived in Japan.

Not only does it taste AWESOME, but there's a certain social aspect that goes along with eating okonomiyaki. It's a food you eat with friends while sitting gathered around the electric grill to chat and make food together.

Since it's so cheap and easy to make, I decided to do okonomiyaki for tonight's impromptu dinner party.

Now, okonomiyaki can get complicated. You'll see some recipes online that call for special flour, daikon, things that you can only find at Asian specialty stores, etc. These are unnecessary. If you want to eat good okonomiyaki, all you really need is eggs, flour, water, cabbage, and the contents of your fridge.

Tonight's dorm fridge haul included:

tomatoes
onions
garlic

Not so involved, but enough extra ingredients to make a good, vegetarian okonomiyaki. We topped it with mayonaise and tonkatsu sauce and it was awesome!!

Batter and chopped vegetables

Okonomiyaki pancake

Over-ripe cherries

Finished !

Rating: 9.5/10
Prep Time: 1 hour (included frying up a TON of pancakes)
Difficulty: 3/10

Kristin

Howdy! Hi!

So, before any actual cooking with (sex)pots begins, I wanted to highlight that we've had an auspicious start: I googled the blog and it turns out it's the first thing that comes up! That's good, since my long-term hope for the blog is a (natural) segue into a book deal. If the dialog in Julie & Julia can get good reviews, then surely mine can too.

Anyway, my first post isn't much of a "cooking" post—more of a self-introduction as presented through food.  Here's the last thing I ate:

It's sugar decoration letters!! Or was, anyway. They are my favorite snack in the world (sans cake, obvi), and are indicative of the food standards I hold myself to. My mom and I were left alone to make dinner tonight, which meant the sugar letters became the meal's appetizer, eventually rounded out by pre-cooked chicken purchased from Stop & Shop. The usual cook—my dad—was out of town, and we saw no need to prove that we can get by on our own.

There is a saving grace, however. As an avid food network fan, I know that Sandra Lee is up for hours every night brainstorming how she's going to utilize her leftovers in "round two recipes." I'll have you know my mom and I figured out our round two in just minutes: this leftover chicken will reinvent itself as chicken salad for lunch tomorrow. Suck it Sandra!

Anyway, I expect the real cooking for me to begin next month when I move to Japan and get my first apartment. I technically have cooked things in the past, so there is a glimmer of hope for the future. Thanks Oberlin College co-ops for "teaching me how to cook"!

On a final note, a self-introduction suggests that someone besides me, Debbie, and Kristin may read this entry, and potentially want to know something about me, the author, Martin Rouse. I can assure you, the non-existent reader, that this is not the case. I just like writing about myself. But more importantly, I really really like Kristin and Debbie, and can't wait to get to know them better through their food choices and adventures.

Martin

PS- Hey guys I brushed my teeth! Note the generous helping of Red 3 and Red 40.