Work, work, work!

I’m unexpectedly slammed this week — I send in one completed proofread and the next one hits my inbox almost immediately! It’s a good position to be in — I’m certainly not complaining about how healthy this month’s invoicing is looking — but it does drain my energy for thinking up posts for this blog.

In light of that, on the topic of this week’s experimental dish, panko fishcakes with yuzu-and-wasabi mayonnaise:

*Used tinned fish for ease and cheapness

*Very yummy but the double-breadcrumbing process was a bit fiddly and the fishcakes tended to fall apart a bit — might judge dredge them in spiced flour next time, or stir the flour into the fishcake mixture to help the fish and the mashed potato stick together more easily

*Used seasoned rice vinegar instead of yuzu juice, reasoning that the acidic tang was the aim and the vinegar would work just as well

*Initially made up the yuzu-and-wasabi mayo exactly as directed in the recipe (using Japanese mayo, which is way yummier than the Western stuff, IMO), but it was a bit mild for my tastes so I ended up using more than twice the amount of wasabi paste. It didn’t seem to mix in completely and evenly, so the flavour was mostly a pleasant blend of mayo-vinegar-wasabi with the occasional super-pungent burst — very very nice, though so I’m not actually complaining! I’ll definitely remember this dressing recipe for the future (maybe for tinned tuna on a baked spud or something?), and in the meantime, I have just enough wasabi paste left to add a nice kick to the teriyaki salmon I’ll be doing next week ^^

Okonomiyaki round 2

I had a bash at the Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure okonomiyaki recipe before officially starting to work my way through the recipe book from the beginning, and now the recipe has come around again!

True to what I said in the linked post, I left out the prawns, cabbage and beansprouts — it worked pretty darn well, as the pancake base actually cooked all the way through and was reasonably moist and firm without being gloopy or soggy or falling apart 😀 I used the rice seasoning instead of dashi powder and bonito flakes again, as the seasoning contains a fair bit of bonito anyway, as does dashi stock. It worked just as well as before, which is to say, very well indeed!

The Asian food shop had Japanese mayo in stock when I was looking for ingredients, so I was able to use the proper, authentic stuff rather than trying to artfully dribble low-fat Hellmans over the thing XD

I was also able to make the udon-topped ‘modanyaki’ variant this time — double-carb heaven! I definitely had to slow down a bit towards the end, but I still managed to finish everything in one sitting, yum yum!

As for future variations, I’m thinking of either reducing the amount of bacon or leaving it off altogether — it’d reduce the grease/fat/salt factor a fair bit, make flipping the pancake base easier (it’s surprisingly hard to do  that without the bacon falling off!) and it’d also mean that I wouldn’t have to supervise the okonomiyaki with one hand while fending off a loudly mrowking cat with the other (she’s old, stubborn and wanted to have some of the bacon even though it’s bad for cats and she’s perfectly well fed on the special CKD food, bless her fluffy paws <3).

This is one of the most delightfully flexible and versatile recipes I’ve encountered yet!

Munchy menchi!

This week’s recipe was menchi katsu burgers — an East/West fusion recipe, and easily one of my favourites from Asian Adventure!

A mixture of beef and pork mince, sautéed onion, dashi seasoning, soy sauce (I forgot to add that one, but it ended up not really mattering), tonkatsu sauce, egg, milk, black pepper and panko breadcrumbs (plus some dried rosemary, which isn’t in the recipe but seemed like a nice addition), all modged up together before being coated in shichimi-lace flour, beaten egg and panko breadcrumbs — yum! The main bit of the recipe instructs that the breaded burgers should be fried, but it also offers the option of oven-baking them at 180C for 12 minutes. I decided to cook the burgers at 180C, but in the grill section of my oven — it has a smaller cavity, which gets up to temperature more quickly, thus saving electricity, and grilling tends to keep the grease quotient of a dish reasonably low.

The recipe instructs for the use of 200g each of pork and beef mince, but the smallest quantity of each that I was able to get was 250g of beef mince and 500g of pork mince (thank you, Sainsbury’s!) — I was effectively going double quantities. I also used 8 small shallots instead of the onion, as they were hanging around in my cupboard and needed using. Additionally, I did my thing of stirring together the egg, flour and breadcrumbs left after breading all the burgers. There wasn’t much egg left, so the mixture was very dry, but I carefully added a few dribbles of water until I had a thick paste, then used that to patch gaps in the breading on each burger.

The increased amount of meat that I used compared to the recipe meant that I was able to make six very large, chunky burgers — I worried a bit that this might prevent them from cooking all the way through, but I needn’t have worried. The burgers were perfect! Moist, tender and juicy, cooked all the way through without getting dry, scorched or hard, and generally highly delicious — this is most certainly a recipe I’ll be making again (though probably using less meat next time!).

The ‘katsu’ in the name of the recipe gave me the idea to have some of the leftover burgers with katsu curry sauce prepared from a tub of concentrated paste that I have in my winter stockpile — should be good! 😀

Nuggets with a difference

Welcome to 2020, the year of hindsight! Personally, I hope Roaring Twenties-type flapper fashion comes back in this decade…

Anyways, my first recipe experiment of the year was chicken karaage — essentially, Japanese chicken nuggets. Chicken thighs cut into chunks, soaked in a soy sauce-miso-garlic-ginger-shichimi marinade for a few hours, coated in flour then fried and served with mustard and Japanese mayo — yum yum! (This was my first time trying Japanese mayonnaise — it’s thicker and creamier than the Western stuff, and so, so good!)

I have a considerable fear of deep fryers and deep-frying, so I elected to shallow-fry the nuggets instead. It worked perfectly well,  but things still turned into a bit of a rich grease-fest all the same. Delicious, but a major calorie bomb! I think I might grill the nuggets next time I make this — not strictly karaage, perhaps, but much healthier and uses a bit less electricity.

With the marinade and the flour left over from coating the nuggets, I did my usual thing of stirring them up together and frying them into a sort of pancake. It worked ok and certainly tasted good, but it fell apart a bit and there was the grease factor to consider as well. Next time, I think I’ll up the flour ratio to get the flour/marinade mixture to the texture of soft bread dough or similar, then divide it into lumps and boil them as if they were gnocchi — much lower fat, and should be just as yummy!