Sesame Dressing

We had only been married a little time before Ryu told me he liked Chinese food also. Wow! Learning to make Japanese food as well as Chinese - I recruited his help. We bought a Chinese cookbook at the 100 yen (Dollar) store and have used it and used it!

This is the Sesame Dressing for one of the dishes (whose name I can't remember or READ!)

The cookbook is Bon Cook #23 Chinese...Something. The recipe is on page 48.

Anyway, this is Ryu's dish to make, but, we are on a chicken eating frenzy, so I am always looking for ideas. The other day I decided to boil a chicken breast, tear it into shreds, steam some green beans and cut them in half, and pour this sauce over it all. We were ALL (meaning, Jun too!) in heaven!

Sesame Dressing

3 Tbsp. White Sesame Seeds - grind these up in a food mixer you can later add wet ingredients too for ease in preparation. (I'm sure you could use black too. We used roasted white ones.)
3 Tbsp. Soy Sauce
1 1/2 Tbsp. Sugar
1 Tbsp. Vinegar
1/2 tsp. Sesame oil
1/2 tsp. rayu (very hot oil. We leave it out when Jun is eating with us - ALWAYS - though we love it!)

After grinding up the sesame seeds, add the rest of the ingredients and blend well. This is the first time I used our food grinder/mixer. Ryu does it by hand. Do as you wish, but I will always use our cheapo frustrating mixer after this! So easy!

This is great over chicken and pork. Also, over steamed veggies like broccoli, green beans or spinach. It would also be great over a salad or chilled tofu! Of course, you can adjust the flavor/sweetness to your liking, too! Try it!

Furikake - Sprinkles for the top of your white rice!

My husband likes furikake. Actually, furikake is the savior of many Japanese housewives, or housewives of any nationality, or I guess anyone at all, who make obentos. These sprinkles add so much flavor, color, fun to the white rice part of a lunch.

We have been buying furikake for years. It has yellow chunks that are supposed to be egg. Hmmm. And dried seaweed - nori. Well, I hate the stuff. I think all the yellow chunks are are lumps of sodium with no health benefit at all.

So, when I was at church last week, and a lady was showing me the furikake she had made and said it was easy - my ears perked up. Her suggestion, my friend Kaoru's help, and an idea or two from the internet turned into this furikake. The hubby loves it! YEAH! It is NOT cheaper than the purchased sodium, but, it is worth it.

Furikake

50 gm. tiny white fish (raw, not dried)
1/3 cup sesame seeds
1 cup bonito flakes (not packed!)
1 Tbsp. soy sauce
3 Tbsp. mirin

In a dry frying pan, "dry" the fish out. Then add the sesame seeds and bonito flakes. When the sesame seeds start popping a bit, add the mixture of soy and mirin. Then, stir over low heat till all the moisture is absorbed/evaporated. Won't take long. Store it in an airtight container in the freezer! It doesn't get hard, even when frozen, and lasts a long time - or not - if you serve it on lunches every day!

I also heard you can use dried radish or daikon leaves. I just got a batch today to try. I will also cut up some of the tons of dry seaweed sheets we have been given and add that next time I make it. Hubby also bought some dried shrimp he wants in a furikake. A friend just told me she cuts up konyaku and uses it in furikake. So, I guess the ideas are endless. And, though the fish is a bit expensive (we paid 350 yen for 50 gm. of fish), the other ingredients are CHEAP! I might even dry out some scrambled eggs for my own version of the purchased stuff!

Cooking Blind

I'm always looking all over the house before I fix dinner these days. Without my reading glasses - one of the 4-5 pairs I have hiding from me - I can't even see recipes I've written out or directions on the backs of packages.

So, it was with comic relief that I realized I didn't NEED glasses to use this flavor pack from Tammy in Ukraine. As it is all written in Ukrainian or Russian, it wouldn't really matter how many pairs of glasses I found, I still wouldn't be able to read it!

It is supposed to be for veggies, Tammy said, but I sprinkled it over pork too. It has a salty chicken consume-like flavor. Soooo good!

Cumin

It is sweet potato time in Japan. My husband dislikes sweet potatoes because - they are sweet. So, I was excited to find a savory (non-sweet) recipe for sweet potatoes on Abagail's food blog, Mamatouille.

Her recipe for Sweet Potato Fries uses cumin. I remembered seeing cumin in the back of my spice basket, and was so happy to find that I still had it. And surprised! It was a full spice jar of cumin. Never been opened. The expiration date was sometime in 2005. When did I buy this? Why did I buy this? How did it find itself into my spice basket?

Well, being raised on antique spices, I didn't hesitate to scoop out the teaspoon of cumin and make the Sweet Potato Fries. I forgot to weigh the sweet potatoes first, so, over seasoned them a bit, but I really liked them. I didn't know cumin was part of the curry family of spices. Ryu gave the potatoes a rating of "fushigi" (unusual), and Jun wanted "more".

The next evening I added the remaining cubed up fries to a chicken dish I made, added a tad bit more cumin, and it got the "omoi" (heavy) rating, which is the highest in our household. So fun to find a "new" spice for us!

NOTE: When making a bland curry-from-the-box for dinner the other night, I added 1/4 tsp. of cumin (I used 1/4 of the box roux) to the mixture and Ryu was SOOO impressed. Me too. It was pretty terrible before the cumin!