Food! Cooking in Japan

I haven't really posted anything about what I've been cooking lately, so I thought I'd give you an update on that. It isn't so easy to find things in Fukuoka for making the American foods I'm used to. Here are some experiments I did:

 

First, my attempt to make chikuzen ni with lotus root. 

This is a popular dish in this area, I think. It didn't turn out so great and obviously it wasn't so good for a picture. I'd forgotten to get bouillon for the chicken broth so I think that's one reason why it wasn't so good, and I also accidentally got chicken necks or something instead of normal pieces of chicken, so it was extremely bony! 

 

My next adventure in cooking was making gyudon, which is beef and rice bowl. This is the sauce I used, which was much more tasty than the sauce I was using before and only a tiny bit more expensive! It tasted actually better than my mom made it back home, can you believe it? All because of authentic sauce.  . . now if I could learn to make the sauce on my own, that would be even better!

 

This was a souvenir from the tea ceremony and I ate it for desert! This is higashi, which are moist sweets.

 

My next attempt was to make unagidon which is an eel and rice bowl. I got anagi instead, so it was pretty salty, I prefer freshwater eel, I think. I just got this because it was cheaper! It was still really good though, and it came with sauce on it already so I didn't have to make it! I cooked it in my fish grill and made a little bit of sauce to add over the rice, but that was it!

 

I next attempted to make oden, another traditional Japanese dish that is like a soup with a million fishcakes in it! It actually turned out pretty good, I'd bought an oden powder mix and followed instructions that I found on nhk.com, which has recipes in English! It wasn't perfect (not as good as  Yuka's mom made it!) but it was good enough! I was pretty happy with this one because it's not easy to make if you aren't used to cooking Japanese food!

My other recent ventures were making Indian-style curry rice where I used green curry and mixed it directly with the rice, cooking it over the stovetop with chicken, etc, just like making fried rice! Usually, you cook the rice and curry separately, but I really liked this recipe. I also recently made sloppy joe's which turned out delicious! I forgot to take a picture, but will post one when I eat it again. Of course, they don't make a very pretty picture, but it's amusing to see sloppy joe's with the giant slices of bread they have out here! They don't sell hamburger buns at the regular grocery store, but it only takes one slice of the super-thick bread here to be the same size as a whole bun! Seriously, that's how big the slices are . . . well, until next time!

I'm going to hanami today (looking at cherry blossoms then eating) so I hope to update again on Sunday!