I'm trying to learn how to make sushi. I love eating it and I mastered some of the basics, like how to form the rice patties for nigiri and how to spread the rice on a piece of laver for maki.
Fillings are a little more challenging though. I like the raw fish but the US grocery stores are kind of a roll of the dice... it SHOULD be safe enough, but is it really? Also quality of the raw fish I've eaten off Albertson's fish counter seems not as good as the stuff the sushi places get from their suppliers.
I got stuff for California rolls today so I will try that. Got ahi tuna as well - that's usually safe to eat cause it's deep-frozen at sea. (TBH most seafood is deep frozen at least once before it gets to your plate unless you're buying live or off a fish dock, so I am less worried about parasites and more worried about taste and texture.)
I tried making tamago and it looks really messy (I can do french and american omelets but not that well. It always breaks in the pan when I try to flip or fold.) But it tastes about right, maybe it will work?
I'd like to be the cool mom who serves awesome bento lunch boxes and delicious tamago. That would be a redemption arc from the universally sad and unappetizing packed lunches I got in school (unless boy oh boy it was pizza day!) But is it achievable? I guess I can comfort myself knowing that a bento box lunchbox itself is already a lunch upgrade because the food is presented in a much more appetizing way than the same items served in zip-loc bags and tupperwares.
Beef stroganoff looks like barf but tastes delicious. I have a bunch of dill in the garden and we have always used it in stroganoff, but imagine my surprise when I was browsing recipes* and most of them didn't call for dill. Am I crazy? Has my family been cooking weird stroganoff all this time?
*I know how to make it, but I like looking at other recipes to see if anyone has a variation that sounds interesting before I cook something.
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ETA: I asked Nigel to go to the store to grab a couple of ingredients I needed, including mushrooms. And I didn't even think about telling him how many I needed, just assumed he'd grab one of those pre-measured containers. Nigel returned with exactly four white button mushrooms
(He went back out, lol - ended up using a little over a pound because mushrooms are fucking delicious)
nah beef+dill is a known combo for Russian cooking I think. When making borscht I like to chop some dill frond and serve alongside the sour cream/greek yogurt as garnishes.
Dill's also nice with salmon... roll that salmon in the dill, top it with some lemon slices, bake n serve w boiled red potatoes. It's good.
I just made Japanese curry. I've had some of the roux cubes for a couple years and the best by date was months ago, but who cares? Opened them up and they were fine. Perfect, even.
Chicken as the main protein, I started with onions and then Jacked it up by overcrowding the pan (a Dutch oven) sauteeing in beef tallow, so despite the tallow, did not get a brown on the chicken. This was ultimately no big deal.
The other ingredients other than the nearly two pounds of onions were potatoes, turnips, banana peppers I grew, rehydrated shiitake mushrooms, a single monstrously hot habanero because even though S&B has "Extra Hot," it actually really isn't, but super hot is not really consistent with Japanese curry so only one for a giant batch. Also the usual dash of fish sauce, and an herb packet with a bunch of Szechuan peppers, so I could easily remove them at the end. Not totally for spice, I just don't want crunchy shit in Japanese curry.
Oh, I also used coconut milk for the roux. And served it over basmati rice. So it is a complete bastard curry with Japanese, Thai, Chinese, and Indian shit in it. Mighty white of me. I hope Uncle Roger would be horrified.
That sounds like it was tasty.
Naval Curry is a
Jewish British Empire plot to get Japanese sailors to eat wheat flour. Its purpose is to displace some of the white rice they were used to eating. Japanese sailors would join the Navy because one of the perks was that they got to eat lots of polished white rice that ordinary Japs had problems affording and buying in quantity because it's basically a in-demand processed food. The Navy could buy all the white rice it needed, though, because white rice is more shelf stable than brown rice (the oils and shit in the husk cause the brown rice to spoil faster.) So it ended up that the sailors ate little else but white rice, gorging on it basically, and they started getting beriberi and other nutritional deficiencies, because wheat flour/noodles/bread etc was considered way less desirable to the Japanese sailors. So the Navy introduced this curry to force sailors to eat enough enriched flour to avoid going blind or whatever and get some protein and b-vitamins in them.
(Why do Japanese hate eating proteins I wonder? It's not just historic scarcity. Japanese Navy could get whatever food it wanted and its sailors still suffered from beriberi and pellagra. It's like they want to carboload on rice and eat a de minimus amount of fish and pickles to complement it, plus maybe a miso soup that's mostly salt, laver, kelp, fermented bean paste, a piece of tofu the size of a thumbnail, and more salt. I like all these things, but not in these ratios.)
Anyway. Naval Curry came to Japan by way of Britain by way of India. It's a bastard dish even if you prepared it exactly like the S&B package directions tell you to.
