Level up!

Time is counting till mission but that aside I want to talk about a super simple dish I made for the first time. It's called Gyudon which simply means beef served on rice. Apart from putting rice in the rice cooker the only prep required is for the meat. The method I used today was along the lines of my previous 'don' dishes i.e. sliced onion, dashi soup stock, soy sauce, mirin, sake and you can put sugar but I refuse to. Before I put the onions in I made sure I gave the liquid some time to simmer so that the alcohol evaporated. After that I used about 90grams of thinly-sliced beef, covered and left to simmer for about 5. The critical point to the meat preparation is the heat level and time spent cooking. Too low and the meat will be uncooked or over-chewy, too high and you'll run out of liquid you want a little left so it mixes with the rice. If the meat is also left to cook for too long it starts to lose its flavour. The finished should be taken off the stove asap with the meat looking thoroughly cooked and some liquid remaining. So simple and all things considered it cost me about 250 yen to make and TASTY!

Other than this new dish I've mainly been trying new methods with known dishes. I no longer use oil for my soba, I use miso soup to go with my somen noodles (although I still haven't narrowed down the cooking time well enough, I end up with water from the noodles diluting the miso soup) and the other day I finally made a recognizable Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. The last one is a really tough dish I still haven't gotten the proportions right. The one non-Japanese dish that I've been practicing is Croatian-style crepes like my mum taught me, if we had an oven I would try the strudel recipe handed down through from my grandmother on my father's side to him to me. The pancakes are really tricky, I've gotten the technique down nigh perfect but the proper batter quantities still need tuning. One thing that is throwing me off a little is that Japanese eggs are really different from Australian ones, somehow the yolk is huge and also there's a huge translucent part different to the white of the egg. I was also originally having trouble with the flour clumping but that has been solved by sifting and a secret ingredient that I forgot at first. Other than that on the topic of food I'm looking forward to heading into ShimoKita finally to get some supplies for the next dish I wanna try - Nikujaga, more on that later.

Karate is going well there was no Judo yesterday because of University foundation day or something like that. Right now most of time is going into trying to will myself to get an assignment done for UTS. Future news will be arriving on my sculpture class which starts this Saturday and the camera I finally decide to buy, currently leaning towards the DMC-fp1 but I'll see what my dad says first :D

Ijou desu.