Chicken Katsu Donburi

In case you didn't know, I have been reading alot of bento making books lately. ALOT. I've got my hands on a total of 5 now, and I've been reading them nightly. Japanese cooking, I concluded, consists of 3 main ingredients: Shoyu, Sugar, and Mirin. If you have all 3, you can make almost anything yummy.

I love donburi. It makes the rice so tasty! I never would have thought I could make this and i managed to! It's so simple, using those same 3 ingredients.

1 tsp Mirin
1 tsp Sugar
1 tbsp Shoyu
2 tbsp water
2 tsp sake
1 small onion (chopped)
1 piece of chicken katsu/cutlet, cut into strips**
1 egg (beaten)
cooked rice

Heat first 5 ingredients in a skillet until bubbly, add in onions and cook until onions are cooked through. Reduced heat, add in chicken cutlet, cover, and cook for another 5 minutes. Slowly pour beaten egg into the skillet, move the skillet around to fluff the egg. Using spatula, loosen the content bottom from the skillet, flip the content over on the top of a bowl of rice. Serve!

**can be substitue with pork cutlet/tonkatsu, diced chicken with shiitake mushrooms (that's what I made for lunch the next day), shrimp, etc. lots of variety!

Sushi Night

I haven't made dinner in a long time. At least nothing worth mentioning. Last night I decided to make something Mr. P would like: sushi.

I went to pick up some poke (hawaiian style raw seafood salad) from the grocery store before heading home early evening. I had spicy tuna, ahi poke, ocean salad, along with a fresh wild caught ahi fillet. I thought about making california roll too, but I didn't get any avocados from my in-law's tree and decided to save some money. The poke and the sashimi costed about $25.

I have been using hapa rice (half brown and half white) for quite some time now and didn't have any white rice. I thought I could try making sushi rice out of them -- not really a good idea. It's best to use white japanese rice.

Sushi Rice:

cook rice as directed. in a bowl, mix in one part sugar, 2 part rice vinegar, and a dash of salt. If it's 2 cups cooked rice, then 1 tbsp sugar, 2 tbsp rice vinegar, and 1/2 tsp salt. pour into cooked rice, mix well and let cool.

Inside out sushi roll:

Place siran wrap as base, place nori on top of siran wrap, thinly spread sushi rice all over nori. Flip nori over so rice is on the bottom. Add your inside stuff starting at half an inch from the base of the nori (mine is spicy tuna), line the filling up horizontally. start rolling by grabbing the siran wrap and cover the filling slowly and tightly, lifting the siran wrap up as the nori hits the inside and continue to roll through. Use your hands to grip the roll tightly, then open up the siran wrap. To cut, run a sharpe knife through cold water (per cut) and cut them into 6 to 8 pieces.

Maki Sushi:

Same as inside out, but don't flip the nori over, so rice is on the inside. =)

Gunkan style:

Using a pair of wet hands, grab some rice to shape it into an oval shape rice ball. Cut the nori into strips (you should be able to see the lines lightly indented on the sheet of nori) then wrap it around the rice ball with the base of the rice ball touching one base of the strip. This is so that there is room on the top of the nori to create a "pocket" to put your filling on top. Then you can fill in whatever filling you want on top, the more, the better. Filling suggestions (possibilities are endless!): spicy tuna, tako poke (octopus), ahi poke, ocean salad, tuna with mayo, corn with mayo, tobikko (flying fish eggs), ikura (salmon roe), uni (sea urchin), etc.

Nigiri, or Sashimi:

No sweat, just cut them in slices and place it on top of an oval shape rice ball, or just eat them with wasabi and shoyu!

Of course there were plenty of poke leftover, I also made Edemame Rice with this too. for $25, i think it's not bad to play sushi chef!

Bento Books

I had lunch with my friend today and she surprised me with a copy of Yum-Yum Bento Box book, signed by Pikko!!
I first started showing interest was when I got my hands on Susan Yuen's first bento bookHawaii Bento Box Cookbook. I was intrigued by the recipe section as I love to cook. I mean, she was a sou chef at Palomino's! Her food must be AWESOME! Sure enough, I started making her recipes and it's always a winner! Eventually I found her blog so I added it to my favorites.

Some where down the line of reading her blogs, I started seeing Susan commenting on other blogs and needless to say, I end up having a new folder under my favorites and added to-date 8 bento blog sites, including Pikko's blog.

I decided to start doing bento for lil P's summer fun days and posted them up for my friends to see. They were amazed, though, my camera sucks, and it's not even great compare to these author's bentos. I am still learning, will probably never be like them. But I'm very happy to get a copy of this Yum-Yum Bento Box book. Perhaps I can make lil P lunch if he decides not to eat school lunches when school resumes in August! Thanks Yen for the wonderful gift!

Summer fun bentos

7/6: Bakugan ham sandwich


















Lil P is obsessed over bakugan and pokemon. so I figured I'll try to please him. I had to go through his dark room to dig up some bakugan cards to see how they're supposed to look. To my surprised, he knew exactly what they were just by looking at it and thought it was cool, and ate the whole thing...except for the fiber bar that he absolutely needed. And I found wrappers from chocolate which I did not get for him. He said his friend gave him one. sigh.


6/7: Meatball Sandwich of Onix from Pokemon


















I asked lil P if his friends ever look at his bento. he said yes and told me they wanted to see more pokemon. So I asked him to give me suggestions. He immediately went to his pokemon book and showed me some of the characters. Originally it was a green dragon guy and he said he'll be fine eating lettuce (OMG!) but then I decided to make it easier on me by making him a meatball sandwich. Of course I stuck the fiber bar back in this time and told him he MUST eat that before eating any other snacks!

6/8: Spam musubis and kalbi bento

















Lil P said he doesn't need anything special, so i told him musubis. He said he wanted the ones I buy down at the okazuya, he said it's better than the ones I make, hmph! So I told him I think i can master the way they make theirs and I really think I did! The okazuya really just left out the shoyu, they just put sugar on the spam and fried it. At least that's what I did and he said it tasted the same.

Kalbi on the other hand was made the night before. Lil P's absolute favorite dish so I used Susan Yuen's first bento book's recipe. I made too much as Mr. P and I worked out so hard we weren't hungry for a big meal. So I decided to pack some for my sister for lunch at her office and packed some for myself too. :)

6/9: Pizza manaupa

















Yup, this week is mostly per request. Lil P requested to have the pizza manapuas again. So here it is. I decided to not do the cheese topping but egg wash the top instead so it looks shiny like a baked manapua. This time I'm even smarter by mixing carrot puree into the spaghetti sauce so that he could have some veggies along with his favorite food: pizza! You can find how to make it here, on 6/30.

bentos (con't)

6/30 Pizza Manapua

















Lil P likes pepperoni. I picked some up a while ago and used it for pepperoni roll from previous post but didn't use them all up so I put them in the freezer. I pull them out of the freezer yesterday and bought pillsbury biscuit dough and thought instead of pizza roll, I'll make it into mini manapuas!

Mini Pizza Manapuas

Pillsbury mini biscuit dough
spaghetti sauce
Pepperoni slices (chopped)
Shredded cheese

1) The dough is already individually cut up, so I flattened it.
2) Put in the center a penny size spaghetti sauce
3) Top with some chopped pepperoni, then shredded cheese.
4) Pull the sides up to cover the fillings, it's hard to close it, so I flip it over so the seal side is on the bottom.
5) I did 6 of these then place them on the pan to bake in the toaster oven at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes.
6) I then pull them out, added more shredded cheese on the top of the buns, place it back in for another 3 min or so to give the cheesy look on the top.
7) Or, if you want a shiny top, simply brush beaten egg on top of each bun.

You can do more than just pizza!

6/29 "Froggy Business"


















Yesterday I felt a bit lazy and was just going to pick up musubi at the okazuya this morning. But I got half an hour to kill last night so I told myself to save money and make my own spam musubis. The only cutter I have that is small enough to use for the spam is the frog cookie cutter. So I cut 3 slices of 3 frogs last night and put the rest in the freezer. This morning I fried up the 3 slices of frog spam (1 tsp sugar, 1 tsp shoyu, 1 tsp mirin), microwave leftover white rice, and cut up some nori strips to make the musubis. I had some eyes cut out from cheese but I decided not to add any more details as is as I was afraid lil P might not eat it. My friends saw the pics and quite a few of them were asking what it was. I guess I should have made eyes for the frogs. :( and cutting the nori thinner would help too. 3 mini musubis wouldn't be enough for lil P, so I added in fried chicken from the leftover I made couple days ago. The fried chicken recipe was from a japanese bento making book. (marinte bite-size chicken in shoyu, ginger juice, and mirin for 10 min, then drench in flour and then fry. note: I would suggest to drench them with flour and cornstarch mixture. The flour alone didn't make it crispy enough)


6/28 Pikachu Turkey and Cheese Sandwich

















Cut out pikachu shape with cheese, cut of eyes, ears, nose, mouth with nori. add cheeks with ketchup, add mouth with turkey.

Planning is everything, if you know what you're making and know the steps to do them, it'll make your cooking time much faster. For lil P, I wrote out the things I could make (in less than 20 min) and ask him to tell me when he wants them, and I put the schedule on the fridge. For example: Day 1 is fried rice, Day 2 is musubis, Day 3 is ham and cheese, Day 4 is meatballs with fried noodles, Day 5 is peanut butter, Day 6 is hot dog, etc once I'm at the end of the list, I just start over again. The truth is, not even I follow it to the tee (probably because lil P doesn't care as long as I make things he'll eat), but it's good to know you have variety without pulling your hair off trying to figure out what to make, or having sandwiches everyday.

More Bentos (plus Julie and Julia)

conquered more bentos this week!

6/21 "Basketball"

American cheese single, use a cup to cut the cheese in a circle, then use a tooth pick to cut out the lines of the basketball.

6/22 "Fishy Fishy in the Sea"

Use cookie cutter to cut out the shape from the bread, spread peanut butter or Nutella and sandwich together. Using toothpick, draw the eyes and mouths using Nutella. Add graps and soy beans to act as 'bubbles'.

6/23 "Catapillar"

Line meatballs (ready made) to look like a catapillar, cut two small carrot pieces into "L" shape, poke it in the first meatball top as antenna, place 3 pieces of shredded cheese for eyes and mouth.

Julie and Julia (semi review)

While I was folding clothes the other day, I turned the channel and found Julie and Julia on HBO. I didn't see the beginning, neither did I finish the movie before I get called out to finish up other chores. But I did watch about half an hour of it. To my surprise, it was a pretty good movie! Part of it is because I love cooking, but also because it was just entertaining! Maryl Streep played really well as Julia Child and I love the frustration and melt down of Amy Adams trying to work on a recipe but couldn't get it the way she would like. Reminded me of the time I had to make a dinosaur cake for lil' P's bday party and it turned out to be a disaster! I cried and sobbed and good thing mr. P was comforting. Speaking of which, he hasn't been comforting lately. hmph! Anyway, I am planning on recording it so i could watch it entirely. As a matter of fact, that book is at the "lending" library at work. I was tempted to borrow it to read it....but I never finish a book. sigh....

Bento Making

I have been reading alot about bentos, I have become virtual friends with Susan Yuen who's had her second bento book out already. I enjoy reading her blog with cute bento ideas, and I absolutely love her recipe portion of her book. I often seek for her advice. Lil' P started summer fun and I needed to make him lunch daily. I thought, "maybe it's time for me to start making bentos" and asked her what she would recommend for older boys. She responded with a post just for me!!! How awesome is that?!!?!

http://susanyuen.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/transformers-sandwich-bento-98/

Let's see if I could make it happen...


6/16 Summer fun bento: Autobot Chicken Quesadilla with Extra Fiber Poptart

Thanks Susan!!

6/17 "Stampede of Dinosuars" titled by lil' P