Things i like about Japan

 

Japan is known for their mini bar. This narrow alley has at least 15 bar mini bars although it appear to be one quiet alley, once you stepped into one of these bars, the ambience transforms. U got to experience them!

 

-This is one good looking shrine with a thousand over orange pillars spread over 2km-

 

-Ramen is a must eat in Kyoto. With their unique ordering system, i.e via a vending machine as shown below , it was a refreshing and eye-opening experience to me-

-Just click away, your noodles will arrive piping hot shortly-

-I love these red leaves...such a beauty-

 

If you like things modern and ancient, then Japan is a great place to explore. The people are extremely helpful and polite. The place is spotlessly clean that you even find koi fish swimming in their drains. One thing i dislike about Japan is everything is expensive there. For eg:- a thick slice of toast bread with a glass of milk (picture below) is 450 yen, equivalent to rm18.

 

 

 

-Not sure what species is this fish. Found in a drain in Shirakawago. Look at the crystal clear water. A big contrast to what we find in Kuala Lumpur's drains...*hehe*-

 

 

-One of Osaka's famous dining street, Shin Sei Kei. We ordered sashimi, a lemon whisky and some snacks at one their casual dining place (pics as below)-

 

 

-Sashimi, raw salmon fish. Not the freshiest i've tasted-

 

-Love their sashimo. Plump, juicy and full of roes inside their bloated stomache. Delish!-

Well, besides food, Japan is unique in their art and culture too. We were lucky enough to sight geishas & maikos on our 1st day there.

-They look like a clay model to me, "unreal" as they appeared and dissapeared really quick. Just enough time for me to snap a picture or two-

 

If i ever return to Japan, i hope to visit Tokyo, their capital and Hokkaido!

The trip was a smooth sailing one for hubby and i in that 8 days but i must admit i didn't think the scenery were great. It was just okay and did not take my breath away. So if you were a person who loves picture perfect landscape, can forget Japan. That's it about my Japan trip. Hope you enjoy the pictures and illustrations.

 

Sept & Oct In A Go (Part 2)

 

We also have beef & chicken satay for our Mid-Autumn party! :-))

 

Of all the toppings, i love the apples one the most. There's pineapple, peach, peanut butter, choc hazelnut and cream cheese. My least favourite is the peanut butter topping...very cloying.

-This is one of the 1st to finish. Rock melon with sweet juice grapes. YUM-

-We have 6 mini Japanese lanterns as well to create the Mid-Autumn ambience. :-D-

 

 

After the Mid-Autumn Party, come October where hubby and i travelled to Kyoto, Takayama & Osaka in which i will write in another post.

 

Well, the title "Sept &Oct in a Go" is sure apt with the content in a zoom zoom kind of Go...

 

Sayonaro! See ya in my next post on Nihon hai.

September & October in a Go

Hello! I am pleasantly surprised to find so many new posts when i logged in today, intending to write a few posts myself.

Let's start with September!

-Food hubby & i prepared for the mid-autumn celeb with some of our close pals.

From front left (anti-clockwise) is slow cooked brinjal with potatoes and mushrooms seasoned with salt (i made this but not yummy. i tried to imitate the appertizer i had in an italian resto but failed miserably), fried noodles by hubby garnished with fried eggs (this is one of the only dish that finished on that night), fried drummets (combined effot by hubby & i but hubby fried better looking drummets than i do...fail again) and lastly steam edamame by me, yummy Japanese green beans as snacks-

P/s:- Something wrong with the connection. Takes ages to load one picture and the other 5 failed...

I will come back to finish this post off!

Food Poetry Nonsense from September to October 2012

On the first day of September my true love said to me;

go and eat prawn noodles

make yourself fishy

join you I will not

but beside you I will play computer games.

On the fifth day of September my true love said to me;

shall I make you a cereal drink?

It's good for health

You like it a lot

It'll perk up your mood all the time.

On the tenth day of September my true love said to me;

How nice this risotto is

It is all chicken and vegetables

no E colourings and preservatives

keep it up my love, you'll make me

healthy but with a belly.

On the fifteenth day of September my true love said to me;

Doesn't look very appetizing

yet once you try this onion soup

you'll be all charged and smelly

but who cares because I'm all oniony too!

 On the twentieth day of September my true love said to me;

I am going to bake

show you my love

my heart especially

when it's all given to you.

 On the twenty-fifth day of September my true love said to me;

I want to eat fast food

make myself a pork burger

much fresher than plasticky Macdonalds

much more oomph than your mouth can take in one bite.

On the thirtieth day of September my true love said to me;

If I knew what life was about

I wouldn't be swimming to search for answers

I would be cooking for passion and

swimming for fish to cook.

 On the first day of October my true love said to me;

I am going to make noodles

but of a special kind

they will be as delicious as

hawker food style in Malaysia

you'll want more and more.

On the fifth day of October my true love said to me;

Bread is the most basic of food

bake it I will

with bacon and cheese

hearty enough for dinner.

 On the tenth day of October my true love said to me;

Eat your apples; two a day

easy to cut with apple cutter

even if you're lazy

you can still do it

come on, you boleh!

On the fifteenth day of October my true love said to me;

Chicken drumsticks here I come

make something with soya sauce

let it be golden brown and with

vegetables to brighten up the day.

On the twentieth day of October my true love said to me;

Let's have Mexican

go for chips and chicken with guacamole sauce

sweet vegetables at the bottom

heat up in the oven.

 On the twentieth of October my true love said to me;

The Lorraine quiche looks good

for tea shall it be

dinner we can skip

for this enormous pie is shared only with the two of us.

Now you see this bowl of chilly chicken ramen from Wagamama's Restaurant in Amsterdam....

Now you don't! It's gone, thanks to me...

Hubby's 38th Birthday

 Hubby celebrated his 38th birthday on October 3rd which fell on a Wednesday. He was working from home on that day and I had lectures at university. I was out of the house from 11.00 am till 6.00 pm. It is a change for me as I am normally home on Wednesdays when he is home. University life means lots of travelling - technically classes start at 1.15 pm and end at 3.00 pm but I take up to four hours in travelling time. I was home at 6.00 pm because I went to buy hubby a birthday cake.

I got hubby a cream chocolate cake from the department store HEMA in the center of Alkmaar upon reaching the train station. Hubby was pleasantly surprised. He was still working at the computer and we had the cake as our tea. Hubby had to continue working still after that.

His mother had dropped by earlier in the afternoon to wish him happy birthday and to give him a present of a flower arrangement with decorative fans on it which were on closer view, banknotes folded creatively into fans.

She had also bought him half a birthday cake. So we had plenty of cake to eat. It was nice that both cakes were of different flavours - the cake that his mother bought was a pure chocolate cake.

We went out for dinner in the Thai restaurant in Alkmaar at 8.30 pm. We were fortunate that the rain had just stopped. We ordered Thai chicken curry in the war. It is a chicken dish with three different types of curry making the same dish. I thought that the curries will be served separately but I think three different curries were mixed all into one plate.

 Perhaps that's why they called it chicken in the war.

Our other dish was a pork curry dish served in a clay pot, while the last dish was a tauhu (bean curd) chilly salad dish. We had our meals with rice.

The chicken in the war was really spicy but I enjoyed it a lot. So was the salad dish.

In the middle of the night, I had a terrible tummy ache from all the chilly. Hubby's tummy was not feeling too great the next day either.

But we had a nice time together in the restaurant. Hubby was feeling more festive now. I had initially bought hubby a computer game "Mists of Pandaria" extension set for his World of Warcraft. I was surprised to know that he actually had this game already, so I had to change it at the shop the next day for a refund. Nevertheless hubby was happy that I thought of something that he liked. He knew that I feel that sometimes he plays too much games.

In the end, I got hubby some shower gel from Nivea as I ran out of ideas of what hubby might want. I was not sure what other computer games he might like for I hardly know any games unless he tells me about it.

We are going to England, in particular London to celebrate his birthday again in conjunction with his sister and nephew's birthday next Friday. We are looking forward to the trip and I plan to give hubby another nice dinner since we had tummy upsets from the Thai dinner.

Food may come and food may go, but birthdays with hubby must be perfect in my opinion. Hubby is fond of Asian food and I am pleased. I am fond of Dutch / Western food now and hubby is neither pleased or angry. He says "just be yourself and that is the best of all." How sweet.

Although it is already two weeks since his birthday, I wish hubby the greatest birthday yet and may all his dreams come true! Your wife will see to it...

Chef Jonker's Philadelphia Pork

From a commercial on tv and from my initial interest in the dish but lack of commitment to actually make it, hubby took over the reins from me. He made Philadelphia pork which is basically an oven pork dish coated in a type of herb butter from the Philadelphia brand which is famous in Holland. He slices the pork fillet into half, marinates it overnight  and on the next day spreads the butter inside the pork just like one would do a sandwich. He then cuts bell peppers and adds them inside the tin foil together with the pork. Then it goes into the oven for forty five minutes at 180'C.

The dish is delicious and I feel like I'm having a meal in a Michelin starred restaurant. The sauce from the marinade is delicious and the pork is all buttery with a distinct herb taste.

It is a joy to be eating this meal. I didn't think that from butter you could get a delicious dish. Of course it's fattening but I will overlook this for now. Good things come with a cost; hence the saying "you can never have too much of a good thing", if this interpretation is right. You must strive for less and in moderation. Thus eating = living.

Or maybe it means the other way round - you can never have too much of something good because it is always getting better and better. It means that you can have more of it and appreciate what you have! Thus living = eating. Not bad at all I would say and definitely easier to follow.

Korma Curry Pork with the Couch Potato Chef

Feeling re-energized on a dreary-weather Friday evening, I decided to cook a proper meal with TLC (tender loving care) for hubby and myself for dinner. For two weeks, I had not cooked a proper meal - by proper meal, I define it as something which is not oven-baked, instant or tapaod (take-away Malaysian style). I was down with an inflammation of the tail bone; in simple words just lower back swelling. I was unable to bend down and could walk only very slowly. Hubby took one day leave from work to see to my needs. I felt very immobile. I could not walk without pain then. It saw me lagging behind housework, cooking, studies, my favourite morning sessions at the gym, piano playing in Almere and my new found interest in ballet. So happened I had exams too last week, and I was at an all point low. So when I found out that I didn't do too bad after all in the exams, my spirits were lifted. For all that two weeks of almost no-physical action, I was feeling sluggish and unintellectual given that I was brooding more than studying and lamenting the fact that my brain didn't seem to work like it did ten years ago at university. Oh, am I that old already?

I decided to make korma curry pork to celebrate my coming out of back pain, my exam results and for thanking hubby for taking extra care of me. For the past two weeks, our meals have been out of the box and didn't feel like mama's recipes; you know that feeling of sentimentality you taste when you're eating home cooked food even if you're faraway.
I cut mushrooms, tomatoes and pork fillet into cubes. Then begins the meat stir-frying part. My style is to toss and play with them as if they were dice in a roulette game. Makes it more interesting with an oomph factor in the frying, making me pay more attention to whether or not the meat is cooked.

I add in the Dutch button mushrooms (they are a bit flatter and whiter than Chinese ones) after the pork has cooked for a bit, but not completely. The reason is I always don't trust mushrooms - yes, that's right. I somehow feel that if I don't cook mushrooms long enough, I'll be poisoned by them. So I treat them like meat.

The mushrooms on their own are tasteless. So if I run out of ideas of ingredients which complement or match the food, I use mushrooms as an all-rounder food. Great tip, no?

 Then I add in the Korma sauce. It comes in a small bottle. I pour all of it inside. I wait for the curry to bubble for a bit, starting at the sides of the pan. Then I know it is really starting to cook and sizzle.

When the curry is all bubbly, it kind of reminds me of a hot swamp in those Piranha type movies where some giant crocodile or monster fish lurks beneath the murky waters ready to pounce as the bubbles get bigger and higher. So when the bubbles are big enough and spread towards the center of the pan, I know it's time to pounce - I do so by adding the tomatoes!

Tomatoes are my last ingredient in any dish because I like it when the tomatoes are still juicy instead of all wrinkly when the dish is ready. Some dishes I see here people cook tomatoes until there is nothing left of them. All you see is a strand of skin of what once was, instead of the juicy red flesh.

I stir the whole mixture thoroughly and with TLC. I felt it all coming towards me now after all the moodiness and back pain is gone. Last unseen ingredient - TLC!

I cannot help but add some Vietnamese chilly sauce inside for more fiery passion in the dish. The label on the Dutch korma curry says that it is only mildly spicy; and for Malaysian standards, this means that it is nil as the level of tolerance for Dutch taste-buds are generally low.

The chilly sauce is actually the one which is officially used by Vietnamese loempia (popiah) sellers here. Hubby and I always squeeze a long line along our popiahs when we buy them at the market to eat immediately. At 1.20 Euros per popiah, they really are doing good business cos when we walk together, we never fail to get one.

Finally the dish is all ready to eat. It tastes good and hubby likes it a lot. The next day, he made fried rice with it with the leftovers as I cooked quite a bit. I'm glad that this dish is the start of a more energetic me.

I hope that I would be able to cook proper meals at least three times a week. Nothing beats the creamy flavours of a home cooked meal. Now I follow hubby's style and try to make my dishes as creamy as possible. Maybe this is part from hubby's liking for cheesy meals. So I try to re-create it in Asian meals as well by means of adding santan (coconut milk). However for this dish, there was no need to as it was already creamy enough as the sauce is quite thick.