Creamless Creamy Tomato Soup and macaroni salad from America's test kitchen and Onigirazu

This tomato soup is from a special edition of America's Test Kitchen Magazine called "All time favorite recipes". I love this tomato soup and I made it a few times already. One time, I made it for a friend who just had a baby and she and her family loved it.

This tomato soup use canned tomato and does not have any cream but it is creamy and great.

In America, I think it is common to have tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich, however my son doesn't like cheese so we didn't make grilled cheese with it. But I am sure the grilled cheese will taste great with this tomato soup.

It is great with crouton and the recipe called for homemade crouton but I was too lazy to make it homemade so I just used store bought crouton.

My son love it. I am sure we are making this soup again and again especially during the winter season.

I love America's test kitchen or Cook's illustrated magazined because they try lots of different methods and come up with the ultimate one. They explain all the details and troubles they went through in the process and it is very interesting and educational, I think.

This book is a collection of their favorite recipes and it is a great one to own. I love it. I haven't made all of them yet but I sure would love to try all the recipes in there.



Well, another thing I made is "Onigirazu". This is a new version of rice ball and it seems like it is very popular in Japan at the moment. Regular rice ball is triangle or round but this one is square and you just place seaweed, then add some rice, then add some ingredients you like and add more rice on top and then wrap them with seaweed like a present. Here is how it looks.

I think the reason why it got popular is  because you can add more stuff in it and it is easier to eat than regular rice ball.

This was had Spam and lettuce in it. Spam Onigiri is very popular in Hawaii. Hawaii's spam onigiri looked like nigiri sushi. They put Spam on top and wrapped it with thin slice of seaweed.

Well, the spam was too salty but I like this shape of onigiri. I think you can come up with many different like of stuffing inside.

I also made some sushi roll since we had avocado and imitation crab. I don't know why but it was so difficult to roll these sushi. I guess I am out of practice. I got so frustrated rolling those sushi. I almost gave up but my husband calmed me down and I finished about 6 rolls. 3 of them came out OK but the other 3 were disaster. Oh well.

I also made macaroni salad from the same book which I introduced earlier.
This came out great. I Actually added more vegetables than the recipe called for.

I think this is great for potluck party or BBQ or something like that. It was really good but the portion I made was huge. We had to eat macaroni salad everyday.... Well, I am glad my husband loved it so he didn't mind eating them everyday :-)

Pork and Onion with Ginger and Garlic

It started to feel like fall in NY this past few days. It is kind of sad since I LOVE summer but at the same time, it is exciting to think about all the bakings and warm food which we will be enjoying in fall.

We actually baked cookie yesterday since it was cool and rainy day. I love baking when the weather is bad. My husband and my son helped me to bake and they really really enjoyed being a sous chef.
And the chocolate chip cookie we made was pretty good.

Anyways, I would like to talk about the really yummy pork dish which I made a few weeks ago. I think this is a typical Japanese flavor. Soy sauce, Sake and Mirin. It goes really well with white rice and I always have to be very careful not to eat too much rice.

I am sure many Japanese people love this kind of dish but since my husband and my son loved it also, I think this might be a universal dish which can be enjoyed by people from all over the world.

I made this kind of dish before but this was the first time I used cilantro and tomato as garnish with it. This was absolutely great idea since we LOVE cilantro, eating this pork with cilantro made it taste even better and fresher. This is optional but if you like cilantro, I highly recommend eating it with cilantro. Well, in my opinion, just about anything taste better with cilantro ;-)

The only way to find out is to try making this dish and eat it yourself! Here is the recipe.

Pork and Onion with Ginger and Garlic

Ingredients
Very thinly sliced pork     1/4 lb
Onion                                2 medium (Sliced thinly)
Green Onion                     2  (chopped)
Ginger                               2 Table Spoon (Grated)
Garlic                                2 cloves (Grated)
Soy Sauce                         1 Table Spoon
Mirin                                 2 Table Spoon
Sake                                  2 Table Spoon
Cilantro  (optional)           a BIG handful
Tomato  (optional)            2 small (cut into 4 pieces)
Vegetable Oil                    1 Table Spoon

1, Add vegetable oil into frying pan and saute onion until soft

2, When onion got soft, add pork, ginger and garlic

3, Before the pork turns its color, add sake

4, After the pork turned its color, add soy sauce and mirin and saute more

5, Taste, add chopped green onion and mix together

6, Spread chopped cilantro on a plate and add pork and onion on top

7, Garnish with tomato and serve with rice.

This is an easy quick meal that satisfy everybody's appetite! Enjoy!

Japan

We are in japan! Enjoying japanese bread!

Potato and Beef Croquette Recipe

Croquette is a very popular dish in Japan and I think you can find them in many different countries in the world. I love them but since it is quite time consuming to make it and fry it, I don't make it too often. In Japan, you can find already fried croquette in a supermarket or you can also find frozen one so you can just fry them at home.

Since I had 1lb of ground beef and lots of potatoes at home, I decided to make this dish the other day.

I made a lot of them and froze half of them. Next time I want to eat croquette, I can just take them out from the freezer and fry them.

Normally in Japan, we eat this with Tonkatsu sauce which is something like a ticker Worcestershire sauce. I always have this on hand but if you don't have it, you can either use regular worcestershire sauce, ketchup, hot sauce or even without any sauce. If you season them well during cooking, you don't really need any sauce.

If you want to but it, you can buy them from Amazon. This is a very popular brand of tonkatsu sauce in Japan. Bull dog Tonkatsu Sauce.

Here is the recipe.

Potato and Beef Croquette
Print Recipe

Yields about 14 large croquette

Ingredients
Potato   4 large
Ground Beef   1lb
Onion         3 medium
Carrot         3
Nutmeg      2 teaspoons (Optional)
Salt             1 tablespoons
Pepper        1~2 teaspoon
Flour           about 1/2 cup
Egg             2
Panko (Bread Crumbs) about 1 cup
Vegetable Oil for frying plus 1 tablespoon

1. Peel and cut potatoes into small pieces and boil them until fork tender.

2. While cooking potatoes, chop onion and carrot into small pieces.

3. In a Frying pan, add 1 tablespoon of oil. Then add onion and carrot to saute.

4. When onion and carrot are cooked, add ground beef and saute until meat is cooked. Add nutmeg, salt and pepper.

5. When potatoes are boiled, drain and mush in a large bowl.

6. Add meat mixture into potato and mix.

7. Let the potato/meat mixture cool.

8. When it is cooled, prepare flour, egg and panko(bread crumbs) stations.

9. Shape potato/meat mixture into a oval shape and dust with flour.

10. Then into egg then to panko.

11. Heat vegetable oil in a pan and fry them until golden brown. Since inside is already cooked, you don't have to worry about inside being uncooked.

12. Serve and eat while it is hot.

Kids love this potato croquette. I would recommend making a bunch of them and keep some of them  in the freezer for later.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone had a great New Year's Eve and had a great start into 2014. We sure did!

We invited some friends over to our place and had a Japanese New Year's Eve. It is very traditional to eat soba noodle for New Year's Eve so I made soba noodle. Also, I made some Sushi.

I was not sure if my friends like sushi and soba but they loved sushi and soba! I was so relieved. I made banana pudding for dessert. Everything went well and our son loved having guest at home.

He even stay up till midnight to celebrate new year.

It was a great start to a new year and it was a wonderful fun night. I am so blessed to have such wonderful friends to spend New Year's Eve with.

Every time someone stand up to go somewhere, our son was worried that they are going home so he kept saying "I don't want to say bye bye".

Anyways, we had a wonderful time and we wish 2014 will bring lots of happiness!

Homemade Salmon Nigiri and Negitoro Roll

The other day, we went to this big Japanese supermarket in NJ and had our favorite ramen noodle then bought some Japanese groceries. This time, we took our friends from Manhattan. One of them has been there but the other one hasn't so I was curious about how she would like it.

Well, seemed like both of them really enjoyed this visit to Japanese supermarket. I was very happy that they liked it!

Anyhow, we always buy negitoro when we go there and make sushi roll so I bought negitoro then I saw these beautiful salmon sashimi next to it. And it was on sale! I had to buy them. I bought two packages of salmon and two packages of negitoro.

Negitoro is always great but this salmon was also wonderful. They are beautiful and so fresh and very fatty! It said this salmon is from New Zealand.

Look at this salmon. Isn't it beautiful?

Negitoro is my favorite sushi of all. This time I made rolls with seaweed outside. I added more scallions and shiso leaves. They were delicious!

We used to have this wonderful sushi restaurant very close to our house so we used to eat sushi often but now we moved so we don't have any good sushi restaurant around. So I was really craving for good sushi!!!

My husband loved it also. We haven't given any raw fish to our son yet so I made vegetable miso soup and steamed sweet potato for him. It was difficult to make him try sweet potato in the beginning but once he tried it, he loved it. Lately, my son is refusing to eat vegetables. he used to love them. I don't know why all of a sudden he hates them. I asked other moms and read some stuff and seems like it is quite normal at this age and I am not supposed to force him to eat.

When I was kids, I couldn't eat a lot (now, I can not stop...) and there are many vegetables I didn't like. My mom never forced me to eat more or eat what I didn't like. Now, I love vegetables except green peas and some beans. So I guess you will grow out of it but it is difficult to see him refuse to eat something that I put a lot of effort to make. Well, I am trying to find a new way to eat vegetables. If you have any good suggestions, let me know!

He liked Okonomiyaki (Japanese savory pancakes) If you don't know what okonomiyaki is, here is ther link to my old post.  I add lots of vegetables in this pancakes and he eat them. Also, when I make fried rice with chopped vegetables, he eats them. Well, I guess I have to keep trying.

Now, I am thinking about ordering organic vegetables from local farms in a box. I think this is fun way to eat new vegetables. They will just mix different kind of vegetables which are in season and send them to you at your door. I am curious about trying this.

Also, I am excited to plant some vegetables with my son this spring. This way, maybe he will be excited about eating vegetables which he grow himself!

Tofu and Chicken Hamburg

There is this popular cookbook in Japan which is published by a company called Tanita. Tanita is a company who sell weight scale which can also measure your body fat. This scale from Tanita is very popular in Japan and I actually have one myself.

And this company has a cafeteria which offer healthy lunch for its employees since their goal as a company is to promote healthy life style and maintain healthy weight and body fat and they wanted to start promoting this starting with their own employees.

This cafeteria became popular and they decided to publish a cookbook to promote healthy food for the public and this cookbook became one of the best selling cookbook in Japan last year.

I was very curious about this book so when my sister came to visit me last year, I asked her to bring one copy for me.

To be honest, I haven't used this book at all till now. Partly because many of the ingredients are not easy to obtain from my local supermarket.

However I found one recipe which I can make from what I have and what I can get from regular supermarket so I decided to give it a try after more than a year of looking at this book.

The dish I tried is Tofu Hamburg. Hamburg is a very popular dish in Japan. It is with onion and ground beef normally but this one is with Tofu and ground chicken. It is also have this seaweed called Hijiki.

The sauce is with ginger and sugar and soy sauce and some other stuff. I think I measured sugar wrong since it was really sweet but it tasted good.

My husband and my son loved it. My son had it without any sauce but he loved it.

The rice is half white and half brown. I thought my son wouldn't like it but actually he didn't mind at all. Sometimes, we think that children don't like certain things but they might surprised you by liking it. So I decided to let my son try things even when I think he wouldn't like it.

Anyways. this is a great healthy meal and I am sure I will be making this again. Hijiki is not something which you can get from a regular American supermarket but this is dried seaweed so I buy them when I go to Japanese store and I keep them in my pantry. It is very healthy food and I like it.

I baked broccoli in the oven for the side dish. Lately, I am trying to eat more vegetables since I feel like I don't eat enough vegetables.

Easy and Delicious Japanese Beef Bowl

This dish is something I make when I don't have much in my fridge or when I don't have desire to cook something complicated. This is super easy yet very delicious dish which my husband and my son love.

When I go to Japanese grocery store, I usually buy one or two package of very thinly sliced beef and freeze them for later use. I find it difficult to get this kind of thin sliced beef in the U.S. sometimes. But, I have seen them in Trader Joe's and some other place. I think if you go to Korean grocery store, they have these also. It is like beef for Philly Cheese Stake. The one I normally buy has some fat on them and I think this is the key for great beef bowl.

Anyways, it is super easy and I just make this without measuring anything but I thought maybe someone will be interested for this recipe so here I go.

Japanese Beef Bowl (For 3~4 people)
Thinly Sliced Beef   about 0.8 pound
Onions                      2
Ginger                      about 1~2 table spoons (Chopped or julienned)
Vegetable Oil          1 Table Spoon
Soy Sauce               2 Table Spoons
Sake                        2 Table Spoons
Mirin                       2 Table Spoons
Sugar                      1~2 tea spoons
Cooked Rice          about 3 cups (before cooking)
Picked red ginger   (optional)

1, First of all, slice onions and chopp or julienne ginger)

2, Add oil into the pan and fry onion. When it is softened, add ginger and fry little more.

3. Then, add meat and Sake.

4. When the meat is cooked through, add soy sauce, mirin and sugar. Bring to a boil and turn the heat off.

5. Add rice into a bowl and transfer some of the meat and sauce.

6, Add picked red ginger on top and serve.

My husband and I love ginger so I normally add lots of them in and also add picked ginger on top but if you don't like ginger, you can just add a little bit.

This is a super easy dish which taste really good. This is kind of a Japanese fast food. You will find some beef bowl fast food chains in Japan. They are cheap and good!

If you can find thinly sliced fatty beef, you should try this dish!

Sushi Play Date

The other day, I had Chilean Empanada play date with my mom friends and this time we had sushi play date with same member!

Since it is Sushi this time, I was the teacher :-)

This is how they came out.

Since it is not too easy to get sushi grade fresh fish around here, we used ingredients such as avocado, smoked salmon, cucumber, canned tuna, imitation crabs, eggs and so on.

Everybody enjoyed making sushi and I was very happy also. I think tuna salad roll was everybody's favorite.

It is not easy to watch 4 babies and cook at the same time but we also have 4 moms so some of them cooked while others watched the kids.

We rolled and ate and repeat that many times and by the time we finished rolling all the sushi, we were so full. We had lots of leftovers so everyone brought back some for their husbands.

One of them had a tool called sushi master so we used that also to make some heart shaped sushi. Aren't they cute??

This play date was actually a few weeks ago. Since then, we already had two other cooking/play date!
The next one is Venezuelan Empanada and then we made pineapple upside cake on different day. Those photos are coming up next!

I love cooking/play date! I am so happy that I found some friends whom I can enjoy cooking with!

Easy and Delicious! Japanese Chicken and Egg Bowl (Oyakodon)

This is very typical Japanese dish called "Oyakodon" It means parent and child bowl since ingredients are chicken and egg (parent and child :-)

This is very easy dish to make and I like it but for some reason I forget to make this. So overall, I would say I make this dish 2~3 times a year. I think I should make this more often.

My husband also likes this dish and similar dish called "Katsudon". "Katsudon" is pork cutlet bowl. Instead of chicken, you add pork cutlet. I don't make this at home because if I make pork cutlet, I will just eat it as is. I don't want to add egg and sauce and stuff. So my husband sometime eat this dish in a food court of Japanese supermarket.

Here is how you make "Oyakodon"

Oyakodon

Chicken Breast  1/2lb
Onion    2 small
Egg       3
Scallion    3
Sake        3 tablespoons
Tempura dipping sauce   3 tablespoons
Sugar      1 tablespoons
Water      2 tablespoons

1. Cut the chicken into bite size pieces and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of sake. Marinade for 1 hour or so in the fridge.

2. Slice onions and add in a frying pan with rest of sake, tempura dipping sauce, sugar and water and cook until soft.

3. When onion is soft, add chicken pieces into the pan and cook.

4. Meanwhile, mix eggs in a small bowl.

5. When chicken is cooked, add eggs into the pan, bring to boil and add chopped scallions.

6. Serve it over hot rice and enjoy!

This is very easy Japanese dish which you can try with simple ingredients. Enjoy!

Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year to everyone! I really hope that 2012 will be a great year for me and my family and for everybody who is reading my blog!

In Japan, tradition is to eat soba noodle on New Year's Eve. Even though I am in the U.S., I feel like I have to eat soba noodle on New Year's Eve in order to have a good ending of the year and good beginning of the new year.

Here is the soba noodle I made. The shrimp tempura is from Trader Joe's frozen shrimp tempura. I tried this item for the first time but it was actually pretty good! I think I will buy this again since I prefer not to deep fry things at home. (It is a lot of work and lots of cleaning after :-))

My husband's house tradition is having a broth fondu on New Year's Eve. So we invited a few friends over and had broth fondu. The recipe for the fondu broth and the sauces were all from my mother-in-law. She taught me how to make all the sauces and the broth!

Broth Fondu is a lot healthier than cheese fondu and you can enjoy it with different kinds of sauces. We had some vegetables, chicken, shrimp and salmon. The sauces were banana curry sauce, onion ketchup sauce, garlic sour cream sauce, egg pickle sauce and also cilantro mint sauce which my friend brought.

Everything was really good and we enjoyed nice fondu and good conversation.

There were lots of things happened in 2011. I hope we will have a great 2012. I know we will!

Also, I didn't update my blog too often in 2011 but I would like to try updating my blog more often in 2012! Hope you guys will come visit my blog :-)

Have a happy and healthy 2012 :-)

Sushi Rolls

This year, Avocado price was quite expensive up till now and I didn't want to spend $3.00 for an avocado but now it is getting cheaper so I am enjoying avocado a lot lately. By the way, did you know that if you want your avocado ripen fast, you can put them in a brown paper bags and it will make it ripe faster? I learned this from a stranger at supermarket and I tried it. It really works! Ever since then, I always keep at least one brown paper bag at home.


Anyway,one of the way for me to enjoy avocado is California roll. I hadn't made sushi rolls for a while so I decided make sushi rolls and enjoy avocado. I also made tuna salad roll, smoked salmon and cream cheese roll and spicy shrimp salad roll.

All of them tasted good but my favorite is California roll. To my surprise, my husband liked Smoked salmon cream cheese roll the most.

Making sushi roll is very tiring. Maybe because I am not used to it. I always get exhausted and also I make way too much of them.

Well, I love eating sushi. I wish I could get really fresh fish around here so I can make some fresh fish sushi at home. Well, the good thing is that we have really good sushi restaurant in where I live so I can always eat fresh sushi whenever I want. I love these American creative sushi rolls.

Anyway, I invited some mommy friends today to my place and had play dates. I invited three mommys with their girls so we had 4 babies at our place today including my son. It was so much fun! So there are 7 ladies and 1 boy (my son). My son was happy with all these ladies around him.

I am very happy that I found some friends with babies. It is nice to talk to them and ask somethings when I am not sure about things. We can help each other! This is great.

Makizushi (Sushi rolls)

I made sushi roll the other day and it ended up disastrous. I have made sushi roll before but that ones were the worst looking sushi rolls I ever made. I had no idea why but it looked really bad so I couldn't even take photos of them. 

Well, I know that I can make it better so I had to try it again. I think that one of the reason why it looked so bad was that I was trying to make inside out rolls. This time, I decided to make only seaweed outside roll which is much easier to roll. 

Here is the result! 

It looks pretty good isn't it? The inside of sushi is just imitation crab, egg, cucumber and mayonnaise. I should have made variety of sushi but I didn't have many ingredients for it so it was just those ingredients this time. It tasted great and it looks pretty. 

Yes, seaweed outside is much much easier to roll. I guess I need more practice for inside out style sushi. 

My husband also tried to roll. He even tried to make inside out sushi. Well, as I said inside out sushi is difficult to roll so it didn't come out quite pretty but his seaweed outside roll came out pretty good. 

This was a great dinner and I felt much better since I was able to make it prettier this time. Next time, I will try different ingredients. 

My tip for making sushi roll is not to add too much rice and also leave the edge of seaweed empty for about 1/2 inch. And practice makes perfect!