Pork Ginger & Oven fried potato

Welcome to 7th Kitchen!

Pork Ginger is a very popular home-cooked meal in Japan. Here is how you make it.

1. Make marinade. Grate ginger and garlic. Add soy sauce, Sake, Mirin and sugar. Mix well.

2. Add thinly sliced pork and thinly sliced onion in the marinade. Let sit for 30mins.

3. Heat a frying pan with vegetable oil, add pork and onion in the pan with the marinade.

4. Cook for about 20~15mins until pork and onions are done.

5. Serve with rice.

My husband and I love ginger so we put lots of ginger in this dish. Ginger is the one thing we almost always have at home. If you like ginger, I think you will like this dish. I was wondering how this dish will be with chicken. I never tried but maybe I should try it with chicken someday.

For the side, I made oven fried potatoes and boiled spinach.

I just cut those small potatoes into half and boiled in a pot for about 10 mins and then transfer to the baking sheet and sprinkle salt, rosemary, garlic powder, pepper and oil. Then stick it in the oven for about 20mins. It is simple and crispy and good.

I personally love combination of ginger and garlic. I use it quite often especially when I make marinade. It might be too strong for some people but it makes a great marinade with soy sauce, sake and sugar.

simple lahoi chicken curry with onion and tomato & sweet saffron pilaf with nuts and currants

Last night, I tried two dishes from this book (Indian home cooking) which I borrowed from library the other day.

It takes quite a lot of time and work but it was definitely worth it. It was awesome!

First I made "sweet saffron pilaf with nuts and currants". This pilaf has pistachio, almond, dried currant and many spices. It required 2/3 cup of sugar but I did no want to make it too sweet so I use less than half of that amount. For me. it was perfect. It was sweet yet not too sweet and nutty. The book said that you can also eat this as a snack or dessert but we ate this with chicken curry.

This chicken curry recipe was also from the same book. I think I was supposed to use chicken with bone but I used boneless chicken breast this time. This is also quite a lot of work because after you saute spice, onion and tomato etc, you have to put them in the mixer and puree and put them back to the pan and cook more. But it worth all the work. It was tangy and spicy and creamy (even tough I did not use cream at all).

This tangy spicy curry went really well with this sweet saffron pilaf. I really love the combination. My husband also loved these dish especially the pilaf. I think I will be making this pilaf again. It makes me so happy when I make something that taste really good and exceed my own expectation.

Indian food need lots of different kind of spices but there are many Indian grocery store in NY, I can purchase them without any problem. Well, now a days, I am sure you can order anything on-line. I am very thankful that I have access to all these different flavors and spices. I would love to try more dishes from this book.

Broiled Salmon and sauteed snow pea

Welcome to 7th Kitchen!

Last night, we made salmon and sauteed snow pea. One of our friends made this dish for us one day and since then, we make this salmon dish quite often. It is simple and easy to make and taste good.

I had salmon filet in the freezer so I used it. Normally, we buy big piece of salmon at Costco. They have good quality salmon and it is cheap. It normally about $15~$20 for a big piece of salmon at Costco. We buy them and cut them into half and freeze them.

Salmon is simply baked in the oven or broiled in the broiler for about 10mins. We add chopped green onion and soy sauce based sauce. and that is it. I think when the quality of fish is good, simple way of cooking is the best.

I also sauteed some snow pea. This is also simply flavored with salt and pepper. I add sesames at the end. It was really good. And I love the color next to the salmon.

We had this with simple white rice and miso soup. My husband likes miso soup. When I was little, I did not like miso soup too much but now I like it. If you have miso paste, it is super easy to make and you can use many different kind of vegetable in it.

I love this salmon dish because it is easy and also it is economical. I bought this piece of salmon for about $16. The salmon picture above with the aluminum foil is half of what I bought and this will feed about 4 people. So, $16 salmon can feed about 8 people in total. (Well, we don't eat too much so maybe it might be for about 6 people in a regular household) Isn't it a good deal? I mean if you have salmon at a restaurant, it cost like $20 per person.

But, I also like eating out. You can experience many different kind of ingredients and different kind of preparation. I can learn a lot of things from eating at restaurant. And when I eat something really good at the restaurant, I always want to try to recreate them at home.