Ladies & Gentelmen, I Give You...Itaria-Don

It's fusion, I tell you, fusion! East-West fusion food is not just limited to fancy chefs on the Food Network and over-hip, hispter restaurants!

When one only has ONE stove-top burner, NO oven, a small grill and a rice cooker you either tend to get boring or creative.

Well, today marks the start of my creative streak. Behold!

The Cooking Technique: Asian Stir-Fry

The Cuisine Inspiration: Italian

The Presentation Inspiration: Japanese "Donburi" (something over rice)

The Main Ingredients: rice, chicken, olive oil, tomato, dried oregano, red wine vinegar and a bit of salt. (Don't ask me about amounts, but I did use 1 tomato and enough chicken for one person, so basic rule of thumb is 1 person gets one tomato and the rest is up to you.)

The Fusion Process:

1) Put rice in rice cooker - or cook rice however you cook it. I'm in Japan and Mel is Filipino, so rule of thumb in either Kyoto or NYC is rice cooker. Turn on.

2) Put olive oil into saucepan, and when hot, put chicken in. Put a lot of oregano (so that you can actually smell it, I like oregano, however to each their own, you can put whatever spice but I have oregano and basil on a regular basis). Start stir-frying on medium-low heat level. If you have too much olive oil drain a bit, but keep enough to prevent chicken from burning and to help make the sauce.

3) That's where the tomatoes come in. Dice them beforehand, and when the chicken is 99% done cooking, drop them in. Add more oregano, a bit of salt and red wine vinegar to your liking - its like stir-frying a chicken salad! (I came up with the red wine vinegar at the last minute, I like a little zing).

4) At this point, the juices in the tomato will make the stir-fry more like a boil/sautee - that's what happened to me, since I have a really small pan. Don't worry about it - FUSION! Keep boiling/sauteeing/stir-frying the whole lot (make sure there is liquid enough for some sauce, you don't want a dry pan) till the rice is done - purpose is to keep it all piping hot and to finish cooking hte chicken. But you don't want your tomatoes boiled into a pulp. Taste sauce, add more oregano, red wine vinegar, etc. to your liking.

5) Put rice in bowl, add stir-fry + sauce ON TOP of rice. This is important - putting it on top puts the "don" in "donburi." Mix as you like, to get the taste spread throughout the rice.

Presto! Some sort of twist on Italian food with a further Japanese twist! I call it "Itaria-don." In Japanese, "Italy" is "Itaria" so I just add "don" to indicate that this is a "donburi" or "something over rice." Yum, yum!

If there are leftovers, place in tupperware, put in fridge and select your favorite bento box for lunch the next day. Put the rice in the top part (with the tupperware-ish top) and the chicken/tomato stir fry in the bottom. Add some kalamata olives and warm feta cheese and it becomes..."Girisha-don." ("Greece" is "girisha.")

Hmm...need to get more chicken. And have to wait till I get home for the feta cheese.

We're Cooking Japanese, We're Cooking Japanese, I Really Think So!

I had to go grocery shopping.

If you remember my first round of gorcery shopping in a Japanese supermarket, it didn't go well. After getting a few things from Takashimaya, it was still a wee bit frustrating.

So today, I decided to take some action. I went to AllRecipes.com and looked up some Japanese recipies. I did not want to live off a diet of spaghetti, sandwhiches and salad, and instant udon/ramen is downright nasty. Cup Noodle is good, but only in small doses. Since this is Japan, I don't have an oven either, which made things a bit more difficult.

So I got some recipes for a stir-fry, udon, miso and one more thing. Two of the recipes had the same ingredients so it worked out really well. And I put down the usual suspects on my grovery lists: bananas, cucumbers, lettuce, ham, OJ, bread, etc.

I eat lunch at school so it's the dinner I worry about. Like I said, spaghetti every night isn't a good thing. Luckily, I have only eaten spaghetti for dinner twice, if anyone was wondering. It's been salad most of the time. But that can get expensive since veggies are expensive here.

Ingredients for miso soup was easy. I asked a clerk were dashi stock and miso paste was, and easily found the tofu. In lieu of seaweed, I got this leafy green thing to put in the soup.

I had a list of complicated ingredients to make the soup part of udon. I knew I would put like a beef or chicken with veggies in it, but its the soup part the always got me scratching my head. But when I was getting the dashi stock and miso paste (always get yellow instead of red, it tastes better) I noticed a box with the following label on it:

"Udon Suppu"

"Suppu" is the katakana for "soup." I took the box and looked at the back - obviously, I can't read the entire thing, but I like Japanese packaging because they have little pictures. Pretty much, add a little packet of this "Udon Suppu" stuff to hot water, then add udon noodles.

Simple!
Cost effective!

They even have packets for "Karee Udon" which is "Curry Udon." A fusion of Japanese and Indian. Maybe next time. Add two packets of udon noodles for 35yen and I was ready to go.

For lunch, I made the miso soup using the basics of the recipe that I found on AllRecipes.com. Here are the results:



It's miso soup! It's got tofu! It's got leafy green stuff!

And what is even better:

It tastes amazing. I did not mess this up! I made enough for two bowls of it. So I had this (both bowls of it) with a half-sandwhich; the bread is rather thick here and they only come in slices of 6 or 4, so I take one slice and cut it in half to make my sandwhich. I have given up on cheese, so its usually lettuce and ham with mayo. I save my tomatoes for the salad.

For dinner, I made udon. I bought this beef in the supermarket that is really thin and had a little package of sauce with it. So I took half and sauteed it (no oil, I put it in the pan and let it cook in its own juices) and poured half the packet of sauce in it - the rest of the meat and sauce I put in a container for lunch tomorrow so it will marinate overnight. Added some carrots, boiled the water, put two packets of "Udon Suppu" in it since I did not want my udon to taste watery, and - tada! Udon!



I am very happy. My tummy is happy. I can cook Japanese food. Just wait till I get started on my cooking classes. I may not be able to cook much, but by the time I come home in March 2008, I will be able to cook Japanese food.

I'm Cookin', Yes Indeed I'm Cookin'...

Yesterday I tried to cook. Again.

"Tried" being the operative word here.

Mind you, I do know how to use a microwave and make (some) stuff on a stovetop. And pop in ready-made chicken legs and salmon fillets in the oven. That's what I did in London for a year, but I gained 15 pounds because of it. Not healthy.

I can steam vegetables so thats healthy. And heat up soup.

Har-har. I am a horrible cook.

When I cook, I need to follow a recipe. I can't just know a recipe off by heart. Apparently, my mother tells me I am a horrible cook so that just makes me more nervous. And Mel is the golden child of the kitchen (thanks to his mother who is an amazing cook) so he just laughs at me. Not very constructive here! My mom hates cooking and she told me that, so I did not learn much from her in that particular department in my formative years, being high school (ha ha). So what did I do in my senior year?

Signed up for cooking class as an elective. My high school has a Culinary Arts program that gets students into the CIA (Culinary Institute of America, not the Central Intelligence Agency) and to positions at Le Cirque. I wanted to learn the basics and a few recipes. I learned how to cut an onion properly, and that a recipe is a really good thing to have.

So what did I make yesterday?

Chicken, baked with olive oil and lemon juice. I was afraid that the chicken was undercooked so I overcooked the chicken and made it a bit dry. I remedied that with some more lemon juice. Made Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco treat!) to go with it - herb flavor - and it was a bit salty for me (Mel quite liked it) so I added lemon juice to cut the salty flavor.

I think that will be my cooking mantra - when in doubt, use lemon juice.

And for dessert, apple pie with vanilla ice cream: apple pie a la mode. I did not make the pie from scratch, are you kidding me? That's a weekend job. Stole some Mr. Softee ice cream from my freezer upstairs and took it into Mel's apartment in the basement downstairs.

So I am cooking in the downstairs apartment and I used like a million knives because unlike Mel - who had etiquette courses and knows which knife cuts which - I don't know a paring knife from a steak knife. I used a butcher knife to "butterfly" the chicken cutlets; at least I know how to do THAT. It's a really good butcher knife, Mel got it from IKEA and even his mother liked it and she knows knives. His mom makes EVERYTHING from scratch. I need to learn how to make her chicken adobo, that is one Philippino dish I like.

That's another thing to add: when in doubt, use a butcher knife.

My mother decides to visit me and see how I am doing:

"Lower the flame, ALWAYS keep a low flame."
"What's that burning smell? MARIA! You forgot to take out the broiler pan!!!! ALWAYS CHECK THE ENTIRE STOVE!!!"

I get NERVOUS when I have people watching over me! I didn't burn down the dorm in London so I am quite fine thank you! Geez, having my mother watch me cook is like when my father stands over my mother's shoulder when she is at the stove. Whenever he does that to either of us, we tell him that he is not in the Army anymore and no longer a captain and we are NOT your underlings so quit it.

He was the commander of a paratrooper group so he had to watch everything. As I mentioned previously, he is a slob but has good manners and is neat when the time [i.e. being in a military bunker, but that was the 70s] call for it - he had to take etiquette classes during officer's training; they stuck books under his armpits and he had to hold it in place so he can learn how to hold a knife and fork properly. So every so often we have to remind him to stop looking over our shoulders like he is going to give us a citation for dusty boots.

Which means that I have two men who have more etiquette than my mother, me and my maternal grandmother put together (And mind you, my maternal grandmother is mostly all about following Emily Post's etiquette book, the Greek edition [if there was one]. She is always telling me to "Sit straight and be a lady."). Mel even once suggested that I take etiquette courses at the Harvrd Club, but I wasn't 21 at the time so I couldn't partake due to the wine portion of it.

So I forgot to take out the broiler pan which led to a burst of smoke from the stove. Bah. I like the broiler. I can make a kick-arse strip steak (with Montreal steak seasonings of course) with a broiler.

This is what I can do - nominally. I can make pasta, chicken and steak. I think the toughest part will be fish. And I have to learn fish and learn it fast.

Either that or I will be eating a real college student's diet: ramen.