dish 17 AND 18) Steak & Guinness pie AND Yakitori

Wow, I have now done 18 Dishes out of 52... I am feeling pretty good about that, pretty good indeed :) In Nagambie I took my favourite Jamie Oliver Cookbook along and lazily flipped through it on Monday while listening to the Beatles outside by the river. It was so relaxing!...............................4e;foiejw Oops, i just fell asleep, i was remembering the relaxation..

Anyway I made a shortlist of recipes that I wanted to cook and Josh picked which one sounded the most tempting to him. It was Steak and Guinness Pie, or as Jamie calls it in his rather wordy title fashion: Steak, Guinness and cheese pie with a puff pastry lid.



It was meant to go black in the slow cooking process but mine didn't :( frown. It was super dooper hot body delicious though :)



As I have a habit of doing, I didn't read the whole method before I started cooking which lead to some... minor complications. After we got back from the supermarket and started chopping ingredients I saw that the pie didn't actually need a total of 1.5 hours in the oven.. It needed 1.5 hours, THEN a stir, THEN another hour, THEN the puff pastry is added and it needs another 45mins. Did I mention that we were meant to be driving back home after dinner on Monday night?? Well we were. I was picturing us packing up at 10pm and getting to bed in the wee hours, then crawling out of the house for work/uni on Tuesday. No thanks. So Josh immediately decided he could skip his lecture on Tuesday morning and I spoke to my boss who said he would be happy for me to take another day off :) Woot woot! So the next thing you know, Josh is popping the champagne cork and as we needed something to distract us from the gorgeous smells of rosemary and onions and beef filling the cabin, we put "UP" on, which made me cry 3 times. Good thing Josh thinks it's cute that I get emotional over movies ^_^ Our extended holiday came to an abrupt end when Josh realised he had an optometrist appointment at 1pm back at home... so we had to set our alarms for like 8am or something loco and pack and clean and drive away. Poo.

The 18th dish in my new repertoire is the Japanese dish YAKITORI!! I love this dish! My first CONSCIOUS memory of Yakitori was when I went to Japan with Josh for our 3 year anniversary in March 2008. We were walking back to our hotel from late night drinking at 2am, and we saw the yakitori vendor selling his delicious heaven sticks for a few hundred yen a pop.

Those 4 lanterns say Ya - Ki - To - Ri. How coool! So basically Yakitori is like a meat skewer with a sticky sweet/soy sauce which is charcoal grilled. The name Yakitori is, like many Japanese dish names, very literal and derivative. 'Yaki' means 'to grill' and 'Tori' is chicken. Traditionally you will see yakitori made of offal like hearts, skins, intestines, tails etc but the most western friendly version is Tori Niku (tori= chicken and niku= meat) which is just nice thigh meat on skewers. That's the one I tried :) When I say that this night was my first conscious experience, it's because I have a terrible memory and may have absentmindedly eaten in on some Japanese excursion durng high school or duting my Yr 11 Japanese exchange holiday. I like to imagine I didn't and my first brush with this dish was in Japan with Josh :)

So I have been wanting to make this for some time now, and finally decided to make it a few nights back. I gathered my ingredients and made a thick and glossy sauce...

Then Josh beautifully skewered the meat and spring onions for me. I found out that sometimes they use 2 skewers to thread the meat and spring onions on to stop everything from rotating on the stick during the grilling process. But this recipe didn't say that :P

Here is the finished pile (drooooooooooooooooooool)

And then we put it all together in this bento box:

And stuffed our everloving faces. I still have heaps of rice and stuff so I'm thinking of making some sushi! I ave never made Inside out sushi before so maybe I could do that :) WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE