Katsu Katsu Katsu-don!

AHOY MATEYS!!! Well, lookie here. Dish numero thirty five-o COOKED! This little old dish is a Japanese dish involving meat schnitzel over rice. Anything suffixed with "-don" just means it's a rice dish! So this is a cutlet (katsu) rice dish (don). Ever literal hey? I found the recipe online of course at J-simple recipes. They have some cool things on there! I got myself some Pork steak from the vic market... possibly not the right meat to use?? Dunno. Maybe i should have just tenderised it, it was uber tough.

Ingredients: (serves 4)

4 eggs

1 onion

4 deep–fried breaded pork cutlets

4 servings steamed rice
150 ml bonito soup stock

5 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons sugar (the original recipe used double this but i found it too sweet)

The recipe used pre-cooked cutlets, so i had to crumb and cook them my own way. I used panko crumbs - the japanese breadcrumb. Ultra crunchy! So yeah, cook them in oil....

Then chop them up into slices on a board but try to maintain the structural integrity of the whole piece if that is possible. Meanwhile, boil the bonito soup stock, sugar, soy sauce and onion for 3 minutes on medium heat. When it is ready, add some of the liquidy onion stuff to the frypan and lay 2 of your schnitzles in the liquid and let it go for a few minutes...

Then crack your eggs into a cup and beat gently, then try to pour 1 per schnitzel:

Then serve over rice, and garnish if you wish, then crack a japanese beer and relax.

The last integral step is to eat so much that you feel actually SICK and wish you had made a salad... voila! So, it's about time I start cooking some HEALTHY dinners right? What kind of example am I setting for the children of the world?! But seriously, It can't be great. My dad actually patted my belly after i finished lunch yesterday at my brother's birthday celebration... I know how to non-verbally communicate dad, I know what you were saying. That is not good. If anyone actually says anything though, I would literally eat their head off. Not even joking, I may be hungry..

purezentoooooooo

My Japanese friend Shiho has gone back to Japan for good :( Before she left though, she gave me a bunch of presents!! So nice!!! Below are 12 cans of Japanese alcohol i remember fondly....

She also gave me heaps of beer snacks which Josh and I will sample tonight!! Japanese night!! :D

 She gave me a lovely cup to replace the one i broke!!

Some cute chopsticks to add to my collection....

 A wind chime for under my pergola...

AND THE BEST!!! OKONOMIYAKI BANNER declaring that i make/sell okonomiyakiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!

WOOHOO! So i am working on an amazing package to send her to say thanks :) we'll see how the beer snacks go!!!!

DISHES 31-34... UPDATE

Oh my gosh! I have fallen so far behind in my recipe posting!!! I suppose it's a good sign that i am powering through them!! Here are a few more recipes I have always been interested to try out, and have finally made!! The first is Yoghurt Baked Lamb! I made a yoghurt marinade with greek yoghurt, chili, saffron, curry flavours, pepper, lemon etc and slathered it all over the leg of lamb, and baked it in the oven with some roast vegies. DELICIOUS! So tender! 

That was awesome! I also picked up a bunch of cool pasta from the Italian Deli, and decided to use the giant shells ad make stuffed pasta shell bake.

So I used ricotta, mashed potato, grated cooked carrot, salt, pepper, cooked diced onion, spinach, parsley, parmesan, 1 egg... and maybe a few other spices.. and filled the boiled shells with the mixture.

I then made a tomato sauce, and put a little on the bottom of a baking dish, and lined the shells up, then spooned the sauce over everything, and added a little more cheese (he he he) and baked for a bit...

I THEN used the Risoni to make this vego dish I've had my eye on for ages! It's artichoke, fennell and spinach risoni. So I left the quantities at home again (this is becoming a habit) but it was... butter, olive oil, fennell, onion, artichoke hearts, white wine, asparagus, spinach, 300ml cream, 1 tbsp dijon mustard, lemon. And of course Risoni pasta...

Pretty good, but it was lacking some OOMPH. So maybe if i make it again i need something a bit more POPPY in it!

Oh my gosh, my lovely cousin Bec sent me this book for Christmas. It has childhood memory recipes like toffee apples, musk sticks, candy hearts... amazing! So i started at recipe number 1... peanut brittle!

I got out my candy thermometer (never used) and set to work. Literally 20 minutes later i was staring at the finished product wondering what the hell i was worried about in the first place. Super easy, you just have to watch the temperature and add things at the right stages.

Bec said i should push some peanut brittle through the phone for her, it made me laugh :) The book is rad. Hopefully I will make some more awesome things from it... there is a recipe for Lollipops for crying out loud... LOLLIPOPPPSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!! So those are dishes 31-34... tonight i am making number 35... a Japanese Dish, CANNOT WAAAIIITTTT woo woo woow ow wowowoowowowwowow

how much fun can you have with a hair extension or two?

THIS MUCH!

I wanted to know what i'd look like with long hair as i'm thinking of growing it (OMG), so my cousin Nikki and I were mucking around with her extensions. We remenisced about her Grade Prep photo with the awesome fringe and decided to recapture the moment...

So silly.. my stomach hurt from laughter. good times!

it's about time...

HA! End Post. No not really. While that photo is indeed about time, the real message here is that it's about time that i pulled my finger out of my anus and started making some more progress on the house! I decided to paint, and the colour i wanted was one similar to what my dad used when renovating. It was picked for him because it complemented the blue laminate kitchen at his house, and obviosuly was the cheaper option as apposed to purchasing a new kitchen. And as my house is decked out with blue carpet (shudder) I figured it would match too. Luckily he still had about 4 litres left so i can use as much as i need. I think it looks much cooler....

I am going to do one more wall, as it looks funny just having that corner done. Now that I know it looks good, i'm going to amp it up! Wieew! Also, I have an electrician coming on saturday morning (7am) to install all my lights finally. I bought them sooo long ago! I was quite busy over the weekend!! I also set up the worm farm i got for christmas....

And here are my little wormy friends. I have 1000 worms to start with, and we'll see how they go! I think i can start feeding them now :)

After all that hard work, i sat down to a cup of apple and cinnamon tea in my new teapot and tea cup! Josh got me the teapot for xmas - he thinks it is garish but its the one i wanted, so he got it for me anyway just to make me happy :) what a nice boy! And i got the cup from my friend Claudia! It matches the blue ones i have :D awesome!

 Also, i did lots of cooking! I will post up the proper recipes in another post, but for now here is one dish i invented. I can't make it count towards the total 52 dishes cos there was no recipe, and i didnt really like it but i wanted to use my giant tube pasta i got from the Italian Deli in Williamstown...

 It fogged up the lense so i did a soap opera pose... as you do.....

Ok, yeah so it was one of those nights when i didnt know what to do... so i made bruscetta and also pesto (with waaay too much garlic - oops!!) and then sort of put it all together into a pesto pasta nest with baby bruscetta topping!

Visually it looks awesome but i didnt quite get it right. I might thik about it some more and attempt it another day :P I'll be back tomorrow with more food stuffs :D wooo hooooo!!!

Jerk it

Hey party people! I have had this window open for literally hours and not done a thing until now. Facebook notified me that my cousin Andrew had updated his website so when I checked it out I saw that, much to my elation, he had created a blog back in July. He has abandoned his photography job, friends and life here to have himself an amazing New York adventure. From facebook I could only guess as to what the photos represented and the meaning behind the status updates was. I could barely pull myself away from his blog in order to update mine :) Once I read every post and caught up on everything he's been through in the last 6 months with astonishment painted on my face, I came back to my little blog. I guess my blog's cool and all... but the content is totally not as adventurous as his. He's a rap dancer for sure :) Not in the true sense of the word. Or maybe he is. He probably is.

So instead of trekking around the globe physically, I have been doing so culinarily. In my defence, I have been doing it from a distance of 26km from home. Rather exotic, don't you think? So, while I was house-sitting, the rains that devastated parts of Queensland merely annoyed me as I sat inside staring wistfully at the pool and reading about the horrific events in the North in the daily paper that was delivered to the door. Being house-bound, and having realised I am no longer good at reading piano sheet music, naturally I turned to TV for something to do. And because they had Foxtel, the cooking channel quickly became my closest companion.... apart from Josh of course ;) I got to watch some of my old favourites (like the cook and the chef and Jamie Oliver), I got to explore shows i had seen only once or twice (like Nigella), and I got to see NEW shows which I now LOVE... like Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers. Good Times! I also saw one show called World Kitchen where the host focused on Jamaican Food for the episode. I had always wanted to try Jerk Chicken, but after seeing some Jamaican dudes cooking it in the forest I was determined to try my hand at it... although in a suburban kitchen as apposed to underground smoking techniques. Mind you, if I could have, I would have tried. So I did some obligatory research and made a list of ingredients then somehow convinced poor Josh to join me at Footscray Markets on a muggy rainy day. If you were there, you would have spotted us.. we were the bored looking and nasally assaulted boy and the over-excited girl whose eyes were glazed over like a stunned pikachu as she surveyed the produce going "pi----kaaaaaaa". Needless to say, I had fun and it was cool to be back in Footscray. I want to go back again soon to do some people watching, it is a mecca for people who are for lack of a better word... characters.

So back at the house, I gathered my ingredients...

That may seem like a lot of ingredients for marinated chicken, right? Yes, in fact you are right. But it is worth it. If I may borrow one of Jamie Oliver's catch phrases, this is DEAD EASY. This is the second time i have forgotten to bring the recipe with me so I will post it in a few days, but for now please enjoy my brief explanations of each step :)

STEP 1) Basically put everything except the chicken in a blender and you have your Jerk Marinade....

STEP 2) Cut up your chicken. You can butterfly it, but I wanted two smaller peices to start off with so I cut it in half with some heavy duty kitchen scissors... Josh looked like he was going to vomit all over the bench when i was snapping the bones. attractive...

STEP 3) Take a childish photo. I couldn't resist......

STEP 4) Pierce the chicken all over with a fork, then spoon the marinade over it. It is recommended to leave it like this overnight, but I only left it for a few hours...

While it's marinating, prepare some nice soothing and cooling salads to combat the fiery heat of the chicken.

STEP 5) Cook it. I wanted it to have a charcoal flavour so we opted for the barbecue cooking method. We had the heat up high and placed them on the hotplate with the body cavity side down. We turned the heat down, closed the lid and left it for 15 mins. Then we turned them over to give the breast and leg a bit of a blast and left it for another 15 mins. I basted it a little along the way with the left-over marinade to ensure the flavour was there in full force. This was our cooked product:

STEP 6) Cut it up. Every recipe I read or saw on tv/youtube called for it to be cleavered up into smaller pieces which I was pretty chuffed about. In the absence of a meat cleaver, I opted for a big ass knife and cut it up, cracking through bones to reach my goal...

STEP 7) Serve up, and EAATTTTTTT:

Oh my god, it has been such a long time since I have had such deliciously succulent chicken! I don't know what I did to make it so good but we all agreed that it was superb. SUPERB. Everyone got seconds, if that's any indication! If you follow my lead, you should reach the same effect. I'll post the recipe soon, so please give it a go. It's super easy. I didnt use enough habanero chillies due to my unfamiliarity with their heat so it wasn't spicy, just.....orgasmic.

So there you have it, dish THIRTY out of 52! How exciting! I have already got many more dishes that I want to make of course. Probably none of which are low-fat :P All this heavy food has made me do the un-thinkable today... WALK half an hour to the train station this morning. Wow. Then I went for another 30 min walk at lunch time. Unthinkable! I feel good though. Oh I just remembered, I'll be doing some PROPER camping next month. Another tick off the list. I better get moving hey? ;) Time's running out. And don't even tell me that I missed the December Poem... I am fully aware of my blunder. December was an exceptionally hectic month for me, so i'll be doubling up this month :) I'm sure nobody really cares except me anyway so we cool!

JERK CHICKEN RECIPE:

- 1 chicken (un-marinated)
- 3 habanero chillies (i only used 2 and it wasn't hot)
- 2 medium brown onions (you can add spring onions too for another layer of flavour)
- 8 cloves of garlic
- 2 Tbsp each of: fresh thyme, ground allspice, Sugar, Salt
- 2 tsp Ground black pepper
- 1-2 tsp: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 1/2 soy sauce
- Juice of 1 lime
- 1 cup orange juice
- 1 cup white vinegar

Blend it all up and rub it on the chicken, pierce the chicken with a fork here and there. I butterflied my chicken to get the most marinade on it. Leave overnight or as long as you can then BBQ it. :)