Together with my grandmother, I prepared dinner for my family. The “kondate”, menu ideas were all mine, and we started off by visiting the grocery store in the morning to buy the ingredients we needed.

This is thin slices of pork with capsicums and long beans, stir-fried with soy sauce and “mirin”, sweet sake. It was very important when placing in the pan, to put the end of the rolled meat at the bottom first to let the meat stick and prevent the vegetables inside from falling out.

The filling are “ume”, Japanese apricot, paste, macrophyll and cheese inside these fried chicken breasts. It was difficult to control the amount of cheese to put inside, so that the cheese would not leak out when frying. Before frying I coated the rolled chicken with flour, dipped it in egg, and covered it with bread crumbs to make the outside crispy. I have very little experience in cooking fried dishes, so this was very new to me and I realised how time-consuming the preparation stages before frying (flour, egg, and bread crumbs!) are. I also learnt how to dispose used oil, and this was another new thing I had done this week.

This is boiled lotus, macrophyll, dried bonito shavings and “myoga”, Japanese ginger, tossed with rice vinegar. I learnt that when boiling lotus, I must add some rice vinegar to prevent them from turning black from oxidisation.

Finally, this is called “tataki kyuuri”, which means “beaten cucumbers”, where you literally “beat” the cucumbers with a wooden rolling pin. According to my grandmother, the cucumber will taste more watery and juicy by cutting them this way.

 

It was a great experience for me as I was able to try all these different cooking methods I have never done before. I had many to learn from my grandmother, especially when cutting vegetables – I am still not certain about how to cut vegetables in the specific way I am imagining at that moment, and also struggle to determine what shape and size would suit the dish I am making. I would like to focus more on this from next week.

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