Week 45: I made another Japanese-styled pasta dish on a busy weekday evening. This time, I stir-fried pork, Japanese spinach, shimeji mushrooms and pickled nozawana (which we brought back from our trip to Nagano in summer). Since pickled nozawana already has a strong, salty taste, my mother had told me to be careful with the amount of soy sauce I add for flavouring. I also followed my mother’s tip to add two spoonfuls of drain water from boiling pasta when tossing the stir-fried ingredients with pasta. This prevented the spaghetti from stick with each other. I believe I have improved on this pasta-boiling procedure after cooking pasta several times. Furthermore, I enjoyed selecting ingredients and coming up with my own “Japanese pasta”, which I had mentioned in August as what I would like to do next.
Week 46: I am visiting Japan again for October break. I had really been looking forward to cooking those Autumn vegetables I love! This week, I focused on sweet potato. 
This is a stir-fry dish, where I added pork and another common root vegetable used during Autumn, lotus root, soy sauce for flavouring. The outcome was great! However, I struggled so much when stir-frying. I thought I had added enough oil, but the vegetables kept on sticking on the pan, especially the sweet potatoes. In order to soften the sweet potatoes and lotus root, I put a lid on the pan and left it for 5 minutes… When I opened the lid, the bottom of the pan was burnt and had tuned black! Fortunately only the bottom ones were stuck to the pan and the vegetables were nice and soft, but it took me 10 minutes to wash the burns off the pan. I believe I must have added more oil to prevent this from happening next time. Or perhaps, soften the sweet potatoes and lotus root by heating them in the microwave before stir-frying, so that I won’t need to cooked them in the pan for so long.
Later on the week, I found a recipe where I simmer sweet potatoes, carrots and onions in soy sauce and dashi (Japanese broth). 
I followed what it said on the recipe, but I found it very plain in taste. I think I used too much water to simmer the vegetables, which weakened the flavour. To cover up my failure, I sprinkled sesame seeds and yukari frikake, and prepared dashi soy sauce (soy sauce enriched with dashi) to be added if desired. In addition, I struggled with maintaining the sweet potatoes in good shape as they easily break apart when cooked. Specifically, as it can be seen in the photo, the skin easily comes off.
As such, I had numerous struggles with cooking sweet potatoes. I did really enjoy exploring those recipes and cooking sweet poatoes for the first time! Especially because I cannot do in Singapore (I cannot find them there), I believe it was a valuable experience. Next week, I would like to try more and get better at working with them!
