Lotus root with pork rib soup (莲藕排骨汤).
Got the slow cooker from my Brother recently so I decided to cook some nice soup for myself.. As the ingredients available here is limited (both in terms of choices and also what I like to eat.. :p), I decided to cook some lotus root with pork rib soup..
As you can see on the price tags on the ingredients, they are not cheap... I only added a few cloves of garlic and that's all.. no seasoning, no salt, no ajinomoto.. all natural! :)
After almost 5 hours of cooking, this is the end product.. :)
Beef/Pork Rendang
Next, I tried cooking rendang with another cookery that I bought recently.. I am using some of the rendang spices my ex-colleague brought me when he (and his wife) came over for sight-seeing in April..
The recipe called for 500g of beef but the prices of beef in Japan is not cheap, I decided to mix in some pork too.. Yes, I do know that these two kinds of meat get cooked at a different rate, but I just wanna try it out and see the difference.. So I bought about 300g of beef cubes, which cost me 680yen and another 300g of pork at about 430yen.
This is not the first time I am cooking rendang.. Been cooking my own rendang (with those pre-packed spices) since my days in Singapore.. but this is the first time I am using 2 kinds of meat and using the new pot I just bought.. The end result was not very satisfactory.. Somehow it seemed to be slightly more watery even though I did not add any water to it, which is a no-no when cooking rendang.. maybe I didn't really defrost the meat thoroughly.. or maybe the beef in Japan is different.. anyway, I am not complaining as I love the extra kuah with my bread.. :)
I only ate half of the rendang and kept the other half in the fridge.. and the next day, I had rendang/curry mee!! :) :) The noodle was supposed to be ramen.. :p so instead of using the ramen soup, I just put the cooked noodles into the left-over rendang... added a couple of small sausages.. and there I have it, my own curry mee!! :) :)
Yaki soba
Bought some pre-packed yaki soba noodles. Here the seasonings were given inside the pack, so all I did was to add in 1 carrot that I bought for 98yen and a packet of fish cake (223yen) and I would have myself some nice yaki soba (or in plain English, fried soba). Nothing too fanciful nor difficult.. Just using my trusty rice cooker!! :) :)
Shall try more dishes using whatever ingredients I can find in Japan in future.. Need to get my hands on some dark soy sauce (老抽).. then I would be able to do some really nice dishes.. :) :)
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