Udon/Salmon/Tomato-Stewed Chicken

Monday: Udon noodles with pork, seaweed, tofu, fried bean curd, mushrooms, and looooots of ginger. Warms you up.



Tuesday: Salmon night with lots of veggies. Always so soft and juicy.



Wednesday: Chicken stewed with fire-roasted tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, parsley. Chicken was ok - made us want to eat a yummy clam linguine.

Niku Jaga

Niku jaga, literally meat and potatoes, is like the poster child for "mom's flavor" in Japanese home cooking. As a hearty dish with a warm and kind flavor, it's not hard to understand why. The dish is stewed in your usual dashi, soy sauce, mirin, and sake plus a little bit of sugar. Here's an interesting story about the birth of nikujaga: an officer in the Japanese navy who studied abroad in England loved the beef stew he ate there so much that when he came back to Japan, he asked the cooks in the navy to recreate the dish. The cooks had no idea what beef stew was and ended up creating their own yummy Japanese version.

Salmon Oyako Gohan

Another rice dish, only tonight I cooked the rice by itself and broiled the salmon separately and mixed it all up together with shiso leaves later. "Oyako" means parent and child, which is why Oyako-don usually refers to chicken and egg over rice, but I looooove the salmon version of oyako-don, mostly because of the salmon roe. The shiny, squishy, salty, juicy presence of the salmon roe when added on top of the salmon rice - YUM!

Takikomi Gohan

Tonight I made takikomi gohan, rice cooked along with seasoning and meat and/or veggies. Often when you have this in Japan, the ingredients are a reflection of the season - like bamboo shoot rice in the spring, and chestnut rice in the fall. The seasons don't make much of an appearance here in Hawaii (although it is feeling a couple of degrees cooler lately which must mean it's winter), so today's ingredients were also very seasonally neutral - chicken, carrots, and dried mushrooms, along with dashi, soy sauce, sake, and sugar for seasoning. The rice came out yummy - it's kind of cool that the rice cooker by itself can produce a dish that can stand on its own. I'd like to try another takikomi gohan recipe sometime, maybe something that uses Hawaii specific produce? To be researched...