Pork Shabu Salad

Made a simple pork shabu salad today to go with leftovers from last night's dinner. Some random discoveries from today:

• I tried using kuzukiri in the salad today - they're glassy, transparent noodles and I really like the texture they add to salads. They come as dry little sticks and need to be put into boiling water, just like pasta. With pasta I usually end up with more noodles than I planned for because of their unexpected growth spurt during boiling, but with the kuzukiri I was surprised in the opposite sense, and kept on having to boil more sticks to get 2 salads' worth of noodles. The effort was worth it, though.
  
• Tofu steak ingredients still taste good on day 2!
• I should shop at Nijiya more often - their pork shabu slices are much nicer than the Marukai ones.
  

Tofu Steak and Sashimi Salad

Tonight was a return to Japanese food with a new tofu steak recipe. I found the recipe in a "Dinner in less than 15 minutes" type Japanese book but it took at least half an hour with both H and I working in the kitchen at full capacity - hopefully next time we can make it more efficient. The sauce came out pretty yummy but very strong - the recipe calls for a loooot of miso - so next time we'll try it with less miso. H suggested that we cut the cooking time in half by forgetting the renkon (lotus root) chips, but I actually liked those a lot. I love the crunchy texture of renkon. Now that we have all this leftover renkon in the fridge, I will be looking for some more yummy renkon recipes.

Oh, and the sashimi salad! The sashimi that I bought today wasn't labeled, but I chose it because it was relatively cheap and I thought it would look pretty on a salad. Both H and I were pleasantly surprised by the very nice flavor and texture of the fish. I'll be looking for this mystery fish again at Marukai.

Eggplant with Meat Sauce

At least 90% of our meals since we've moved to Hawaii, both at home and eating out, have been Japanese food. So to add a little variety to our lives, I tried an eggplant with meat sauce recipe today. It came out ok - was a little dry and could have used more salt, but good enough for a first try. The highlight of dinner was the salad - arugula with tomatoes, walnuts, mushrooms, and freshly shaved parmesan cheese - soooo yummy. More malasadas for dessert.

Hamachi and Malasadas

They were selling some yummy looking hamachi fillets at Nijiya today. So I looked up my buri teriyaki recipe - hamachi is a young yellowtail, buri is the older one - and made the simple sauce (equal parts mirin, sake, and soy sauce). H woke up from his nap and pan fried the fish to perfection before we added the teriyaki sauce, and when we bit into it, it was sooo soft and yummy! Miso soup with eggplants, fried bean curd, onions, and little fish.

Oh and the malasadas...we went to Leonard's for the first time today at H's strong request. The line was surprisingly long. Since we had imagined the malasadas to be like tiny donut holes, we bought 4 - and then discovered that they were like full-sized donuts. Dessert for the next couple of days!