This is a recipe I came up with last night for dinner. I liked it a lot and it went well with buckwheat, although I'm sure any grain would be just as complementary.
Ingredients:
4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
2 carrots
1/2 cup frozen peas
1/2 fresh red pepper
12oz tofu (any tofu is fine, but I like the silken Mori-nu firm tofu.)
Peel the carrots and cut into any shape you like. I like to just cut them into disks. Cut the chicken into small cubes or strips, add salt, pepper and a bit of dry or ground ginger and set aside. Heat a medium pan on medium heat with 2 teaspoons of olive oil (extra virgin if you have it). Add frozen peas to the pan and stir to cook. Add carrots let them cook for 2-3 min, stirring frequently. Turn the heat to medium high. You don't want the veggies to turn watery. Remove the veggies and add the chicken to the pan. Dice the red pepper and add it to the chicken. Stir frequently to get the chicken and pepper cooked evenly and quickly (3-5 min). Slice the tofu in any shape you want and add it to the pan. Keep stirring. The pan should be pretty hot and the chicken should turn golden where it touches the pan. Add the carrots and stir together for a couple of minutes. Turn off the heat. Add salt to taste.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
chicken and carrots
Thursday, April 16, 2009
oyakodon
Over the past year as I've become curious about all things Japanese my knowledge of Japanese food has increased a lot. I used to just know sushi and soba, but now my vocabulary has expanded. Words like ochazuke, nikujaga and oyakodon bring up delicious memories in my mind. Oyakodon 親子丼 : おやこどん is one of my favorite and very easy to prepare dishes. Litteraly it means parent and child and consists of chicken and eggs plus onion. Traditional Japanese flavoring is a combination of soy sauce, sugar, sake, and mirin, which is a sweet cooking wine. I don't eat sugar, so the oyakodon I prepare takes a bit different, but still very delicious.
recipe below...
Sasha's oyakodon:
2 boneless skinless chicken thighs
2 eggs
1/2 sweet or yellow onion
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp water or broth
dash of old bay seasoning
1 tsp olive oil
Heat up olive oil on medium heat. Cut up the onion as fine or course as you like it. Saute for a few minutes until it start to become transluscent. Dice the chicken into small cubes and season with soysause and old bay, add to the pan with onions and let them cook together, covered, for 3-4 minutes, stirring occasionally. In the meantime, combine eggs, water or broth, a bit of soy sauce and old bay and mix together with fork. When the ckicken looks done, stir the chicken and onion mix, and add the egg mix evenly to the pan. At this point it's up to you when to stop the cooking process. Traditionally, oyakodon eggs are slightly runny. To achive this, turn off the heat and serve soon after adding the eggs. If you cover the pan and let the eggs cook though, this becomes more like a fluffy omlet, which is also good. I like to make the oyakodon different consistensies depending on my mood.
Serve over white, short grain rice, or any rice or grain of your choice. Makes 2-4 serving depending on your appetite ;)
And now for a more traditional oyakodon tutorial look here.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Rice-cooker Meals
Soon after I moved into my current apartment last fall, we realized that our ancient monstrosity of a stove was leaking gas. It took just over a month for our landlord to acknowledge that there was a problem and buy us a new stove. In the meantime I had to figure out how to make home-cooked meals without a stove.
I've had a rice cooker for about a month at that point, and although I tried cooking all kinds of grains in it, I didn't add anything else. One day desperate for some home-cooked food, I put some diced chicken pieces that I had marinated in soy sauce along with the rice. The result was fantastic! The chicken (I used skinless thigh meat) was steamed and tender, the rice took on the flavor of the chicken. Since then I experimented with adding various ingredients to the rice cooker. Tofu and black wood-ear mushrooms are my favorites to add along with chicken and I like to add oregano and Old Bay seasoning to enhance the flavor. In the few months that I've had the rice cooker I've discovered that it is a wonderful appliance; able to cook not only rice and other grains to perfection, but also porridges and whole meals including meat. The one I have is made by Zojirushi and I am very happy with it.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Comfort food
When I was younger I was not very discriminating in my food choices and I had a good appetite, as a result, by the time I graduated from high school, I was quite a bit overweight. It didn't bother me too much. I liked to study and to hang out by myself. I spent a lot of time reading, and thinking; the world outside my head didn't interest me much. When I started graduate school, however, my perspective started to change. A major reason for this was discovering yoga. I started to realize that even though I have a good imagination, the real world is a lot more fun. I started to care more about the health of my body. I became more physically active and changed my diet.
At first the change was very drastic. I stopped eating meat, fish and dairy and stopped eating food that had been processed to a great extent and which contained very artificial or unnecessary ingredients. I started reading labels on foods and discovered that even the simplest foods, like canned peas, often had unnecessary ingredients, like corn syrup. I even stopped drinking coffee. I spent the next couple of years refining, my diet, at various times cutting out certain foods. I started to pay attention to how my body feels after eating different foods. I found that some foods make me feel sleepy and sluggish. While others make me feel energized and satisfied.
Nowadays I try to only eat food that makes me feel good. It isn't always possible, especially when going to peoples' houses or eating out. But I try to cook and eat my own food whenever I can, and I always read the ingredients on packages. A couple of years ago I started eating dairy, chicken and fish again and drinking coffee. One of the best things about being a vegetatian is that I learned about many new foods. When you eat meat, it is often the focus of a meal and its easy to overlook the vegetables and strarch that accompany it. When vegetables and grains are the focus of your diet, you start looking for more variety.
One of my favorite new foods is quinua. Quinua (pronounced KEEN-wah) is an edible crop from South America. It can be cooked like rice (2:1 water to grain ratio) and had a delicious hearty flavor and chewy texture. My favorite way to cook quinua is to mix it 1:1 with red lentils (which don't need to be soaked) and boil it with salt and curry powder. The final result reminds me of mashed potatos but with more texture and is my ultimate comfort food, expecially in cold weather.
Quinua and red lentils:
Measure out 1/2 cup each of quinua and red lentils, wash several times under running water. Quinua tends to float, so you have to be careful that it doesn't get washed away. Bring two cups of water to a boil, add the quinua and red lentils and stir. When the water boils again, reduce heat to low and simmer for about 10 min. At this point I add the salt (to taste) and about 1 tsp of mild curry powder, stir and simmer for another 8-10 min. If I'm feeling ambitious, within the last couple of minutes I add frozen peas and baby spinach without stirring and leave the pot for 10 min after turning off the heat to let the peas thaw and the spincah wilt. I then stir and enjoy. Goes especially well with roasted chicken. Mmmm...
