His 'n' hers

K loves scallops. I have caught him drooling over pictures of the juicy shellfish whilst browsing the the internet. So I treated him:



Hotate (scallop) Don
(have you noticed I make a lot of don? Fewer dishes for me to wash!)

12 scallops
1 tablespoon cooking sake
20ml soy sauce
2 tablespoons butter
4 eggs
2 tablespoons sugar
a pinch of salt
chili powder
some toasted nori (seaweed)

Season the scallops with salt and pepper. Beat the eggs with the sugar and a pinch of salt, scramble them and set aside. Fry the scallops on both sides in a little oil. Pour over the sake, then put a lid over and allow them to steam cook. Remove the lid and add the butter and soy sauce to the pan, turning the scallops over to coat. Serve the scallops over a bowl of rice, with the scrambled egg, sprinkle with a little chili powder, and garnish with some shredded nori.

Over recent months I've spent so much time trying to cook things that my meat-eating family will enjoy, with very little thought to myself. So I have resolved to at least occasionally cook something that we can all tuck into as a family, and first up is a veggie shepherd's pie :-) As well as being extremely healthy and tasty (this will now be making a regular appearance at our dinner table, there were absolutely no complaints about this dish), it was also very cheap to make!



Veggie Shepherd's Pie

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, halved and sliced
2 large carrots (500g/1lb 2oz in total), peeled and cut into chunks
2 tablespoons thyme, chopped
200ml red wine
400g can chopped tomatoes
2 vegetable stock cubes
410g can green lentils
950g sweet potatoes , peeled and cut into chunks
25g butter
85g grated cheese

Heat the oil in a frying pan, then fry the onion until golden. Add the carrots and all but a sprinkling of thyme. Pour in the wine, 150ml water and the tomatoes, then sprinkle in the stock cubes and simmer for 10 mins. Tip in the can of lentils, including their juice, then cover and simmer for another 10 mins until the carrots still have a bit of bite and the lentils are pulpy. Meanwhile, boil the sweet potatoes for 15 mins until tender, drain well, then mash with the butter and season to taste. Pile the lentil mixture into a pie dish, spoon the mash on top, then sprinkle over the cheese and remaining thyme. Bake at 190c for 20 mins if cooking straight away, or for 40 mins from chilled, until golden and hot all the way through.

Faba-roo-ny (yeah, I have a toddler)

Had a very disappointing day today. Was feeling very sorry for myself until I walked into my kitchen and set to work on a special dinner. Earlier this week I was delighted to take delivery of a very exciting parcel from an AFWJ friend who's family have a business importing meat from Australia (www.roomeat.co.jp), and so a have had enormous pleasure browsing my cookery books for recipes that could be tweaked to suit kangaroo and ostrich meat!

I decided not to tell K what I'd be serving and just watch his reaction to the taste. People can get very judgemental and picky about a new food just from hearing it's name, before even taking a bite. What's cute and cuddly in one country is often a delicacy in another, but I can't be doing with this pick-and-choose attitude - flesh is meat, right? I should point out that I myself am a vegetarian (I don't eat any meat or fish, my personal choice and not one that I force on others), although I do prepare and cook meat and fish dishes for my family. (Oh, and I don't understand people who claim to be vegetarian and yet eat fish, or even chicken, that always seems somewhat hypocritical to me...)

Anyway, on to tonight's dinner! I decided to attempt my own version of a recipe I saw in Nigella Lawson's Feast (Sake Steak and Rice), I suppose I could call it Kangaroo Don but let me know if you can think of anything better!




Kangaroo Donburi (serves 2, but K ate the lot!)

2 good size pieces of Kangaroo long fillet
some thinly sliced spring onion
2 shiso leaves, chopped

Marinade:

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoons soy sauce
1 crushed clove of garlic
1 tablespoon oil
1/2 teaspoon wasabi

Sauce:

60ml sake
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon wasabi

As I was advised, start by soaking the fillets for a while to remove some of the blood before adding to the mixed marinade ingredients and leaving to steep for a good few hours. Take it out of the fridge about 20 minutes before you are ready to cook. Heat a frying pan (or a griddle if you have one) and cook the fillets for two minutes on each side. Double wrap each fillet in foil and leave to rest for 10 minutes while you make the sauce.
Put the sake in a small pan and bring it to the boil before adding the remaining ingredients. Open the foil parcels and pour the juices into the sauce. Slice the meat (it should be rare and cooked perfectly), place on top of steamed rice, pour over some of the sauce, and garnish with the onion and shiso - ready to go!

A quick look at the wikipedia entry for kangaroo meat should be enough to convince you to give this a try:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_meat

So if you've read that, you now know that it is free-range, as organic as a wild animal can be, high in protein and anti-cancer and body fat reducing CLA, and very low in fat. But does it taste good? I can't tell you from my own experience, but as I said, K ate the whole lot, mumbling 'oishii, oishii' the whole time, so I can assure you that it gets the thumbs up in this house!

A huge thank you to Eric for the very generous package - friends, please do have a look at his website to see what they have to offer! And watch this space for more recipes, K is now very keen to sample ostrich...

Scraping the bottom

We had a great afternoon on Saturday. We took the children to Mannou Koen (Park) for the 'Ice Festival'. Mannou Koen is a beautiful place set on the side of a mountain. It's huge, with nature and play areas, and the most amazing views... There's a big, wide open space with mounds just like Telly Tubby Land and enormous inflatable balls to play with, and a gigantic white 'cloud' to bounce on! Unfortunately I realised as we were half way there that I'd left the camera on the dining table, but K took some snaps using his phone and it could take a while for him to work out how to transfer them to the computer. We're going back there in April anyway, so there'll be more photo opportunities then.

The Ice Festival wasn't up to much. It was a lovely sunny day, the park was all bright and green, very Spring-like in fact... but there was a slide made of ice for the kid to toboggan down, with the obligatory festival food stall next to it selling takoyaki and chips. That was it! The boys enjoyed it, though, and once they'd been down the ice-slide we headed for the main play area. This is where I did myself an injury. The boys persuaded me to join them on the slides (which were huge, 65m long winding down a hill) and we had great fun trying to work out how to go faster. I should explain that slides here aren't like the slides back home, they are made up of hundreds of rollers. And I did wonder why the adults were nearly all descending in a squatting position (on their feet), but I assumed it was just to go faster. I found out, when I climbed into the bath in the evening, that it is actually to protect their derrieres! At the time I was unaware that my coccyx was taking such a bashing, but now I can barely sit! I got friction burns!! Nice of someone to warn me... Trying to keep upbeat about it all, at least this is perhaps an indication that there is less padding in that area than there was a few months ago!

On the way home we stopped at an okonomiyaki shop for dinner. I LOVE okonomiyaki (a kind of thick pancake made with chopped cabbage and other bits and bobs), but as I didn't have my camera with me, I'll just have to go there again. J reluctantly agreed to try what was on offer and hasn't stopped talking about it since! Instead, I'll tell you about the dinner we had the night before - avocado donburi served with edamame and miso soup.



The donburi is simply rice topped with diced avocado and drizzled with soy sauce and a bit of wasabi. I used to make this for K quite often in the UK, as it's supposed to taste very similar to raw tuna, which we weren't able to get easily. The avocado were really cheap - 2 for 100 yen (about 70p)! I prepared a big bowl of edamame (soya beans boiled, in their pods, in salty water) for all three boys to fight over, they can't get enough of them!