more from masakichi

I tried several more recipes from Masakichi, this time from her book titled, "Bento no hon" (Bento book).

This chicken recipe is called Buchi-uma chicken. Buchi means "really" in Hiroshima dialect. Uma is a shortened version of umai which means delicious.

So, this is "really delicious chicken"

10 chicken drummettes
2 teaspoons grated ginger
2 teaspoons grated garlic
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup shoyu (soy sauce)
1/4 cup mirin (sweet rice wine)
2 tablespoons sugar

Put your chicken into a pan, making sure that they line-up and don't overlap each other and there isn't too much space between each piece.
Add the next 6 ingredients and put the stove on to medium heat.
When the liquid starts to bubble, put an oshibuta (drop lid) and turn the heat down to medium-low.
Cook for 10 minutes
Turn the chicken over and cook for another 10 minutes.

NOTES: This recipe is easy and delicious, it kind of reminded me of shoyu chicken, a dish we eat in Hawaii.

The next recipe was easy also but needed a bit of tweaking.

Kabocha no kurogoma yogoshi ("dirty" pumpkin)

1/8 kabocha, cleaned and washed
1 tablespoon dashitsuyu*
1 tablespoon sake (rice wine)
1 teaspoon ground black sesame seeds

After cleaning and washing the pumpkin, cut into bite sized pieces
Put into a dish and drizzle the dashitsuyu & sake
Cover tightly with plastic wrap
Zap in the microwave for 1-1.5 minutes, pumpkin should be soft when tested with a chopstick
Toss in ground sesame seeds

NOTES: Dashitsuyu is a blend of fish-seaweed stock, soy sauce and a little sugar, if you can't find dashitsuyu where you are, I would suggest making your own by adding a teaspoon of fish-seaweed stock, a teaspoon of soy sauce and a half teaspoon of sugar. In the directions it didn't mention the plastic wrap, so I ended up zapping it for longer than 1.5 minutes in fact it was almost 2 minutes total.

The last recipe I tried was called Cabbage Oyster-bitashi

Hitashi or in this case bitashi is a style of cooking where you boil the veg and then toss it with a shoyu based sauce.

3 or 4 large cabbage leaves
1/2 tablespoon oyster sauce
1/2 tablespoon shoyu (soy sauce)
1 teaspoon sesame oil
some chili flakes
water to blanche cabbage
white sesame seeds

After washing the cabbage, cut into large bite sized pieces
Mix the next 4 ingredients and set aside
Boil some water
When the water comes to a boil, add the pieces of cabbage and swish around for about a minute
Drain
Add the cabbage to the oyster sauce dressing, toss
Sprinkle with white sesame seeds

NOTES: I would just drizzle some sauce to toss instead of dumping the cabbage into the dressing, it was a bit too much dressing. But taste-wise this was good, I would definitely make this again.

Over all, all the recipes were easy and delicious, I'd make them again.

What's cooking in your kitchen?

p.s. it's pocky day!!