Our next cake recipe will be for carrot-cake form the rice cooker. Just as easy as all the other cake recipes, and the carrot gives the cake a sweet taste, a soft texture and some extra vitamins (so you don't have to feel too guilty if you eat a bit too much from this cake ;-)
Ingredients (makes a cake with approximately 19cm diameter, and 3 cm height):
125 gr flour
2 eggs
1 tbsp sugar
50 ml oil
100 ml milk
1 tsp baking powder
1 carrot, grated
The baking process is pretty much the same as all our cake
recipes: mix all the ingredients together. Grating the carrot can be a little tedious, but really gives the cake a nice taste.
Grating the carrot
Mixing the batter, gets a nice orange colour
Put the batter in the rice cooker, put it on cake-setting and let it
bake for 30 minutes. (or what your own rice cooker requires) After the rice cooker has finished, wait until the
pan and the cake has
cooled down. Then you can turn over the pan and with a little shake the
cake will come out perfectly.
With the winter coming (although we still have some nice warm days in autumn) it will be time to make some delicious Japanese winter dishes. Oden is a typical Japanese one-pot winter dish, in which all ingredients are slowly simmered in the soup. Preparation-time is very fast, but the dish will also require at least 30 minutes (more likely 40) waiting time.
Ingredients (2p):
1/3 daikon, peeled and cut into 3/4 inch pieces
2 boiled eggs, peeled
1 atsuage (deep fried tofu), cut into large slices
2 or 3 ganmodoki (fried tofu fritters), cut into halves
5 chikuwa (tube-like fish paste cakes), cut into pieces
hanpen (surimi fish cake), cut into triangles
for the soup:
700 ml water
2 tsp dashi powder
2 tbsp mirin
4 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sugar
Feel free to change the ingredients; add some potatoes (peeled) and konnyaku, substitute for other tofu or fish paste cakes.
First step is the preparation: boil the eggs (around 5 minutes) and peel them. Cut all other ingredients as listed above.
Then, take a big fry pan and mix the ingredients for the soup together. Place the rest of the ingredients in the soup (do it the Japanese way and group the ingredients together). Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and put on the lid, then let it simmer for about 30-40 minutes. (the daikon should have become soft) Make sure you do not run out of soup, else add some extra dashi-water and soy sauce.
Now that is has become autumn, and with Halloween getting near, we just had to make some pumpkin recipes! We still love our Kabocha cookies recipe, but we also wanted to try some new recipes. This time, we tried 'simmered kabocha'.
Ingredients (2p):
1/2 kabocha (Japanese pumpkin)
circa 180 ml water
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp soy sauce
Cut the kabocha into small cubes.
In a pan, mix together the water, soy, and sugar and bring to boil. When it boils, add the pumpkin pieces and turn down the heat. Now let the pumpkin simmer for about 15 minutes.
Serve with rice for a light lunch, or eat as a side dish. This dish has a perfect taste for cold autumn days.
One again we would like to share one of our easy rice cooker cake recipes. This time it will be an apple-cinnamon cake!
Ingredients (makes a cake with approximately 19cm diameter, and 3 cm height):
125 gr flour
2 eggs
1 tbsp sugar
50 ml oil
100 ml milk
1 tsp baking powder
2 apples
cinnamon
Peel the apples, remove the core, and cut them to small pieces. Cover the pieces in cinnamon.
The rest of the baking process is pretty much the same as all our cake
recipes: mix all the ingredients together until the batter is smooth. Add some extra cinnamon to the batter for some more cinnamon-taste to your cake! Also add the apple pieces to the batter, and make sure they are evenly divided.
Put the batter in the rice cooker, put it on cake-setting and let it
bake for 30 minutes. (or what your own rice cooker requires) After the rice cooker has finished, wait until the
pan and the cake has
cooled down. Then you can turn over the pan and with a little shake the
cake will come out perfectly.
Kitsune Udon literary means "Fox Udon". According to old folk-tales, the favourite food of foxes (kitsune) is 'aburaage': fried tofu, which is the topping of this recipe!
Many area's in Japan are famous for their servings of Kitsune Udon. For example, the area around Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto. Fushimi Inari is dedicated to Inari, the shinto god of rice and
business. His messengers are foxes (kitsune) of which there are many
statues all over the mountain. Most of the foxes are depicted with a
granary key in their mouth, a symbolic key to success and prosperity.
Though their boss is the god of rice, the foxes are more into tofu. We visited Fushimi Inari Shrine last June, and off course we tried some Kitsune Udon!
Fox next to the torii gates by Fushimi Inari
Because we really liked the kitsune udon, we wanted to make it ourselves too!
Ingredients (2p):
For the udon-soup:
2 packs of Udon (are normally sold in packs of 3)
circa 700 ml water
dashi powder (out brand required 2,5 tbsp of dashi powder for 700 ml water to make udon soup, but check the box to see the amount needed)
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp mirin
2 tbsp sugar
For the topping:
Aburaage*
Naruto-maki (fish cake, in long round shape), cut into thin slices
* You can (apparently) make the Aburaage yourselves. However, we have never tried that and just go for the easy way: store-bought Aburaage. You can just buy the same tofu as is used for inari-sushi.
How to make video...
.. or the instructions:
Mix the dashi-powder with 700 ml water. While bringing up the heat, add the soy sauce, mirin and sugar.
When it gets to simmer, add the udon noodles and let it cook for about 3-4 minutes.
In the meanwhile, get the aburaage out of the packing, and cut the naruto-maki into slices.
Slices of Naruto-maki
Divide the noodles and soup in two bowls, and top with the aburaage and naruto. Enjoy!
We see packages of Okra all around in Japanese supermarkets, and although it is not a Japanese vegetable, it can be used in many Japanese style cooking. For example, try adding it to a Japanese style curry! But this time we want to share a recipe of a Japanese side dish that uses Okra. It's ridiculously easy to prepare, so there is no reason not to try it. Seasoned boiled Okra can easily be adjusted to your own taste, and is a very nice side dish by any (rice) meal.
Ingredients (2p):
1 bag okra
Soy sauce
Bonito flakes (Katsuobushi)
(optional) fresh grated ginger
Japanese bag of Okra
First, boil the okra for a couple of minutes.
Boiling
Cut off the top and bottom, and throw those away. Cut the remaining of the okra into small pieces.
Add the bonito flakes (kutsuobushi) on top, add soy sauce and (if you like) the fresh grated ginger, and mix together.
And your side dish is already ready to serve, very easy and quick!
Nasu Dengaku (or Eggplant broiled with miso) is one of the many Japanese recipes that combines both eggplant and miso paste. The two tastes go very well together, and make for a very delicious combinations. We have already posted some recipes that featured eggplant and/or miso-paste, and this time we will focus on Nasu Dengaku. It is a delicious, and also makes for a very nice looking side-dish.
Ingredients (2p):
2 tbsp miso paste
1 tbsp soya
1 tbsp suiker
3 tbsp mirin
2 eggplants
View the 'how to make'-video...
... or read the instructions with the photo's:
Cut the eggplants in halves lengthwise, and put them in the broiler (or oven) until soft. In our broiler it took approximately 5 minutes on 200 degrees.
Cut eggplant
Eggplant in the broiler
While the eggplant is in the broiler, mix the miso paste, soya sauce, mirin and sugar together. It will become a smooth, brownish mixture.
Miso mixture
When the eggplant has become soft, get them out of the broiler. Put miso-sauce-mix on the insides of the eggplants, and sprinkle with sesame seeds.
Eggplant with miso-sauce and sesam seeds, ready to get back in the broiler
Put back into the broiler until the miso-sauce starts bubbling and the sesame seeds turn brown (should be around the same time). Serve as a side dish (preferably by a rice dish), and enjoy!
A new recipe in our very populair 'rice cooker cake'-recipe series: Japanese matcha cake. Matcha, fine powder green tea, doesn't only make for delicious tea but can also be used to make all kinds of sweets (matcha-taste chocolate is also one of our favourites) and desserts. And this time, we we share a recipe to make your own matcha cake!
Delicious pieces of matcha cake
Ingredients (makes a cake with approximately 19cm diameter, and 3 cm height):
125 gr flour
2 eggs
4 tbsp sugar
50 ml (coleseed) oil
100 ml milk
1 tsp baking powder
1,5 tbsp of matcha powder
The rest of the baking process is pretty much the same as all our cake recipes: mix all the ingredients together until the batter is smooth.
A tip for adding the matcha: add it little by little as the last step, so you can taste and adjust the amount of matcha powder if you think the taste is too strong (or too weak).
The cake batter mixed with matcha powder
Put the batter in the rice cooker, put it on cake-setting and let is bake for 30 minutes. After the rice cooker has finished, wait until the pan and the cake has
cooled down. Then you can turn over the pan and with a little shake the
cake will come out perfectly.
In part I of the gyoza update, we shared how to make your own gyoza. Now, in part II, we will share the best way to prepare gyoza
(home-made or store-bought), so you can enjoy them to the fullest.
Ingredients:
Gyoza
oil for frying
Raw gyoza
Heat some oil in a fry-pan, and add the gyoza. Fry them until the bottom turns brown(ish).
Add gyoza in the fry-pan
Then add some water, so there will be a low layer of water in the water
(around 1/3 of the height of the gyoza), and lower the heat till medium.
Add a lid on the fry-pan, and let the gyoza simmer until all the water
has evaporated.
Add some water, and let the gyoza simmer with lid on the fry-pan
When all the water has evaporated, remove the gyoza from the pan, and serve with some soy sauce dip. Enjoy!
We love eating gyoza, but -we will admit- up until now we would just buy ready made packages in the supermarket so we only needed spend a little time preparing them. But, since we like gyoza so much, we figured we should also try making them completely ourselves. And it was a big success! They tasted sooo much better than the store-bought ones, we even got to love eating gyoza even more :)
Home made gyoza
So, this time we want to share our favourite recipe for gyoza. And also, in part II of this update, we will share the best way to prepare gyoza (home-made or store-bought), so you can enjoy them to the fullest.
Ingredients (makes 30 gyoza):
200 gr ground pork
1/4 cabbage
2 tbsp soy sauce
clove of garlic
grated fresh ginger
pinch of salt
30 gyoza wrappers
(Optional) equipment:
Gyoza mold (used to fold the gyoza)
Our gyoza mold
We sometimes end up having to much filling to put in all in the gyoza. But, not to worry, it makes also for delicious meat balls you can enjoy the day after. On another note, you can make gyoza without the gyoza mold, just use your hands the fold the gyoza together en push to let it stick. Maybe it will not look perfectly, but it's the taste that counts of course!
Cut the cabbage in small pieces, boil for a couple of minutes, and make sure all excess water is removed.
boiling the cabbage
Then, in a bowl, mix the ground pork together with the garlic, ginger,
salt, soya sauce. At last add the cabbage to the mixture and mix.
gyoza filling all mixed together
Take the gyoza mold, and put a gyoza wrapper on top. Place a spoonful of filling in the wrapper, and close to mold to seal the gyoza.
spoonful of filling...
...put into the wrapper...
...and closed to seal the gyoza
Repeat this process 30 times, for 30 delicious gyoza
all 30 gyoza filled
For more clarification see our instructional-video:
Recently we came across a strange looking fruit (or was it a vegetable, we were not sure when we saw it) in our local supermarket. Looking at the sign, we learned that is was a 'uri' or うり in Japanese. Which still didn't bring us any further in knowing what kind of food it was. However, is was on sale and therefore very cheap, and the friendly lady of the supermarket ensured us that it tastes very good and was a very popular product today among customers. So, we decided to buy it.
Our uri
At home, we looked it up in our dictionary, and it turned out that it is a kind of melon. We therefore decided not to prepare it but just eat it raw as a side dish. We peeled the skin, and cut is into bite sizes pieces. You can either remove the seeds or eat them just as you would with a cucumber.
After we had tasted it, it turned out the taste and the texture is actually like a mix between a cucumber and a normal melon! Very surprising, but very delicious indeed. It makes for a very good and refreshing (especially in summer) side dish, so from now on, every time our supermarket is selling uri's we will buy them
Time for another cake made by the rice cooker! Our previous chocolate cake recipe was a big success, so this time we want to share another favourite of our cake recipes. Again it is very easy to make in the rice cooker.
This recipe is for Japanese sweet potato (satsuma-imo) cake. We have already posted several dinner recipes made with satsuma-imo (sweet potato rice & steamed sweet potato), but it's sweet taste makes it an excellent ingredient for cake too.
Ingredients (makes a cake with approximately 19cm diameter, and 3 cm height):
125 gr flour
2 eggs
1 tbsp sugar
50 ml (coleseed) oil
100 ml milk
1 tsp baking powder
1 satsuma-imo
Mix the flour, eggs, sugar, oil, milk, and baking powder together until the batter is smooth. Cut the sweet potato in small pieces, and add to the batter, then mix together.
Sweet potato cut into small pieces
Sweet potato cake batter in the rice cooker pan
Put the batter in your rice cooker, and make sure the potato pieces are evenly divided. Put the rice cooker on cake-modus,
and turn on for 30 minutes.
After the rice cooker has finished, wait until the pan and the cake have
cooled down. Then you can turn over the pan and with a little shake the
cake will come out perfectly.
Finished Sweet potato cake
The cake will be a little heavy, but that makes it also perfect to enjoy at a picnic or put in a bento box.
(recap from last cake recipe: No need to grease the rice
cooker-pan, it already has (should have) a
very good anti-stick layer and the cake will come out easily. Our rice
cooker has a cake option in the menu, which will ask for the
amount of time you want to cook your cake. All rice cookers are probably
different, so check the options in the manual. Apparently, you may even
be able to make cake in a rice cooker with only an on-button, but we
haven't tried that so we can't say anything about it.)
Now that the summer is getting warmer and warmer, it's time to try some seasonal recipes specially for hot days! This time we bought a goya (bitter melon), a vegetable that looks like a strange cucumber with bad skin, but tastes very different! It's has an extreme bitter taste, so beware when buying/tasting.
It's full of vitamins and therefore very healthy, and it is said that it helps your body withstand the heat of the summer. Most recipes with goya come from Okinawa, Japan's most southern region, so they should know what works best against the heat.
This time we tried making a simple variation of Chanpuru, a stir-fried dish
from Okinawa that normally contains vegetables, tofu, and/or some meat.
It is very often made with goya, which is therefore (not surprisingly)
called 'goya chanpuru'. Because is has such a bitter taste, we prefer not to eat a whole meal of it, but rather prepare it as a side dish.
Ingredients (2p):
1/2 Goya
clove of garlic
2 eggs
the outside of the goya
Cut the goya in half lengthwise, and remove the inside and seeds with a spoon. Then, slice the goya thinly.
Goya slices, with seeds removed
Heat some oil in a fry-pan. Add the goya slices, and season with pressed garlic. Fry until the goya softens. Then, add two eggs to the mixture, and stir till the eggs are baked.
Stir-fried goya with egg
Serve, on a plate. If the taste is still to bitter, it can help to add (a little bit of) mayonnaise, because that will soften the taste. It also took us a while to get used to the taste, but once that happens it actually tastes quite good.
Now you are ready to survive the summer heat :)
With the winter coming (although we still have some nice warm days in autumn) it will be time to make some delicious Japanese winter dishes. Oden is a typical Japanese one-pot winter dish, in which all ingredients are slowly simmered in the soup. Preparation-time is very fast, but the dish will also require at least 30 minutes (more likely 40) waiting time.
Now that is has become autumn, and with Halloween getting near, we just had to make some pumpkin recipes! We still love our Kabocha cookies recipe, but we also wanted to try some new recipes.
Kitsune Udon literary means "Fox Udon". According to old folk-tales, the favourite food of foxes (kitsune) is 'aburaage': fried tofu, which is the topping of this recipe!
We see packages of Okra all around in Japanese supermarkets, and although it is not a Japanese vegetable, it can be used in many Japanese style cooking. For example, try adding it to a Japanese style curry! But this time we want to share a recipe of a Japanese side dish that uses Okra. It's ridiculously easy to prepare, so there is no reason not to try it. Seasoned boiled Okra can easily be adjusted to your own taste, and is a very nice side dish by any (rice) meal.
This time we tried making a simple variation of Chanpuru, a stir-fried dish
from Okinawa that normally contains vegetables, tofu, and/or some meat.
It is very often made with goya, which is therefore (not surprisingly)
called 'goya chanpuru'. Because is has such a bitter taste, we prefer not to eat a whole meal of it, but rather prepare it as a side dish.
