Dinner on 27/02/08

Menu; pasta with tomato sauce & vegetables

I just found this photo, but I can't remember what kind of taste it was. It must have been very simple using tinned tomatoes, garlic, onions, broccoli and sweet corn. By the look of it, I must have been trying to use up the frozen vegetables. I like simple food like this occasionally.

Allergy free cake

As I mentioned a few times, I would prefer giving my daughter non-wheat products, and on that day, I made an allergy free cake! My daughter is allergic to eggs, dairy products and soy (which is a bit upsetting as we've got lots of soy products in Japan), and this cake doesn't have any of them! Most supermarkets nowadays have a section where there are allergy free products on the shelf. On the back of "white self-raising flour", there are some recipes using this special flour. The recipe for this cake is one of them. My daughter loves this cake, and so do we! I thought it was clever to use a ripe banana instead of using an egg. The banana has a similar texture to eggs.

I'm not sure if I can write the recipe for the cake because it's not mine. I don't follow the recipe exactly though. I use less oil for instant. When I recreat the recipe, I will write it.

Dinner on 22/02/08

Menu; Vegetable stir-fry with rice noodle.

As my daughter had a very mild wheat allergy (she's fine now!), we've come to eat rice noodle instead of noodles made from wheat. I heard that rice is easier to be digested than wheat, and I prefer giving my daughter rice products to wheat products. Anyway, I boiled the noodle, stir fried vegetables and tuna and added the noodle towards the end. I like using tinned tuna with sunflower oil as it gives flavour to the dish. I didn't even need any sauce to this dish. The light brown stuff on top, by the way, is dried bonito.

It's been a while...

It's been a while since I updated this blog last... I've been wanting to update it, but haven't got round to it. I've been taking photos of my food, but I suppose I was trying to write recipes for it, which is not that easy as I don't normally think about how much sauce to put in and stuff...

Anyway, I will update photos of my food, but I won't write too much about each dish.

The visitors to this blog must have been dissapointed every time they visit the blog - I'm very sorry.

Dinner on 23/03/08

Menu: chicken soup with kelp; rice and umeboshi puree

It's been a while since I last updated this blog. I've been extremely busy trying to do many things. Hope all the people who come to check my blog are doing well :)
The other day, I made my favourite soup - chicken soup with kelp! We had a bad day and felt really cold. We couldn't warm up even we had the heater on. We definitely deserved a nice comfort food that day, so I decided to make this soup. There are several versions of this soup, and this time, I just used chicken, kelp, ginger, Chinese sake, lots of leek and a pinch of salt to taste. I didn't use dashi stock or anything. It still tasted nice. For the people who are not used to using dashi stock - you don't have to use it as long as there is enough chicken in the soup. Chicken and other ingredients make a lovely stock. I have to have kelp in this soup though. I love kelp so much, and it just tastes really nice in the soup. My two-year-old daughter loves kelp like me :) I put a fair amount of kelp in her bowl, but she kept asking for more.

What's your comfort food? As for me, chicken soup with kelp is definitely one of them.

How to Live to be 101

The other day, there was a TV programme called "Horizon"on BBC2. It was about "How to Live to be 101", and Okinawa was featured!!! I was proud of that. Even though many people don't know much about Okinawa (some have never heard of the name), it's a good sign that we get to see and learn about Okinawa on television. Click here to watch the programme, which is available for 4 more days.

The two doctors who were talking about Okinawa on the programme are the ones who wrote the book called The Okinawa Program : How the World's Longest-Lived People Achieve Everlasting Health--And How You Can Too . In the programme, they were cooking Goya Champuru, which is one of my favourite dishes! One of the important ingredients in our stir-fry dishes (champuru as we call it) is tofu. We eat tofu a lot. It's different from Japanese one, and we love our tofu.

If you would like to know and learn how to live long like us (to be specific, the old people in Okinawa), this is the book. I've got a copy of this book as well.

Dinner on 06/02/08

Menu: vegetable curry and rice

Did you know that we have our own style curry in Japan? It's one of the popular dishes in Japan. Unlike the other types of curry (Indian, Thai and so on), our curry has a milder taste.
I hear that curry was introduced to Japan by the British.

A ready-made curry sauce mix is commonly used in Japan, which makes it extremely easy to make. Japanese-style curry was the first dish I made as a kid (I was six at that time.) It's a polular camping dish as well. I remember making it when I went camping on one of the school trips. It's so easy to make it as long as you have the sauce mix and the ingredients.

Well this time, I made the sauce from scratch. It wasn't that hard to make it. I cooked finely chopped onions, garlic and ginger until they were brown, and then put in some flour and curry powder and mixed well. Finally I added soup stock little by little, stirred quickly and let it simmer until it thickended.

This time I used onions, carrots, potatoes and green pepper as ingredients. I added some grated apple as well.

I'll write a recipe for it, hopefully, some time soon.