Step one: purchase ingredients. When one is out shopping with the cooking inept, you will find that she is equally inept at knowing what to buy for cooking. In this first attempt, this Inept-Sensei bought 3 potatoes, an onion, spinach, 6 pieces of bacon, 12 small pieces of ham, and 10 eggs. This was to be a meal for a full week, so when not following this recipe, keep that in mind! Step two: google it. As an example, you might try entering, "How to cook potatoes, onions, and eggs" into the search bar. A perfectly reasonable guide to preparing a six serving meal in 25 minutes will pop up, but do not believe it! I will assure you that the amount of time is very slightly inaccurate. But just a tiny bit. Also, after skimming through it to see that you should cook the potatoes until lightly brown, then add the onions until both are golden brown, and then poor an egg concoction on top, feel free to stop. Too much reading just clutters the mind when trying to focus on determining how to prepare a meal properly. Step three: prepare your ingredients. Apparently potatoes are best when you wash and peel them first. In that order. Then, very carefully so as not to remove any portions of your fingers, haphazardly attempt to cut them into cubes. Don't worry, uniformity on the first try isn't even worth thinking about. I say just go for it! The onions as well have a special preparation method that can easily be found online along with a video of the process. Again, perfection is impossible, so I say just go for it! THEN watch the video. You'll be crying over the onion after you've peeled and cut it for more than one reason. By the way, I bought a whole onion, but after peeling the whole thing, and cutting half of it, I compared it with the amount of diced potatoes I had and made the executive decision that half an onion was enough. Of course, feel free to continue crying and chopping if you like extra onions, but the taste of the dish may vary from my first masterpiece, so I highly recommend you think very hard before you change even one of my directions. Step four: can you turn on the stove? Answer: nope. For this step, when in Japan, please turn to your very Japanese proficient roommate and request that they help you. There are only a few buttons on the stove, but when written in Japanese with the knowledge of, "this thing gets super hot" please always have roommate supervision. For the sake of creating dinner for this week, my victim was my roommate Ayano, who was prevailed upon a multitude of times during this whole process. Thank you, Ayano! Sorry for bothering you so many times on such a peaceful Sunday! Step five: heat until golden brown. I would give you more specific instructions, but I don't know the appropriate term myself. Let me describe the process for you instead, while providing some advice along the way. First, place a pan on the stove top. Second, very important, having obtained the info of how to turn on the stove, proceed to turn it on. Third, pour a dollop of oil into the pan. The type matters, but in Japan it doesn't... Because I can't read what type of oil it is and I don't want to bother. Don't be shy to experiment with the amount of oil, either! A drizzle here, a splash there, a sprig if you are feeling up to it, I can honestly tell you that a dollop was probably incorrect. Fourth, carefully scoop you're prepared potatoes into the pan. Do NOT dump them in willy-nilly! The oil WILL splash, and burns CAN happen. Thankfully, I put the oven on too low and didn't let the oil heat up. Sometimes speed and impatience can be a good thing! Fifth, stand there, watching your potatoes cook, occasionally chasing them around the pan when you become bored of just staring at them. When you've accomplished a golden brown color, and an assumed delicious texture, feel free to dump them into a bowl to store for later. Step six: other stuff should be golden brown too. Follow approximately the same directions for the onions, but perhaps consider starting from the fourth instruction of step five, seeing as if you get a new pan then the worst part of cooking will just become worser. (This is a Peter Pan reference from one of the many movies made about him. I don't actually condone using worser in any context other than such a movie quote. To be grammatically correct, I would actually use horribler; it sounds better.) Repeat the potato steps for the onions, bacon, ham, and spinach, with a few tweaks. For example, if you wait for the bacon and ham to be golden brown, most likely it will never happen and you will be stuck in an infinite loop until your house burns down. Such meats do not become golden brown. They go from a white and red, or pink color, directly to a deep brown color, then to a charred crisp. Just go by gut! If it looks cooked, then take it out and hope for the best! Just take a small bite first to double check! Uncooked meat can be dangerous! For the spinach, if it has turned brown in any capacity, you are doing something wrong. I honestly put it into the pan, let it sit for 5-10 seconds until it was looking good and wrinkly, and then removed it and put it in my bowl of finished vegetables. It is possible that you don't need to cook the spinach, but I did it just in case, for completion's sake. Step seven: eggs, dishes, done. Carefully crack 3 eggs into a bowl and whisk. Bits of egg shells are not necessary, but can be used to add a pleasant (?) crunch. For those of you who don't know, to whisk is to use a strange metal kitchen utensil to stir something. In this case, I whisked the eggs until everything was yellow. The final step, dump the eggs into the pan until they partially solidify. Then, stir while adding in an equal amount of the other ingredients that have been cooked and wait for the eggs to completely solidify. Do this for all 10 eggs and hopefully by the end all the ingredients have been safely disposed of as well. At this point, there will be an inordinate amount of dishes dirtied and strewn across the kitchen, but it has been three hours since starting and you are bound to be hungry and exhausted. I'll have you know, this dish was supposed to take 25 minutes. This is one amazing example of how the internet lies to you. Take this as a life lesson and never listen to the internet again. And that folks, was my first, and possibly going to be my only, experience of cooking in Japan. Due to large amounts of school work, club activities, daily Snapchats, going out to dinner, and relaxation time I haven't finished this post until now, but in fact this is an experience of a Sunday morning over a month ago. Looking back on it, I can tell you that none of it was exaggerated in the heat of the moment. It is all true, hard fact that requires attention to detail and exact measurements when replicating. Perhaps you might be wondering how the taste turned out in the end... It turned out exactly like one might expect from following my directions to the T. Delicious...................ly edible. The looks were questionable and the taste was bland with a bit more questionable thrown in for good measure. It (unfortunately) lasted for 5 meals, and I ate all of it, but would I make it again? .... Just try it. I think you'll know the answer to that question somewhere during step 6 after 2.5 hours have passed.
0 Comments
|
AuthorPicky eater extraordinaire. Follow me as I attempt to survive on Japanese cuisine. Or attempt not to get fat on it. I still haven't figured out which one it will be yet. ArchivesCategories |