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Wow I’m tired today. I didn’t get home until 6:50 yesterday and Dan got home at 7. We at at 8 and then after the dishes it ws 8:30! I got up at 5:40 this morning. Thank goodness there is only 1 monday a week.
Tonight I made agedashi tofu. See image (above) and recipe (below). Mmm. I’m not that good at it and I’m sure it would earn a student at a Japanese cooking school an expulsion, but it tasted pretty good.
Agedashi-Dofu (Deep-fired tofu)
1/2 lb tofu (half of one of those round containers of 800 g or one of the 400 g rectangle packages)
cornstarch or flour
oil for frying
1 cup dashi-no-moto stock
1/4 cup mirin (cooking rice wine)
1/4 cup soy sauce
sugar (optional)
1/4 cup minced green onion
1 tablespoon or more bonito (katsuo-bushi) flakes
3 tablespoons daikonoroshi (grated daikon)
1 tablespoon grated ginger
lemon slices (optional)
Drain tofu on strainer for several hours or on paper towel. Cut tofu into bite-size cubes. Bring sauce ingredients to a boil in a saucepan. Coat the pieces of tofu with cornstarch or flour. Heat the oil for frying, but do not begin until ready to serve. Deep-fry the tofu just until golden brown; do not overcook. Pour the sauce in a bowl. Put tofu in the centre of the bowl and sprinkle bonito flakes and green onion over the tofu. Place a mound of grated daikon next to the tofu, and top the daikon with a grated ginger. Squeeze lemon juice over daikon if you wish.
Japanese food always turns the kitchen into a disaster zone though.
Tyler | November 26th, 2005 @ 3:05 pm
Your culinary experimentations impress me. I’m starting to suspect that, like me, you find the experience of cooking a good meal at home far more satisfying than eating in a restaurant! The only time I like to eat in a restaurant is when it’s stuff I can’t cook well at home, like Indian food or smoked meat or something.
We should trade recipes, or hang out and cook sometime. I made Vietnamese Bahn Pho soup this week and it turned out fabulous!
Karen | November 27th, 2005 @ 1:41 pm
Wow thanks, a compliment for cooking is always appreciated. Indeed, my attitude has been that if I can make it at home as good or better than what is out there in the restaurants, then I try to make it. I have found it is harder to find good Japanese food here (there is one place on rue Ontario that we like, but its quite far away) so I started trying to cook more Japanese food. It hasn’t been without incident though … I almost set fire to the kitchen in Edmonton trying to make tempura once …I started taking pictures since I probably spend about 7-8 hours cooking a week on average, and I thought, why not blog it? I’ve been meaning to make a home-made cookbook but I was too lazy to do the formatting since I only have Word-like text-editors that don’t handle images well and this is my way of avoiding the whole problem…
Have you been to Pushap yet? Its better than the curry I had in Brick Lane in London.
I have never tried pho, but it sounds good. That sounds like a good idea. Dan should have some free time in the end of Dec and in January. Also I’ve been planning to have a ‘perogy party’ with Edith since the summer where I could bring the ingridients for my family’s heart-stopping Romanian perogies and if other people havce recipes to bring theirs, invite a whole bunch of other people, and make like 500 to 1000 perogies. Then everyone could take some of each kind home and we could cook some to eat there. Do you have perogy recipes?? What about Paul and Bonnie?