Taste of Japan part II

I cooked up some more Japanese food today. Two very simple things here that were just godlike. The egg thingies on the left are a sweet omelet roll thing called tamagoyaki, the little soy cup in the middle is for dipping the tamagoyaki. It was just sooo good. The recipe is simple: you need at least a few eggs and a tablespoon or two of sugar. If you are a pro you can put in a bit of dashi and soy or mirin or whatever as Yasuko of Yasukon Keittio told me. I followed this really awesome youtube video for the cooking technique. It has a really cool electronic song that plays in the background that I was listening to many times while making the tamagoyaki. Strangely about 8/10 youtube commenters seemed to hate the song. Well that is just more proof that the only people commenting on youtube are 'tards. Anyway as you'll see in the video the tricky part is the cooking technique where you have to re-oil the pan and roll the omelet up a few times. You should also ideally have a special frying pan like this.

The other thing that was really awesome was the sesame seed salad dressing I put on the salad. I haven't tasted that in like 4 years. It was just as good as I remembered it. The blue soup plate just contains some simple tanki udon, they're the same thick tapeworm-y noodles that I made a stirfry variation of in my earlier blog post.

Yakiudon

Recently I went to visit the Helsinki University of Technology to talk about some stuff related to my work. It really isn't interesting enough to blog about. But before I went back to Turku I took some time to do some quick shopping in the center of Helsinki. I went to Tokyokan and spent about 60 euros and walked away with two medium-sized grocery bags full of japanese food items. I bought mostly noodles but also finally found the sesame seed salad dressing that I haven't eaten a single time since I was in Japan a very long time ago. Today I cooked up a yakiudon dish. It's incredibly easy to make but so good. You basically stirfry some vegetables and meat if you like, then you add the noodles and the sauce that the package contains. The noodles aren't dry and crappy like the instant ones you can buy in just about any shop here. You also don't have to boil them in water, just put them in the frying pan and add a small amount of water. I think maybe it's the sauce that makes the dish so good. If you don't have pre-made sauce you can make your own. I've gotten the best results so far by mixing a bit of soy sauce, some sugar and a bit of worcestershire sauce.

The picture you see above is the result of my godlike cooking skills. What you can also see is the DVD box of season 2 of the Ultimate Fighter that I got today from Amazon. I'm watching it right now and drinking a beer out of one of those new style plastic bottles that Finland is apparently switching to. I guess we'll see a lot of less broken glass all over the sidewalks after the weekends from now on. Smar decision.