We made pretty much the yummiest homemade Japanese meal I've had to date. As Brandon would say, "That sounds like a challenge!"
Anywho, we made up some of those spicy carrots I was telling you about. So I documented that, as well. First, you gotta chop the carrots matchstick style.
There's my baby, hard at work!
Then you have to toast some sesame seeds, and sautee the carrots in sesame oil along with the seeds.
I'M SO PUMPED FOR CARROTS! Those are the dumplings to my right. I'll get to those in a minute.
Then I made the sauce. My recipe is an abbreviated version of the one on JustBento, just because I used what I had in the house. It worked out nicely, though. My verison is spicy. My roommate Stacy makes a sweet version, using sugar instead of hot pepper paste. Personally, I think brown sugar goes better with soy sauce than white sugar, but that would admittedly have a totally different flavor.
I just mix in some hot pepper paste with my soy sauce and VOILA!
After the carrots have cooked for a while, I add the sauce.
OH MY GOSH it is SO nice to have a camera that works.
MMM brown and delicious. So, I just toss them in that for a while, then I drain the sauce - but don't get rid of it! It makes a great spicy salad dressing.
Ok so lets talk about the REAL stars of the show - the dumplings! These dumplings were handmade by Brandon and I. The wrappers are made from homemade dough - REALLY simple, just flour and water. The filling is ground beef (I substitute beef for pork because I don't really eat pork), green onions, soy sauce and sesame oil. I store them in the freezer in copious amounts of flour to keep them separate.
I put them in ziplock bags and make sure they lay flat when I first put them in, so they don't clump together. Once they're frozen, though, you can move them however. They're solid as rocks after that.
Then I boil about an inch of water and put them in.
You HAVE to keep them moving, they stick really easily, and once they stick they start to tear.
My roommate Eric added soy sauce to the water when he cooked them. They were golden brown on the outside and super yummy. But I like to keep my soy sauce to a minimum, so I don't do that (I'm being a total hippocrit here and you'll find out why in a second).
When they're done boiling, I just put them in a bowl by themselves becuase they tend to bring starchy water with them, which can gunk up your rice. Here's our dinner:
White rice with spicy carrot sesame salad, Beef dumplings and homemade iced green tea. All of this was made from scratch, can you believe it? I'm so proud of myself!
So, I'm a hippocrit because I said I wasn't going to make dipping sauce for the dumplings, since there's soy sauce on the carrots as well, but the carrots were so spicy and they stained the rice so I couldn't cool off my mouth that way. So I went ahead and made some dipping sauce for the dumplings. I want you to know that this amount of soy sauce in one meal is NOT normal for me. I keep my salt intake to a minimum. I rarely add salt to anything, and I'm very careful about soy sauce. But tonight was a special treat. So here's my recipe for the dipping sauce: equal parts soy sauce and sesame oil, then just a dash of red wine vinegar.
It was such a yummy dinner - totally japanese, completely homemade and really yummy. Lots of comfort food. Definitely too much soy sauce for my taste, but It was definitely a treat to indulge a little.
Now I'm going to sit back and finish my lovely iced tea. Two blog posts in one day, I'm exhausted!
Oh wait... Now I have to do dishes.........
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