Japanese Gyudon aka Beef Bowl

Japanese gyudon (gyu is beef, don is rice bowl in Japanese), a variation of sukiyaki, is one of the popular dishes from Japan in the States.  It's an easy one-dish meal to prepare at home.  Kids normally like it a lot.  We just made it again recently at home so here's the recipe ...

Japanese Cold Ramen

For hot summer days, some of us crave for "cold" food to cool us down.  Japanese cold ramen is one of those foods.  I believe it is a Japanese version of Chinese cold noodle.  According to my husband who used to live in Japan for a few years, Japanese eateries serve this ramen noodle with ice cubes underneath the noodle on the serving plate.  I did it once at home, it was kind of interesting and unique.  Without the ice, it is still perfectly a good meal.

I have always use store bought cold ramen noodle kit package, they come in fresh noodle package located in the refrigerator section or dry cold ramen along with other dry ramens in most Asian markets.  There are a few fresh cold ramen Japanese brands but I only know of one dry cold ramen brand (see photos below).  Making the noodle sauce from scratch is actually quite easy - peanut sauce, hot sauce, or sweet vinegar sauce, and more.  I believe peanut sauce is more popular or well known compared to the others.  I will update this post once I have tried it myself.

Teriyaki Chicken

Everybody seems to like teriyaki sauce, be it with chicken, beef, fish or other ingredients.  The most popular one is probably teriyaki chicken, my family is no exception.  We make it once in a while when we crave for it.  Although it is healthier to make the sauce from scratch and it is not very difficult to do so, most of the time we opt to use store bought sauce for convenient sake.  We have tried a few different brands but we prefer "Mr. Yoshida's marinade & cooking sauce - original gourmet, sweet & savory".  We get it at Costco.  The one thing I don't like in the ingredients is the high fructose corn syrup, which is probably why the sauce is really good.  As long as we don't eat it too often, I would say it's not a big deal.  I do try to avoid high fructose corn syrup whenever I could in foods or drinks.  I have tried to make teriyaki sauce from scratch a long time ago but I recall it didn't turn out very good and have never tried it again since then, which I should.  When I do, I will post the result and update this recipe.  In the meantime, here's teriyaki chicken recipe using ready made sauce.

Japanese Light Cheesecake

My family loves this light cheesecake - its texture is cake-like, not cheesy.  I guess you could call it the Asian version of the regular cheesecake.  

Oriental Eggplant

Eggplant is a versatile vegetable and used in many foods around the world.  Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Indian, Thai, and many others have eggplant as one of their main vegetable dishes in their cuisines.  You can either use it for curry, casserole, roasted, fried, sauteed, steamed, and on.  There are also different types of eggplants - big and round Italian eggplant, the long and slender Chinese eggplant, the short and thin Japanese eggplant.  The textures are slightly varied between them but very insubstantial.

The following recipe is shared to me by my 3D decoupage instructor, Kyoko.  She is an excellent cook and I love her foods, which is mostly Japanese.  This is one of her wonderful Japanese recipes that I am sharing here in the blog.  Unlike the Chinese version that has thicker sauce to it, this recipe is not too far off in terms of taste, flavor and texture to its Chinese counterpart - sweet, tangy, ginger and garlicky palate to it.  This eggplant dish is always popular whenever I made it for potluck or get together.  You can always opt to steam them instead of frying the eggplants if you choose the healthier version and don't mind a nod down in regards to taste (that's the trade off).  I have tried both versions.