Nikujaga: Japanese Meat and Potatoes

Master!

Seyoung and I have been watching a Japanese drama called Sinya Shokudo (深夜食堂, Midnight Restaurant).  In each episode the main character, the taciturn, enigmatic diner chef simply known as Master, deals with a different dish and a different story about the patrons of his tiny Shinjuku late-night diner.  Each episode is titled for a Japanese diner-type dish, which makes you pretty hungry after you've watched an episode.

 One of the last episodes featured a common home-style dish called nikujaga (meat and potato) that looked pretty simple and deliciously hearty, so I gave it a go.

This stove-top casserole dish holds about three litres or so, Seoung and I ate almost all of it in one sitting.  To be fair we hadn't eaten much all day, and it took a while for the stew to, well, stew.


The recipe I followed was a synthesis from three other recipes from Closet Cooking, Just Hungry and No Recipes.

Ingredients
400 g beef, sliced into thinnish bite-size pieces
4 medium-large potatoes, cut into bite-sized chunks
2 large carrots, sliced into bite sized chunks
2 small yellow cooking onions
1 slice of ginger
3 tbs soy sauce
1 tbs mushroom soy sauce (I just like the taste of this stuff)
3 tbs white sugar
1 tbs sake
2 tbs mi-rin
1 tsp sesame oil
2 c dashi (or something similar, or just water, or stock)

Method
You'll need a large-ish pot for the stew.

Combine all the liquid ingredients and the sugar and stir until most of the sugar s dissolved or you couldn't be arsed to stir it any more.

Using a little cooking oil brown the beef, then add the onions and ginger and saute for a minute.  Add the other veggies and saute for a a few minutes.

Add the liquid ingredients and the sugar and simmer until the stock is reduced by about half.  Again this depends on your taste, but it should be reduced to concentrate and blend the flavours.  I simmered it for at least an hour.

The Farm Report

The weather has been pretty variable since we set up the first garden box two weeks ago.

By "pretty variable" I actually mean completely and utterly miserable.  We've had snow, rain and temperatures between 0 and 5 Celsius every day.

Luckily the soda bottle cloches seem to do the trick, or the plants are tougher than I figured, and every seedling has survived so far.

This coming weekend we'll plant the second garden box and I'm planning to build two smaller boxes for herbs.

The War on Slugs

Our new grow boxes are full of tender young plants, tempting targets for slugs.  I've been told and read of many different strategies for dealing with them: eggshells scattered around the plants, pans of stale beer, and copper.  Apparently copper reacts with the slime created by snails and slugs and gives them shocks or something.  I guess it's like when you chew a bit of foil by mistake if you have metal fillings.

Various methods of using copper as a barrier were considered, lengths of copper wire stapled to the sides of the garden box (too narrow to really stop a hungry slug), copper pipe strap nailed to the box (too expensive for an experiment) and strips of copper mesh (available in decent lengths for a reasonable price, but not readily to hand)  While poking through the kitchen section of Home Hardware I found copper scourers.  They seemed to be made of copper mesh rolled into a donut.

I bought a package -- and was gently admonished by the cashier (and the label) not to use them on non-stick pans -- and headed home.

The scourers were unrolled and gave me two tubular lengths of copper mesh which I cut apart into lengths of 'tape' which I stapled around the base of the garden box which we planted today.

I will report later on the effectiveness of the wire obstacle we've erected to keep the slugs out of our garden box.  Once we've had a chance to see how well they work, that is.  Even if they don't care about the copper, they'll probably have a pretty rotten time trying to get across the sharp metal mesh.

Garden Box Farming

Seyoung has taken an interest in growing plants in the window over the past couple of months (if you look in the window you can see the lettuce.) She started growing lettuce and green onions and I thought that a small outdoor garden might be fun. 

I looked into "lasagna gardening", which seemed really easy, except that you need to have a bunch of compost to start it. Then thought about garden boxes.

I mentioned the garden thing to someone at work and they said that if I needed some pallets to make the boxes I could have some. Brad and I took home an assortment of pallets over several trips until I had enough to make two grow boxes and enough left over to make a compost bin and a couple of planters. The hardest part was breaking down the pallets and removing the nails. 

We now have two garden boxes measuring 1m by 1m by 50cm deep (500 liters of earth each). The boxes are lined with heavy polyethylene and I cut down 30 or so 2 liter clear plastic soda bottles to use as cloches. 

 Seyoung had already started lettuce, green onion and a few other things, some of which have been transplanted into the garden to see how they'll do.  She's also started a bunch of herbs indoors for the second garden box (it isn't filled with soil yet). 

One of the worst things we have to contend with here, besides the 5 hours of sunshine per month, is SLUGS.  I've looked into ways of controlling them and settled on one thing to try first.  I'll post about that later.

Back to the Beginning

As many of you who might still be following my now-erratic blog already know, Seyoung and I recently returned to Canada, got married and set up house, such as it is.

Things haven't been easy, I didn't think they would be, but it's honestly much harder than I had imagined. It's like I'm redoing it all again from scratch, which is, I suppose, exactly what it is. For the third or fourth time in five or six years, I'm starting (in most ways) from scratch.

Here's to hoping that things get easier.

I'll post periodically about things that went on during the year and a half or so "blackout" prior to now. There were good times and bad, interesting times, photos were taken, adventures were had. I should write them down so I can relive them myself.

Writing style

The last post I submitted showed an analysis of my writing style based on some fiction I wrote as part of a role-playing game.

I submitted my last blog post about the near-drowning sea kayaking adventure of Song-jeong Beach and here's the machine verdict:

I write like
Ursula K. Le Guin

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

Oddly enough, I have read and enjoyed a fair bit of her writing.

The J. K. Rowlings stuff I can't explain, I've never read any of her writing, but I have watched the film adaptations.

EDIT: I've thought about it a bit and the primary feature in most Ursula LeGuin writing that stands out for me is the theme of sea journeys. Maybe that's the difference. We all write in different modes. I imagine that Rowling and Leguin don't write in the same style when writing in their journals, or their shopping lists, than they do when they sit down to tell a story.

So I guess my storytelling mode, according to this online 'bot, is most akin to Rowling's style. Depends on the story and the day...

Weird

Here's a web widget that (apparently) analyzes your writing...

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!