Ah, I just can’t get out of lazy holiday mode! On Thursday, I finally cooked one thing from my list. This was an impromptu dinner party, and it went til 7am. The food was obviously gone early, but having a stacked wine rack has its pitfalls. Pitfalls? Might be the wrong word. Luckily, as I don’t have any Japanese costumes, I didn’t commit any highly inappropriate racist themes on the night, I had considered painting my face white and putting a dab of Geisha red lippy on.. but I didn’t.
Japan
No, I didn’t do anything too hard, it’s been really hot here and I wanted something snacky so I chose (and slightly modified) my Japanese menu. I was meant to do Gyoza as well, but screw it that can be for another day. I did make chicken karaage and Japanese style potato salad.
Chicken:
3 x tbspn soy sauce
1 x teaspn grated ginger
1 x teaspn brown sugar
splash of wine
2 x cloves garlic, minced
1kg Chicken thighs
Flour to coat
Basically, just cut the thighs in half, trim the fat, and soak in the marinade for at least an hour in the fridge. Heat about an inch of canola oil in a heavy pan, make sure it’s hot hot hot and shallow fry the chicken, flour dusted til it resembles KFC.
Potato Salad:
2 x blue potatos (chopped rough and boiled)
1 x carrot (also chopped and boiled)
1 x Lebanese cucumber, cut into ribbons
½ white onion, sliced thin
Egg Mayo
I used a ceramic knife on the cucumber and onion, gets it nice and thin. Use a mandolin cutting thing if you’re going all fancy, but hey, that requires more cleanup. Make sure your carrots and potato are cold, and slightly mash them into a bowl, so that the potato is kinda smooshed, but still forkable. Dry the onion and Cucumber with paper towels and mix in with your choice of amount of mayo, salt and pepper.
EAT.
I’m guessing this would go great with sake, but we only realised that after eating half of it, and damned if I’m walking to the bottle shop when there is half a plate of fried chicken on the table. I’m not stupid. We just washed it down with a million glasses of Sav blanc instead.