Long time, no post

Back to Wellington and into the blogging spirit already!

First I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone that made my holidays awesome :) I had a great three weeks. Although it probably doesn't seem to anyone like I did much, I had a really enjoyable time. It was good to just hang with and talk with everyone again for such a long period of time. I'm missing the serenity of Palmerston North already!

As you all know, I got rather obsessed with my Japanese translating over my holiday and now that I am well equipped to cook with a whole lot of recipes up my sleeve, I am utterly determined to try my hand at Japanese cooking. As well as the three Japanese cookbooks I have from Japan, I have also built up a collection of cookbooks that are in English. From all of this, I should be able to come up with some things to cook for quite some time.

I started tonight actually. I was going to have something simple like soup and toast for dinner because I was unpacking this afternoon and unprepared to go all the way to the supermarket to get some things. So I had to look for a simple recipe that I could cook with what I had. I cooked a side dish for my dinner. The recipe was from a mini Japanese cookbook I have by Keiko Ishida. It was a recipe for pumpkin but I thought it looked good and decided to try it with kumara instead. So this is my version of the recipe. I adjusted the ingredients a little accordingly.

Simmered kumara
Ingredients:
1 kumara
150ml water
2 Tbsp sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp mirin
1 tsp soy sauce
toasted white sesame seeds (to taste)
salt and pepper

Method:
1. Cut up kumara into pieces about 2 x 3 cm.
2. Put kumara, water and sugar in a pot, cover and bring to the boil. Simmer for 2-3 minutes.
3. Add mirin, soy sauce and season with salt and pepper. Reduce heat and simmer for 5-10 minutes or until kumara is cooked and most of liquid has reduced.
4. Serve and garnish with sesame seeds.

This tasted good. And it required me to toast sesame seeds too which was a little scary. But they are much more tasty now.

And I had this with a gigantic bowl of rice and egg :)