Salmon Mushroom Rice & Chawan Mushi

Cooking For a Lazy Day

There might be some days when you are tired and all you want to cook is something really simple and quick. These two recipes are perfect when I'm having a lazy day. The ingredients are simple and  it takes no time to prepare them. So, if any day you need something easy but still tasty, try these! It's so good and easy, you won't believe it.

Salmon Mushroom Rice

 

Ingredients (Please measure your ingredients accordingly):
- A handful of Shiitake mushroom (soaked and chopped into small sizes)
- IMPORTANT: keep the water used to soak the mushroom as we need it to cook the rice.
- 2-3 Salmon fillets
- Japanese soy sauce + sake (I actually replace with Teriyaki Sauce)
- Salt 

Method:
1) After soaking the mushroom, use the water to cook the rice.
2) Add in the mushrooms and some Teriyaki Sauce or soy sauce  and sake accordingly. Don't add too much, you can always add more sauce after the rice is cooked.
3) Cook the rice in rice cooker.
4) While the rice is cooking, prepare the salmon by placing it on baking tray.
5) Add the Teriyaki sauce or soy sauce
6) Bake the salmon for 10 mins or until cooked
7) Once salmon is cooked, pick out the bones and add the salmon into the cooked rice and mix well.
8) Add Teriyaki sauce/ soy sauce/ salt according to taste

Chawan Mushi

Ingredients (The measurement is enough for 4)
- 4 large eggs (lightly beaten)
-1 1/2 tsp Mirin
-1 1/2 tsp Japanese soy sauce
- 2 cups of dashi stock
- 4 Shiitake mushrooms (soaked until soft)
- Add any seafood that you like (like prawn, fish cake or scallop). I added prawn and scallop this time.

Method:
1) Mix the beaten eggs with mirin, soy sauce and the dashi stock.

2) Divide the rest of the ingredients into 4 small bowls and pour in the egg mixtures. Cover the bowl with aluminium foil.

3) Steam the egg mixture on a high heat for about 5 minutes. Then reduce the heat to low and steam for another 15 minutes or until they are set. Serve immediately.

 

 

Beef Teriyaki Don

Easy Beef Teriyaki Don For Dinner

One of my favourite Japanese dishes whenever I go to Japanese restaurant is of course the very popular Japanese Teriyaki meal.

Whether you want to make the sauce from scratch or buy a bottle of teriyaki sauce from the Asian grocery, this dish can be easily made at home. Of course, lazy me... I chose the short cut by using the pre made teriyaki sauce. It's really quick to prepare this dish and it is very tasty too. 

Also, this recipe is called Beef Teriyaki Don because 'Don' comes from the word 'Donburi'. Donburi is a Japanese rice bowl Dish. It's where a dish is served on top of a bowl of steamed rice in an oversized bowl.

I bought the pre-sliced beef from Asian grocery or  you can also slice the beef yourself. All you need to do is put your beef in the freeze until it's half frozen and slice the beef thinly. Half frozen the beef enables you to easily slice the beef thin enough without much struggle.

I don't provide an exact measurement for the sauce, so please add the sauce according to taste.

Beef Teriyaki Don

Ingredients:

- Sliced beef

- 1 onion (sliced)

- Teriyaki Sauce

- Sesame oil

- Mirin

- Sugar

- A handful of spring onions to garnish

Method:

1) Heat up the wok, add sesame oil. When oil is hot, add in the beef, stir the beef quicky then add in the onion.

2) Add in teriyaki sauce and sugar until you get your desire taste, then add in a dash of mirin.

3) When beef is ready to be served, garnish with spring onion.

4) Served the beef on top of a bowl of steamed rice, make sure you pour over the extra sauce too.

Note:

- If you don't have mirin, you can exclude it as Mirin is usually included in teriyaki sauce. I added some mirin because I like add more cooking wine in my cooking for an extra intensity to the flavour of the dish.

- If you have time you can marinade the beef with teriyaki sauce for at least 1/2 to 1 hour in the fridge before cooking.

Chicken Mushroom Rice

 

"Anyone who eats three meals a day should understand why cookbooks out-sell sex books three to one." (L. M. Boyd)

This is another quick and easy recipe that taste absolutely delicious, it takes less than 30 minutes to prepare this recipe.  This recipe was inspired by the chinese glutinous chicken rice (Lor Mai Kai) where you can find in most of the dim sum restaurant. I tried to make my own version of it, using long grain rice. I guess if you want to have an even healthier version, you can try it with brown rice too. All you need to do for this recipe is prepare the ingredients, stir fry them and mix everything with rice and let the rice cooker do the cooking for you.

This recipe need to use chinese pork sausage (La Chang) that you can find in asian grocery and nowadays there's a good substitution for this, that is the duck liver sausage - (Run Chang). This is the yellow packaging shown in the photo below. But if you don't like it, you can just opt out this one.

Make sure you get rid of the coating by soaking the sausages into water and peel of the coating.

Wana know the secret of achieving a tender chicken meat????

It will be the Baking Powder. Marinate your chicken meat with small amount of baking powder. In this recipe I used around 1 and a half  teaspoon of baking powder. Mix it well with chicken, leave it for 5 minutes and rinse the chicken. Make sure you clean off the baking powder thoroughly.

The measurement I used below can easily feed 5 people.

Chicken Mushroom Rice

Ingredients:

- 5 chicken thigh fillet (cut into dice size)

- A handful of dried mushroom, soak well in a bowl of water. Make sure you don't throw the mushroom water away, as we need it to cook the rice.

- Pork sausage/Duck liver (cut into thin slice)

- Around 15 pieces of dried shrimps (cut into smaller sizes)

- 5 garlic cloves (chop into smaller sizes)

- Fried onions (you can find this in grocery store if you are lazy to fry yourself)

- 2 tablespoon of cooking oil

- 2 cup of rice

Marinate Sauce:

2 tablespoon Oyster sauce

2 tablespoon sweet soya sauce

1 tablespoon salty soya sauce

Method:

1) After you marinated your chicken with baking powder (this is optional) and cleaned them throroughly.

Marinate the chicken with the marination sauce while you prepare for other ingredients

2) Cut the mushroom into smaller pieces (is up to you how you like the size of the mushroom to be, you can slice it, cut it half or even keep it as a whole, I quarter mine in this recipe). 

3) Heat up the work, add in the oil, add in garlic and dried shrimp, stir until they become golden brown. Add in the pork sausage(duck liver), stir for 3 minutes, add in the chicken and stir until cooked. Add more sweet soya sauce, oyster sauce/salty soya sauce until you get the right taste. Add in the fried onions and give it a quick stir.

Keep in mind that you need them sweeter and saltier, as they need to be mix and cook with rice in the rice cooker.

4) Once the chicken is cooked, turn off the fire and leave it while you prepare the rice.

5) Wash the rice and measure the water as how you will cook your rice normally and add a little bit more water than usual, because we will need to add in the cooked ingredients in it. 

Make sure you use the mushroom water to cook the rice (However, if you accidentally throw away the mushroom water, then you can just use plain water)

6) Once you measured the water for the rice, scoop half of the cooked ingredients and stir it with the rice, then scoop the rest of the cooked ingredients and just add it on top.

7) Put the rice mixture into rice cooker and you can watch TV while the rice cooker do the cooking.

8) Once is ready, serve it on a plate or bowl and I like to eat mine with chilli sauce.