Strangely enough, the smoke alarm never went off.

My last dish from Persona 4: Golden was daigaku-imo.  It was a moderate success, and given some practice I may actually be able to make it taste as good as it sounds.  So I went searching for another dish to make, taking screenshots of all the names so I would remember them all.

I admit I just started googling the names of the dishes because I had no idea what many of them were.  But it was yakiniku that stood up and screamed “THIS IS IT!!  MAKE THIS ONE!!!”  The pictures I saw and the blogs and recipes talking about it made my eyes light up.  Indoor grilling, at the table.  It’s absolute genius.  How is it that we don’t do this already?  The slicing of the ingredients looks like work, but you may be able to do that on a weekend and make this dinner on a Monday or Tuesday.  And then you’ve got dinner on a day you would normally have leftovers.  WIN!

One problem.  We didn’t have an indoor grill.  So, when Karen asked me why I was shopping for an indoor grill to put under the Christmas tree (“Aren’t we supposed to be shopping for the kids?”) I got to say “It’s for the blog!”  And we had company coming for New Year’s Eve so I had an excuse to make it an event.

First I had to actually make the sauce, because it seems there is a traditional yakiniku  barbecue  sauce.  I used the one in this blog post:

Yakiniku sauce recipe from someone who knows what they’re doing.

I had no concept of what it should taste like or how thick it should be, so I followed the directions exactly and pulled it off the heat when I thought it was thick enough.

It wasn’t thick like “regular” barbecue sauce, but I figured that was a good thing.  It tasted amazing, however.

The next step, it seems, is to slice everything up and wait for your wife to come home from work.  Coming up with ingredients was interesting.  Beef, chicken, mushrooms, bell peppers, any vegetables that hold up to grilling.  Here in central PA we didn’t end up with a lot of things that screamed “Japanese!” but that was okay.  I hope.  Here’s our dinner waiting to be cooked:

Yes, there is bacon.  Is there any meal that is not made better with bacon?

To start things off we made some miso soup, and while this was cooking Karen fried up some of the kiraage I mentioned in the potato post.  Really, it’s awesome, and when you have a meal like this the five year old is going to demand chicken nuggets.  And the marinade uses the same grated garlic and ginger as the yakiniku sauce, so that was already done anyway.  Then everyone sat down and we started to cook the food.

Now, usually in our house dinner goes something like this: The kids mess around, wasting time, maybe playing video games or something, while mom and/or dad spends an hour or two in the kitchen crafting some sort of wonderful meal, hopefully to be enjoyed by all.  Then we all pile into the living room where we spend 15 minutes telling the kids “Stop talking and eat or your food will get cold. No you can’t skip to dessert.”

This didn’t happen.  We sat at the table for over two hours, and we were all talking and having a great time and, since grilling is fun, nobody complained about what was for dinner.  And afterwards, when it was discovered that the kids didn’t eat any vegetables, I threw up my hands and said “Next time.”  Because there will be a next time.  There already has been, in fact.  We had our first yakiniku meal on New Years Eve and did it again two days later.  Hopefully the kids will keep into it, because it was a lot of fun and it could very easily become a weekly or bi-weekly thing.  It was so cool I thought “I should get one of these for my sister next year.”

The only problem was that for seven people the grill was a little small.  That’s why we started making kebabs, so we could fit more food on the grill at a time.  We thought about getting a second one, and that would be very cool, except I’m pretty sure it would exceed the current capacity of a dining room outlet.

So it was another victory for Persona.  Great job guys!