Brinner for Dinner

When looking for games that let you cook, sometimes you get desperate.  “Wow!  Look!  I’m cooking!  Blog this!”  Never mind that it happens once in the game and has no effect on anything whatsoever.  That pretty much describes the cooking scene in Heavy Rain.  You crack two eggs in a skillet, swirl them around a few times, wait for it to cook, and put it on a plate.

I think they call it an omelet.  I remember thinking aren’t these game developers from France?  They didn’t even add any salt.  I thought to myself I can do better than that.  That looks nasty.  So I announced to everyone that we were having brinner on Tuesday, and there was much rejoicing.  Isaac made a suggestion.  “Can we have rice omelets?”  Rice omelets.  I remember that from somewhere.  PERSONA!

Yes, Persona 4 to the rescue again.  There is more cooking in this game than in any other I’ve played.  There is even an omelet cook-off, and the writers have a really good sense of how funny bad cooking is.

They give you the choice of what kind of omelet to make, and one of them is a rice omelet.  So how do you make a rice omelet?  I found a few recipes online, and it seems there’s no hard and fast rule as to what vegetables to put in the rice, so I used what I had on hand, which was frozen corn and peas.  I set some rice cooking while I chopped up the chicken and onions.  I sautéed them until the chicken was mostly cooked, and then I added in the corn and peas.

Once they were nice and warm I added the rice and one and a half tablespoons each of soy sauce and ketchup.

It was smelling very good, let me tell you.  I moved on to the omelet.  I decided to make a big omelet that would feed two people.  I mixed two eggs with a teaspoon of milk and put it into the skillet.

This is not an omelet you flip.  I’ve never made one like this before, so it was kind of odd to follow the directions when it said to put the filling in when the eggs are mostly cooked.  I did what I was told, and even put some mozzarella on top because it’s awesome.

I may have added too much filling.  When you do a google image search the edges are folded in neatly, making it look like a football.  Too bad no one has ever thought to put sauce on top shaped like laces.  But my filling was spilling out everywhere.

Oh yeah.  It also ripped a bit while I was trying to fold it.  I am actually impressed  I made it look look that neat.  It tasted great, though.  I made one big enough for me and Isaac, and I started to make one for Karen but she said she had a recipe for a spinach omelet she wanted to make.  And in the end Isaac only had two or three bites, so I suppose that tells me what he thinks.  He assures me “I liked it!  I was just full!”  Okay.  I thought it was good, anyway.

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!

Persona Potatoes

In this installment of Games That Cook I bring to you a video game from the PS2 era, reborn on the Playstation Vita.  Ah, the Vita.  This little handheld system could easily be the only game console I play, if only there were a lot more games for it.  The game I’m discussing here is Persona 4: Golden.

One of the things you can do in Persona 4 is make boxed lunches to take to school and share with a friend.  This turns out to be very useful in other parts of the game too, but that’s another post.  There are a lot of different lunches you can make, and I thought to myself that a good way to judge the quality a video game is by how good the food is in it.  So I made some.  Since the most of the food in Persona is Japanese I spent some time on google figuring out what the dishes were and picked one that sounded easy, and also awesome.

Daigaku Imo translates to “university potatoes” and they are a pretty popular snack in Japan, it seems.  Sweet potatoes are cut up, deep fried, and coated with a sugar syrup that hardens to a crunchy shell, and tossed with some black sesame seeds.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?  There are a lot of recipes to be found, and not all of them call for deep frying, which I found interesting.

This is the website with the recipe I used:

Candied Sweet Potatoes from Just One Cookbook

It even has a video.  My blog is so lame.  The video is actually why I chose this recipe.  She even demonstrates the proper technique for cutting up the potatoes, which I’m sure I did wrong.

Since this is traditionally a snack food I decided to make it part of a larger meal of small parts.  I was making some butternut squash soup anyway, and we had some chicken breast so I thought I could figure out something to do with that as well.

Here are my potatoes, freshly sliced:

Next you’re supposed to soak them in water for a bit to remove some of the starch.  I didn’t take a picture of that.  Then mix the sugar, oil, vinegar, and soy sauce in the pan while it’s cold and put the potatoes on top.

Put on the lid (wrapped in a towel) and add medium heat.   When the pan is hot, flip them every couple minutes.  Here’s the first flip:

After three flips I decided the pan wasn’t hot enough and turned it up a bit.  That’s when things started getting brown and I figured it was the right choice.  After a few more flips (I think the total time was probably 15 minutes or so) dinner was served:

It was indeed very sweet.  Sweeter than I expected, although I’m not sure what I was expecting, since the recipe is called “candied sweet potatoes.”  Maybe if the pan had been hot enough from the beginning they would have spent less time cooking, getting less sugar coating..?  Whatever, they were good.  Trust me.

The surprise of the meal, though, was the karaage on the other side (page 103 of The Manga Cookbook) which I didn’t take any pictures of at all.  That was great.  It’s fried chicken nuggets seasoned with soy sauce, ginger, and garlic, and breaded with cornstarch.  The kids filled up on that and ignored everything else.  This meal was very easy to make and it was a big hit.  Karen packed some leftovers up bento-style and took it to work the next day.  Even Yukiko liked it.

A job offer.  That’s just what I need.