CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

I felt that we needed a thread about cooking Japanese recipes. I can't be the only one whose love of anime has prompted me to try cooking Japanese food, am I? So if you've had success with any Japanese recipes --or not-- here's a good place to share them.

For starters, I made Japanese red bean pancakes for dessert last night, using a recipe I found here: http://justonecookbook.com/recipes/dorayaki-japanese-red-bean-pancake/. They were good! However, the red bean paste filling takes about a million years to make. (Or, more realistically, about 3 hours from start to finish.) Once you have red bean paste on hand, the dorayaki are easy to make. The pancake part is pretty much identical to making American-style pancakes, and it doesn't take long to form them into sandwiches. The pancakes are very filling, though: probably the combination of protein and sugar.

Funny you should mention, I'm actually making curry and rice with katsu tonight. I made it once before and it was awesome. I tried and failed at onigiri once. I'm not too crazy about rice balls anyway.

Okay, I have to preface this post by saying that the list of dishes below might make it look like I cook a lot. I don’t. But I have tried making several Japanese dishes because I lived in Japan for several years and it was way easier to get the ingredients for Japanese recipes at the Japanese grocery store than to try to get ingredients for Western recipes. Now that I’m back in the States I haven’t done much Japanese cooking other than curry rice.

Here’s some of the stuff I have made:

Curry rice: One of the quintessential Japanese home-cooked meals. I like putting beef and cheese in it, but recently I’ve been going back to making more vegetable curry (I use sweet potato, carrot, and onion).
Thin-rolled sushi: The fillings were cucumber, canned tuna, and egg, separately.
Rice with bamboo shoots: Rice cooked in a rice cooker not just with bamboo shoots but with some seasonings and other things, and sometimes with meat, depending on the recipe.
Niku-jaga (braised meat and potatoes): This is easy to make, at least if you have liquid dashi on hand, and it’s incredibly delicious. And filling. I especially like putting in shirataki (a kind of clear noodle).
Simmered kabocha (Japanese pumpkin): Kabocha . . . I love kabocha.
Cold Chinese noodles: One of my favorite dishes to eat during hot weather (I lived in the southernmost part of Japan for five years, so that makes it one of my favorite dishes to eat period). It can be either really quick and simple to make or somewhat time-consuming depending on the ingredients you’re able to buy. If you can get pre-cooked noodles that are ready to eat and toppings that are either already shredded or very easy to cut it makes it a lot simpler to make (e.g. in Japan they sell pre-shredded omelet in packages, though I would always cook the omelet myself). A vegetable shredder helps a bit, but the biggest time-saver is buying pre-cooked noodles that are ready to go straight out of the package.
Tuna rice: Rice cooked with tuna and some seasonings in a rice cooker. Easy to make but not terribly exciting.
Miso-braised mackerel: Also easy to make. I substituted salmon for mackerel sometimes, but the sweet miso sauce makes a perfect complement to the sharp flavor of mackerel. Very good with either salmon or mackerel; just watch out for the bones.
Simmered beef with burdock: What it sounds like. Easy and delicious.
Braised five vegetables: This had some exotic ingredients, like lotus root and konnyaku (devil’s tongue jelly). Good but time-consuming (took me over an hour to make), and it would be difficult to get all the ingredients in the States.
Chicken mizutaki: A chicken-and-rice broth, often made for people who are ill (Japanese equivalent of chicken soup). I tried putting some small pieces of bacon in it once, in addition to the chicken, and it gave it a whole lot more flavor.
Gyuudon (beef and onion over rice): One of my favorite meals, but the gyuudon I made myself was only ever okay and not nearly as good as what you can buy for about $3 in a Japanese fast-food restaurant.
Oyakodon (chicken and egg over rice): This is another recipe that goes on the “easy and delicious” list. It's also another quintessential home-cooked meal.
Yakisoba (stir-fried noodles with pork and vegetables): Also easy if you are able to buy a bottle of yakisoba sauce instead of making it yourself (which I don’t think I’ve tried).
Rolled sweet omelet: What it sounds like.
Kinpira gobou: Carrot and burdock root sautéed in sesame oil with sesame seeds. Really delicious if you like those ingredients. Pretty troublesome to cut the vegetables into thin strips unless you have a shredder; that’s the most time-consuming part.
Gyoza (a kind of Chinese dumplings to which “potstickers” do not do any kind of justice whatsoever): A friend and I hand-made these together, and it took a LONG time. It’s mainly wrapping them one by one that takes forever; I would probably never do this by myself because it is just so time-consuming. But fresh hand-made gyoza are incredibly good.
Chinese-style pork and komatsuna stir-fry: Komatsuna is a type of leafy green vegetable. This dish is really good and really easy to make but there is no komatsuna in the States. T.T
Stir-fried pork and chingensai: Chingensai is a Chinese vegetable which also can’t be found in the States, at least not where I am. T_T
Tomato and ground beef: Seasoned ground beef on top of sliced tomatoes, with a garnish on top. Obviously not a traditional Japanese recipe, but I got it from a Japanese recipe book. It's pretty good, especially in the summer because only the meat is hot.
Cream stew: Originally a Western dish, but it’s been adopted by the Japanese and is a popular winter dish. If you have a Japanese grocery store in your area you can probably get a box of it there (you also need meat and vegetables to put in it, but nothing that isn’t readily available in the States).

And here’s one to try at home:

Taco rice: A very famous and popular dish in Okinawa; you don’t need a recipe or any exotic ingredients to make this. Spread a flat layer of steamed rice on a plate (about 1”), then top it with taco meat (seasoned however you season taco meat, or I usually use soy sauce and seasoning salt to taste), shredded cheese, lettuce, tomato, and salsa.

I haven’t given a complete list; I’ve left out some stuff that I thought was just okay, either due to the dish itself being so-so or my ability to cook it being mediocre, and also some stuff that I tried to make without success. For example, one of my favorite Japanese meals is kitsune udon, but I’ve not been very successful with making any kind of Japanese soup from scratch, so it’s a favorite of mine that I cannot actually make myself. -.- But anyways, most of the dishes I’ve listed above are very good.

I love how Japanese food looks!! (and tastes when I can get an actual Japanese meal) My sister had a Japanese student for a room mate one year and she made us some really good curry.
I really want to try to make Omelet Rice, Sushi, and Onigiri(me and my sister have already made plans for the onigiri :])