Found Not Lost

Don’t go pulling your diet pills, you can just look at the pictures. Here are some of the things we’ve been cooking up in our kitchen lately:

Ratatouille this is supposed to be THE dish from the movie, Ratatouille. It’s not your regular chopped up vegetables thrown together in the pot, this is definitely more refined and the taste reflects that too.

These were my entries for Lasang Pinoy Sundays, a weekly food photo blogging event featuring Filipino foods, in the spirit of the other photo events like Wordless Wednesday, Thursday’s Challenge, and so on.

Yakitori Grilled Chicken It’s summer time, so you know it’s gotta be the time for grilling. We certainly have done our share of grilling already. This is the first of many, I’m sure.

Finally, a Danish Braid We cooked this up as part of the Daring Baker’s challenge. If you ever want to show off to your friends and pretend like you’re some kind of baker, then you’ve gotta learn how to do this braided dough.

We finally got to try Chipotle Burrito over the weekend and got some mixed reviews. Overall, everyone (me, the husband and 3 kids) thought the burrito was good, BUT…

1. There was not enough meat (husband)
2. Not enough selection (daughter #2)
3. You have to pay for chips and salsa which offsets the lower cost of the burrito (daughter #1)
4. Too spicy (daughter #3)
5. Not spicy enough (mom)

We all agreed Chipotle Burrito is better than Taco Bell. Their ingredients were fresh and the rice was good. They just put too much rice and not enough meats in their burrito. They had fresh and quite good guacamole. The salsas were also good, just not spicy enough for me, but that’s just me. It is good enough to tide you over, but not anything to rave about or itch to go back to. The consensus is, it’s good in a pinch when you just want something good to eat, but definitely not a planned night out destination. We also all agreed, this ain’t no Mexican food. If you’re looking for authentic fare, better look elsewhere.

My daughters have been into potatoes this week for some reason. We’ve cooked up baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato salad and these delicious fried potatoes which we had for breakfast. After a few tries and errors, I finally found I could fry up these babies without burning the onions. I am so used to sauteeing onions first that I did that every time and ended up with burnt onions by the time the potatoes got browned and cooked. So I tried putting them in later, after the potatoes have started browning and are almost cooked, and that did the trick! Perfect potatoes ever since!

If you are ever in Japan or at least going through a Japan airport, do yourself a favor and try these beautifully wrapped mochis. Mochi is a snack made of glutinous rice flour that has been flavored with a variety of flavors. My favorite from this box are the ones in yellow wrapping they are lemon flavored. The pink ones are strawberry flavored. The rest of the delectable morsels are rose scented, macha, orange, sesame, toasted sesame and other flavors that I couldn’t quite discern.Mochis are not too sweet, soft and slightly chewy. Just the perfect thing to have when you want something light that is also slightly exotic.

Furikake is what I call Japanese confetti. It is a Japanese condiment that consists of a mixture of finely shredded nori, the seaweed wrap used for sushi, mixed with other ingredients like sesame seed, ground fish, salt, sugar and seasonings like wasabi, egg and shiso among many. This condiment is used to flavor rice. Sprinkled over the white background of newly cooked rice, it would definitely whet your appetite. It certainly does mine. I could just eat furikake over rice and nothing else.

I recently made breakfast with furikake in our kitchen. Check it our, see if you like it.