Cooking: Japanese curry with beef and beer

In my neihgboorhood is a nice and very big Asian supermarket. I love to spend hours in the shop looking to all the strange and not so strange, but still weird products. The other day I came across the Japanese curry section in the shop. I know the variant from India, but never tried the one from Japan. I hadn´t any idea of the taste and how to make a proper meal of it. The problem was solved when I came across this video on Youtube from Ochikeron. I give the recepie a shot today and tried it!

I used a bit different ingredients than the orginal recepie. I couldn´t find the specific mushrooms so I used the normal brown ones. I also couldn´t find the good beer. Instead of the Japanese beer I used Dutch beer (Heineken).

All the ingredients I needed: mushrooms, beef, edame beans, onions, beer and the Japanese curry, in my case Golden Curry.

First I started to chop all the mushrooms and onions. Afther that I decied to do the recepie a bit different: I cooked the edame beans first and pop them out of their shield.After that I follow the first step of the orginal recepie: baking the onions! When the onions were getting brown I added the mushrooms and the beef. I baked those till they were also brown and added some water and the beer. I cooked those ingredients for about 7 minutes.

Before adding the block of curry I removed the foam. I waited till the curry was melted and added also the allready prepared edame beans. I cooked the whole mix for another 5 minutes. In the mean time I prepared the rice, added all the pieces together and tada I had my meal!

I loved the taste of the curry and I liked how it turned out. The only was that in mine opinion this is more a winter meal, instead of a light summer meal. This is a firm meal, so not very sutable for the hot summer.

Cooking: popin' cookin' candy sushi DIY kit

Yesterday I have tried a popin' cookin' DIY candy kit. Those kits are coming from Japan and are used to make your own candy or cookies with a minimal of ingredients. You only need some water and the powders from the kit. I allready new of the kits before I ever saw one with my own eyes. I follow PaperPastels on youtube and she posts sometime movies about the kits. I liked the idea and wanted to try one myself, but they're very hard to find here in the Netherlands. This week I was lucky enough to find some of the kits in one of my favorite Japanese shops in Amsterdam: Roppongi! I actually went only to the shop for a birthday gift for one of my friends, but came home with way more stuff ^.^

The Roppongi haul: three boxes of Pocky, little containers for my bento box and off course the Poppin' Cookin' kit.  

They sell diffrent kind of kits. I chose the one to make candy sushi.I think the design of the box is typical Japanese with all the colors and screaming text and cute figures. The bag inside the box had the same typical Japanese design:

And the bag contained: the diffrent powders, a little plastic spoon, a little plastic bottle, a plastic mold and some liquorice (the 'seeweed').

I'm always very happy that Japanese stuff contains always a lot of pictures. I can not read nor understand Japanese, so the pictures on the back of the box were very handy! I started making all the pieces for the candy step by step and this was the result in the end:

 

 Now it was the time to put all the piece together for some sushi! According to the pictures on the box I needed to make four diffrent kind of sushi, but I didn't notice the fourth one on the package, so I ended up making three sushi's. It was quite easy to make the sushi, althought I had a little fight with the 'seeweed'. It's like making real Sushi. I always have a fight with seeweed, so it was common for me.
And here is the result in the end: a maki, a egg nigiri and a tuna nigiri.

 And the taste? Well it's very sweet and stickey, but I kind of like it. It taste a bit like winegums. I think about buying the other kids too. It was fun to make and eat, so I will give it a try again!