Cooking and such

A random google search for Japanese curry recipe got me hoooked onto two blogs: norecipes.com and justhungry.com, of which the writer of the former is half Japanese while the latter is Japanese. norecipes.com boasts a wide variety of "recipe-less" recipes (lol the irony), ranging from American to Asian to the Mediterranean dishes. While Marc (the writer) does provide steps to follow for some of his dishes, he usually encourages people to vary the ingredients according to their preferances, instead of trying to obtain the "perfect" taste. This is probably suitable for people who already have a feel for cooking and are thus able to tweak the ingredients while still keeping the food edible. For someone like me who has totally no experience in cooking, aside from those using instant mixes- I once tried cooking something from scratch and it ended up tasting so awful a starving man will turn his nose up at it- the not-so-specific instructions are not stopping me from trying out his recipes, especially when the pictures look so good! The first recipe I'm going to try is the Daigaku Imo, literally translated as "university potato", which is simply fried sweet potatoes covered with a sugar coating. One thing that is holding me back from cooking is the process of finding all the ingredients required, but this Daigaku Imo only requires the simplest of ingredients which can probably be found in most kitchens.

While norecipes.com is mostly about Marc's experiments with different cuisines around the world, justhungry.com talks more about the Japanese culture and food. Since the food are all Japanese, there might be a little difficulty in finding the ingredients, not to mention that they are usually quite expensive as well! Not really worth the money if I were just to make it once and keep the ingredients until they turn bad.. So until I'm ready to start cooking more often, or to cook for more people, these two sites will remain a good read for now!

Oh and as I was browsing through the recipes, I found one for Sukiyaki, and right at the beginning, Marc wrote :"No… I’m not going to burst out singing that Japanese pop song from the 60′s that got renamed for the US market by some culturally insensitive prick record executive. Instead you get my rendition of this ubiquitous dish that’s become synonymous with Japanese food. Not that I have anything against record execs, or even renaming songs, but really… did ya have to name it after a hotpot dish? I wonder how that guy would have felt if I took a song like “Unchained Melody” and renamed it “Beef Stew” in Japan because it’s easier to say and more catchy." This really cracked me up! Imagine "Beef Stew"! HAHAHA!