“Everybody, you have to stop! Stop eating! It’s not beef. It’s made of people!”

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Tonight’s meal marks the second time Ev-Ar that meat has been cooked in this house (not counting nuking kitty-food and reheating Trader Joe’s shrimp gyoza, of course). The last time I actually cooked meat here from scratch was tempura, which technically started with pre-cooked shrimp. This time, it was gyoza. I swapped ground turkey for the pork, since I figured my tastebuds and tummy would be happier. Plus, I wanted to do it “the right way” first before mutating it to entirely tasty veggies. The meal also consisted of sushi (mmmmmm….tasty) and made-from-scratch miso soup. Several lessons were learned, including:

  • Do not neglect the fact that the gyoza recipe serves ten. It is really easy to gloss over this fact because the individual ingredient proportions are relatively small and the serving information is at the end of the page, past the picture.
  • Do not accidentally knock a quarter pound of ground turkey into the garbage disposal. Sure, it was the extra stuff not utilized by the recipe, but it could have somehow been put to good use.
  • Pay more attention to the fry/boil/fry cycle of the gyoza. The first batch was a bit…err…crispy. The second turned out okay, but pretty soft. The third and forth are in the freezer. The guys at Shin Seng Gumi make it look entirely too easy.
  • Next time, the miso will be made from instant dashi. Making it entirely from scratch is tedious, time consuming, and wasteful of the dashi that does not get used.
  • When making it yourself, you can be a rebel and put in a whole bunch of tofu cubes
  • For those who are vegetarians, miso is, technically, not vegetarian. The broth touches bonito shavings (basically, tuna) for a bit to soak up their flavor.
Posted in: Dear Diary Food

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