Some winter cooking

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Even though it's been getting warmer these days, I'm still inspired to cook hot stews and soups.  x3

Here's a few of the dishes I've made over the past couple of weeks.

 Beef Curry

This may sound silly but my inspirations for making any kind of stew comes from watching Brock cook in the show Pokemon.  I still remember watching it as a child and my earliest memories of anime characters cooking was seeing Brock cook for his friends.  Because of this, I always think about his stews when I make my own.  xP

I even cut up the potatoes into more spherical shapes to achieve the anime aesthetics.

 

And does anyone else notice that food always looks tastier in Anime?  Their food always looks so delicious!!!

Examples:



Now back to my own dishes...

Nikujaga

I really wanted to put our portable hot pot to use so I looked up some recipes similar to oden and came across nikujaga.  It's beef and potatoes mixed in a shoyu/mirin broth.  This is one of those dishes where you can add whatever you want to make your own unique flavor.  I added some onions and carrots so mine looks a lot more like stew and it tasted great!

Onigiri

Yet another Japanese food that I recall Brock making.  I still find it absolutely hilarious that the people who wrote the translations for the English dub had the voice actors call the onigiri (aka riceball) a, and I quote, "Jelly-Filled Doughnut!"  ( o __ O ) ...
I'm so glad that in recent dubs of anime, they're starting to properly name Japanese foods/names although they still call mochi "Jelly-Buns" in Fruits Basket.  WTF is up with the "Jelly" names for foods with filling?  lmao 

Custard Pie

This is a recipe that I had to slowly perfect over time.  The trick to making the perfect custard pie is to bake the pie longer on a lower heat, (around 300 degrees F) and on the lower rack in the oven.  I also use evaporated milk opposed to regular milk.  I tried baking this custard in pyrex bowls (because I always have extra custard) but when I do, the bottom cooks too fast.

The 'pie' works so well because the pie crust protects the custard from cooking too quickly on the bottom.  When baking custard, you have to make sure that the custard is not boiling.  The boiling of the custard will leave your custard with bubbles in it and ruin the ultra smooth texture that it should have.  Custard pie is actually a really easy recipe, I even used a ready to bake pie crust as I'm too lazy to make my own.

That's about all the recipes I made recently.  I've been so bored lately, probably because I haven't been picking up many shifts at work...  Well, this is all for my dog's recovery from her surgery.  The poor girl is older so she has to have a bump removed from her ear.  I hope it isn't too serious.

I'm slightly annoyed right now because I have this invoice hovering over my head.  Apparently the shippers or whoever is responsible feels like they can give me an invoice with no info on how to actually pay the bill...  I'll save this for another blog post since it's a whole different story. 

And a metaphor of my inner turmoil

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