Oyako Donburi (Stone Age Chicken)

This little beauty is the ultimate in one-dish cooking, which was lucky, because most of our kitchen utensils and dishes were dirty and piled high on the sink.

This is what it looks like when you use the correct ingredients (image courtesy Jason Thomas)

 

It was just one of those days. Collect one kid from school, try and spend some ‘quality time’, then get to daycare to collect the other two, then start the mother juggling act:

-          Hungry screaming baby who wants food, no I want to be picked up, no I want food, dirty nappy, where’s my food, she stepped on meeeeeee

-          Hungry six year old who swears she’s ‘staaaaarving’

-          Homework requirements, ‘how do you spell rhinoceros’

-          Accompanying three year old to toilet, ‘why are wees yellow?’

-          Breaking up fights

-          Feed the baby

-          Bath the baby

-          Convincing the other kids to keep their clothes on

-          And try and cook dinner for four people all with different preferences and requirements.

And I managed this without a glass of wine. No seriously.

Chicken donburi is the classic chicken and egg dish. In a saucepan you bring dashi stock, soy sauce, sugar and mirin to a boil. Then you add sliced onion and boil a bit. Then you add chopped chicken thigh and simmer. When the chicken is done and the stock has reduced, you throw in some beaten eggs, which cook in the heat, setting everything like a big chicken-and-egg existential omelette, which you serve with steamed rice.

Sounds gross? It’s really really not.

Ok, maybe a little gross

Except in my kitchen things never seem to go smoothly, especially at 5pm when I have three feral kids all dying of something or other.

The recipe requires mirin. Mirin is a rice wine, a bit like sake but with less booze.  Personally I don’t know why you’d bother, which is probably why when I looked in the cupboard we didn’t have mirin. We had sushi rice seasoning and rice wine vinegar. Crap.

AND they were both out of date. Double crap.

2010? Man, that was three years ago!

 

But I had passed the point of no return with this dinner. My limited remaining brain capacity could not comprehend another dish made with chicken thigh and beaten eggs, so I was forging ahead, regardless of having the wrong ingredients that would probably give us all food poisoning.

I didn’t know which of the alternative ingredients to use, so I used a bit of both. I also threw in some Swiss Brown mushrooms because I had found another donburi recipe which called for them, and I thought it would be a great way to up the veggie quota of dinner, especially since there was no chance in hell I was making any sides tonight.

Sorry, wrong eggs

 

When my husband finally stepped through the door, he was greeted by two naked little girls playing Barbie dolls and one rather grumpy wife. We threw the kids in the bath, begging them to play quietly and not wake the baby up while I finished making dinner.

It smelled great.

It's one of those dishes that taste better than it looks

We sat down to eat.

And we both choked on the first mouthful. It wasn’t the out of date seasonings – it was the rice. I had cooked basmati and it was so very very wrong for this Japanese dish.

‘Don’t we have sushi rice,’ he asked bravely. I ignored him.

‘I appreciate you cooking dinner every night,’ he continued. ‘But you don’t have to. We can have sandwiches,’ he said.

I ignored him.

I wish I’d had that glass of wine.

 

My thoughts

What thoughts? I told you my brain capacity is severely limited.

Japanese Eggplant (Say Hello To My Little Friend)

I probably wouldn’t have started the M3V Project with this particular dish, but it was that horrible week between Christmas and New Year when it is practically impossible to live (or cook) normally. My husband suggested Japanese Eggplant and when I agreed, it was because I secretly thought he was going to cook it.

I had completely forgotten – before I even started – the main reason for this blog (ie that I am meant to cook my way through an entire cookbook).

Here is what the picture in the book looks like:

Original images were taken by Jason Thomas

Here is what mine ended up looking like.

It looks EXACTLY like the one in the book

It was actually quite a process to get it looking this bad.

According to the blurb ‘the flavours in this dish complement each other perfectly, with the soft and mild eggplant taking on the taste of the other ingredients’. This ended up being absolutely true. It was just a pity I didn’t actually use the ingredients suggested.

Something here doesn't belong in a Japanese dish

The recipe used a number of typical Japanese ingredients including sake, soy sauce and fresh ginger and garlic.I had every intention of using sake. I even went to the bottle shop to buy a bottle, but when they told me the only one they had was $30, I baulked at the thought of spending that much on two tablespoons of rice juice.
I would have quite happily drunk the rest – I don’t mind a drop of sake, even if it does taste like vegemite. But considering my usual tipple costs about $10 a bottle, spending three times that much to flavour some eggplants (not my favourite veg) seemed extravagant.

I thought I remembered reading something once that suggested you could use sherry in place of sake. I may have made that up. Anyway, I tipped in what was left of my McWilliams Sweet Sherry in place of the sake, and you know what? The recipe was right! The eggplant DID take on the taste of the other ingredients, unfortunately it was mainly the sherry.

While the original recipe suggests stuffing the chicken mince filling into the baby eggplants, dusting them with cornflour and then deep frying them, it ALSO suggested a ‘healthier’ option would be to slice a large eggplant thinly, and then sandwich the filling between two pieces before cooking in a sandwich press.

Eggplants looks pretty silly, I think

We went with option number two. Boo Boom (fail!). As soon as I dropped the sandwich press down, the filling oozed out the sides and made in it into a little eggplant circle with a chicken burger surrounding it like a halo of sherry-spiked goodness. It tasted strange, and it looked even stranger.

I'm pretty sure this isn't what the authors had in mind

I then tried cooking it on the sandwich press without actually closing the lid, but this just resulted in raw chicken and a few complaints from the gallery (‘Mummy, what are you cooking? It smells like pancakes’).

Finally, my husband took pity and suggested I cook the little eggplanty sandwiches in a frypan with a lid on. Finally success.  Sort of. They still looked terrible and still tasted of old-lady sherry.

Was I just flogging a dead horse by now?

There was also a bit of a drama when I wandered off to refill my glass of champagne: ‘Mummy! Something’s on fire!’

You're right dear, it's your mother's love for these new stemless glasses

Eventually, we had half a dozen finished Japanese Eggplants ready to serve.  The dashi based dressing really made the dish.

I blame my husband

My Thoughts

I strongly suggest NOT using sherry instead of the sake. I strongly suggest leaving sherry to fruit cake and old ladies.

I would actually like to try this dish if it were made according to the recipe.  It’s probably something you shouldn’t attempt at home, but leave it to the (Japanese) professionals.

Not a very auspicious start.


Please contact me if you have any questions or would like to find more out about the recipe.