Mountain Mama Teaching: Cooking through Japan

I didn't get as many photos of our Japanese cooking adventures, but we certainly did enjoy them, and I'll share a few recipes that we used.

We actually had some friends over for dinner and did a cooperative effort for our Japanese food. She made hibachi chicken and sauce (which was DELICIOUS but turns out to be an American invention). We made some fried rice to go with it.

One of my favorite things about Japanese restaurants is getting those multiple small dishes of the salads/side dishes, so we decided to make a few of those. We made daikon salad (not sure our radishes are exactly daikon, but they are similar and work well) and sunomono (cucumber salad). The recipes on that site Japanese Cooking 101 were easy to follow, and they had a ton of recipes. My boys really loves eggs, and my oldest is a bit picky with things, so I thought the little wrapped omelette (apparently, called tamagoyaki) would be a good one to make. She even warned in this recipe that it takes a bit of technique to get it right, and I should have heeded the warning. I don't recommend trying this one for a beginning adventure. Ours ending up tasting good, but it certainly was not pretty!

We also used my friend Lizzy's recipe to make miso soup. She does a great job of figuring out what works well for cooking in our part of the world and adapting recipes for ingredients we have available.

Always my silly boy

We happen to have a few good Japanese restaurants. It was a bit pricier than what we would usually do for a lunch, but it was yummy, and we all enjoyed it very much!