Recipe: Kabocha Squash Soup

Yesterday I was watching repeat of TV show “Seinfeld” with my husband. And they are showing the episode of “Soup Nazi”. One of the best episode of Seinfeld!(You can see the short clip of it here)

Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” Clip

That was so funny and made me wanna eat a bowl of nice soup
And I found a Squash in our fridge.
The squash I used for this recipe is called “Kabocha”.
You can see the image of Kabocha squash here.
(http://www.recipetips.com/glossary-term/t--35847/kabocha-squash.asp)
In Japan, we eat this Kabocha squash for fall/winter season. It's sweet kind of squash.
Here’s how I made the Kabocha squash soup. You can make this soup in 20-30min.

Ingredients:
-kabocha squash 1/4
-milk 1 cup
-onion 1/4
-celery 1 stick
-butter 1 table spoon
-chicken flavor bouillon 1/2 teaspoon
-salt, pepper, sugar a little
-bay leaf 1

1.Cut the squash and scoop seeds out by spoon.

2.Wrap the 1/4 of squash by plastic food wrap and microwave it between 5-8 min. Duration will be depends on your microwave and how thick the squash is.
Poke a tooth pick to check how soft it gets.
If the tooth pick goes through the squash easily, it’s cooked perfectly!

3.While you are microwaving the squash, start to chop 1/4 of onion and 1 stick of celery.

4. Put 1 table spoon of butter in the pod and start the heat.

Once butter starts to be melt, you can put chopped onion & celery.

5.When the squash is cooked, scoop the orange part from it’s skin.
You can put it’s skin into the soup if you like, but the color of the soup would be yellowish green. Probably it’s healthier to put the skin into the soup nutrition wise…but soup looks better without the skin to my eyes...

6.Put the squash into the pod, then add 1 cup of milk.

7.Add 1/2 of chicken flavor bouillon, bay leaf, and a little bit of salt, pepper, and sugar.
Check the taste and if you need more spice, add some more.

8. Pick the bay leaf out from the pod and put whole soup into the food processor, or juicer to puree. You can eat without pureeing it. I just prefer to have a smoother texture soup. 

THAT’S IT!!!!!

Now ready to eat it!

Today I also made some dinner rolls.

BON APPETIT!!!!

(As the garnish, I add some cream and parsley on top of the soup)

Even though I didn’t buy a soup from the Soup Nazi, my tongue and stomach was so satisfied with this soup

Memory of HAWAII: Garlic Shrimp

When we traveled to HAWAII last December, we ate many many wonderful food over there.
The lucky thing was one of my husband friend lives in there and he recommended us great local restaurants.
He especially recommended Shrimp Wagon in KAHUKU.


According to him, this Shrimp wagon is LOCO’s (Loco = local people in Hawaiian) favorite food truck. Sometimes he drrives to KAFUKU just because only for Garlic Shrimp dish.

Rice and macaroni salad (up left), and garlic shrimps on the cabbage salad (up right).

And it was AWESOME!!!!!!! It was so good that I can eat it everyday!!!!! It was really worth to drive far from WAIKIKI beach just for this dish!!!!

Two months has passed since we came back from the trip, suddenly we missed HAWAII and the taste of garlic shrimp!!!!

Sometimes I like to challenge myself to cook what I ate in the restaurant. I try my best to recall the taste of the dish and figure out its ingredients and seasoning to cook it in my kitchen.
And this is my version of Garlic Shrimp dish.

Rice is same as original. Instead of macaroni salad, I made potato salad. And garlic shrimp on the cabbage salad like original.

Here is what I did.
I prepared shrimp with garlic, salt and white pepper with some potato starch. Potato starch helps to keep shrimps tender even after its cooked.
And I sauteed them with butter. Also I added some garlic powder in the end.




The result was really good! I could put some more garlic and butter… But hey, it was a first attempt, so I am happy with the result. It was really close enough what we had in HAWAII.
And less butter is less fat and a little healthier anyways.

Recipe: Banana Roll Cake

Sometimes I want to eat cake very bad.
And if I have some bananas in our house, this is my favorite cake to make and eat.

“Banana Roll cake”

And good thing is this cake is not hard to make.

All you need to have is

-Egg: 4

-Sugar: 6 table spoon

-All purpose flour: 4 table spoon

-Salt: a pinch

-Vanilla extract: a little

-Banana: 2

-Whipping cream: 7oz

-Sugar for whipping cream: 2 table spoon

1. Separate yolk and egg white. Put a pinch of salt and sugar (6 table spoon) into the egg white and whip it until they form stiff peaks.

2. Put yolk into the egg white and mix them together.

3. Put flour through sifter into the mixed egg and mix them with a spatula nice and easy. And add vanilla extract.

4. Spread them onto the prepared baking sheet (I use the size of 13x18 to bake it thin and flat) and bake it 9-10min. in the oven which is heated up around 360F.

5. Meanwhile, prepare the whipped cream.

6. When the sponge cake gets cold, it is time to spread the whipped cream on top of it and put bananas.Roll it!!!

Instead of banana, you can put the other kind of fruits like pears, peaches or strawberries.

Even you can add cocoa powder into the sponge cake to have some chocolate flavor.

Please enjoy to make it and eat it

Chicken Teriyaki Buns

Since I found that making buns are not difficult and not time consuming that much, I am trying different buns whenever I have a spare time.

And today’s bun is Chicken Teriyaki Buns.

On the top of bun, I put chiken Teriyaki and cheese.

Once I made bread dough with 300g of bread flour, I can make 12 buns of a pam size.
And Teriyaki sauce was pre-made. Not hand-made of mine. Well, I cheted…
If you are a costco member, There is good pre-made teriyaki sauce called “Yoshida Sauce”. As you can see by name, Mr. Yoshida who is originally from Japan made this sauce. So it’s taste is authentic Japanese sweet&salty teriyaki taste. My Japanese friend gave me two thumbs up for this receipe so I can highly recomend to you

Potato Stuffed Buns

Everytime when I go back to Japan, I always go crazy about food.
Sushi, ra-men noodle, and Japanese bakery's bread, buns&pastries.
Of course I can find good bakeries here in L.A, too... However if I really miss the taste of Japanese bakery, I need to recreate them by myself.
So here is what I made.

Potato Stuffed Buns

Bread part is similar to French bread.
Inside is potatoes and bacon dressed with mayo, salt & pepper.
Japanese style mayo is little sour than American mayo.
Adding a bit of rice vinegar to American mayo is the solution to have similar tastes.

Easiest way to prepare potatoes, cut them small pieces and microwave it 5~7 min.
Less dirty dishes, less effort, but taste good :-D
That's my favorite way to cook ;-)

Keep yourself warm

I was sick quite long time... maybe around 1 month and 2 weeks or so.... I got it from my work...
Since I am working with 25 kids age 3-6, around this season of the year, one of the kids catch a cold and that cold goes to the other kids... spread to everybody eaisly...
And because they are so young, thery don't know how to caugh or sneeze properly. They caugh or sneeze straight at me.
Even though I am very careful not to catch a cold, it is matter of time... and once I became sick, it takes me a while to recover from it because the other kid gives me new one...

However thanks to that,  I found the good drink when I am sick.

Ginger + Honey + Lemon drink

Receipe

1. Put some ginger into a cup of cold water and microwave 2-3 min.

2. Add some lemon or lemon juice and honey.

That's it.

Well.... I guess I can't call it even as a receipe....

The point is heating up the ginger is very important according to my mom.

Hot ginger works better for keeping you warm comparing to cold ginger.

I normally put ginger1: lemon juice1: honey1 relatively. Maybe around 2 tea spoons amount.

But each one's taste is different.

You can also use hot tea instead of hot water.

After I start to drink this every morning from two weeks ago, I recovered from a cold dramatically.

Now I feel I recovered 100% :-)

Recipe: Honey bread

This is one of my favorite recipe.
You can have sweat and soft bread with this.

Honey Bread
-bread flour 7oz (200g)
-all purpose flour  1.7oz (50g)
-honey 1.4oz (40g)
-sugar 0.7oz (20g)
-salt 1teaspoon (2-3g)
-butter 0.7oz (20g)
-yeast 1teaspoon (5-6g)
-milk 6oz (170cc)

If you have a bread machine, set it "light" or "sweet bread". Other than that, it gets burned.
With my bread machine, it takes 2 hours and 40min to have a bread like this.

 It is really soft.

I had it for lunch today with some salad.

 The dressing for salad was mixture of mayo, soysauce, rice vinegar, and home grown parsley.

It was really good together!

Recipe: Prosciutto and Arugola Sandwich

"Prosciutto and Arugola Sandwich" is the easiest and tastiest sandwich.

Here is the recipe.

What you need is,

French Bread

Mayo

Prosciutto

Arugola

That's it.

I always make french bread with my breadmaker.

And here is the recipe.

French Bread

Bread flour 7 oz = 200g

All Purpose flour 2.8 oz = 80g

Salt 0.1 oz (a little less than 1 teaspoon) = 3g

Butter 0.18 oz = 5g

Dry yeast 0.21 oz = 6g

Water 7oz = 200cc

Select the "French bread" course.

If you don't have a breadmaker and if you don't wanna spend your time and energy to make a bread by your self, then get some french bread or baguette from the bakery.

After you get french bread, all you need to do is 4 steps.

1. Put some mayo on the one side of each bread.

2. Put some proscuitto hams.

3. Put some arugola on them (I used homegrown arugola)

4. Put the other bread on top.

Because I am using old type breadmaker and I can't remove the propeller which is for mixing the flour, the bread has a vertical hole.
The new design machine allows you to take the propeller out in order to make square bread perfectly.

As you see, it is very simple. Even I don't count this as a real recipe. However it tastes really good!
Please try it when you get a chance.