Cooking Notes

My work-exchange buddy Samuel from France is a baker, and he found an oven in the kitchen that goes up to 350 degrees, so we threw a pizza party! It was my first time understanding how the dough is made (he even sent me a very detailed recipe afterwards!!), and the first time I made something really close to Italian wood-fired pizza with my own hands. It made me decide "one day I want my own pizza oven!!" It used to be a secret daydream, and now I clearly want this big toy XD

When you're free to pick the toppings yourself, I found you can't be too greedy: 3 kinds, or 4 at most, is the limit, and too many makes it feel unfocused. Take the classic Margherita: tomato, cheese and basil might sound boring, but it's actually just right.

I also made an apple sweet pizza to go up against them and win over the French stomach!

Samuel had been a bit dismissive of sweet flavors (very politely, haha), but in the end he said it was good~~ I tried two versions. One was an apple-filling version, with fresh apples sautéed in sugar and cinnamon powder first. The other was a fresh apple version, with thin slices laid flat directly on the dough (both had mozzarella, and camembert added halfway through baking, of course). Out of the oven, I drizzled them with brown sugar syrup and cinnamon or powdered sugar. The adults liked the apple-filling version, and the high schoolers liked the fresh apple version.

At the share house where I stayed for two short weeks, I really wanted to thank everyone for looking after me and let them taste a bit of Taiwanese food. I figured I'd already made egg-crepe wrappers, so dumpling wrappers should be no problem... right?

It turned out to be a success, and really tasty, but making the dumpling wrappers took an insane amount of time. I'd planned to make all the wrappers first and then fill them all at once, but I don't know if the dough was too wet or I didn't dust enough flour on the outside, everything stuck together in one lump and I had to redo it all QQ In the end, I decided the best way is to just divide the dough into little balls, and turn each one into a wrapper only when it's time to fill.

I don't know if it's because they were freshly made, but almost all of them came out beautiful when cooked, with no breaking! I'd also thought the wrappers would be too thick (they're handmade after all, so it's hard to get them super thin), but they turned out totally just right!

As a rule of thumb, a raw dumpling weighs about 30 to 35 g, with 12 to 16 g of dough.

• Crispy egg crepe (dan bing): I found a small shop near the guesthouse that serves Taiwanese breakfast, and after eating there I realized... I couldn't let my foreign friends have a real crispy dan bing, so I made it for them myself! I kneaded the dough (my dough-kneading experience is probably under three times), and it was a super successful re-creation!
• Taiwanese-style pickles: Very simple ingredients: napa cabbage, with vinegar and sugar 1:1. It goes super well with traditional Japanese pickled plums that are salty to the point of exploding, but you need to soak it longer before the plum flavor comes out (maybe four or five days?). I left a little behind when I left, and later the German guy even messaged me specially to say it was super good once the plum flavor came through!
• Apple cake: It's all thanks to pancake mix! But I deserve a round of applause for making it in a small stainless steel pot XD Because it was thick, it had to be cooked on low heat (in fact it burned, and I cut off a thin layer, but once I laid the apples on top it looked like it had always been that way XD)
• Fried foods: This time I fried on an induction stove, and practiced how the temperature is actually different for different ingredients. For example, vegetables need a relatively lower temperature, while potatoes and sweet potatoes need a higher one. Vegetables first, then meat. The Japanese guests praised my frying! (Even if it was just politeness, that's fine! So happy!)

Cured in soy sauce and mirin at 1:1 (something that showed up in a short video, and a friend sent it my way, so I gave it a go). It's delicious! I finished one right away, and it's as sinful as a salted-egg-yolk pastry!

The only thing is that it's hard to get the thickness you want. Or rather, hard to time it for mealtime... By feel you need to soak them for at least 15 to 25 hours to get them liquid or paste-like. The one in the photo is about 25 hours, fully paste-like.
Once I cured one for 8 hours, and the yolk was still very liquid, broke easily when I fished it out, and hadn't absorbed any flavor.

A long, long, long time ago, on PTT's cookclub board, I saw someone sharing that the innards of squid like this can be used in cooking. On a whim, I finally tried it!

First stir-fry the squid until half-cooked and take it out. Then put the innards, soy sauce and butter into the pan, mix them, and put the squid back in to coat the squid meat (a bit like the way you'd make salted-egg-yolk mushrooms). Finally I found some somen in the cupboard, boiled it in another pot, mixed it with the squid pieces, and served it! (Similar to how you'd make pasta.)

So fresh, so good! I love it!

I bought 500 g of sake lees to make amazake. Nobody else liked it, so I had to use up all the sake lees myself within a month. I couldn't be bothered to look up other uses, so I made it all into amazake and drank it as a drink every day, and ended up with diarrhea 😂 (maybe because it helps your gut move)

Store-bought amazake is super sweet! Making it myself, I found you can't cut the sugar too low either, or it doesn't taste good~~~

• Water 1000 ml
• Sake lees 100 g
• Sugar 60 g (I thought it was too much, 30 to 40 g should be enough)

Bring the water to a boil, turn off the heat, add the sake lees (in bite-sized pieces) and soak for 10 minutes. Turn the heat back on and stir until dissolved. After it boils, add the sugar, and once it's fully dissolved, turn off the heat. Done!

The recipe comes from Shishi no Sato. When I bought the sake lees, I asked the staff which kind is suitable for amazake, and they handed me a sheet with a recipe, which even had a sake lees cheesecake recipe on it!

My last cook before moving out, so I invited friends over for dinner. This time I wanted to cater to one friend's tastes (likes okra and bell peppers, doesn't like garlic) and make the whole meal rich and varied. I'd planned 2 or 3 appetizers to try layers of flavor and texture, but everyone helping with the prep made things too chaotic so I gave up XD

• Okra chowder: The contents are actually very ordinary: onion, bell pepper, okra, clams, shrimp and black pepper. Everyone said they'd never had that combination but it was delicious. I made it the day before and set it aside, and if I cut some fresh okra in when reheating to serve, the color would definitely look better. I don't know if it was heated too long, but it was a bit bitter. A ton of black pepper gives it a nice bit of heat. Reference recipe: https://www.dashofjazz.com/okro-soup-shrimp-spinach/
• Mackerel mousse: Black pepper, salt, mackerel, yogurt, lemon juice and minced onion (I forgot to garnish with scallions). It was actually very good on toast when I tested it, but I tried other things on the spot and it blew up...
• Marinated meats: Marinated chicken wings (mirin, soy sauce, a little fermented black beans... I forgot, but the black beans brought out a nice flavor. One friend loved this one), marinated chicken (mainly salt koji), marinated chicken (just a simple marinade of olive oil and so on), and marinated pork belly (garlic, soy sauce... I forgot).
• Salads: The base ingredients were the same. The chicken salad had a common oil-and-vinegar flavor, while the shrimp salad used a ready-made shiso plum Japanese-style dressing plus pineapple and nuts, for more crunch.
• Okra, cold-tossed: One version was the safe choice of sesame oil and salted kelp, and the other used herb vinegar and salted kelp.
• Aiyu jelly dessert soup: What we served on the spot (?) was osmanthus pineapple honey. The extra plum honey from making pickled tomatoes the day before also went super well with aiyu!
• Other: Super ordinary but highly praised hash browns, plum-pickled tomatoes, all kinds of grilled things (bell peppers, shiitake, eggplant), and pan-fried baby napa cabbage. It was very ordinary, just salted a bit after pan-frying and before serving, but the inspiration came from grilled purple cabbage I'd eaten in Italy. Cut the baby napa cabbage in half, pan-fry it keeping its shape, and the outside is beautifully browned while the inside stays moist.

Photos by my friends at the dinner!

I'd been down for a good while and hadn't cooked anything new. Then, wandering the market, I found lots of stalls selling mulberries, so I bought a bit to make jam.

• I bought nearly 400 g, and the result was a bit more than 1 jar. I think 300 g fits one jam jar.
• Lemons are so expensive now, but luckily I picked a neighbor's fragrant lemon to make do.
• Mulberries don't set, so it was still runny after cooking. I mainly eat it with yogurt or want to mix it into a summer drink, so it doesn't matter. If you don't want to add gelatin, you can probably blend part of it in a blender and enjoy both the fruit pieces and a thick texture.
• I added a bit of rum, but I couldn't tell any difference in texture with or without it.

• Nanbanzuke: Fry the fish, then soak it in a sweet and sour sauce! Later when I ate the supermarket version in Japan, mine turned out very similar!
• Iberico sausage salad: The classic olive oil + balsamic vinegar
• Pan-fried green beans and shishito peppers
• Store-bought corn dumplings turned into potstickers. Sadly I couldn't find the really tasty vegetarian dumplings.
• Chicken hearts and gizzards: A drinking snack, and the crispy garlic slices at the end are the soul of it!
• Okra with salted kelp: Add sesame oil for a salty flavor, a side dish I've always loved!
• Tsukudani smelt: There was nothing to pair it with in this meal, so it was a bit salty.
• Tazukuri (walnut and dried baby sardines): A Japanese New Year dish
• Smoked salmon salad: A refreshing lemon flavor

• The broth is based on chicken (chicken stock) and kombu. There should have been Japanese soy sauce and mirin, though I'm not sure. At the end I added a stronger, beany miso (which also makes the broth thicker and clings better to the noodles), plus fragrant white sesame.
• Besides chicken (I used thigh this time, but I'd rather use wings to add more collagen and make the broth thicker), there were also carrots, carrots and shiitake.
• My friends praised it enthusiastically!