Convenience Store Frozen Pasta, Not So Bad!

Frozen food has come a long way in Japan. In a culture where many people are too busy to cook or find it's not worth the time or effort to cook for oneself, ready-made, instant, and frozen food can be readily found. My image of frozen food growing up was that they were fast and simple, good for when pressed for time, but still tasted like it was frozen. Nowadays frozen food could trick anyone into thinking it was made from fresh ingredients.

Take this pasta for example. It's a product in the "Okaasan no Shokudo" line-up that is found at the Family Mart convenience store, the name owing homage to 'mom's cooking'. The package indicated that the end product is like fresh pasta with shrimp umami and a rich tomato cream sauce. Inside you will find a rock hard solid pack of the frozen sauce and pasta that you just pop into the microwave!

I found the sauce to be really rich in tomato flavour, more than the light orange colour leads to you think. The noodles were a bit softer than al dente, but still had a slight bite. The shrimp was plump, but the downside was that it did have a bit of a fishy flavour giving away the fact that it is not fresh. The broccoli surprisingly had a good texture and wasn't mushy at all. Overall, it was tasty, something you might expect to appear in mom's repertoire of cooking!

Making a Japanese Favourite, Tamagoyaki or Rolled Egg Sandwich

Tamago-yaki or rolled omelette is a long-time favourite for any Japanese. The love starts out when mom cooks the omelette and gives it to her children at a young age. I don't know any kid, or adult for that matter, who doesn't like tamago-yaki. Kids like it because it's soft, easy to eat, and either sweet or bursting with dashi flavour (depending on which region of Japan they are brought up in). 

Now that bread has become so popular in Japan, sandwiches have gained in popularity too. So, why not put tamago-yaki in a sandwich? Plus Japanese bread is usually on the sweeter side which pairs perfectly with egg. They have been around actually for quite a while, but now there is a new trend for shops to make the rolled egg omelette sandwich unique. Some boast a super fluffy omelette, some make a combination of cucumber and mayo, some use brand quality chicken eggs and others advertise the bread more than the egg itself.

Today I made my own version of tamago-yaki sandwich. I got the idea from watching Cooking With the Chef on the NHK tv on demand website.

Tamago-yaki sandwich on whole wheat bread

My little twist was using whole wheat bread to make it that much healthier, and I used less sugar in the egg because I'm not big on the sweet variety of tamago-yaki. I do think however that the sweeter ones go better with Japanese bread than the savory kind.

Making the rolled egg omelette

First I made the layered rolled omelette in a special frypan especially made for tamago-yaki.

Helping it keep its shape

To give the omelette the perfect shape, I rolled it in a sushi-making mat to let it cool.

Wasabi and mayonnaise spread

To my bread I spread some mayonnaise and wasabi paste; I probably could've used more mayo though. The finished omelette was sandwiched between these two pieces of bread, the edges were cut off to make it a clean appearance, and voila! my tamago-yaki sando was done!

Nothing went to waste

Don't worry, I didn't waste the cut off edges; I toasted them and ate it separately as a snack.

Here's another tamagoyaki sandwich I made on a different occasion, this time with matcha mayonnaise (I came to the conclusion that I prefer the wasabi mayo).

The hardest part of the sandwich is getting the rolled omelette right. In Japan, the professional chefs start off with mastering tamago-yaki, making several at the start of each training day. But for this sandwich, I'd say getting it perfect is not a must since it is going to be 'hidden' between the slices of bread. Try it, and put your own twist on it!

Japanese Foie Gras Terrine?

I don't indulge in foie gras very often, but I found some frozen foie gras in Amika, a small scale grocery store for food business owners (but anyone can enter, no membership needed). I thought it was a reasonable price, 1200 yen for 100g, and I hadn't had it in a while so I decided to challenge my cooking skills.

The package included two small lobes of foie gras, so the first one I sauteed as a luxurious topping for a steak. I put the second one back in the freezer and planned to pan-fry it another time. But then I saw packages of pates in a specialty grocery store and it made me think of how much I miss foie gras mousses and foie gras terrines. I casually looked up how to make a foie gras terrine on the internet and found that it didn't look that hard, it didn't require a huge list of ingredients either. The only thing I didn't have was Sauternes, port wine, or any dessert wine. I didn't exactly want to go out and buy a bottle either since I only had 50g of foie gras to work with. It dawned on me that I did have mirin on hand! It's a sweet sake (rice wine) used for cooking in Japan. So I went about removing the veins, seasoning the liver, and then poured on the mirin. I then stuffed it into a little ramekin and put it into the oven at low heat.

Homemade foie gras terrine

 Voila! The terrine turned out a little rough, I could have probably used a bit heavier weight to press it down after taking it out of the oven, but it actually tasted nice. Mirin added just the right sweetness to it. The experiment was a success!

Terrine spread on some bread

I tried it with some bread, but the Japanese bread is a bit too sweet, a regular french baguette would've been better. I wonder if Japanese sweet plum wine (umeshu) would do the same trick in a foie gras terrine...