Chicken yakitori

As per my habit of making meals with balanced portions of protein, carbs and vegetables, I have managed to create a meal that combines some of the most delicious foods you can think of: Yakitori chicken, macaroni cheese and pumpkin. The most complicated part was letting the chicken marinate for 24 hours before frying it up in a pan. The rest merely involved preparing a pack of easy mac and boiling pumpkin. Cause I'm fancy like that. And there's nothing more Japanese than making a traditional Japanese in an American way.

The chicken yakitori was of course, amazing. I will never want to eat non-marinated chicken breast again.

Hamburger Donburi

Yet again, I felt like burger with rice as a substitute for bread. The only thing that's missing here is the mayonnaise, but I figured that enough flavour came from everything else.

Sushi

I used 1 cup of sushi rice (also short grain rice, even arborio rice, are both fine), to which I cooked according to instructions and to which I added sushi vinegar. I didn't use a sushi mat, I just laid out the nori on a chopping board, pressed a cup of the prepared rice onto half of the sheet, laid out the filling in the middle of the rice, in a line, then rolled up the whole thing, making sure to wet the two pieces of nori that were coming together. It was like making a Vietnamese cold roll, or tortilla wrap, only you don't have to fold in the sides as well. After the roll was wrapped up, I sliced it. For the filling, I used leftover fish fingers. Which aren't the best, but are an extremely cheap protein source. The sauce is mayonnaise mixed with wasabi powder.

We had already made sushi with proper ingredients like carrot, cucumber and smoked salmon (and egg!) but they had already run out rather quickly, and I needed to use up my fish fingers.

Abundance bowl with carrot and sultana salad

I recently learned about "abundance bowls." They are modelled on donburi, which are various types of meals that are based on a bowl of rice with toppings. Only with abundance bowls, the rice is generally "bulked out" with lentils or chickpeas, and they are topped with salads and lean meat. The salad I used here was a carrot and sultana salad with a dressing made of peanut butter and French dressing. It didn't sound very appetising, and I didn't touch it for the longest time. But next to the lentils and rice, it felt like an abundance of flavours and textures. The nuttiness of the peanut butter accentuated the nuttiness of the lentils in the rice, and the tang of the French dressing balanced out the nuttiness. The sultanas added a little sweetness. The rocket added zing. Overall, very happy.

Okonomiyaki style omelette

Okonomiyaki, otherwise known as "Japanese omelette," or "Japanese pizza" is basically an omelette that contains flour and cabbage and has various toppings ("anything you like") as well as the kewpie style mayonnaise that is so common on top of Japanese dishes and a special "okonomiyaki style sauce," or bulldog sauce. Or XO sauce. I'm not sure what. In any case, my aim was to create my own low carb version. I made a cabbage omelette which I topped with low fat mayonnaise and a mixture of BBQ sauce, Worcestershire sauce and soy sauce. The textures are definitely different to the original, but I'm hoping the flavours are similar.