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.

Vietnamese style cold rolls

I had leftover fish curry, so I decided to use some of it to make Vietnamese style cold rolls. I used 30 g rice paper, 50 g rice noodles, lettuce and as much fish as I needed (not much at all). I prepared the rice paper by dipping it into a bowl of boiled water. I made about 3-4 rolls, which was very filling and about 500 calories. I put all the leftover noodles and lettuce in a bowl in the fridge to have cold rolls later. The little container of what looks like sand is actually toasted rice. I think you make it by roasting rice in the oven for a while, then crushing it with a mortar and pestle, though I'm not sure because my Cambodian housemate made it for me. It adds a little satisfying "crunch" to the rolls. Cold rolls has become my favourite way of using up leftovers, mainly those cheap rotisserie chickens I have been getting cheap on the way home via the supermarket late at night.

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.

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.

Burger rice stack

After perusing many recipes of "stacks," I wished to create my own version that was low fat and did not involve bread. This resulted. The only problem that resulted was that it crumbled apart the moment I commenced eating it...

For those of you who wanted to know how I moulded the rice: I simply pressed the rice that was cooked according to instructions into a small bowl. After a few minutes (or seconds), I upended the bowl onto the plate like you would with a freshly baked cake.