Pretty decent week so far. On Monday I went into Shinjuku to renew my housing contract. I also was struck by an urge to make BBQ sauce, yet another commodity that is hard to find in Japan. After searching around a bit, here is what I made.
1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup sugar
1 medium onion
3 tbs lemon juice
1 cup Dr Pepper
chipotle Tabasco sauce to taste
salt, pepper, chili powder, and cumin to taste
1 tbs corn starch
This is a really simple one. Chop the onion very finely and fry it. Once soft, just mix everything minus the corn starch together in a sauce pan with the onion, and boil it for 10-15 minutes or until it starts to thicken up. To help with the thickening, add the corn starch (dissolved into 1/4 cup of cold water, of course). This makes a pretty decent BBQ sauce. I cut the sugar by half from the original recipe, but it was still a little too sweet. Next time, I'd add some mustard powder and maybe some vinegar.
Yesterday, the cooking spree continued. First, I went swimming for an hour at the local pool, and then my new housemate and I made hamburgers topped with my BBQ. Then we made an apple pound cake, which turned out really well, despite almost burning the house down. We made two batches: one which we tried to cook in my Pyrex bowl in the toaster oven, and the second which we cooked in the pan you see below.
Batter
3/4 cup oil
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1.5 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 apples, diced
1/2 cup chopped nuts
Icing
1 stick of butter
2 tsp milk
1/2 cup sugar
This one is also really easy. Just mix everything for the batter together, put in a greased baking dish, and bake. I can't really tell you about times, because we used a toaster oven: about 20-25 minutes on 290W seemed to work fine for our half batch. For the icing, just put everything into a pot and simmer it for 20-30 minutes, stirring often. If you have extra apple, add that to the icing as well. Coat the cake with the icing.
Dinner was BBQ beef rice.
Cheers,
