Cooking Mama's Cooking Challenge #2: Miso Soup

Bit more exciting, but fair warning... I couldn't source any kelp/konbu so I'm going to make do with whatever seaweed-like things I can scrounge.

Chop up!

OK I chopped these earlier for storage reasons.

Slice up!

Apparently I failed to take a photo of me slicing the tofu, but instead here's what we're using for seaweed, some sushi nori sheets ill cut into squares with scissors and some dried cornish seaweed seasoning I managed to find. Probably not the most cost-effective way to make a simple soup, 

Make Stock!

The game also totally fails to mention the involvement of dashi (the soup stock), but I'm going to make do with a simple vegetable stock cube instead (THATSE FUSION CUISINE, BABY!!!)

Stew!

Hey this is looking... pretty good actually! You can't really see the tofu cubes easily because they sink to the bottom but they are there and I even bought SILKEN tofu.

Finish!

**
This actually turned out pretty alright. Not a huge lover of miso soup, its very mild and delicate but the seaweed and generic UK veg stock worked out nicely. And it's really easy to make if you fancy a bit of novelty and a lot of iodine.

Cooking Mama's Cooking Challenge #1: Boiled Rice

So, I'm going to go through the entire recipe list of Cooking Mama on the Nintendo DS and make all the recipes, using ONLY the gameplay (and the wiki page for quick reference) as my only instruction on how to make the dishes.

Here goes!

Measure and add!

I think I will make myself about 2 portions so I can have some for lunch tomorrow.

Wash some rice!

Oof tough one this, steady on!

Set the timer!

I don't have a rice cooker like The Mama but I have a steamer so this isn't too far off really. 

Finish!

**
I'm quite fond of rice but i'm a bit fonder of it with any kind of seasoning really.

It's been ten years...

 ----------


Ten years!!! Since I last updated this blog. Fair warning, I considered purging my old posts because they are probably cringe and contain problematic language here and there... but I've decided to keep them, and hope that they become buried in the sands of me actually making new content. Please note that I condemn any bad attitude and language used by 23 year old me, and think that she belongs in jail.

I was never really planning to come back to this blog. I still cook, but taking photos of my dinner and writing 6 whole paragraphs of bitchy remarks is kind of a pain... But the I decided I kinda wanted to do something related. I wanted to systematically go through the entire recipe list of a videogame and do every single recipe.

Or at least, the closest I can manage with what I've got in a brexit-ravaged, tory-soiled England with access to a big Lidl and a small Tesco.


------------

Heres a little border thing, yknow, for a fresh start and that

------------------------------------------------------- border border border ---------------------------------
-------------lines lines----------------------

graphic design is my passion

 ----------

St Patricks Day Cupcakes

Yes Yes, Irish stereotypes, the colour green! GIMMICKS.

Bite me, Internet! I made cupcakes. Did you?

Brewage

What's the greenest flavor? Peppermint? Apple? Lime? How about GREEN TEA? Clue is in the name, bitches. How do you aquire this flavour? Psh, how do you think. Take a handful of teabags and brew the strongest green tea you can.

The glace is always greener.

I made a basic cake mix as usual, then tipped the concentrated green tea in, added green food dye, and because those are liquidy things, dont forget to make up the consistancy a bit with some extra flour if you need to.

Could it be? ..PUREST GREEN!?

I even had green cupcake cases! Looks like I've come prepared.

Shamrocks for my real friends, real rocks for my sham friends.

Then I made some green icing (with more green tea and green dye) and decorated it with pistacios and glace angelica which is sortof vaguely in the form of a shamrock! ...kinda.

Curry Pizza.. No really.

Mode: 2-4 Player
Hardware: Pans, Oven.
Accessories: Water.

Sometimes you just have to try something.

I always like to be all 'It's alive!' when I add yeast.

The main thing I wanted to do with this experiment is have a go at making a pizza bread with indian style spices.

Gritty. Those afflicted with pica look away please.

I used my new blendermajig's grind feature to grind up some onion seed, cardamom and garlic to put in the bread dough.

Stuff was cooked.

I think I got some dairy free rogan josh or something of that nature, to cook with chicken and is that onion and cucumber I guess? I don't REMEMBER THIS AT ALL. This is what I get for not keeping up with this blog. What are we even doing here? Jesus, Valkyrie.

I lack the facilities to make it round. ROUND IS OVERRATED.

Here's the pizza base in the oven. Can I just say that if you've never done this, you should definately try making your own pizza dough. Home made bread is THE SHIT I don't know why it's always so good. But it always is. You could just eat that on its own.

It's cool only the whole internet can see.

Man, this curry looks kinda dry. I don't know. Guess I needed more sauce. I'd have done something creamier, but... it had to be dairy free, so yeah.

Probably more to Splinter's tastes than the ninja turtles.

Post-Mortem: ** The bread was awesome, the curry was sortof dry and oniony, I actually ended up adding some ketchup to it to make it a little saucier. Curry goes great with bread, naturally. Also, this is really more of a knife and fork endeavour in spite of me calling it a 'pizza'.

Chinese, Milanese, you eat frozen peas.

Mode: 2 Player
Hardware: Pans, Oven/grill
Accessories: Fizzy ribena

Paulie wants me to update so OK but this one might make the spanish people sad, so blame Paulie because I could have just been slacking off and playing games but instead I blogged this. Milanese chicken spaghetti.

Proper Milanese style chicken is a good quality home made breadcrumbed chicken fillets. What I am about to use is like breadcrumbed processed meat I bought at the corner store on the way home.

When you're paying for the ingredients, you fill up on salad.

At least the vegetables are fresh. I gots me some pepper, spring onion and green beans all loosely chopped. Meanwhile I jammed the breaded chicken in the oven/grill to cook while I make the pasta.

Sorry I can't remember what it was. Tasted like spanish food.

I fried/boiled/whatever them in a pan with some kinda spanish tomato and pepper sauce that I bought at some point. I boiled some spaghetti in another pan offscreen.

...Froiled?

When the spaghetti was fully cooked, I ran out of pan space so I combined them into a bigger pan to mix them together. Then I served that up with the chickeny bits on top for ARTISTIC REASONS.

Howard Hodgkin!

Post-Modern Expressionism: *** The spaghetti was pretty tasty. The chicken doesn't really go super well with it, though. Also, it feels like im eating a remix of every kinda food I associate with childhood, which is kinda weird.

Blend your own burger

So for christmas I wanted a blender... or a juicer... or... a soup maker.. or.. I dunno... maybe all of those things? So I got this brilliant looking piece of gadgetry right here.

Thanks again mum and dad!

But having never seen anything like this in anyone's kitchen ever before, one does wonder... well, a) how the balls does this work? b) does it work well?
I decided to make some mystery burgers using beef mince and whatever else I happened to have in the kitchen, that being a load of mushrooms and some red onion.

Kinda Gigeresque.

I chopped the onion just enough to fit it in the capsule thing, and then you take that, add a bladed cap, and use it on a pressure sensetive motor powered key like one of those electric pencil sharpeners. Well, here goes nothing!

Hey, is that strawberry yog-EUUUGH

Okay so... I'm noticing there isn't really any sort of power... settings... so really your options are 'puree' or 'never mind ill just use a knife'.

Remember that bit in gremlins?

The good news is that suddenly having the ability to neatly reduce anything I want into a colourful goo is... fucking awesome.

Whoa... they're holding together.

Well, that was easy. Now I just fry 'em up and all.

You figure out how to cook a burger.

Verdict: This is pretty wicked, but the downside is I really don't like the taste of mushrooms, so these burgers were actually kinda gross. Interesting though, they're all light and airy. One thing is for sure, this should not be the end of my strange burger experiments.