All posts filed under: Culinary Adventures

Unagi at home

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Unagi: freshwater eel. Often served as unadon or unagidon (on rice). From what I’ve read, in this country at least, restaurants buy their unagi pre-cooked and pre-sauced. I love unagi, but why pay someone else to microwave pre-cooked, pre-sauced unagi when you can do it yourself? You can find unagi packs with sauce in the frozen section of your local Asian market at about $9NZ each. I’ve bought these before from a Japan shop and also a Chinese grocer. All you have to do is remove the eel from the packaging, zap for a few minutes then pour on the sauce. Serve with rice, maybe a salad or greens and some edamame and presto! 2 bags of unagi can feed 2 or 3 people for dinner.

Liver for breakfast

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A group of scientists that have been doing a study on rats… In testing, two groups of rats: one group eating a meal of steak, mashed potatoes, vegetables, and vitamins each day; the other eating nothing but raw cow liver. The rats were tested each day for how long they were able to swim in a 55 gallon drum of water. As the days and weeks passed the scientists found the rats eating just the raw liver were steadily swimming far longer than the other group. The group eating the meat, potatoes, and vegetables with vitamin supplement were consistently swimming for 15 minutes and then starting to sink like lead. The 15 minutes never made it past that point. However the raw liver eating rats reached the point where they were swimming far longer than anyone wanted to bother testing which brought the test to an end. Every since I read that story, I’ve always wanted to include more liver in my diet. I want to be a super rat or at least swim until …

Adventures in Pancetta

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I’ve been thinking about pancetta since the weekend when we saw it at Nosh Food Market. I really wanted to try pancetta so went to Sabato in my lunch break today and bought some. I love gourmet food stores. I got to taste lots of stuffed olives, porcini cream, salami and cheese. Heaven! They even do free coffee there but I didn’t have time for a coffee today. Sliced the pancetta up and fried it with calamari, cauliflower, garlic and dropped it onto some fettucini. Did some reading and pancetta is like bacon minus the smoking. At over $70 per kg, it sure would be sweet to try making some pancetta. Especially since pork belly is so cheap! Still got a small half of the pancetta left. I’m thinking that it will go great in some onion/garlic stuffing shoved inside some poultry. Nom.