Cooking 101

No blog posting seems complete without at least one picture of Liam, so we will start there:

Josh and I have had the same conversation over and over in the past 13 years. I tell him "I love to cook!" and he tells me "I love to eat!" thus sealing that we are a perfect match.

I suppose with all my cooking though I never really anticipated that in my lifetime I'd be living overseas, and not able to read 95% of the labeling in the grocery stores. It has made cooking interesting to say the least.

Last weekend though we found a break through - a Japanese cookbook in English, complete with pictures of commonly used Japanese ingredients. Last night I tested it out and made a great dinner of salmon rolls and pickled cucumber salad. I was pretty darn proud of myself.

Tonight I cracked open my current favorite Japanese soda:

And determined I would make this Yakitori recipe:

It didn't have a huge amount of ingredients, and looked to be fairly straight forward.

I prepped by making a lovely salad with fresh lemon squeezed over it to go with our chicken...

Then went to work on the chicken skewers. It was way more work than I anticipated. I am pretty sure every dish in our kitchen was somehow dirtied in the process of making this meal.

Swear words used in the process: one. Skewers caught on fire in the fish grill: two. Time consuming, yes. But, very tasty!

Overall though, I am really enjoying learning how to cook a new style of food. And, even better, Josh continues to enjoy sampling my attempts and/or creations!