Food Adventures: Kitchen Experiments

Since I love cooking and eating, I thought when I started this blog that it might have a bit of a heavy leaning towards food related things! This hasn't really happened so far, but I thought I'd start sharing some of my food experiments with you! These will be both new things I've eaten and things I've tried to cook!

Cooking in Japan is no mean feat when this is my kitchen...

That's it. 2 hobs, a sink, a microwave and a couple of cupboards. 

No oven, hardly any preparation space and no grill. Takes some getting used to! And combined with my severe confusion every time I head into a Japanese supermarket, it's lead to some slight kitchen disasters, as well as some very tasty food!

On Monday, I promised to cook for John as he had work and I was off. On the menu?

Pad thai - prawns, beansprouts, lime and chillis from supermarket and rice noodles, fish sauce and nuts from international supermarket in Sendai station.

And I was hoping to make my first foray into baking my cooking a microwave chocolate pudding. Everything available at our local supermarket (and a note to the wise...sugar in Japan is next to the salt. And looks identical to it. I spent a long time trying to find it!)

Unfortunately I don't have any more photos to show you as it all got a bit chaotic! The pad thai was a success...prawns here are DELICIOUS...I used this recipe, and just missed out the things I didn't have. It was really yummy! 

However, the cake was a disaster :( I realised too late that I didn't have scales or a proper measuring cup and was trying to convert into ml! Too tricky! I also assumed the flour was self-raising...it's not! I have now found baking powder...it's called bakingu powada in Japanese :D So I will try this recipe again and if I can make it work, I'll share the recipe and photos with you! 

One other food photo for you before I head out to work...

Toppo...potentially even better than Pocky. Decision pending! The kitkat was our first foray into random flavoured kitkats (a Japanese speciality)! They were strange but fairly tasty!