Marukaite Chikyuu (German Version)

From the Hetalia soundtrack. Another funny version of it. Hi! I made another dinner from my new cookbook. This one was really good! It's nikujaga, which literally means meat potatoes. It's their version of what they saw of the English beef stew. I think I talked a while about it when they had it on Hetalia. They definitely have a good spin on it. The main part is (western) potatoes, thinly sliced beef, onions, and carrots. It has a little bit of sesame oil added while browning the beef. After cooking the vegetables and meat, you cover it with water and let that cook for a bit. Then, you add dark soy sauce (lots of it), sake, mirin, and sugar; and let that simmer for a while. It smelled so good while it was cooking! Mom said the sauce tastes like the sukiyaki sauce from one of our favorite Japanese restaurants. I agree it was pretty similar.

I also made some onigiri for lunch. I forgot to warm up the rice a bit before I pressed it in the mold, so one of them was a bit crumbly. Oh well, that's ok. :P Another one turned out perfect, and the last one I didn't really have enough to make a full one. It was kind of half of an onigiri. I put the ume paste in one, sweet gherkin pickles in another, and the 'half' one I put soy sauce on it. Then, I put some nori on top of all of them. The mold makes HUGE onigiri, but that's fine with me. :P They were very good! I think I might be addicted to the ume paste. It tasted so good! It really is like a very tangy apricot, it tasted slightly like a plum to me too.

Today I did a lot of catching up. Hopefully, tomorrow I'll do some of my normal stuff during the day. Then we'll head over to Val and Dave's to celebrate New Year's Eve. That should be fun! I find it interesting that there's not many good things on TV over here for the week just before New Year's, but in Japan there's so many awesome programs. ^_^ I know they are more into it than we are, but it seems a bit odd.