Takikomi Tomato Rice

Posted August 14th, 2014 in Food | 1 Comment »

takikomi

Tomato rice, often used for omelet-rice (omu-rice), is usually made with cooked rice, chicken pieces, some vegetables and tomato sauce in a frying-pan, just like stir-fried rice.  We call the rice “chicken rice”, and I love it even without a thin omelet wrapper.  The problem with cooking this rice is that sometimes the rice becomes bit mashy while stir-frying, and you have to have cooked rice to make this.  so, when you feel like omelet-rice, you first need to cook rice then stir-fry with other ingredients.

I hate mashy rice.  Especially with Japanese rice (medium to short grain rice).  It’s soggy, soft and has no texture that I love about rice.

So these days I often make this “chicken rice” in a rice cooker.  You don’t need to stir-fry in a pan as a rice cooker will do all the work.  It’s easy, time saving, and less washing to do!

The basic ingredients are medium (or short) grain rice, chicken thigh pieces, onion, carrot and sauces, but this time I made it with prawn & chopped bacon instead of chicken.  Yum!!

takikomi2

I added spinach in this recipe.  You can modify this with any vegetables at least you add the correct amount of rice and sauces.

<Recipe>

  • Rice 450g
  • Tomato Sauce  4 table spoons
  • Oyster Sauce 1 teaspoon
  • Stock Cube 1 (vegetable or chicken) or 1 teaspoon
  • Frozen Chopped Spinach 1 portion
  • Chopped Carrot 1/4 cup
  • Chopped Onion 1/4 cup
  • Chopped Bacon 1/4 cup
  • some prawns, no shell, heads and tails

 

  1. Wash rice.  Level the rice in a rice cooker.  Add sauces and stock cube.  Add water to the level marked “3”, or you point your finger down inside the rice cooker, add water to the first line of your finger.
  2. Add other ingredients.  Level the surface.
  3. Turn on the cooker.

 

You should leave the lid of rice cooker closed for at least 10 minutes after the rice is cooked.  Mix the rice through within 30minutes after cooking to let the excess steam escape.

Serve with or without thin omelet, and enjoy!


Bringing Japan into our life in Perth

Posted August 9th, 2014 in Ume's Thought | No Comments »

Bagels

Gosh, time flies ….!!!  It’s August already?  It’s been, what, 4 months since I last wrote a post on Umeboss!

Things have been hectic in my life for the last few months – I had another baby boy, restarted my small business Bagelier  (only occasionally), some of my friends decided to move out of Perth so we had several farewell gatherings, and just keeping up everyday with a 3-year-old boy and a newborn is busy enough. :-[

Baby-Hugo

I missed how a newborn baby smells, moves, smiles and wiggles.

I can’t believe my elder son is attending kindy from next year. He currently goes to a Japanese kindy (not a proper kindergarten though), daycare, Japanese book club and Japanese playgroup every week, so I’m sure he’ll be ok going to school 3 days a week, but it’s just that I can’t believe he is grown up to be a school kid soon.

Looking after 2 children is hard work (especially they are boys!) but I’m not quite sure why I started doing the baking business now! I guess it’s part of my personality (my blood) that I can’t just sit around the house – I feel I need to be doing something… I push myself.  It’s a very tiring personality I have!

So, other than baking, most of the time I’m in Japanese environment where people and I speak Japanese only.  I decided to do this way because I wanted my children to be able to speak Japanese in future.  Japanese is my first language and it feels weird if I had to speak English (second language) to my own children. So I made lots of Japanese mum friends and I spend most of weekdays with them, letting kids play together.  Thanks to that, my elder son (3 years old) speaks more Japanese than English.  So my plan is working in spite of the fact that I’m the only Japanese speaker in the house and all my family are overseas.  I know his English will be stronger once he starts to go to local school, but at least he has the base then I believe he won’t forget it.

In oppose to his Japanese, my English is getting worse these days.  Because I spend everyday with my babies I don’t get lots of time talking English now.  I don’t want to be someone who stays in non-English community while in Australia, but I guess I need to stay like this until boys go to school and then I can start spending more time with English-speaking friends and working in English-speaking environment.  Until then…

I sometimes miss myself few years ago when I was speaking only English and forgot how to speak Japanese properly. It was a funny experience – I know all Japanese in my head but words didn’t come out from my mouth.  I was 23, and spent only 2 years in Australia (21 years in Japan) and already forgot how to speak my own language! So I know my kids will lose some Japanese while living in Australia… I’ll just have to keep up talking to them in Japanese as much as I can and it’ll keep our (both me and my kids’) Japanese skill, I hope..