Chef serves a meal consisting of his own genitalia

Mao Sugiyama got surgery to remove his genitals, then cooked and served them to five lucky guests.  The meal costed 100,000 yen (under $300).

Bon Apetite!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/24/asexual-mao-sugiyama-cooks-serves-own-genitals_n_1543307.html?ref=mostpopular#s=1018957

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Update - Jun 26, '12

The chef is currently being investigated by the Tokyo police to see if he had committed a crime with this dinner:
http://www.canada.com/news/Japan+police+probe+cooked+genitals/6843519/story.html

Carrot Cake

Hey guys I'm back!  It's been over a month since I last posted and it's mostly due to me cooking and eating the same types of food, mostly variations of braising different types of meat.  This past weekend though, a friend of mine asked if I can bring a carrot cake over to a dinner party so I thought I might as well blog it!

For each layer of the cake:

• 
  
• 4 eggs
• 1 1/4 cups vegetable oil
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 3 cups grated carrots
• 1 cup chopped walnuts

First combine together the eggs, oil, sugar, and vanilla

Should look like this when it's all mixed together.  If your brown sugar has clumps you should work the clumps out

Dump in the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg

Fold in the dry ingredients.  The trick is to fold in the dry ingredients just enough that it's thoroughly mixed in.  If you work it too much you'll develop gluten strands and have a tougher cake.  I like to use a wire whisk to just work the dry ingredients and then fold it into the rest of the batter with a rubber spatula.

Dump in the carrots

Add the walnuts and fold it all together.

Pour into your buttered, 8 inch springform pan.

Here it is 350 F for about 75 min.  Each oven is a bit different so use a toothpick and test the centre of the cake to make sure it comes out dry.  The original recipe says to cook for 40-50 min but it wasn't near done for me at that point.

Let it cool for about 30 min. and then take it out of the pan.

Cut off the muffin top so you'll have the flat surface on top.  If you're really OCD you can measure all around the cake and mark the height with toothpicks so when you shave the top off it'll be level.  But I just eyeballed it and it looks ok to me.

Now the icing!  Mix together 1 block of cream cheese, 1/2 block of butter, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and 3 cups of icing sugar.

After the cake is nice and cool, smear it on top.  Give it a nice thick layer.

Slap on that second layer.  You did bake a second layer didn't you?

Here's 1 layer of icing done.  You can see it's sitting on a lazy susan made for cakes.  It helps that you can spin the cake while icing it.  I put it in a fridge to firm up a bit and put on a 2nd layer.  I ended up making another batch of icing but it actually was too much.  Next time I'll probably try multiplying the original amount by 1.5 and it should be just right.

I couldn't get the brown cake not to show through the white icing on the side so I hid it by putting on a some chopped walnuts on the side of the cake.  Here's the finished product!

Yum!  I got a bunch of compliments.  Hopefully they were being truthful!
















To give credit to the origonal recipie: I got it here: allrecipes.com

How to Make Tamago

I love Tomago and it's always been a mystery to me on how it gets prepared.  Here's a video on how it's done!  If I had a pan like that I would so want to try this:



I always thought the egg was steamed.  I'm surprised it's actually layers and layers of fried egg.

Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup

One of the interesting things I get by moving my food blog to a real blogging site is that I can get to see statistics on which is my more popular posts are, with over 200 views and counting!  The 3 cup Taiwanese chicken post was the most popular getting hits from all around the world from Russia, Brazil, Germany, Spain, Malaysia, and the Ukraine.  So this inspired me to do another Taiwanese recipe: Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup!

Most of the Beef Noodle Soup recipes I found online were not very good.  Especially on Chinese sites.  I had my co-worker help me translate and they read: take premade beef soup mix and pour it in water.  Cook beef.  Done!  Yeah it's lame.  So I used the one posted at Epicurious.com.  I'm not sure how close this follows a traditional Taiwanese recipe but I was almost able to find every single ingredient I need from Save-On-Foods so at least it's convenient!

Ingredients:

• 2.5 cups of water
• 1/2 cup of soy sauce
• 1/2 cup of Chinese white wine
• A stick of rock sugar
• 1 thick slice of fresh ginger
• 3 Green Onions
• 2 Garlic Cloves
• 5 Parsley Stems
• 1 Asian dried tangerine peel
• 2 whole star anise
• 1 Package of short ribs
• 1 bird's eye chili pepper
• Some Chinese 5 spice
• Some Chinese pickled mustard greens

First I sprinkled the chinese 5 spice on the short ribs.  I basically treat it like a BBQ rub by heavily seasoning both sides and then rubbing it in.

Then I chopped up the green onions, and bird's eye chili.

Then I combined the water, soy sauce, rice wine, brown sugar, ginger, green onions, garlic, parsley stems, tangerine peel, star anise, and hot birds eye chile pepper in a pot and bring it up to a boil.

After it comes to a boil, bring the temperature down to a simmer and then add the beef.

Simmer for just over 2 hours.  Add chicken broth to replace the liquid that was evaporated during the braising process.  Pick out the beef and remove the bones, trim off the fat, and cut up into chunks.  Run the broth through a chinoise and remove the solids.  If you skim off the fat you can basically use it right now.  I found the flavours to be very bright - especially the hot chili taste.  I put it in the fridge overnight so that the fat floats to the top and solidifies (like butter) and it can be removed very easily.  The flavours also mellowed down a lot and it wasn't as hot as the night before.

To serve, cook the noodles, blanch some baby bok choy, and dice up some of the chinese pickled mustard greens.

Tada!  You're done!

It ended up pretty good.  A bit on the sweet side so I'll 1/2 the rock sugar next time.  But I thought it tasted fairly authentic and was pretty proud of myself.  You can use other kinds of stewing beef other than short ribs but I like how the bones in the short ribs basically makes a beef stock while you're braising the meat.

Eggs braised in the urine of virgin boys

This article was posted in the Vancouver Sun:
Urine-soaked eggs a spring taste treat in China City

I'm adventurous but I think I'll draw the line here.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

I just learned about this documentary on Jiro.  I first learned about Jiro from watching Anthony Bordain's No Reservations.  Apparently he is regarded as the world's greatest Sushi chef with 3 Michelin stars under his belt (the same as Gordan Ramsey).  The documentary is currently playing at Tinseltown if you want to catch it.

Dine Out for Life

If you eat out this Thursday, you will be helping people living with HIV/AIDs!  What's this? - you ask?  Well, 215 restaurants in Vancouver and Whistler will be donating 25% of their sales to help support those living with HIV / AIDs.  So not only will you be filling your tummies with delicious goodness - people who are less fortunate will be getting some help too!

Here are the restaurants that will be honoring this: http://www.diningoutforlife.com/vancouver/restaurants

Interesting restaurants include: , Burgoo, C Restaurant, Cru (which I reviewed), Diva at the Met, Gothams, Hawksworth, Hy's, Las Margaritas, Memphis Blues, The Pear Tree, The Reef, Salt Tasting Room, Stephos, and The Tea House.