Cubic Foot Kitchen: Cornbread

This recipe was supplied by my dear mother and adapted to be cooked in my rice cooker. There are no eggs in the dish, but there is milk so it isn’t vegan. When I made it, I also included dried peppers because of my love for spicy food, but I omitted that from the recipe itself. This recipe was so easy, so simple, and exactly the Southern cornbread flavor I was looking for. The recipe calls for buttermilk, but if you add lemon juice to milk, 1 tbsp per cup, you get about the same flavor.

Rice Cooker Cornbread

Ingredients

• 2 cups cornmeal
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• ¼ cup oil
• 1½ cup buttermilk

Mix all ingredients very well. Put in your rice cooker, and cook on normal settings. After the cooking cycle is complete, let it stand in ‘keep warm’ mode for 15 – 25 minutes, or until the top is both dry and golden brown.

PS. Sorry about the cell phone pictures.

Cubic Foot Kitchen: Black Bean & Sweet Potato Stew

Yet again I have been pleasantly surprised by leftovers. Last week I made black bean burritos for some friends, and they gave me a yaki-imo (grilled sweet potato) as a thank you. Now I hadn’t finished off the burritos because I made a bit  too much, and I ate half of the potato but it was too huge to finish. Today I am making it a point to eat up leftovers and some veggies that will go bad soon, so I devised the following solution. (Items in parentheses are ingredients that I wish I could have added, but didn’t have on hand)

Black Bean & Sweet Potato Stew

Ingredients

• ½ a vegetable bouillon
• 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• ½ an onion, coarsely chopped
• 1 ~ 2 carrots, coarsely chopped
• (celery, coarsely chopped)
• (cilantro (corriander) stems)
• a handful of mushrooms, coarsely chopped
• cumin seeds
• sweet potato (in this case, already cooked), cut in to bite sized pieces
• black beans (in this case mine were cooked and included onions & spices)

Directions

1. Boil the bouillon, garlic, onion, carrots and mushrooms with salt and pepper. In the rice cooker, fill the water barely over the ingredients.
2. Let everything boil together for a few minutes, and then add the black beans, as well as a sprinkling of cumin seeds.
3. In the rice cooker, let it run until finished, or cook on the stove until it reaches an appetizing consistency.

At the end, I added some chopped cabbage and bean sprouts, then garnished it with a lone flour tortilla chopped in to long strips (it had not been well sealed, and had therefore become a bit stale). I wish I could show you the photos cause it even looks pretty good.

Cubic Foot Kitchen: Leftovers

Okay, I must put this up here for posterity’s sake because I’m still a bit shocked at how well it came out. Today I made lunch in my rice cooker, completely out of leftovers. I guess I’ll just call it Sweet Potato Rice.

Here’s a breakdown of what I used: I had some rice from last week that I had undercooked to match with some Indian food we ate for lunch, and it had gotten very dry and hard in the fridge for a few days. Also, I had made sweet potato au gratin a la denki suihanki (sweet potato, with milk, cooked in the electric rice cooker) for an IPSP/IR party. When I made that dish, I was doing quadruple the portion I am used to and accidentally added too much milk. Because I only had an hour to cook it, I ended up ladling out the excess liquid, now a mix of potato starch and milk boiled together. Finally on Saturday I had bought four 焼き芋 (yaki imo) at the Tokamachi Snow Festival to split amongst my group, and I still had one whole potato left. So today I added rice, plus starchy milk, plus chopped sweet potato, plus mushrooms and some water to my rice cooker and crossed my fingers.

This effort to not be wasteful left me with a surprisingly delicious lunch! The rice actually sort of baked on the edges, and was very delicious. I even had a bit of Mango pickle over it, which tasted nice too! I guess we just need to remember that even food scraps can be recycled, with scrumptious results.

最近は…

So much has happened lately, a lot of which is just I did this for one class, and read this for another. I gave a presentation for one professor, and so on and so forth. I sometimes feel that being a graduate student drowns other things out of your life in certain ways.

But that’s not all! I’ve been cooking a lot lately, and falling in love with the strange fruits and vegetable available in this part of the world. In a sense, I’m setting myself up for over-priced asian grocery store dependency whenever I move away from East Asia, but I cannot say that I mind terribly much. The solitary other female vegetarian here and I have become friends and lunch-slash-dinner buddies as of late. I tell her that we would be doomed to companionship even if we detested each other’s company, so we are fortunate to have actually hit it off. Between the two of us, a lot of culinary magic is occurring around the time of day when you stomach starts to grumble. It is very good to have a partner in crime, because the overcrowded kitchens are not worth braving to cook a one person meal. The kitchens are a few kinds of horrifying, especially for we few of the vegetarian persuasion.

A few weeks ago there was an around the world at IUJ event where students set up booths exhibiting their region of the world, or nation in the case of a high enough concentration of students (such as Indonesia, Thailand and India). I helped with the Americas, because we didn’t have enough students from either North or South America for even a continental booth. We made friendship bracelets and helped kids (and the occasional adult) make cute crafty stand up Christmas trees, and to decorate them. The even was fun, but also very draining. There are a few photos by one of my classmates at the end of this post.

Some other recent events include a low-key birthday party for a friend’s boyfriend, the cooking of a magical miracle leftover collage improv dish (tasted great, but shouldn’t have), Trivia Night (my team actually won second, shockingly enough), an adventure to rival Lord of the Rings where we walked for 10 km in a few hours in search of a restaurant that was open, a brief but enjoyable trip to a nearby Zen Buddhist temple, a brief skype encounter with family in the low country, and the grand rearranging of my bedroom furniture. Well, and as always a ton of school. I wrote my Japanese final presentation on the Appalachian Mountains. ♥  I went to Tokyo this past weekend for a belated Thanksgiving dinner, and had an amazing and fulfilling time.  It was quite an event, and deserves a post all its own. I’ll get on that soon when I have time.

photo by Bobby Liang

photo by Bobby Liang

photo by Bobby Liang

And that’s all for now, folks. またね。