This is the recipe I used to make the meatballs with, courtesy of one of my friends. It was supposed to make the crack-like meatballs from IKEA; added bonus: it was in Internet memes. The recipe itself wasn't too hard, though it did call for something I never would have considered putting in meatballs: mashed potatoes. But it gives the meatballs an interesting, kind of smoother texture when you bite into them. I was worried that that meatballs would all come apart when I cooked them (they nearly did) but the second, smaller batch I made turned out pretty fantastic.
The best part was that it called for half beef, half pork - exactly what they sell here in japan for not an absurd price. The recipe though, is pretty much a heart attack waiting to happen, with the amount of butter it advises to use! I'm going to try it next time with just oil and see how that goes, since I'm really fond of using olive oil. But yeah, you cook the onions in garlic, and then you cook the meatballs in not a little bit of butter, but FIVE TABLESPOONS of butter. Holy woahly that's a lot of butter.
To make the gravy (which, is one of the better gravies I've had), the recipe called for beef stock, which I thought I had. But at first I couldn't find it at all! I had bought all the other ingredients at the store the day before, so I figured I'd nip to the close store for some beef stock since they usually have most things.
They didn't have beef stock. It was also pouring rain when I decided to go out and get it. Like POURING cats and dogs. I have good timing, what can I say.
The meatballs turned out ridiculously tasty though; even more so the second day, and cold! Definitely would recommend giving it a shot, though maybe with less butter. :)
Tonight though, I discovered that cooking salmon steaks is ridiculously easy. Like, why wasn't I doing this before easy. The only things I have to clean up are the dishes I used to eat with; everything else got cooked in a tin foil. I used a little garlic salt, sea salt, olive oil (of course!), lemon juice, lemon pepper, and basil and wooow it tasted amazing. I have one of them saved for tomorrow.
I really hope though that the sashimi I ate tonight wasn't bad because of the heat. Normally I don't buy fish in the summer because the heat makes it spoil faster, but I wanted a back up in case the salmon turned out... not so great. It was so tasty though. :3
And here I was, not going to cook earlier today. I'm super excited that I'm more confident about taking advantage of the huge seafood selection (or well, at least the salmon steak part of it - one medium sized piece for only 100 yen!). I guess if I have to eat cheaply this year, I'll be eating lots of tuna fish from a can, pasta, onions, tofu, rice, and salmon! Listed like that, it actually seems like I have a pretty decent variety of stuff going on. Actually, I probably could make a decent kind of variety with the different salts and stuff. Now to work on side dishes... I should try my hand at pickling stuff for sides. :D
Maybe I'll end up losing weight after all!
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