Sneaking in before the end of the year, I have one last challenge post to share. I’d picked out three recipes from my Wagamama recipe book – partly as a give this book one last try to see if it’s actually worth it’s shelf-space – when I compiled my list for this year, and when I tackled the first one at the end of October I thought, cooking all three of them and writing them up would be a fund Nablopomo post to make! Given the date on this post, you can probably guess how well that went, but I’ve managed to get them all cooked before the end of the year, so I’m going to count that as a win overall!
First up on the list was Yasai Donetabe, unfortunately this was everything I feared from one of these recipes. There’s a lot of ingredients, a lot of really specific prep to do and in the end it was just fine. Not brilliant, not terrible, just fine. I don’t even have that much to say about it, it was just underwhelming, an awful lot of effort for a decidedly average stir-fry. A not very auspicious start to my project.
Next up was a dish I knew rather bettet. Yasai Cha Han is one of my favourite dishes off Wagamama’s restaurant menu. When I used to referee roller derby, it was my favourite post-match, pre-train dinner, if the game was in Aberdeen. Tasty, filling and easy to eat on a train, if I was cutting it fine and needed to do takeaway. When I was making with list of recipes to try this year, I knew this one had to be on that list. Given how faffy so many of the dishes in this recipe book are, I kept putting it off, what if I spent ages making it and then it was disappointing? After many a disastrous attempt at béchamel and carbonara, and how close my attempt at ice-cream came to being custard, I’m also a bit way of any dish that involves adding eggs to an already hot dish. But having been thwarted in my attempt to go to Wagamamas on my recent trip to Aberdeen, I dug out the recipe and was surprised by how deceptively straight forward it seemed. Essentially it’s just rice, button mushrooms, tofu, baby corn, mangetout, spring onions, soy sauce and eggs. How hard could it be?
Not very hard at all apparently. I think this is a contender for the most straight-forward and satisfying recipe I’ve tried from their book. You cook the rice separately and leave it to rest while you stir-fry the vegetables and tofu. Once the veggies are cooked, add the rice – I recommend doing this in batches so it mixes through nicely – add the soy sauce, cook for another few minutes to get the rice nice and hot, and add the whisked egg, stir-frying vigorously for several minutes until the visible egg looks set/cooked. Serve. Absolutely delicious.
Due to the twice cooked rice it isn’t an ideal bulk cook, but it was so quick and straight forward to make that I could easily half the recipe and just make enough for a quick lunch or tea before or after work. All the ingredients are things I usually have in the fridge, and if I don’t can pretty much guarantee can be picked up at the nearest supermarket on the way home from work if I’ve got a hankering. Definitely one I’ll be making again!
For part three I decided to make a change of plan. So originally, I’d planned to make Moyashi Soba for my list, but after my disappointing first recipe, I decided that this one was just too similar and picked another one from the vegetarian section that looked tasty. I picked Pumpkin Curry, I’ve made various curries involving curries over the year, and they’ve all been successful, to the extent that I think part of my reasoning for not picking it when I was making my initial list at the start of the year was that I didn’t really need another pumpkin curry recipe. However it was pumpkin season when I made the other recipes in this post and I had a couple of little pumpkins in the house so it seemed an ideal choice as a recipe that used something I had and needed to use up seemed like a recipe that would get cooked. Unfortunately life happened in November and the pumpkins got used for other recipes and the recipe didn’t get made. However, as the end of December loomed and I had this post two thirds written and taunting me, this seemed like an easy win for getting in one last new recipe. Also I’d bought a giant sweet potato for lasagna that I didn’t get to make – apparently there’s a shortage of frozen butternut squash this year – so in the absence of small pumpkins I substituted it.
If I have one real complaint about the Wagamama recipes it’s their tendency to use small amounts of lots of different ingredients, which probably makes complete sense when you’re making things to order in a restaurant and you want it to be the same experience regardless of what chef’s on shift and which branch of the chain you’re sitting in. I do generally find things like six button mushrooms and four baby sweetcorn kinda cute and silly – those being ingredients that are pretty much fridge staples so I know I’ll use them up. But four 2.5 cm cubes of tofu? Really? Needless to say I just used more veg and left out the tofu because I’m not opening a packet just for that.
This was the first recipe that I’ve seriously tackled one of the many Wagamama sauces they list at the start, and despite the fact that I definitely made it ‘wrong’ – I realised halfway through that it wasn’t one of their ‘bung all the cold ingredients together in a jug and combine’ sauces and had to improvise – but it turned out pretty tasty despite that, though I still need to try it the ‘correct’ way too. The recipe more generally turned out pretty well, not the instant success of Yasai Cha Han, but promising enough – and straightforward enough – that I’d be willing to give it another try to finesse it, before deciding if it’s getting a slot in my regular rotation of recipes.
Cupboard Life 