Impulse buy (oops) at the MyBasket: pork belly-wrapped hamburg steak! Very striking raw, but cooked, it looks and tastes very similar to a normal hamburg. It would actually be interesting if you replaced the pork belly with bacon or another cured meat.
Anyway, I made a kind of yakitori sauce to baste and served it with rice and green beans amandine. Not bad! But I wish I had the equipment/skill to at least get a bit of texture on the pork belly part—it was too hard to balance the patties on their side!
もちもち肉巻き // Mochimochi Nikumaki
Rice wrapped in fatty pork, chargrilled, brushed with sauce, and served on a stick. We tried two sauces: yakiniku (Korean barbecue) and a garlicky salty sauce. Really delicious, but challenging as beach food. We did manage to keep the rice from falling into the sand!
肉巻き三種類 // Nikumaki Trio
Nikumaki (literally ‘meat wrap’) is a fixture on Japanese restaurant menus. Asparagus is a very common one, and I was excited to try zucchini (not a vegetable you see a lot here) plus a super luxurious cheese-stuffed pepper nikumaki. Wrapped and stuffed!
The meat is usually fatty pork, but you could use turkey bacon if you don’t eat pork. It’s easy to do it at home, and some other good fillings are rice or rice balls, kimchi (recipe/pics at link), eggplant, myoga ginger if you’re adventurous... really anything you can think of!
It’s really weird posting about this recipe right now. It’s been backlogged for a while, so I’m getting really jealous of my past self for eating this when we’re still running out of meal points right now.
This is possibly the most indulgent thing we make. All the ingredients have to be from off-campus and it’s MEAT!!! My roommate saw a video about it and sent it to me, but I was a little hesitant because I don’t really like doing things with hot oil. Usually they are the one who fries the nikumaki for me, so the way we justify cooking it is by labeling it “team bonding” for the dorm suite.
Team Bonding Nikumaki Onigiri
Time: Like and hour-ish
Serves: 1. Ok, maybe like 3. If you are feeling generous
Ingredients from The Outside World (bought with real money)
2 cups rice
4 umeboshi
pork sliced very very thinly (use the one labeled good for shabu shabu)
2 tblspoon soy sauce
2 tablspoon mirin
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon sugar
Throw It Together
Cook your rice. I have a rice cooker, which makes everything infinitely easier, but if you don’t it’s very easy. Boil 4 cups of water then add 2 cups of washed rice. Cover tightly and simmer on very low heat for 20 minutes.
Remove the pits from the umeboshi and chop finely. As soon as the rice is done, add chopped umeboshi and mix well.
Take a slice of pork in your hand and put a little rice in the center. Gently wrap the pork around the rice and pinch the edges closed. Start with less rice until you get a sense for how much you can put in without overfilling it. If you overfill it, it will burst during cooking. To be fair, it will still taste good, it will just be kind of ugly. We tried this with beef too, and it tasted great but the beef would not stick closed the way pork did.
Heat a little oil in a pan over medium-ish heat. Place pork rice on the pan, pinched side down. Cook until the edges of the meat are no-longer pink and then flip.
Mix together soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar. When the pork is cooked through, add remaining ingredients. and simmer another 5-7 minutes, spooning sauce over the nikumaki.
