Yesterday

Yesterday was a busy day.  I made gyoza for dinner.  The most tedious part about making gyoza was the cutting.  I always cut the vegetable myself rather than using a food processor.  Although, it didn't take a too long to cut the napa cabbage (I used napa instead of cabbage this time) into small pieces like before.  I guess my knife skill has improved slightly.  Hahaha...

In the meantime, I heat up some water to make hourensou shoyu (just spinach with soy).  The kids actually like spinach this way.

After adding green onions (it should be nira, but difficult to get where I am at), I had to salt it to remove the water from the vegetable.  I leave the vegetables to sweat for an hour or two, while I prepare other things.  I had some chicken breast out since I was planning on making general tso chicken for today.  After I marinate the chicken cubes into a ginger/garlic/soy sauce, I got ready to cut up gobo that had been sitting next to the sink for a while now.

I wanted to make the ingredient that goes into chirashizushi, so I started shredding them with the knife.  Then, I had to cut the carrots and takenoko so that I can stew them in a soy/sake/sake base sauce.

By the time I got back to the sweating vegetables it was almost dinner time.  I still haven't squeezed out the water or wrapped them up.  Not to mention the shrimp that I had to mince finely to add in.

Of course right when I was ready to wrap, my son complained that he was sleepy.  But the timing was really bad, so, I stopped working on the gyoza to give him a bath.  Maybe that will wake him up.  And it did.  I continued with the gyoza, realizing I had forgotten two ingredients, ginger juice and garlic.  I usually like to add in when I am using frozen shrimp.  So, by the time I finished the wrapping and ready to cook it was 7 pm, way behind my usual dinner time.  (I always try to have dinner around 6 or at least 6:30).

Oh well, when we actually sat down to eat it was 7:30 pm.  At least, everyone enjoyed the meal.  And that is what it is all about.  :)

Seriously, I was so busy, I didn't even get a chance to catch up with manga. Hahaha....