japanese dinner

On a night out with my girlfriends and their husbands weeks ago we found ourselves talking about having a get together, a potluck dinner. Apparently Tony one of my girlfriends husband had too much to drink that night and carelessly offered to cook his buddy eddie his famous ramen (carelessly because he said he would never commit to cooking when he's drunk again hahaha).Not that im complaining. So the theme was decided a Japanese dinner it would be.

I was to make the common Japanese dishes tempura, makis and sashimis and misono rice. Alessandra and Tony the ramen, Marie and JR the mango kani salad and sake, while Georgia and Eddie the tepanyaki, but of course I knew I was bound to get the meat and cook it myself and just demand the donation for it hahaha typical of my girlfriend Georgia.

Monday came and we all agreed to do the dinner on that Friday. I envisioned a modern Japanese table set-up with chopsticks and sake shot glasses etc. but during the week I found myself suffering from stomach pains and ended up staying in bed for the last 3 days. Thursday came and everyone confirmed for dinner the next day, I was still unprepared. Friday morning I had to wake up early to go with my husband to work then buy some of the ingredients needed, for some reason I was craving for some uni sashimi (sea urchin) that night then I had to drive my son to the dentist and we ended late so I had to postpone my grocery after lunch. I rushed to the grocery at 1pm headed home at 3:30 and started cooking at 5pm the dinner was at 7pm so I had 2 hours to prepare for the feast. It was chaos, I was doing my mes-en place for the makis, the tempura and my mind was on how to set up table…..oh my!

To top it all the Japanese rice I cooked for the misono and the makis cooked in 5mins and almost burned , good thing I caught it on time. In between the chaos I asked Alessandra to pass by for some uni on the way to our house and unfortunately the resto that they were supposed to get it from didn’t have any. 630 came and my husband arrived from work I had to teach him how to roll the last 5 sushi’s so I can bath and change he learned it in 3 mins. Everyone started coming. Tony came with a big I mean HUGE tray of mes-en place for his Ramen which I thought was just going to be a pot of ramen, but then it was the works, the noodles were separate the condiments were on different containers and to top it all we had to set up a grilling station in my very small kitchen/ living space to start his ramen. Marie and JR arrived and I was still frying my ebi tempura, it was great coz we had extra hands to finish the frying. Then of course the last couple arrived with nothing in their hands but a not so empty stomach, apparently they forgot they had a wedding that night and couldn’t back out from our dinner. While the husbands were nursing their beers, the wives were busy preparing the dishes…..i got my last dish to be prepared, pulled out the marinated meat from the chiller that was to be for tepanyaki, dumped it to the sizzling plate with butter and added some garlic, it didn’t taste that good, I thought it had some weird smell of beef maybe coz I was scrimping and bought the not so expensive meat, nevertheless everyone kept mum about it but I knew it wasn’t that good at all…..hahaha!!!

Finally we all sat down for dinner. We had a feast right in front of us, the tasting bowl Tony said he would served turned out to be huge bowls and could even be a meal by itself, since everyone knew we had to eat the rest of the food, most of us didn’t finish the very yummy noodles, we ate the rest of the food with some pauses in between to breath. As a cook I only had a few pieces of everything and didn’t really pig out since I was smelling these food since 5 hours ago. Eating our dinner took us about 3 hours. Sake toast and a few jokes and stories later we all ended up with a full full full stomach!!! Which can be indicated with the smokers rushing out to the balcony and lighting a cig with their hands on their stomachs.

The night was still young and we all decided to play some poker, tell some more jokes and laugh all night,the sake turned into beers which turned into scotch. Good thing I was on meds so I couldn’t touch the alcohol, my husband won the game and we got back our share for the dinner but the losers didn’t go home empty handed instead all the tupperware I can find in the cabinets were filled with leftover japanese food to be consumed in the next few days!!! Although it didn’t turn out to be the dinner I envisioned, it turned out fine, everyone had a great time, full stomach and memories to be laughed about again in the next gatherings to come. After that night we talked about having another one, this time the theme was to be worked around Eddies baked oysters ….will see how that goes!