Friday 29 March - Japanese

Good Friday, so a nice few days off work to mess about in the kitchen. We decided on Japanese, as that is Georges favourite food.

I'm not very good at rolling sushi, so this was a bit of a half hearted attempt - we use smoked salmon to fill the sushi as I don't trust supermarket fish to be very fresh.

I did three different varieties - plain salmon, salmon and chive, and salmon and 'caviar'.

We served these as a starter with the usual accompaniments of wasabi, soy and pickled sushi ginger.

  

We followed this with chilli beef ramen - I used the Wagamama recipe for this, and the only change  I made was to add some sliced dried shitake mushrooms to the bowl.

The noodles and vegetables were placed in a bowl, and topped with some lightly cooked sliced beef - I used sirloin here - one steak was plenty for the three of us.

Finally, an oriental stock, flavoured with ginger, garlic and coriander, and with some chilli ramen sauce stirred through it, was poured into the bowls - and the slurping commenced!