Shiitake and Spare Ribs Rice Cooker Meal

Don't have time to cook?
Do you have a rice cooker?
If you said yes to both, then this will be perfect for you!

The key to this dish is to prep the night before. You want to marinate the meat overnight in the fridge so the flavour penetrates through so you do not loose any of the flavour when you cook the meat with the rice. If you marinate it over night, you also do not need to use as much seasoning as you would if you try to do it last minute.
Too much seasoning can result in very salty rice so you want to avoid that.

Prep time including washing the meat and cutting it is around 20 min.

Shiitake and Spare Ribs Rice Cooker Meal

Ingredients 

• ~1lbs spare ribs
• 3-5 Shiitake Mushrooms (up to your taste)
• Optional 2-4 pieces of 雲耳 (to your taste)
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp Black Bean Garlic Sauce
• 2g of julienned ginger
• 1 tsp corn starch
• 3 muks (rice cooker cup) of uncooked rice

Directions

1. Wash the spare ribs.
2. Cut the spare ribs so it's 1 bone per piece.
3. Mix sugar, soy sauce and black bean garlic sauce together in a container that can fit all the meat.
4. Add the meat to the container and mix well so all the meat is coated.
5. Let it marinate overnight in the fridge.
6. In the morning before you go to work, put the shittake mushroom and the 雲耳 into a bowl of water so it re-hydrates during the day. 
7. When you're ready to cook the rice, mix the corn starch into the meat.
8. Wash the rice as you normally do and add the normal amount of water to cook the rice.
9. Squeeze the water out of the shittake mushroom and rinse it off.
10. Cut each shittake mushroom into bite size pieces.
11. If you're cooking with 雲耳, cut that up into 1 inch strips. (mine are usually around 1x0.5 inch strips).
12. Julienne the ginger
13. Add the meat to the rice cooker pot on top of the rice.
14. Then add the mushroom and 雲耳.
15. Sprinkle with ginger and make sure some of the ginger is touching the water to ensure that the ginger taste will make it all the way into the rice.
16. Then turn on the rice cooker to cook and let it cook.

And that's all to it! All the work is during the prep. The cooking is easy. You can leave it alone and do other stuff like wash and cook veggies or work out etc :)

Pork and Lotus Root Patties

Yes, it's possible to eat lotus root and not just in soup! When you cook it, it has a sweet flavour and crispy texture.
Probably not the best looking picture in the world since it's just meat patties but the flavour and texture is pretty awesome.

This is one of those rare recipes that I will use volume rather then weight for measurements.
I also like to make big batches of this and then freeze them in dinner size batch to make it an easy meal later.

I use minced pork butt or a mixture of pork butt and pork shoulder for this recipe if I want to go leaner.

Pork and Lotus Root Patties

Ingredients

• 2lbs boneless pork butt
• 1lb pork shoulder
• 3 big pieces of lotus root
• 3 tbsp soy sauce
• 3 tbsp sugar

Directions

1. First, remove the skin from the pork shoulder. Cube up the pork butt and pork shoulder into smaller pieces.
2. Mix the meat together and use your grinder or food processor to mince the meat.
3. While the meat is mixing, scrape off the outer skin of the lotus root with the back of a knife. It'll be all nice and white like the picture below when it's done.
4. Cut off the ends of the lotus root.
5. Cut off the lotus root into long pieces that will fit into the food processor's opening.
   
6. Use the blade option to slice the lotus root thinly. Or you can use the shredding option as well. Both will work fine.
7. Now that you have everything in pieces, you can start mixing everything together. In a big bowl or several big bowls, add the meat, lotus root, soy sauce and sugar together.
   The minimum ratio I would suggest is 1:1 volume for meat:lotus root (as shown in the picture to the right
   
   with a container). I would even go as far as 1:1.5 ratio for meat:lotus root so the crunchy texture will come out even more! So having said that, you may  not need to use all the meat you grounded up. But that's ok cause you can use it later for something else. Any left over meat, wrap and freeze or refrigerate for later use or just cook it right away.
8. Once everything is mixed up, you can pan fry them up to eat right away, or package it up and freeze it for an easy meal on a different day.

Soy for your garden

So it's fall time and starting to get cold.
There was frost on my windshield this morning.
I decided it's time to get rid of the remaining flowers in the flower bed so I can transform it into a vegetable garden next year.
Since it was previously a flower bed, I don't know what's the state of the soil, how much nutrients are in it etc. So I decided to heavily fertilize my soil to make sure it's ready for growing vegetables next year.

My fertilizer of choice is....soybeans!

Yes that's right, soy beans. Why Soy?
Soybean is a rich in protein and is usually used as a supplement for protein in vegetarian diets.
The microorganism loves the protein as much as we do and will use it and in return create nitrogen for your soil!

Soymeal adds 7% Nitrogen, 2% Phosphorus and 1% Potassium.
The process to make soymeal is a little different from soy milk since I boil the ground up bean to make milk instead of keeping it in powder form. And the oil is not exactly extracted in the process to make soy milk. But it's almost the same so the ratios of the type of nutrients it'll provide is not far off.

I currently do not have a compost so I'm burying the ground soybeans right into the soil after I finish making soy milk.
But honestly,  this takes forever because 1/3 cup of soybeans makes about 1L of soy milk.
It'll take me forever to make enough soy by products to dump into the garden. And I'll feel guilty if I boil the beans and then throw it into the garden without using it for anything else first. (Boil first to eliminate risk it'll grow into a plant next year.)

Doing it a bit at a time is great for in season trench composting if you want to give that a try.
But right now I'm trying to get my garden ready for winter. So I went to a tofu shop and brought several bags of soy leftovers for $1 each. It's the exact same product I make but they have it in huge quantities because they mass produce soy milk to make tofu.
The bags I brought were huge so it was perfect for fertilizing my entire garden before winter stars. Much cheaper then buying compost and it's organic!

Give it a try before the frost sets