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 :)

King Oyster Mushrooms

Have you ever seen these at grocery stores and wonder what to do with them? How they taste like?
I live in Canada and I remember the first time I saw them at the grocery store was several years ago.
It was on demo, I tried it and fell in love with it.

Since then, I've seen the popularity of this mushroom grow. I now see it in restaurant dishes (both Asian and non Asian places) and I see more groceries stores carrying it. However I noticed a lot of people still don't know what it is and after so many years, it's still one of the demo booths I see at the grocery store every week. So I thought I would do a quick post on how easy it can be to cook these tasty mushroom.

Even though I first found these in an Asian grocery store, they are actually native Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Northern African plants. It became popular in Asian and now different Asian countries also grow it.

How to store?
If you're not eating it right away, take it out of the tray and plastic wrap and put it into a paper bag. Then place it in the fridge. If you leave it in the tray, sometimes you'll find something fuzzy on it. That's still safe to eat but I find you avoid that if you put it in the paper bag.

Here's a super simple way to cook the mushroom to try it's flavour and texture.

King Oyster Mushrooms

Prep Time: <5 mins Cook Time: ~5 mins

Ingredients

• 1 package of King Oyster mushrooms, normal or baby size works
• 1 green onion
• 1/2 tsp minced garlic
• Dash of oil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Optional sesame oil

Directions

1. Rinse the mushrooms
2. Cut into slices as shown in the picture to the right with the white line.
3. Cut the green onion into strips
4. Heat up a pan to medium heat
5. Add oil to the hot pan to help make it non-stick and add the garlic and white part of green onion and stir
6. Count to 30 and add in the mushrooms
7. The mushrooms will start turning more translucent as it's being cooked. Add in the green onion when the mushroom is about 75% done, just the centre is still the original raw color.
8. Add some cracked salt and pepper to taste and you're done!

The sesame oil is optional because it's a very strong flavour and it can over power the mushroom if you're trying to figure out how it taste like. But adding a little gives it extra fragrance.
Simply, yummy and fast!
Enjoy