A while ago, Michele and I decided that in order to "pay back" or "compensate" or "just because", we'd feed both her family and mine. That finally came to pass this last Sunday, and it seems to have been a resounding success. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food (I certainly did), and had a good time. It's been three days since the dinner Michele and I put on, and I *still* have leftovers in the fridge.
We prepared 4 dishes: Gyoza dumplings, Otsu, Sauteed Ginger Beef and Cabbage, and Brochettes de Poulet, Ananas et Gingembre. We were going to make dumplings for desert, but we couldn't find all the ingredients easily, so we decided to substitute for shop bought dumplings. Which we also couldn't find on short notice. We ended up settling for Manju Mochi (I think that's right - it's basically mochi balls with a manju filling). Even though I normally don't like red bean paste, I enjoyed it immensely ^_^.
Michele is a genius at preparation. Although we both helped each other, Michele took the lead, scheduled everything, and basically made sure that I wasn't fucking it up. We did about 3 hours of cooking on Sunday, but we did a further 2 hours on Saturday, preparing and marinating the chicken.
It only just occurred to me that I should have taken photo's of our efforts, but as people started arriving as we were still cooking, it would have been a little weird. The above links have pretty good photo's anyway, so check them out. The sites themselves are worth a look.
