Yaki Onigiri

Yaki onigiri

Ok. So I slept all day (Tuesday), woke up late, had a bunch of stuff to do, and will be out most of Wednesday. I'm feeling tired, frustrated, discouraged....

So I put some steel-cut oats in the new rice cooker for breakfast, on the timer.

I need to pack a lunch today, so I started thinking about what to fix. I wanted something super simple. Fried rice. I decided to cook up some rice, dry fry it will some diced veggies and add soy sauce. I pulled out my (old little other) rice cooker and made the rice. A complete no-brainer. I'll add some raw veggies to the lunchbox....

Then I got distracted. Instead of just making the fried rice I decided to play with my new onigiri maker. That went well, sort-of. You're supposed to use short- or medium-grain rice, so the rice balls stick together, but I only keep long grain in the house, except for Arborio, and I wasn't going to use (waste) my expensive risotto rice in an untried recipe. And I was using a new tool, and the directions are in Japanese, which I don't read....

The first few rice balls held together pretty well; the last ones fell apart on the plate. I ate those and decided to make yaki onigiri out of the rest, thinking the grilling/glazing process might hold them together. The last two of those that I formed still wouldn't hold together, so I decided to make ketchup yaki onigiri out of them.

Bottom line: I spent a lot of time and effort discovering that I don't like yaki onigiri. And I have a mess to clean up in the kitchen.

I do recommend Lunch in a Box, the blog of a woman I met on the Flickr! group for my Laptop Lunch system.

Early on in the process I considered ditching the onigiri and making risotto instead. It takes more attention than using a rice cooker, but the overall time and energy spent would probably have been less.