Psuedo-Japanese Food

I’m half Japanese. And yes, I grew up eating with chop sticks and I ate rice at least 3 times a week. I have a rice cooker in college and when I studied in London I learned how to cook rice in a pot (which is hard, people!) Anyway, the point is I crave/need Japanese food about once a week. So I have been experimenting with easy ways to make my fave Japanese foods.

Katsu-don (yes, that’s a real word. It’s basically fried pork cutlets with rice)

Ingredients:
-2 pork cutlets
-Panko bread crumbs (you can use regular bread crumbs, but these are the best!)
-1 egg (I use the egg white, but you can use the whole egg)
-½ cup of flour
-Oil for frying
-Rice

Instructions:
1.Make Rice! Put it in a rice cooker. Or look at my instructions for rice in a pot.
2.Heat up oil in a skillet.
3.Set up your dredging station: Place the egg, flour, and Panko on individual plates. Then dredge: cover the pork in flour, then egg, then Panko.
4.Fry those suckers up! They should be crisp and golden. Yum!
5.This is the ghetto part: Put the rice in a bowl, then place the pork on top. Use soy sauce for flavor. You can add Rice Sprinkles (Furikake), miso soup, seaweed salad, whatever. That’s it!

Fake Oyako-don (Oyako is the characters for parent and child, in this case referring to the pairings of egg and chicken)

Ingredients:
-Chicken (I used rotisserie chicken, but you can use leftover chicken or bother to make your own)
-1 egg (or 2 if you want)
-Onions
-Soy sauce
-Oil
-Rice

Instructions:
1.Once again, make rice!
2.Heat up oil in a skillet.
3.Slice however many onions you want (the onions are traditionally in slivers).
4.Sauté the onions, then add the egg (I personally scramble it in a separate skillet, but you can cook it in the same pan), and add the chicken (this is mainly to heat it up). Add soy sauce for flavor.
5.Add on top of the rice. That’s it!

NB: Both these donburis (Japanese for rice bowls) have their own special sauce, like oh so many Japanese dishes. So by just using soy sauce it’s still the idea without taking up much time.