Sunday dinner: Asian edition! Sorry that the feature went missing for a while; I was sick for a few weeks and couldn’t cook even a regular meal without sitting down, much less contemplate a Sunday sized one. After not doing it for a while, I got a bit lazy. >_> There was one Sunday dinner we had around St. Patrick’s Day that I will post later. Anyway, on to last weekend! We had:

1. Chicken Yakitori with Jasmine Rice
These were on the cover of the new, May 2011 edition of Food & Wine magazine, and I thought they would be great to make for Sunday dinner the second I saw them. I replaced the water + seaweed + dried tuna flake stock you’re supposed to make for the sauce with regular chicken stock, since I don’t eat anything that lives in water. I also used about half the sauce to baste the skewers as they cooked to give the chicken more flavor; despite this, there was still a lot of it left over, so that portion of the recipe should probably be halved.

2. Spring Rolls with[out] Carrot-Ginger Dipping Sauce
These were a bit of a failure, partly because of the recipe, partly because my grocery store sometimes really sucks. On the recipe side, I wasn’t really sure what radish sprouts were or what daikon was, but I was fairly certain the store wouldn’t have it. Of the things I thought the store would have, I couldn’t find any beets or rice paper wrappers. Instead, it sold some very strange soy wrappers that were ridiculously overpriced. The packaging had no directions as to whether I was supposed to soak them like I would rice paper, so I opted not to. Honestly, the vegetables would probably have been better as a salad. I chose to forgo the carrot-ginger sauce as I already had plenty of the sauce left over from the yakitori.

3. Free-Form Pineapple, Mango, and Berry Tarts
Since I don’t own tart pans of any kind, free-form tart recipes are appealing as an easy way to bake tarts without buying pans. Blueberries are very expensive this time of year so I thought I would replace them with raspberries. Once I made the tarts though, I realized there wasn’t really any room for anything besides mango, pineapple, and diced strawberry. They were absolutely divine regardless. The sprinkling of sugar on top really helped.

4. Jasmine-Tea Tangerinade
Unable to find tangerines, I substituted clementines. I also cut out the simple syrup, since my pitcher wasn’t large enough for the recipe, and replaced it with ⅓ cup sugar, added to the water I boiled for the tea. I’m not sure if the clementines are milder in flavor than tangerines or if I brewed the tea too strong, but the citrus flavor didn’t come through as much as I would have liked. It was still a very refreshing drink though.