December Kosher Challenge Link Up: The Great Oriental Mix-Up

So I’m posting this as I’m dealing with a nasty case of bronchitis, and while I should be in bed, this is really too funny not to post. Another title for this post could be ” Everything that could possibly go wrong in a recipe does.”

This month’s on-the-fly Kosher Challenge is Chinese. We all know the joke: “Where do Jews go for December 25? For Chinese.” Hence, Chinese is the name of this challenge. I also had family coming over on the 23rd, and was planning to make turkey and side dishes. This was going to be great.

I was set. I was going to make a Chinese turkey! I went to Cho-Sen Island in Long Island a while back, and had gotten a dish called tuna yakitori. I thought the sauce would be better on chicken, honestly. It was tart and only a little salty. I was having family come over, and what better thing to serve than yakitori turkey?! The turkey was defrosting, I had my bottle of yakitori sauce, I was ready to go. I paired the sauce with apricot jam (use 15 oz of jam to 1/4 bottle of yakitori sauce. Mix well. To my uncle, it tastes like raisin sauce. Go figure)

I decided I wanted to pair this with fried rice with peas and eggs. Like you get in the restaurants. So far, no problems. Turkey’s in the oven, cooking away.  Rice is made up, peas defrosted, raw eggs ready to be added. That’s when the problems hit.

The turkey got over done. You could still eat it, but it was over done, no question. Still tasted pretty good, because everyone went for seconds. I never made fried rice before, so I took the cooked rice (Uncle Ben’s 10 min in the bag) and mixed it with the peas. Heated up sesame oil, dumped it in the pot, got it good and hot. Added the raw eggs. Waited..and waited for it to turn into those yummy pieces of egg you get in real fried rice. Some stuck to the bottom of the pan, and the egg was cooked, but all it did was turn the rice sticky and a light yellow color.

Yakitori and apricot glazed turkey wing on bed of “fried” rice with peas and eggs.

So we sit down to eat, and everyone is happy and fine, and wondering about yakitori. ” It’s Chinese,” I tell him. My uncle says ” Well, it sounds Japanese, but you would know better than us, right? ” I thought it was Chinese, it was on the same shelf as soy and hoisin..but I better go find out.  A quick Google search informs me that yakitori is Japanese for “grilled chicken. And so ended the recipe where everything went wrong, including the sauce. But even a day after, I’m laughing about it.