Cooking failure ^^;;

Maybe it's because I've been reading a manga that talks about a lot of different foods-- 深夜食堂 (Midnight Restaurant) --lately, but recently I've developed a bit of an interest in cooking. Last week I even bought four cooking magazines (in Japanese, of course) and went through them, putting stickies on recipes I wanted to try.

Monday night (Dec. 7) was my first attempt at one of those recipes: 手羽元の肉じゃが風煮もの, "nikujaga" (meat & potatoes) style boiled (chicken) drumsticks. Unfortunately it was a bit of a failure.

Well, it was still edible, but there were a few problems with my cooking...

The first one was a circumstantial issue. While I was in the middle of cooking I got a call from the Monday night eikaiwa because no one had shown up. Turns out there was a miscommunication about the schedule so I ended up having to stop midway through cooking to go to the eikaiwa, and I didn't come back until an hour later. Luckily this interruption occurred before I actually started boiling everything, but it still probably wasn't the best thing for the recipe...

The next problem was that I completely forgot that the soy sauce I had in my pantry was dark soy sauce.

Lastly, I let everything boil for too long. At the end of the time recommended by the recipe, the potatoes were still a bit hard, so I decided to let it boil for a bit longer. Even though I was standing by the stove the entire time, I guess I was spaced out or something, because it ended up getting overcooked. ^^;;

Ah well. I'll just have to be more careful next time. (Although, I don't know when I'll have a chance to cook again since my schedule until winter vacation is crazy busy. And I'll probably go back to my "raw veggie" diet for a bit in January to try to compensate for all the' holiday binge eating.)

Here's a photo of the finished product.

It looks OK until you compare it to the photo from the recipe... ^^;; (You can really see what a difference it makes if you use dark instead of regular soy sauce...)