The month is drawing to a close...

April is almost over, which means I've been scrambling the last few days to make my required number of recipes - 10! It doesn't sound like many, but for some reason this month's menu was difficult. We were gone for part of it, causing creativity to inspire the meal below - noodle bowls, which happen to be a frequent lunch for many of my Asian students:


I had said April would be focused on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean food. It turned into just the first two because, really, two entirely different types of cuisine were enough. The main reasons why the menu was difficult, though, I have decided were:

1) I had a really difficult time finding a variety of mushrooms around here - which was really quite surprising since mushrooms are very popular around here - and many recipes I wanted to try called for them.
2) I just wasn't willing to buy lots of bottles of new sauces. The new purchases I did end up with are oyster sauce, Chinese cooking wine, mirin, and dark soy sauce (yes, there are two kinds).

Here are the last two dishes from Asian April:

Spicy Shrimp with Udon Noodles

and

Hand-Hacked Pot Stickers.

You might notice that the potstickers are shaped more like egg rolls. One thing we learned this month is the roll-up method of egg rolls is the easiest to use when making anything with wrappers - wontons, pot stickers, egg rolls, you name it. But no matter how we rolled these, they tasted great!