Ginger Chicken Teppan (Ninja Food)

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This forum is full of recipes, but not many are adequate for when you have company. And by company, I mean the kind of people that would expect you to commit seppaku if you served them peanuts and weren't aware of their allergy. I'm talking genuine Nippon Ninjas. Serve one of those mother fuckers a bowl of porridge and some warmed up chardoney and you won't be seeing this Christmas!

So here we go, this even involves seaweed so you know it's Japanese ^_^

Ingredients

• 200g udon noodles
• handful of sliced mangetout
• 1/2 red onion thickly sliced
• 4 spring onions diced in 1" lengths
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 tbl spoon fresh grated ginger
• 1 red chilli
• 2 handfulls of beansprouts
• 3 tbl spoons of tsuyu sauce
• 2 beaten eggs
• 300g diced chicken
• vegetable oil
• pickled ginger (gari)
• coriander

Method

Ok, first up 'tsuyu' sauce, now that certainly sounds Japanese and I haven't mentioned sea weed yet... well you can either buy tsuyu sauce, or you can make it, it's piss easy to make, but you do end up with rather a lot. The good news is that it keeps for ages in the fridge so you can eat this every day for like a year..

Dashi

Dashi is a fish stock and one of the ingredients in the tsuyu, again, piss to make and just as easy to buy, we're making ours as it's an excuse to buy all kinds of weird shit from shops that have deliberatly named everything in Klingon to try and fool you. You need..

• 10" square piece of konbu (this is the seaweed, or kelp, if there's a difference?!)
• handful of bonito flakes (katsuo bushi) basically pink dried fish flakes
• 1 ltr water

• Add the konbu to the saucepan of water then bring it to the boil.

• Remove the saucepan from the heat, and remove the piece of konbu then add a handful of the bonito flakes.

• Bring the saucepan back up to the boil then turn off the heat. When all of the bonito flakes have sunk to the bottom of the pan (takes about 30s, not long) strain and discard the flakes keeping the liquid.

This is our Dashi stock, we're only going to be using a 1/3rd of this so the rest can be put in the fridge for ages.

Now to make the tsuyu sauce, this bit is really easy too!

Tsuyu Sauce

• 300ml of dashi
• 75ml dark soy sauce
• 3 tbl spoons of mirin (a sweetened sake/rice wine used for cooking)
• 1/2 teaspoon of sugar
• pinch of salt
• 10g bonito flakes

Combin all of the ingredients apart from the bonito flakes in a small pan and boil for 15 minutes until the sauce has reduced a little, remove from the heat then add the flakes and allow to soak for 1 minute, then seive and remove the flakes from the sauce. Again, we've made far too much sauce, so refridgerate it!

Now for the main bit!

Bring a large pan of water to the boil then add the noodles.

After about 2-3 minutes when the noodles have softened, drain them then pour cold water over them in the strainer.

Now put all the ingredients except the cooking oil, chicken, pickled ginger and coriander into a bowl and mix them up to get them all coated in the egg. I personally find it fucking impossibly to actually mix up anything that is to do with noodles, i always end up with a huge clump of noodles with everything else mixed up next to it, hopefully you're better than me! Ninjas however don't tolerate failure, so you'd better be!

Heat the wok up until it's bastard hot and smokin', then add the cooking oil and the chicken.

Stir fry that bitch like it ain't no thang for around 5 minutes or until cooked.

Add the bowl of 'mixed up' everythinge else to it and stir fry for another 3-4 minutes until it's all cooked and happy. You can add more ginger/garlic/tsuyu now to taste, I added a bit more ginger as I love the stuff.

Then serve that bad boy! Sprinkle chopped coriander and the pickled ginger over the top!

Fortunatly I was the only ninja in the house today so it's all mine, miiine, miiiiiiiiine! And will do for lunch tomorrow!