Ready for a cool story bro? My mom's boyfriend grew some string beans (that were used above in the tempura) in his yard. My boyfriend and I started a garden (or should I say I started the garden and gave up on it while he still tends to it and does all the work) a while ago. Every now and again I'll use something from it. Green onions in random meals, bell peppers in fajitas, various herbs in this and that, etc. I don't know why I find it so fascinating when we can grow our own things in our yards and then incorporate them into our meals. Most times we just go to the store and buy stuff, not even thinking about where it came from, how it grew, or what it took to get it onto our plates. It's always so exciting to me and once we move into our house in a few months I plan to have an even bigger garden with tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, everything.
Anyway, my mom's boyfriend brought some of the beans over and that's what sparked this whole themed dinner. He and my mom contemplated what to do with them and they decided to do some tempura. From left to right in the picture above we have sweet potato (recipe at the end of this post), carrots, the string beans, mushrooms, pumpkin, and shrimp. What I don't have pictured is the tempura bacon we experimented with. I had seen an episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate on The Food Network one day and someone had picked bacon tempura. I thought it was so wrong that it had to be so right. It tasted like what it was, deep fried bacon. Definitely delicious and definitely something I will never do again, lol.
We also made sushi. Ahi, salmon, daikon, and tobiko (flying fish roe) all over sushi rice and wrapped in nori.
And last, to top it off, some miso soup.
I have to a admit that I don't like sushi. I don't like most Japanese food (I can hear my grandma in my head saying, "What kine Japanee you?!"). I didn't eat most of this, only the sweet potato and shrimp tempura, but the food was too pretty not to share. I saw that my mom was using a recipe for the sweet potato tempura so I decided to share that. It's basically the only thing (along with the miso soup, my mom making it like her grandmother used to) that was made from scratch. For the veggies and shrimp we just used a box tempura mix. This batter is sweeter and more dense than the batter you'd use for doing vegetable and shrimp tempura. I don't know how available purple sweet potato is outside of Hawaii, but you can definitely use yellow sweet potato if that's all you can find.
Sweet Potato Tempura
Ingredients:
3 sweet potatoes
about 2 inches of vegetable oil (sorry for not having the exact measurement, this is how we cook around here)
1 t. vanilla extract
1 t. salt
2 t. baking powder
2 cup flour
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
Directions:
1. Boil your sweet potatoes until tender, slice into rounds.
2. Heat your oil over medium-high heat.
3. Stir all your tempura batter ingredients together. Dredge each piece of sweet potato in the batter, shaking off excess batter.
4. Drop several pieces into the hot oil. Let them cook until the batter turns brown on one side, about 3 minutes. This batter does take a little while to get brown.
5. Flip and cook until the other side browns.
6. Drain on paper towels to soak up any extra oil.
It is best eaten fresh, but can be kept over night in a zip loc bag or air tight container.
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