Week 3

 This week, our theme was Asian food. For our first day of eating at a restaurant, we went to Kizuki Ramen & Izakaya. This is a local ramen place that is pretty close to Catlin, right between Portland and Beaverton. I ordered the chicken shoyu ramen, pork gyoza, and a side order of edamame. Overall, I'd say this was one of the best meals I have had so far. The ramen was very flavorful, and it came with a lot of chicken and vegetables. The gyoza was also really good, and I would definitely get it again. I recommend this place to anyone who lives in the area.

For our first day of cooking, we decided to make udon noodles and chicken katsu. These were fairly easy to make, although the prep time ended up taking longer than we anticipated. Making the udon noodles and vegetables was pretty straightforward, but we got to improvise a bit by choosing what spices to add to our chicken katsu. We coated a few pieces of chicken in our spices and breadcrumbs and cooked them as a test, and realized that we could add even more spices because even though the chicken was cooked nicely, it didn't have too much flavor. Once we figured out the right amount of spice and added the katsu sauce at the end, we ended up really liking the chicken. As for the udon noodles, they tasted pretty good in my opinion and the chicken broth that we bought was rich and tasty. We also decided to cook and add some spam into the udon mixture to give it more flavor and make it more filling, and I think that was a good choice.

On Thursday, we went to a sushi restaurant called Sushi Mioga. Rishi had been there before, and he said that it was pretty good for the prices they have. Personally, sushi is not my favorite but I still have it from time to time. However, since I don't usually eat it, I let the other people in my group help me in letting me know what they like to get when they have sushi. I ended up eating salmon nigiri, salmon rolls, Seattle rolls, shrimp tempura, gyoza, and avocado rolls. Out of everything, I liked the salmon nigiri and shrimp tempura the best. I was surprised by how much more I liked the salmon nigiri than the salmon rolls, because they are essentially the same but the rolls have seaweed. I felt like the food was decent for what we paid, but since I am not a big fan of sushi I can't really judge whether I would recommend this place to people who do eat sushi regularly. 

For our last day of cooking, we planned to make sushi but ended up switching because we are planning to get help from John and his wife with that next week. So, instead we made butter chicken marsala because that was a dish that we all agreed we wanted to learn how to make at the start of the project. In my opinion, the butter chicken and rice that we made was hands down the best thing we've made so far. We cooked the chicken perfectly and the sauce that we made it in was very flavorful and had a really nice consistency. I have had butter chicken many times, and honestly the meal that we made was better than most butter chicken dishes I have gotten from other places.