Monday, October 13, 2008

More Takoyaki Fun

Takoyaki is more fun when cooked and eaten together with family and friends....


Healing

Posting a song that's been playing on my head for some time now...

I'm still looking for the chords of this one.. or maybe I'll try playing it by ear...





Very inspiring lyrics...



Download mp3

Friday, October 10, 2008

Satisfying My Takoyaki Craving

Perseverance and hard work really pay off.

It has been weeks now since I’ve been craving for Takoyaki and I can’t justify always spending $10 for just four pieces of it when I knew (I thought!) that it was easy to make. All I needed was a takoyaki pan. (My brother even had Takoyaki as a result of my craving and he loaded pictures in his blog to make me drool over them).

For those of you who have no idea what Takoyaki is – it’s a Japanese street food which Westeners call Octopus balls. I’ve had them since I was little in the Philippines and I knew them as “Samurai Balls”. When we moved to Malaysia, I frequented MidValley Megamall since there was a stand there selling takoyaki with different fillings – octopus, prawn, cheese. Naturally, when we came to New Zealand, I’d be craving for it. We found only one restaurant serving it which became our official celebratory restaurant since food wasn’t that cheap. So I had this idea to just make them myself and all I had to do was get myself a takoyaki pan. (Check out this site and learn more about takoyaki).

A takoyaki pan is quite unique because it has holes especially made to mould the batter. There’s an art to making it as well where you have to use skewers to turn them over at the right time. I googled for places where I can get the pan here in NZ and it turns out that there are none. I ended up in Amazon and found a takoyaki pan selling for USD20 but the shipping costs $40! I also came across the Aebleskiver pan which looks a lot like the Takoyaki pan but is used for cooking Danish pastries. I gave up and begged my mom (who was in the States) to just buy me the Pancake Puff pan and send them here.

And so just to satisfy my cravings, Ronnel and I went to our celebratory Japanese restaurant and had my Takoyaki fix. Deep inside, I haven’t given up so for the last time, I searched for Japanese shops which had one. I was directed to a Japanese good wholesaler in Auckland and back to the Wellington warehouse and finally, I was told there was one pan left. I couldn’t believe my ears. I dropped what I was doing and asked Ronnel to drive us there (we left at about 440 pm from work).

At first, we couldn’t find the place since it didn’t look like a shop. It turned out that we were looking for a warehouse. They were a wholesaler and they just gave in to my request to purchase just one item—because there was just one left! I was truly blessed! When I got there, the guy asked if I was Anthony. Apparently, some other guy named Anthony was also looking for a pan and I got there first. What are the chances! Oh well, sorry Anthony, you snooze, you lose!  But hey, you made somebody very happy.

Anyway, here’s my first attempt at making takoyaki… It wasn’t 100% successful but it tasted great!