[Restaurant] Ju Izakaya Japanese Restaurant

Ju Izakaya (japanese style pub) opened back in April, right at the same complex with J-Town, the Toronto North Japanese supermarket.


We start off with 5 different types of skewered chicken, (from top to bottom): Chicken leg meat, Leg meat with Japanese leek, Chicken liver, Chicken gizzard, and Chicken cartilage (soft bone from the breast).
All of them were seasoned with salt, in order to try out the taste of the meat.
The leeks were brunt quite bad, and the Chicken cartilage were also slightly brunt.
It was quite, including me and my friend, there were only 10 customer. That's why the food came real fast, it's nice and hot.


Took this picture with my old cell phone, so it's really fuzzy.
This is called Motsuni, which is a Pork intestine stew. Flavored with miso, the pork intestine along with sweet potato, burdock and Konjac (aka konnyaku) makes a great tasting stew.
We share this bowl, as the order was about 12 - 15 spoon full of ingredient, with a miso soup like broth.


The grilled beef tongue really surprises both of us.
As we were enjoying the flavorful Motsuni, the over-the-edge saltiness of the beef tongue really hits our tongue!
By adding the lemon juice to the tongue, our tongue only pick up the salty lemon taste.
Less salt would be great, as the beef tongue was quite a thick cut, if only it had some beef tongue taste to it.


Of course we are not nearly full with just that.
Second round we start off with a skewered leg meat with sauce (Tare). The Tare version was much better than the Shio version, mainly because of the sweetness of the sauce gives the meat a different flavor, and the sauce keeps the meat juicer than salt (the salt one was juicy too).


Also we tried the Chicken skin skewer and the Chicken meatball.
For the Chicken skin, we decided to have it with salt, as the sauce would probably made the skin soggy.
It was great, skin crispy and not dried out (served HOT of the grill), and the amount of salt was really nice, thumbs up!

Does anyone really eat meatball with salt only?
Chicken meatball with sauce on it was just ok, nothing special, except the price was higher than other skewers.


We started eating the Ochazuke (お茶漬け) without taking any pictures, so "borrow" the picture from Ju's website.
Three different toppings to choose from, Salmon, pickled plum and takowasa (たこわさ, pickled octopus).
My friend had the one with salmon, and I had takowasa.
I didn't try the salmon one, and because I mixed everything together, I can't really taste the takowasa by itself.
But the Ochazuke was really good, the broth really tasty, the rice are softer than you would have in a bowl of rice (probably soaked in alot of broth), the garnish on top (seaweed and arare あられ) was just like what you see on pictures, everything you expect in an Ochazuke.


We were full right after this. (perfect)

TOO BAD they don't have any beer yet! How come an Izakaya doesn't have any beer or sake?!
(I don't see any LLBO license application posted on the door, don't know what's going on.)

Price wise, real Japanese style of food in Toronto, I would say they are at mid-range? But without beer or sake (or a glass of calpis), I don't think I would visit in a few months.


Let's hope they get the license real soon, and apply the profit from the sales of beer & sake to lower the price of food, that would be great!

[Blog] New blog tools update

Added a few things to the blog.

First of all, the links for the older post are changed to something like this:

so visiter can see which page they are on, and how many pages in total.
since this is a javascript function, if you've those browser add-on to block javascript, you probably won't be able to see it.

Thanks to Blogger Plugins for the "numbered page navigation" code.

Next up are buttons for Twitter、Facebook 及 Google Buzz.

(I expected to see the same thing happen to every post, all links are ZERO.)
Haven't use Twitter for a while now, ever since I switched over to Plurk back in 2008.
I found that alot of people just join Twitter recently, and it would be a good way to promote this blog, so that's why I added it in.

I don't really use Facebook, because I don't play those flash games (not anymore), and I don't really update my personal info there. (If I really have time, probably should update this blog more often.)

But most people I know, they love to use Facebook and they are always on Facebook, that's why I added this button, to better serve the people who loves Facebook.

Google Buzz button, this is just for the sake of adding stuff. People I know don't rarely use Google Buzz, and some don't even have a G-mail account, (sigh) may be I will take it off when Google decided to shut down the Buzz service.

Again, Thanks to Blogger Plugins for Facebook share count button, Twitter retweet button (service provided by tweetmeme), and add Google Buzz button

Also added the Facebook Like Button, which shows up at the bottom of every post. I think it's just the same function as the button at the upper right hand corner of the post.
Just another way for all of the Facebook to use.

You guessed it! This code was from Blogger Plugins, on Facebook like / recommend button


I wanted to add the lightbox (picture viewing function) code into the blog, was reading the code from Blogger Plugins - light box image viewer, but somehow it doesn't quite work with my blog, as the lightbox will show the full size picture, which is way to big to fit on screen.

Then I found The Illuminated Path - Logan's Blog, and they have a code for blogger (blogspot), which they have restricted the lightbox size to 640px when showing the pictures, that's almost perfect...

But I will have to add the line rel="lightbox" to every picture manually, and it only works with pictures that has a direct link (like Picasa). Since my blog mainly uses pictures hosted on Flickr, if I have to made lightbox to show pictures from Flickr, I would be violating Flickr user agreement.

gotta find a better way to do this.
Found the original LightBox code, it include the automatic adjustment to pictures, along with some modification, can actually have lightbox to display a link-back to flickr.
Too bad it doesn't work on blogger (blogspot), tested everyone of it, I can't even see my blog (stuck at loading).


Right now have to settle with the slimbox w/ MooTools, and hope fully one day someone will find a way to get this to work with Blogger (blogspot).
Please click on the picture to view the larger picture.

[Share] F*** My Life

This website allows user to post a one line comment about their everyday life. well, the worst part of their life.

F*** My Life: Your everyday life stories

It's so sad that it's so funny (yeah, I know I'm twisted), sometime it's just helps you from feeling bad when you see how other people's life can be so F***ed up.

I would suggest people over 18 to visit this website.
Anyone under the age of 18 should check out family channel Canada instead.

My sister's blog

this is a link to my sister's blog.

bake from scratch

Please visit her blog! Thanks!!!

[Food][Cooking] Fried Chicken with Herb

This dish is a Taiwanese famous snack, and probably the easiest to re-create. Also it's just fried chicken with herb, western culture should have no problem accepting this to be sell at street vendors.
But you don't see it being sell at your street corners, hack, you almost don't get to see any street vendors these days in Toronto.

Since fried chicken are being sell at a ridiculous price (ie KFC popcorn chicken?), to make it at home you can eat till you drop and it's probably the same price or less. And it's always tastier and fresher to make fried chicken at home, right?



To make this fried chicken, first you have to marinate the small pieces of chicken leg meat overnight. (Well, you can just whip it up at anytime you feel like some fried chicken, but it will be much better in taste if you marinate it for a some time.) marinate the chicken meat with soy sauce, sugar, white pepper, cornstarch, sesame seed oil.

Before you fry the chicken, let it sit for half an hour in room temperature to make sure the meat get to cook more evenly.

For coating the chicken, we use sweet potato flour. The texture of the sweet potato flour is the key to this dish, when the lumps in the flour gets into the hot oil, it will turn into little crunch sticking to the meat. The flour makes a nice crunch on the surface of the meat, and the flour lumps sticking on top, the double crunch makes this dish stays crunchy even cooled. (yeah, right. like it can get a chance to cool down before it got into someone's mouth.)

Mix the sweet potato flour with salt and white pepper. Make sure the chicken gets coated on all sides, then set it aside on another plate to sit for a minute. This will ensure the flour sticks to the meat for good.

This dish should be made with Taiwanese Basil-like herb, since there isn't any available here in Toronto (at least I don't see them in supermarket), you can use Basil or Thai Basil instead. Coat the herb just the same as the chicken.

Heat the oil then turn it down to medium-heat, as the chicken has to well done, a medium-heat is a safe way to make sure the chicken is cooked through and avoid the coating gets burnt.

Fry the chicken for 3 to 5 minutes depend on size, then turn the heat up so that the oil drawn out of the chicken pieces. Also adding the herb to fry with the chicken for a minute, drain the oil and place them on some paper towel to remove any excess oil.

Sprinkle some salt and white pepper on the chicken while they are hot. Add some chili powder for an extra kick.




Chinese version posted at:
http://chichican.blogspot.com/2008/06/fried-chicken-with-herb.html