Shepherd's pie in the toaster oven

Basically this has been my lunch for the last week, and will be in the coming week as well!

Cinnamon/nutmeg pancakes

1/2 cup corn flour
1/2 cup rice flour
1/4 (generous) cup of corn starch
1 tbsp corn grits
1+1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 egg
3/4 cups soy milk
1 tbsp vegetable oil.
nutmeg or cinnamon

Mix dry ingredients together while heating up the pan. Mix in the wet and start making pancakes. Once you've poured a pancake into the pan, add the nutmeg or cinnamon on top.

This makes a light, not-to-sweet pancake with a unique flavour. They're a little stiffer than regular pancakes, so eating them like pseudo-cookies is quite good. A nice breakfast for a cloudy day!

Birchirmuesli!

In my classy faux-tupperware, no less

One of my favourite summer foods of all time when I was a child was birchirmuesli - it's pronounced "beer-cher-moozly" ("ch" as in "Bach"). I don't even really know what language that is off the the top of my head, but the word's pretty much synonymous with "delicious". The best thing about birchirmuesli, though, is that, in addition to being super-healthy and tasty is that it's quite easy to make!

Buckwheat Sweet Potato Bread

Sweet potatoes are cheap this time of year! Make the most of it with this delicious and hearty bread, taken from this recipe on Gluten-Free Mommy. I obviously had to make some changes, not having xanthan gum, half the flours, or even nutmeg - which I should invest in, seeing as how it's a very autumnal spice and I'm sure I'll be wanting it for other things.

Sweet potato cake

While riding around on my new bicycle (!!) last weekend, I chanced across a small fruit-and-vegetable stand selling what I assume are farm-fresh vegetables. I can't tell, of course, since there's no way I could read this information even if it was advertised, or even ask, but I went in anyway and came out with numerous healthy treats, among them some sweet potatoes, which I just discovered on my top shelf this evening!

Sweet potato cakes are a traditional Japanese treat, naturally gluten-free, and healthy for you, so I figured I'd try my hand at them, since I'm actually not quite sure what else to do with Japanese sweet potatoes. Herein lies the recipe:

I have committed a Cooking Sin...

...I baked first and now I just want to eat that. And not make dinner. Even though dinner is going to be delicious, I can't stop eating it.

"It" being a not-particularly-photogenic banana bread.

Told you.

Recipe follows...

Pumpkin lasagne stew

People in Japan love their pumpkins - it's delicious barbequed, pan-fried, or baked: the other day, I decided to try baked! This recipe is modified from one that Skittles sent me from her mother's cookbook; apparently the original uses butternut squash, but I have yet to find one of those in Japan, and pumpkin turned out to be a delicious (and cheap!) substitute.

Banana-buckwheat pancakes

Gooey and delicious!

I'm still having problems adjusting to working until 9 almost every night and not getting home until at least quarter to ten... it makes dinner an endless question, since I always am hungry for something, but I don't want to eat a giant meal. Pancakes is one way to solve this; I can have two or three to keep my tummy happy, and then throw the rest in the fridge for breakfast or snacks the next day.

Gluten-free banana walnut bread

Sorry, I ate most of it before getting around to taking a picture like, two seconds ago.

 50-en bananas at the grocery store? Well, I know what to do with those! Modified from a recipe at HubPages.

Peanut butter, miso, and cinnamon cookies

Made in my tiny toaster oven!

EDITED AS OF 08/14: These cookies are actually incredibly nasty. I'm not sure what I was thinking, or perhaps I was just incredibly hungry after making them, but they are for all intents and purposes totally inedible now, and the very act of biting into one triggers an instant spit-it-out-now reflex. For the love of Pete, don't put the miso in these cookies. Just... keep them peanutbuttery. I will experiment further sometime down the line, I'm sure.


It's a rainy day in Nagoya, and after walking home from the gym at noon in a torrential downpour, complete with thunder, I abandoned previous plans to bum around downtown shopping, and decided to make it a lazy afternoon at home. And what's more rainy-day than making some cookies? These are modified from a recipe I found at Pattycake.

Buckwheat Pancakes

Ever since I found buckwheat flour at my local grocery store, I've been wanting to try these pancakes out - though buckwheat isn't my absolute favourite type of pancake, I can see it swiftly moving to the top of my pancake rankings due to this recipe!

Rice-cooker frittata

So, I took this recipe from Just Bento's frittata recipe, and modified it a teensy bit because I don't have the veggies she uses. I'm definitely going to have this for lunch tomorrow! Eggy goodness...

Walnut and cinnamon-swirl cornbread

Lately, I've been craving baked goods. Probably because for me, baked goods are comfort food to ward away the stresses of life (of which there are many when one is a clueless gaijin), but being gluten-free makes it a little difficult to get my fix. Add to that the fact that I don't have an oven, and things get more complicated - thank goodness for rice cookers! This recipe is modified from one I found at Gluten-Free Mommy.