9 Sauces

I am on a cooking spree again. The other day, I made shrimp on lemongrass. Orginally, the recipe was shrimp on sugar cane, but a previous wrestling with a 5 foot length of sugarcane left me with blood on my hands. Really, how does one splinter a small trunk using a Chinese cleaver?
Inspired by the grand photos in this book, I hankered for a shrimpy skewer in the comfort of my own home. They turned out well, although the flesh seemed rather spongy, not unlike a crab claw one eats in the 2nd course of a 10 course Chinese dinner. (Note to self, hand chop shrimp, rather than blend, chunky is okay). The piece de resistance, was the nuoc cham dipping sauce. Umami dribbles of garlic, hotsauce, fish sauce, h2o, rice vinegar, and lime juice.

A conversation about how chicken Mcnuggets were made, inspired me to make my own nuggets. Do you know how it's made?  Whole bits of chicken, skin, bones and all, are blended into a greyish tubelike paste, which is sieved to remove the solid bits. Ammonia is added to sanitized the whole affair, pink food color to similate food appeal. Gross! So I breaded my own chicken breasts with parmesan, panko and furikake (seaweedy sprinkles) before broiling them in the oven. The fun part was the unnamed sauces....

White miso
Caramel
Anchovy paste
BBQ
Japanese mayo
Dijon/Hot mustard
Tonkatsu
Mango dipping sauce
Homemade nuoc cham (not shown)

Pure delight, double dipping up and down the line, for a mere taste for some and a full dunk for others. In the end, my favorite was the fishy saltiness of the anchovy paste followed by mayo. I had more sauces, but was limited by the number of small plates we owned. One child asked, where the most obvious sauce, ketchup was. We don't eat ketchup anymore. Due to a moment of health induced delirium, we decided to stock salsa in the house instead. Let's see how long that lasts....