Life is a destination, and you've already arrived.

My cooking bible right now is Makiko Itoh's Just Bento Cookbook, and there's a delicious recipe that I'd tried a few weeks ago and felt needed tweaking for us. I followed the the recipe for Miso-Peanut Meat Sauce to the letter (which every recipe deserves at least once), putting it on Udon noodles, but it was a little too much for us.

Last night, I cooked my "what do I have in the fridge" version, and it was beyond amazing.

12 oz red miso
4 TBSP seasoned rice vinegar
2 TBSP Mirin
1/2 cup water
5 TBSP sugar
1 TBSP olive oil
1 lb ground beef, not lean (to keep from drying out)
1 TBSP grated fresh ginger
about 1 tsp onion powder

Mix the miso, vinegar, mirin, water, and sugar well, forming a thin paste. In a large skillet, cook the ginger in the olive oil a moment then add the beef and a few shakes of onion powder, browning the meat.

Add the miso mixture to the skillet and stir well, reducing heat to medium-low and simmer until the sauce is thick and glossy.

In the meanwhile, I cooked a package of thin, flat rice noodles (like you would use for Pad Thai) to serve with the sauce. All in all, we ended up with an incredibly flavorful stroganoff-like dish that was devoured in minutes. I saved enough to send with Akalee for work today, as it IS intended to be eaten at room temperature.

The book mentions that this sauce is also good for dipping, such as raw vegetables. I personally can't imagine it anywhere but on noodles or rice...or straight from a spoon, it's so delicious! You can keep it for a week in the fridge, or freeze it up to 3 months.

Speaking of straight from a spoon--

Easiest Dulce de Leche ever!

My mother always made caramel for pies by boiling a can of sweetened, condensed milk on the stove. It confused me a lot later in life, because regular caramel tastes a bit different and the name threw me off. That became even more complicated when I traveled to Argentina and discovered that their dulce de leche tasted like the pudding-like caramel to which I was accustomed.

US marketing is not much better; as the dessert market has been flooded with "Dulce de Leche" flavors, I found that most of those were just ribbons of regular caramel through ice cream, or similar. I finally looked up the difference a few weeks ago, and found that what my mother made actually was dulce de leche, not standard caramel--caramel itself being made solely with sugar, while dulce de leche (as the name spells out) is the reduced and caramelized sweetened condensed milk.

Anyways, my point is that I've been craving it like crazy, but not crazy about leaving an explosive can of milk on my gas stove unattended for hours. I tried cooking it by hand, heating slowly, but it became candy. Thanks to Pinterest, I saw a much simpler method: take a slow-cooker (crock pot) and put the can inside, filling the pot with water at least an inch over the top of the can. Set the whole thing to heat on low and leave it 8 hours. Well worth the wait, but goodness it's so rich!