So the bucket list item was changed to making authentic simmered daikon

The pursuit of this bucket list item then revealed a personality flaw that probably explains for many of my failures in life – I left too much to chance, experimentation, and last minute winging it

What I did was quickly reference a recipe for simmered daikon, quickly eye the ingredients required, then head to the supermarket a few hours before dinner to get them. It was only when I started to cook that I truly was reading the recipe in detail to understand the steps – which of course meant some steps were somewhat compromised:

• my daikon was sliced too thin, and I ended up having to stack the daikon slices instead of just having one clean layer
• because of the stacking, I had to add more dashi to have all the daikon be immersed, which kinda messed with the proportions of the other ingredients (mirin, sake, shoyu)
• I didn’t consider any additional ingredients that could be used to serve with the daikon (miso paste, yuzu bits)

And so yeah, my simmered daikon dish was pretty much a resounding meh.. and it made me think.. what could I have done to improve the odds?

Well probably all the stuff I did after..

• watch a Youtube video to actually look at the steps and figure out what equipment and other ingredients might be necessary
• run through steps in your mind – “mock cooking”
• google the cooking terms to be very familiar with them – what does simmer mean? how do we effective measure wet ingredients versus dry ingredients?
• compare across multiple recipes to see what is similar, and what differs – make sense of the entire recipe first
• ensure all equipment, paraphernalia and ingredients are purchased and ready before actually starting

So.. yeah.. I haven’t crossed off this bucket list item, but I sure learnt a lot. =)