Inaugural Dinner Party

Image above: My guests at my inaugural dinner party in my new apartment. (L-R) Tomoko, Jung-Su, and Yeji

After a month of practicing various Japanese dishes from A Japanese Kitchen and JustBento.com I invited Tomoko, Jung-Su, and Yeji over to taste my attempts for my first dinner party in the new apartment. Having not really hosted for well over a year now it was quite chaotic but it was also great recapturing the exhilaration of bringing it all together.

For starters I made chicken yakitori and broke the golden rule of never making a new dish for the first time when hosting a dinner party. But y’know, sometimes it’s kinda fun pushing yourself to see if you can deliver.

Image above: My first attempt at making some chicken yakitori for the starter course.

Amazingly enough it turned out alright and went down well though, next time, I’m going to try improving it so that the sauce is more flavoursome and the chicken has a more roasted look to it.

For main course, I made pork tonkatsu (as from my previous post), sesame beef with bean sprouts and red peppers, and a Japanese stir-fry with shimeji, enoki, and shiitake mushrooms. All served with Japanese rice. And to my complete relief they really liked it and we polished off all the food.

After dinner, I broke out the new Nintendo Wii which I bought the other day and we set about making our Mii characters. And for fun, rather than designing our own Mii I got them to design someone else’s.

Image above: Jung-Su looking at how his Mii character is being shaped by Yeji.

All done, here’s the four of us ready to start playing:

Image above: Our four Mii characters on the Nintendo Wii. (L-R) Jung-Su (created by Yeji) and is wearing make-up!, myself (created by Tomoko) where I look like Neo from The Matrix!, Yeji (created by Jung-Su) and looking very kawaii, and Tomoko’s own version of herself – a very chic look.

When we saw this, we all died laughing at poor Jung-Su as Yeji had put blusher on him and made him really short compared to the rest of us! So, Mii’s created we had a ton of fun and laughter playing Wii Play, Wii Sports, and Mario Kart for the rest of the evening – as these photos and video of Tomoko and Yeji playing Wii Boxing shows.