Tempura Night!

So I was speaking with my baking consultant the other day, who is actually the same person I spoke about in my Japan post - the one who tricked me into trying a piece of octopus. Somehow we got on the topic of sushi and how my husband and I won't eat it but she was quick to point out that there are types of sushi that don't contain fish.

She started talking about a piece of sweet potato tempura over rice, or a type of sushi where rice is stuffed into a tofu pocket. It sounded interesting. Not enough for me to try to make my own, but the tempura part made me want to have that for dinner one night! Plus, my husband loves sweet potatoes so I knew he's like that in a tempura batter.

Now, I know I can find recipes to make tempura batter online, but I actually wanted to do it right and have it taste good the first time around. I totally cheated and bought the McCormick's box mix of tempura batter.

So I set out to make us some tempura for dinner. All the mix needs is 3/4 cup ice cold water and then you stir it together. Heat some oil in a skillet to 375 degrees F and start battering your food!


I chose to make chicken, shrimp, broccoli, sweet potato, red pepper, carrot and onion tempura. It was actually a very messy process...I got batter all over the place and oil kept splattering out of my skillet so I had to do a major clean up after!


But it was worth it! Despite having a totally fried meal (besides the brown rice we paired it with), it was very delicious and we used a variety of sauces to dip it in. We used some duck sauce, soyaki sauce from Trader Joes and an Asian vinaigrette we also got from Trader Joes. We liked the soy/teriyaki base sauces the best.

Our favorite things that got tempura'd were actually all of the vegetables. The chicken was just so-so and we fried the shrimp too long so it got tough. But all of the vegetables turned out great!


Next time I'll probably make less tempura and some steamed dumplings and rice to go along with it!