International Appeal

Apparently Blogspot tracks various statistics for its blogs, mainly traffic statistics.  You can see which posts are receiving hits, how many hits you're getting in a given time frame, which sites the traffic is being directed from, what country the hits are coming from and what browsers people are using.

I started to notice that, although the vast majority of traffic to my blog comes from within the USA, I definitely have folks checking in from a few other countries as well.  Below is a screen shot of one of my stats pages.  

I've also received hits from Latvia, Netherlands and Norway.

In all honesty, I'm not sure how people are finding this page if not through my Facebook posts or from a link directly provided by me.  I've tried to search Google for this blog with no luck.  I'm especially surprised that anyone from outside the US would manage to find it.

So here's my offer, courtesy of my friend Alyssa:  if you're viewing this page from any country other than the US, please either post a comment or drop me an email and I will cook a meal from your country and document the results in a blog post.

For anyone viewing this page from within the US, you can also feel free to leave a comment or send me an email with suggestions for culinary feats I should attempt to tackle.  If nothing else, it may lead to an amusing commentary with photographic evidence.

I'm currently planning to attempt Japanese this Friday.  I chose Japanese for a few reasons:

1)  It's mildly exotic without being too "scary" for the less adventurous diners

2)  It will be easily scalable in the event that my invite list unexpectedly grows

3)  It will provide a sake-drinking venue to hopefully clear out the many bottles of high quality sake I have sitting in my fridge, their flavor slowly deteriorating.

The proposed menu:

Appetizers

 - Shrimp and veggie tempura

 - Homemade potstickers

 - Miso soup

Main Course

 - Chicken teriyaki with sesame-soy glazed baby bok choy

Dessert

 - Choice of either green tea or red bean ice cream

I'm looking forward to finally using my deep fryer for the tempura, even though the idea of large amounts of hot oil scare me only slightly less than molten sugar.  As for the potstickers, they should be relatively easy if I use pre-made wonton wrappers.  Clearly, I am not planning on this approach, but will likely have them available in case the "potsticker dough experiment" yields disastrous results.  It's likely that I won't entirely know whether the dough was a success until after I've cooked them, so the whole ordeal is a bit risky.  I'm planning on making the miso soup from scratch as well, which will entail making my kombu dashi first as I can't bring myself to use a packet.  The rest of the meal should be pretty straightforward.  I'll braise the chicken in a homemade teriyaki sauce and steam the bok choy before searing it in some sesame oil and basting it in glaze.  I'm going to have to wing it for the ice creams.  I'll probably just use a simple base ice cream recipe and add in the macha for the green tea and red bean paste for the red bean.

Should be fun...