It’s not that I’m not allowed, it’s just that whenever I get ambitious, I get reminded about a particularly disastrous incident from about a decade ago.

I get a relative pass on stuff like pasta and baking-from-mix; it’s understood that I really can’t mess those up too badly, but anything involving actual ingredients includes an element of risk.

On the other hand…

Last night I stopped into our local H Mart.

If you don’t have an H Mart near you – and they’re pretty heavily concentrated in the Northeastern US, so you probably don’t – they’re a huge asian grocery store. They’re mostly a Korean grocery, but they don’t limit themselves to Korean products, just like Uwajimaya doesn’t limit themselves to Japanese food.

I mostly go there because it’s more convenient than Uwajimaya and I can get the same imagawayaki and frozen chicken curry dinners at both places.  I go to Uwajiyama for baked goods, drinks, and their in-store Kinokuniya.  It all balances out.

Anyway, I put one package of imagawayaki and four frozen chicken curry dinners in my basket, and it looked kind of pathetic.  Bachelor-style grocery shopping, you know what I mean?

I figured I’d browse the store a bit.

So, I picked up some benishouga because I was out and you can’t have gyuudon without benishouga, and I got some instant miso soup mix and a package of boil-in-bag Golden Curry to try out, and then I stumbled across two products:

1) Tonkatsu sauce.
2) Panko breading with a tonkatsu recipe on the back of the package.

These two products had a sort of undeniable synergy.

Now, I’m going to need to actually purchase pork and eggs – you know, actual ingredients – but if all goes well, I will soon have home-cooked tonkatsu…

…that, or another spectacular disaster.