making teriyaki sauce w/o the teriyaki sauce

i've been itching to make this for a while.

~couple tablespoons of mirin (a sweetened sake), ~tablespoon or two of rice wine, ~tablespoon of soy sauce, a splash of asian chili sauce (NOT hot sauce), a small splash of rice vinegar, two cloves of garlic chopped, and a squirt of sesame oil. put raw chicken tenders in it to marinate. pan fried chicken and sauce separately. added a slurry of cornstarch and water to sauce to thicken. caution: the sugar in mirin burns, so keep adding water to the pan to deglaze/keep from burning. so far, i haven't found a way around having sweet things burn in the pan other than drowning it. it'd probably be ok with a ton of oil, but that's just ick. to thicken sauce.. add a slurry of about 1 tsp-1tbsp cornstarch with 2x times water to pan and stir stir stir until it gets thick enough. adjust concentration with water. don't use flour. cornstarch thickens things at a low heat, which is good for sugary liquids. flour doesn't start to thicken until it's "cooked", which usually means boiling temp and it's finicky and hard to judge just how much is enough b/c of that delay.
how's my non-recipe trial and error sauce taste? better than with storebought sauce like mr. yoshida brand teriyaki (by the third try). and with a kick. that stuff is no good for marinating and usually is too salty and even more full of sugar than homemade. that means it's only good for pouring over the top of food when done cooking, the flavor won't penetrate the meat, and it'll burn faster than you can say--well, fast.

dinner at that darn squirrel's house:

some very typical taiwanese foods present such as taiwanese style sausages over pineapples, congee, scrambled eggs, and some not so typical stuff like pan grilled miso marinated salmon on a bed of lettuce, spicy oil/sauce mixed noodles, congee, and pillsbury biscuits among other things. it's been years since i'd eaten anything at home cooked with pineapples, so i forgot completely about that canned commodity. will recreate. curiously enough, for cantonese ppl, congee is usually eaten for breakfast only, and usually not with a slew of side dishes like you would see in northern or taiwanese cuisine. for HKers, it's eaten like cereal at breakfast. but for them, it can be eaten like a bowl of rice at all meals. more on zuk in this post here on the ABC's site

unfortunately, no pictures of either of these as i was too lazy