I cook a lot of stirfries. They're easy to make and get me to eat my vegetables by covering everything up in a good sauce. Recently, though, I had the opportunity to prepare more than one dish, for once. > [!NOTE] > Why am I only cooking dinner this one night when I need to eat *every* night? [Like almost half of young adults](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/12/23/fact-check-47-american-young-adults-live-their-parents/8672598002/), I'm currently stuck living with my parents. When I'm working, I meal prep stirfries to keep me fed 5 days a week; for the other two, my parents usually make dinner. We just got a new air fryer oven that's about 4 times the size of my preferred air fryer; to get a feel for how it works, I wanted to make tonkatsu. As a couple authentic restaurants in my area do, I paired it with a simple salad, miso soup, and steamed rice. Having an entree, side, soup, and rice at the same time like this is referred to as [Teishoku](https://gurunavi.com/en/japanfoodie/2016/06/teishoku.html), and it's how most Japanese meals are served (especially at good restaurants in my area). You'll also sometimes see another type of set meal called [Ichiju Sansai](https://www.justonecookbook.com/ichiju-sansai/), the main difference being it has more side dishes than Teishoku. I'm probably wrong about the definitions since every article explaining it is a wall of text I'm too lazy to read, so take my interpretation with a grain of salt. Speaking of being lazy, it's why I went for Teishoku instead of Ichiju Sansai... and also why two of my dishes require almost no work. If you'd like to follow along, here's a rundown of the recipes I used. I'll describe my process and modifications to them below. - [Tonkatsu](https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/278809/air-fryer-tonkatsu/) - [Tonkatsu Sauce](https://www.justonecookbook.com/tonkatsu-sauce-recipe/) - [Salad Dressing](https://www.justonecookbook.com/tofu-salad-with-sesame-ponzu-dressing/) - [Miso Soup](https://www.justonecookbook.com/homemade-miso-soup/) Of everything I made, the tonkatsu itself was by far the most time consuming, albeit not very difficult. The process of double breading all the pork chops takes its sweet time, especially when I have a tendency of running out of the breading materials. Thankfully, I thought far enough ahead to buy an extra box of panko breadcrumbs, but I ended up having to water down the eggs for the last few pork chops.  Because it wasn't fried in a vat of oil, the tonkatsu turned out very light and didn't look done when it came out of the oven, but it was cooked perfectly and the taste was great. If you really want the perfect golden color on your tonkatsu, try toasting the panko breadcrumbs before breading; I, on the other hand, am lazy and mostly fine with it. As for the sauce, I'd recommend sticking to the one in the original tonkatsu recipe rather than the standalone one I tried. While the original sauce is more complex to make, the flavor is much better in my opinion since it isn't mostly Worcestershire. Alternatively, I might actually bother buying a bottle of premade sauce to save the time and effort next time. For the salad, all I took from the linked recipe was the dressing. I paired it with some finely shredded Napa cabbage and it turned out great, exactly what I was looking for. The soup was fairly simple. Instead of making the dashi broth from scratch, I added 2 tsp of dashi powder to 4 cups of water. I followed the rest of the recipe as-written, and the soup still turned out especially flavorful (I was impressed for my first time making it). I'd recommend halving the amount of dried wakame leaves though, as a whole tablespoon is a bit excessive when we already have a salad to go with it. Since I don't own a rice cooker, steamed rice is one of the few things I know how to make by heart. I personally perfer calrose rice as I can't get the time and water-to-rice ratio right when using long grain. Anything shorter will end up as mush when you're eating it. Just bring 200g of washed rice to a boil in 12 fl. oz. of water. After that, cover and reduce the heat to low. Don't touch it for 15 minutes, then kill the heat and let steam (keep the lid on) for another 5-10 minutes. Fast and easy--just what I like. As with every time I cook for others, dinner was 30 minutes late. Good news is I timed everything well enough to be done at the same time, and everyone seemed to agree it was worth the wait--myself included.