Chinese Cooking 中國滷肉 in Japan

OK, I will be honest. After three weeks in Japan, I really wanted to eat some REAL Chinese/Taiwanese food. There are plenty of Chinese restaurants here (中華料理のレストラン) But they tend to have foods that are really sweet, and low on spices. Basically, the Chinese food here tastes like "China Buffet" food in Japan. It's okay, but it's NOT CHINESE FOOD.

There are a couple of places that have good food here, but tonight I just felt like cooking.

This is one of the "comfort food" dishes that my mom used to make.

Get some seeweed (昆布) and soak it in water with some red peppers.

Cut up some meat (it can be anything beef/chicken/pork)

slice up some onions/garlic

combine everything into a bowl along with lite soy sauce, sugar and hot pepper oil (ideally one should use 老乾媽, but I couldn't find it here). Then marinate it for an hour or so.

Add some cooking oil and dark soy (remember dark soy (老抽), doesn't really add too much taste, but will darken the broth and make it look more visually appealing), then cook for a few hours. In this case I had some leftover carrots in the fridge and threw those in after the meat cooked for an hour or so... don't throw vegetables in too early otherwise it will just turn to mush.