I was a weird kid who loved to flip through my mom's old cookbooks. She didn't have too many, perhaps three or four in all, that she had picked up in the early days of her married life in the mid-'70s in Tokyo. Looking at them now, most of the dishes featured in these old cookbooks have almost no appeal to my (spoiled) eyes. The presentation is painfully outdated (thick stoneware plates with brown lines around the edge--an unmistakable mark of the '70s), and what must have been exotic dishes, made with what little imported ingredient available at the time, now appear lacking in authenticity. The strangely genteel instructions, combined with the kind explanations of exotic ingredients and novel preparations (that have since become mundane) are almost quaint.
It was evidently not so for the ten-year-old me, for quite a few of the entries have marks--ranging from simple circles to stars and flowers--that I penciled in as I leafed through these cookbooks. My hope was that my mom would look at the marks, realize that I wanted to try those particular dishes, and cook them for me. That rarely happened, for my mom was not an eager cook (though she was and is a good one), but a few of the recipes she did try stuck around, in one form or the other.
One such is the Toban Djan Pumpkin, a dish that blurs the boundary between the Japanese home cooking and the Chinese cooking. It takes one of the staple veggies in Japanese cooking--pumpkin--and combine it with a Chinese chili bean paste. Back when the recipe was included in the cookbook, toban djan (Lee Kum Kee makes one) was probably not an everyday condiment in a normal Japanese housewife's kitchen. (Accordingly, the editor of the cookbook accompanied the recipe with a little expose of what it is.) Toban djan was beyond my ten-year-old culinary imagination, so I didn't mark it as "I want." Then, years later, when I was flipping through the cookbook (again), I found the recipe. Being a lazy ass, I asked my mom to try it (even though I was more than old enough to cook it myself), and this time she did.
It was so good that it's been in our repertoire ever since. We've both tinkered with the recipe over time, and our version features celery, which was not in the original recipe but gives an indispensable flavor twist to the dish in my opinion.
Toban Djan Pumpkin (for two)
Remove the pulp from the pumpkin and cut it into thin, bite-sized chunks (see the photo). Slice the celery diagonally.
In a pan, heat some oil and fry minced ginger and toban djan. (Be careful not to inhale the über-spicy toban djan fume--I accidentally did once, and it was pretty agonizing.) When the ginger and toban djan start to emit that appetizing aroma, add celery, then pumpkin and stir-fry, till the vegetables have turned a little translucent and have a nice coat of aromatic oil.
Add water, bouillon powder, sugar and green onions and simmer till most of the water is gone. I usually keep the lid on during this process, but when I want the water to evaporate faster (say, before the pumpkin lose all its shape), I take it off.
The heat of the toban djan compliments the earthy sweetness of the pumpkin, while (I thin) the celery and ginger somehow bridge the two very different flavors. It's good right off the stove, but it's also wonderful chilled on hot summer evenings--a good reason to make more than one serving and refrigerate! My mom used to be a bit taken aback by how her gluttonous daughter (thats me, yeah) kept looking through the same four or five cookbooks all the time, but thanks to my gluttonous obsession, we now have a pretty good pumpkin recipe to spice up our autumn table.
Below is the "before" photo of the beautiful Japanese kuri pumpkin.
I picked up the one on the left, with the beautiful green pattern (from the Green Acres farm in Green City Market). It probably could have used a few more days on the patch (a bit of greenness right under the skin), but it was delicious.
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