It seems positively unlikely (or negatively likely, am I supposed to say?) that there is an authentic home-style Italian restaurant just a few blocks from a gang-infested stretch of Howard, but there is. Tucked between a flat, nondescript bank building and Fish Keg, a fried fish take-out (whose fried fish are actually pretty tasty), Cucina di Donatella serves authentic cooking of your lost Italian mamma. It's classic, but not in the marinara-smothered-overcooked-pasta kind of way; it's classic in you-might-find-the-same-food-in-a-Roman-trattoria kind of way.
The open-kitchen restaurant is small with about 8 tables, but the menu is extensive. Not to be missed is the handmade pasta dishes that take up about half the menu, but there are also nightly specials that show up on the chalk board on the wall, as well as in the almost chant-like recitation by the waiters who seem to emphasize their staccato Italian accent. Though meat and fish entrées sound great, we usually succumb to the temptation of simply prepared pasta dishes.
Tagliatelle alla Boscaiola
Patrick's favorite is the spinach lasagna, which puzzles me as to how in the world Donatella, the owner chef you can often glimpse in the kitchen, makes this usually heavy-with-greasd dish so light. The strong, green flavor of the abundant spinach is definitely the most prominent feature of this dish. My favorite might be a medley of mushroom pasta with black truffle oil (this was one of the specials last year, during the mushroom season), but unfortunately, this might be harder to encounter. There are also pasta dishes that I've never seen anywhere else. One of them is the pasta al prosciutto con burro e salvia (wide, flat pasta rolled with prosciutto and sage in butter sauce). The butter did get a bit much for me toward the end of the meal, but the combination of the salty prosciutto and the fragrant sage was quite delightful.
Gnocchi Genovese
When we visited Donatella's kitchen a few weeks ago, Patrick had Gnocchi Genovese and I had Tagliatelle Boscaiola (fetuccini-like flat pasta with carrot-and-mushroom meat sauce sans tomatoes). Both were excellent in a simple and clean way. The Gnocchi was extremely tender yet still had just the right resilience against my teeth, and the basil-infused olive oil never got overwhelmingly oily. The parmesan cheese sprinkled over the white wine-based meat sauce on my dish was a pleasant (and salty) complement to the otherwise very subtle mix of flavors. But the true BANG! was the appetizer, bruschetta with chopped mussels (see the photo below). The crusty bread was literally piled high with mussels. I'm usually not a huge fun of mussels, but this one was fantastic. The oceanic kick of the mussels was perfectly balanced with the strong zest of freshly chopped garlic and the sharp, green flavor of the Italian parsley.
The service seems to fluctuate. When it's excellent, it's amazing; unintrusive, knowledgeable, friendly and swift. When it's slow, it can be reeeeeeeeeally slow (but never snooty). So, don't go there starving. Bring a bottle of wine (it's BYOB), sit back, enjoy the conversation with your party, and when they're ready, you'll be served an excellent, reasonably priced classic Italian. Many reviews (including this detailed one from Sun Times) rave about their desserts, too--I just have to try some soon!
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La Cucina di Donatella
2221 W. Howard St.
773.262.6533
Parking is available along the alleyway on the west side of the building.
Yesterday, I posted a super-easy recipe for shiratama dango, dessert rice dumplings from Japan, on Gapers Block Drive Thru, here, but I wanted to follow it up with a slightly more complicated presentation of the same versatile dumplings. (For the explanation of the shiratama dango and how to make them, see that post.)
The traditional way to enjoy shiratama dango (which roughly translates to "white pearl dumplings") is to dress them with a mixture of soybean flour, sugar and a touch of salt, or with the ubiquitous sweet red bean paste. I modified the sweet red bean paste for this recipe.
Shiratama Dango with Roasted Jewel Yam Paste, Orange Ginger Syrup (for three to four people)
First, roast the whole jewel yam in an oven for 5 hours at 200 degrees. Slow-roasting the yam will bring out its sweetness and condense its otherwise subtle flavor. When it's cooked through, peel it by hand and mash through a strainer into a small saucepan. On a low heat, mix 3 tablespoons of sugar into the yam paste, and let the moisture escape for a while, stirring constantly. Cool the paste in the fridge.
For the syrup, heat 1/4 cup of water in a small saucepan. Throw in sliced and crushed ginger, dried orange peel and 2 tablespoons of sugar. Simmer down until the liquid becomes syrupy. Cool the syrup in the fridge.
When the paste and the syrup are nice and cool, start the dumplings. Mix water into the shiratamako (sweet rice flour) little by little. The best way to mix them is to use your hand, and when the dough is "tender as earlobe," stop adding water. (The above amount is just for an idea. Adjust the amount for yourself, aiming for a dough that's not powdery but doesn't stick to your hands too much. Drier dough is easier to handle.) Meanwhile, boil 2 cups of water in a saucepan. When the dough has the right texture, form it into small balls--about 1 inch in diameter--and flatten them between your palms. Make a dent in the middle so the dumplings will cook evenly.
Drop the dumplings one by one into boiling water. They'll sink to the bottom at first, but they'll float to the surface when they're done. When they come up to the surface, take them out with a slotted spoon and cool in a bowl of cold water. (Don't put them in the fridge, because excessive chill makes them toughen.) Assemble the dumplings, yam paste and ginger syrup in a nice dessert bowl and serve. The dumplings have a tender yet resilient texture, and retain the subtle hint of its rice origin in flavor. The kicky heat of the ginger is pretty nice in this otherwise sweet dessert. Best with hot green tea!
Chili, originally grown in Latin America and "discovered" by the European invaders during the 15th and 16th centuries, is probably one of the most widespread ingredients in the world. It seems that a myriad of different chili "peppers" are cultivated and used pretty much everywhere in the world. (Though chili is often called a pepper, the two species aren't related.) Japan is not an exception; since the introduction of the red chili in the late 16th century, the spicy fruit has become an indispensable part of the Japanese traditional cuisine. According to an Wikipedia article, soon after its introduction to Japan, chili replaced black peppers, which had been introduced from Persia via China and widely used as the source of spicy heat. The fact that black peppers were more commonly used for seasoning udon noodles seem rather odd to the modern Japanese ears, because we're now so used to using chili for that purpose that using black pepper in udon almost sounds exotic and innovative.
Red chili gave rise to a very popular spice mix, "shichimi to-garashi." "Shichimi" means "seven flavors," while "to-garashi" means "foreign spicy stuff." In a culinary tradition that doesn't have too many other spice mixes, shichimi (as it's often called) is a curiosity. Because red chili was imported as a medicine, the shichimi was born in a pharmaceutical district of Tokyo called Yagenbori. ("Yagen" is a mortar that apothecaries used to grind medicinal herbs and spices.) In 1625, an apothecary mixed red chili with Szechuan peppers, mandarin orange peels, black sesame, poppy seeds, etc., all of which had purported medicinal value, to create a condiment with a health appeal. Thus created, shicnimi became a mainstay in the urban Edo culture where people sprinkled it generously in their soba noodles for an extra kick. I use shichimi in miso soup, especially when it contains chicken or pork; on soba and udon; and most frequently on kimpira veggies.
Amazingly enough, after nearly 400 years, the descendants of the original shichimi maker are still in the same business in Asakusa district of Tokyo. Their spice store, Yagenbori Nakajima Shoten, is considered to be one of the three most revered shichimi producers in Japan. Unfortunately, most people, including myself, rely on national brands like S&B, photographed above, for everyday use, but the flavors and aromas are much stronger in the freshly ground and freshly mixed shichimi sold at traditional shichimi stores.
When Patrick and I visited Sanja Matsuri (a huge, energetic festival in Asakusa) last year, we saw a stall selling the traditional shichimi. With boxes of colorful ingredients--red chili, golden sesame seeds, green nori and so on--and the old vendor guy in a traditional artisan outfit, the stall made me feel as if I'd slipped into the bustling streets of Edo, 300 years ago. The wonderful thing about these traditional stores and stalls is that you can have them make your shichimi according to your own taste. If you want it more citrusy, they'll add more orange peel. If you like heat, they'll increase the ratio of red chili. Furthermore, each store has its own recipe: Yawataya Isogoro in Nagano prefecture, for example, uses ginger and shiso, which gives their mix a refreshing fragrance. I believe there is a permanent stand along the Nakamise mall that leads up to the Asakusa Temple (Senso-ji), so if you'd like a taste of traditional Japanese spice mix, and happen to be in Japan, check out that store. Otherwise, shicnimi is available in small jars at Japanese grocery stores, and many of the Asian grocers as well.
Young garlic stalks bring us the sense of early summer. They are the tender stem of the flowering part of the garlic plants that grow exponentially in this season. Their season is so short that whenever I see them, I cannot resist buying them. They're tasty in stir-fries, but they can also be made into a refreshing ethnic salad. My mom gave me this recipe; I don't know where she got it, but it's most likely been handed to her by one of her friends who likes to experiment. It's a very simple recipe similar to the now-familiar cucumber salad, but the fresh, green flavor of the young garlic stalks seems to be more pronounced in this salad than in stir-fries.
Thai Garlic Stalk Salad(for two)
Boil the garlic stalks until they're tender (but not mushy or soggy). Add a pinch of salt, if you like, to the boiling water to prevent discoloration. Rinse them under cold, running water. Meanwhile, mix Thai sweet chili sauce and Nam Pla in a bowl. Toss the garlic stalks in the sauce, place in individual bowls and sprinkle with chopped peanuts.
I've seen some Japanese cook bloggers make the sweet chili sauce from scratch. I don't think I can be that slow-foodesque (thus I have the category "cheat cuisine"), but I do admire their ambition. According to one of my favorite food bloggers (an older husband-and-wife collaboration with beautiful food porn shots and witty writing well-versed in Japanese traditional comedy), sweet chili sauce could be made with tamarind, sugar, Nam Pla, garlic and To Ban Djan (Chinese chili sauce). Wow. I might try this sometime, but for now, I'd just stick to the sauce out of a bottle...
Ma Po Tofu is an ubiquitous staple in Chinese restaurant in Japan. From dingy, family-run eateries to upscale restaurants, every Chinese restaurant seems to have this dish on the menu. The Japanese like this aromatic and spicy tofu concoction from Sichuan so much that there are a wide range of ready-made sauce mix for Ma Po Tofu available in supermarkets. As a result (?), I'm quite fond of the dish, and sometimes get craving for it.
Culinary history has it that Ma Po Tofu was first created by a common Chinese wife as a cheap yet filling dish during the Qing Dynasty. Its Japanese incarnation features cubed tofu, which is stir-fried in a thick and spicy sauce with ground pork and green onions. The signature aroma and tongue-numbing spiciness of the original Chinese version derive from two different spices--red chili (usually in the form of To Ban Djan and Sichuan peppercorn--but the Japanese version often skimps on Sichuan peppercorn to suit the less spice-resistant Japanese palate.
We spent the morning running some errands today, and when we got home a few hours past noon, I had a mild craving for the dish. Luckily, I had a package of tofu, ground pork and spices, so I decided to make Ma Po Tofu for lunch. For some reason, though, I didn't feel like eating the brown gravy (which is what Ma Po Tofu usually looks like), so I made a few adjustments to accommodate my weird temporary aversion to brownness. Because I omitted most of the brown ingredients (soy sauce and oyster sauce), the dish came out much lighter both in color and in flavor. I think this might be a good Ma Po Tofu derivative for a hot summer day. If you're interested in a recipe closer to the original Chinese dish, though, Food Network has a decent-looking recipe here, in a section appropriately titled "Budget Gourmet."
Greener Ma Po Tofu (for two mild appetites)
For the sauce, mix the following together beforehand:
First, drain the tofu by wrapping it in paper towel on a plate. I recommend using American-made tofu for this dish, because Japanese ones tend to retain more moisture and take more time to properly drain (plus they are more fragile). Chop up the green onions, Asian chives, ginger and garlic. Heat 1 tablespoon of sesame oil in a large enough pan (or in a wok, if you have one) and fry the aromatics till they start to emit their awesome fragrance. Add ground pork and fry till it's cooked. Season with salt and pepper.
Cut the tofu into 1/2-inch cubes. (If you get a Japanese tofu, this step gets trickier: because Japanese tofu is so fragile, it often requires that you place it on your palm and cut it by gently pushing a knife through, without forward or backward motion. Get a firm American tofu to avoid this excitement.) Add the cubed tofu in the pan and gently stir-fry for a few minutes so that you won't break up the tofu too much. Give the pre-mixed sauce a final stir (corn starch is quick to settle on the bottom) and pour it in the pan. You might want to turn the heat down a bit to let the sauce simmer to its appropriate thickness. Meanwhile, ground the Sichuan pepper. When the sauce is at the right consistency (not runny, but not blobby, either), drizzle one tablespoon of sesame oil and sprinkle the Sichuan pepper. Mix lightly, and serve.
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Spice House (with multiple locations) has excellent Sichuan peppercorns. This aromatic spice adds a wonderfully refreshing fragrance to everything from Asian cole slow to chilled shrimp noodles. At $2.09 for a small jarful (1 oz), it's worth the investment.
During the season, I get my supply of Asian chives from the organic Henry's Farm in Evanston Farmers Market, but they're also available in Asian grocery stores like my perennial favorite H Mart.
Recently I've been thinking about recipes and copyright. Several Japanese blogs alerted me to this question; they had explicit warnings against "copy-and-pasting the copyrighted recipes" on their sites. "Copyrighted recipes!?" I thought. It had never occured to me that recipes could be copyrighted.
Curious, I went to the U.S. Copyright Office to see if a recipe could be copyrighted. According to the laws regarding the issue, it appears that recipes could be copyrighted as literature. While the method itself cannot be copyrighted, recipes "accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions" could. In the same vein, cookbooks could be copyrighted as a specific combination of recipes. Japan seems to have a similar understanding of the copyright surrounding recipes.
According to an article in Food & Wine, there is a movement in a corner of the culinary world to change the copyright law to include recipes--cooking methods themselves. Implicated in that movement is none other than Homaro Cantu, the executive chef at Moto. Given what he does with his molecular gastronomy (edible menus, foam of food extract, etc.), it is understandable that Cantu wants to copyright his recipes. Both in form and process, his cuisine might resemble an art object than food in the traditional sense of the word. And yet, there’s still something strange about the idea.
A part of that discomfort comes from the fact that recipes, traditionally, are a result of collaborative effort. Behind many dishes, there are generations of cooks, both amateur and professional, who learned, modified and shared the recipes. An innovative chef might make a radical change in the cooking method or the ingredients to a recipe, but chances are, there still is some sort of an original on which he bases his innovation.
Furthermore, even if a truly innovative chef comes up with a strikingly new dish that doesn't resemble anything else, his creation might very well be a mutated cross-reference of two or more traditional recipes or cuisines. (This process is sort of similar to that post-modern favorite idea of intertextuality, I suspect.) I realize that a similar confluence occurs in the area of arts, which does enjoy copyright protection, so the fact that there are many culinary traditions behind a dish alone cannot justify the lack of copyright protection in cooking methods.
And yet, copyrighting recipes seem to be rather contradictory to the communal nature of cooking and eating. I cook dishes I learned from my mother (who might have learned it from her grandma, or from her friend), eat it with my friends and family, and while eating, share the recipe with others around the table. I do modify recipes and sometimes come up with a new combination of ingredients and condiments, but sharing these ideas with others seem to be a rather crucial part of cooking and eating--because I might have learned the recipe from someone else who was also willing to share it, because I might have gotten the idea from someone’s suggestion, or because I might have simply combined two culinary traditions that usually don't mix together. I'd feel like I should reciprocate. Of course, there's probably a whole other set of pressure and competition when you cook for a living, and it must be quite frustrating to see someone else run a successful business with a menu that's a complete copy of your own (which you spent weeks to develop). But still.
The copyright situation surrounding the Japanese food bloggers may be closer to the professional cooks' than that of some random amateur like me. In Japan, quite a few cook-bloggers, not necessarily professional but with an admirable skills and talents, have had their recipe books published purely because of their popularity in the cyberspace. If you are looking for an opportunity like that, it is understandable that you would like to prevent others from copying your ideas and recipe modifications, for that would erode the appeal of your brilliant originality.
And of course, the food is not simply nourishment. As I wrote before, cooking exotic food, adding an original twist to an existing dish, and coming up with an unheard-of recipes are talents that are highly valued among the Japanese cook bloggers. Their food/cooking life seems almost all-encompassing: Who cooks the coolest food is deemed the coolest person. Although the cook-bloggers may not openly admit it (because they blog "for fun," "to make friends" and "to share recipes"), there is definitely an element of competition. Since the coolest cook on the block (pun not intended!) might get a chance to get her recipe book published, the competition only intensifies.
And, as you might have suspected, I see this competition with a bit of weariness. The cook-bloggers are creating a huge reservoir of cooking references as they reference each other and try to come up with something new, and I certainly do benefit from their effort. (Hell, I've borrowed ideas...) But at the same time, going for copyright protection for their recipes seem a bit too far-fetched. It is also true that there are predatory companies that exploit the accumulation of unprotected amateur recipes for profit, but when we start to think only defensively, we may be stifling our own creative freedom and our tie to all the other cooks and cuisines from which we draw.
I don't know if they're the same wild strawberries whose extremely fragile flesh held Russ Parsons (author of How to Pick a Peach) agonizing here, but there is a reliable patch of wild strawberries in the back of my parents' house. (I'm not disclosing its location, because they're all mine!) When I found the patch during the first summer in Chicago four years ago, I was crazy with joy. I couldn't believe I could pick wild, and even better yet, edible, strawberries just a few steps from home. Since then, my mom and I have picked these tender delicacies every summer. Perhaps because they're so tiny, these wild berries are much more densely sweet and aromatic than the huge Drisxxl strawberries.
This year, I'd been procrastinating the strawberry hunt. There were two things against this annual event: the aggressive blackbirds and omnipresent cicadas. Along the marshy area behind the strawberry patch, the blackbirds (red-winged blackbirds) nest in the reeds. Their breeding season, rather annoyingly, is just about the same as the height of the strawberry season. When I go out for a strawberry hunt, therefore, I have to duck the pissy blackbirds that dart straight toward my face from their high vantage point on the power lines. They don't actually try to peck me, but they are very good at scaring me away from their young ones (and those juicy strawberries).
And this year, there were cicadas. In Glenview (where my parents live), the cicadas were everywhere. The whole forests were pulsing with their sounds--sort of like a million wind-up toys released at the same time. The sidewalks were strewn with their crunchy shells and crunchy carcases, forcing everyone to tiptoe to avoid them. In forest preserves, dozens of stray cicadas flew into the face of anyone who ventured in. I imagined the little grove by the strawberry patch to be quite the same, and was reluctant to get near it. So, I'd delayed the strawberry hunt till today.
On the way to the strawberry patch.
As I'd been suspected, it was a bit too late for the height of the strawberry season, but there was a few late bloomers left. The fun of strawberry hunt, at least in my patch (note the unwarranted possessive!), is that I have to sort of comb through the other plants to find the tiny, ruby-colored fruits dangling just a few inches above ground. My eyes take some time to get re-attuned to the scenery. At first, I don't see any berries at all. All I see is a sea of leaves. What catches my eyes are the reddened tips of the strawberry leaves. After a while, I see a cluster. It is when I kneel on the ground that the tiny red berries start to burst into my visual consciousness. Where I didn't see anything but stalks of grass and leaves of ox-eye daisies, now I see strawberries. Because it was later in the season, much of the berries have already ripened and fallen to the ground, and many of the ones still on the vine had started to dry out. (These "naturally dried" strawberries were pretty tasty, actually.) The entire area, as I crouched on the ground, exuded an overwhelmingly sweet fragrance, probably from the overripe, half-rotting berries on the ground. It was almost like smelling a huge pot of perfect strawberries slowly cooking on a confectioner's stove.
This year's bounty.
I gathered a small bowlful and went home. (The butterflies were becoming bothersome.) As Russ Parsons lamented in the above article (he ordered a package of wild strawberries across the country, which arrived as a pool of mushy strawberry juice--even with layers of protection that the producer of the fruits carefully placed around the berries), my wild strawberries showed signs of their fragility. After only about twenty minutes of sitting in a plastic bag, many of them had smashed surface and their precious juice had stained the inside of the bag. I rinsed them quickly, removed the stems, and contemplated what to do with them.
Update: I (predictably) made a tiny quantity of strawberry jam. Being about a tablespoonful, it disappeared in a blink of an eye!
If you like variety, you might be a little weary of the onslaught of all these barbecue-get-togethers. If that's the case (or even if you're totally fine with lots of invariable barbecues), you might try different marinades for the meat you slap onto the grill. America has lots of amazing barbecue sauces, but so does East Asia, where I came from. I recently made a Korean-style barbecue marinade at home, and it was soooo good I'm going to share it.
To make about a cup of Korean BBQ Marinade, you'll need the following:
The key to a well-rounded marinade is to sautée the onion and garlic thoroughly, until their stinging raw smell dissipates. First, purée the chopped onion and garlic cloves in a food processor, and fry them in heated sesame oil, slowly on low heat. Meanwhile, mix all the other ingredients in a separate bowl, and add chopped prunes in the mix. Purée this mixture as well. When the raw smell is gone and replaced by that nice, sweet-ish aroma of cooked onions, add the mixture into the saucepan. Mix well and cook for about 15 minutes, on low heat. Stir occasionally to prevent burning.
I marinated strips of beef rib meat in this sauce for a few hours, fried them in a pan, and added some more of the sauce at the end of the cooking. Using shredded daikon, shredded carrots, mizuna and boiled spinach, I made this Korean barbecue into a slightly healthier fare, but I could have accompanied the meat with grilled veggies as well. The sauce had that spicy, sweet and complex flavor of the pre-made Korean BBQ sauces that I sometimes crave, so I was very happy.
To be specific, the Korean BBQ sauce I'm talking about is the Korean BBQ sauces made and sold in Japan. Korean BBQ is called “yakiniku” in Japanese, meaning, simply, “grilled meats.” Yakiniku shows a heavy influence from the Korean-style BBQ; its origin is considered to be the grilled meats that the Korean people, who had been brought over to Japan for forced labor during the WWII, cooked for themselves after the war. (Discriminated and massively underpaid, they used cheap or unwanted organs.) This grilling method and marinade soon spread, and developed into something uniquely Japanese over the years. The boundary is decidedly blurry; Some considers yakiniku to be Korean, others see it as a part of the Japanese everyday food. One thing for sure is that the yakiniku marinade in Japan deviates a little bit from the "real" Korean BBQ sauces used in Korea; nevertheless, it is the less authentic Japanese ones that I thirst for.
Since all the ingredients have been cooked with lots of salt and sugar, the sauce should keep in the fridge for at least a week. I know this marinade requires a lot of "exotic" condiments (like toban djan and mirin), so if you have any question about where to get them, what the hell they are, and what to substitute them with, feel free to leave a comment! (Or, you can be totally lazy and get the pre-made ones in Asian grocery stores, too. Pre-made ones are pretty tasty, and I used to use them exclusively, although I might not go back to the habit now that I've discovered the joy of making it myself.)
Now...what I want is a charcoal grill and an apartment with a porch to cook the meat marinated in this sauce. And a beer. Then my life would be sooooo peachy.
If you've ever been to grocery stores that cater to East Asian people, you might have seen a peculiarly long root vegetable called burdock. Called "gobo" in Japanese, burdock roots are one of the staple vegetables on Japanese tables. Burdocks have a wonderfully earthy, slightly pungent flavor that anything else I know has. This strong flavor seeps out, as burdocks cook with other veggies or meats, and permeates the entire dish. Burdocks have a texture similar to parsnips', and when cooked quickly, burdocks retain their crispiness.
Today, I had a bit of leftover beef turning unappetizing gray in the fridge, so I decided to make "kimpira gobo" with a fresh burdock root and the beef. In a nutshell, kimpira gobo is a side dish made with burdocks and carrots, quickly fried and flavored with sesame oil, soy sauce and sugar. Although it doesn't always use meat, kimpira gobo would be a good disguise for the not-so-fresh-anymore beef, because it also uses ginger and aromatic red chili mix called "shichimi."
Kimpira Gobo (Quick-Fried Japanese Burdock)
To prepare the burdock, you don't have to peel it. Indeed, with its tough texture, it might be pretty difficult to peel it (I've never tried). Instead, you can just wash it vigorously with the rough side of a Scotch-bright type of sponge, until the soil-colored outer skin has been scrubbed off. (Compare the colors of the burdocks in the two photos.)
The traditional way to cut burdocks for kimpira gobo is either to thinly julliene it or to shave it into tiny leaf-shaped pieces (this method is called "sasagaki," meaning "shredded like bamboo leaves"). Since I'm pretty bad at doing the "sasagaki" method, I usually julienne my burdocks. This time, though, I used the "rangiri" method, which maximizes the flavor-intaking surface area (see the photo). You place the knife at a low angle, and roll the burdock about 70 degrees before you make the next cut. (This sounds so precise and scientific, but it really isn't!) Cut whatever beef you had at hand into little bits, if it's not ground.
Heat the sesame oil in a small saucepan and fry the chopped ginger until it starts to release its distinctive aroma. Add beef and fry, and when it's about done, add burdock and fry over medium heat, stirring constantly. After about five minutes, add the soy sauce and sugar and mix well. Turn the heat down and cover the pan to let it simmer for another five minutes. (The steam cooks the burdock through.) When the burdock is cooked through, sprinkle some shichimi or red chili pepper flakes and sesame seeds (if you'd like).
Hey, this isn't going to make a meal, you might say. And you're right. Kimpira gobo alone isn't going to make a meal. It's going to be a part of a meal with probably rice, miso soup, maybe a broiled fish, and perhaps another veggie dish (like the easy cucumber salad I wrote about here). Since kimpira gobo keeps in the fridge for nearly a week, Japanese cooks simply pulls it out every once in a while to add a dish to the meal. They usually have multiple backup dishes like this (called "sozai" or more politely "osozai") to fall back on. When their family starts to complain about the monotony, they might chop it up and mix it in Japanese-style omelette (called "tamagoyaki") or use it to make seasoned rice (called "takikomi gohan" or "maze gohan"). For weekend breakfast, I like to make scrambled eggs with it.
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Burdock buying tip: Many of the burdocks available here have grown too much and/or have been too long out of the soil. These have much tougher texture and are better avoided. For a fresher and more tender one, look at the cut bottom of the burdocks and choose one without a brown "ring" inside--this brown ring appears when the burdock gets old. If the flesh has started to break up in the middle, don't buy it--it'll be stringy.
Continued from the previous post about the recent history of Japanese eating habits.
The recent Japanese interest in "other" "ethnic" cuisines, especially those from Asian countries, is rather similar to the ethnic food boom in the United States. Eating at ethnic restaurants and cooking ethnic food at home are considered to be the proof of one's awareness and appreciation of the exotic beauty. Being able to appreciate the exotic is, in turn, an expression of one's truly "international" character--something that has been much hyped about in Japan in the last few decades (as is evident in their feverish desire to master the English language). And oddly enough, the Japanese interest in once-neglected regional food of their own country may be seen in the same light.
Even during the westernization of the Japanese eating and cooking habits, certain types of Japanese cuisine survived as a much revered tradition. Sushi, which is originally a Tokyo fast food, spread to the entire country, and enjoying expensive, super-fresh sushi remained firmly grounded in the Japanese eating habits. Similarly, things like "kaiseki ryori," an elaborate, myriad-course meal with its origin in tea ceremony, continued to be deeply revered as a very-special-occasion meal. But these did not include ingredients and cooking methods indigenous to most of the regions within Japan. Regional cuisines were (considered to be) merely down-home, grandma-style cooking, which one would only enjoy when back at home. You would never have run into a trendy restaurant that served regional food. There were certainly restaurants that specialized in regional cuisines, especially in urban areas where people from all over Japan craved for the down-home cooking of their regions, but these establishments were usually not hip or trendy. This type of down-home regional restaurants still abound in Japanese cities, and remain to be great places to appreciate the wide variety of regional specialties (and sometimes, oddities).
In the past decade or so, however, the scenery has changed dramatically. The Japanese epicureans have found a new fountain of exotic food in their own country. They did not abandon French, Italian and other conventionally "cool" cuisines, but they started to pay much more attention to the different regional cuisines and ingredients within Japan (along with Thai, Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian cuisines in particular). The recent explosion of interest in traditionally produced vinegars (which was the starting point of this long series of posts) is just one aspect of this re-discovery. It is a full circle, in that the Japanese, who once pursued Western cuisine and followed the standardized national cuisine, started to look back into the regional origins of their cooking and eating habits. But in a few significant ways, it's not just a completion of the circle of capricious culinary trends.
First, the regional cooking and ingredients are now very much a part of the consumer economy, which attaches all sorts of fantasies to its commodities to sell them. So, even though the regional cuisines might have been a part of the mundane (for those who come from the specific regions), they are now exotic food in the eyes of the Japanese consumers who have lost (or never even had) the tie to the foods' origins. Closely tied to this commercialization of the regional cuisines is the tremendous change in the way the Japanese people assign meaning to food and eating. Perhaps it is just a nostalgic fantasy on my part to imagine a time when food didn't carry any meaning beyond subsistence and familial (and/or communal) sharing, but the degree of fantasization that now surrounds food and cuisines seems rather unprecedented in the Japanese history.
As I've touched upon earlier, the consumption in restaurants , and re-creation at home, of certain food items, be it a Thai curry or a specialty from Hokkaido, mean that the eater or the creator has a cool lifestyle with a flair or two. It also means that the eater or the creator can afford that luxury, both economically and psychologically. (Leisure is a psychological state, as much as an economic one.) Being able to "enjoy small moments in life" seems to be one of the hallmark of the "cool" lifestyle among the Japanese food bloggers. Procuring (often over the internet) regional specialties and cooking it up in a recently popularized traditional method seems to fit perfectly into that ideal. It doesn't take an exorbitant amount of money, unlike going to a high-end French restaurant in Shinjuku. Rather, it takes connoisseurship and creativity--two highly prized attributes (at least as far as I can tell through reading various Japanese food blogs and comments left on them). For the most part, the people who support the renaissance of the regional condiments, cooking methods and ingredients are common people with mortgages to pay, children to raise, and/or retirement plan to worry about. With relatively small amount of money, regional condiments and ingredients can give them the edge that’s lacking in the mundane.
To be continued, yet again, till a future post on the role of internet and "otoriyose" boom in the regional food renaissance...
It's hot. I know it's not that hot, relatively speaking, but I feel pretty hot. I suppose I've become sufficiently Chicagonized...
It's so hot that our dinner table frequently features chilled noodles. I used to buy pre-made package of chilled noodles (called "hiyashi chuuka," meaning "chilled Chinese noodles") from Mitsuwa, but recently I've been experimenting from scratch. My staple sauce for Chinese fusion chilled noodles has been varying mixtures of aromatic herbs and spices in soy sauce, vinegar and a bit of sugar and sesame oil, but recently I tried a different, less saucy version.
I used the shrimp noodles from the Viet Hoa Plaza (link via Chicagoist). These thin wheat noodles contain powdered shrimp, and release a subtle, oceany flavor when cooked. Because I wanted to make the sauce a lot simpler than my usual fair, I figured that extra shrimpy flavor in the noodles would be a nice addition.
Chilled Shrimp Noodles in Oyster Sauce with Sichuan Peppercorn (for two; approximate amount, as usual)
It seems too simple to proudly present as a recipe... All you need to do is to boil the shrimp noodles, rinse them under cold running water (to give them a nice, resilient texture) and toss them in the sauce. The only twist I gave was a mixture of ground Sichuan (Szechuan or Szechwan) peppercorn and red chili peppers; I used a pinch each and pounded them in a mortar with a pestle. (For a Szechuan cole slow I made with this aromatic spice, see this post.)You can add whatever veggies you'd like to serve with it, but for this meal, I used a tomato and a few scallions.
The combination of two ocean-derived flavors--oyster sauce and shrimp noodles--turned out to be pretty good. Since most oyster sauces have sweetness added, this deceivingly simple list of ingredients can create a fairly complex mix of flavors. I really liked the dish; it was a nice departure from my usual fair of soy sauce, vinegar and lots of garlic and ginger. I'm definitely making this again this summer.
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Our Sichuan Peppercorn came from the always reliable Spice House.
1512 N. Wells St., Chicago, IL
312-274-0378
As the summer sun started to bake the region, Patrick and I joined Danielle and Margarette of Slow Food Chicago for a food tour of Little Village Today. We were ten minutes late to the meeting spot, in front of the Panadería La Baguette on the 26th street, but managed to join the tour before they headed into the Mexican bakery. The walking tour was along the 26th street, which gives you the impression of being in Mexico, with its Spanish signs and lots of street vendors of tamales and horchata. Many of the businesses we stopped at--La Baguette, Dulce Landia (a Mexican candy store chain), El Milagro tortilla factory, among others--weren't extremely new to us, since we live in a Latino-heavy neighborhood in Rogers Park. But we did get to try things we'd never had enough courage to try before.
Fresh-baked sweet bread waiting to be displayed at Panadería La Baguette
A worker at El Milagro tortilla factory swiftly packs bags of tortillas behind a large container of fresh masa
The fresh-off-the-oven tortillas we nibbled on in front of the tiny El Milagro store were wonderfully moist and flavorful. Though they demanded that we eat them with some salsa or mole, the yellow and white tortillas just baked in the factory at the back of the store were quite far from the stale ones you might find in your local Jewel store. Patrick and I usually get our tortilla fix from the Morse Mart, which stocks very fresh tortillas, but still the ones right off the factory tasted better.
As Chicagoans might remember, the shopping mall in which La Baguette does its business was recently in the news. In April, INS conducted a heavily armed raid on a storefront fake ID manufacturer in that mall. This raid had left a deep gash in the community of Little Village. According to some of the business owners, the area, which used to be always packed like festival days, are now deserted. "Everyone's scared," one of them said. Indeed, as we walked down the 26th street around 10 in the morning, it was eerily quiet. The mall's parking lot was only half full, and the wide sidewalks seemed vastly empty. Food vendors stood empty-handed at street corners, without customers.
"So we just made her day," someone joked, as we sipped champurrado from small plastic cups. "We might be her only customers today." She laughed, but there was something chilling about what was meant to be a joke. The champurrado itself--an Aztec-style hot chocolate thickened with masa and flavored with cinnamon--was quite good, though I'd prefer to have it during winter. We crossed the street and tried little bit of horchata--sweet drink made with rice flour--from another street vendor.
An horchata vendor at the corner of 26th and Kedzie (or Sawyer)
Dulce Landia feels like a dream jungle of various candies and colorful piñatas suspended from the ceiling.
We also nibbled on some imported Queso Oaxaca from Cremaria Santa Maria, a few gorditas from Aguascalientes (they allegedly invented this poor-man's feast of cooked meat and cheese in corn-based pocket bread) and a few different Mexican candies from Dulce Landia. Again, none of this was news to me, but it was fun to actually try things I'd been aware of but never tried. Sometimes it requires a lot of chutzpa to walk into ethnic stores and restaurants that seem to only cater to the people of that ethnicity, as if I were intruding in their private sphere. Being a part of a tour partially numbed that sense of intrusion (I don't know if it's a good thing of not, though), and made it easier to enjoy the unfamiliar food.
If I were to choose one "most fun" place from our tour, I would pick Dulce Landia. With hundreds of different candies piled high and lots of colorful piñatas (those paper dolls stuffed with sweets, which blindfolded Mexican children attacks fiercely with a stick on festive occasions) hanging from the ceiling, it reminded me of the candy stores I went to as a kid in Japan. Danielle, who was volunteering to give a tour, recommended two traditional sweets: goat milk caramels (called "cajetas") and a chewy candy made of tamarindo and sugar, coated with chili powder. I liked the tamarindo candy a lot. Sweet, sour and spicy at once, it reminded me of something I'd had before. Though the sense of palate nostalgia was quite wonderful, I couldn't locate the memory of that flavor. I might have had something similar in my childhood in Bangkok, or maybe I was conflating it with a similar Japanese candy made from sugar and pickled plums. Either way, those tamarindo candies were addictively distinctive. Another pleasant surprise was marzapan-like sweets made from peanut powder. Fragile and delicate, it burst with the nutty peanut flavor when put into my mouth. Since there's a Dulce Landia within a few minutes' walk from our apartment, we'll probably revisiting them pretty soon.
I was curious how an American Slow Food movement would establish its identity in a country where there is no truly "traditional" cuisine that lives on as a part of our everyday life (as there are in Italy). I still need to process what I heard and saw during the tour to really wright about this, but joining the tour was definitely an interesting experience, both in seeing a community I'd never been to and in hearing a small part of what the Slow Food people are thinking right here in Chicago.
A family waiting to get their cups of cool horchata
Last night, I wrote a rather bitchy review of a sushi bar on Randolph (Sushi Wabi) at Gapers Block Drive Thru. Our dinner involved super-sweet wasabi sauce and curiously soggy, strangely mushy seared tuna. Given the pumped-up price of this trendy sushi place, I don't think I'm going back there anytime soon...
You can read the review here.
Okay, this was going to be the last of the three-part vinegar story, but it's spiraling out of control, stretching into the recent Japanese history and what not... I'm going to post the first half of it here.
So I'm back to vinegar. In the previous post, I left off the topic with a remark about the increased interest in traditional regional cuisines in Japan in recent years. (The first part of the vinegar sequence, one about a successful PR campaign by a large producer is here.) This trend may be seen as a grand culinary circle that started with homogenization and Westernization in the Meiji Restoration era now coming to a completion with a renaissance of regional food traditions of the old days.
Japan, though small, was divided into even smaller regions, especially before the Meiji Restoration in the mid-19th century, by a bunch of different factors. One large factor is geographical: steep mountains and wide rivers often drew natural boundaries beyond which people did not interact. In the long, relatively peaceful years under the Edo Shogunate (which lasted for about 250 years without too many disturbances), the shogunate promoted this regional division, with the hope of keeping its subjects from forming horizontal alliances behind its back. The idea was to keep the "han" (smaller geopolitical entities led by feudal lords who exercised certain amount of autonomy within their boundaries but were under direct control of the shogunate) separate from each other. This policy of geographical isolation somewhat matched the feudal lords' need to keep their subjects under control. People were not free to travel, and both the shogunate and the individual han's established checkpoints ("seki" or "seki-sho") at strategic junctions along the road system to control the flow of travelers, ranging from samurai's on business to merchants, itinerant theaters and pilgrims.
This strict restriction of travel, combined with the natural obstacles, kept different regions in Japan fairly unique and isolated until very recently. Geographical, political and economical isolation enabled these regions retain their linguistic and cultural variations, and these included, of course, food and cuisine.
All this started to change when the Meiji government abolished the "han" system and established prefectures under direct control of the central government. In order to strengthen the nation's economy and military to face the imminent threat of colonization by the Western countries (the Japanese officials had seen the colonization of China after the First Opium War, 1840-42 with alarm), the central government tried to integrate the previously fragmented country into a powerful and coherent nation state. (Much like the case in Italy around the time of its unification, ordinary Japanese people probably didn't have the sense of "Japan" as a nation. Their loyalty was tied much more strongly to the "han" to which they used to belong.) Food and cooking may not have been the newborn government's primary concern, but this march toward integrated nationhood did have a significant impact on the regional food cultures.
For instance, the Meiji government promoted the consumption of meat--once a taboo in the Buddhist tradition--in order to transform the physique of the Japanese into one that’s fit for a Western-style military. If this kind of deliberate governmental intervention in the field of food and cooking was rare, the increased inter-regional commerce and human interaction accelerated the homogenization of Japanese cooking. Although there still exist a wide range of regional cuisines in the present-day Japan, something that could be called “national cuisine” has come into being in the past century. (Long after the Meiji Restoration, the power of cooking shows and cooking magazines for housewives throughout the 20th century was tremendous in this homogenizing process.)
As was the case with the meat-eating habit, the birth of the standard Japanese national cuisine was often paired with the desire for Western-style cuisine and westernization of lifestyle in general. From the era of the Meiji Restoration (which promoted the slightly hypocritical combination of “Japanese in spirit and Western in practicality” (”wakon-yosai”) all the way after the World War II, all things Western were cool in Japanese eyes. The hostility between Japan and the Western world in the first half of the 20th century dampened the trend a little, but when the United States took over Japan in 1945, the Japanese people were ready to go back to their worship of the West. The particularly Japanese interpretation of Western cuisine (called “yoshoku”), which I discussed a little in the post about okosama lunch, was born in this atmosphere in the early 20th century. Going to restaurants that served “yoshoku” was the coolest thing to do for urban intellectuals for a long time. And in a way, it still is. High-end French and Italian restaurants are still among the most revered places to eat and to be seen among the Japanese who are increasingly more interested in cuisines other than French and Italian.
To be continued (again)!
Where did the shiitake mushrooms go? The last time I saw them, they were happily waiting for their time in a brown bag on the counter top. They were now nowhere to be seen. Did I throw them away by mistake? I didn't remember doing that, but since I know my formidable power of forgetfulness, I figured I tossed out the brown bag without thinking much about it.
"I think I threw out the shiitake mushrooms by mistake," I told Patrick, who was reading something about the Mac's developer conference on Monday. "It's so stupid; I don't even remember doing that, but the bag isn't here, so I think I did it."
"Was that in a paper bag, on the counter?" asked Patrick. He sounded a little anxious. Yeah, I said. "I think I tossed it in the trash," he confessed. "I thought that was the bag of the muffins we ate for breakfast."
He shook the brown bag before tossing it, but the slightly dry, rustling noises of the shiitake mushrooms convinced him that they were the paper muffin cups. Ouch.
So, there went the main ingredient for our Spaghetti Giapponese con Fungi--the easy dinner I planned for the evening. This flavor loss was significant, but I still had some oyster mushrooms and normal white mushrooms, so I decided to stick with the plan, with a bit of alteration.
Originally, I was going to sautée the mushrooms in butter and shallots, add salt and some turning sake, and mix with the pasta. Now that the most significant flavor agent is gone, I had to find something to patch the gap with. What I decided upon is "kobucha," a sort of instant drink made from kelp*. Kobucha usually comes in an airtight can with a tiny plastic spoon, and you dissolve a spoonful of the powdered stuff in hot water and drink it. The drink has a slight green tint, just like green tea. Since its basic ingredients are powdered kelp (kobu, or kombu), salt, sugar and flavoring amino acids, kobucha is widely used to enhance the umami (one of the five basic tastes; the sensation of the full richness of flavors) in Japanese home cooking. I don't like kobucha as a drink, but I'm quite fond of the oceany flavor that it adds to the otherwise straightforward dishes.
So, here is what I did with the pasta with one missing mushroom:
Ingredients (approximation, as usual):
Method for Spaghetti Giapponese con Fungi:
I used just enough olive oil and butter to sautée the mushrooms without getting them burnt, and there's no cream or cheese involved (although you could add them and make it a richer dish). Most of the flavor comes from the mushrooms and shallot, enhanced by the powdered kelp in kobucha. It's a rather simple pasta, but it's chock full of flavor. Although its ingredients are rather oriental (especially if you manage to protect shiitake mushrooms from the evil hands of your significant other :P), but the simplicity is (I think) similar to that of real Italian pasta dishes we enjoyed while in Italy. This went quite well with the light rose, a leftover wine from a few days before.
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* In the U.S. and in Europe, the word "kombucha" is used to refer to a Chinese-origin fermented tea that is drunk for health purposes. I don't know how this confusion started, but the these are two different drinks.
This is a continuation of yesterday's post about the increased consumption of vinegar in Japan and its relation to a PR campaign by a large producer. While I poked around online for information about the Japanese vinegar consumption, I came across a short report prepared by the Development Bank of Japan. This report, though only three pages long, turned out to be a vault of interesting vinegar facts I had no idea about.
In Japan, most of vinegars are made from rice, which is first brewed into sake, using yeast. The alcohol in this sake is then converted into vinegar by introducing various acetic acid bacteria. Old records suggest that the production method of vinegar came from China in the 4th century (along with that of rice-based sake). From the Asuka court in Nara, vinegar started to spread in the Kansai (Western Japan) region, but the spread was slow. Some cities in Osaka and Wakayama became known for different methods of vinegar production, but it was not until Edo period that the use of vinegar became popular among commoners all over Japan. Even now, the Southwestern Japan consumes much more--according to a study, four times more--vinegar than the Northeastern Japan.
In addition to the East-West gap in the consumption of vinegar, there's another complicating factor that we shouldn't ignore when talking about vinegar in Japan. Although there are a few national producers of vinegar (Mizkan, Tamanoi etc.), there are quite a few local producers that make vinegar in traditional ways specific to their regions. One concentration of such producers is in Fukuyama, Kagoshima. Instead of converting ethyl alcohol into vinegar in an accelerated "force-ventilation" method, vinegar makers in Fukuyama let brown rice and wheat ferment naturally in gigantic clay pots. Because of the long fermentation period, the Fukuyama vinegar has a dark cherry wood hue. (This type of vinegar is called "kurozu", black vinegar.) It takes about 3-6 months for fermentation and an additional year or so of aging before kurozu can be shipped out. There are other kinds of regional specialty vinegars, many of them in the Southwestern part of Japan.
In recent years, these regional specialty vinegars have been in the media spotlight. There seems to be two trends merging together to push this trend: the boom in the "health food" industry and another boom in the locally produced specialty food in general. When I did an Amazon.co.jp search for "vinegar," six out of the first 24 results somehow claimed health and aesthetic benefits of eating (and drinking!) vinegar. Three approached regionally produced vinegar as a part of a general quest for high-quality specialty condiments. (Five promoted the use of vinegar as cleaning agent in eco-conscious households, one was a straightforward vinegar recipe book, and others were mysteriously irrelevant results.)
Vinegar has been "discovered" as a new health food that supposedly lowers bad cholesterol, fights allergies, lower blood pressure, accelerates weight loss (a bit thing in already-rail-thin Japan), beautifies skin, and generally betters body condition. Although these healthy claims have never been conclusively proven, many Japanese people have turned to vinegar for a miraculous cure for what ails them (or may ail them in future, if, god forbid, they don't drink vinegar every day!). In this regard, traditionally produced vinegars are regarded as more beneficial than mass-produced ones, because they often contain more of the stuff that's supposed to do good to your health.
The other half of this rather sour phenomenon is the increased interest in regional specialty food in general, but this post is long, I'm getting tired. So that part is for tomorrow...
"Light & Zesty Simmered Chicken" (tori no sappari-ni) is what it's called. It may not look good (it doesn't), but its combination of acidity, saltiness and sweetness is indeed refreshing on a hot summer evening. A typical recipe calls for the following (and I followed this recipe myself):
16 chicken wings
1 cup vinegar
1 cup soy sauce
6 tablespoon sugar
1 clove garlic
1 inch ginger
1/4 cup water
You basically dump everything in a pot (after browning the surface of the chicken, that is) and let it simmer for about an hour to make this dish, but what truly stands out is the exorbitant amount of vinegar that the recipe requires. When I first saw the recipe, I was stunned. A quarter of that amount would probably be enough, I thought. Then I realized: this particular dish was probably made popular, if not invented, by Mizkan, the largest producer of vinegar in Japan. Mizkan produces about half of the vinegar consumed in Japan, so it makes sense that they want Japanese housewives to empty a whole bottle of vinegar for just one family dinner.
I went to their website, and sure enough, there was what seemed to be the original recipe of all the variations you could find online. Many Japanese food bloggers say that they learned about the recipe through a variety of media outlets that Mizkan has used: TV commercials; Mizkan's online recipe book; cooking segments in late-morning and early-afternoon news shows; newspaper ads; and affiliated web sites about health and/or food. Some bloggers say that they followed the recipe they found on the label on the vinegar bottles.
Many bloggers say that they've modified the original recipe to use much less vinegar and soy sauce. This may sound like a failure for Mizkan, whose interest it is to increase the amount of vinegar consumed in Japan, but it is not so. The point of the PR campaign was to introduce the use of vinegar in nimono (simmered-down method of cooking), in which vinegar was almost never used. (The traditional usual suspects for nimono are soy sauce, sugar and some type of stock base.) Many bloggers confess that they'd never thought of using vinegar for nimono before they saw the Mizkan recipe. There may be regional variation, but where I grew up, vinegar's main use was for marinating veggies, making sushi rice and concocting sauces for fried fish. With an exception of sushi rice, these dishes don't require much vinegar--a few tablespoons at the most--and in my mom's kitchen, a bottle of vinegar lasted for a long time. Now that they know they can use vinegar in nimono and add refreshing zest to it, many Japanese cooker-bloggers proudly declare that they keep a bottle of vinegar at hand and turn to it quite often. Some even go as far as stocking more than one kind of vinegar--something completely new in the Japanese down-home cooking.
The Japanese used to consume less than 200,000 kiloliter of vinegar in 1970. In 2003, 450,000 kiloliter of vinegar was used in Japan. The consumption of vinegar more than doubled in 30 years. A graph created by the South Kyushu branch of the Development Bank of Japan (available here, but in Japanese) shows a steady rise of vinegar consumption throughout this period, rather than an explosion in recent years, so it's not entirely fair to attribute all of it to Mizkan's recent PR campaigns. And yet, looking at the online "personal" recipes very similar to Mizkan's version and reading their accounts of how they became interested in cooking this unfamiliar dish, I'm inclined to think that Mizkan's campaign played an important role in increasing the Japanese consumption of vinegar.
There's more about vinegar and PR in Japan, but this post's long enough already, so I'll save that for tomorrow. Stay tuned.
The overall best bakery in Chicago may be the Red Hen Bakery--or it may be the bakery section of the M. Henry. And I'm sure there are other hidden gems, like that elusive baking genius who purportedly sells his divine bread on the streets of Chicago (I searched for this guy, but couldn't find the article...) But when it comes to turnovers, the winner is the one that keeps a low profile.
The bakery is in a desolate stretch of car dealers and strip malls in the Lincolnwood suburbia. Tucked between a Mercedes-Benz dealer and probably a small factory of some sort, it looks like a small factory itself. And that's not too far from the truth: Rolf's Patisserie, the awesome bakery in question here, is basically a baking facility with a nondescript store attached to the front. Even the store section doesn't show much attention in the decorative department: white linoleum floor, fluorescent lights, no cutsy baskets with red-and-white checkered cloth. But that's okay, because their turnovers are to die for.
The filling is nice; tart, sweet and cinnamony. But the true charm of Rolf's turnovers is the crust. It's flaky, but not dry and crumbly. The crust still has the resilience that's a proof of a good pie crust. Just one bite into the buttery crust is enough to tell you of the high quality of the butter they use (and of the generous amount of it, I presume). There's just enough icing on it to give it a sweet kick. I've never had a better turnover in my four years in Chicago, if not in my whole life. My another favorite is the twisted and pretzel-shaped almond pie with lots of sliced almonds and thin thread of icing. Patrick loves their chocolate croissant.
Rolf's seem to do a lot of business outside of their storefront shop. I've seen their out-of-this-world butter cookies and a few European-style cakes in Whole Foods, and can easily imagine other gourmet grocers and restaurants doing business with them. (Come to think of it, I think I first visited their store after utterly amazed by the butter cookies I got from Whole Foods.)
When we go there for the pastries in the morning, we often encounter local elderies chatting away with their pastries and cups of free coffee (when you buy pastries) in front of the large glass window. The store women usually congregate behind the counter filled with colorful cakes, chatting and giggling as they bag cookies and pack cakes into large boxes. Customers come and go, often picking up their special order of birthday cakes and trays of petite fours for get-togethers. It's thoroughly low-key, thoroughly unpretentious--and thoroughly delicious.
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Rolf's Patisserie
4343 Touhy Ave., Lincolnwood, IL
847-675-6565
Last night was so hot I didn't have too much appetite well into the night. (Apparently, when it's too hot, our brain thinks that the heat comes from the post-eating digestion, and therefore get the false idea that we've eaten already. Those "holiday pounds" aren't just a result of turkey roast--they're accumulated throughout the colder months!) Though I'd stir-fried shrimps and fresh asparagus from Green City Market with olive oil, shallots and lemon, what I really wanted was this:
It's a simple but very good dish, made with daikon radish, kmnbu (kelp), abura-age (thin pouch of fried tofu) and shiitake mushrooms. Because the kombu and shiitake release a ton of umami, it only takes a tiny bit of other flavoring, like soy sauce and sugar. I usually add ginger to most of my nimono (simmered-type dishes), but for this one, I don't use ginger. The point is to make it as gentle as possible, so you can savor the full extent of the kombu and shiitake goodness. I think this is sort of Kyoto-style, but I may be wrong; Kyotoans have lots of very subtle techniques when it comes to cooking. I, on the other hand, tend to cook Kanto-style (or Tokyo-style), with soy sauce and sugar often overpowering everything. The ancient Japanese living in Kyoto (those around 8th century onward) looked down on the "Easterners" as inelegant savages, and the difference, if not outright hierarchy, in taste still seems to live on.
The only twist I added to the normal recipe for this taki-awase (literally it means "simmered together") was to grill the abura-age prior to adding them to the broth. I thought it might give them a nice, nutty flavor, but the difference was negligible after the abura-age simmered in the thin broth.
When we were just about ready for dinner last night, the light suddenly went out. And stayed out for about an hour or so. We figured it was probably the wind gusts, but it was kind of fun to have dinner with candle light. Finishing the last bit of preparation with only a candle light was, though, pretty exciting. (And I had to photograph the leftover this morning.) It was a chilling reminder as to how much we rely on electricity...
It's going to be HOT today--the highs predicted to be in the mid-90s. Argh. But then again, Chicago's hot day is nothing compared to hot days in Japan, thanks to the usually low humidity. It's hot, but not stifling. (I was brutally reminded of this difference when I went back to Japan for the first time in three years, on the first day of that year's real hot day. At 7 am, it was already steamy, and by the time we arrived at the Tsukiji fish market on foot around 7:30, my back was a cascade of sweat. Yuck.)
To survive the appetite-killing, hot and humid summer, which lasts from mid-July to late September, Japanese people heavily rely on a variety of chilled noodles. Some traditional ones include udon (thick, wheat-based noodles), soba (delicate, buckwheat-based ones), hiyamugi (spaghetti-thin noodles made of wheat) and somen (even thinner, wheat-based noodles). All of these could be served hot or chilled, but in summer, we eat them overwhelmingly chilled. There's been some foreign influences as well, mainly from neighboring China and Korea. Hiyashi Chuka (chilled Chinese noodles) uses ramen-like noodles and features refreshingly sour, vinegar-based sauce, while spicy, chewy Kankoku Reimen (Korean chilled noodles; naengmyon) has recently achieved a prominent position in the summer chilled noodle war.
I love all kinds of chilled noodles, but here's a basic one: Hiyashi Udon (chilled udon). Since this is my food blog, the recipe is going to be slightly cheat-esque, as usual. You need udon noodles, and pre-made all-purpose sauce mix.
First, boil a large pot of water. Just like you would do when boiling pasta, you should use a lot of water to boil udon. This prevents the noodles from rubbing against each other excessively, which can create slimy coating around them. Follow the instruction on the udon package as to how long it needs to be boiled.
Meanwhile, make the sauce. Traditionally, the sauce comes on the side, and the noodles are dipped in the sauce as you eat them. But this method leads to a lot of leftover sauce, so I usually make a more concentrated version of the dipping sauce and pour it over the noodles. The instruction on the sauce mix bottle usually assumes that you're using it as a dipping sauce, so you can just increase the proportion of the sauce mix to the water, in order to make the pourable sauce. Some aromatic ingredients I mix in this basic sauce are pickled plums (chopped and made into a smooth paste), wasabi, green onions, ginger, sesame paste (tahini sauce could be used), etc. (but not everything at once!). Pickled plum sauce is especially nice in hot summer months, because it adds just enough sourness to the dish to make it refreshing when your body's too hot and exhausted to feel hungry.
Now, when the noodles are done, strain and wash them under cold, running water. This process eliminates the slimy stuff on the surface, while instantly firming up the noodles, giving them a nice, resilient texture. Shake the water off the noodles and place them on plates, then pour the sauce over it. I used some chopped scallions and ground sesame seeds this time, and added flavored boiled eggs (a leftover from this meal. (The two dishes in the background are simmered ferns and spicy stir-fried baby bok choy.)
As I'm sure I'll be cooking many more of the chilled noodle dishes, there'll be a few other recipes showing up here. Stay tuned...
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Some places to get udon noodles and noodle soup mix are as follows:
Mitsuwa Marketplace
100 E. Algonquin Rd., Arlington Hts., IL
(847)956-6699
H Mart
801 Civic Center Dr., Niles, IL
847-581-1212
Sea Ranch
518 Dempster St., Evanston, IL
847-492-8340
Cost Plus World Market
Various locations
Mitsuwa is probably the best place for variety, since it's a large Japanese supermarket. H Mart, a humongous, mainly Korean supermarket, has a decent selection of Japanese noodles and sauce mixes, although it could be difficult to find them in the maze-like clutter of the store. Sea Ranch is a small chain of Japanese grocery stores, and while they can't have everything in their tiny stores, they usually have a few Japanese noodles and sauce mixes to choose from. I've seen at least one kind, each, of soba and udon in Cost Plus World Market, but I'm not sure if they stock Japanese sauce mixes. Some normal supermarkets and higher-end ones like Whole Foods might have a few varieties, too.
This morning I biked down the Lake Shore Path to the Green City Market. Since it's Wednesday, it would be pretty empty, I thought. Wrong. Daley's pet farmers market was just about the most crowded I'd ever seen. There were people everywhere, from a battalion of moms with expensive-looking strollers to a slightly smaller yet sizable army of stylish young men (stylish in a meticulously-created-five-o'clock-shadow-and-carefully-rolled-up-bottoms-of-torn-jeans kind of way). I chained up my bike and walked in, wondering what the deal was. It turned out that Rick Bayless, the stellar chef of Topolobampo and Frontera Grill was doing a kitchen demonstration. One of the vendors at the nearby crepe stand told me that she'd never seen a chef demonstration this popular. (By the way, their cheese & herb crepe was pretty good, though the crepe itself could have been a bit less sweet.)
From a bunch of different stalls, I picked up überfresh asparagus (photographed), two heirloom tomatoes (photographed), about 1/4 pound of shiitake mushrooms and a pint of tiny strawberries. I got some stares when I was biking back home with the bag of strawberries hanging from the handle of my backpack, but that was definitely worth it--most of the fragile fruits survived the bumpy ride along Clark, on my suspension-less road bike. When Patrick comes home, I'll have them with some brownies and the leftover whipped cream (out of a spray can). Though I've snacked on some already...
Apparently, eating local is the "in" thing right now in the food writing industry (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetables, Miracles and Alisa Smith's Plenty immediately come to my mind.) But looking at the veggies and fruits on the farmers' tables this morning in Lincoln Park, I couldn't help noticing the limiting implication of this "locavore" movement. Especially in Chicago.
There were lots of baby greens, asparagus and strawberries. There were quite a few young onions (photographed), chives, snap peas and rhubarbs. But there weren't too many others. Even the things we might think of as perennial staples at supermarkets, like potatoes and carrots, aren't visible in the farmers' market. Not that they should have been--I'm all for seasonality in veggies and fruits. But if I decided to stick to the complete locavore diet, I would be eating baby green salads and grilled asparagus for about a month before other things come in season. (I remember the cucumber hell and eggplant hell when my mom had bountiful years in our backyard veggie garden in Japan.) And what would I eat in winter, anyway?
Frigid Chicago winter aside, I suppose it really comes down to principles. I've been accustomed to being able to eat with a ton of variety, all year round, thanks to the globalized food production and distribution system. This is not just about the cooking methods and cuisines, but also about the ingredients. There's a limit to how many ways you can cook your asparagus. (For me, it's like five or six.) My brain might question the whole system that enables this kind of varied diet, but my spoiled (trained?) palate craves for the very thing that my brain questions. It's a glutton's dilemma that seems to take a lot of determination to solve.
Meanwhile, I'm entertaining the idea of reading either of the locavore books, because, after all, eating what can be produced locally may not be that limiting. Or is this an optimistic illusion?
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Green City Market
At the south end of Lincoln Park, between 1750 N. Clark St. and Stockton Dr.
On Saturday, we went out to Southport for brunch. The destination was the Southport Grocery, whose menu we'd had a glimpse of during our previous visit. I remembered mouthwatering pancakes and omelettes with creative twists, so I was quite excited.
After missing the turn onto Addison and the resultant confusion in the not-so-familiar neighborhood, we arrived at the gourmet grocery-café at around 10. The outside tables had just opened up, but we took a table inside, just by the large front window to avoid the already rising heat while securing enough light for the photographs. The dark brown walls (which is echoed by the same-colored tee shirts that servers wear), aluminum shelves and white tables and chairs insisted that it's a coooool place (which it is).
We sipped their wonderfully punchy coffee while waiting for our brunch. Judging from the fact that the Southport Grocery sells coffee from the two top coffee roasters in the town (Intelligentsia and Metropolis), the coffee probably came from either of the two. It was a bit on the acid side, something I don't like, but otherwise it was a nice coffee, with enough strength for any incurable caffeine addict.
Among four interesting omelette combinations, Patrick's chose one with sausage, mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and pesto. It was very good, if not outstanding (although the herb-sprinkled Tater Tots were quite addictive). The true winner was my Sweet and Savory French Toast, a dish that satisfied both my sweet tooth and savory palate. I often feel tragically conflicted between sugary breakfast and savory breakfast, so this dish was a savior. Three slices of French toast were layered with herbed ham and Gruyére cheese, and were accompanied by a little cup of warm maple syrup. The interior of the French toast was amazing: infused with milk and eggs, it literally melted in my mouth, almost like a very light, fluffy custard pudding.
The fun thing about the Southport Grocery is, as we found out on their menu, that many of the items feature one or more of the specialty goods they sell in the grocery department. So, for example, Patrick's omelette used white balsamic vinegar from the grocery shelf, while the maple syrup on my French toast was an organic variety also from the shelf. The owner Lisa Santos says that she wants to combine two of her biggest passions: dining out and digging around in fine grocery store. Judging from the menu, the Grocery seems to do this quite well. Another fun fact about the store on this "About" page is that it focuses on domestic fine food--something rare in the predominantly Europhobe (but not without a good reason) gourmet grocery industry.
Bottom line: if you're allergic to pretentiousness, don't go there. (A guy in his 30's with designer glasses expressed his love of the store because "their menu is very intelligent". If you think you might start screaming gibberish--I almost did--when you hear this sort of comment at the table next to yours, don't go.) But if you can take some level of hipness and all the emotional baggage that comes with it, give it a try. The space is beautiful, the food is inventive and high-quality.
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Southport Grocery
3552 N. Southport Ave., Chicago, IL
773.665.0100
We'd been to El Famous Burrito just down the street one too many times. Not that their food is bad (it's actually a pretty good bang for the buck), but we felt we should try some other Mexican joints that line the Clark Street between Pratt and Touhy. It's nice to have a favorite neighborhood eatery, but it's also fun to try new ones.
So, the other day for dinner, we went to Quesadillas y Mariscos Doña Lolis near Clark and Morse. A Reader article recommended something called champurrado, "a mixture of masa, chocolate or cocoa, cinnamon and other seasonings." Though we didn't have a faintest idea as to what that was from the description, we were game for it. (We thought it was a bread-like thing, mixed and then baked; in reality, according to this recipe, it's a warm, cocoa-flavored drink thickened with masa.)
The thing is, we didn't look up this info on champurrado before we headed out (too hungry). By the time we finished our seven-minutes walk to the restaurant, I had forgotten what their specialty was. The only thing I remembered was that it involved chocolate. Munching on the homemade tortilla chips loaded with frijoles, I looked for items with chocolate on the menu. None.
"Do you remember the name of their special thing?" I asked.
"Nah, I don't remember," said Patrick.
"I feel like it started with a P," I said (totally wrong).
We decided we were too hungry to remember, and went for the two dishes that sounded good: Patrick got a steak with freshly made guacamole, while I ordered meatballs in chipotle chili sauce. We devoured the thick tortilla chips as we waited for our food. The green sauce had a wonderful peppery flavor (I felt like I was cutting one up right that moment), but the fun part was the brown one. I tried to discern what it was made of, and had no clue. It was very smoky; almost exclusively so. We should have asked the waitress, but she seemed to be so engrossed with a horribly acted drama on one of the many manifestations of Fox Channel that I felt disinclined to interrupt. (Yes, it was something on Fox, not a telenovela on Telemundo. Was there any difference? Perhaps not.)
The food was very good in a rather homey way. My chipotle sauce had just a hint of heat, nothing to make you run for the second glass of cold water. Wrapped up in their homemade tortillas (served in lidded containers to keep them warm), the tender meatballs were quite comforting. Patrick's steak looked intimidating at first. It looked too much like the indestructible, flavorless beef I once had in Madrid, both in color and texture. But when I took a bite into the tortilla-wrapped, guacamole-slathered steak, the premonition immediately dispersed. The beef was on the tough side, that's for sure, but it had a ton of fbeefy flavor (i.e., that greasy goodness) that went fantastic with the onions in the guacamole. The two small quesadillas that came with the steak was a nice touch, too.
When we finished the hearty meal, we noticed a hand-written sign on the wall. "Champurrado," it said. Was that what the Reader article was talking about, I wondered for a moment, but I had absolutely no room for anything else. (We were so full we decided to take a neighborhood walk afterward, if you need an idea as to how large the portion is.) The bill came to just short of $20. You'd pay more here than at El Famous Burrito, but Doña Lolis has a better variety, and the quality of food seems better. So I'd say it's $20 well spent (except that we didn't get to try their specialty).
(Patrick took the steak photo.)
I'd definitely want to try the champurrado (which seems to have been ingrained in my brain by now) the next time we go there, but the meatballs and steak were very good in their own ways. So, hooray for the amnesia!
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Qusadillas y Mariscos Doña Lolis
6924 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL
773.761.5677
For all of you Japanese food aficionados, who bought a bottle of sushi vinegar (sushi-zu) to make sushi and never managed to use it all, I have a solution.
So what's sushi vinegar, to begin with? To make sushi rice, tradition dictates that you steam the rice with konbu (kelp) stock, and add a mixture of vinegar, salt, sugar and mirin when the rice is cooked. But nowadays, many Japanese amateur cooks simply cook the rice normally (i.e., sans konbu stock) and pour pre-mixed sushi vinegar that contains all you need: konbu extract, vinegar, salt, sugar and mirin, as well as flavor enhancers in some cases. I keep one at hand, even though I never make nigiri sushi (sushi with raw fish on it--too risky and too skill-intensive) and rarely make chirashi zushi (sushi rice mixed with pre-cooked ingredients).
The reason I keep a bottle of sushi vinegar around is that it can be used for things other than sushi rice. The other day, I used it for a faux-Chinese sauce for sautéed red snapper. It was pretty hot well into the evening, so I wanted something light and refreshing; the kick of the vinegar in sushi vinegar would be nice.
First, I made the sauce (the amount is approximate; you can modify it to your taste):
1 tablespoon sushi vinegar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1/3 tablespoon sesame oil
1 green onion, chopped
2 pinches crushed red pepper
Then, I heated some oil in a pan, and threw in 2 green onions (cut into 2-inch pieces) and about 1 inch of ginger (thickly sliced). When they start to produce that wonderful aroma, I spread the pieces evenly on the pan, and placed the red snapper fillets on top of the green onions and ginger. It was the first time I did this half-sautée, half-steam method, but it worked well: the flavors of the green onions and ginger got transferred to the fish as it cooked, and this method requires a bit less oil than placing the fish directly onto the pan (in which case I would use more oil to prevent the fish from getting too intimate with the pan).
When the fish was done, I placed it on the plate and spooned the sauce over it. Served with steamed rice, the faux-Chinese red snapper was pretty good. As I planned, the vinegar shooed away the humid heat of the day, and the aromatic green onions and ginger added refreshing kick. With this sauce, I could eat two bowls of rice! (I didn't, but I could.)
The sushi vinegar I currently have is from Mizkan, a 200-plus-year-old vinegar maker in Japan. Its ingredient list is a bit more cluttered with dubious stuff (high fructose corn syrup, especially) than I would like, but it's convenient, and it's tasty. I've seen other brands at Mitsuwa; next time I buy a bottle, I'll check the ingredient lists and go for a less dubious one.
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Mitsuwa
100 E. Algonquin Rd., Arlington Heights, IL
(847)956-6699
Other Asian supermarkets, like H Mart, should have sushi vinegar available, though I haven't checked. It may even be around in Whole Foods and Trader Joe's (though, again, I haven't checked).
The NY Times article on equipping a no-frills kitchen for under $200 is predictable but interesting. While there are points I would go about differently, Mark Bittman's success in keeping the cost under a spartan limit is pretty impressive, too. But he missed one thing. One BIG thing. And that's not surprising, at all.
The missing thing is the saibashi--cooking chopsticks. They're basically a longer version of normal chopsticks, except that they aren't elaborately coated or decorated. Usually made of wood or bamboo (mine are the latter), the saibashi is a wonderful all-purpose tool in any Japanese chef's kitchen. I use them for almost anything: mixing sauces, tossing salads, stirring noodles in boiling-hot water, stir-frying veggies, turning meat over a grill, transferring food from a pan to individual dishes, whisking eggs, picking up piping-hot tempura from the frying oil, scraping off cookie dough from a mixing bowl. And I didn't even have to try hard to come up with this list. In a pinch, when my pot holder has gone AWOL, I even use them to slide out the hot baking pan from the oven, though I suspect this isn't really their intended use. Without these four sets of saibashi, I won't survive a day in my kitchen.
And of course, Bittman wouldn't have included saibashi in his kitchen essentials, because he doesn't cook (I presume) like the Japanese. (Instead, he included stainless tongs.)
Just Hungry points out that a "no-frills" kitchen would vary culture to culture, and if one cooks differently from Bittman, her kitchen might look quite different from his. This is a point well taken, and (sort of quietly) reveals the unconscious ethnic bias in Bittman's article. I don't plan to be hysterical about his lack of social awareness or ethno-racial sensitivity (it's just a short article, after all), but it does make me feel a bit ambivalent, especially given the newspaper in which the article appears. In the same section (Dining and Wine), New York Times enjoys, celebrates and consumes the very diversity of food and cooking within the United States. Then why this apparent disregard of "other" cooking traditions in this specific article? I don't know the answer to this, but it is, at least, quite interesting to see how cultural differences manifest in assumptions about cooking and, thus, what one should have in one's kitchen.
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