Oh, boy, it's been a while.
During my absence, I found a new hobby--one that's not entirely unrelated to my love of good food. Since mid September, I've been taking a weekly class of pottery making, at a local studio. It was as much a result of boredom as that of frustration. I'd wanted more Japanese-style bowls and plates for my food (and for my food porn), but not too surprisingly, good ones are exceedingly rare in Chicago. Especially after the much-lamented closure of the Japanese ceramic shop in Mitsuwa, finding up-to-date ceramics at a reasonable price have been pretty much impossible. So, I thought, why don't I try making them myself? To begin with, we could use some ramen bowls.
Of course, it didn't go as planned. What I discovered during my first few days at the pottery studio was that it wasn't me who determined the shape of the finished product; it seemed that the clay itself decided to take one shape, and once it knew what it wanted to be, there was no way I could force it to become anything else. I cranked out a lot of lopsided, thick-walled bowls of varying sizes, in addition to quite a few outright dead ones (which, thankfully, could be recycled). Ramen bowls were at least a few months away, I decided, with a bit of amusement. And I meekly obeyed the commands of the wild, assertive lumps of clay on my throwing wheel.
The first trick I learned, therefore, was to "let live." Since most of my bowls came out uneven, I soon realized that I need to take their lopsidedness and turn it into something interesting, if I didn't want to start all over again. When one part of the wall had significantly more clay than the rest, I pinched the thick part to make a pour spout; when my finger got caught on the rim of a small dish, I squished the rim even more to give it an artsy flair. That sort of thing.
After a month and a half, I'm surprised to see how much progress I've made. Not that I'm a great potter by any stretch of imagination, but my bowls turn out much more even and they do listen to my commands more. It's not just the clay becoming whatever it wants to be, but now I can, at least sometimes, guide it to take more or less the shape I have in my head. And most of all, it's been such a fun.
Oh, and I've managed to make a few bowls that I can actually use on the dinner table, too. This shallow bowl with Tenmoku glaze is one of them:
Daikon Sprouts, Jamaican Pepper and Chicken Salad for two
Instruction would be just a line: toss all the ingredients together and serve. Daikon sprouts ("kaiware" in Japanese) have a very refreshing flavor akin to that of the shredded daikon you find next to your sashimi. Don't forget to rinse them thoroughly, though--there was a huge outbreak of E-Coli in Japan, blamed on daikon sprouts about a decade ago. This incident, much like the recent contaminated spinach incident here, drove all the daikon sprouts off the supermarket shelves. It took years for the supermarkets to muster the courage to carry them again, and those were sad years--I love the wasabi-like, refreshing flavor of the daikon sprouts. The slight bitterness of the pepper is quite nice, though not absolutely necessary, in this salad.
Last weekend, we had a little overnight trip to Door County. The fall colors were starting to set in in some places, and the lake water was amazingly clear. We drove around, enjoying the crisp, autumnal air, spent a few calming moments on a serene cobblestone beach, admired the Milky Way with our mouths open, and generally got refreshed. It makes me feel old to say that I really loved Door County, but I did.
On the way back to Chicago from the tip of the peninsula, we stopped at a farm market, operated by the Seaquist Orchards, and picked up half a peck of honey crisp apples. They were so sweet and crisp--as their name implies--that they had the same power to tempt us to eat them impulsively as chocolates and cookies do. Though I'm not a big fruit eater in my normal life, those apples made me one, if temporarily. I've had them piled up on the dining table, and they're already down to two-. (Apparently it's the case with other people, too, for we saw quite a few farm markets and pick-your-own orchards on the peninsula emphasizing honey crisps on their signs.)
The apples are so good we've been eating them fresh, but I did play with them once. Using some leftover wonton wrappers, I made appetizer/dessert wontons.
I'd come across an interesting idea of using shichimi, Japanese seven-spice mix, in sweet desserts, and I'd wanted to try it. (Unfortunately I don't remember where I read about that idea.) The spicy kick and the citrusy aroma of the shichimi I had at hand seemed perfect for pairing with apples, so I jumped at the opportunity. For the filling base, I mixed softened cream cheese, some sugar and a pinch of shichimi. To bridge the spice mix and the apple, I decided to fold in a thin slice of ginger in each wonton. After wrapping the shichimi cream cheese mixture, diced apples and ginger slices, I shaped the wontons into small parcels, and deep-fried them till crispy.
The result: I could have used a lot more shichimi. When I taste-tested the shichimi-sprinkled cream cheese before frying, it had an unmistakable aroma and heat of the shichimi. But apparently the frying process made much of that heat and aroma evaporate into thin air, and the finished wontons had only the slightest hint of shichimi left. This was a disappointment, but there was a nice surprise as well: the ginger slices lightened (jazzed up, might I say?) the whole thing fantastically. I thought the ginger would be a nice, refreshing touch in this fat-heavy combination of cream cheese and deep-frying, but the ginger worked even better than I expected. Cooking also brought out the tartness in the apple that wasn't very pronounced when eaten fresh.
We had the wontons as an appetizer, but this would be a nice dessert, maybe paired with vanilla ice cream (drool...). Next time I make this, I'll use a lot more shichimi and see how that works.
Pear tomatoes from my mom's backyard and a handful of Thai-flavored cashews...
Chop up the cashews, toss with halved tomatoes, and let them rest for fifteen minutes in the fridge, and you have Thai cashew tomato salad. Work time? Two minutes. Juice from the tomatoes work as the liquid base for the dressing, for which the seasoning comes from the lime- and chili-flavored nuts. Brought to you by Trader Joe's spicy concoction, Thai Lime Chili Cashews. (Hey, I'm not getting commission from Joe or anything...)
Bitter melon was unknown to the mainland Japanese until very recently. Although bitter melons have been grown in southern Kyushu as well as in Okinawa, it was only after the Okinawan food boom in the late '90s that the most Japanese people came to contact with this easy-to-grow, fun-to-cook vegetable. Nowadays, though, it seems that quite a number of the mainland Japanese are addicted to the biting bitterness of bitter melons. When Patrick had a stir-fried bitter melon in oyster sauce at a restaurant in Chicago's Chinatown, he, too, got addicted.
I myself am not too big on bitter melons--or so I thought. The bitterness was a bit too much for me. But the other day, I saw a large heap of pretty good-looking bitter melons at H Mart, and decided to get one for my beloved husband (haha). Since I had some pork belly and fried tofu at hand, I decided to cook gôya champloo, an Okinawa-style stir-fried bitter melon, for dinner. (Gôya refers to bitter melon in Okinawan language/dialect.)
It turned out surprisingly well: I actually liked the dish. And it wasn't "despite" the bitterness, but "because of." It was easy to make with relatively cheap ingredients, too, and I suspect that I might start buying more bitter melon that I would have imagined just a few days ago.
Gôya Champloo (Okinawa-style stir-fried bitter melon; for two generous servings)
Cut the bitter melon lengthwise in half and remove the pulp, using a spoon. slice them into about 1/5 inch thickness. Soak the cut bitter melon in salt water, if you prefer mild bitterness. (I soaked my bitter melon pieces for about 30 minutes, and it nicely cut down on the bitterness.) Cut all the ingredients as shown above.
Heat the oil in a frying pan, and start with the pork belly. Once the pork is mostly cooked, set it aside. Add carrots to the pan, followed by bitter melon. When the vegetables are mostly cooked through, add the fried tofu. Stir-fry carefully, so the tofu won't break into tiny bits. Then put the meat back into the pan.
Season with soy sauce, dashi powder and salt. Quickly follow the seasoning with beaten egg. (Give the egg a bit of time to cook before stirring here.) Sprinkle with bonito flakes, give it one last mix and serve.
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NHK, the Japanese national TV network, broadcast a drama series set in Okinawa, and within that drama, they introduced a silly little character called "gôya man." It's an anthropomorphized bitter melon with an yellow helmet--and, well, it's pretty cute. If you feel like it, go to Japanese google and copy and paste this: ゴーヤーマン.
I'm not that concerned about what MSG might do to my (and Patrick's) already chemical-ridden body, but I wanted to do it from scratch. It's the stock-making that's I'm talking about. Stock-making (or dashi-making) is considered the very basic of the Japanese cooking, but I'd never done that before. Like so many other Japanese amateur cooks, I'd relied, all my life, on powdered dashi-like substance and liquid soup base mix, which contain a substantial amount of MSG. They're very easy to use, and are quite tasty; some of them, especially the liquid ones, taste better than the real, made-from-scratch dashi that my grandma and aunt used to make. My mom has been using the same evil substances as I do for a long time, so I don't quite remember what her made-from-scratch dashi tasted like, which explains why I don't have any aversion to using the pre-made dashi powder and soup mix. Although made-from-scratch dashi used by high-end Japanese restaurants is mindbogglingly better than the pre-made one, it seemed that unless you're an experienced cook, you're better off using the dashi powder and soup mix.
But somehow, not knowing how to make dashi from scratch and having never even tried it have become a skeleton in the cupboard for me. I've grown apprehensive that some day, somewhere, someone will pop out of the bush and accuse me: "You keep a food blog as if you knew something, when you don't even know how to make dashi? And pretend that you're interested in Slow Food? Noooonesense!" Well, not really, but you know what I mean. It's like being a French cook who always uses bouillon cubes and canned chicken soup stock. It's like building an elaborate castle before laying a solid base structure. I just don't have the basics done.
So, yesterday, I finally looked up some dashi-making methods and tried it myself. Luckily, Japanese-style dashi doesn't require the same intensive labor as the Western-style chicken stock. All you need is a pot, water, bonito flakes, a bit of kombu, a strainer, a stove and maybe ten minutes--all of which I had at hand.
From what little I read about dashi-making, the following seems to be the consensus.
1) Wipe away any dust from the surface of the kombu (kelp).
2) Soak kombu in cold water for a while.
3) Bring the kombu-water to a boil, and retrieve the kombu just before it reaches the boiling point.
4) Add a handful of bonito flakes (katsuo-bushi), give it ten seconds and turn the heat off.
5) Wait till all the bonito flakes have settled on the bottom, then strain.
I more or less followed the direction, except for the last bits about giving only ten seconds to the bonito flakes and waiting for them to settle. Somehow, I didn't notice these two points, so I probably boiled the pot for a minute or two after throwing in the bonito flakes. Then I didn't give time for them to settle before straining the dashi. It smelled good, though--the intense, aged aroma of the bonito flakes had a subtle lining of the sweet and earthy aroma of the kombu. Excited, I used half of the dashi for the miso soup (with daikon, oyster mushrooms, wakame and green onions), while putting away the other half for later use.
The result was a little bit disappointing. The dashi didn't stand up to the relatively powerful flavor of the miso. The soup wasn't as flat as it would have been without the dashi, but it wasn't as satisfyingly complex as my usual one made with the powdered dashi. Five possible reasons came to my mind:
a) The two points where I didn't follow the direction somehow ruined, or didn't extract enough of, the bonito flavor.
b) The ingredients I used for the dashi were sub-par (this is quite likely, since they were one of the los cheapos I picked up from Mitsuwa long time ago).
c) The dashi I made wasn't suitable for miso soup.
d) I didn't use enough dashi.
e) I cooked the miso soup for too long, letting the flavor evaporate into thin air.
While I suspect the less-than-expected result was a combination of all the factors, but I also think that c) might be a larger part of it. The dashi taken from bonito flakes and kombu this way is called "ichiban dashi," meaning "the first stock." Subtle but elegant in flavor, Ichiban dashi is usually used for dishes where you enjoy the flavor of the stock itself, with minimum additional flavoring agents. For something like miso soup, which requires a potent dashi to stand up against the powerful flavor of the miso, other kinds of dashi is recommended.
Niban dashi, or "the second stock," is made from the bonito flakes and kombu recycled from the process of making the ichiban dashi, combined with some fresh bonito flakes and kombu. Niban dashi has more robust and less subtle flavor than ichiban dashi, and is used for nimono and sometimes for miso soup. For miso soup, however, the best dashi seems to be one taken from niboshi (boiled-then-dried baby fish), which imparts a stronger flavor than bonito flakes. (It really depends on the family and the palate; my grandma, for one, always used freshly shaved bonito flakes for her miso soup.)
Though my first attempt at real dashi-making was less than satisfactory (I didn't even mention that to Patrick at dinner table!), I'm determined to try more. Before I run to the store for better-grade bonito flakes and maybe some niboshi, I'll fix the problems a), d) and e). But the scary fact of all is--sort of reminiscent of the MacDonald's and company--that it's probably much cheaper to use the powdered dashi and liquid soup mix than to make good dashi from scratch with decent ingredients. Is this economy crooked, or what?
Continue reading "Trying My Hand at Dashi-Making"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.
Continue reading "When a Child's Obsession Pays"With the exception of canned tuna, I've always been afraid of canned fish. My father used to bring home cans of mackerel in miso and sardines in sweet soy sauce to accompany his evening beer, and sometimes he offered a piece or two to me. At the tip of his chopsticks, these fish pieces glittered with oil and gooey sauce, reflecting the fluorescent lamp above our dining table. Often spattered with stray bits of strangely metallic skin and unidentifiable mixture of bones and guts, the fish out of the can never looked attractive to my child's eyes. My revulsion reached the crest when the fish was shoved just under my nose, where the fishy smell became almost overwhelming. I would recoil from the offending piece and make a face, as my father, now tipsy, placed the piece in his mouth, loudly lamenting his daughter's lack of appreciation but his face betraying his amusement.
So, it's a mystery that I started buying tinned seafood lately. The first was the smoked oyster in a tin that I picked up at a Vietnamese market along Broadway. Perhaps because the smoked oyster pasta came out well, I became bold and bought a tin of sardines next. And it was no ordinary tin of sardines--it was "Sultan's" sardines in chili oil, imported from Morocco.
There's a good chance that I was knocked out by the awesomely nostalgic package. It conjured up an image of a small village store with dust-covered merchandise slumbering in the darkness, sheltered from the sweltering heat outside. The Arabic writing on the other side of the box only added to my exoticism. The problem is--exoticism wasn't quite enough to make me open the tin. Once I opened it, I'd have only so many hours to use the fish before it goes bad. So, the tin sat in the cupboard for a few weeks before I finally made up my mind to use it.
When I opened the tin, I was surprised by the generous size of the fish inside. Somehow, I was expecting anchovy-sized fish cluttering the space, but instead, what I found was two plump pieces of sardines almost bursting out of the tiny container. Despite the annoyance of scales left on the fish, the small nibble I had of the sardine was fantastic. I had expected it to be fishy, oily, salty and maybe somewhat stale, but it was none of these. Thinking that I could eat this right out of the can, maybe on crispy toasts, or with grated daikon and ginger, I started cutting the cabbage--the other main ingredient of the evening's meal.
Sultan's Peperoncino (Spaghetti Peperoncino with Cabbage and Moroccan Sardines) (for two)
In a large pot, boil plenty of water. When the water is boiling, add a generous pinch of salt and add spaghetti. Cook to al dente.
Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a pan and fry the garlic and chili pepper. When it starts to smell nice, add the sardines. After a minute or two, add the cabbage and stir-fry them, crushing the sardines into bite-sized pieces. Salt to taste.
Transfer the pasta into the pan, mix, and serve when the pasta has a nice coat of olive oil.
Since the sardines weren't super-salty anchovies, the pasta came out to be a little milder than I'd expected. It could have used some more salty kick, perhaps, but it was a pretty nice comfort meal. I'm still not sure if I would gladly join my father in his occasional fish-in-a-tin drinking spree, but I'd be definitely buying these Sultan's Moroccan sardines again and again. Next time, I want to try cooking something Japanese with them--perhaps my father can enjoy it with me.
It's probably been fifteen or so years since the Japanese found the joy of combining the traditional flavors of soy sauce, sugar and fish stock with the all-encompassing richness of mayonnaise. I remember how (pleasantly) surprised I was when I first had a bite of mayonnaise-based salad made with burdock and carrots; it tasted somewhat like the conventional kimpira gobo (shredded burdock and carrots cooked with soy sauce and sugar), but the mayonnaise made it entirely new. It was almost Western, a far cry from what to my child's eyes appeared to be a shabby, unexciting veggie dish that made it on to the dinner table almost weekly. Of course, the addictive taste of the fat in mayonnaise was what captivated my then-childish palate, but the combination was widely embraced by the Japanese, young and old, male and female.
The burdock salad, purchased from a then-sprouting convenience store for a quick picnic lunch some fifteen years ago, blurred the boundary between Japanese nimono-style dishes and Western salads in my head for ever. And evidently the same thing happened on a much larger scale. Today, when you visit delis in "depa-chika" (large-scale food courts in the basements of department stores--a fantasy land for any foodie indeed), you'll see lots of crossover dishes like the mayonnaise-based burdock salad. Some use traditional vegetables in a new way (eating daikon raw, as a salad, for example, used to be unthinkable, but now it's a mundane dish) while others combine Japanese and Western flavors and methods. I'm not sure which of the two countries--U.S. or Japan--is more intent in creating new food trends, but surely Japanese vegetable dishes have undergone a tremendous expansion in the last decade. What used to be unthinkable merely ten years ago are now commonplace, and quite a few home cooks are still experimenting with the inspiration they get from commercially produced noubeau Japanese. (Note to self: I should look through some Japanese cookbooks here and see if any of these new ideas show up in them.)
Using a lotus root in a "salad" would be unthinkable for my heptagonalian grandmother (although she might enjoy it once she tried; she's quite adventurous when it comes to food). For her (and for me for a long time), lotus roots are something that we'd find either in kimpira or in nimono (mainly root veggies and sometimes chicken simmered together in soy sauce, sugar and fish stock). But now, I make lotus root salad, as a part of my mundane dinner table, and often to present leftover nimono with a more enjoyable flair.
Lotus Root and Hijiki Salad (for two)
This recipe calls for some leftover "hijiki no nimono," but if you don't have it at hand, you can substitute it with the same amount of rehydrated hijiki and vegetables of your choice (like carrots and beans). If you do this, you might want to increase the amount of noodle soup mix a bit.
First, peel the lotus root. I always use a peeler because the lotus root has a uniquely brittle texture that makes it difficult to peel it with a knife (plus the holes inside mean that if I peel too thick, I'll make holes on the surface). Cut it lengthwise and slice into 1/10 inch thickness (see the photo above for an idea). As you cut the lotus root, throw the pieces into a bowl of water to prevent discoloration.
In a saucepan, boil some water. When the water is bubbling, add lotus root pieces and boil for five minutes. Drain.
In a bowl, mix lotus root, hijiki no nimono, green onion, noodle soup mix and mayonnaise. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.
Lotus roots have a delightful crunch when lightly cooked. In fact, I think the best way to eat lotus roots is to enjoy that crunch, which is so often lost when the lotus roots show up in traditional nimono dishes that involve long and slow simmering. Although this salad-style preparation is very new in the scope of the Japanese cooking, I suspect this might be one of the best--or at least one of the fittest for the contemporary Japanese taste.
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* When buying lotus roots, look for ones without dark, soggy patches on the skin. Fresh ones are mostly uniform in color (sometimes with tiny speckles scattered evenly). Looking at the cut surface often helps: if the cut surface is dried up and/or soggy and brown, the lotus root probably isn't very fresh. If the store has them in sizes too large for you, try breaking them at the joints. (I'm a little fond of the "pop" they make when they snap...) To make your peeling job easier, choose one that's more or less straight, without too many dents and bumps, too!
I have a sneaking suspicion that I've been writing this blog as if I were a knowledgeable expert of Japanese cooking--which I'm definitely not. I somehow learned to cook in my mom's kitchen, first by watching her cook, then "helping" her cook (this was more likely to be "interfering" with her cooking, in retrospect), and finally cooking things on my own from time to time so that my mom could take a day off (although she had to wash all the utensils and dishes afterward; I never learned the good cook's trick of washing soiled pots and pans as I cook). Doing so, I picked up a lot of the basics of Japanese home cooking, but naturally, I missed a lot of it, too. A part of the blame lies with my mom's (naturally) limited repertoire, while another falls on myself, who didn't pay enough attention (or wasn't in the kitchen at all) when my mom was cooking some of her dishes.
One such staple that had been missing from my knowledge was "hijiki no nimono." A short, deer-tail-shaped seaweed, hijiki is most traditionally simmered ("nimono") with root vegetables like carrots and burdock, thin fried tofu and shiitake mushrooms (and sometimes soy beans). Although I love hijiki no nimono, I never learned to cook it. Strangely enough, it was after I moved out of Japan to Chicago that I got motivated enough to figure out how to cook the seaweed.
Having my mom around was definitely handy. I just had to ask her how she does it, although her direction was, as is always the case with experienced cooks' directions, a hair too vague: "enough soy sauce mixed with a little bit of sugar--well, it depends on how you like it, too" wasn't exactly precise. But having eaten the simmered seaweed many times in my life, and having cooked other Japanese food of similar flavor profile, I did get a useful enough idea of the cooking method out of her direction. The first batch I made was on the salty side (and the volumetric expansion of the dried hijiki when rehydrated rather startled me; I ended up making a gallon of hijiki that time) , but the second batch, which I made last night, was pretty good, um, both in flavor and volume. For an expat, being able to reproduce one's favorite foods from the home country is almost a survival skill mainly boosting one's emotional well being, so I'm happy.
Hijiki no Nimono (Japanese hijiki seaweed simmered with root vegetables)
This should last in the fridge for five days or so. (I'd say a week, but I don't want to be sued or anything...) When I get tired of eating the same thing every day, I mix it with scrambled eggs, or with steamed rice. Hijiki's umami works great in these leftover killers.
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* If you've had "inari zushi" or simply "inari," you've seen the "abura-age." It's the brown-colored pouch that wraps the sushi rice. For some reason, no general (i.e., non-Japanese) Asian grocer seems to carry this item, even though many of them carry the thicker version called "atsu-age." Unless you're an ultra-purist, you can substitute the elusive abura-age with the more common "atsu-age." Or, as a tasty alternative, chopped up fish cakes sometimes show up in this dish.
** If you don't have a Japanese soup mix at hand, use 1 tablespoon each of soy sauce and sugar instead. Soup mixes contain "umami" ingredients, but since hijiki, as a seaweed, contains a similar "umami" essence, soup mix isn't a must for this recipe.
I don't like oysters.
In fact, it's probably safe to say that I positively hate them.
Not that I've ever gotten sick from one, but I'm repulsed by the bitter, briny taste of their slimy guts. I can't eat them in any way--deep-fried, cooked with rice, in a hot pot, let alone raw.
So, I don't know why I decided to pick up a tin of smoked oysters at the Tai Nam Food Market yesterday. I was wandering up and down their maze-like aisles filled with exotic food stuffs--like canned shrimp paste, shredded young coconuts meat in syrup, a dozen different rice papers. Then I saw tins of oysters. Some were as is, others were treated: cured, salted, and smoked. Somehow, I wanted one. I didn't know what I would do with it, but before I knew it, the tin was in the basket. I really don't know why.
I wandered around some more (actually for an hour or so--the place is a wonderland!), got a Vietnamese lunch box at Ba Le Sandwich Shop on Broadway, had it on the beach, and biked home. Then I had to face the small, nonthreatening-looking tin of oysters. What would I do with it? To make matters worse, Patrick isn't big of oysters, either. I should open the tin and see what it tastes like, I thought, but didn't have the balls to do it. The tin sat on the kitchen counter as I googled "smoked oyster" in the dining area. Having had virtually zero experience with oysters (let alone a good one), I needed some idea of what flavors would go well with the oysters. Someone baked the oysters in its shell with Vietnamese chili sauce, quail eggs and scallions. That sounded good. Someone else baked a flan with smoked oysters and parmesan cheese. That might work, too. Yet another made a pasta with oyster cream sauce. Hmm.
Then the idea struck. A double oyster linguini! I'd picked up a pack of exceptionally perky oyster mushrooms at the same market. I could pair the oysters with oyster mushrooms. Ha. Obviously I was in a rare, bold mood for a dish based purely on a (bad) joke. Cream sauce should work fine with both the oysters and the mushrooms, but I needed something punchy, something that'd stand up against the oysters' strong flavor. Black peppers? Garlic? But they didn't seem to be the one, although I did end up using them in the final product. Further googling didn't yield too many useful suggestions, so I was left to my own devices.
I opened the can and was amused to see its content faithfully mirroring the rather unappetizing graphic on the box. Inside, greenish brown baby oysters about half the size of my thumb were squished against each other in three neat rows. The texture seemed to be very close to that of cooked liver (something else I'm not terribly fond of). Am I being too daring? I wondered. All the recent news of Chinese poisonous products--food or not--started circling around in my head. What do I do? For an answer, I stared at the oysters. Look thy enemy in the eye, and thou shall defeat it, right?
The oysters were preserved in cotton seed oil, which bore a yucky green tint from the oyster juice. The oil might contain the strongest flavor of the oysters; something a real oyster lover would treasure, I thought, but since we weren't the most enthusiastic lovers of oysters, I figured I could drain the oil to tame the flavor. I rinsed the oysters with a bit of leftover whiskey, hoping that the whiskey might add some interesting flavor compatible with the oysters, while rinsing off the excess pungency.
Following the usual steps for a cream-based sauce, I made the double-oyster pasta in about fifteen minutes. In the final product, I didn't taste much of the whiskey, but rinsing part seemed to have worked pretty well; the oysters had become surprisingly edible. There was a hint of their oceanic and bitter flavor, but it was tame enough that we, the two oyster haters, could actually enjoy the sauce infused with oysters. The smoky note, which became the primary flavor, also helped tame the wild oysters for us. We surprised ourselves that we could actually enjoy oysters, but there was room for improvement. There was something lacking in the pasta. I thought something more spicy--like crushed chili pepper or even curry powder--might liven up the complex but somewhat flat sauce. Patrick thought more cream might be good. Writing this now, I wonder something even crazier--like cherry--might work with them or not. Though my first experiment wasn't a success to be announced with fanfare, I'm definitely going to play with this cheap ingredient more. (A tin costs about $1.50.) When winter comes, I might try Patrick's other suggestion: a seafood chowder with the smoked oysters added to the base as a smooth purée.
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Tai Nam Food Market
4925 N. Broadway, Chicago, IL
It's been pretty mild for July, so I've had a chance to cook things not exactly for hot season. Although I do love eating refreshing salads and chilled noodles at the height of summer, the diet of chilled food does get dull after a few weeks. So I was happy to opt for a homey Chinese-inspired soup when the temperature came down to the 70's. It's a very simple soup with daikon, shrimps and tofu, but somehow very comforting and satisfying.
One crucial ingredient for this soup is shrimp shells, which make the soup base. Shrimp shells have an awesome flavor--it can work in almost any cuisine, from Chinese soups to Italian pasta sauces to American bisques. For this reason, I never buy pre-peeled or pre-cooked shrimps; I want the shells, raw. (Every once in a blue moon, I find a little ziploc bag of shrimp shells and legs from god-knows-when hiding in a back corner of my freezer.) Another crucial ingredient is the tofu. The tofu really should be extra soft. Most tofu available in generic markets, even ones that claim to be "soft," are too rough and tough for this delicate soup. You want a silky, soft texture that doesn't interfere with the low-impact rest of the soup. If you know an Asian grocer in your area, look for a Japanese "kinugoshi" tofu, or a Korean Soon-Dubu tofu, made for Soon-Dubu Jigae (Korean hot soup).
Ginger Daikon Soup with Shrimps (for two)
First, peel the shrimps. (Don't throw away the shells!) Marinate the shrimps with soy sauce and sake, and sprinkle 1/3 tablespoon of cornstarch and mix to coat. The cornstarch should keep the moisture within the shrimps when they're cooked, and add nice, gelatinous coating to the shrimps.
Boil water in a pot and throw in the shrimp shells. Boil for a while to let the oceanic flavor seep out of the shells and drain. (Now you can throw away the shells...) Add ginger and daikon in the soup base and cook till the daikon is transparent. Turn the heat down and add tofu and shrimps. (If cooked at high temperature, the shrimps toughen.) You might want to break the tofu by hand, if it's very soft--cutting it on a cutting board and transferring the pieces to the pot could be tricky.
Give a stir to the cornstarch-water mix and pour it into the pot. Mix carefully so that the tofu won't be in shards. Turn the heat up a little and let the soup boil gently for about three minutes, or till it thickens a little. Add green onions and season with a little bit of salt and pepper.
The fun of this soup is to serve it in a large, communal bowl. In your individual soup cups, you can add other flavorings to your soup, as you have seconds and thirds--I like to have it "as is" for the first cup, then add a tiny dash of olive oil for the second, and maybe a bit of to ban djan (Chinese hot sauce) to the third. To do this, I keep the salinity low when I season the soup at the end of the cooking. You'll be amazed how different the soup tastes each time, and how good it can be without any addition at all.
To follow the transformation of ratatouille, today's entry is a transformation of failed brandade. As I wrote yesterday, my first (possibly the last?) attempt to recreate the rich and creamy brandade we had at Avec was a miserable failure. It tasted good, but the texture was nowhere near creamy. It was more pulpy than creamy--what a formidable cod flesh! I didn't feel like throwing away the fruit of my tear and sweat (yuck), though, so I used some Swedish alchemy to make the iffy brandade enjoyable.
Swedish Alchemy (a.k.a. Fake Jansson's Temptation) for two
First, boil the potatoes until tender. Drain, put them back into the pot and heat over medium flame till the excess moisture has evaporated (about a minute or so). In a heat-resistant baking pan, layer potato slices and brandade alternately three times. Sprinkle the rosemary, garlic powder and parmesan cheese on the top. Bake in an oven at 350 F till the top gets golden.
I don't know if it was a magic of letting the brandade rest in the fridge for a day, or the magic of baking, or what, but what seemed like a pulpy, bland mush just 24 hours before had turned into something comfortingly delicious. The salt cod in brandade imparted a subtle oceanic flavor, and the richness of the milk and parmesan cheese worked very well. The pulpyness that threw me off when I tried the brandade by itself was not an issue any more, when combined with potatoes. I don't know if I want to make this Janssons' Temptation impostor again (because making brandade is pretty time-consuming), but I was pleasantly surprised how good it turned out. Despite my Japanese origin, I felt like I was eating something my (imaginary) European peasant grandma cooked up for her homesick granddaughter in a foreign country.
We dragged out dining chairs and a folding table to the back porch (which is really just a staircase) and had dinner there. With a bottle of Chablis, a bowl of ratatouille (from yesterday), and a Japanese-style light pickle salad, fake Jansson's Temptation made a great summer dinner. As we enjoyed the food and talked, a pair of house finches (the beautiful one with red throat and head) groomed themselves on a nearby electric wire. The light was crisp and transparent, almost like early autumn. Huge trees in our neighbors' backyards rustled their green leaves in the evening breeze. It was a luxurious evening, even though the cost of the meal wasn't that luxurious. We'll miss the back porch view when we move from this apartment in August...
I was trying to recreate brandade, a French salt cod dish that we had at Avec. Other than making me realize what a god-awful amount of calorie-packed olive oil goes into the creamy dip-like concoction, the thing wasn't working too well. The salt cod chunks refused to become creamy, however hard I attacked them with my bamboo spatula till all the other pots and pans on the stove started to rattle and dance. The cod chunks even resisted the glorious power of modern industrial machinery--my stick blender, refusing to kiss goodbye to their pulpy selves. After adding salt and pepper, the brandade-wannabe did taste decent, but it definitely wasn't interesting enough to be the centerpiece of the evening's meal.
That paused a serious problem. My plan was to accompany that brandade with bread and a bowl of ratatouille. Inspired by the awesome Pixar animation of the same name, I had bought a whole bunch of beautiful summer veggies: summer squashes, yellow squashes, Italian eggplants, orange paprika and some cherry tomatoes. All those, along with an onion and a few garlic cloves, had gone into a big pot and was simmering quietly by the obstinate brandade. Though the ratatouille looked beautiful, now that the brandade is out, I didn't have a "main" dish. I thought about taking a few ladles of ratatouille and turning it into a pasta sauce, but then I realized that I didn't have tomato paste or tomato sauce. Hmm.
1/3 pound of ground pork, leftover from the day before, was my savior. I sautéed the pork in a medium-sized pot, scooped out some of the summer veggies out of the ratatouille pot and threw them into the pork pot. Add a few cubes of Japanese curry roux, and voila, I had a decent Japanese-style curry to serve with some sticky rice. Pretty much everybody loves curry in Japan (especially meat-and-rice-craving hungry guys), and both Patrick and I are fond of the dish as well, so it worked out fine.
Curry was brought to Japan toward the end of the nineteenth century by the British, who, during their rule of India, had grown fond of the Indian cooking. The curry that the British taught the Japanese to cook had most likely been an Anglicized (and simplified ) version of the original Indian cookery, but it underwent further modification to suit the Japanese palate. At the time, the Japanese government was looking for ways to incorporate meats into Japanese diet, in order to build a body fit for an Western-style military. (Most Japanese people then had an aversion to eating meats, based on their Buddhist beliefs.) Along with sukiyaki, curry proved a handy tool for the government; first served in the Imperial Navy's mess halls, the Japanized curry gained popularity and spread out to the civilian society. Once a fancy dish served only in high-end Western restaurant for urban connoisseurs, curry is now one of the cheap and easy "national foods" of Japan that everyone, regardless of gender, age and class, eats monthly, if not weekly. Just like I did, many Japanese wives and mothers turn to this reliable dish in a pinch. After all, it's one of the rare dishes that are likely to delight most everybody in their household (except for, perhaps, their already skinny daughters on a vanity diet).
I'll have to use that mediocre brandade for something today--I'm thinking of Jansson's Temptation, a Swedish potato-and-anchovy gratin. Pray for me that it'll be edible...
We Japanese love to massacre modify different Western cuisines to make them suit our taste. (You might remember the soy sauce-based mushroom spaghetti I wrote about a while back.) One of the frequent victims is the Italian food--there are quite a few spaghetti dishes that you don't see anywhere outside of Japan, or outside of Japanese cooks' kitchens. We might add miso to a simple tomato sauce to give it an extra depth of flavor. "Natto," fermented soybeans, also makes its appearance in spaghetti dishes. We might even use "shiokara," various seafood, often squid, marinated and fermented in its own innards (I know it sounds gross, but a good one can be fantastic) as a base for the sauce.
Though I'm not a huge fan of "natto spa," as this type of spaghetti is often called, I am deeply in love with another perennial Spaghetti Giapponese: spaghetti with spicy pollack roe. Spicy pollack roe, originally from Korea, is raw pollack roe preserved in salt and red chili, and is usually eaten with a bowl of rice or as an accompaniment for sake. Mentaiko, as it's called, can be a little bit daunting for someone with an aversion to oceanic flavor (I had to overcome my initial revulsion, too, since mentaiko smells pretty fishy), but once you get over it, it can be quite addictive. Mentaiko loses some of its wild fishiness when it's cooked, so spaghetti with mentaiko (or "mentai spa" in short) is one of my favorite dishes that involve this ingredient.
I don't know who invented the "mentai spa," but it's a pretty simple dish. In fact, I might venture to say that its simplicity faithfully reflects the simplicity of Italian pasta dishes. The main ingredients are the spaghetti, mentaiko, butter, soy sauce and nori (seaweed you find wrapped around your "maki" sushi). It's simple, but the fishy, salty mentaiko, the fatty, rich butter and the aromatic nori blend extremely well with each other. And it's ridiculously easy to make; it's one of the easiest meals to cook, even if you don't know how to cook at all. Indeed, there's no knife involved, either, other than the butter knife you might use to transfer the butter from the butter case to the pan.
Spaghetti with Spicy Pollack Roe (for one)
First, boil the pasta in plenty of water with a pinch of salt. While the pasta is cooking, squeeze the pollack roe out of its thin skin. To get the tiny roe out of the fragile skin, I like to cut one end of the roe sack and pull the sack between two chopsticks tightly held together, but if you aren't used to using chopsticks, you can also do this by breaking the sack open and scrape the roe out with a spoon. When the pasta is al dente, drain the water from the pot, remove it from heat, and add butter, pollack roe and soy sauce. Mix well. The pollack roe cooks by the heat of the pasta. Place the pasta on a plate and top it with shredded nori and shiso leaves, cut into thin strips.
The other day I made this spaghetti for lunch, for the first time in many, many years, and totally fell in love with it again. The punchy heat and fishiness of the mentaiko had morphed into incredibly delicate hint of spice and oceanic flavor, and the butter's dairy richness held it all together. (Just writing this makes my mouth water... Ah!) For folks out there with higher seafood tolerance, I highly recommend this Japanified Italian recipe. Oh, yeah, you should eat it with a pair of chopsticks, too!
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Mentaiko can be found in freezer cases in Japanese or Korean markets. They may come in fancy packages, since they're a bit more expensive. (I think I bought mine, a fake-wood box of 7 oz for $12 or $16.) They're expensive, but you really don't need a ton of them to give flavor to your dishes, so a relatively small package should last you for a while. I got mine at the H Mart (801 Civic Center Drive, Niles, IL).
Pitting a quart of cherries is a lot of work, is what I learned yesterday. Well, "learned" may not be the best word, for I'd figured that would be the case, but still, I didn't realize how much time it took to cut these beautiful, ruby-red orbs in half and dig out their pits embedded in the soft, translucent flesh. The tart cherries were so juicy that the bright-red liquid ran down my fingers, past my wrists all the way to my elbows. I had to periodically stop the work and go wash myself in the kitchen sink.
We'd picked up the tart cherries at, yep, you've guessed it, the Green City Market. One of the farmers said it was their first cherry crop, but I couldn't believe it; the market was literally piled with cartons of plump cherries of varying shades of red. The morning light that danced on their glossy, round surface was a photographer's delight. If they'd been only starting, I couldn't imagine what it'd be like when the cherries are in full season. Eying at the beautiful display of tart cherries in a stand, Patrick reminded me of the Dufour Pastry Kitchens' frozen puff pastry dough we'd picked up a few months ago at Whole Foods.
"Do you want a cherry pie?" I teased asked him.
"Cherry pie! Yummm!" was his answer. Watching the familiar, tastiness-induced smile spread over his face, I finally got over the apprehension that I might ruin the special pastry dough that carried the hefty price tag of almost $12 a small package. (I'm a much better--and experienced--cook than a baker.) But the day of fear was over. The dough needed to be used before it went stale anyway, so now was the time. Cherry pie it was. We picked up a carton of tart cherries, wandered around some more in the breezy market and went home.
I didn't bake the promised cherry pie right away. For one thing, we went out to a prairie preserve in the afternoon, and I was exhausted by the time we got home in the evening (though I did cook dinner, using the fresh produce from the farmers market, for which I gave myself a pat on the back). Sunday was not that different, though our destination was more urban than natural. By Monday, though, I was restless; the cherries must be quickly losing their sweetness and flavor even in the fridge. The pie had to be made. I couldn't waste both the pastry dough and the cherries. I put aside whatever premonition I had over my not-so-great baking skills, set up a pitting station by the computer monitor, put on Mr. Incredible, and started pitting. (The animated feature turned out to be a mediocre choice for the task; it relied more on visual information than I'd remembered it, and I quickly lost track of what was going on in the retired hero's world as initial dialogs were supplanted by loud thuds, thumps and ka-booms.)
As the milk for the custard slowly warmed up on the stove, I studied the dough package. The ingredients list was positively promising: the first ingredient was butter (which was verified by the 120 calories coming from fat out of 170 in one serving). The rest were wheat flour, water, salt and lemon juice. Very clean. When the custard was done, I unfolded the pastry dough on a floured cutting board and cut them into four large rectangles. I'd said "pie," but it was going to be turnovers (for my lack of patissiery skills). I slapped on the custard on one side of each rectangle and placed halved cherries in neat rows on top. Some of the egg whites left from making custard, which only calls for egg yolks, was used to seal the folded pastries. Even with the day's cooler temperature, the pastry dough behaved surprisingly well. It didn't stick to the cutting board, knife or my hands, and didn't lose its shape as quickly as it could have. This seemed even more surprising when we bit into the finished turnovers--I had no idea how a dough so buttery and delicate could stay so obliging for such a long time.
When they came out of the oven, I couldn't believe my eyes (and my nose): the pastries looked like they'd been baked by a professional patissier, with its sides almost bursting out in golden strata, little dribble of hot-pink cherry juice still bubbling here and there. And most of all, the fresh, buttery aroma of the pastry shell itself. I regretted my decision to bake them when Patrick was out at work--it would have been such a treat for him to inhale that fresh-off-the-oven goodness. When he came home, though, we shared a turnover, reheated in the toaster to perk up the slightly moistened shell. We had one each this morning, for a sumptuous breakfast. I'm guessing that we'd have to fight hard to decide who's going to get that one remaining turnover on the counter. They turned out to be as tasty as they looked. You might believe it if I told you that I got them from some expensive, fancy bakery tucked away somewhere in a up-and-coming neighborhood. But then again, they did come from an expensive bakery (in New York, of all places)--the dough was professionally and expensively made, the cherries grown by dedicated local organic farmers, and the eggs and milk in the custard also organic, if not local. Each turnover probably cost us about $4 or so just for the ingredients. But was it worth the price? Absolutely. I'd pit those cherries again and again, and stir gallons of custard till my arms hurt, if only to fill that amazing pastry shell.
...I have to admit, though, I'm in complete awe of those people, amateur and professional, who not only pit their cherries but also make their own pastry dough from scratch. That's just a lot of work!
Using a Japanese eggplant and a little bit of daikon radish that we picked up from the Green City Market on Saturday, I made "asazuke," Japanese-style light pickle. Though it's called a pickle, it's more like a salad than a pickle; it takes only 20 minutes or so in the fridge for the veggies to be ready for din-din. Well chilled and spiced, asazuke can be a refreshing side dish for any summer meal. The added salt dehydrate the veggies a little, making it easier to eat a lot of vegetables than in their bulky, raw state.
Daikon and Eggplant Asazuke (for two, and a bit of leftover for tomorrow)
Slice the daikon and eggplant into 1/8 - 1/10 inch thickness. You can make them thicker or thinner, depending on how fast you want the pickle to be ready. In a hurry, make them thinner; I like to keep them crunchy, so I usually stick to this sickness. Place them in a small ziploc bag, sprinkle salt, kobucha, minced ginger and hot chili pepper over them. Shake the bag so that all the veggie slices are mixed with the condiments and spices, and "knead" the bag a little. Push the air out of the bag, seal it and place it in the fridge until dinner time. When dishing out, squeeze out the excess water by hand.
I added shredded shiso (perilla) leaves on top. Though it's not absolutely necessary, its sweet, faintly fennel-like aroma was quite wonderful on the pickle that combines the refreshing tang of the ginger and the heat of the red chili.
I've done this with normal radishes, and they work pretty well. Also good in this dish are cucumbers (ones with tender skins, like Japanese or Persian cucumbers are the best), carrots and even celeries. Just like cucumbers, you would want eggplants with their skins on the tender side. If the ones at hand seem to have tough skin, you can also peel them partially (so that the remaining skin looks like purple streaks on the white fresh), which is what Japanese professional chefs often do with their eggplants to make them look nicer.
* Kobucha--or kombucha--is a kind of instant drink made from powdered kelp (kobu, or kombu). Since kobu has a ton of natural umami compounds, kobucha is often used as a flavor enhancer in contemporary Japanese cooking. For example, I've used this in a simple mushroom spaghetti. Though you don't have to use kobucha for the pickle (traditional recipe doesn't call for one), with kobucha you can get additional depth of flavor that's unachievable with just veggies and salt.
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By the way, my post about the unassuming yet delicious Georgian bakery, Argo Bakery, is on Gapers Block Drive Thru today.
Green City Market seems to be hitting the peak of the harvesting season lately. What started out as a bunch of strawberries and asparagus is now a huge array of squashes, zucchini, daikon radishes, carrots, broccoli, onions, cherries and all kinds of beautiful berries. From the gorgeous offerings, we picked up (among other things) a bunch of small red carrots yesterday. Their dark, ruby-red skin hid a firm, orange flesh, and the green leaves were still perfectly perky when we stashed them in our increasingly veggie-filled refrigerator. It was a thing of beauty.
This morning, I felt compelled to use at least some of the farmers market bounty from yesterday. (I'd used the beautiful, dark-purple Japanese eggplant for dinner, but there were a lot more to enjoy.) Eying the bag of red carrots and a few remaining Jewel yams from this dessert, I got an idea. I had a potato, a purple onion and a bunch of green onions, so I should be able to make root veggie hash. What I had in mind was the spicy and savory breakfast potatoes from Lucky Platter in Evanston. (And maybe also the similarly appetizing one from m. henry in Andersonville.
I cut the carrots, potato and yams in medium-sized chunks, and diced the onion and green onions. In a pan, I slowly sautéed some minced garlic and onions, then added all the root vegetables. From there, all I need to do was to be patient; I'd discovered that the key to making good chunky hash is not to stir the potatoes. Rather, I'd need to let them become brown and crispy, slowly on lower-than-medium heat. So, this freed me up to make some scrambled eggs with oyster mushrooms (another prize from yesterday's Green City Market stroll). Toward the end, I added the green onions and let all the veggies slightly charred, just the way they are in Lucky Platter and m. henry. I love the concentrated veggie sweetness in charred onions and green onions, so I made sure they get the right treatment. A bit of salt and a few generous shakes of hot chili powder from the Spice House was enough for seasoning. (This hot chili powder was already in Patrick's cupboard when I met him three years ago. God knows how long it'd been sitting there before that, but it still has enough kick to spice up most everything!)
Out of curiosity, I'd sampled a small piece of the red carrot when I was cutting the veggies. That tiny piece was more than enough to fill my mouth with the almost pungent, green flavor of carrots. So, I was surprised, when I tasted the carrots in the hash--there was no hint of that pungent carrot flavor left in them. Instead, the red carrots had become as sweet as the jewel yams. I would have believed it if someone had told me that there's a ton of sugar added to the dish. Thanks to the slow cooking, all the root veggies had turned extra sweet and flavorful, without the least trace of the flavors they have when they're raw. Not that I hate the raw carrot flavor to the guts (I have to admit I'm not a huge fun of it, though...), but it was a pleasant reminder of the botanical basics, which I tend to forget, when seeing them as merely an "ingredient," that carrots are roots, a part of the plant that is a reservoir of sugary energy for the leaner days.
Apparently I was too excited to make this dish. Three little yams, one potato and three small carrots didn't seem like much when I cut them, but I'm completely stuffed two hours after our sumptuous breakfast of root veggies and eggs. Do I regret all those calories, though? No way! Coming from a country (or is it just my family?) that doesn't feast on hearty weekend breakfast, I'm utterly in love with this very American (it seems) luxury.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
The veggie dish I touched upon in the previous entry features a spinach-like Japanese vegetable called "komatsuna" (photographed in the lower-left hand corner). I found a very fresh bunch in the stand of Henry's Farm in Evanston Farmers Market last Saturday, and couldn't resist. It's pretty rare to see komatsuna in Chicago, let alone a fresh one. Flavorwise, they're more subtle than spinach--komatsuna doesn't have that earthy, pungent flavor spinach has (or is supposed to have). The delight of komatsuna is more in the light, crunchy texture than in punchy flavor. Komatsuna