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 The presentation is painfully outdated (thick stoneware plates with brown lines around the edge--an unmistakable mark of the '70s), and what must have been exotic dishes, made with what little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"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.
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.
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 is often used in miso soups, and marinated with ground sesame seeds, soy sauce and sugar (goma-ae). (By the way, other veggies in the photo are potted Thai basil, oyster mushrooms and asparagus, from the top, clockwise.)
I also had a fresh, firm bunch of oyster mushrooms, also from a farmers market stand. To use both of them and to enjoy their subtle flavors, I decided to lightly stir-fry them. The ideal recipe would call for real homemade chicken stock, but of course I didn't have one at hand, so I used the powdered Chinese soup mix. In heated oil, I sautéed a generous amount of minced ginger, and added the komatsuna and mushrooms. When they're about 70% done, I added some soup mix dissolved in about three tablespoons of hot water. (I wanted that restaurant-style wateriness; this worked well.)
The komatsuna was still nicely crunchy and the oyster mushrooms had soaked up the ginger and chicken flavors. I could have used all the komatsuna in the bunch; it was such a good accompaniment to steamed rice. The small bunch of komatsuna was (I think) about $3, so this isn't something we can do very often (which is kind of funny because I could easily spend $3 or even more for coffee in one day!), but it'll be quite difficult to resist the soft green leaves when we go to Henry's stand...
I'll probably use the rest of the bunch for miso soup one of these days. There isn't enough left to make the komatsuna a main feature of a dish, sadly.
On Memorial Day, the aroma of char-grilled burgers wafting from our neighbors' backyard (all the way up to our third-floor apartment!) was a torture. It made us crave for a few little things, all of which were denied for one reason or the other: a cute little Weber grill (no place to store), a place to grill (back porch too small, smoke detector too sensitive), etc., etc....
We thought about going to the Moody's and have a beer or two with their burgers in the outdoor patio, but this was a bad idea, too. I had a bunch of super-fresh veggies we got from the Evanston Farmers Market on Saturday, and considering I wouldn't be cooking on Tuesday, I wanted to use them now. Oyster mushrooms, in particular, were screaming to be cooked while still perky. Plus I had a chunk of fatty pork ribs (deboned) from Mitsuwa, and there was a dish I wanted to try with it. (What I did with the oyster mushrooms, I'll post tomorrow.)
The recipe (link in Japanese) I followed was Vietnamese, but a very similar dish, called "kakuni," exists in the traditional cooking of Kagoshima, a southern prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. An excellent producer of the renowned Kurobuta (Berkshire black) pork, it is no surprise that Kagoshima has developed this simple but delectable dish of fatty pork simmered in soy sauce and raw cane sugar. Kakuni was never a part of my Tokyo-born mom's repertoire, but ever since I had a collapse-under-my-chopsticks tender kakuni in an izakaya (Japanese style tapas bar), I've been a faithful lover of this simple dish. (Kakuni goes superb with shochu, barley- or sweet potato- based liquor, another Kagoshima specialty. And thus, kakuni is often found on izakaya menus.)
The only reason I forwent Japanese recipe over the Vietnamese one is that I wanted to experiment more with the Vietnamese coconut caramel that I picked up a few weeks ago (and made an awesome fried rice). I was stunned to find the god-awful amount of sugar the recipe required, but since it was the first time I cook this dish myself, I faithfully followed the sucroseful recipe for two:
1. Marinate chunks of deboned pork ribs in 1 tablespoon of Nam Pla (or Nuoc Mam), 1 tablespoon of sugar, 1 tablespoon of caramel sauce, a clove of minced garlic and black pepper. Let it sit in the fridge for an hour.
2. Sautée the pork in a frying pan so that all the exterior is nicely browned.
3. Pour the remaining marinade into a pot. Add 3 tablespoons of Nam Pla, 2 tablespoons of sugar, one dried hot pepper, and place the pork in the pot. Add some water so that the pork chunks are half immersed in the sauce. Simmer for an hour or so.
I boiled two eggs and grilled (without oil) some sliced sweet potatoes and added them into the simmering pot at the end of the cooking time, but this is a tasty but dispensable flourish if in a pinch. (The original recipe only calls for pork and eggs. The idea of sweet potatoes came from the fact that Kagoshima, the birthplace of kakuni, also produces a lot of sweet potatoes, only some of which are brewed into shochu.) As the kakuni simmered down, the wonderfully rich aroma of fish sauce and caramel filled the kitchen and then the dining room, and mostly dispelled the annoyingly enticing smell of the backyard barbecue. I quickly made a few other dishes with the fresh veggies from the farmers market, and by 5:30, we were enjoying the fatty pork and sweet potatoes. By 6, we were happily intoxicated. Intoxicated enough, indeed, to watch an episode of A-Team, which both of us adored as kids. But alas, a bottle of Stella Artois was not nearly enough to stop me from remarking: "I have no idea why I loved this show! This is awful!"
We promptly switched to a few episodes of The Black Adder. No barbecue, but it was a good Memorial Day feast. At least there weren't any severed enemy heads on our table...
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Takkatsu is the best place to sample how good Kurobuta can be in a breaded-and-fried form. (Full review coming soon, since we love this place.)
161 W. Wing St., Arlington Heights, IL
847.818.1860
I just started writing for a local web magazine Gapers Block's food blog Drive-Thru. My virgin post is on young garlic leaves that I procured at the Evanston Farmers Market.
With the garlic leaves, I made this:
Check it out!
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