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.
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...)
Pickled nozawana was one of the few things that I'd been craving for since I moved to Chicago. It's very difficult to find a fresh one, since the pickle turns sour pretty quickly and (not surprisingly) it doesn't seem to be produced in the U.S. So, I was literary elated when I found a bag of fresh-looking pickled nozawana at H Mart yesterday. It'd been more than four years since I had my last ration of this wonderful pickle.
As you can see in the photograph, fresh pickled nozawana has this beautiful, deep but vibrant green hue. When it turns sour, the green becomes dull and an unconcealable tinge of brown sets in. Not that there aren't people who prefer aged nozawana that's turned sour (quite a few Japanese people do, in fact), but I'm just not big on that sour taste in aged pickles in general.
Nozawana is a crunchy, leaf vegetable that belongs to the turnip family. For something in the turnip family, it grows rather big: a fully grown nozawana can reach three feet. Preferring chilly and misty climate of the highland, nozawana is a specialty of the village of Nozawa, and grown in the surrounding Shin-etsu region. Although I did come across a few American seed companies (such as the Kitazawa Seed Co. in California) that distributes nozawana seeds, I've never seen one being sold fresh anywhere around Chicago.
Nozawana has a distinctive flavor that's difficult to describe. (Well, well, this shows my limitation...) The closest vegetable I've had in the U.S. is the generically called "potherb" stir-fried with shredded pork, served at the Lao Szechuan (a surprisingly stylish website they have!). Whatever they're calling "potherb" has a different texture from nozawana--the one at Lao Szechuan seems denser and less crunchy, but the flavors are very close. Strange for a vegetable, both nozawana and the "potherb" have a hint of meaty umami. My amateur's guess is that they have some amino acids that produce this complex, meat-like flavor.
Guessing aside, nozawana is just really tasty. If you find one on a restaurant's menu or in a Japanese grocer's fridge, grab and try it. I'd planned an American-style dinner for yesterday, but the nozawana changed it all: I had to have rice, with the nozawana, so I did. Ah, I could have eaten the whole bag in one sitting, with maybe three bowls of rice! I didn't need anything else (although I did behave myself and had a balanced meal). I hope Patrick wasn't too taken aback by my uncharacteristically ferocious defense when he tried to snatch the last piece of nozawana--I just had to have that one, too. It's mine. It's all mine...
My happiest day would be when one of the area farmers start growing nozawana and sell them in farmers' markets...
Continue reading "(My Personal) Pickled Nozawana Craze"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"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'm not a big fun of carrots. I eat them, but I don't like to eat them in a large quantity. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of picking up beautiful heirloom (?) carrots from farmers' markets; it's just really hard to resist the happily grown, lacy leaves (that you don't see too often in supermarkets) and the unusual palletes ranging from pearly white to striking vermilion to rich burgundy. Since the farmers' market carrots tend to have even stronger flavor, I always end up with my purchase patiently waiting for their turn in the fridge--often for weeks. (Good thing they don't go bad quickly.)
Today, I was determined to clear the fridge of the beautiful, burgundy-colored carrots that I'd picked up weeks ago. There were six good-sized ones, so a drastic measure was in order. Remembering the amazing transformation of the root veggies in a slow-cooked hash, I decided to do something similar, but this time with an Asian twist. (Come to think of it, I think I got the carrots when I did the hash; which makes the carrots three-week old. Sigh...) The main was to be shiitake mushrooms stuffed with ground chicken, Vietnamese pink mint (that tastes like Japanese shiso), and ginger, so a side of slow-cooked carrots in Thai red curry sauce would be a nice accompaniment.
Slow-Cooked Carrots with Thai Red Curry Sauce (for two)
First, wash the carrots and cut them into bite-sized chunks. Heat a generous amount of butter or vegetable oil in a heavy frying pan, and sautée the garlic and onion. When they're half translucent, add carrots. Stir to coat the carrots with butter (or oil), then arrange the carrots on the pan so that every piece is touching the pan. Sprinkle the coriander seeds. Turn the heat down and cook slowly, without stirring. Every once in a while, turn the carrots to ensure that all sides are browned.
Meanwhile, mix the coconut milk, red curry paste and lime peel in a bowl. After about 30 minutes of slow-cooking (or when the carrots are cooked through and the onions are nicely caramelized), pour the mixture into the frying pan. Let the sauce simmer and thicken for a minute or two. Serve in a bowl or on a plate, and garnish with fresh cilantro. It does take about half an hour for the carrots to slowly release its sweetness, but that doesn't mean that you have to tend the pan every single minute of it. I managed to make the stuffed shiitake mushrooms and miso soup while the carrots cooked. This is a let-the-stove-do-its-job-while-I-do-mine kind of recipe.
As was the case with the root veggie hash, the slow cooking on low heat brought out the natural sugar in the carrots, while the tang and heat of the Thai red curry livened up the sweetness. There wasn't a hint of that green, pungent flavor typical of carrots--this might be a disappointing dish if you love that flavor, but even for a carrot lover, I think the surprising sweetness within the carrots that the slow-cooking brings out would be pleasurable. I wonder if you could pass this dish to your carrot-hating kids without them rejecting it--it doesn't taste like carrots at all, but then again, kids are freakishly keen observers when it comes to foods they don't like. I've read enough accounts of failed attempts to "hide" a detested ingredient in an innocent-looking dish. One thing for sure is, though, that once a carrot hater puts this in his/her mouth, the toughest hurdle has been cleared.
We successfully defeated the six remaining carrots with this wonderfully comforting dish--just in time for a next bunch from the Green City Market on Wednesday!
I spent ten years of my childhood in an agricultural town in central Japan. Our house stood on the edge of a tableland overlooking carrot fields. In spring, the smell of freshly turned earth permeated the air, and soon, deep green leaves of the carrots turned into a swelling ocean. In summer, reflections of the intense sun on the transparent plastic sheet that covered the green houses below in the field sometimes surprised my sleepy eyes as I ate breakfast. This was the east side of the house, and east was where my primary school stood, in relation to my house. I walked through the carrot fields to and from school, occasionally picking mulberries along the way, until my purple fingers looked like an alien's. In early summer, when farmers pulled out and discarded smaller carrots to give room to the better-growing ones, I would pick up the small yet still good ones from the side of the fields and take them home. Though my friends from farming families didn't do this (most likely they had more carrots than they would ever wish to see lying around at home), I didn't think picking up discarded vegetables was a shameful act; to me, the small carrots slowly withering away in the afternoon sun were perfectly good food going unappreciated. I might still feel the same way. With berries to pick, carrots to find and nectar to suck, twenty minutes of walk twice a day, along the same route through the field, across an irrigation canal and up the last steep climb to my house was never a routine.
The scenery changed when I moved on to middle school. The middle school was to the north of my house, and most of the way there was residential. Beyond a railroad and a busy national highway and past a small, dark shrine, the way to middle school never felt as fun as the road to the primary school. I may not have paid as much concentrated attention to the surrounding, either, for I talked and talked and talked with a close friend as we walked from school together. With a good friend to share it, the world seemed to be much larger than the mulberry trees and carrot leaves. We trashed school policies, discussed politics as if we'd been cynical adults, lamented environmental destruction and exchanged our thoughts on books. As we immersed ourselves in the conversation, old houses and little rice paddies disappeared into the indistinguishable background. Until my friend made a turn at the national highway, I was oblivious of what was around me. In a strange way, thus, my memory is much more vivid between the highway and my house; the cracked surface of the pedestrian bridge, tall summer weeds swaying violently on the roadside as cars zoomed by, and the tiny corn field between the railway and my house.
The farmer who had that field must have been alternating his crops, for all sorts of vegetables showed up: taro, sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkins, peas, and what I remember the most--corn. During the harvest season, the farmer would set up a small shack--more appropriately, a small shelf with a tin roof--by the green, erect stalks of corn and sold his harvest directly. I don't really know if that was a he or a she, because I'd never seen the farmer manning the shack; there was a tapper ware box with a slit on the lid to put coins in, and everyone left a few hundred yens in exchange for the sweet, plump corn cobs just cut in the morning. When I saw the corn shack on the way back from school, I would run to my house and told my mother. She then would grab her purse and walked up the hill to get the corn before that special sweetness evaporates into thin air. She would boil them immediately, and often the main fare of her dinner was that corn, just boiled with salt.
For a long time, I didn't understand the "corn as snack" or "corn as dinner" concept. It was tasty, but I didn't think it was good enough to replace my cookies and chocolates, or my spaghetti or curry and rice. I watched my mom sink her teeth into the thick, yellow stick, thinking of the prehistoric meat on the bone that troglodytes feasted on. When she ate corn this way, her eyes focused on the next row of pearly kernels to guide her teeth and her fingers tense from the pressure to hold the fat cob, there was a simple, child-like pleasure that emanated from her. While I almost envied her delight, simplicity of food didn't convince me. And I suppose that hadn't changed too much even now: I do enjoy less complicated good food much more now, but I still don't think I can be as happy as my mom was with a dinner of a corn on the cob. I can't help adding the "twist."
Summer Festival Corn on the Cob
Corn on the cob is a ubiquitous summer festival food, sold in multi-colored tents with a long and narrow charcoal grill set in the front. The vendors roast the corn on the grill, occasionally brushing it with soy sauce. The soy sauce burns and adds a wonderfully earthy and nutty flavor to the corn, which I think perfectly complements the sweetness already in the kernels. To recreate this flavor, I often sautée the boiled corn in a bit of butter until the kernels show brown burn marks. Then, I sprinkle some soy sauce and let it burn a bit on high heat. You need to be careful not to set off the smoke detector (it can be pretty smoky, but that's what makes it so tasty), but a box fan in the kitchen window should be enough. Eating this festival corn transports me back, in time and space, to the rural Japan I grew up in--picking mulberries and all.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
Monday was our first summer day, with the temperature in the mid-80s. The sky was blue with a few thunderstorms in the horizon. It was too nice of a day to waste indoors, working at computers. So we decided to pack a picnic lunch and spend our lunch hour at the lake.
I had a small red cabbage, half a carrot, and a bunch of snow peas (among other things) in the fridge, and I'd also wanted to experiment with cole slow with an Asian twist. Back in April, when Tom and I had an Iron Chef Battle (the not-so-secret ingredient was garlic), Tom made a fabulous Asian slow, and I had that in mind.
Recently Tom had also given me a portion of Szechuan Peppercorn from Spice House, so I decided to use it as the flavor backbone. Often used in Ma Po Tofu, Szechuan peppercorns have moderate heat and wonderfully refreshing, slightly minty aroma. This was actually my first time to see them in their original shape (I'd only seen them in ground form), and I really liked the reddish shell with subtle bumpy texture and the creamy green seed that showed between the cracked halves of the shell. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to remove the shells. Out of sheer laziness, I decided to just ground the whole thing, removing only a few conspicuous twigs from the ground peppers.
I shredded all the veggies, and made the vinaigrette:
1 table spoon of olive oil
1 table spoon of vinegar
1 chunk of ginger, minced
1 pinch of Szechuan peppercorns, ground
2 tea spoon of soy sauce
2 tea spoon of sugar
When I tasted the vinaigrette right after mixing, olive oil dominated everything else--even the Szechuan peppercorns. Since I thought the flavors might settle better as the veggies soak up the vinaigrette and the flavors from the veggies in turn seep into the dressing, I tossed the veggies in the vinaigrette and let the slow sit in the fridge for a while. Meanwhile, I baked the (frozen, out-of-the-box) battered cod in the oven and also warmed two pieces of French peasant bread. When, after about 20 minutes, I took out the bowl of cole slow from the fridge, the olive oil had been tamed by other flavors. Hooray!
We packed our lunch, stuffed a backpack with a beach towel, two cans of soda and eating utensils, and headed for the Evanston beach. It was a quiet day at the beach, and we managed to secure a park table. It might have been a bit too windy--while we ate, the tree above us kept adding its leaves and bark pieces to our salad--but it was nice to be out. A little boy raced on the lake shore path back and forth, back and forth, on his colorful training bike, while his mom read by the small mobile crib of his little sister. An older couple were having their brown-bag lunch at the table next to ours, and a young couple sweettalked, leaning on a rock. (It was so relaxing that I forgot to take a picture of the finished lunch box!)
We had to head back soon, but if we hadn't had to, we would have spent the whole afternoon there on the green grass, reading and talking. The Japanese say "I feel like my hair is being pulled back" when she doesn't want to leave, and it was one of those "hair being pulled back" moments.
Saturday night, after a Chinese feast for lunch, we knew we shouldn't be hungry. But being gluttonous foodies, we found ourselves slightly snacky around 7:30. I didn't want anything too heavy, but I didn't want to snack on things like chips or cookies (both of which we have plenty at hand, despite our rational side telling us not to). And we had an open bottle of white wine in the fridge. That needed to be consumed before it turns sour. So I quickly made a few veggie-based munchies to go with the Chardonnay.
Curried Tomato and Egg Salad
I used six of the mini Roma tomatoes from Whole Foods for this, but any one large tomato of preferably a sweeter kind should work just fine. Boil two eggs and let them cool. Meanwhile, cut the tomatoes into bite-sized chunks. Dressing is a mixture of mayonnaise, lemon juice, salt, pepper and Ras El Hanout that I used for this fish dish. When the eggs are not too hot, peel the shell and cut them into wedges. Mix all the ingredients in a bowl, chill and serve.
I also added some Caribbean Calypso spice mix from the Spice House, but it had lost most of its orangy zestiness (been sitting in the cupboard for too long). I still think that the orange flavor might be good with the Arabic curry, so the next time I make this, I'll add some flesh orange zest (or get fresh Calypso mix).
Quick Japanese Cucumber Pickle
This is a quickie. All you need for this recipe is some sesame oil and what's called "ponzu." Ponzu is a traditional Japanese condiment that combines soy sauce, fish stock and citrus juice. It has a wonderfully refreshing flavor of a Japanese citrus called "yuzu" (although the ones available in the U.S. seem to substitute this distinctive citrus with lemon), and the fish stock adds nice depth to any dish. Bottled ponzu tends to be on the sharp side, but hey, I can't make it from scratch every day (that would involve finding the elusive yuzu, making stock from bonito flakes and konbu, and other time-consuming steps), so I rely on the less-than-perfect ready-made ones. Ponzu can be used as salad dressing or dipping sauce for broiled fish, but today, I used it for this quick pickle.
To make this light pickle ("asa-zuke" in Japanese), cut the cucumbers into bite-sized bits and sprinkle some salt on them. After a few minutes, gently squeeze the excess water out of the cucumber, and pour some ponzu over them. Drizzle a touch of sesame oil, and let it sit in the fridge for ten to fifteen minutes. When the cucumber bits are slightly brown from ponzu, it's ready to serve. Today, I used some cilantro for garnish.
The ivory-colored dish in the front is the oven-roasted russet potatoes with garlic and rosemary, which came out wonderful. I should have made more of those, but then again, the idea was to eat light after an indulgent lunch, so a potato and a half for the two of us was just fine.
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A Seattle Times article describes a Seattle-based chef's experiment with ponzu, and is much better at explaining what the condiment tastes like than I am.
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