December 7, 2009 by kanako
As you know, I’m not a big fan of sushi. On an average day, making sushi is far too much work for the home cook to take on: you have to make the rice, flavor it with vinegar, then let it cool, then make each sushi shape by hand, plus you need several different types of fish for credible sushi. It’s expensive, it’s time consuming, who needs it?
But what if you have a craving for raw tuna, but don’t want to go to all the trouble to make sushi? In that case, try this maguro zuke-don recipe, a kind donburi (see also Oyako-don) made by placing sashimi (raw fish – in this case, tuna) over a bowl of normal white rice.
The great thing is that even very lean tuna – which doesn’t make for very good sushi – works quite well in Maguro zuke-don. The result is this easy, quick, and really satisfying dish.
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Posted in Recipe, rice | Tagged sesame, spring-onion, sushi-nori, tuna | 12 Comments »
December 4, 2009 by kanako
Here’s another of those nice-food-if-you-can-get-it recipes, the “it” in this case being the tricky to find main ingredient: garlic sprouts.
Though, on second thought, there’s really no good reason these should be so hard to find in the West. They’re just the young green plants you get from a garlic bulb when you plant it in the ground.
Garlic sprouts seem to be a popular ingredient in Chinese cooking, and we also eat them in Japan, usually with beef. The taste is garlicky, but milder than the bulb’s and they have a unique sweetness that’s not weighed down by a strong smell. Their crunchy texture survives a fair amount of cooking.
Here in Montreal you can find Garlic Sprouts at the big Chinese/Vietnamese/Cambodian grocery superstore: Kim Phat.
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Posted in Recipe, main dish, today's meal | Tagged beansprout, beef, garlic-sprout | 2 Comments »
December 2, 2009 by kanako
Literally, shoga-yaki means “ginger stir-fry” but, of course, the shioga (“ginger”) refers to the flavoring rather than the main ingredient. As its name implies, the fragrance of grated ginger is the key to this dish: combined with the sweetness of onions and the succulence of pork, it makes for an absolutely winning stir fry!
When I started to write this post, I tried to do my usual thing: a bit of online research to try to find out where it’s originally from. Turns out it’s really hard to pin shiogayaki down: anywhere in Asia where there’s ginger, soy sauce and pigs somebody will try to put the three together on a hot pan.
And the results are…well, just give it a try. This dish will make a believer out of you in no time.
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Posted in Recipe, main dish | Tagged ginger, onion, pork | 1 Comment »
December 1, 2009 by kanako
Just to prove that East is East and West is West and sometimes the twain shall meet, here’s a Japanese potato salad!
To tell the truth, I was shocked when I found out potato salad was originally a western thing. For Japanese people, this is definitely one of those old recipes that make you nostalgic for mom’s food. In other words, potato salad is so deeply adopted in Japanese cooking we don’t even file it under the category of “Western-style cooking” – we just think of it as our own.
My mom used to make potato salad as a side dish, particularly when the main dish was something with pork, and doubly so if it was stir-fried with soy sauce. So, in Japan, potato salad is more side dish than a main dish, and you don’t eat a large quantity like Germans do.
Even so, like any potato salad, it’s perfect for a party or a barbecue!
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Posted in Recipe, side dish | Tagged cooked-ham, cucumber, mayonnaise, potato | Leave a Comment »
November 27, 2009 by kanako
Kakiage is a member of the tempura family, though these mixed vegetable fritters are less complicated to make than is usual for tempura. For this recipe, I show you how to suspend them in a dashi-based sauce rather than serving them in the usual tempura way – with salt or Worcestershire Sauce. Needless to say, if you prefer, you can eat them that way as well.
Kakiage is a useful recipe when you need to use up the vegetables remaining in your fridge, things like onions, carrots and green beans. Just make some Kakiage, then keep the finished fritters in the freezer. You can eat them on their own, as I show here, or with Udon noodles. When you make udon, take the ready kakiage out from the freezer, heat it in the toaster and add them to the noodle soup as a topping: a great way to sex up a simple bowl of udon.
Made right, the fritters will retain a bit of their crunch even underneath a very watery sauce. The result is absolutely scrumptuous!
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Posted in Recipe, main dish | Tagged carrot, daikon, egg, gobou, onion | Leave a Comment »
November 26, 2009 by kanako
Strictly speaking, nabe’s not a recipe so much as it is a piece of hardware: a communal clay pot filled with broth you heat at the table. All kinds of stuff can go into a nabe, from thin slices of meat (for “shabu shabu” and “sukiyaki”) to meatballs (“chanko-nabe”) to salmon and miso (“ishikari-nabe”) to poisonous blowfish (“te-chiri”) to mystery stuff your guests bring and put in with the lights off so you can play at trying to guess what’s in it (“yami-nabe”, a great dinner party game!)
Nabe is the quintessential Japanese winter dish. It conjures up the special kind of conviviality that comes with sharing a meal from a single pot with friends, family or business contacts.
Yose-nabe is one of the most popular in Japan: a light broth flavored with sea kelp and starring, chicken, shrimp, tofu, mushrooms and vegetables. Readers in Quebec may think of it as “Fondue Chinoise Japonaise”, only with none of that weird curry mayonnaise! And with a lot more vegetables in it. This, again, is a basic principle of Japanese cooking: every meal should have some meat or fish in it, but the meat should always be massively outnumbered by the vegetables.
In Montreal, you can find Japanese Nabe clay pots starting at $25 in Chinatown, and we just use a simple portable electric burner to put on the table ($19.95 at Canadian Tire). But if you have an electric pot for Fondue Chinoise, or even a normal Fondue pot, those will work fine. You just need something to keep the ingredients simmering.
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Posted in Recipe, main dish, today's meal | Tagged chicken, enoki, gobou, hakusai, leek, lime, mochi, scallop, shiitake, shrimp, shungiku, tofu, Udon | 5 Comments »
November 22, 2009 by kanako
In Japan, there are dozens of variations on miso soup. But if one of them can be called the “standard version”, this is it: a light broth containing bits of tofu, wakame seaweed and green onions.
This is probably the version of Miso soup Western people are most familiar with, since it’s the one almost always served at sushi places. Still, you should remember: this is a miso soup, not the miso soup.
It’s easy to see why this version is so popular, though: simple, delicious, and easy to match with any Japanese dish, it’s always tempting to fall back on this recipe when the time comes to make 1-dish 1-soup.
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Posted in Recipe, miso soup, soup | Tagged miso, tofu, Wakame | 2 Comments »
November 20, 2009 by kanako
Just looking at the Japanese name for this dish you can tell that something screwy is going on here: “piman” comes, of course, from the French “piment” – bell pepper. In fact, Piman Nikuzume is a typical example of “Yoshoku” – 洋食 – a “western style meal.” As you can guess, what we have here is a thoroughly Japanified take on Westernness. Really, Yoshoku means “Japanese Style Western Style Meal.”
The stuffing here could just as easily turn into “hambaagu” – you guessed it, Japanese style “hamburger”, which is more like a hamburger steak and a third of the way to a meatball rather than something you’d eat between slices of bread.
In Japan, though, eating just meat is considered a little boring and usually too heavy, so the solution in this case is to encase the hambaagu in vegetables. Of course, just putting a bell pepper around it doesn’t really make a hambaagu lighter, but psychologically, somehow, it becomes much more acceptable to the Japanese palate. For me, also, piman nikuzume is always much nicer to eat than hambaagu: a mongrel dish that tastes like home to me.
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Posted in Recipe, main dish | Tagged beef, green-pepper, onion, pork | 2 Comments »
November 19, 2009 by kanako
Everyone knows rice is the cornerstone of the Japanese diet, but the stuff has one fatal flaw: there’s no way to eat it with your hands. Not, that is, unless you learn to make Onigiri, Japan’s original solution to the problem of how to render rice not just delicious, but portable and snackable too.
If you like manga or anime, you’ve certainly seen characters munching on these odd, triangular rice balls. Why manga characters are fixated with Onigiri I have no idea – maybe because within Manga’s conventions, onigiri work as a kind of code for “food” in general. (“Gohan” does, after all, mean both rice and meal!)
If you don’t like animation so much, you may never have seen them. But the next time you need to pack a lunch and want some rice in it, you’ll be glad you know how to make these.
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Posted in Recipe, rice | Tagged rice | Leave a Comment »
November 18, 2009 by kanako
This bean-sprout stir fry is yet another one of those nothing-to-it dishes that Japanese moms can make pretty much with their eyes closed. As a side dish, it will round out any meal, adding crunchiness, vitamins and a delicious buttery taste to your dinner with a minimum of effort.
Bean sprouts are a staple throughout Asia, and as with any food that’s eaten so often over so many years, it’s sprouted (pun intended) its own little set of food traditions and rituals. One of them, which my husband finds totally crazy but everybody in Japan considers a settled fact, is that you really should trim the sprouts: snapping the stringy ends off with your fingers before you cook them.
This takes time, and it’s an easy corner to cut. In fact, I’m sure Japanese people often do skip this step, unless they are cooking for guests. But Japanese cooking is all about the details, and trimming the ends off of sprouts definitely makes a difference. Try it once, and see for yourself!
You should think of this recipe as a base. Sure, it’s delicious on its own, but if you just add some hot broth to it at the end, you have a delicious soup. And if you use it as a topping for ramen noodles, you easily upgrade a lowly junk food to Real Meal status with a minimum of effort.
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Posted in Recipe, side dish | Tagged beansprout | 1 Comment »
