February 6, 2010 by kanako
Inari is sushi, but not as you know it. Variously called Inari, Oinari-san, or Inarizushi, it’s made by filling Abraage pockets with Sushi-rice. As I wrote some time ago, in Japan people don’t really make sushi at home very often (see: Fight the Sushi Monoculture), however Inari is the exception. This is not a fancy dish; it’s a popular food you make and eat at home.
The other day when I was talking with my mother on the phone, she told that she made Inari for dinner. This made me all nostalgic and I got inspired to make Inari, too.
Tradition says that the name inari came from a Japanese shinto divinity that is often associated with a fox. The favorite food of this sacred fox was Aburaage. Sacred foxes or no, historic documents show Inari was already a popular form of sushi in the mid-1800s.
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Posted in Recipe, rice | Tagged aburaage | Leave a Comment »
January 29, 2010 by kanako
Yes, you read that right, what we have here is stir-fried lettuce. I know it sounds strange, but just trust me on this one. Although the lettuce seems withered, you’ll see it remains surprisingly crunchy and delicious after cooking.
Simply seasoned with salt, pepper and fresh ginger, Ebi Lettuce Itame is a delightfully “assari” dish. This is one of those hard-to-translate terms: it means subtly flavored, delicately textured and light all around. Japanese culinary culture puts a big premium on this sort of thing – subtle, refreshing dishes that won’t leave you feeling weighed down or overstuffed. I guess this isn’t necessarily that fashionable in Western cooking, but in Japan calling a dish “assari” is high praise indeed.
So when you want something light but still more consistent than a salad, try some stir-fried shrimp with Lettuce.
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Posted in Recipe, main dish, today's meal | Tagged ginger, lettuce, shrimp | 2 Comments »
January 24, 2010 by kanako
Some Japanese dishes just defy categorization, and none more so than okonomiyaki. In the West, I’ve seen it described in restaurant menus as Japanese Pancakes, Japanese Omelettes, even as Japanese Pizza – which, frankly, is only confusing.
Pay no attention. Analogies fail. In any case, the point is not the pancake itself, but the special sauce, which is what makes okonomiyaki taste a lot like…okonomiyaki!
The recipe I’m sharing here is for Osaka-style okonomiyaki, the city’s signature dish. Though I’ve seen fancy London restaurants serve it as an exotic delicacy (and charge upwards of 12 pounds for one!), in Osaka there’s nothing fancy about it: it’s a cheap, filling, flavorful meal young people adore.
Having grown up in the Kansai region, okonomiyaki is definitely “home cooking” for me. I even went to university in Osaka, and considering college students probably eat more okonomiyaki than anyone, I’ve certainly had more than my share. But you don’t have to be from Kansai: I’ve found that this is the one Japanese dish that just about every western person enjoys. Even Canadian children, who wouldn’t think of eating most of the weird things I put on this blog, love okonomiyaki.
Though it’s undoubtedly junk food, Osaka people take their okonomiyaki pretty seriously. In this recipe, I try to share a lot of secret little tips and tricks (marked in bold type) so you can make Okonomiyaki like a pro from your first try.
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Posted in Recipe, main dish, mid-afternoon snack | Tagged cabbage, pork | 6 Comments »
January 16, 2010 by kanako
How do you usually eat Tofu? In the Japanese repertoire, there are plenty of recipes to choose from, from Yu-dofu and Nabe to Miso soup, Kenchin-jiru, Agedashi tofu and Hiya-yakko, a popular fresh tofu recipe that I’ve not yet presented here.
In this recipe, I show you how to make a kind of fancied-up hiya-yakko using sesame oil rather than soy sauce. Why the need to fancy it up? Because, while simple Hiya-yakko sure is delicious, it’s just a little bit too plain a dish to serve guests. If you want to make a fresh tofu dish that’s sure to impress, this recipe is the solution for you.
A note of caution: these uncooked tofu recipes will turn out impossibly light and delicious if you use the right kind of tofu. Really, they live or die on the quality of the tofu you manage to get. In Kyoto, where silken tofu is a prized artesanal specialty made fresh each morning by traditional craftsmen, it’s hard to go wrong. Here in Montreal, where the tofu is ok but not necessarily fantastic, results can vary. Wherever you are, you should only try these using the best quality, softest silken tofu you can find.
And a tip: in North America, some quite decent Korean brands market this type of tofu as “extra silken”. That’s the kind you want.
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Posted in Recipe, soup | Tagged garlic, ginger, sesame, shiso-leaves, spring-onion, tofu | 4 Comments »
January 14, 2010 by kanako
This typical Kyoto recipe is a simple way to make fresh, home-made pickles (what we call “otsukemono” – 漬物 - in Japanese) in as little as 12 hours. It’s great as a “chopstick vacation” – a tiny side dish to contrast with the flavor of the main dishes.
As my mom is from Kyushu, this isn’t something she would normally make at home. However, I remember Senmai-zuke very well from growing up near Kyoto, and I always liked it. The image of Senmai-zuke displayed in front of the pickles stores is something which always reminds me of Kyoto.
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Posted in Chopstick Vacation, Recipe, side dish | Tagged konbu, turnip | Leave a Comment »
January 8, 2010 by kanako
Named after the golden red color of the autumn leaves by the Tatsuta River near Nara, as evoked in a famous poem dating from 9th century, Saba Tatsuta-age is a wonderful recipe to try when you manage to secure high quality mackerel (‘Saba’ in Japanese), whether fresh or frozen.
Though traditionally prized for the delicious taste you get when you seal in all of the fish fat, this method of cooking has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts as scientists have increasingly identified the health benefits of essential nutrients such as Omega-3, which are plentiful in mackerel and other blue-backed fish.
A secondary, but not inconsiderable, advantage is that this way of cooking mostly attenuates the strong, fishy-smell that’s typical of Blue-Backed fish. The result is a succulent fish dinner that’s nutritionally outstanding without the overpowering fishy taste you get from other ways of cooking mackarel.
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Posted in Recipe, main dish, today's meal | Tagged ginger, mackerel | 3 Comments »
January 1, 2010 by kanako
In Japan, New Year is not just a party, it’s a very important festival of purification, renewal and ritual. In fact, New Year’s day (not eve) is one of the most important holidays in the festival calendar. It’s called Shogatsu and it heralds a week-long bacchanalia when lots of traditional banquet foods are served.
The traditional shogatsu dinner is called Osechi: it’s a huge amount of work which basically requires the whole family pitch in. In my house in Japan, my mother used to prepare it every year, with my two sisters and I as assistants. Traditionally, osechi must be served in three- or five-story lacquerware Bento boxes. The banner you see on the top of this blog is, in fact, of one of the osechi we prepared at my house in Japan a few years ago.
Not having lacquerware for Osechi and having a Venezuelan husband, this year we decided to do something East-West for our first shogatsu meal. We had Hallacas, the traditional Venezuelan Christmas food, which is similar to Mexican tamales and we made with his family a couple of weeks ago, and I made small but special little side dishes: Umaki (Japanese omelet with eel), Nuta (spring onions with sweet miso souce), and Ikura Mizore-ae (salmon roe with grated daikon). Mizore literally means sleet in Japanese.
Mizore-ae is very simple but it turns a beautiful dish for a special occasion.
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Posted in Chopstick Vacation, Recipe, side dish | Tagged daikon, salmon-egg | 3 Comments »
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 »
