Squash arrived in Japan in the middle of 16th century from Cambodia through the Portuguese. Originally, we got a kind of butternut squash, but today the green-on-the-outside variety, known as kabocha squash or Japanese pumpkin, is the most common in Japan.

Kabocha Nimono is the kind of old kitchen stand-by recipe most Japanese moms can make with their eyes closed. Cooked this way, you don’t even have to peel the squash: the skin becomes very soft through simmering. The big pitfall to watch out for here is using too much moisture and letting the pumpkin get all soggy. The goal is to get the squash soft and buttery, almost like a chestnut. You don’t want it waterlogged.

Ingredients: (for four)

• A half of Squash (use the type that’s green on the outside, not pumpkin!)
• Dashi stock – 400cc (mix hot water with half a teaspoon of dashi powder)
• Soy sauce – two tablespoons
• Sugar – one tablespoon
• Mirin – one tablespoon
• Sake – two tablespoons

Preparation:

1. Dig out the seeds and cut the squash into chunks.
2. If you like, partially peel the squash. Don’t peel all the skin off: it’s much prettier with some of the green skin still on.
3. If you have enough time, cut off a little the corners to keep it from crumbling after cooking. This technique is called mentori (chamfer).
   
4. Prepare hot water (400cc) and dissolve the dashi powder (half a teaspoon) in it.
5. Place the squash and dashi stock in a big pan. The liquid should be just to cover the squash.
   If it’s too much, pour off some of the liquid to keep it from becoming too watery later.
6. Heat the pan. When it starts to boil, add soy sauce, sugar, mirin and sake.
7. Make a paper towel dome  to seal in the moisture, and cook over middle heat until the sauce reduces (about 5 minutes – depending on your pot).
   Don’t cover.
   
8. Check whether the squash is cooked by piercing with a chopstick.
   As soon as you find it’s cooked, turn off the heat. Don’t overcook it.
   

Torisoboro Gohan isn’t really a fancy dish, but it’s very flavorful and always seems to be a major hit when I’ve served it to Westerners. To make it really appealing, you want  to pair it with brightly colored garnishings – usually green beens and silk-thread eggs – aiming for a tri-color effect at the end.

Full disclosure: on our recent trip to Japan, we ate an outrageous amount of tofu.

All I can say is, she made a believer out of me. Or, maybe that’s soft-pedalling it a bit. A fanatic. Yes. She made a tofu fanatic out of me.

Of course, I’m aware that fried snacks have an image problem, but I go by Michael Pollan’s Food Rule #39: you get a free pass on any junk food you make at home, from scratch. When you make your own junk food, it becomes what it should be: a rare treat, rather than a health destroying habit. Plus gobou is full of fibre, so even when fried it’s much healthier than potato chips.

In case you’re wondering, Gobou is the taproot of the Burdock plant – you know, the one with the bulbs that stick to your socks when you walk in the woods. The roots have a highly distinctive appearance: brown and earthy just like an ordinary root, but very thin and very long. In Montreal you can always find gobou at Kim Phat. Elsewhere, many Asian Stores carry it, so don’t be afraid to ask.

I often serve Gobou Fries to guests as a snack to go with beers before dinner, sort of the way you serve peanuts. In my experience, most Western people are totally unfamiliar with it, but once they taste it, then they keep picking at it until it’s gone. Delish.

Ingredient:

• Gobou root -one
• Chicken stock – one cube
• Flour – two tablespoons
• Frying oil

Preparation:

1. Shave off the skin of the gobou with the sharp end of a knife. And rinse it with cold water.
2. Cut the gobou into slices. For this recipe, I personally prefer thick rather than thin slices.
3. Soak gobou chips in lukewarm water for about 5 minutes.
4. 
5. Drain.
6. Crush the chicken stock into powder with your fingers, then mix the powder with the gobou slices. Rub together to homogenize.
7. Powder the flour over the gobou and mix them well.
   
8. Heat the oil and fry the gobou about 5 minutes.
9. When it browns take it on the newspaper to absorb excess oil.
   

And if you’ve just come from Menuism, welcome! We already have 72 detailed Japanese recipes up on this blog – each with step-by-step illustrations – and we add new ones all the time. So there’s plenty to choose from for the aspiring Japanese home cook: just get yourself a good, sharp knife, make friends with the clerk at your nearest Asian grocery store, and get started!

Intense certainly describes the taste of Konbu Tsukudani – a powerful mix of sweet, salty and umami. Usually I buy the ready-made kind in Japan and bring it, but I recently ran out. So, I decided to make some from scratch. Turns out, if you can get dried sea kelp, it’s easy.

In fact, Konbu Tsukudani is delicious even without rice. Probably the simplest way to enjoy tsukudani is to just eat it on its own, as an accompaniment to green tea: something intensely sweet and salty to heighten the flavor of the tea.

Ingredient:

• Dry Konbu -25 g
• Sugar – 2 tablespoons
• Soy sauce – 3 tablespoons
• Mirin – 2 tablespoons
• Dashi – a teaspoon
• Water – 1 cup
• Vinegar – 3 tablespoons

Preparation:

1. Leave the pieces of konbu to soak in the vinegar for about 30 minutes. This is the secret to making the konbu soft. The vinegary taste goes away later.
2. When it softens, cut the konbu with scissors into 2 cm. x 2 cm square.
   
3. Place the cut konbu and water in a pan and bring it to a boil, cooking at low heat for about an hour.
4. After an hour , add dashi, sugar, soy sauce, and mirin. Then cook it again at low heat until the sauce thickens and the moisture boils away almost entirely.
   
5. Cool it down. Then, if you like, add sesame seeds or katsuobushi.
6. Put it in a small tupperware and keep it in the fridge.

For best results, let it sit in the fridge overnight. For some reason, that makes it noticeably tastier!

As toppings, you have some leeway to choose your favorite: a lot of people are fans of a Natto and Okra topping, others prefer roast pork, salad, grated daikon and so on. Me? I go for that soft-boiled egg…

Today, we made Hiyashi Udon because we were in a bit of a hurry and didn’t want to spend too long cooking. Another plus: here’s a dish you can make in 20 minutes flat. To save even more time, you could even use the same sauce you made for Somen on your Hiyashi Udon, but I prepared a slightly different sauce today.

Ingredients: (for two)

• Udon -200 g. (use dry udon, avoid the “fresh” pre-cooked kind you sometimes see in Asian stores)
• Topping: spring onions, a piece of ginger, two boiled egg (4 minutes), katsuobushi

For the sauce (You can use this sauce for Hiyashi Somen, too)

• Soy sauce – 3 tablespoons
• Mirin – 2 tablespoons
• Dashi –  a teaspoon
• Water – 250 cc

Preparation:

Make the sauce

1. Bring the water to a boil. Then add dashi, mirin and soy sauce.
2. Turn off the heat and cool it down.

Prepare the noodles

1. Slice the onions, grate the ginger, and make one soft boiled egg per portion.
   
2. Fill the large pot with water and bring to a boil.
3. Cook the noodles for two minutes less than the instructions in the package suggest. (about 12 minutes)
   Do not add salt to the cooking water, Udon is already salted.
4. When the Udon is finished cooking, drain it and rinse it with cold water.
   Use your hands to rub off the slimy residue (after this udon becomes “al dente”).
   
5. Put a portion of noodles in each bowl. Then add the toppings.
6. Pour the sauce and serve.
   

August is when ginger is at its best. At this time of year, prices are low and you can find the fresh, fragrant roots everywhere.

If you read this blog regularly, you already know that Japanese home cooking is seasonal cooking. So, at this time of year, we make lots of deeply ginger-perfumed recipes – in part because of an old folk belief that this root helps fight off the sluggishness and lethargy you get when the weather gets really hot.

Here’s a flavored rice that puts ginger to good use. This spicy and refreshing ginger-scented rice goes great alongside fish. Best yet, it’s very easy to make: you just add some sliced ginger and a little bit of simple sauce, and cook it as you would plain white rice.

Ingredients (serves 5)

• Rice – 3 cups
• A small piece of ginger
• Water – 3 and half cups (It depends on the rice. See Gohan.)
• Soy sauce – 3 teaspoons
• Sake – 3 tablespoons
• Dashi – 1 teaspoon
• Salt – a pinch

Preparation:

1. Wash rice (do this quickly: no more than three minute.)
   In a mid-sized to large pot, place rice in water and leave to soak for about 40 minutes.
2. Peel the ginger and slice it very thin, then cut the slices into tiny strips.
3. After the rice has soaked, add the ginger, soy sauce, sake, dashi and salt to the rice.
4. Cover pot and cook on high heat for about 12 minutes.
5. After 12 minutes, turn to medium-low heat for about 5 minutes until the water evaporates completely.
6. Then turn heat off and let it sit for another 5 minutes. (If you are using gas stove, turn heat all the way down.)
7. Turn over thoroughly and put cover back on. (If you’re cooking with gas, turn it off.)
   Let the rice steam for at least another 5 minutes.

Today I prepared Shoga Gohan with Simmered Sardines (see Saba Nitsuke) and boiled sweet corn (Japanese style: without butter.)

The Nanohana Ohitashi was served to us in a big bowl to be shared. We were a little taken a back, at first, by the size of the portion. It was really a lot; actually, it seemed a little bit too much for three people. But as we started in on it, we quickly understood that finishing it wouldn’t be a problem: it was just so fragrant, so elegant, so stylish. Slightly piquant due to the mustard, and bitter but also sweet thanks to the contribution of the rapini. It was perfection in a side dish.

By the end, there was none left.

Ingredients: (for four)

• A bunch of rapini (Nanohana)

For the sauce

• Water – 100 ml
• Dashi – 1/2 tea-spoon
• Mirin – 1/2 table spoon
• Soy sauce – 2 table spoons
• Musutard  - as much you like (If you use Japanese mustard, one teaspoon)

Preapration

Make the sauce

1. Microwave 100 ml of water until boiling hot
2. Dissolve the dashi in the hot water
3. Add the soy sauce and mirin
4. Stir

Prepare the rapini

1. Wash the rapini without taking them apart and bring a quart of water to a boil
2. Dunk the rapini in the boiling water, base first, leaves on top
3. Mix in and boil for about 1.5~2 minutes.
4. Drain and run under cold water to cool.
5. Squeeze out the excess moisture with your hands and cut the greens into 4 cm. long segments.
6. Dissolve the mustard in the sauce.
7. Place in a bowl, add the sauce and mix a little bit.
   Serve as side dish.

Even if this is a side dish, I like to eat a lot of  nanohana ohitashi. So I prepared a very simple lunch with takikomi gohan and nanohana ohitashi.