Spring Asparagus

Not everybody likes asparagus, and I admit it's not the easiest vegetable to like, particularly if you have ever been subjected to the canned variety. (School cafeteria, I'm looking at you.) But fresh asparagus is wonderful. My mother is of the opinion that if you get really slender stalks, you should eat it raw, like a carrot. That's going a bit far for me. My favorite recipe is tossed with olive oil and salt and roasted in the oven.  But what's a Japanese take on asparagus?

I give you Asparagus Tossed with Crushed Black Sesame (aspara no kuro goma aé)

The ingredients are: 

• 12 oz. asparagus 
• 2 tsp. mirin 
• 2 tsp. light soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp. black sesame seeds 

Michael Pollan would approve: it has only 4 ingredients. 

The sesame seeds are the hardest part, since they have to be toasted. One thing I have learned: heated sesame seeds pop! They were jumping out of the pan like popcorn. Save yourself some cleanup and use a lid.

black sesame seeds

Basically, you toast the seeds, and process them in the food processor with mirin and soy until its a grainy kind of paste, the book says it should resemble "wet sand". You can add stock or water if you think it's too thick. Put to one side.

With the sesame seeds out of the way, put a pot of salted water on to boil, and prep the asparagus. Remove the woody ends and slice the spears into 1 to 1-1/2 inch pieces. Save the tips separately.

prepped and ready to go

When the water has reached a rolling boil, but in all the asparagus except the tips. Wait for the water to come back up to a boil and add the tips. Cook for another minute or two and then drain it. 

Put in a bowl and toss with the sesame seed mixture. It is now ready to serve. Tasty, green and oh so good for you. 

Two Chicken Dishes

I've been thinking about recipes I could make ahead and take to work. Things that could be packed in a lunch box and reheated in a microwave.

I started with gingery ground chicken (tori soboro). This was a snap to make, since it's just ground chicken cooked with a marinade. The highlight of this was I got to use my Japanese grater, which is such a neat tool. If you have ever spent time trying to finely chop ginger for a recipe, this is the most wonderful thing ever invented. You just rub ginger on the tines and it practically liquefies.

The chicken itself is pleasant, mildly spicy, but nothing to write home about.  But it is wonderful as part of a composed meal, so add the rice, the vegetables, the mushrooms I wrote about earlier. This is a choral meal, one where everything together creates a harmonious whole. All the components are okay on their own, but they are better in combination with other things.

Tangy seared chicken wings (tori teba saki no su itame) are soloists. They can stand alone. The wings (or in this case, thighs) have a more aggressive flavor profile.  It's the same procedure as the ground chicken, brown it and then letting it complete cooking in a marinade. But with this recipe, the flavoring is much more aggressive. And once you have taken the chicken out of the marinade, cook it down until it becomes a thick, tangy, vinegary sauce. Yum!

Unfortunately, neither of these was photogenic, so there are no pictures.  Well, I took some, but they wouldn't convince you to try the recipe. Pretty, they weren't. (Oddly enough, there were no photos in the cookbook either.)

Next up, Spring vegetables, which should look much better.

Of Rice and Radishes

I've never understood why people would get so tense about about cooking rice.  To me, it always seemed fairly straightforward: boil water, add rice, cook until done. This is the pasta method of cooking rice, and results in a fluffy rice that does not stick together. This is wonderful to make pilaf with, or to add to soup. 

But if you want sticky rice, rice that can be molded into balls and picked up with chopsticks, this method is useless.  So I have to learn a whole new way to cook rice. A lot of cooks swear by rice cookers (and the cookbook does recommend some) but I have an aversion to kitchen gadgets, so I followed the recipe for stove top rice. 

The first thing you have to do is to pick your rice. Rice come in three basic varieties: long grain, medium grain, and short grain. Long grain is what we in the West usually eat.  The Japanese prefer a medium grain rice, so that is what I bought.

Wash the rice. The goal here is to wash off the extra starch and to get the rice absorbing a little water before you start cooking it. Don't throw away the water you use to wash the rice! Save it to water the garden, or for cooking. It contains valuable starch.

washed rice

Side note: In Katherine Hepburn's book on filming The African Queen, she tells of how they were having a horrible time keeping her hat brim from falling over her face in the humidity of (what was then) the Belgian Congo.  The wardrobe department came up with a brilliant idea, rice water. They boiled rice and used the starchy water to stiffen her hat brim.  Thus are Oscar winning movies made.

Back to the rice. After you've washed it 4-5 times put the rice and a carefully measured amount of water into a pot with a tight fitting lid, and from there it's mostly a matter of having a reliable clock and not lifting the lid, no matter how tempted you are. I followed the times the author specified (and didn't lift the lid) and it came out beautifully: snowy white, sticky but not glutinous. The perfect opportunity to use my impulse buy from the Japanese grocery store - rice seasoning.

I think I may have overdone it, but it tasted good.

Then, since I had saved the water I washed the rice in, I made Steamed Radishes in Citrusy Miso.  The recipe has you cook the radishes most of the way in the starchy water, and then finish them up in a seasoned broth made of dashi, soy and mirin.  Then you serve the radish chunks with a citrus miso sauce. 

Worth a try, but not a taste sensation

This was like the steak dish from a few weeks ago. I like all the components, I just don't like them together. And I'd rather have the daikon raw. Raw, daikon has a palate-cleansing crispness to it, but cooked, it was like eating plain steamed turnips. The miso sauce didn't really help. The cookbook recommends using the miso as a dip, and I can see where it would be really good for that.

Three more recipes completed! I'm thinking mushrooms next.

New Year's Feast

Ingredients for New Year's Salad - daikon, carrot, dried persimmon, salt and lemon zest

In honor of the Lunar New Year, I decided to pull out the stops and go for multiple recipes.

• New Year's Salad
• Sweet and Sour Sauce
• Flash seared steak with two sauces
• Smokey Citrus Soy Sauce and Creamy Sesame Miso Sauce

It looks like a lot, but most of the work is creating the sauces. My only tip is to watch the sesame seeds closely when you toast them, they go up in a flash!

New Year's Salad - Kohaku Namasu

The salad is pretty, isn't it?  Even though I couldn't find Kyoto red carrots, which I'm sure would have been more colorful. I also don't have the skills to shred dried persimmon, so I just cut it up small. Anyone who can shred such a gooey ingredient has my full respect. Although it's called a salad, for a western audience, it's probably more appropriate to call it a pickle. I like it, it's nice and tart, but I like it better as a condiment.

Seared steak. According to the recipe, you should use Wagyu beef, which I’m sure is wonderful. But I have a mortgage, so I used USDA Prime instead.  And as you can see from the photo, I overcooked it a little.  Don’t get distracted when you cook – bad things happen.

Flash seared steak with two sauces - Gyu suteki, oroshi ponzu, goma miso soe

I’m sorry to say, I did not like this. I like steak and I like the sauces, but I don’t like them together.

Of the two sauces, I liked citrus soy (oroshi ponzu) best, especially once I put the grated daikon in it; salty, lemony, and peppery all at the same time. It was okay on the steak, but nothing special.

The creamy miso (goma miso soe), while lovely and nutty, was like putting peanut butter on a hamburger.

So I ditched the sauces and ate the steak with some leftover pesto. (I love garlic.)

But all was not lost, because I was able to use the Citrus Soy to make Chilled Udon Noodle Salad (Oroshi Kake Udon).  I ate it for lunch for the rest of the week.  It’s a pretty good thing to pack for lunch; it’s only mildy drippy, you don’t have to heat it, and the daikon adds a nice crunch.

6 recipes down and 126 to go!

Washoku: Fun with tofu

Mushrooms about to be roasted

I have completed two recipes: Basic Sea Stock (dashi) and Silken Tofu Topped with Mushrooms (tofu no kinoko an kake). The stock is incredibly simple. Soak kelp in water for 15 minutes, bring it to just under a boil, steep with bonito for four minutes and strain.  The result is a slightly thickened (the glutamates in the kelp do that) pale yellow liquid with a very mild flavor. 

With my nice new stock, I made tofu topped with mushrooms. Again, very simple recipe. Put mushrooms in a pan with oil and cook until they become soft and brown, add stock, soy, mirin, and salt.

Scallions

The tofu (drained and pressed) is heated in the microwave (the paper towels are to soak up the liquid that comes out).

Pour the mushrooms over the tofu, sprinkle with scallions and serve.

Isn't it pretty?

The result is not bad. I admit my Western tastebuds think sauteing the mushrooms in garlic and butter would improve this a lot, but it's really a nice meal. It's filling but not heavy and you feel so virtuous after eating it. It's not totally vegetarian (fish flakes in the stock) but you could use vegetarian stock instead if you want to be truly vegan about it.

2 down,  132 recipes to go!