Japanese

Salmon with red miso

March 8, 2009 by greg 1 Comment

On the island of Hokkaido, in Japan, they make a simple and tasty salmon dish by flavoring it with miso paste and mirin and cooking it in foil with cabbage and onions. At least I knew a student from Hokkaido who prepared it that way, and it was delicious! My dish is nothing like the tasty original I had before but it does bring back my memories of that succulent fish.

I didn’t have any cabbage on hand but I did have plenty of onions. I sliced one up into good sized rings and layed it out on a sheet of heavy foil. I seasoned them with salt and pepper.

I took a whole salmon filet and marinated it with a mixture of red miso paste, mirin (a sweet Japanese cooking wine), a tiny bit of soy sauce and a splash of sesame oil. More onions were placed on top.

The salmon and onions were wrapped up tight in foil and cooked simply on a hot griddle. I cooked it from start to finish in about 20 minutes – until I saw steam coming out of the foil at a good rate and it felt hot all the way around.

Here’s what it looked like when I opened it up. I wish it had the same dark color that it had before I cooked it but it was tasty never the less.

Filed Under: Japanese Tagged With: fish, salmon

Shabu Shabu at home

February 16, 2009 by greg 8 Comments

It has been almost a year since I’ve made shabu shabu at home. Although I did report about a wonderful shabu shabu dinner I had in Japan in December. I actually made this meal a few weeks ago but am just getting around to blogging about it now. Please forgive me for being so late with my offering.

Shabu shabu is traditionally made with beef that is sliced paper thin. The name comes from the sound the beef makes as you swish it back and forth with your chopsticks in a pot of boiling broth. This is a wonderful family meal where everyone gets to share in cooking the meal at the table. My sirloin is not as marbled with fat as is usual for shabu shabu. I have some lean grass fed local beef that is still flavorful but also much healthier for you. Since the beef is only barely cooked, the texture still comes out tender even without the fat.

Shabu shabu also requires that you cook vegetables in the broth after you eat the beef. Here are bean sprouts, enoki mushrooms, shitake mushrooms, carrots, baby bok choy and napa cabbage ready to be cooked.

The table is all set with my nabe pot on the burner.

Before we sat down to eat the shabu shabu I fried up some frozen gyoza and served them with a spicy chili vinegar sauce.

The pot is heating up.

I have been soaking this kombu in the pot of water for a few hours to flavor the broth. This was removed once the pot came up to boiling.

I served two dipping sauces for my shabu shabu tonight. The first has soy, vinegar, green onions and grated daikon radish.

The second sauce is made from sesame paste, soy and vinegar.

We’ve eaten the meat and now it’s time for the veggies.

After you have had your fill of meat and vegetables, the broth that has been flavored even more intensely by all the food being cooked in it is used to prepare noodles. These udon noodles were made from scratch and cut just before cooking.

The udon is cooking nicely.

Yum! Comfort food all the way. Perfect on a cold winter’s evening.

Filed Under: beef, Japanese Tagged With: shabu shabu, udon

Okonomiyaki at home

December 31, 2008 by greg 5 Comments

After having this in Osaka I wanted to try making okonomiyaki at home. It turns out that it was quite easy to do. For two large okonomiyakis I started with about half of a medium head of cabbage chopped up. I added some chopped up green onions – about 4 of them. I had about 3/4 cup of cut up cooked shrimp and half of a cooked chicken breast that I cut up into pieces so I added that also. The batter was made from one cup of flour, 1/4 tsp of baking powder and some salt. I flavored that with just a bit of a fish dashi powder. Everything was mixed together along with two eggs. The mixture was piled onto the griddle to cook.

After cooking on one side the pancake was carefully flipped over to cook on the other side. This was repeated twice to make sure the inside was fully cooked.

The okonomiyaki sauce I made is pretty similar to what I had in Osaka. I made it from about 4 tbsp of ketchup, 1 tbsp of soy sauce, about 2 tbsp worschestershire sauce, a splash of mirin and a couple tbsp of brown sugar. This was heated in a pot just until everything mixed together and the sugar was dissolved. On top of the sauce is just mayo. Unfortunately I haven’t found bonito flakes yet so we ate these unadorned. But they were tasty.

Filed Under: Japanese Tagged With: okonomiyaki

LIght and Healthy Japanese Food

December 29, 2008 by greg Leave a Comment

Ok, so the Japanese food bug is not completely out of my system. Last night I was in the mood again for some light and healthy food. I had plans to make a miso/soy marinated chicken breast and serve that with a Japanese inspired soup.

To start I filled a pot with some water, kombu (or konbu) which is a dried seaweed, and some Korean dried fish pieces. These are not strong flavors and were used just to make a light broth that reminded one of the sea. I soaked these together at room temperature for about an hour then heated it to boiling. Once the broth boiled for about 5 minutes I removed the kombu and fish. The fish I discarded. The seaweed I used for a salad.

Meanwhile I marinated some boneless skinless chicken breasts in a mixture of grated ginger, soy, mirin, a splash of sake, sesame oil and red miso paste.

Here is the broth after removing the fish an seaweed. To flavor the broth just a little more a couple tbsp of soy sauce were added along with a splash of mirin, a splash of sake and some salt.

The kombu was cooled and shredded finely.

This was mixed with finely shredded carrots. To flavor the salad, rice vinegar, soy, sesame oil and mirin were added.

The plate ready for chicken. The green is a napa salad seasoned with rice vinegar and mirin.

The chicken was just cooked under the broiler in the oven until nicely grilled and cooked through.

For the soup I added carrots, green peppers, green onions and somen noodles to the delicately flavored broth.

Now that hits the spot!

Filed Under: chicken, Japanese Tagged With: kombu, soup

Shabu Shabu in Kobe

December 21, 2008 by greg Leave a Comment

Shabu shabu is another nabe dish made by taking paper thin slices of beef and dipping them into a pot of boiling water or broth for just a few seconds to cook. More on the food in a second. Let me first describe my Thursday in Kobe. This is a wonderful city just west of Osaka. Kobe Pharmaceutical University sits on the hillside looking down upon Kobe’s numerous narrow winding streets. This picture shows one of their WIDE streets! Imagine a street as wide as one car twisting and turning through densly packed homes up the side of a hill. Their big taxis climb those hills every day.

In the morning my host Naito Sensei took me to the Hatsukura sake factory for a tour of their sake museum. There I learned all about how rice is polished, infused with koji spores to convert starch to sugar, and then fermented with yeast. Of course we left with a taste and a bottle!

Dinner that evening was a slighly formal shabu shabu dinner. We ate at a traditional low table on the tatami mats. Actually there was a hole under the table for your feet so you didn’t have to sit cross legged for hours. See the nabe pots ready for action?

This sake is made especially for this restaurant. I have to say it was quite good.

We started with a small appetizer of marinated raw fugu. I would call it a Japanese seviche with its vinegary marinade.

This is onion, garlic, radish and chives to garnish the dipping sauces for the shabu shabu.

A sashimi course, of course!

A bite of crab, seaweed and cucumbers.

This is a bit of fried monkfish. The chili was not very spicy. I’ve never seen a pink batter before. Very festive for the holiday season.

Our sever brought the plates of beef and vegetables.

I am always in awe of the wonderfully marbled beef. Makes for tender shabu shabu.

Our server demonstrated the shabu shabu technique. Grasp the beef slice with your chopsticks and swish it back and forth in the boiling pot for just a few seconds. The dish is names shabu shabu after the sound of the beef swishing in the broth.

The flash cooked beef is immediately plunged into a bowl containing a sesame sauce and eaten.

After the meat is eaten, next come the vegetables. Here you can see tofu, enoki mushrooms, green onions, bean sprouts, mushrooms, carrots, some greens and napa cabbage. The noodles are for the end of the meal.

The veggies cooking away.

We had two kinds of noodles – the clear ones you see served with the vegetables above and these wider noodles that were brought to the table after the vegetables. Also in the pot are some sticky rice cakes cooked along with the noodles.

A perfect end for a wonderul meal – a bowl of macha green tea ice cream. I like the fact that this ice cream is not as sweet as our American versions.

Filed Under: Japanese Tagged With: Japan, Kobe, shabu shabu

Salmon with red miso

Shabu Shabu at home

Okonomiyaki at home

LIght and Healthy Japanese Food

Shabu Shabu in Kobe

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