Sake! (part 1)

At the moment, I have these two varieties of sake in the house:

When I first bought them, I didn't notice that the left sort of bottle was different from the right. And even the shop assistants at Yumi Hana sometimes fail to notice that they are different when I check out. (The right bottle is 0.60 Swiss francs more expensive than the left.)

I tried some googling, but so far I can only tell that they both seem to be from Nihonsakari Breweries. The left bottle has furigana: it is called Reishu.

Googling also told me that these are sake I should drink cold. The problem is that I don't like cold sake that much.

Of course I could buy table sake or sake in tetrapak cartons. But table sake (I will post a picture on occasion) is only slightly less expensive than these, and I have the impression that, once opened, the flavor of the sake in tetrapak cartons (again, pictures of that later) deteriorates over time.

To be continued. 

Curry nabe

Ben and I made curry nabe for the second time today, again using an adapted version of this recipe from Hiroyuki's blog.

During the day, I had asked Ben which green vegetable he would like to have in the nabe, and he said he would like broccoli. I think broccoli goes very well with curry :)

The broth was like this:

1000 ml water
2 teaspoons instant kombu dashi
1 tablespoon soy sauce (15 ml)

and 2 blocks of this curry roux, bought at Nishi's Japan Shop:

 Getting ready:

  I put the ingredients of the broth into the nabe and turned on the heat full throttle. Then I disappeared into the kitchen for a minute to prepare two bowls of pickles to have as a side dish, when my daughter called in alarm from the living room:

 The donabe had boiled over and broth had spouted out of the hole in the lid. This taught me not to leave the donabe unattended ;)

Almost everything in the nabe:

 

We later added leftover pasta. (We didn't use the Sanuki udon you can see in the pictures above.) Good, but difficult to eat with (plastic) chopsticks.

 

 I still have to make adjustments to the broth. We use instant kombu dashi and not fish dashi, and I guess the former is not as flavorful as the latter. We also don't add meat in any form - the broth won't absorb flavor from meat.

Nevertheless, it tasted good!

What if...

...you have spent a lot for sushi and you are still hungry?

The answer is easy.

You turn this:

into that:

By the way, Google Translate translates "mentaiko" as "erfahrene Kabeljaurogen" (experienced cod roe) ;)

At the Nippon Sushi Bar

On Friday, my daughter brought home a very good school report card. And she had been asking to have sushi again for a while now. We had other reasons to go to the city center today as well, so I decided to take her to the Nippon Sushi Bar, which is located in the basement of a big department store.

This is what my daughter had (and another plate just like this):

 

And this is what I had:

 

 

 What I like about the Nippon Sushi Bar is that the sushi are always fresh and tasty, and that the people operating it are honmono no nihonjin (real Japanese people). I love to listen to their conversation and being able to understand bits and pieces of it :) In most sushi places here in Switzerland, the people making the sushi come from other Asian countries.

Tomato Nabe

Ben and I went on a big shopping tour today. This is what we got for dinner tonight:
 

Well, we already had the carrots, the Swiss brown mushrooms and the Chinese cabbage. But I went to the Asia Store at the train station in the next "village" to buy a few things, and found they had enokitake (and only enokitake in one package, not a mix of mushrooms) and atsu age (thick, deep-fried tofu). I had also bought a green vegetable my Turkish supermarket sells under the name of "Kai Choy" - mustard greens according to Wikipedia (behind the pack of tofu). Wikipedia also tells me they are closely related to mizuna.

I adapted this recipe from Hiroyuki's blog, so the broth was like this:

1 can (400 g) of peeled tomatoes
600 ml water
2 and a half teaspoons of instant kombu dashi
2 tablespoons (30 ml) mirin
2 tablespoons (30 ml) soy sauce

We didn't use potatoes (like Hiroyuki did), but we added mie noodles to the nabe later.

Carrots and thick portions of Chinese cabbage in the donabe:

 You can see pieces of atsu age on the saucer on the left.

 Mushrooms added:

I must say, I was right to buy the donabe and the portable gas burner. These nabemono are such great food to have on cold winter evenings! And what's more, Ben told me that he thought he had seen spare gas cans like the ones I bought at Yumi Hana (Korean/Japanese grocer) at our local supermarket.

But today's greatest find was this:

 

Can you believe it? Our Turkish supermarket sells gobo (burdock root) now! 

I'm not yet sure what I will do with it. One of my Japanese cookbooks (the one in German) has recipes for kinpira gobo and kenchin jiru (vegetable soup). Maybe my other cookbooks have more recipes. I could use some advice, though :)

Potato Goulash, Japanized

Yesterday, I didn't feel like cooking anything extravagant (and going shopping for that purpose), so we made one of our quick fixes.

 

As far as I know, this is a Hungarian dish. Once, I was able to eat a more original version on a train which was coming from Budapest. This particular version was born out of necessity. Normally, you need a tablespoon of tomato paste (tomato purée). But one day, I started with preparing the potatoes and the wieners, and then noticed that we didn't have any more tomato paste in the house. So what did I do? I had bought ready-to-use Japanese curry sauce at my japanese grocer's. I used that and a little less liquid (300 ml for this version, half a liter for the original).

This is the curry sauce I used:

It also works well with the medium hot version of the sauce. I haven't tried the hot version yet. I like to be in control of the spicyness myself, so I use shichimi togarashi:

 Ingredients for 2 servings:

500 g potatoes
300 ml water
2 teaspoons of instant kombu dashi
2 round onions
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
4 wieners, Western size (about as long as one adult hand)
1 bag (1 serving) of ready-to-use Japanese curry sauce
Salt (to taste)
Shichimi togarashi (to taste)

As Ben and I both don't eat meat (anymore), we use these vegetarian sausages:

Quorn is an industrially produced meat surrogate. Wikipedia will tell you more about it. Tofu wieners will work as well, I presume. (Of course, you can use *real* wieners if you like!)

Directions:

Peel the potatoes and cut into 1.5-cm-thick cubes. Peel the onions and finely dice them.
Dissolve the instant dashi in the water. Cut the wieners into rather thin (4 to 5 mm) wheels, like this:

Heat the oil in a skillet. Sauté the onions until they turn translucent.

Squeeze out the bag of curry sauce into the skillet and heat for a few seconds, stirring. Deglaze with the kombu dashi and stir. When the liquid returns to a boil, add the potatoes and turn down the heat to medium to low (we put it between 3 and 4 on a scale from 1 to 10).

 

Cover and simmer until the potatoes are almost tender (for us, this takes between 15 and 20 minutes, depending on the potatoes we use). Then add the sausage wheels and heat them in the goulash for a few minutes until hot.

Add salt and shichimi togarashi to taste. Serve in a deep dish and eat with a spoon.

Yesterday, Ben said I was too generous with the shichimi togarashi. I told him that he got this impression because the last time we made this dish, I forgot to add it. 

Learning Japanese, part 1

This is what I see when I take a break from my daily chores, sitting on my sofa:

I can read Hiragana quite well, Katakana almost as well. But when I have to write Katakana, I sometimes have to think hard about a character, to the point of having to look it up.

I want to replace these posters soon with posters of the 30-something kanji I should have learned up to now.

I have been doing Japanese lessons once a week since end of last summer. Prior to that, I used Rosetta Stone (language learning software), which I think is quite good :)

Our sensei gave us a lot of shukudai (homework) over the Christmas break. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to do it all. When the lessons resumed, I told my sensei that I didn't have enough time to do all the homework because I had been cooking so many Japanese dishes.

She said: "Really? What did you cook?" and when I said "Kiriboshi daikon... hijiki no nimono...", she made a face and shook herself ;)

(to be continued)

 

Special "Asia" Sale at Migros

Migros, one of our local supermarkets, is holding a special "Asia" sale these days. They have various Asian foodstuffs at reduced prices, as well as a non-food area with Asian-style items.

The first things I bought were these kawaii bowls:

 

Closeup of one of them:

 

As if we didn't have enough bowls already! But I hope to use them as matchawan, and I wanted bowls which had a design on one side only. In Japan, we were shown how a tea ceremony works. You are served your bowl of matcha with the "beautiful" side of the bowl facing you. Then you put the bowl on your palm and turn it with the other hand, twice a quarter of a turn, so the beautiful side faces the host, thus showing respect and humility.

I don't know yet if they are really large enough to whip up matcha in them. I will report back when I have tried that. At the moment I am drinking Lapsang Souchong (heavily smoked Chinese tea) and I don't feel like drinking matcha.

Furthermore, I bought these potholders:

 

I like to have a spare set in case one of the two sets we have gets scorched. One strange thing here in Switzerland is that they mostly sell one mitt and one cloth together.

On Saturday, Ben and I went shopping at Migros together. We bought these silicone cooking tweezers:

 

Ben said, "Do we really need 'training' cooking chopsticks for beginners? We are not babies anymore." And I replied, "But unlike the wooden saibashi we have, these are dishwasher safe." That won the argument.

We also bought this "sushi" lunchbox, although we have lots of clic-clac boxes already:

I think Ben let me have it because it has variable compartments.

The last thing I bought was this set of hashioki:

And yes, we have the stainless-steel hashioki (shown in front), but I wanted to have "suteki" hashioki :) Besides, they are not as high as the stainless-steel ones, and thus work better with shorter chopsticks.

The one thing Ben didn't let me have was this ginger grater:

Honestly, what can you do wrong at a price of 4.90 Swiss francs? But as a teacher of mine used to say: "The things you buy cheap are the things that are effectively expensive, because the quality is not as good as with expensive things, the cheap things won't last that long, and don't work that well." Good thing that we are now in a situation where we can afford this philosophy from the start.

 

 

Finally, Okonomiyaki again!

At the moment, I could eat okonomiyaki every second day. Sadly, Ben wouldn't like to do the same.

Since I came across Hiroyuki's great okonomiyaki recipe, it took us 3 attempts to create the perfect okonomiyaki for us. I am responsible for the dough and Ben does the rest.

Normally, we throw leftovers from Japanese meals into the dough, but today I have created a version from scratch.

Ingredients for 4 okonomiyaki (these are only rough guidelines, your mileage may vary):

1 carrot, about 75 g
half a zucchini, about 150 g
several cabbage leaves, about 100 g

5 to 6 medium-sized Swiss brown mushrooms, about 150 g

4 eggs
200 g white flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
200 ml water
50 ml milk
half a teaspoon instant kombu dashi (substitute with fat-free stock powder or Vegeta - as shown below)

Vegetable oil (we use peanut oil) for frying

Trim and peel the carrot. Wash the zucchini. Coarsely grate both.

Coarsely cut the cabbage into 1-cm squares. You should have about 1 cup (250 ml) full of cabbage squares.

 

(The blue shovel is a measuring cup for 1 cup.)

Sift the flour into a bowl. Add the baking powder and instant dashi (or stock powder or Vegeta). By and by, add the milk and water and stir to combine. Lastly, add the eggs and stir them into the dough.

Then add the vegetables and fold them into the dough. It should look like this now:

 

 Wash and trim the mushrooms. Cut them into slices about 2 to 3 millimeters thick:

(If you like your mushroom slices thicker, you will need more mushrooms.)

Bring some oil in a pan (we use a rather small pan of 23 cm diameter) to medium heat. Ladle a quarter of the dough into the pan and cover. Fry for a minute, then scatter mushroom slices on top.

Cover and fry for 3 more minutes, then flip the okonomiyaki over, cover, and fry for 4 minutes.

It should look like this.

 

(The times and temperatures may vary greatly depending on your stove. You may have to experiment a bit until it works out perfectly.) Fry 3 more okonomiyaki like that.

Up to now, this recipe might sound heavily westernized ;) but okonomiyaki wouldn't be okonomiyaki without proper condiments, like this beni shouga:

We also use aonori, Japanese mayonnaise, and I use okonomiyaki sauce and katsuobushi (Ben doesn't).

(There is katsuobushi in the cereal container on the right.)

At this point, I'd like to thank Hiroyuki for doing his blog, which has been extremely entertaining and a constant source of inspiration!

 

Root vegetables in salt dough

Couple of days ago, our local supermarket had multicolored carrots, and parsnips. So tonight, we made vegetables in salt dough.

You need this much flour:

 

and this much salt:

 

and this much water:

 

  Mix flour and salt, and add the water 100ml at a time. Knead thoroughly, until you have a firm dough. Let that sit for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, you can take care of the root vegetables. You will need 1 kilogram of them in total. I used multicolored carrots, and parsnips. Parsley roots work well, too.

 Trim and peel the carrots and parsnips. Cut large roots in half so all pieces are roughly of the same thickness. Put into a bowl and mix with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, freshly ground pepper, some fresh rosemary and thyme.

Preheat an oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Now you can roll out the dough. Cut the ball of dough into one slightly larger and one slightly smaller half. Roll out the smaller half first.

 Put baking paper on a baking tray and place the rolled-out dough on it. Scatter some sage leaves on the dough and place the veggies on top.

Roll out the other, larger half of the dough and place it over the vegetables. Use a fork to "sew" the edges together.

Put it into the oven (2nd rail from the bottom) and leave it there for 50 minutes.

While the veggies are in the oven, you can fix the sauce. You will need this:

 

Vegetable stock, a medium-sized potato, a small onion, and 4 teaspoons of prepared horseradish (in the bowl on the left). We used a rather thick concoction from Bavaria - the finished sauce cleared our noses immediately ;) You will also need 100 milliliters of half cream.

Finely grate the onion and the potato.

 

Put the grated onion and potato and the stock into a small pot and bring to a boil, stirring. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes over very low heat. Then add the horseradish and the cream, and blend using a hand-held blender. An ordinary blender should work, too. Add salt and pepper to taste.

At this point, we also fixed ourselves some couscous. Rice or potatoes are other options.

The unopened salt dough fresh from the oven looks like this:

And this is what my first plate looked like:

Ben says this dish is missing a (vegetarian) schnitzel, but I don't agree.