Summer is here. A very fucking uncomfortably hot summer is here. I am not young enough to go out to the beach and lay out all day any more, which pisses me off. However, staying young-looking requires me to wear a lot of sun screen. What is it to get old? It’s not fun at all. I remember when I went to Jamaica by myself for a week, and when I got back, my friends told me I over-tanned and was too dark. I miss those days.

What else do you do in the summer aside from going to the beach? BBQ! Although I don’t have a grill to do an American-style BBQ party, I have a nice rooftop, and a panini maker which can be turned into a griddle. I host yakiniku parties (Japanese version of Korean BBQ) in the summer all the time. Every time I do it, I want to make it a very authentic, fun, and delicious experience for everyone.

Luckily, I live in NYC where I have an easy access to kalbi (sliced bone in rib), or harami (skirt steak, which I recently learned are considered to be “intestines”. To make it even better, intestines have lower calories than regular meat, so skirt steak is one of the healthiest cuts of beef!!). These are two signature meats for any  Japanese BBQ party.

As Yoko has said, dipping sauces are very expensive in the US, and I always make my own sauce for the occasion.

This sauce is very similar to Soy Vay marinating sauce (which is pretty interesting, since the brand was started by a Jew who was in love with Asian BBQ sauce and started the company with a Chinese girl. I haven’t read the label, but I bet it’s kosher, too).

It’s easy, and a lot cheaper than buying store bought kind. Plus no MSG!  Although I do not mind MSG whatsoever since I grew up wit it.

INGREDIENTS

200ml Cooking sake
200ml Mirin
800ml Soy Sauce
80 grams Miso
2tbsp Sesame seeds
2tsp To-ban jan (or Sriracha or any kind of Asian hot sauce)– if you like spicy, add more
About 1cup Sugar
1 onion
1 carrot
1 apple
1 lemon
3-4 cloves of garlic

Do you like penis shaped arrangement of the vegetables?  It’s a bit too skinny, though.

First you boil the cooking sake and mirin. Once it boils, fire it up (flambe) to cut the alcohol.

Meanwhile, cut vegetable, and put them in a blender.

Add 600 ml of soy sauce, as well as sugar into the sake/mirin mixture. In the blender, add the rest of soy sauce, miso, sesame seeds, and hot sauce. Blend all  of them until smooth.

Add vegetable mixture to the liquid. Cook for about 30 minutes over very low heat. Add lemon juice during this process.

From this point on, you may want to adjust taste by adding more sugar, or hot sauce. Important factor is that this is a dipping sauce, so it should be quite a strong flavor– very salty, as well as sweet and spicy. I added a bit of peanut butter for mildness, in this batch. You can get creative with it.

Final product.

I bought kalbi from a new meat shop in Chelsea market. It tasted good, but kind of tough. I think the cut was a bit too thick.

With this view, grilled beef and booze, what more can you expect from summer?!

Do you remember my pickle pear liqueur, which turned out to really be called sickle pear liqueur?  Making fruit liquor is pretty easy. In Japan, when green plums (unripened plum) are available in June, many people make their own umeshu (plum wine). I know Mitsuwa market in New Jersey has the whole kit (plum, liquor, rock sugar and a jar) for a very very limited time in June, and I asked my colleague to check and see if they have it. He forgot, and now it’s already July, the season is over. Damn.

So I was walking through the Greenmarket the other day, and found green plums. They are definitely different from what is used in Japan, but I liked the color, and decided to tackle another batch of fruit liqueur. This time, this will be a New York State green plum liqueur.

As you can see, they are green, and although they look unripe, they are actually ripe. I researched around to see if I can make plum liquor with ripened plums, and there was some mention of, “you can also use ripen plums, which will be sweeter than regular plum wine”. Sounds good enough for me.

So I washed them, try to pick the belly button (which results in bitter aftertaste, apparently), and dumped them into a big jar.

No local Japanese grocery store had rock sugar (koori-sato), so I rented a Zipcar and went to Mitsuwa. I don’t know if the FDA has changed some regulation, but even Mitsuwa didn’t have rock sugar. I was pissed, but then saw brown rock sugar. I remembered that “brown sugar plum wine” is getting very good reviews in Japan.

I had no idea about the validity of using brown rock sugar, but I was like, what the hell, I need sweetness of sugar, brown or white, it’s the same difference.

So I had two pounds of plum, 300gram (1 package) of brown rock sugar, and magnum bottle (1.75 liters) of cheap vodka in a jar.  It looks a bit poopy.

Two days later, the liquid is very dark.

I will be able to drink this in the fall, and will let you know how good or bad it turns out.

My friend Futoshi came back from Japan and brought some of the newest and weirdest junk food from the motherland.

In recent months, the most popular food item in Japan is apparently the edible chill-infused oil or 食べる辣油.  I saw articles about it in newspapers everywhere– Japan’s major condiment brand Momoya, came out with this type of chili-infused oil with fried garlic, fried onion, etc. I have been dying to try it and was very happy that Futoshi brought it back, along with a few other things.

You can find chill-infused oil regularly at Chinese restaurants, you know, that dirty container of very red oil with chill flakes floating on the bottom. But this is different. It’s spicy, but not too spicy, and you can pour it on top of rice. People say, “You don’t need anything else.”

After two bites though, I was done, and immediately got heart burn. Not so much a fan. After all, it’s oil, with bits and pieces of garlic and onion.

Sake candy, aka Sake Drops.

It tastes like sake, but after a while, it starts to taste like soap. Gross.

Sapporo beer-flavored caramel. Do I need to say more?

Subtle flavor of beer, but then it starts to taste like soap again.

The worst and gross-est, takoyaki-flavored caramel.

It’s like salt taffy, without any sweetness. It does have a strong takoyaki flavor with a very strong Worcestershire sauce taste.

Why does Japan have to keep coming up with weird and gross junk food like these?

I’ve been in the US for 14 years, and I have pretty much tried all of what this great country has to offer for the kitchen. As you remember, from Smart Lidz to vegetable-life-prolonging bags to cheap mandolins, I’ve experimented with many gadgets, and found them all very useless (and almost lost my thumb). But I guess the stand mixer is super great, which I don’t think is sold in Japan (or if they are, I wouldn’t be surprised they cost $1,500 a pop). Or the American sized jumbo oven (which I don’t have currently) is great to cook large quantities, like a 20 pound turkey, roast vegetable, apple pie, and stuffing all at the same time.

Having said that, I haven’t converted on two things (or I should say, I re-discovered the beauty and usefulness of them) in my kitchen. I think they are worth while.

1. Saran Wrap

Let me tell you, American saran wrap absolutely sucks. It’s basically just a piece of plastic, nothing more.  Glad’s Cling Wrap is somewhat ok, but you can never compete with the quality of saran wrap from Japan.

Words can’t explain the strength, durability, and stick-ability of Japanese saran wrap. you don’t need Ziploc containers, you can just cover leftover dish or bowl of leftover food with a piece of wrap, and it’s tightly covered, so no need to worry about its freshness the next day.

On top of this, the sizing is so smart. There are wide variety sizes available in Japan, but even here, there are long (regular size) and short ones.   Short ones are perfect for covering small dishes.  That’s so Japanese, to not waste anything, even saran wrap!

Though it’s about $5 per 20 meters (65 feet), which is a bit more expensive than the US brands, it’s worth every penny!

2. Dish Washing Sponges

This is actually cheaper than any of the sponges you find here. Again, words cannot explain how great this is. The lacy outer with soft sponge inside keeps suds very very well.  When you wash dishes, you want to have enough suds, and this is super perfect for it. It’s very soft and won’t scratch anything.  Five of them for about $1.50. What a bargain!

You can buy these items at any of the Japanese grocery stores in the city. Trust  me, they are worth trying.

In Japan, people give gifts to each other on many occasions. Don’t you have one or two Japanese friends, who give you gifts whenever they return from Japan despite the fact that you’ve never given them anything? You thought, “This is awkward, do you like me or something?!” right? I have no idea where this custom comes from, but we are taught to give gifts to friends from a young age.

When my mom came to visit me from Japan, it was such a headache to try to think of, “What to get for her friends.” We went around EVERYWHERE to find American gifts. And when I go home every year, I have to bring so many chocolates and nuts (pistachio are very expensive in Japan) so that she can give it all away to neighbors and her friends. I don’t even know them, but the fact that I, her son who lives in NYC, is obligated to buy gifts for people I haven’t seen for like 15 years is such a pain.

In the middle of summer, and the end of the year, many Japanese people send gifts to their colleagues, people who they are close with, etc. I think this ritual is to show gratitude to people. My Americanized self thinks, “Why can’t they just say thanks, instead of giving gifts?” But it is very Japanese. They show their gratitude with goods, not with the heart. Us Japanese people are cold-hearted people anyways.

As summertime gifts, many people give mizu-yokan. Yokan is Japanese sweets, made with mushed beans and sugar, solidified using agar (or kanten).  Its consistency is very thick, and it is usually eaten with hot tea. During the summer months in Japan, where it’s 100% humidity and above 100 degrees, it’s too sweet, and tea is too hot, so some smart person diluted yokan and made mizu-yokan (translation: water-yokan).  For those who are not familiar with mizu-yokan, it’s like loose red bean jello. It doesn’t sound appetizing, but its consistency, and subtle sweetness is very refreshing.

It’s one of the easiest recipes– seriously, no one should fail this.

All you need is a can of red beans (1lb), plus powdered agar (you can buy it at JPN grocery stores), water (600ml), and 2 tbsp brown sugar.  Powdered agar is very convenient, and although you can substitute with gelatin, I highly recommend finding agar agar since the texture will be quite different.

1. Mix red beans and 300ml water in blender. Blend for about a minute.

2. Strain it. This is important to have very smooth texture.

3. Boil 1 pack of agar (4 gram) with 300ml water, continuously stir.

4. add brown sugar and dissolve, then mix it with red bean mixture.  Pour into individual cup, chill until settled.

No matter how hot it may be, using the stove for two minutes isn’t so bad. Since cans of red beans already have enough sugar, you can omitc the brown sugar as well. It’s cold, smooth, subtly sweet and very refreshing. I am giving this to my colleagues as my gratitude, though I never get reciprocated. Wow, I am so Japanese.

Sorry about this unseasonable post, I totally forgot about it.

I always wondered what the big deal was about ramps. Most high-end restaurants boast ramps on their menus during the spring season, but I was never interested in it for some reason.

We have a very convenient Greenmarket on Wednesdays outside of my work, so one day, I decided to see what this ramp craze was all about. Unfortunately, that day I had plans to go out for happy hour. After a couple of martinis, I stumbled home, and when I opened my bag, there were the ramps. Must. Cook. Before I pass out…

So I blanched the leaves, and put them in the fridge to do something the next day.

What to do with the roots?

Drunk Yamahomo found a jar of ginger in honey, which I occasionally use for baking. Hm, I thought, pickled ramp roots might be a good idea.

So I dumped the roots, added soy sauce, vinegar to the honey/ginger mixture.  I think I was supposed to blanch them before putting in pickling liquid, but hey, I was drunk.

The next day, I went to Buona Italia in the Chelsea Market and bought octopus, mixed with ramps, and poured a vinegar-miso sauce over it.

Oh My God, I now fully understand why ramps are such a big deal. When eaten raw, it has garlic-scallion taste, that’s kinda bitter and even spicy. But once it’s blanched, it becomes VERY sweet and awesome.

I was missing out on A LOT by not using ramps more often before. Next spring, I will definitely get bunch and create more dishes. The roots?  They are even better now. I waited for about 2 weeks, and they are spicy, sweet (from the honey), and pickled quite nicely. I use them instead of garlic, just chopped up for salad dressings and things

Drunk cooking sometime creates horrible things, but sometimes, it can produce amazing results. Please do not ask me for the exact recipe of this, for obvious reasons. I do not remember…

When you think of tahini, it’s all about middle eastern cuisine, right? For sauces, hummus, and even cookies, it gives everything a nice sesame flavor. Although it has an exotic name (sounds like a beach in tropical island, doesn’t it?), it’s basically just sesame paste.

You can buy sesame paste at the Japanese grocery stores here, but it’s very pricey. Japanese use a lot of sesame in cooking as well, from sesame tofu, to dipping sauce, to sweets. Sometimes you will find black sesame pudding, or black sesame creme brulee on the dessert menu at Japanese restaurants. Sakagura in NYC has some of the BEST Japan-inspired desserts, which includes very good black sesame creme brulee with tea ice cream. Brilliant.

At the end of the day, tahini is also just sesame paste, but with oil added into it. Regular sesame paste is just purely ground sesame. You can make your own sesame paste by grinding the sesame slowly for an hour or so, since quick grinding gives out too much oil. As a part of Buddhist training or discipline, they are required to grind sesame manually. The tedious action is meditating, I guess. I would die if I had to grind sesame for an hour though.

My friend told me she was making tahini tofu, instead of sesame tofu, and I thought it was a brilliant substitution. However, due to a strict confidentiality agreement between her and her cooking class teacher, I am not allowed to post the recipe for it.  So I decided to make tahini pudding instead.

Anyhow, this recipe is pretty easy.

INGREDIENTS

100 gram of Tahini
1/4 cup of hot water
300 ml milk
100 ml heavy cream
4tbsp sugar
Vanilla extract
Half packet of gelatin (if you like more solid, you can add more)

METHOD

1. Sprinkle gelatin in a tbsp water and set aside.

2. Mix tahini and hot water well.

3. Heat milk and sugar together, but DO NOT BOIL. Once the sugar melts, and right before it boils, take off the heat, mix it into the tahini mixture slowly, and mix well.

4. Add gelatin, mix well.

5. Strain twice.

6. Add cream and vanilla extract, mix well.

7. Strain again.

8. Pour it into a cup or ramekin, chill it for 8 hours.

This makes very jiggly booby pudding. It’s barely solid, but it is solid. The sesame flavor is strong and it tastes nutty.

It is always fun to make traditional Japanese food, using something we can easily obtain here in the States. Tahini is also great for making shabu-shabu dipping sauce. Mix it with soy sauce, vinegar, dashi and sugar, it makes a lot better than store bought ones.

I try not to buy many kitchen gadgets, especially since the mandolin was such a big mistake. Not only did I almost lose my finger, but there’s not much use for it. I have a stand mixer that I use all the time, and the meat grinder attachment is awesome, especially in the summertime for homemade burgers.

I tried to make homemade pasta a couple of weeks ago, and completely failed. Since many fresh pasta recipe says, “You can either use rolling pin or pasta machine,” I tried using a rolling pin. It didn’t roll… Whatever I did was wrong, and the dough was more elastic than pizza dough, and didn’t stretch at all. In the end, I cut it all up anyways, and dunked it in boiling water. It took 10 minutes to cook the damn thing, and was totally inedible. Failure.

So I contemplated whether I should buy a $150 stand mixer pasta attachment, or an old school pasta maker for $34.99.  After pondering this for a while, I decided to go with the pasta maker for obvious economical reasons. Unless you are an Italian mama who needs to make pasta every day of the week, there’s no need to spend $150 for attachments, don’t you think?

Let me tell you. I LOVE IT! It is soooo much fun. I looked around a lot of sites for dough recipes, and ended up using one that came with the instruction of the machine. 2 1/2 cup of flour, 4 eggs, pinch of salt. That’s it.

Just like how you see it on TV or magazines, you make a well with flour, drop eggs and salt, and mix and knead until the dough is shiny.  Luckily the dough was working fine this time, and it became very shiny.

After resting the dough for like an hour, here came the fun part.

Cut the dough into 4th on floured surface, and thin it out so that it goes through the roller.

Start with the widest (dial 7), roll it out, fold in half, roll it out, fold in half.  This activity is definitely kids friendly, or any idiots who can’t cook will be able to enjoy.

It’s more like Playdough than cooking at this point. Slowly roll the dough with a tighter dial, and eventually, you will end up with this almost-see-through beauty.

Then you can cut it.  You can easily cut this with a sharp knife, but I wanted to use the fettuccine cutter. This part was so satisfying too. How easily, and evenly, you can cut pasta with this was just awesome. And it comes out in a matter of seconds.

I call this, ladies and gentleman, PASTA PORN!

I could have thinned it out even more, but don’t you think this is pretty good for a first timer?

I had frozen tomato sauce, so made meatballs, and boiled the pasta for like 4 minutes. Pasta with meatballs. It was amazing how al dente the pasta was.

Now here’s where my creative (yet crazed) kitchen brain starts to tick. Using the pasta machine, what should I make other than pasta? Yes, I will definitely make spinach pasta and other noodles, but something even crazier. Something that needs to be stretched thin, that needs to be cut evenly, without using oil (pasta machine can NOT be washed with water since they are made out of cheap metal, and any contact with water will definitely rust badly). If you can think of something out of ordinary, please let me know. I haven’t been able to come up with anything interesting so far.

Know any aspiring teenage chefs?  Although I’m slightly above the 12^th grade cut off myself, I encourage all UmamimarTEENS in the greater New York area to take a look at Japan Society’s 11-day summer workshop Japanese Cuisine 101: Washoku in August, which focuses on health and wellness through Japanese food.

During the last workshop in 2008, Kayoko joined the group on a private tour of the fish distributor Uoriki Fresh in New Jersey, and stepped inside their “Superfreezer”, which goes down to -72 degrees! Check out her post and the video of the freezer here. This year’s schedule promises even more insider tours of culinary facilities, cooking sessions with professional chefs, and talks with experts in the industry.

Although the June 3^rd priority deadline is upon us, applications will be considered on a rolling basis after that date. More info and both general and tuition-waiver applications can be found here.

Kayoko can attest to how cool these experiences are!

JAPANESE CUISINE 101: WASHOKU
2008 Summer Immersion Workshop for High School Students
Monday through Friday, August 9-13 & 16-20, 2010, 10 am-4 pm each day

Since Japan is surrounded by ocean, it’s very easy to get very fresh seafood in any part of the country. We Japanese love squid, octopus, and any kind of chewy seafood. Italy’s geography is similar, and they also love squid and octopi. Fried calamari, Italian restaurant’s signature appetizer is basically the same thing as squid tempura in Japan.

We tend to eat octopus as is (boiled, sliced, and eaten with soy or a vinegar-miso sauce), but the Italians and Greeks took extra steps with it and created tender grilled octopus and such.

When you want to buy good octopus, you don’t go to a fish monger. The ones in Chinatown especially are so badly frozen, you will definitely end up with octopus that is so tough and chewy, no matter how you try to tenderize it.

So where to get good octopus? At the Italian market. In my case, I am specifically talking about BuonItalia in Chelsea Market, NYC. You usually go there for cheese, pasta, olive oil, or, for me, almond flour for macarons. Everything is well priced, and the variety of flours (soy, wheat, chestnut, you name it, they have quite a wide kinds of flours) is fun for trying different recipes.

I recently heard that their flash frozen octopus are some of the best octopi you can get in NYC, so I went there, and sure enough, there were plenty of frozen octopi in the freezer. I assume Polipetti means octopus in Italian.

They are not the large ones like you see at Sushi Kuni.  I’ve made takoyaki (octopus balls) with this before. Cooking raw octopus is a bit of a challenge. Large octopus tends to get very tough when boiled, so there are quite a few wacky methods people use to tenderize it. Some of the craziest ones I’ve heard are:
- Beat it up with a daikon-like object like you hate the thing
- Put the it into the spin cycle of your washer (please double bag it in very thick ziploc bag to avoid octopus-flavored clothes).

I would love to try this, but don’t want to do it in my home. But since the octopi at Buon Italia are pretty small, there’s no need to go through this.

So what I usually do is to boil it for like 30 seconds in boiling water, and that’s it.  If you want to eat as sashimi, this is the best way to cook these small guys.

This time, I read around for how to cook octopus, and tried this method. (She did use the spin cycle, but I skipped that part).

1. Cooking liquid: 1 cup of white wine, 1 halved lemon, and thawed octopus in a pot, then put enough water to cover the whole thing.
2. Put in a wine cork (I didn’t know this, but it apparently it tenderizes stuff during the cooking, who knew?)
3. Cook for about 30 minutes until octopus is tender.
4. Keep the octopus in this liquid, set aside, and let it cool down.
5. Either grill it, or use however you like

I cut each leg and coated it with olive oil, garlic, salt, and lemon and put it in the broiler until it got a nice color. I could have eaten as is, but I wanted to fancy it up a bit, so I cut up a cucumber, tomato, and made dressing with vinegar, oil, garlic, basil, bit of sugar, mustard, and Kewpie mayo. Cut octopus into bite size, mix all of them together, and right before you are ready to serve, cut up avocado, and mix it into the salad.

It’s good and tender.

By the way, this was part of a gourmet dinner party I hosted over the weekend. Here are some of the other dishes I made:
Hamachi sashimi (torched just a bit), with mixture of cucumber, red pepper, yuzu pepper, vinegar, oil, herb on top.

Prosciutto de parma wrapped pineapple with balsamic vinegar reduction.

Duck breast with onion confit over sun dried tomato risotto, with roasted asparagus.

I’ve been trying too many weird recipes recently, but I can also make gourmet dinners as well.