Last week I attended a birthday party at a friend’s house. He rarely cooks but when he does, he is highly experimental and innovative.

I had a drink and was busy chatting with fabulous guests, discussing the recent catastrophic Christian Dior Fall 2011 couture collection. All while inspecting the food table and scooping up various dishes onto my plate.

And then I suddenly experienced an explosion… in my mouth. A crunchy, fresh, slightly spicy wave of YUMZERS! hit my taste buds like an otherworldy tsunami.

I was hooked.

My friend loves the traditional edamame snacks served in Japan with cold beer after work, but thinks it gets too salty and also clumsy when you’re sucking the beans out of the peel while greeting new people and holding your drink at parties. So he invented this Edamame Explosion Salad to serve at parties and beach blanket barbeques.

Here is the recipe and I know you will love it too.

EDAMAME EXPLOSION SALAD

INGREDIENTS
2 cups soya beans
1 small bag baby leaf salad
1 cup crayfish tails (bay shrimp will do)
1 small carrot
1 avocado
A handful of sugar snap peas

Dressing: 1 part extra virgin olive oil, 1 part vinegar, 1 part mustard. Salt and pepper.

Simple as that. Let’s make it!

METHOD

1. Wash the edamame beans. I bought a frozen bag in the local Asian supermarket. You can probably get them fresh in certain areas of the world – like Tokyo, Berkeley or other places that put a value on fresh food (humf).

2. Put your sugar snap peas in a heat resistant bowl and boil some water.

3. The reason you don’t just wash them is that a lot of sugar snap peas are grown on farms in countries that like to water your vegetables with toilet water (why let waste go to waste?). This results in stomach aches, infections or death by vomiting, so please: boil your peas.

4. Pour the boiling water over the peas and let them soak while you attend the other vegetables.

5. Wash and dry the baby salad leaves. A good mix of different kinds is always a treat.

6. Chop and slice the little carrot. I want a julienne shredding tool for Christmas.

7. Easy avocado trick: Cut the fruit in two and use a knife to slice into the green meat.

This specimen wasn’t exactly ripe enough but the show must go on.

8. After slicing in both directions, dig out the meat with a spoon. Easy! And no cut off fingers or dirty chopping board!

9. Pour the water from the crayfish tails and dry them as you don’t want a wet salad.

10. Back to the sugar snap peas: throw away the now lukewarm water and rinse well in cold water. Slice thinly.

11. Get the olive oil, vinegar and mustard out.

Mix well with salt and pepper for a smooth and spicy groove.

12. Ok guys, here we go. Everybody, in!

Zing!

13. Stir carefully around to coat the dressing into the salad. I probably should have made a little more dressing–it depends on what you prefer. Americans usually like the salad to sail around in a canoe on a sea of dressing. The Japanese like to sprinkle a little on to still be able to taste the ingredients.

Ready! Works very well as a fresh summer party snack (leave small bowls for your guests to eat it) or a light lunch salad. The slight spice of the mustard makes you crave more beer which is always a good move if you want your guests drunk, wet and wild.

Bon appetit!

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I don’t like eggs. But it’s not as debilitating as many people think. I can always get a waffle or bagel with a side for breakfast and choose to ask for no egg with my ramen. Luckily I am okay with foodstuffs with eggs as an ingredient mixed in, so ice-cream and cookies are safe and encouraged.

One of the more challenging food items that requires surgical precision when separating unwanted egg particles is the potato salad. In the east and west, the potato salad pops up at picnics, on the dinner table or as a side at restaurants. More often than not I must decline the potato salad at potlucks or substitute it with coleslaw at a dining establishment.

One of the small obstacles when deciding to get married to my husband was the potato salad. Back in the day, I noticed that my soon-to-be husband was a huge Mr. Potato-Salad Head. When eating at izakayas, he would always order potato salads and savor each bite in pure bliss when it was a particularly pleasing recipe. If the potato salad passed my egg-free dissection test I would have a bite or two but otherwise, I could not understand his addiction.

When moving to the U.S. my husband’s eyes lit up at the mountains of potato salads displayed in the deli sections of supermarkets. Unfortunately, after buying pints of potato salads in several locations, he discovered that potato salads in America are very, very different from potato salads in Japan. The salads here in the U.S. are much more sour and mustardy, while Japanese potato salads are sweeter and creamier, and often include bonuses like cucumbers and ham. My husband’s search left him discouraged and left me with a lot of to-go plastic containers.

We’ve been in the U.S. for a year now, and my husband still occasionally buys potato salad perhaps thinking that one of the delis have changed their recipes. The latest episode was about three weeks ago when he bought a jam-packed pint at Andronico’s, only to leave it rotting in the fridge until I had to scoop it out of its container and throw the mush away.

So I had an idea. Perhaps I could make a Japanese potato salad that requires no eggs. It would serve a double-duty purpose: I could perhaps find a potato salad that I could eat AND do my one heroic “Wifey”act of the year by making my husband one of his favorite dishes from his distant homeland.

This recipe was a hybrid of a few Japanese potato salad recipes I found in books and online. I was surprised to find that a few didn’t call for eggs.

Yoko’s Japanese Potato Salad

INGREDIENTS
2 potatoes (I used two medium Russetts), cubed
1/4 onion thinly sliced
1 Japanese or Persian cucumber thinly sliced
Salt
Optional: 1/4 pound of ham, cut into strips

Dressing
4-5 tbsp of Japanese mayonnaise (make your own!)
1 tsp of lemon juice
1 tbsp of rice vinegar
1 tbsp of sugar

METHOD

1. Heat up a large pot with water to boil the potatoes.

2. While the potatoes are boiling, slice the onion and cucumbers very thin. In separate bowls, salt each generously and massage. Once they have been sitting in salt for five minutes, rinse them and then give them a good squeeze to wring out any excess water. Set aside.

3. Cut the ham in little strips.

4. Once the potatoes are tender, strain them and then transfer them to a mixing bowl. Lightly mash the potatoes.

5. Mix up the dressing ingredients. Drizzle all of it over the potatoes and mix well.

6. Add onions, cucumbers and ham to the mixing bowl and mix well.

7. Taste while you go and make sure everything is coated with the dressing. I found that I needed to add a few more squirts of mayo and sprinkle some salt as I mixed.

The result? Much better than I expected. Between the two of us, we ate the whole two-potato recipe for breakfast along with our big bowls of udon. I foresee making many more batches of this stuff and jam-packing it into those plastic to-go containers that I so diligently washed and saved.

*My name in the recipe denotes that this dish is egg-free!

I used to be amused by the number of Kewpie mayonnaise tubes my 85 year-old grandma had stashed in her packed fridge in Tokyo. I would visit her house every few months to clean out her fridge. She would forget that she already had certain condiments and kept buying them because they would get buried into the depths of her fridge. Out of sight, out of mind.

By the end of every clean-up session, I would have a few plastic bags full of rotting produce to trash and several once-used Kewpie or momiji-oroshi (spicy grated radish) that I would take home for my own, much tinier, fridge.

I’ve still got more than 50 years until I reach her age. That’s why I was overcome with shock this morning when I was putting away my groceries to find that I had purchased a bottle of rice vinegar when I already had two. So now I have three huge bottles of rice vinegar in my pantry.

I had been meaning to post another installment in my ingredients series, and given that my senility is giving me hints (three hints to be exact), this seems to be a perfect time to discuss rice vinegar.

Japanese rice vinegar is made from rice or sake lees and yields a milder acidity percentage than all of the other vinegars I have in my pantry. For example, I have a red wine vinegar at 7% acidity, Safeway distilled white vinegar at 5% and rice vinegar at 4.3%. Because rice vinegar is my go-to vinegar for dressings and marinades, when I do use other vinegars they do seem super sour. In a taste comparison between raspberry, distilled white and rice vinegar, the rice vinegar tastes much milder than the other two–round, almost sweet.

Although rice vinegar is most commonly used in Asian recipes, I have tried (with success) substituting rice vinegar in western recipes for salad dressings and dipping sauces.

RICE VINEGAR AND GARLIC DRESSING

One of my favorite dressings is a white wine vinaigrette recipe I adapted. All I did was substitute white wine vinegar for rice vinegar. You might remember my kaki (persimmon) and arugula salad with rice vinegar dressing.

INGREDIENTS
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup rice vinegar
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 pinch ground black pepper

WASABI PONZU DRESSING

My next favorite salad dressing uses rice vinegar, ponzu and wasabi. This is a dressing I came up with after frequenting an izakaya in Nakameguro, Tokyo. They served a pile of thinly shaved daikon with a wonderful wasabi dressing. I posted this wasabi ponzu dressing last year which I drizzled over a bunch of neba-neba (aka slimy) things including natto and wakame.

INGREDIENTS
1/2 tsp of wasabi
Pinch of sugar
2 tsp of ponzu (I use Yuzu Passion)
1 1/2 tsp rice vinegar
3 tsp extra virgin olive oil

SUNOMONO

Sunomono is a classic marinade with rice vinegar as the main ingredient.

INGREDIENTS
3 tablespoons sugar
4 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon dashi (or water) for thinning to desired taste (optional)

Rice vinegar is a staple in my kitchen along with soy sauce, miso, mirin and sake. Without rice vinegar, I can’t dress my salads, make sushi rice or marinate veggies. Without rice vinegar, I am Kitchen Kastrated [sic].

Not to worry though, I am pretty confident that even when I am truly senile I’ll still remember to pick up a bottle at the store.

One thing California and Japan have in common is the abundance of bright orange Fuyu persimmons when November hits. Persimmon or kaki, in Japanese, are best eaten uncooked and must be peeled. The most common way to eat them in Japan is for dessert, perhaps alongside a branch of a few very plump kyoho grapes.

Kaki peeled

The thought of incorporating kaki into my meals never occurred to me until I was served salads with kaki at both the Chez Panisse Cafe and Pizzaiolo during the first week of November. It was definitely creative and very Californian and I shamelessly adapt it here for Japanify this week.

SALAD
2 large handfuls of the freshest, youngest arugula you can find
1 Fuyu persimmon sliced

DRESSING*
Recipe makes much more than you need, keeps for a long time
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup rice vinegar (or white wine vinegar)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 pinch ground black pepper
*use 2 tablespoons of dressing for the salad size above

METHOD
1. Wash and spin arugula.
2. Peel and cut kaki into quarters. Slice thin.
3. Add all of the dressing ingredients into a jar, bottle or container with lid. Shake vigorously.
4. Drizzle dressing onto salad.
5. Toss well and serve.

Not only does this salad showcase the bounty of fall, it is also SO easy! You can add avocado if you want, but the salad is best kept simple with the contrast of the sweet kaki and the spicy arugula taking center stage.

Is it really the last day of Sloth Season? Say it ain’t so! Sigh. Totally not fair considering the Bay Area has been a shroud of fog, gloom and sweater-weather all “summer”. In Dante’s Inferno, San Francisco is not unlike the third circle of hell, where the gluttonous are punished in eternal rain and relentless cold.

Fitting, actually for the Umamimart family.

What better way to end all the slovenly sloth (who live in Dante’s fifth circle of hell) than the laziest edition of Lazyass Cookin’ yet. This is a recipe of my mama’s that I grew up eating. She would make it for fancier occasions so of course I always assumed she slaved over the dish when I was younger. Turns out Hideko is the President & CEO of Lazyass Cookin’. Such trickery.

Now, here’s your chance to trick yourself, and guests too!

Fresh, colorful tomatoes are still abundant at the farmer’s market (at least here on the west coast, as of this past Saturday), so please enjoy this recipe while they are still around.

Jorge, a guy I work with, gave me this gorgeous green tomato.

Slice lengthwise.

Chop onions into little pieces. I like mine a little spicy, so always opt for the Spanish yellow onion. Chop them uniformly if you’re trying to make a good impression, but otherwise, fuck it. We’re lazy.

Ingredients for the dressing: Shoyu, vinegar, sesame seeds. You can use ponzu instead of the shoyu and vinegar, but I didn’t have any. Probably could have added some sake and mirin too, but whatever. As Hideko would say: Do as you please!

Mix above into a cup. I would say one part soy, one part vinegar, and just a little drizzle of the sesame oil. Not too much, as it gets really overpowering otherwise. Adjust to taste.

Place tomatoes flat on a plate. Sprinkle the onions over it. Then pour the dressing over it, evenly.

Here’s the most important part: put this in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes so it gets nice and COLD! If you’re like me and are perpetually in a rush, go ahead and cheat by putting it in the freezer. Ideally though, this is something you want to keep cold in the fridge until the last moment when you’re ready to sit down and eat.

This seriously takes about five minutes from start to finish, in preparation. Doesn’t get much lazier than that. And such a great way to celebrate ripe, sweet tomatoes!

Enjoy the rest of the summer, mes amis! May Sloth Season last for as long as we can possibly get away with it.

This was originally supposed to read “Octopus, Shrimp Avocado Salad with Kewpie-Wasabi Dressing,” but the octopus part did not happen. After reading a recent string of octopus posts on Umamimart including Tokyo JUNKtion: Corpse Candy, ¡Viva España!, Umamiventure #26: San Pedro Fish Market (LA), ReCPY: Best Octopus(sy) in NYC and Raw Octopus from Tsukiji Market I executed a complete impulse buy at the local Mexican seafood market near my house. I was especially determined to recreate the salad that Yamahomo makes in his Octopus(sy) post.

The octopus I bought was a one-pounder and I was really confident that I could handle it despite the fact that I had never prepared an octopus in my life. Boy, was I in for a surprise…

When I got home, I reread Yamahomo’s post and it cleared up my memory (shabby), and I realized this was going to be much harder than I expected. I proceeded to Youtube some videos on how to prepare octopus and almost barfed a little several times (live octopus preparation in particular).

The more and more I became better acquainted with these on-screen octopi, the more I feared looking into my refrigerator to pull my little guy out of his plastic bag (even though he was long dead).

I eventually did get him out of the bag, convincing myself that life is worth living for its risks and challenges.

Even so, I was thoroughly disgusted and thought about “freezing him for later” twice.

I couldn’t bear the thought of turning its head “inside out like a sock” as one online source suggested, so I decided I’d just dump him whole, into the pot with 1 cup of sake, water, half a lemon, about an inch of ginger and a wine bottle cork.

I was really trying to suspend my disgust at this point, and quickly closed the pot with its lid.

Half an hour and a really pungently stinky (if the ocean had an armpit it would probably smell like this) apartment later, I uncovered the lid and was semi-pleasantly surprised. PINK!

Pink is one of the less intimidating colors on the tonal-spectrum, so I chilled out a bit.

After cooling him down to room temperature in the liquid, I “fished” him out and placed him on my cutting board. His legs curled outward over and around his head.

One-by-one, I hacked each leg off. In fear of finding myself face-to-face with this creature, I kept the head parallel to the board. When all eight legs were chopped off, I asked my husband to throw the head out.

But to feed my terror, he stood it up and took photos of it.

TRAUMA.

At this point I had lost my appetite so thoroughly (and quite possibly forever for octopus) that I decided he will NOT be making it into tonight’s salad.

I think it’s the baggy eyes that made my stomach turn.

To my credit, my husband ate two legs and said they were quite good. I am just so disgusted at this point with octopus that I’ve placed the remaining legs in a tupperware – and I am sure that I will not be snacking on those.

And that’s the prelude to the actual recipe for this week’s post, Shrimp Avocado Salad with Kewpie-Wasabi Dressing.

Salad Ingredients:
2 avocados chopped into bite-sized pieces
10 shrimp, steamed and chopped into bite-sized pieces

Dressing:
2 tbsp kewpie mayo
1 tbsp tamari
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tsp salad oil
1 tsp wasabi
a pinch of sugar

This salad is heavily inspired by Yamahomo’s salad, but I substituted wasabi for mustard and skipped the basil, cucumber and tomato, for a wafu touch.

The key here is to pick ripe but slightly firm avocados. I find that mexican supermarkets are excellent for this.

Additionally, buy shrimps with heads whenever possible. Anything with a head still on it is going to taste a “whole” lot better. Deveining the shrimp is a bit of a pain, but when you eat the final product, you’ll appreciate the effort that pays off in both flavor and presentation.

Steam shrimp whenever possible. It will retain flavor better than boiling. I steamed my shrimp after deveining and but before removing the heads.

I took this salad to a potluck dinner and I was pleased to see it was a hit. I was also very pleased that I made the decision not to add the octopus in there.

I was always baffled by tamari. I had never used it until one of my friends and faithful readers of UM suggested that I should write about tamari vs. shoyu (soy sauce) on Japanify.

So this week, I purchased San-J brand’s Tamari (I chose that brand because I happened to have San-J brand’s Organic Shoyu stocked in my pantry right now).

Tamari comes from the word “tamaru” in Japanese which means “collect, gather or accumulate.” Tamari was originally a liquid byproduct of the miso-making process (which involves fermenting soybeans, which apparently the Japanese do in many many ways). Essentially, fermenting miso “sweats off” tamari.

Tamari (left), Shoyu (right)

While shoyu is made out of roughly 50% soybeans and 50% wheat, tamari is made with little or no wheat – so it’s a good shoyu substitute for people who are allergic to wheat. The result for tamari is a much thicker and milder sauce than soy sauce. But remember, both types are produced from the fermentation process.

While the unapologetically and piercingly salty shoyu is the best choice for sushi and sashimi, tamari is ideal for sauces and dressings for more depth and umami. I have yet to try making tsuyu with tamari, but I can predict that it will be a better choice than shoyu.

A taste comparison I did was for a salad that I am lately pretty into making. Canned tuna, garbanzo beans dressed in Japanese mayo, shoyu/tamari, EVOO and black pepper. The dressing was good with shoyu, but rounder and more agreeable with tamari. After making the same salad while substituting shoyu for tamari, I finally understood why tamari might work better in certain situations.

This was my salad:

3 handfuls of mizuna
5 okra sliced (optional)
1/2 cup of garbanzo beans
1 canned tuna/salmon

Dressing
1 tbsp tamari
1 tbsp EVOO
2 tbsp Japanese mayo
salt and pepper to taste

Mix canned fish and garbanzo beans into a mixing bowl.

Add dressing ingredients into the bowl and mix well.

Slice okra and wash mizuna. Place mizuna and okra in a big salad bowl. Then add the fish mixture to the salad bowl and toss. The fish mixture may clump together so don’t be shy to use your hands to toss the salad and coat the mizuna leaves well.

The tamari was perfect in the salad, which didn’t overpower the delicate mizuna leaves. It was also a perfect accent to the raw okra which can taste a little… well – raw.