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Published: July 24th 2006
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Dinner 1!
Mmm, was tasty. The books on the table are "Another Roadside Attraction" by Tom Robbins, loaned to me the night before I left by Jamie Dyal, and a bilingual book of Japanese and English minimalist poetry. So the first project I needed to accomplish was to learn to cook some Japanese foods. I enjoy cooking, and have learned a lot from doing it last summer. The whole summer I tried to make everything from scratch, which turned out to be expensive and very difficult, but I learned a lot about how to create foods. What sorts of things to mix in with what to achieve a certain consistency, taste, color, or accent - that sort of generally applicable stuff. So I wanted to apply that knowledge this summer and learn how to adjust traditional Japanese foods to my taste. Japan has some strange restrictions on my cooking ability, however:
1) My pantry where I can store things is, in fact, a shelf above the sink. My entire store of foodage has to fit into a 18 x 12 x 5 inch space.
2) My fridge is roughly the same size as my mini-fridge at Stanford. All foods I need to refrigerate and / or freeze have to fit into a space that'd fit maybe one and a half twelve-packs of Coke.
3) I want to minimize my cooking equipment costs, since I can't really take it
Udon
Hrm ... was okay. back. Therefore, all foods have to be prepared with:
a) One knife
b) One spoon
c) One pot
d) One pan
e) One spatula
f) Two pairs of chopsticks
g) One glass pot with lid designed to be microwaved for rice cooking.
4) I have one electric burner that is more akin to a hot plate than a burner, so I can only cook one container of things at a time, excluding microwave.
5) Japan lacks four out of five ingredients I'm used to. Butter isn't common. Cheese is phenomenally expensive. Many vegetables are imported or expensively engineered.
These turn out to be fairly profound restrictions. One burner alone is probably the biggest issue, missing ingredients aside. I've ended up making a lot of stews and stir-fries because of it. Some, things, however, turn out to be more freeing: chopsticks are ridiculously useful as cooking tools. They are wood, so they don't conduct heat, they have an opposable grasp, and four chopsticks on one skilled hand makes a perfectly fine whisk. Marvelous little tools.
Anyway, these restrictions and the lack of typical ingredients has forced me to expand my cooking repertoire.
Dinner 3!
Man, I'm hungry ... I gotta leave this internet cafe and grab something now. So I decided I would start with mushrooms. I don't know a thing about cooking with them, but they exist in large quantities at the markets and are quite cheap. So I felt I'd spend a few days this week learning to cook with them.
This is the menu I came up with:
Dinner 1: Tonkatsu with Enrigi Glaze
Enrigi have a musty earthy flavor (as a good mushroom ought, I suppose) and a meaty consistency. They aren't half bad cold, so I figured I'd start with something simple to bring out their flavor. I sauteed some onions in a pan and added in the mushrooms. They soaked up the delicious onion flavor and mixed it with the natural earthiness. After adding in red pepper and garlic to add some spiciness (and since these are solid enough mushrooms to stand up to that strength of flavor), I took out the topping and cooked the tonkatsu in that juice. Then I put the tonkatsu on the plate, deglazed the pan and mixed that with the mushrooms and draped it over the top.
Verdict: tasty! As I hoped, the textures went together extremely well: the crispy crunchy tonkatsu, meaty mushrooms, and soft onions also mixed their flavors quite nicely.
Notes: Enrigi soak up juice like no other. Be sure to supply them well to soak up flavors.
Dinner 2: Bunashimeji Udon
Bunashimeji - small, kind of bitter. Seems like they need to soak up some juice. So how about some udon soup?
Made udon, drained it, soaked it in cold water, and set it aside. Boiled some dashi (fish-derived Japanese basis for ALL foods), then when it hit boiling I took down the heat and added tofu (for protein), egg (for protein), kimchi (for spiciness), lots of mushrooms (focal point), and a little bit of miso soup paste (for more broth flavor).
Verdict: Failure! I just couldn't get a good broth flavor out of this thing. The mushrooms didn't end up tasting half bad, but the overall flavor was simply too thin and watery. Everything was also uniform texture: squishy kimchi, squishy mushrooms, slippery noodles, slippery tofu, slippery egg. I need something hard, crunchy, or meaty to offset it. Should've thought this one out more!
Notes: Mushrooms aren't bad with soup, but you need a good broth first. These mushrooms really are bitter, and without the sweetness of miso they would've been near-inedible. Bunashimeji simply must be eaten with the juices of other things.
Dinner 3: Shiittake Kimchi Pods
I had heard of shittake mushrooms before, and their usefulness for vegetarians with their meaty consistency. So I mulled over this for a little bit, trying to figure out what I could do with them. They seem ripe for sauteeing, but I'd already done that ... soup also was done ... what else can you do? So I thought about it, and realized I hadn't done a meat wrap yet. My first idea was to use cheese, but then remembered that one simply cannot get cheese in this country. Period. Although you can buy it at an import store, it is literally six times the price at Safeway near Stanford. And a goal of this exercise is to learn how to cook more Japanese foods. So, I decided I would wrap up the shittake mushrooms around a couple pieces of kimchi (because kimchi makes everything good, as we learned at Tottori and the ridiculously low-quality meat).
I cut out the stems and set them aside, took a piece of kimchi, and placed it inside the mushroom. I then used a little bit of flour and water to seal a shittake bottom to another shittake top and keep the kimchi juices inside. Then, I placed them in the upper steam chamber of my rice pot and let it steam with the rice. I then made some kimchi, onion, and mushroom fried rice, and then cooked that together with the meat. In the end, I reassembled the meat, rice, and loose kimchi mixture with the shittake kimchi pods.
Verdict: Partial success. The pods should not be steamed. Although the mushroom flavor is quite nice in moderation, the steam amplifies and makes eating an entire mushroom an unpleasantly strong experience. Perhaps slicing it up would've helped, but I'll look into other ways of cooking it - the steam just makes it kinda soggy. Maybe even raw would work ... I dunno about toxicity and stuff, though, but I figure it's probably fine. The stems, on the other hand, were heavenly - they sucked up the onion and kimchi, and then juiced up on beef flavors, mixing with their normal mushroomnes - tasting strongly of earthy goodness and solid natural flavors. Again, kimchi and onion can save any food.
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So what have I learned? Mushrooms aren't as delicate as I thought. They have a pretty strong flavor in general, which can be either enhanced or mitigated by cooking style, but this should be kept in mind when cooking with them. Additionally, one should pay attention to the texture of the mushrooms, because you turn them into something quite gross if you're not careful. Generally, I'd assign them a seconday role in a dish - they arise from death and decay, and while this can mix well by soaking up broth or merging with meat, it proves a hard fact to forget if they are the focus, or if you're somewhat lacking in your cooking abilities like me.
Next week is fish!
~Danny
P.S. At least one more post coming up tomorrow - about my job, including my new address - and maybe one more about things I've been mulling over if I have time. Later!
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Beckydono
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More sauces!
Mushrooms are yummy. Try making shittake sushi. They're also yummy in udon. My favorite thing to do with mushrooms is simmer them in various wine reduction sauces; depending upon the strength of the flavor you can do either a white wine or a red wine. Isn't that convenient? :) My favorite all-purpose ingredient is tomato. But I guess tomato is not that common in Japan. Sad. :(