Osechi Ryori Part 2

Come on, you didn’t really expect me to allow the leftovers to go to waste did you?

A great end to the first day of the year!

Osechi ryōri (Japanese New Year Meal)

あけましておめでとうございます! Happy New Year!

1st of January can mean only one thing in many Japanese households – osechi.  Osechi ryori is the traditional Japanese food eaten on New Years Day dating back centuries, an array of delicate dishes presented in lacquered boxes.  This year we didn’t get back to Japan so made it at home (check the bottom of the post for last years photos from Japan).

In addition to the traditional 3 jubako (lacquer boxes) we indulged in some homemade sushi and got some chu-toro (tuna belly) for sashimi…

…while not quite up to the standards of a master in Japan, this was really nice sushi (squid, octopus, prawn and saltwater eel)…

The jubako roughly followed the Japanese traditional one one being seafood, one from the land and one from the earth...

 

I couldn’t resist this little photo of one of the Cook Japan kids fave osechi dishes – ebi prawn) tempura on one of our “only to be used on New Years Day plates”…

Osechi wou;dn’t be osechi though without also having a bowl of ozoni – soup with “mochi” (steamed rice pounded into a sticky/elasticy rice cake) inside…but its not for the faint hearted!  Each year there are a few small deaths recorded from people choking on mochi!"

So that was our attempt at making osechi and it was a wonderful meal and perfect way to start what will hopefully be a good 2010.  Last year, we were back in Japan and this is the magnificent food Mrs Cook Japan’s mum rustled up…a true master of the kitchen!!!

…and yes, it did taste as amazing as it looked!

So with the osechi devoured, there’s only one thing left for me to do…relax and enjoy hatsuburo (the first bath of the year).  Oh, and the kids will be expecting otoshidama – the traditional Japanese gift of money on New Years Day!

Happy New Year everyone…and don’t forget the Cook Japan shop is running a 10% discount on all stock through January.

Kimchi Nabe

You may already have come across our last night of Nabe action…

 http://cook-japan.blogspot.com/2009/09/nabe-japanese-one-pot-stew.html

…but for those of you who missed out that particular delicacy, nabe is a one-pot Japanese dish consisting of various ingredients which is cooked in (obviously) one –pot in the centre of the table and shared by who ever has the good fortune to be dining with you.

In this case, it was the kids, but once they’d had their fill/got bored of the hassle we pumped up the volume so to speak and chucked in a pile of kimchi (Korean pickled cabbage) and gochujang (fermented chilli sauce) to give it some kick…and a distinctive redder look…



Cooked over a camping stove in the middle of the table, this is a wonderful dish as the weather closes in the nights get longer.  In this case, we had the tofu, shiitake mushrooms, prawns, chunks of white fish, dumplings, pork mince balls, udon noodles and a range of Japanese green vegetables we were fortunate to receive today from a friend with a farm specialising in Japanese produce – but you could get away with some Chinese cabbage and rocket.   



What makes it yummy is the chilli from the kimchi and gochujang.. definitely a cold-boosting dish and a great meal to share with friends (especially if you have a fridge of cold beers on hand)…

…one of the great things about nabe is that as the pot is kept warm on a portable stove in the middle of the table diners can pick what they want and generally graze.  Eating together from a shared pot is considered as an important feature of nabemono; the belief is that eating from one pot makes for closer relationships. The Japanese thus say, Nabe (w)o kakomu (鍋を囲む、"sitting around the pot"), implying that sharing nabemono will create warm relations between the diners who eat together from the shared pot…
 

Cook Japan TV

Not only do we have some great products at Cook Japan so you can have fun in the kitchen and some lovely recipes on the blog, plus an expanding section on the shop, but we are now launching Cook Japan TV…



…in addition to our own videos highlighting our appliances and recipes, we also have an ever growing content of some truly great food demonstrations and programmes.

You can watch a true takoyaki master at work, see demonstrations of all our appliances and we have also sourced some fabulous Japanese and Korean recipes – all of which make cooking great food incredibly simple and straightforward.

For sushi lovers, we also have the brilliant sushi episode of Ryori no Tetsujin (Iron Chef) - a superb cooking programme.

So have fun and we hope you enjoy Cook Japan TV – we are constantly adding more great content that we know you’ll love so “subscribe” to Cook Japan TV and stay up to date!

COOK JAPAN TV

Takoyaki (octopus ball) experiment

If you’ve never had takoyaki they are delicious!  Yes, I know the idea of octopus balls may sound a little icky, but trust be on this one, they are wonderful.

Unfortunately, much as I love them I am not fit to make takoyaki within a millions miles of this artist…

…tell me you’re not impressed by that!

Anyway, a friend recently gave us an old takoyaki pan so we decided to give it a clean and give it a try…with my 7-year old standing in for the takoyaki master.  Unfortunately we had no beni shoga (pickled ginger) or katsuobushi (bonito flakes), but that wasn’t going to stop us once we were armed with our octopus and had made the batter…

…first task was oiling said paid and getting it up to the required temperature so we could pop in the batter, then add those cheeky little pieces of octopus…

                         

…was you’ve got it hot enough and it looks as though the underside is cooked…

…the only think left to do was to flick them over (unfortunately not with the dexterity of the chap above), but still we did manage to keep the balls moving sufficiently that they ended up looking like this…

…which wasn’t bad for a first real effort from a 7-year old…so we popped them on the plate gave them a covering our sauce and crushed nori (in place of katsuobushi) and hey presto…

    

…luckily, we had enough batter and octopus for 4 batches, so everyone got more than enough!

Miso Soup – Hangover Cure

We’re coming up to the weekend, so in case you happen to accidently imbibe too much this weekend and wake with a head that feels as though a thousand elephants are stampeding through it, try this for a great hangover cure…



Miso soup is a cracking cure for a hangover…although this isn’t of course the only reason to drink it, after all you should never need a reason for a good bowl of miso soup coz its so delicious, but…

…it does work as a cure if you had one too many, in fact in Japan some companies even market special “hangover cure miso soup” like Nagatani-en whose packaging specifically shows a beer glass with the words “For people who like their drink”…



So there’s two ways to basically make miso soup, firstly using miso paste, and secondly using instant miso soup which reconstitute rapidly in hot water.  Now I’m not a huge fan of instant food for the most part, but you can buy some absolutely fabulous instant miso soup – often coming in a huge variety of flavours.  Giri-no-haha’s (mother-in-law) care packages often include boxes of very good quality instant soup.  Here’s one I had last night (just with dinner, don’t worry I wasn’t hungover…)



It may not looking appetising yet, and I won’t tell you what my seven-year thought it looked like, but add boiling water and hey presto…

 
Your other option is to use miso paste which is dissolved into dashi stock then put in your additional ingredients like tofu, chopped spring onions, clams, wakame (seaweed) etc etc.  Its really easy to make you just need to get hold of some good miso paste.  Now don’t be put off my the large tubs this often comes in and wonder how you will use it all…


…it has a great shelf-life, but as well as using it to make gallons of miso soup, you can use it in a myriad of other recipes.  One of my favourites which I’ll blog on one day is Miso Pork – smother pork in a miso sauce, ideally overnight, then scrape off the excess marinade and cook the meat (great on a BBQ).  The great think about this dish is that you can reuse the excess miso you scrape off the meat a couple more times as a marinade (just keep it seperate from the rest of the paste), and even then rather than throwing it out if you finally use it to make soup you get a nice rich flavour which just gives it that little bit of something different.

Enjoy!

Oden – a Japanese winter stew

Oden is a classic winters dish in Japan – simmered over a low heat for hours its a wonderful warming dish that is also really good for you.

Its easy to make, all it needs is a bit of forethought so that you have time to really bring out the flavours of the ingredients.  Quite simply, put some dashi soup stock in a large pot with water and then add sake, soy sauce and sugar.  Pop your ingredients in, bring to the boil and then leave on a low heat for several hours – in Japan its not uncommon to make this the day before and leave it on a really low heat.


This dish was therefore a perfect experiment for the Cook Japan rice cooker; all the ingredients went in, it was brought to the boil then simply left on “keep warm” until we were ready to eat.



Yesterday was a simple oden, we didn’t have time to get to the specialist shops that would have other ingredients, so we just used tofu, daikon (Japanese radish), potato, boiled eggs and shin beef.  Each mouthful was then dipped in a little plate of karashi (hot mustard) for extra taste…

  
With time to shop, or if we were back in Japan, we’d have tried to buy and use some of these common Oden ingredients as well:

• Tsuji – beef tendons
• Chikuwa – tubes of mixed processed fish meat (sounds weird, but tastes divine)
• Konnyaku
• Deep fried tofu, or fried tofu pouches (Atusage and Aburaage)
• Tsukune – fish or meat balls
• Pumpkin, and other Japanese regional twists on this classic stew

Ultimate Oden…

Tofu, Minced Pork and Cabbage

One of my favourite dishes is Mabu Dofu, which I’ve loved every since I lived in Japan and always end up eating on my birthday.  Japanese mabu dofu is much milder than the original Chinese Szechuan dish – although I’ll more than happily eat either.

This isn’t quite mabu dofu, but is not a million miles away and still extremely tasty…




While the rice was happily cooking away in the Cook Japan rice cooker, I turned my attention to rest of the dish…mixing a bit of water, miso, sugar, mirin and salt in a bowl, then frying the cabbage over a low heat with the minced pork.  Once the mince starts to change colour in comes the mixed seasoning and then the tofu cubes for a final 10-minute simmer and the whole thing goes on top of a steaming bowl of rice.



Although the miso gives the dish a nice deep flavour, I love my mabu dofu a bit spicier than my children so in goes a really good dollop of gochujang (korean spicy miso paste) to give the whole dish a kick…

…as I say not really a “pure” traditional Japanese, Chinese or Korean dish, but one where having robbed bits and pieces from each kitchen the resulting dish is lovely.
 

Nabe – Japanese One Pot Stew

Nabe (or nabemono) is the pot used in Japan for one-pot stews, which are placed in the middle of the table usually on a portable stove so the dish is kept hot, but also allows you to keep adding more food and keep eating.

In Japan a “shared pot” is an important aspect of building closer relationships, hence the phrase Nabe (w)o kakomu (鍋を囲む、"sitting around the pot" which implies that sharing nabemono will create warm relations between the diners who eat together.

Their is a huge variety of nabe dishes, plus its the sort of thing you can adapt to whatever ingredients you have at home.  Saturday night we opted for a pile of typical Japanese vegetables along with udon noodles and some meatballs made from pork mince, spring onions and ginger:

 

These were then all cooked in the nabe, the water having been already seasoned with konbu (kelp) and served in individual bowls with ponzu (citrus based sauce similar to soya sauce) and some more spring onions, plus grated Japanese white radish:



Of course no meal in house tends to escape the Cook Japan rice cooker, so at the end of the meal the previous days leftover rice was mixed with the remaining liquid in the nabe along with an egg to make zosui/ojiya, a fabulous end to any nabe…

Double donburi delight

Yeah, not one but two bowls of food…double donburi delight!

I was still a bit peckish after my bowl of gyu-don…didn’t need to eat, but was suddenly given the glorious excuse of my wife also cooking up a batch of “buta no kakuni” – a real favourite.  For those of yet to try this delicious dish, its essentially Japanese braised pork belly.

I’m a huge fan of this dish, its a brilliant way to cook pork belly…and it goes wonderfully with sake.

 

 
My wife’s killer recipe for buta no kakuni is to cook the pork belly in earl grey tea for 1-1.5 hours until it is really tender, she then changes this to fresh water and adds ginger, garlic, leeks/spring onions along with soya sauce, mirin, sake and sugar which gives the dish its lovely sweet syrupiness.  The dish is then left to simmer on a low-heat for around 2-hours until the liquid is almost gone and reduced to a sauce.

Try this, its a fantastic way to cook belly pork – there’s a bit left in the pan, tomorrow I’ll eat these remnants and the flavours will be even deeper, yummy!

As for my "entree", by the time the pork belly was done I'd already tucked into a nice bowl of gyu-don for dinner – essentially a “beef bowl”.  Its lovely thin slices of beef that are simmered in a sauce (made from soya sauce, dashi and mirin) and some onions – my wife then popped a dash of corn flour in to just thicken the sauce a little and make it stick to the beef.  Throw some pickles, or in my case shichimi (seven flavour chilli pepper) and you can sit back and enjoy a lovely meal. 

(Of course the rice for both was out of our Cook Japan rice cooker…where else?)



If you love a bit of gyu-don - check out my blog on the packet of "Yoshinoya Gyu-don" I was sent from Japan...oishii!!
For more information visit: www.cookjapan.co.uk

Unagi-don (grilled eel) for lunch

Had to some left over rice in my trusty Cook Japan rice cooker and thanks to my giri-no-haha (mother-in-law) back in Osaka one last packet of unagi (grilled eel) with sauce – perfect for making one of my favourite dishes…Unagi donburi.

In Japan the hottest day of the year is known as Ushi-no-hi, if you eat unagi on that day it will strengthen your body so you don’t get ill as the year starts to get colder.  Unfortunately, here in England its already cold, but any day is a good day for unagi donburi…