Sardines with Mentaiko

What is mentaiko I hear you ask? Well, its marinated Pollock roe to the unitiated…

…but this isn’t any mentaiko, its karashi mentaiko or spicy fish eggs!

In case you’re not sure, the mentaiko is the orangey/brown balls on the outside of the fish.   Of course the bowl of rice was courtesy of the dear old Cook Japan rice cooker, but what a wonderful combination for a quick easy healthy lunch…

The sardines have been cooked have a sweet soy sauce taste from their own marinade, which combined with the slightly spicy marinated mentaiko is a great fusion of flavour and texture.  With a steaming bowl of fresh rice its a real treat along with a piping hot bowl of miso soup and a side of homemade gobo (burdock) salad…

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.

Slow Cooked Pork (in the Rice Cooker)

This is a slight variation of a firm Cook Japan family favourite…buta no kakuni (Japanese braised pork belly).  Mrs Cook Japan is loving our local supermarket’s so called “forgotten cuts”, in this case pork cheeks… 

…so it was still pork, just that it happened to be cheeks and not belly…I have to say if you are a fan of slow cooking pork cheeks are a wonderful cut of meat for this type of dish with a fabulous texture.

So the recipe…Mrs Cook Japan’s secret  is to cook the meat 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,dried lily flowers and daikon (long white Japanese radish) along with soya sauce, mirin, sake and sugar which gives the dish its lovely sweet syrupiness.  The whole thing is put in the rice cooker and left to cook for a couple of hours, after which a few spring onions and leeks go in and everything is left on “keep warm” until its time to eat.

One of the great things about this dish is the way the daikon soaks up the sauce, creating this wonderful marbling effect and making it absolutely delicious…

The finished pork just falls apart on your fork/chopsticks, the tenderness of the meat and flavour is superb and only increases with time (especially if there’s some left for the following day). 

Served on a bed of rice (thankfully we have 2 rice cookers for when it comes to making meals like this), the only drawback was having friends pop round…once they’d had a bowl as well it meant was nothing left for me reheat tomorrow…

Simple yet tasty…

Sometimes just throwing together some bits and pieces in the kitchen is all you need to.  At a loss as to what to make and without the ambition or desire to try and remedy this mindless state, grabbing a few things from the kitchen and fridge actually turned into a perfectly good lunch…

…of course there was some rice in the rice cooker, so that had to feature, but then I also remembered we have some yukari (dried red shiso/perilla leaves) which makes a great accompaniment to a simple bowl of rice with a lovely plum flavour…

…you can’t beat a bowl of miso soup with your rice, so out came the miso paste to which I added some shungiku (garland chrysanthemum) which is a beautiful leaf and full of flavour…

and my wife has recently been making pickles so it seemed rude not to have a plate of that as well. 

what a great combination…

…so nearly a perfect lunch, but I kinda fancied some meat as well and as luck would have we’ve got a big joint of cha siu pork in the fridge so I chopped off a few pieces, gave them a quick heat-up in a pan and used a sauce made from soy sauce and honey to give it a bit more vavavoom…

 

…simple and yet tasty, just what you want for a simple lunch without much thought.

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!

Lily Flowers and Steak Slow Cooked in a Rice Cooker

Yes, you read that correct the first time…lily flowers!

Dried lily flowers are a great accompaniment to a meal; they rehydrate when cooked and add a really nice flavour to your dish.  
 
Do you remember the delicious ox cheeks from last week?  Well the butcher had sold out, so opting for another cheap, but yummy cut of meat, the purchase of “chuck steak” was made. 
But, what is Chuck Steak I hear you ask?
Well, chuck steak is a rectangular cut of meat that contains part of the shoulder bones and contains a lot of connective tissue, including collagen. Collagen melts during the cooking of the meat, making the flavour intensely stronger, which is one of the reasons this is such a great meat for stewing, slow cooking, braising, or pot roasting.

As for the lily flowers…also known as “golden needles”, the dried lily flower is usually left to rehydrate in water for 20mintues or so before cooking and is a common ingredient in many Asian dishes. 
So…how to make Lily Flowers and Steak in a rice cooker…

First chopped onions and a bit of garlic go in the rice cooker on “braise” then in goes the chunks of chuck meat and when the braise function comes to and end (after a few minutes) add some water…
…give it a few minutes then in goes the standard Japanese base of soy sauce, dashi, mirin and cooking sake so you get some sauce when the whole thing has finished cooking…and some seasoning and the lily flowers.
Once the “braise” as run its course the rice cooker reverts to “keep warm”, leave the food on this function until its ready to eat – in our case it was a few hours before the kids ate dinner, and a couple more until I got home to polish off the rest….


All in all, a great cut of meat, lovely lily flowers on a bed of nice fluffy perfectly cooked rice.  A wonderful dish.
For more information visit: www.cookjapan.co.uk

Yoshinoya – the best beef bowl in the world!

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A care package arrived this morning from Japan, but this was not just any old care package it contained packets of Yoshinoya’s gyu-don (beef topping and sauce to go on rice).  The those of you who’ve never been to Yoshinoya, its a classic of Japanese fast food.  Founded in 1899 its now a normal site throughout Japan and sells cheap tasty gyu-don (beef bowls) that really is quite wonderful

I heard Yoshinoya had now started selling packets of their food so you can have it at home, even if home is thousands of miles away from the nearest restaurant. 



What an easy dinner…pop the rice in the Cook Japan rice cooker, the packet into boiling water then when both are done empty the beef and sauce onto the rice. 

It doesn’t get any simpler, just add a sprinkling of shichimi (Japanese chillil powder) and…



I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed eating this and how much I resented having to give some to the kids – ha ha!

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!

Tonkatsu (breaded pork) and Shishito (Japanese green peppers

We are really lucky, one of our Japanese friends near Brighton has a commercial allotment where she grows Japanese vegetables – many of which are then sold to restaurants across the south-east.

As a result, we are able to get a plethora of great freshly grown produce, but without doubt one of my favourites, and one of the hardest to get in England, is shishito.  Shishito is a short Japanese green pepper which we usually just grill, but tonight for a change we opted for tempura shishito…and I’m so glad we did…



Alongside this, there was a bit of last nights Oden still lurking in the pan, rice from the good old Cook Japan rice cooker, a bowl of miso soup and another big favourite tonkatsu.  To make it all you need is a nice piece of pork loin or pork fillet which is then deep fried in a coating of flour, egg and fine breadcrumbs and then served in slices…



Unfortunately we’ve run out of tonkatsu sauce, but if you mix ketchup and HP sauce its a pretty good substitute…



Simple, yet delicious…if you can find shishito buy some!  

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.