Braised Ox Cheeks and Meatball Soup

My word the weather here in Brighton is fast becoming rubbish – after a pleasant end to September the last three days have seen the skies open and buckets of rain descend…

…enough to make the most stout-hearted soul depressed, or at least take refuge in a hot bowl of soup.
Little admission…today was the first time we tried making soup in the Cook Japan rice cooker – it has a “soup function”, we just have not got round to trying it before.  The plan was to get some shin beef, but the butcher didn’t have any…slight downer, but what he did have was ox cheeks – an absolute steal at £1.56 for 400g!

If you hadn’t noticed yet, I love my Cook Japan rice cooker, the versatility is great…the ox cheeks, lamb mince meatballs, onion and garlic were cooked using the “Braise” function then the water, tomatoes, root vegetables, seasoning, bit of wine and splashes of random sauce bottles around the kitchen all got chucked in and once the appliance clicked into “Keep Warm” mode the soup was left for several hours to develop its flavour…

(not a perfect picture but you get the idea)

Look at these cheeky chaps, don’t you fancy one?  The flavour was so rich after 3 or 4 hours on a low heat, and really succulent and juicy…

Perhaps should have skimmed it before greedily diving into a bowl, but I quite enjoy the lip smacking aspect of the meat fat when its a thin soup like this – I like the way its adds more depth to the flavour when its not a hearty soup in its own right…



Very tasty and at £1.56 for 400g a true recession-boosting dish!

For more information visit: www.cookjapan.co.uk

The best things in life are free…fresh caught mackerel

Sometimes its the simplest freshest dishes that are best.  Yes, we all love the fun of complicated recipes that “hopefully” taste great and wow are friends, but as well know you can’t go wrong with good fresh ingredients…

…so what could be better than a freshly mackerel!



This poor little fella had only just been caught an hour or two previously, and boy did he taste nice.

Mackerel is a real family favourite in our house, saba-zushi (mackerel sushi) is a huge fave of mine.  I’d have loved to do that (although one of his friends did end of being eaten raw which was fabulous), but instead opted for popping the fish (having already gutted it) under a very hot grill until the skin starts to blacken and crisp (don’t waste mackerel skin its super tasty and definitely part of the enjoyment of the meal.

Once the skin has blistered, flip the mackerel open and lift out the bones in one easy movement and then just pour over a little soy sauce, and if you have it to hand also some grated daikon (radish).  Lovely simple fresh tastes that don’t need anything more complicated…



To make the meal complete all it needed was a bowl of hot steaming rice from the Cook Japan rice cooker, miso soup and a nice cold beer…what could be better?

 

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!

Basmati Rice with Mung Beans (topped with fried onions and hummus)

Today, felt like a healthier more simple day after a bit of excess over the weekend – a bowl of miso soup did feature!

This was a recipe my sister very kindly passed on, she even bought us the Moong Dal/mung beans to go with it…



This is so easy to make, washed basmati rice is mixed with the mung beans (split green beans) and put in the Cook Japan rice cooker.  All you then have to do is press “Start” and wait for it to finish cooking – talk about simple and my word is it tasty.



Rather than cooking my normal “x” number of cups, this was made with 2/3 cup of rice and 1/3 cup of mung beans as the ratio to which water was added.  While the rice cooker was working its magic, I leisurely fried some onions and grabbed the remaining hummus from the fridge.

Hey presto, the rice is cooked, the onions go on top and hummus makes a great accompaniment…



…the rice cooker is sitting there on “keep warm”, think i’ll pop back to the kitchen and have a bit more!
For more information visit: www.cookjapan.co.uk

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!  

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…