Tonight I tried a few new recipes. One of them involved katsuo-bushi, or shaved bonito. I decided to be fancy with the katsuo-bushi this time, and I got out our dried katsuo chunk and the shaver and put my husband to work. He sat at the kotatsu (which is really only our small, multi-purpose table as the heater doesn't work) and the dog sat next to him. They ate the big chunks they shaved off, and gave me the flakes for cooking.

Normally, I take pictures of our dinner before we eat, but tonight my husband did. He is usually a much better photographer than I am, so I'm not sure why this picture isn't quite in focus. At any rate, here's our evening meal. We had chicken wings rubbed with salt and pepper, cooked on a bed of onions and carrots, kabocha (pumpkin) soup, and stir-fried peppers stuffed with katsuo flakes. Other than that, we had hijiki salad, gobo peanuts, garlic pickles, spinach in sesame sauce, and our multi-grain rice. A better picture of the peppers, chicken, and kabocha soup. The soup was OK, not anything spectacular, in part because the kabocha I used wasnt' exactly fresh. The chicken wings were not bad, and the katsuo-peppers weren't bad, either, but they were quite difficult to eat. I'll have to come up with a better cooking method if I make them again.
I also made a small dessert tonight. I am trying to eat healthier, but in the evenings my sweet tooth just kicks in and I crave sugar. I've been thinking that maybe a slightly sweet dessert might help that. So tonight, I made kiwi and papaya in daikon oroshi. I sprinkled the top with pomengranate seeds, although the recipe didn't call for that. The daikon I used had more of a bite to it than they usually do, so it was a bit strong, and the fruit wasn't very good. I didn't think it was too bad--at any rate, I ate my serving and ,y husband's when he decided he couldn't eat it. But I think papaya is good under any circumstances.

Leftovers 2

Nothing exciting for dinner yesterday at all--and yet, I spent two hours or so in the kitchen making pickles. I told my husband we needed more garlic so I could make more pickles--and he came home with a gallon jar of peeled garlic. I was thrilled to have the garlic already peeled, but it needed to be used pretty much right away--because where do you store a gallon of peeled garlic? So I made four giant jars of miso garlic pickles, a jar of garlic pickles in soy sauce, and two smaller jars of honey garlic pickles. I've tried the honey garlic pickles before, and they have never turned out correctly, but this time I used very small jars, and used more honey than the recipe asked for. I'm hopeful they'll turn it, but it will be a month before they're ready.
Anyway, I spent so much time making garlic pickles (and a new batch of hakusai pickles--Kansai-style instead of plum this time) that I didn't have time to cook anything super-nice for dinner. That, together with the fact we're still cleaning out our refrigerator, meant we had another night of leftovers. The chicken, both spicy and citrus, reappeared, as did the bit of fish that was left, and the miso soup, filled up with tofu we needed to use. We had our usual little side dishes, the garlic pickles, the hakusai, and the hijiki salad, with tororo for our multi-grain rice. The only things I made fresh were some sauteed snow peas, and a zucchini and mushroom stirfry.

Leftovers!!

We had a bunch of leftovers we needed to use today, and a bunch of vegetables that were about to turn, so I had to cook them. Some of it I had been planning to make yesterday, but some of it I just realized I needed to use today. So we had (in the tupperware conatiners) leftover fish, leftover gobo and pork from last night, and a little bit of leftover simmered vegetables. Then we had hijiki salad, nappa cabbage and plum pickles, miso soup with tofu and green onions, and the miso-garlic pickles.
We had some chicken we needed to use, so I made spicy chicken thigh meat (with the red peppers), and a lemon simmered chicken. Those are both in the center of the table. Then I made some spinach with sesame sauce (it was a bit runny tonight), and some shungiku (chrysanthemum leaves) with ponzu (citrus soy) sauce. The shungiku is in the blue striped dish. Finally, I fried some shishito (Japanese peppers) and whipped up a little dipping sauce. I served them on paper towels to soak up a bit of the grease (classy).
We had rice with multi-grains mixed in today (it's purple), and I made some tororo to top it off. I really need to get a good grater for my tororo. Chunky tororo isn't cool.


The miso soup. Miso is so versitle, and you can add so much to it, it's like a perfect food. Tonight we had really simply miso, and I made it a bit too salty. Oops.
The shishito, topped with a bit of sea salt and black sesame seeds. You can see the shungiku with the lemon, and the spinach in front of it, as well as the dipping sauce off to the side. The dpping sauce was essentially tempura sauce.
Our two chicken dishes! The spicy chicken and the citrus chicken. They were good, I suppose, quite easy, so I can't complain. The citrus might have been better stir-fried rather than simmered.
Another view, this one with the shungiku in the picture. I really, really love shungiku. It's hard to explain how much I love them. And ponzu is so multi-purpose, and delicious. Citrus and vinegar are two flavors I love that my husband isn't quite so keen on, but he likes ponzu.

Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving. I wasn't planning a turkey, but I was thinking of making kind of a large meal. I ended up spending the day busy and out of my house, however, which meant I didn't spend a lot of time cooking. Then I got home and had to clean up a few things.
So the big dinner I'd been planning went out the window, and I just made a few recipes I've been wanting to try for awhile. We don't do a traditional Thanksgiving at all, in part because my husband is Japanese, and in part because he doesn't like turkey. Turkey once a year is good for me, and I eat it at Christmas, so I wasn't too disappointed without it.
First, we had the leftover soybean soup from yesterday, and our usual hakusai-plum pickles, and the pickled garlic. For our first dish, I sliced up some gobo and sauteed it with garlic, pork, and red peppers. The recipe called for kuwai (which, I learned upon googling, is arrowhead in English), but of course I didn't have any, so I left it out. It was fine without them, but a bit salty. I want to try arrowhead now, though, so if anyone sees any, let me know where to find them! They sound a bit like water chesnuts?

The second new dish I tried was broccoli. My husband isn't supposed to be eating fried foods because his cholesterol was high, but I figured since it's Thanksgiving we could have something a little special. So I made broccoli, topped with mashed potatoes and fried. It was quite easy. I added cheese and an egg to the mashed potatoes and they cooked right up.
Finally, we had a bird--chicken. I've already posted a picture of this chicken on the blog, but today I was given some dried red shiso that I wanted to try, so I made ume-shiso chicken again. It was quite yummy.
I also fried up some peas and some kabocha (pumpkin), mostly just to test the oil temperature before I did the broccoli. It's a good thing I did, too, because the oil was too hot and the peas burnt.
Not much, but that was our Thanksgiving! Happy Day to everyone.

Tonight we had some leftovers to use. I made sauteed butter corn, because we had some corn leftover from a pizza I made for lunch (yes, we do the corn-on-pizza thing).
We had red fish (yes, that's what it was labeled. We think it was a snapper of some sort, but we can't be sure), marinated in sake lees and grilled. Then just the usual sides: nappa cabbage and plum pickles, peanuts and gobo in miso sauce, and the garlic pickles. I did, however, made some hijiki salad (in the white flower-shaped dishes, with gobo and carrots), and I tried a new kind of soup.

I had imagined it would be a bit thinner, but it actually ended up being quite an almost creamy soup. The flavor is delicate compared to the heartiness of the... it's almost a gruel, a very filling, thick soup. The name of it, translated from the Japanese, is something like Pureed Soybean Soup. I was a bit hesitant about it, but I had some soybeans we needed to use, and it actually was quite good. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't this.


And just for fun, a picture of the mysterious red fish. You also get a shot of the peanut-gobo miso pickles, and a corner of the miso-pickled garlic, as well.

For dessert, I had half an orange that I really needed to use, and some pomegranate seeds that had been sitting in the fridge awhile as well. I thought they'd look pretty, and taste nice together, so I just put them in a glass dish. It was a nice way to finish the meal.

One of my long-running goals is to be able to make chawan mushi. Alas, it's a bit tricky, and I haven't got a proper steamer, so I always end up with half-cooked egg mess, more or less edible, but never tasty. I've tried and failed at chawan mushi several times, and my husband has gamely eaten my mistakes, but it's gotten a bit frusterating.
Today I decided to take a step back and try a different steamed egg dish, one decidedly less complicated. This is called, according to my cookbook, "tori no tsukimi mushi," or "Moon-viewing chicken." I'm not sure if it's called that because you use autumn vegetables, and moon-viewing is associated with the autumn in Japan, or if it's called that because the egg looks like a moon. At any rate, I used chicken and shiitake mushrooms in the bottom of the cups, and topped them off with shungiku (chrysanthemum leaves, truly delicious). You add a sauce, and I topped them with foil and steamed them. They came out quite well, I think. I was very pleased! So I suppose there's one more step on the road to chawan-mushi conquered?
I had leftover chicken after I made the steamed egg dish, so I simmered some daikon (radish) and chicken for an extra little dish. Overall, not a bad meal. The leftovers are out, too, although I forgot garlic pickles tonight. We do have hakusai pickles, though, and miso soup with our rice. Not a bad meal.
I should have added a garnish to the radish and chicken. It's quite bare, and looks quite colorless.

Tonight's meal: hiraki-aji, or an open aji (mackerel). Lightly salted and grilled. I also served it with ao-nori salt, or green seaweed and salt, which is on the small round plates. Rice, miso, and garlic pickles, of course. Other than that, I just made my usual simmered dish--this time with bamboo root, renkon (lotus root), carrots, taro potatoes, shiitake and kikurage mushrooms, and snow peas. Oh, and some cucumbers in miso dressing.




A close-up of the fish:




And a close-up of the soup and the simmered vegetable dish. The miso soup today had tofu, enoki mushrooms, and mitsuba, which is quite similar to watercress. It was delicious. We'll have both of these again tomorrow, as I made quite a bit. I think the simmered vegetable is my current favorite dish.

Chicken stir-fried with shiso leaves, and topped with an ume boshi (pickled plum)-shiso dressing. Served with tonjiru soup, the bok choy and nameko mushroom stir fry, and gobo and peanuts in miso. I also served our garlic pickles, and a simmered dish of taro, carrot, pepper, bamboo, and renkon (lotus root). The simmered dish is so quick and easy, as well as being quite delicious and very colorful, so I actually make it often. It's great in the winter.




A close-up of the chicken:

This is a salted, grilled aji. It's in season now, so it was quite delicious. Didn't quite fit on the plate, though.
Served with a nameko mushroom-bok choy stir fry (clear glass bowl), rice, and tonjiru (pork-miso) soup. Tonjiru has carrots, potatoes, green onions, and pork in it. In the wooden dishes in the middle, we have the garlic pickles, spicy gobo pickles, and some small dried fish.

An izumi-dai fish (it's a kind of snapper) that got a bit mangled when I grilled it. I threw this meal together in about 30 minutes; besides the fish, we have the rice and the miso, a sliced tomato, garlic pickles, and an eggplant saute. Very simple.


Here's a close-up of the eggplant-zucchini stir fry:

A quick, simple meal. Shoga-yaki (ginger pork stir fry), rice, miso soup, eggplant and edamame pickles (blue striped dish), wakame stir-fry (it sounds gross, but is pretty good, and excellent for you. It's in the brown and white dish). Finally, in the clear glass dish, I served some cucumber in a miso sauce, and on the small plate we have garlic pickled in miso. Garlic's supposed to be quite good for your health, so we have 2 cloves a day.

Shopping Day!

Look at all the fish we bought!Some of it we froze, so I'll cook it later. But the square cuts of fish were sashimi-grade, so we had such a wonderful meal:Sashimi, with rice and miso soup. It's a perfect meal. We have here on the white, rectangular plate aji (silver), hamachi, and katsuo (dark red). On the round plate, we have oo-toro and chu-toro, as well as maguro and salmon. The white, square container has squid in it. Here's another image of the sashimi:


That was such a good meal. A very great treat!

My husband works full time and attends school full time, and I'm a full-time Ph.d student. This means we basically see each other once a day: we sit down and have dinner together.
Therefore, I like to have slightly nice dinners we can sit down and enjoy. I don't do anything too elaborate, but it keeps me sane to prepare a nice meal and then share it.
I started posting pictures of the meals I cooked when my father expressed interest in some of my recipes. My husband is Japanese, and we both prefer that cuisine, so my dad was interested in trying some new dishes. Rather than type out every recipe I made, I thought I would post the pictures and he could tell me which ones he wanted. I started by posting pictures of food on my facebook, but now I'm moving to this blog. If there's a recipe you'd like, just comment and I'll post it (eventually--I do get busy sometimes so I make no promises).
This is a meal from a few days ago. I served nappa cabbage-ume pickles (in the blue striped dish), a simmered dish of taro (sticky potato), carrot, shiitake, and green beans, a mix of brown and white rice, some miso garlic pickles and spicy gobo pickles (in the brown wooden dishes in the middle), and a ginnan (ginko nut), ground pork, shiitake, and tofu soup that was truly delicious.

Here's a close-up of the soup:
It was quite good, but I don't know when I'll ever get ginnan again.