Apparently one of my friends actually reads my blog, because when she came over for tea this afternoon she came bearing macarons. I need more friends like this. These are also from Bonjour, our neighborhood French patisserie, and they were delicious again. Better than yesterday, even.



My husband went to work out while I was preparing dinner tonight. I'd gone for two hours this morning, so I didn't join him. As I was cutting up the gobo, I heard him come home, and a second later I heard him yelling for me from the door.
He's torn a muscle in his right calf. It's seriously grotesquely swollen, just looking at it. The poor guy is hobbling around our apartment on crutches, and I'm wondering how he's going to fare on his own when I go visit my parents next week.
He pointed out this means I'm the only healthy one in the house: he's torn his right calf muscle, and the dog has a torn left knee ligament. The dog has surgery scheduled for Dec. 29, just in time for New Year's. I hope my husband is better before then...
Anyway. After making him an ice packet and getting him to sit down, I went back and finished dinner. I had thought since we'd both been so good with working out lately we could afford to have a little bit of fried food. That was a mistake, since he won't be working out for awhile, but it was too late.
Tonight, therefore, we had fried renkon (lotus root) and gobo (burdock) with matcha salt, chicken with a matcha-mayonnaise sauce, a new batch of kenchin-jiru soup (the tofu fell apart today, ugh), and our usual rice and ume-hakusai pickles. Yes, tonight's theme was matcha. I'm on a tea kick lately, as you might have guessed from my ocha-gara consumption.
The mayonnaise recipe came from a new book I got today, that I think I'm going to use quite often. The author gave a recipe for the chicken, too, but I didn't quite want to do that. I followed a basic Japanese recipe for the "shita-aji," or base flavor, of chicken, and used the matcha-mayonnaise as a flavor on top of that. I think it worked reasonably well.
My basic shita-aji recipe for chicken is a liberal dash of sake, some peeled and sliced ginger, and some naganegi (leek). Just marinate it, or cook it up and add a sauce. It's worked for me fairly consistently.
Although I clearly need to work on my decorative drizzling of sauce.
The renkon and gobo chips. They were DELICIOUS--much better than potato chips--but I'd imagine equally bad for you. Also, the "paper-thin" cutting made me realize how much we truly need a mandoline in our kitchen.
Below, more renkon than gobo...
And more gobo than renkon. Oh, they were so good. But terrible for you, I'm sure.
I thought the gobo was so cool and pretty fried like this.