Simple Potatoes, on the side

As I've mentioned before, one of my favourite things about going to a Korean restaurant was enjoying the side dishes, or panchan, included free of charge with the meal. These side dishes were made from whatever vegetables the kitchen decided to use, and varied seasonally, and with the moods of the staff. Part of the fun of going out to dinner was the anticipation for the side dishes - to paraphrase Cartman from South Park, wondering what side dishes we would be enjoying with the meal.

Somethings were quite common, and very Westerner-friendly - such as pan-fried spinach with sesame oil and garlic, or small boiled quail's eggs with salt and pepper for dipping. Barbecue restaurants often featured some sort of creamy salad, like pasta or potato salad. (And cheap places offered mounds of shredded cabbage with a mayo-ketchup dressing) Other panchan were more challenging, like raw crabs fermented in chili sauce, or raw-oyster studded kimchi.

I always enjoyed getting a potato panchan, because thanks to my North American upbringing, a meal never quite felt complete unless it involved some sort of potato. Normally, this craving could be satisfied with the aforementioned creamy salad. But other times there might be whole baby potatoes, simmered in soy sauce and malt syrup (better than they sound). One of my favourites was extremely simple, and I remembered it the other day, when I was staring crankily at two runty potatoes that were malingering in my kitchen.

In Korea, this panchan came with matchstick potatoes fried in sesame oil, garlic, salt, and green chili. Since I wanted to make this to fill out my bento, I made it without the garlic, as I always feel shy about using a lot of garlic in Japan. Instead, I cut the two potatoes into thin matchsticks, heated up a frypan, and added about two tablespoons of sesame oil. The potatoes go in for about five minutes - the key is to madly toss them about in the hot oil, getting them coated, and cooking them no more than until they're still a little firm when you bite them. (Try not to lose too many behind the stove; this really annoys the person tasked with cleaning up.) Then, I season them heavily with the shichimi togarashi I'd bought in Takayama. This is a a flavourful seasoning that isn't particularly spicy, and worth picking up if you're curious about it. If not, try using Montreal steak spice. This takes only minutes to make - most of the work is in cutting the potatoes. It's great for lunch the next day, or in a morning omelette.

Ploughman's Pickles

A ploughman's lunch is a simple affair of bread, cheese, pickle, and perhaps some other vegetables or pate dressing things up. When I say pickle, I don't mean a pickled cucumber, I mean some sort of preserved vegetable. Pickled onions, I think, are popularly served with a Ploughman's, and I think Branston pickle is also a reliable contributor. It's a little known fact about me that when I was growing up, I loved cheddar cheese and dill pickle on white bread, which must have bemused my mother to no end. While other kids were unwrapping their PB&J, I was happily working through my cheese and pickle sandwiches.

These days, cheese is pretty rare in our house, as it's quite expensive in Japan. Every once in a while, though, Sous-chef Peter crumbles and comes home with a wedge of extra-old cheddar from the Seijo Iishi, an imported-foods store. This week, the stars aligned, and while Peter was in Yokohama, buying a wedge of cheese, I was in Chigasaki, picking up a bag of red onions for the ridiculously low price of 198 yen. When I got home and realized what I had on hand, I went to work making a quick sweet pickle from the onions.

I cut up about 5 smallish red onions, and tossed them in 2 tablespoons or so of salt. I use sea salt, since it's what I have on hand, but pickling salt is probably best for this sort of thing. When you make proper canned pickles, it's important to get the ratio of salt correct for food safety reasons, but since I don't have the proper equipment or storage space for canning, I go about this as if I were making a quick pickle. A jar of pickled onions doesn't stand a chance of last longer than a couple of days in my house, anyway. Once the onions are salted, I use a Japanese tsukemono-ki (pickle press) to press out the water. You could leave your onions in a non-reactive bowl, with another bowl, full of water to act as a weight on top. After 10 or 15 minutes of this (long enough for me to die trying to attempt world 1-1 in Super Mario Brothers) I drain off the liquid, and give the onions a quick rinse in water. I try to squeeze out any extra liquid with my hand. Then I put them into a glass jar - one I got at Muji, for just this purpose.

Once I crammed all the onions into the glass jar, I boiled 2/3 cup each of rice vinegar and sugar. No particular reason for this measurement, other than it seems to fill the jar I have on hand. If you have a smaller or larger batch you'd like to do, just use a 1:1 ratio of vinegar and sugar. You may find this yields quite a sweet pickle, especially if your onions are quite mild. In this case, you may want to reduce the sugar down to 1/2 cup. I've also heard of people using Splenda instead of sugar, and why not?

I left the onions in their bath overnight, and today I ate the marvellous sandwich pictured above for breakfast. A bit of rye bread, toasted, and spread sparingly with butter. Then, a heaping pile of onions for tang and crunch, topped off with a few shavings of cheddar (at 700 yen for 200g, you'd better believe a thin shaving!). If you wanted to make a killer, decadent sandwich, you could smother the onions with cheese and broil the whole lot of it, so that the molten cheese conceals a layer of sweet, tangy pickle. Not that I thought about doing that, though. I am a model of restraint.

Corn Jumble

I'm really on a vegetable kick, aren't I?

Well, it's summer, and I really don't want to waste a bit of it. With Sous-chef Peter bringing home piles of produce every weekend from the market, I'm having fun thinking of new ways to deal with it all. I know it's impossible to think that you could ever get sick of eating fresh, sweet corn on the cob, and I haven't yet. It's hard to resist five ears for 200 yen, but my fridge and bento box are just too small to hold full ears of corn, so as soon as they come in the door on Sunday, I get to work cutting them down into a more manageable size.

Right now, I'm making a sort of corn salsa/pickle out of them, which Canadian Bento christened "corn jumble". It's as good as name as any, and so I present to you: corn jumble.

This travels great as a side dish in a bento, or to the beach like it did this week as a trio of side dishes for a yakitori cookout on Enoshima beach.

I steamed five ears of fresh corn, and diced up half a red onion; a red pepper, and two Japanese cucumbers. I soaked the red pepper in cold water for ten minutes to take away the sharp onion-y taste - I find even red onions in Japan are stronger than I'm used to. I rubbed the cucumbers with salt, to take away any bitter taste in the peel. Since Japanese cucumbers are so small, they don't need seeding - I'd recommend using an English cucumber or a seeding a regular cucumber. You could add black beans to this to make it more substantial, but since I didn't have any hanging around - I didn't. I seasoned this with a half teaspoon of salt and several grinds of fresh pepper, and then made a dressing from 2/3 cup each white sugar dissolved over heat in rice vinegar. When the sugar is dissolved, I pour the dressing over the whole lot of vegetables; cool; and then leave in the fridge for an hour or so until the flavours mingle. Like most things, the longer you leave it; the better it tastes.

I don't recommend trying to eat it with chopsticks like I did, though. Exercise in frustration.

Quick Pickles

I ended up having a glut of onions and cucumbers last week, thanks in part to a miscommunication with sous-chef Peter, who is responsible for ingredient sourcing each week at Ofuna market. Since daytime temperatures are hovering above the 30 degree mark in my kitchen, and I'm dealing with a ridiculously small bar fridge, something had to be done. I got this idea from the cucumber thread over at eGullet.org.

My mother used to make cucumber pickles every year, along with jam, jellies, relishes and chutneys. When I mention to my Japanese friends that I make tsukemono (Japanese-style pickles), they're often surprised that a foreigner a) knows how to make them, and b) enjoys eating them. When I mention I grew up on home-made pickles, albeit of a different style, their eyes really bug out. Unlike my mother, however, I don't have an array of canning equipment and a large basement to store things in, so I'm limiting myself to quick pickles - lightly salted vegetables, kept in the fridge in a sweet vinegar bath. I think it's a fast way to use up a glut, and they're a great addition to my lunch box.

If you'd like to play along, just slice some onions and cucumbers, then toss them in a few spoons of coarse salt. Put them in a bowl with a weight on them - like another bowl filled with water, for example. In fifteen or twenty minutes, rinse them off, and squeeze out any extra liquid, and put them into a non-reactive container, like a glass jar or tupperware. In a pot, dissolve sugar in vinegar in a 1:1 ratio - I used 2/3 cup rice vinegar to 2/3 cup white sugar. When the sugar has fully dissolved, pour the liquid over your cucumbers and onions, cover and refrigerate. Add garlic or dill, if you like. Or not. They should keep for about a week, but we're eating them so fast, they're hardly making it that long.

Stuffed Zucchini on a Japanese Gas Range

Peter came home on the weekend with a big bag full of zucchinis and cucumbers that he got a Ofuna market. Yes, it's that time of year again - time to wonder what the @&*% to do with all the zucchini.

In my opinion, it's best to deal with them when they're small, otherwise they breed exponentially, and you find yourself in a weeping pile in the middle of the kitchen, having made zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, zucchini stir-fry; zucchini pickle and having grated zucchini into spaghetti sauce, oatmeal, and finally, in a desperate bid to finish it off, directly into the toilet. It rather reminds me of the time I bought the biggest daikon I could find, and was still making things out of it a week later.

I have no idea what the Japanese do with zucchinis, so I thought back to how I like to eat zucchinis in Canada. All I could remember was roast zucchini, which seemed hard to manage in my oven-less kitchen. One reason why I started learning to cook Japanese dishes was that I'm limited by my gas range - it seems most of the dishes I grew up on rely on having an oven to bake or roast ingredients. (This usually takes longer, but does leave the cook free to wander off and put the wash on or play a short round of Mario Party. ) One dish I really loved in Canada was stuffed eggplant, in which big eggplants are stuffed with ground chicken, breadcrumbs, and herbs, and topped with cheese and grilled in the oven. I though with a little re-engineering, I could make this with zucchini on a gas range. Thus, I give you Erin's Stuffed Zucchini (on a gas range)

Step 1: Sternly deal with Zucchinis


There is always too much zucchini. It's a fact of life. Although Peter brought home only four small zucchinis, I knew it would be too many. I set two aside to be cut up and frozen. The remaining two were lumpy and bumpy and irregularly shaped, like most natural things, so I cut them down to smallish boat-like shapes. The long skinny top bits I sliced thinly and set aside for a side dish for the next day. Then, addressing the boats, I hollowed them out with a knife and spoon, and finely chopped the scooped-out guts. I put them into a bowl to form part of the stuffing. In a pan, I heated some olive oil, maybe a tablespoon or so, and salted and peppered the boats. When the oil was hot, I lay the boats in the pan, hollow-side down, covered them up, and put the heat to medium low.

Step 2: Stuffing Logs


While the boats sizzled, I added about 200 g of ground chicken to the boat-guts (sorry, but boat is so much easier to type than zucchini), along with two tablespoons of breadcrumbs (panko for me, but any kind would do), a crushed clove of garlic, some fresh thyme I had off my thyme plant, and generous salt and pepper. I squashed this all around until it was evenly mixed. At this point, I checked on the boats, and flipped them. They were nicely browned on one side. Going back to the stuffing, I formed it into four flattish sausages, and set them aside. A few minutes later, the boats were nicely limp, so I took them out of the pan, and added the sausages. I pan fried them for about five minutes on each side, until they were cooked through. Then I plopped them into the boat hollows, judging to see which hollow matched which sausage best. Then I transferred the lot of them to my fish grill.

Step 3: Up in My Grill


When the stuffed boats were together, I put them onto my fish grill, and topped them with grated cheese. I had white cheddar, but parmesan or gruyere would be grand as well. Even regular 7/11 pizza cheese would do in a pinch. Then I fired them under the grill for about 5 minutes (while I queued up the next episode of Lost on my computer), and served them up for dinner with some crusty bread. This makes a very light dinner, so I recommend some sort of side - salad, baked potatoes, rice....as you like.

As for the rest of the zucchini, since my pan was already dirty, and I had already sliced them up, I popped the slices into the frying pan with some sesame oil, salt, and Korean chili powder. One strategy I try to employ to cut down on my time in the kitchen is to always try to think of two dishes I can make out of one prep session. Prep once; eat twice, and all of that. When they were limp, I put them into a plastic container for the next day's dinner.

Two zucchinis down; two to go.

Eggplant, Aubergine, Ca Tim, Nasu....

I love eggplants so much, I know how to ask for them in four languages. One of my great theories of language acquisition is that you only ever bother to learn how to say the things you're really, really motivated to get. That's why I can order in flawless Japanese at the Starbucks, but any other situation leaves me hopelessly frozen. My friend Evan is an example of the flip-side of this rule - he knows how to make requests for things he really, really wants to avoid, and thus knows how to say "no onions" four different ways in Korean, which I think is a bit of a life accomplishment.

I love eggplants cooked almost all ways, but one of my favourite uses for eggplant is baba ghanouj. I could eat whole tubs of the stuff back in Canada where it was dangerously located in the dip aisle of most major grocery stores.

Now, I probably wouldn't have developed such a keen interest in cooking if I hadn't shipped myself halfway across the earth, away from everything I had grown up with, and away from the convenience foods available in the average North American supermarket.
Suddenly, our first Christmas in Korea, we realized that eggnog would be completely unavailable to us. Eggnog! The bright red 1 litre cartons, appearing on shelves around November first, were a seasonal harbinger, getting us through November with hints of nutmeg and custard and the holiday festivities to come. What would we do without eggnog? Christmas simply wouldn't be Christmas without it.

Somewhere in the back of my mind niggled a thought. Was it possible...to make eggnog? Like, from scratch? Surely eggnog must predate milk in cartons? A quick Google search netted me this recipe, which seemed to involve an impossible amount of alcohol, making it just the thing for our first Christmas away from home. I make it every year now, at Christmas, and occasionally baffle and amaze other Canadians that it can be made from scratch. (People from other countries are usually baffled and amazed at its utter existence - who drinks raw eggs and milk for fun?)

Where am I going with this, you ask? Well, eventually it occurred to me that you could make, like, from scratch, all sorts of things that I used to buy already made from grocery stores. Like salad dressing, eggnog, guacamole, chip dip, mayonnaise, and...baba ghanouj.

There are lots of recipes on the net, but I rarely bother following one. I roast some Japanese eggplants - I usually char about 5 of them under my fish grill until the skins blister. Then I let them cool, and squash them up. Next I add a judicious squeeze of lemon juice, a glug of olive oil, salt and fresh crushed garlic to taste. If I have some on hand, I add about two tsp of sesame paste, but if I don't have it, I don't sweat it. Spread on bread, it's heavenly. I mentioned this method to some of my Japanese co-workers and they were intrigued. The next time I have some eggplants kicking around, I'm going to make some and bring it in for them, and see how they like it. Maybe I can start a baba ghanouj craze and eventually be able to buy it in the grocery store again!

Asparagus Green Bean Kinpira

Yet another Harumi creation!

Actually, this sort of recipe is pretty flexible once you know the method. A kinpira is a mix of vegetables sliced thinly, and pan fried with a bit of oil, seasonings, and chili powder for a kick.

Anything can be kinpira-ed I guess, but a traditional kinpira uses burdock root, carrot, or sometimes vegetable peels, like daikon or broccoli peel. I posted about making a more traditional kinpira a while back, but now that summer's hit, and I have a wide variety of vegetables to cook from, I'll be kinpira-ing more creatively.

It seems like every neighborhood in suburban Japan has a little unmanned farmstand where the community garden's bounty is stacked every day. It runs on the honour system, and bags of whatever's fresh are left out next to a locked coin box. Take what you like, and leave 100 yen or so. The other evening, bags of runner beans were left on ours, so I picked them up to go with the asparagus Peter had brought back from Ofuna market.

Harumi seems to enjoy fusing western and Japanese ingredients, so her kinpira recipe calls for olive oil and soy sauce as the seasoning. First, you blanch 250 g asparagus and 200 g green beans. Drain them, and heat some olive oil in a large fry pan, maybe two tbsp or so. Lightly fry the drained vegetables, adding 3 tbsp of good quality soy sauce. Harumi calls for a sliced fresh red chili to be added, but darned if I know where she's buying fresh red chilis in Japan, I've never seen them anywhere, even at the posh department stores in Tokyo. I added a tsp of gochugaru (Korean chili powder) since I had it on hand.

This is great served hot or cold, as a salad.