Tomato Mushroom Rice

In the spirit of challenging myself, I bought a Japanese-language cookbook of bento recipes from the fabulous Kinokuniya at Times Square Shinjuku. Since it has lots of helpful photos, I've been able to infer and guesstimate a lot of the kanji I don't know. My food vocabulary is coming along quite well - too bad I still can't have a decent conversation with anyone! The book itself, as far as I can translate, is called "Two-Okazu Bentos", okazu meaning the bits in the bento that aren't the rice. It has a lot of "yoshoku", or fusion-style recipes in it, and in fact is authored by a Chinese writer (which I figured out later, when I bothered to try and read her name).

Actually, I don't have too much trouble thinking up okazu to put in our lunches, since they're usually just leftovers from dinner. Room-temperature rice, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired, and I'm always looking for ways to jazz it up. A recipe for tomato mushroom rice caught my eye, so I decided to try it this week, since I knew I'd have some chicken thighs left over from dinner. If you happen to have some rice leftover, this is a great twist on fried rice.

The method is simple. To serve two people, take about 100 g of chicken - dark meat is best, but whatever you have will do. If it's already cooked, great - if not, cube it fairly small, and brown it in a frying pan, with some chopped onion if you like. Use olive oil, or neutral oil - whatever you like. Then add some sliced mushrooms - I used eringi mushrooms (the mushroom with my name!), but the recipe actually calls for button mushrooms. Maybe four of those, as you like. Then when that's nicely brown and cooked, add about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of cooked rice. Mix it around, then add one good-sized diced tomato. Toss it all about, and add generous amounts of salt and freshly ground black pepper. (Actually, I added a chicken bullion cube in lieu of salt, a trick I learned from Harumi - boy does it ever add great flavour! All that MSG, I guess.) You want to cook it down until the water from the tomato has been absorbed. Then, garnish with something green - I used some green onion, but a sprig of rosemary or thyme would be nice as well. Heated up the next day for lunch, it's incredibly simple and good! It was nice at room-temperature , too, so I consider it a bento success.

Passion fruit

One of the things I miss the most about living in Vietnam (aside from the coffee!) is the mind-boggling array of fruits available fresh everyday. The memory of the fruit ladies cycling around our neighbourhood, selling bags of fresh sweet pineapples or mangosteens by the kilo; heaps of brilliant scarlet rambutans looking like little muppet heads for sale by the side of the road - it haunts me while I stare grimly at a pile of dusty-looking apples selling for more than a dollar a piece here in the supermarket in Japan.

My favourite of them all, the bestest of fruit is the passionfruit. (Some people prefer mangoes, but I always feel that if I wanted to eat a pine tree, I'd go back to Canada) I like it in all forms, but the most simple is as a juice. Koto, a great restaurant near the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, sells a fabulous version mixed with ginger and pineapple juice, that is the bees' knees, and I miss it daily.

Peter saw passionfruits at the market in Ofuna the other day, and sweetly brought one home for me. I scraped it out, and mixed it with a little water, a spoon of sugar, and some ice. If it hadn't been before noon, I might have added a slug of gin, which complements the tangy taste well.

Hanoi, I'm counting the days until I return!

Sesame Chicken Bento

I've been cooking enthusiastically from Harumi Kurihara's, "Harumi's Japanese Cooking", which is a super book, and really accessible if you're cooking in North America. A lot of the recipes appeal heavily to Peter, as well - who is a lot less afraid of trying new things these days, but still likes Western-style dishes best.

His favourite recipe is Steamed Chicken Salad with Sesame Sauce, and I have to admit, I think its gorgeous too. It takes only a few minutes to throw together, and uses the microwave, which is great if it's hot outside. I guess it would keep well in the fridge for lunches the next day, but every time I've made it, we're fighting each other for the last bit on the plate. The only way to keep some aside for a bento is to take it out first and hide it away!

Which I did recently, to make this bento for Peter....


I heated the salad up in the microwave to thicken up the sauce, and spread it over plain white rice. Most of the cheap veggies at the market this week were green, so I had to really think about how I would get any decent colour into this box, but I found some takuan hiding at the back of the fridge, and cut out some carrot flowers to go with my snow pea "leaves". I got a happy "good lunch!" text message from Peter later, which is the highest of honours, really.

The salad itself goes like this:

Take a largish boneless chicken thigh, skin on, and poked with a fork. You want about 250 g of meat. You could use BSCB if you like, but...I'm afraid to say I've completely gone off them myself, they're so flavourless. But anyway, use what you have. Put it in a microwave-proof dish with a piece of crushed ginger, S&P, a drizzle of sesame oil, a splash of sake if you have it, and the tops of some green onions. Put the chicken on the bottom of the bowl, and everything else on top. Cover it and nuke it for about 6 minutes, or until it's cooked. Set it aside to cool while you mix up the sauce. Don't drain it!

Okay, the first time I made the sauce, I didn't have any of the sesame paste called for, so I subbed chunky pb, which Peter raved about. But in Japan, chunky pb ain't cheap, nor does it grow on trees, so now I use the sesame paste instead. Which, while still not cheap, is readily available.

So the sauce goes like this: use the liquid from the bowl with the cooling chicken in it (this is why you want to use thighs!), and add 4 tablespoons of sesame paste; 2 tablespoons of soy sauce; 2 tablespoons of sugar; 2 tsp of rice vinegar; 2 tsp of chili paste (I use Korean gochujang since I always have it on hand and it's pretty mild. If you don't want to bring the spicy, add some miso or more sesame paste - but I think it adds something and isn't really that spicy); 2 tablespoons of sesame seeds (I use black ones for the pretty colour); more chopped green onion, and 2 tsp each of chopped ginger and garlic. It sounds complicated, but it's worth it. And if you've made it once, it goes much easier the next time. Mix it all together and throw in the cooled chicken, shredded. Serve it with chunks of cold cucumber, or green salad. Harumi also mentions that it goes nicely with cold noodles. She also swears that it feeds four as an appetizer, but she's never met my husband.

Soba

I love noodles.

Peter likes ramen noodles, but is less keen on soba (buckwheat noodles), so on days when he's not around, I like to indulge.

I had everything on hand for a soba fix thanks to my lovely co-worker Akiko. The other week, when I was dealing with my giant daikon, I made some Korean banchan with part of it. I made so much that I brought some in for one of my students, whose family loves spicy things. She had brought me a whole cabbage a week before, and I wanted to return the favour. Since I was bringing in something for her, I couldn't not bring in some for Akiko, who is quite the chef herself. This week, she brought it some soba and tsuyu she had made herself to say thank-you. (How do you say "gift spiral" in Japanese?)

The soba gets boiled up - well, I couldn't quite read the package instructions, so I just tested every few minutes, and it seemed done after around seven or so minutes. I drained it, and ran it under cold water to cool it off. I didn't need it too cool, since it's been so cold and rainy here lately. You serve the noodles separately, coiled for easy chopstick handling, and dip the noodles briefly into the cold tsuyu, before slurping them up quickly, trying not to get it all over your top, if possible. I garnished mine with some grated daikon and green onion, as per Akiko's suggestion. You can buy bottles of tsuyu in the shop, if you like, but here's Akiko's recipe:


Soba Tsuyu (450cc for 4 people)

100 cc of soy sauce (The good stuff-don't skimp here!)
500 cc of water
30 cc of sugar
30 cc of mirin
5 g of konbu
10 g of katsuo bushi (dried bonito flakes)

Boil for 8 minutes on a low heat without a lid. Oishiiii-so!

I had to run out to the shop briefly to get some toothpaste, and couldn't resist picking up these inari sushi as well - something else Peter doesn't particularly care for, but I love. They're made from tofu skin that has been simmered in soy sauce and mirin, then stuffed with sushi rice. I hear they're pretty delicious home-made, but it's the sort of thing that you have to make a lot of in one go, I think, and then I'd be stuck eating them all myself!

Hijiki and Carrot Salad

Since I had pledged to try a new vegetable each week, to familiarize myself with Japanese produce, I knew eventually I'd want to try some sea vegetables. While wandering through the fish section last week at the supermarket, I found packages of fresh hijiki, and decided to have a go at carrot and hijiki salad. I found the recipe for this in Washoku, and was interested in it, as the author mentions it keeps well for bentos. In fact, she said it would keep happily for 5 days in the refrigerator, which is just the sort of side dish I need when I drag myself out of bed every morning, and start scrounging to fill the lunch boxes. (Although recently, I've taken to diagramming the bento-breakdown on our kitchen whiteboard to help jog my memory for side dishes - some smaller leftovers tend to get lost in the back of our fridge and end up in the garbage on Sunday-purge-the-fridge-day).

I made the salad with julienned carrot and fresh hijiki. The recipe calls for dried, reconstituted hijiki, but I'm not sure if that is because the cookbook assumes that fresh hijiki would likely be unavailable for her readers. It's not really a salad, but more of a braise I suppose, as the carrot and hijiki are simmered in dashi, but it looks like a salad, so that's what I'll call it. The vegetables are sauteed briefly with a bit of oil, then sake is added, and sauteed until it evaporates. Then, after adding about 125 ml of dashi, you cook it covered, on a low heat. You cook it until the liquid is almost gone, then add a tablespoon or so of sugar, plus another 125 ml of dashi. That should
be cooked down again, and finally the soy sauce is added, and cooked for another minute or so. It should then be cooled in the pan with the lid on, to allow the flavours to mingle.

When I made this, I hadn't read that final step, and was a little disappointed with the salad - I thought the carrot and hijiki were too separate - and I thought the hijiki really overwhelmed the whole dish. But when I tried it the next day in my bento, I found that the flavours had settled, and it tasted like more than the sum of its parts. It looked so pretty in the bento as well - the orange and black provided a nice colour contrast with the green bean side dishes I had this week. When I mentioned to some of my co-workers I had made this, they were surprised- I guess it's a pretty old-school Japanese side-dish.

Next week, I want to make a few of the side dishes Maki has featured over on just bento - her spicy miso asparagus looks incredible!