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.

Somen Salad

Sorry I haven't posted in a week, all, it's been a crazy week for me! Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I wanted to try a few more recipes from Harumi Kurihara's Japanese Cooking, and "Somen Salad" was next on my list.

Somen is a type of thin wheat noodle, usually served cold in the summer. This is a decidedly non-traditional Japanese recipe, though, as it calls for canned tuna and mayonnaise. It takes only a few minutes to make up, and is a great twist on cold pasta salad.


The recipe calls for 100g of dry somen (they come helpfully bundled in 100g bunches in Japan - a bunch of this size likely to be about as thick as your two thumbs together). If you don't have somen handy, angel-hair pasta would make a good substitute. Cook it as you would regular pasta, until it's al dente, then drain and rinse in cold water.

While the pasta is cooking, thinly slice some cucumbers. If you're cooking along in Canada, an English cucumber is your best bet. Japanese cucumbers are thinner and smaller than most cucumbers you'll see there. A lovely tip I learned from my Japanese teacher is that you can lessen the bitterness of cucumber peel by rubbing the outside briefly with a bit of salt, and then rinsing it. I've seen this tip repeated in almost every Japanese cookbook I've read, so this must be as common here as peeling cucumbers is in Canada. You want about a half a smallish English cucumber, sliced thinly and cut into half-moons. If you like a crunchier cucumber, salt the slices with a tsp of salt, and set them aside to drain for five minutes or so. When they've shriveled a bit, rinse them, and squeeze out the extra water.

The recipe also calls for 50 g of thinly sliced onion. If you have red onion hanging around, this would be great. I didn't, so I used another tip from the book, and soaked my onion in cold water for 10 minutes to remove the sharpness. It worked really well - I'd never heard that tip before! Cool beans.

Add everything together in a mixing bowl, along with about half a tin of drained tuna, 4 tbsp of mayonnaise (Kewpie brand , if you can get it - once you go Kewpie, you can never go back), and some freshly ground black pepper. Toss, and chill.

Green Beans, a couple of ways.

People who know me well know I'm hardly a vegetarian, but lately I've been taking a hard look at the way I've been eating and I've concluded that in the case of meat, less is more. First; it's expensive, and grad school's not going to pay for itself. Reducing the amount of meat I have to buy is just another way for me to save up. Second; I've been on a bit of a green kick, considering my country is melting at the top. That sort of thing worries me, and the raising of livestock for consumption is a major contributor to greenhouse gases. So I can add meat-reduction to my list of life changes, along with switching to a bicycle; taking public transit; and using reusable containers for my meals. I'm lucky to currently live in a country that makes these lifestyle changes a bit easier.

The New York Times has a great article on ways to help reduce meat consumption. Number four on its list of ways to eat less meat is, "Buy More Vegetables and Learn How To Cook them". One of the things I've enjoyed about learning to cook in Japan is how vegetables are treated as dishes unto themselves, and not merely something to be boiled and added to the plate at the last minute. (Although, to be fair, as I can hear my mother screaming at the computer in Canada, when I was growing up, especially in the summer, there were always at least two or three side salads on the table; and we always had home-made pickles in the winter.)

Last month, I posted on the sorts of side dishes I make weekly. Because we eat bento boxes for lunch, and a fairly light dinner late at night, it really helps for me to have several salads and cold cooked vegetables in the fridge, ready to go with a bit of rice and some sort of soup or light meat dish. Peter and I now routinely split one chicken breast or thigh between us, and I can stretch 250 g of beef or pork into dinner and lunch for two, just by making sure there are lots of different kinds of veggie dishes on the side. Of course, it helps that in Japan, it already comes incredibly thinly sliced. Another trick I use is to use meat as a sort of condiment - like adding a bit of bacon or ground meat as a topping. People who don't like vegetables, in my opinion, just haven't been adding enough fat and carbs to them!

All of this is an incredibly long justification for a couple of recipes that are so delicious, they really need no justification at all. Both of them feature green beans, which I hated for so long, mainly associating them with the frozen stubby cut ones that so many people in Canada grew up on. Fresh green beans are expensive (anywhere) most of the time, but they seem to be coming into season here in Japan, so I'll be snapping them up while I can. If you have fresh green beans, by all means, use them, but I think frozen whole beans will work just as well.

The first recipe, I invented on the fly while living in Hanoi - although I'm sure similar printed ones exist somewhere. Our local street vegetable lady had a pile of fresh snake beans one day, and knowing how Peter loves them, I picked them up. I cut them into short lengths, and dressed them up. Apologies, as I'm not a professional recipe writer, but this is how it goes...


Take a largeish bunch of green beans - enough to feed two people. Blanch them in boiling water, and then shock them in cold water to help the green colour set. Drain, and put them aside to cool. While they're cooling, in a frypan, fry one or two slices of bacon, cut into thin strips. The better quality the bacon, well...the better. If you're going to eat less meat, you had might as well make it good meat. Once it has rendered a bit of fat, add a crushed clove of garlic, and a healthy pinch of salt and fresh-ground pepper. Stir it around a bit, and add good sherry vinegar, dijon mustard, and sugar to the pan, using the vinegar to pick up any of the bacon that has stuck to the pan. You want to add them in a 1 tbsp:1tsp:1tsp ratio, depending on how many beans you've decided to cook - I usually multiply it by the number of people who will be served. Then, when the sugar has dissolved and the vinegar is frothing, add a very healthy glug of olive oil to the pan. Take the pan off the heat, and toss the green beans. If you want to make a very simple lunch out of this, serve it with some french bread and shavings of parmesan; you won't be disappointed. This keeps in the fridge for a day or so, but it never lasts very long in mine. The green colour will fade somewhat in the dressing, so if you want the bright green look, make it the day you want to serve.

The second recipe I found over at - Just Bento! - for green beans with carrot and ginger.
I'm always happy with the recipes there, and this one was no exception. The green beans are blanched and chilled, just like in the first recipe, but then are dressed with a quarter carrot, julienned and lightly simmered with ginger, mirin, and soy sauce. She's a much better recipe writer than I am, so I'll let you follow her clear directions through the link. A note on mirin if you're following in Canada - mirin is sweet cooking wine, and is an integral ingredient in Japanese cooking. I couldn't imagine my kitchen without it now. It should be available in any Asian food market, or even major supermarkets in bigger cities. If you don't have access to it, you can use honey thinned with water, or just flavour with a smaller portion if sugar. Mirin adds a hint of sweetness that balances out the saltiness of soy sauce.

Just Bento also has a recipe for Asparagus in Spicy Miso Sauce, which you can also see pictured in the back at the top of this post. It calls for both miso and gochujang, ingredients that not many of you probably have at home. If you do, however, I can strongly recommend it - and much easier to make than a hollandaise sauce!

Kimchi Bokkumbap

Kimchi and pork together are one of life's great flavour marriages. There's nothing more delicious, especially after a long day of hiking, than a big plate of Dubu Kimchi (tofu topped with sauteed pork and kimchi). Except possibly a slab of samgyeobsal (pork belly) grilling on a slanted plate with the kimchi cooking in the pooled pork fat below.

I didn't have the time or inclination to make either of those dishes this weekend, so I had to settle for my runner-up favourite - kimchi fried rice. A staple of lunch restaurants and food courts in Korea, it's traditionally made with Spam; I prefer to use bacon. It's great for using leftover bits of rice in the fridge, which is what I did at the end of this week when I was cobbling together the scraps of the fridge to fill in our bento boxes. A warning - if you've never tried kimchi before, the smell is powerful. I apologized profusely for the smell to my co-worker, but as a kimchi fan, she said it only made her hungry.

The method is simple; in a hot pan, saute around a 1/3 cup sliced kimchi in sesame oil. When it begins to lose a bit of its violent red colour, and becomes a little limp, add a few strips of thinly sliced bacon. Continue sauteeing on low heat until the bacon is browned, then add a cup or so of cooked rice. Conventional wisdom requires the rice to be cold for good frying results, but to be honest, I find short grain koshihikari rice sticks in hard clumps when it's cold, and is almost impossible to break up in the pan. If my rice is cold, I blast it in the microwave first. Continue frying until the rice has soaked up all the kimchi juice and bacon fat it can, and then remove to a hot plate. In Korea, it's often served sizzling on a hot cast-iron plate. I like to garnish it with some toasted sesame seeds and strips of nori when I can. The gilding on the lily is to add a fried egg to the top - if the yolk is still runny, you can let it ooze over the rice as a decadent sauce.