Yakitori Izakaya

A final post before I take off to Hanoi for a couple of weeks for some sightseeing and serious eating.

Peter's parents arrived this week to join us for our holiday this year, so our first trip was to Tokyo, of course! Our first dinner, however, had to be in Fujisawa, at our favourite yakitori restaurant, Sui Sui.

Yakitori, simply, is chicken on a stick. Traditional yakitori places are easily found near train stations everywhere by looking for their trademark haze of chicken grease smoke. They serve up all parts of the chicken, from wings, to hearts, to bits of chicken cartilege, and cold draft beer to weary salarymen on their way home. The chicken sticks are grilled over hot charcoal, which gives them a smoky, fatty taste that goes perfect with beer.

Sui Sui, however, is a more of an izakaya-style bar which serves not only chicken on a stick, but a wide array of other snacks as well. When we arrived, we ordered a range of things for John and Wendy to enjoy.

When we sat down, the first thing up was an unordered dish - the house serves one automatically, as a kind of table charge, in case you weren't planning on eating much. This is annoying to a lot of foreigners, but at Sui Sui, it's always tasty, and since we don't have to tip, I don't mind it at all. This was some soy braised chicken tossed with onions, peppers, and mizuna leaf. I've got to figure out how to make this one at home.



Next, a traditional summer snack - edamame, or soy bean pods, boiled in salt water. Just the thing with cold beer! We also tried some pork belly with kimchi - I'm on the record as say that pork and kimchi are one of the world's finest flavour combinations, along with tomato and basil, and peanut butter and chocolate.


A more traditional take is chicken thigh and negi - a kind of Japanese leek, grilled simply with salt. Fantastic!

Not-so-traditional potato wedges - fried and then drenched in garlic butter. Don't knock it, 'til you've tried it! It's a good thing we spent the whole day walking, though.


A little more crazy - mochi (pounded sticky rice balls) wrapped in bacon, brushed with soy and mirin, topped with cheese and black pepper, and grilled. Un-%^&*ing-believably good.


Finally, a favourite of many foreigners in Japan - tsukune - chicken and green onion meatballs, grilled with more soy and mirin. They also do a ponzu citron sauce as well, which we always forget to order.

This is one of my favourite places to go and have a quick drink and a bite to eat. They also have a selection of awamori - Okinawan rice spirits, which John swore tasted like the potato moonshine he used to make in P.E.I. Wendy was happy with her ponzu and ume wine, and as for me, two cold Ebisu drafts were all I needed to rehydrate. A perfect night!

Pork and Myoga Salad

Like a lot of people living in the greater Kanto area, I face an hour commute on the train most days. When my train pulls in at my station each night at 10 pm, rather than walking alone down a quiet platform, I join hordes of shuffling suited salarymen and women on their way home. It sometimes takes as long as five minutes to get off the platform and out through the gates, especially if the throng, heads bent over mobile phones as they resignedly send their ETA to family members, gets thwarted by the odd Tokyo-bound passenger locking up a gate coming onto the platform. It's Japan, so no one grumbles - we just pull our bags to the side and pause our shuffle long enough for the straggler to crowd-surf his way to the train.

After being spit out of the gate, I follow the crowd past the bicycle lot and down the road. I can't bear to take a left turn into the 7/11 like so many others, because the thought of konbini egg-salad sandwich or floppy chicken karaage leaves me cold. When I finally get in the door, I'm hungry, but a heavy meal is out of the question. That's when a recipe like this saves the day - it's light; it's healthy; and it keeps well in the fridge to make up the next day's lunch. If I'm feeling like something more substantial, I have it with a bowl of steamed rice.

I found this recipe in the Japan forum at eGullet.org, which has been an invaluable resource to me as I've learned how to cook Japanese food. First, you need about 200 g of lean pork - I take thinly sliced Japanese pork and boil it quickly, which cooks it without any added fat. Really, though, any cooked pork would do - leftover grilled pork loin or chops would be fine, I think. Then, I thinly slice three Japanese cucumbers, which is about the equivalent of one English cucumber. To this, I add three shredded myoga bulbs, which are a sort of edible bulb of a ginger plant. It doesn't actually taste like ginger, though - more like a shallot or sweet red onion, either of which would make a lovely substitution. Three largeish shallots or half a smallish red onion would do. Then, for a dressing, mix 100 ml each of good quality soy sauce, mirin, and rice vinegar. The final touch is to add wasabi paste, which adds a lovely sharpness to the salad - add it to taste. There isn't any oil in this recipe, but I don't miss it in the dressing, because the salty soy, the sweet mirin, and the sharp wasabi all work together to make it well-balanced and satisfying.

This time of year, having a cool bowl of tangy salad - along with a cold Kirin beer - is just the way to relax after a sweaty and stressful commute.

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.

Ginger Eggplants

Eggplant, as you know, is one of my favourite vegetables. I love the way it slumps into velvety softness when you cook it properly. In Vietnam there was a restaurant that made eggplant stir-fried with garlic and honey that was breathtaking in its simplicity. Each piece was infused with garlicky oil, and was meltingly silky. I have always been frustrated in attempts to recreate this texture in my own kitchen, ending up with tough chunks of eggplant that burned in the wok, despite repeated lowering of the temperature, additions of more oil, tears, and desperate entreaties. Roasting an eggplant in an oven for a long time will eventually yield the texture that I'm looking for, but I'm still without an oven.

So when the summer's first eggplants appeared on our local vegetable stand this week, I turned to my copy of "Washoku" for guidance. The author gives several eggplant recipes, taking seasonality to a new level by calling for eggplants from different parts of summer. I chose a recipe for eggplants cooked with ginger, hoping to recapture some of the Hanoi magic.

I wasn't disappointed, as the recipe yielded a pile of sweetly tender eggplants with the exact right balance of sweet heat from the ginger and briny salt from the dashi. I made them one night after work, and left them in the fridge overnight to be served with sold somen noodles for the following evening's dinner. It was a great way to beat the heat.

I cleaned and scored the skins on five small Japanese eggplants. I'm sure you could use the fatter, bigger eggplants, if they were cut down into sixths. Then, I heated a teaspoon of oil in a frypan. I seared them, skin side down, for about a minute; then flipped them, and added 1 tsp of sake, 1/3 cup of dashi (made from a powdered mix), 1 tsp of sugar, and the peels from an inch stub of peeled ginger. I then covered and cooked them for another three minutes, until the sauce had reduced by half. After picking out the ginger peels, I thinly diced my peeled ginger and added that. The recipe actually calls for grated ginger juice, but since I keep forgetting to pick up a ginger grater every time I'm at the dollar store, I just chopped it up finely. I also added a small slosh of soy sauce and mirin, just to adjust the taste. According to the recipe, it's important to let the eggplants cool in the pan; covered; to allow the flavours to mingle and concentrate. Like everything I make from this book, they turned out perfectly. They can be garnished with white poppy seeds for contrast, but since my ginger chunks were still visible, I thought they provided colour contrast enough.

They had exactly the right texture; soft and yielding to the touch, and I was thrilled to have reached this texture without ridiculous amounts of oil. I'd like to try a Mediterranean spin on this dish using garlic and oregano as seasonings and chicken stock as the braising liquid. The daily piles of eggplants at the mujin show no time of stopping soon, so I'll have lots of raw materials on which to experiment.

Galbi Salad

One of our favourite things to do when it was hot in Korea was to hit up an outdoor galbi (grilled meat) place - the best of which were to be found on the infamous "meat street" in Ilsan, where my friends Dave and Jo live.

Meat street is, in the words of my friend Aaron - "like RibFest all the time" - translated it means that if what you want to eat is meat; meat street is the place you must go. Near to the outdoor shopping plaza called La Festa, this street is lined up and down with barbecue houses selling various pieces of pork and beef, to be grilled up by you and your friends, seated around a metal table with a hot grill in the middle. The best places use real charcoal in their grills, and offer a wide variety of panchan to go along with the meat. At the end of the meal, you invariably need to shower to remove the fine coat of pork grease that seems to hang in the air, penetrating your hair, your clothes, and your soul.

The whole meal is a steal, as you need only pay for your meat (which comes in 200g orders), beer, and rice. All side dishes are complimentary, and are refilled at your request. If you're a foreigner, they especially love to refill your kimchi plate if you at all show any love for it. We rarely spent more than $12 a head to fill up on meat, rice, soup, and enough soju to cover the table with a forest of green bottles.

Each of my friends had their own grilled meat quirks. Dave always wanted to stay a little longer and get another bottle of soju, as "it's cheaper here than at the bar..". Jo was a creamy salad aficionado, and knew all the places with the best variety of panchan, since she didn't like meat so much. Peter always wanted to see if anyone will go in for the beef, even though it cost double the pork. Evan always grumbled that we always go out for galbi, and why do we never go for ddalk galbi? Corey liked to cook the slivers of garlic in the tops of the grilling mushrooms, and Dan always tried to beg the staff to bring the rice out at the beginning of the meal, instead of at the end, as traditional. And me? I liked to deconstruct the panchan - like, how exactly do they make this? My favourite panchan is what we like to call "galbi salad" - if it has a Korean name, I'm sure I don't know it. But if you're looking for something that goes really well with barbecued meat, this is the ticket.

Clean and tear one head of red leaf lettuce. To this, add several green onions, shredded or chopped thinly. For the dressing, combine 1 tbsp each of sugar, roasted sesame seeds, Korean chili powder, and white sugar. Mix together with 2 tsp. of soy sauce, 3 tbsp of rice vinegar and 4 tbsp. of sesame oil. Shake vigorously, and toss it together with the salad. Spicy, sweet and crisp, this goes incredibly well with barbecued pork chops or pork belly.