bbq sauce (base)

Everyone has their own favorite bbq sauce, but let’s admit it – usually it’s store bought. There’s nothing really wrong with that, and there are definitely some good sauces out there to buy. I didn’t get into the idea of making it from scratch myself until I started living somewhere where it’s virtually impossible to find. I know, I didn’t think that was even possible. Still, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to throw something together quickly in case you run out, or want something fresh and customizable, or a way of giving your burger an original and personal touch? I think it’s worth a try.

Let me start out by acknowledging that everyone has different tastes on this, but what we’ll make is a launching pad – something to build from. I imagine you’ve noticed that with a lot of my stuff, but I like solid basics. If you have some solid basics down, it’s easy to be original and creative by adding this or that to suit your own tastes.

So what are the solid basics when it comes to bbq sauce? Well, for one, it’s based around tomatoes. That’s the main ingredient. Whether you’re using fresh tomatoes, paste, or ketchup (catsup? Anyone?), that’s the body of the flavor. Tomatoes naturally lean towards both sweet and tart flavors, so that’s the next step. For the sweet it’s sugar or honey (unless you’re a dire fan of Sweet-N-Low), and for the tart it’s vinegar.

You can see I’ve already given you a load of options – what kind of vinegar, tomato choices, sweeteners, etc. From there you add in your spices and additional flavors to make the sauce unique. Check the labels of bbq sauces in the store for inspiration if you’re feeling low on creativity. I’ve seen everything from onion powder to coffee to chocolate, and I’m sure there’s a whole lot more recipe secrets out there worthy of lifting an eyebrow at.

The great thing about having a building block to work from is that you can change it to fit with many different dishes. Maybe some rosemary to have it go with that lamb, maybe some red wine, garlic and shallots to fit it with that skirt steak. So, here’s my simple, basic recipe, the base that I like to think you'll soon be putting your own twists to.

simple, quick bbq

●3 Ketchup

●1 Honey heated thin (and not just any honey!)

●1 Vinegar (I blend rice and balsamic here)

●1/4 Mustard (whole-grain here)

●Hot sauce (optional, but not really that optional)

●Black pepper (or another seasoning of your choice, like paprika or onion powder)

●Salt (not cooking salt!)

●Lemon (to taste)

Mix all together and there you go. As for the ratios, I use about a 3 to 1 to 1, with the hot sauce and seasoning to taste. Maybe you're astounded that I don't use garlic? I am a garlic lover, but I don't need it every time. Add it when the menu calls for it. Give it a try!

too-may-toe, too-ma-toe, tomato sauce

Tomato sauce, one of the official members of the haute five since Auguste Escoffier’s interpretations of the mother sauces, is one of those most basic and most necessary to conquer. It is the underlying source of so many beautiful dishes. If you can make a good tomato sauce, you are well on your way towards delicious pastas, pizzas, soups, and myriads more.

If you are still buying your tomato sauce in a jar, this recipe is a must for you. Have you ever tasted that stuff right out of the jar and actually liked it? DIY it and not only can you make it perfectly to your tastes, but perfectly suited to your meals as well. So, that’s what we’re going to do.

Good tomatoes are naturally quite sweet, but leaving them in a can gives them tartness as time progresses. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s something to keep in mind later when we balance the flavors. First of all - and this should be obvious – a tomato sauce can only be as good as its tomatoes. That’s why I rather heartily demand that you find Italian canned tomatoes and accept no substitutes. The Italians know how to take care of their tomatoes. Oftentimes, those canned tomatoes are better than what I can get fresh locally, so don’t think badly of them just for being in a can. Also here’s a tip – don’t be fooled by labels advertising “Italian-style” tomatoes, check for the “prodotto in Italia” – make sure that they’re actually tomatoes grown in Italy.

 
The tartness in the canned tomatoes has to be balanced, but with what? You might think of adding sugar as a sweetener to combat the sourness, but I prefer to use that tartness to our advantage rather than counter-attack against it like it’s some kind of bad flavor. Garlic, and the richness that garlic contains, will do most of the work for us here. Frying the garlic in the pan a bit before adding your tomatoes is just what gives a great balance to the sour notes within.

The other trick is using whole tomatoes. If you want a really smooth sauce, feel free to blend and strain it after making, but make it first. I’m convinced this creates a richer something, and the tinny flavor seems less infused in the tomatoes packed this way. You can add anything to this either during or after it has been created to make it fit your style, so give this a shot.

croutons, small cubes of delight

To me croutons are, more than anything else, a way of preventing food waste. Take old, stale bread (not molding, just stale) and cut it up into small pieces to remake it into something that you would want to eat. Throwing away bread is such a shame.

The other thing that’s nice about croutons is that, since they are fully dried, they have a long shelf-life if you store them in an airtight container. The other route you could go with stale bread is to make breadcrumbs, but I’ll cover that some other time. Basically you just throw it in a blender. Like I said though, I'll cover it later.

You can flavor these any way you want, and it’s a great opportunity to use up some of those dry herbs you’ve had lying around since you got them in that gift set five years ago. The method I show here is the baking method, but actually you can successfully make croutons in a frying pan if you don’t have the time to bake them off. If you’re storing them for a long time, however, I prefer baking them because it more evenly dries out all of the moisture from inside.

 
Like I said in the video, croutons are great with soups and salads, but that’s news to exactly zero people out there. Here’re some other ideas that you may not have considered – toppings for chicken bakes, gratins, and casseroles. Bread puddings. Pie toppings (replace the herbs and spices with sugar!). Snacks for dip. The list goes on, and I’m sure you can come up with many more. I’d love to here about your creative ideas for croutons, too, so give this one a try!

the French Dip sandwich - the name tells you it's not foreign

Nothing says, "I wasn't invented in the country that my name says I was invented in" like writing a country's name into the title of a recipe. The history behind the French Dip goes way back to America in 1908. Or maybe it was 1918. It's hard to say, since the exact date is debated. The reason for this shroud of mystery lays in a double-claim over who originally invented the sandwich - Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet, or Philippe The Original. Both restaurants are long-standing establishments in the Los Angeles area.

Not only the restaurant, but the claims themselves also change quite a bit. Some say it was a police officer, while some say a fireman, who came in for a bite. While hastily trying to get this customer a sandwich, according to some, the cook accidentally dropped the sandwich into a pan of meat drippings. Alternatively, the customer asked if the sandwich could be dipped because of a problem with soar gums. Whatever the case, all the stories agree that the result was so popular that patrons were back for more in no time at all. Nowadays, you can find these slightly soggy, beefy wonders just about anywhere, at diners or even at fast food chains.

To my mind, French Dips are the quintessential soup and sandwich combo - simple, hearty, and filling. Despite its name, this is old school American fair. This isn't something I'd want to overdo by getting too complex. Meat, onions, and a nice spread on a French roll is as far as I want to go with this. Don't be fooled by my picture there, those tomatoes and that spring of dill were only needed for the photo-shoot. Not that they were bad, but they were definitely superfluous.

One thing I like to do, as you'll see in the video, is poach the beef in water for a minute or two. This does two things for me. It gets the meat tender and starts it off cooking, while also flavoring the water and making the start of a nice beef stock. The next step is to slowly simmer a bunch of onions in there and complete the soup.

In the video, I used a homemade barbeque sauce that was great, but feel free to use whatever is handy. Simple mustard, as long as it's good mustard, would work fine for the spread too, but when I'm really feeling fancy I like to upper class it a bit by mixing it with some cream cheese and maybe a little oil. You could easily start adding things like garlic or spices, and they would be delicious, but refrain from doing so. We're keeping this one simple, it's a lesson in restraint. Let the meat speak. After all, this sandwich was born with the idea of dipping meat into meat juice.

chicken breast quickies - that didn't come out right

square plates are awesome - like a canvas!

Sautéing or braising chicken breasts in a fry pan has got to be the easiest and quickest way of preparing a meat-based meal, but I’m surprised to find how many people still have trouble with this. I’ve prepared a few pointers to make the process a bit more clear and get you on your way to happier, healthier breast-feeding.

These chicken breasts were reserved for cooking from a previous post on chicken stock. Check that out if you want to learn more about stock creation.

The two biggest concerns around the breast appear to be knowing when it is properly cooked through, and what to do about seasonings and flavors. The second concern starts first. Think of flavors in advance and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble – better than the scenario where the thing’s already in the pan and you realize too late that you didn't plan the next step.

This goes back to the idea of mise en place, the French way of saying don’t have the things you want to use in an inaccessible pantry back cupboard. Keep things you use frequently handy, and get the things you want to cook with out and ready before cooking. It’s a simple idea but it makes things go much more smoothly.

This time around we’re keeping our recipe very simple, but you can work in all kinds of things after getting this down. Of course the vegetables here can be switched out with others of your choice. The lovely thing about what we're doing here with salting the vegetables a bit while cooking is that this will end up making its own sauce, by drawing the vegetable juices out. That just sounds delicious already right? Say it with me now - vegetable juices.

The Procedure:

In the video, I previously had poached these breasts in water to help create a chicken stock base. You can poach in boiling water for about 1 minute if you like, but if you have the time, you might as well turn that water into a chicken stock since you're already off to a good start.

Salt and pepper your breasts – both sides – and rub in bit of oil with maybe an herb. That's plenty right there, but I put it on a plate of sliced onions for some more flavor, since I wanted to cook onions anyway.

Get your frying pan hot on high heat, and then lower to medium heat.
 

over a bed of onion slices for a nice addition

Add your oil, wait a moment for it to get hot as well.

Place in your ingredients starting with the hardest ones, like carrots. You don't have to cook these for so very long, just a minute or two is fine.

Make some room in the middle, and place your chicken in the pan skin-side down – away from yourself in case of oil splashes – and listen for a sizzle (and make sure it’s there). I reiterate - if there is no sizzle, the pan has gotten too cold. If you just leave it on medium the whole time this shouldn't be a problem.
 

Keep on medium and don't walk away from the frying pan too much, chicken doesn't take that long. This is key - do not move the chicken around. One flip is what we want, so leave it and only check to see if there's that golden color on the skin.

When the skin has gotten nice and golden, turn it over. It should only take 2-3 minutes per side, but chicken breasts vary in thickness so that's only a rule of thumb. When the chicken is done, take it out of the pan (or it’ll keep cooking) and put it on a plate to rest. One note, if you cover the pan with a lid like I do towards the end of the video here, the steam will cook the chicken from all around, so it'll stay juicy.
 

There are two methods for confirming that the chicken is cooked through. One is to use a meat thermometer – internal temp should be 74 degrees C or 165 degrees F. The other is to cut open the thickest part and confirm that there’s no pink meat. Once you cook a lot of these, a third option opens up and that’s to check by feel, the spring-back of the chicken when you poke it. By the way, I've noticed the look-and-see method only works for chicken breasts, for other meats it’s better to have a thermometer around.
 

And oh yeah, this is a chicken breast, don’t throw the skin away. That’s the best part! If you’re that worried about the extra calories, well, just don’t be worried. You’ve already gone lean by going chicken, right? Who would want to get rid of that crispy golden deliciousness?

Ingredients from the video

two chicken breasts SKIN ON
1 onion sliced
1 stock broccoli
1 carrot
2 big tomatoes diced
white wine or flavorful liquid (stock etc.)
herbs (thyme and sage here in the vid - you could also use dried if that's all you have, you poor thing)

chicken stock for the soul

If chicken soup is for the soul, then a good chicken stock is the basis of that spiritual healing. Another on the list of things that are a million times better fresh but that most of us rarely find time to make, this is one that is just integral to so many ways of cooking, and it’s great to have on hand. If you want to know where that rich, full flavor that you just can’t quite place is coming from in that expensive restaurant dinner, it’s the stock.

I follow the freezer-pack method, in which you freeze all of your stock in ice cube trays and then store the cubes in freezer bags for later use. I like this because you can use the stock cubes as measurements, and you can throw them right into a hot pan for instant satisfaction. Whatever you do – and you are bound to have heard this by now – don’t buy those bouillon cubes. That’s fools’ gold, a cubed kitchen trap hemorrhaging salt that’s sure to make your lovely dish unpleasant. In fact, when making stock let’s just leave salt out of the equation entirely.

Remember, we’re not making broth, it’s stock. It’s an ingredient, like salt is an ingredient. Since you don’t salt things for taste until the end of the cooking process, you want to avoid upping the salinity of your ingredients, which will only cook down and become more concentrated – hopefully not concentrated-ly salty. 

In the video, I use a couple chicken breasts to flavor the stock, but reserve them for another recipe. You can see that recipe here.

There’s an unavoidable part at the end of making a stock when every home chef (professional chefs having long lost their empathy for ingredients) feels bad about throwing out the used up vegetables. As hard as it is to come to terms with, those onions and carrots simply don’t have anything left to give.

If you’re really thrifty, you could use them in compost, but otherwise bite the what-a-waste bullet and toss them. It may seem like a pity, but the soul of that celery has been transferred to that liquid heaven in your pot.

is there ever a good time to bring up whale meat?

 It’s probably difficult to take an unbiased stance on the topic of hunting whales for whale meat. It is a reality however, that in certain places, like Japan (and where else?), whale has been hunted and eaten for hundreds of years. During the restoration after the war, whale hunters supplied the impoverished population with thousands of tons of whale meat to bolster food stocks.

MacAurthur, as it happens, encouraged this practice – possibly because it was a cheap source of food, and also possibly because excess whale oil was then taken back to the United States and Europe, where it was used in the making of many things from lamp oil to soap. In fact, it became such a main source of food that only a few years after the war, over fifty percent of the meat eaten in Japan was whale meat. It’s since the end of the war that whale meat became a staple of school lunch, and even though it lost its popularity as Japanese consumers were able to afford pricier meats, asking around I’ve noticed most people remember having eaten whale at school growing up.

The loophole - if you want to call it a loophole - that Japanese whalers have operated on since the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986 is a provision that allows countries to catch a certain number of whales for scientific research. The meat from these scientific catches is then distributed for sale and eventually reaches grocery stores and restaurants. Mm, science meat.

 

Because this is a very sensitive topic to a lot of people, I’ve tried my best to remain neutral, but you can probably pick up my bias anyway. For those of you that live under the “don’t fry it until you try it” mantra, I will just say this – I have eaten whale. A sashimi plate of it was pushed upon my nose under the pretext that it was a cut of beef served rare.

Upon eating the first bite, the old man who had invited me to try it burst out uproariously, “It’s whale! Haha!” I protested that he might have considered a method other than deceiving me into eating it, his words: “What are you, Green Peace?”

shinkansen bento – a step up on the ekiben

Eki, in Japanese, means train station. So the eki bento, or ekiben, is the train station bento box. At stations all around the country, quick bento lunches can be bought right on the station platforms before boarding a long train home, and the Shinkansen bullet trains – equipped with flip-down trays and roomier seating - are the best trains on which to put this practice to use.

But, coming back from my trip to Kanagawa and Tokyo - which ended up being predominantly a culinary excursion - I decided to finish my time with an upgraded ekiben, something the station platforms wouldn’t be able to supply.

Like many train stations in Japan’s larger cities, Shin-Yokohama station is connected to a network of shops and a basement-level food court, although the term food court gives the wrong impression. Laid out like the jewelry section in a department store, vendors sell freshly made bentos of all kinds – whether sushi, chili shrimp, or cob salad. 
 
The price is a bit steeper down here, where they charge per hundred gram, but the quality is high. As you can see here, I went with some maguro tuna sushi and an assortment of tasties like marinated squid, hijiki salad, and salmon roe over noodles.

Put together with some Yebisu white silk beer it cost me near 25 bucks, but all in all, this high-speed picnic made the trip back a lot more comfortable.

a sticky situation with honey, jam, and unlimited crackers

On a drive way out to Karuizawa in Nagano prefecture, I noticed the air getting cooler and cooler as we climbed through the mountains. The snow had nearly all melted away off the Karuizawa ski slopes by the time we got there, but the sakura cherry trees were still in full bloom. Having watched the flowers drop off those trees in my more tropical (well, tropical enough to have a few palm trees, anyways) town of residence a full month before, it was refreshing to see. But that wasn’t the main attraction for driving out into the middle of nowhere.

No, Karuizawa, wouldn’t you know it, is a well-known shopping destination. Fueled by the money pouring from a community of wealthy vacationers and retired salary men with a penchant for golf, this sprawling country club and shopping mall serves all the world brands names that you would expect – Burberry, Chloé, Dunhill, The Gap.

But it wasn’t hand-bags and suit jackets I was looking for. Down the streets and beautifully flowered lanes heading away from the mall, Karuizawa opens itself to the specialties of its region – honey, jam-making, and hand-carved wood furniture.

 
The beauty of these shops was the free samples! Bins of crackers lay out, with sample spoons for the testing and trail of every imaginable type of jam or honey. Fig jam, chestnut tree honey, blueberry and rum jelly. Barely avoiding a diabetic overdose, I munched my way through dozens of shops in search of the perfect cracker bite. I found it in a raspberry and red wine jam that became the purchase of the day. Kudos Karuizawa, now I just need some cheese.

Kamakura

Miko priestesses dance at a Kamakura shrine to gagaku music

dango roasting over a grill

Visiting Kamakura, an ancient temple site that has long been a standard omairi locale for the Japanese, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have already been to Todaiji and the Daibutsu, so the famous (although very slightly smaller) giant Buddha in Kamakura is a local next step.

Still, while the temples are in fact quite beautiful, there are so many of them and they are of a similarity such that looking at them one after the other is, well, tiring to say the least. There's only so much walking through gates and admiring of chrysanthemum flowers that anyone can take before their stomach starts grumbling.

sweet sake manju steam buns

Fortunately I happened across a section of town that offered hot food and treats from street-side stalls. Dango, dumplings made from sweet rice flour and skewered before roasting, are a specialty of the region.

I also enjoyed the soft fluffy texture of sake manju – steamed buns made with sake and sweet adzuki bean filling – on a bamboo bench while watching the crowds mill about shopping for trinkets and snacks. The three flavors pictured, from the left, were yomogi, kokutou brown sugar, and mochi rice. Yomogi is a Japanese variety of mugwort, but it's not nearly so bad as that sounds. Think of it as a leafy and faintly flavored kind of an herb. In Japan, it's mostly used as a kind of natural food coloring, although it does impart a nuance of vegetative flavor to the steam bun.
 
I munched on sweets and snacks for a bit longer before deciding that my stomach was telling me it was time for something more substantial.

Lunch led me to sausages. Thick, bratwurst-like sausages with local craft lager from Enoshima. A German experience is not exactly what I was expecting out in a rural and old-school-traditional Japanese town, but it was good nonetheless.

And it had the biggest line in front of its stall. I guess times do change.

mystery meat - but of course!

Quiz time! Here's some mystery meat for you - something I'm guessing not all of you have given a try yet. Or seen sold as food.

Ok ok, here's a hint - what's four-legged, hangs out in the desert, and has one or two humps on its back, varying by region?

If you answered anything other than camel, you were totally wrong! It's totally camel.

double the hump for double the flavor!

I got this in a seal-pack from a friend who claims it's common eating back home. It was heavily salted, but rather palatable. I would say it tastes a lot like kangaroo, but since that may not be very helpful to some of you as a description, I will say it was similar to a fat-free and somewhat coarser lamb shank.

We had it pan fried with a simple stir-fry that utilized the vegetables around the house at the time. By the way, back home for my Uighur friend is a city in the Xinjiang region of China, an area of what used to be the Silk Road. Apparently camels are used not only for packing, but raised as we raise cattle as a source of food.

It was a first for me, and I'll be sure to ask what kinds of recipes camel tends to be used in!

vinegared cucumber cod maki with foam sauce

believe it or not, there is cod in there under the foam sauce

White, firm, and clean tasting, cod has remained one of my very favorite fish. I do have a bias however - it seems that I have a Newfoundland cod fishing heritage on my mother’s side. Donning oil slicks and bundling over stormy waves in the foggy waters of the Grand Banks, some distant relative fought and struggled with these fish in what I imagine was an epic battle that would have put The Perfect Storm to shame.


Meanwhile I get mine down at the fishmongers. Unfortunately the cod I have to work with in Japan is Pacific cod - what they used to fish off the Banks was Atlantic cod. You can’t taste the cold water of the Labrador Current in the Japanese varieties, but it is - for the purposes of cooking - the same fish.

We are making a point of creating two different but balanced flavors. The cucumber is vinegared to give it a refreshing sour tang, and the fish with its foam sauce is an herbaceous and rich companion to it. We want it so that by eating the cucumber it makes you want to eat the fish, and vice-versa. The rice vinegar could be replaced with apple or wine vinegar, but I recommend against balsamic for this recipe because there's too much flavor going on there. Additionally, while the extra step takes some more of your time, soaking the cucumber slices overnight can make a really nice pickle for the wrap.

First off, get some rice going. White is fine but I prefer to throw in some herbs while it's going to flavor it up. The fish: salt – both sides! – of your square-cut fillet and set it aside while you peel your cucumber. Take your peeler and take as thick a slice off the side of the cucumber as you can. Make four of these slices per fillet, and chop up the rest of your cuke in as haphazard a way as you choose. 

George Clooney in The Perfect Storm

Throw these guys into some salted water and add to it about 2 shot glasses (50ml) of vinegar. Let them soak while you make the fish.

Back to our fish. Drain off any juices from the fish that may have collected from your salting. Pat dry. In a fry pan over low heat, add a small amount of not-olive oil (something less flavorful, like grapeseed oil) and add the fish. As it begins to whiten you’ll see a line coming up the side of the fillet. When it gets around halfway, turn the fillets over and add the remaining chopped cucumber.

Just before you feel that it's done, take it off the heat. Don't overcook this one! If you have nice fresh fish, please consider leaving the center soft like you would with a steak. You'll thank yourself that you did. Just after taking it off the heat, evenly sprinkle a small amount of vinegar – I like rice vinegar here as well – to calm the flavors. The heat remaining in the pan will warm the vinegar and brighten its flavors.

You'll also probably want to make a foam sauce - it goes frighteningly well here. I'll talk more about foam sauces in another post. If you don't want to take the time, don't worry - it'll still be excellent without.

Pat dry your cucumber slices. I use a form to shape the rice, but you could use an old soup can or an upside-down cup. Make it into a cylinder and wrap the cucumber slices around it. Put the fish fillet up on top there and drizzle your foam sauce over if you're using it. Or as an option to that you could sprinkle an additional small amount – the goal is not a puckered face, so be sparing – of your vinegar after plating if you like. Simple and elegant.

chorizo sausage - not for desayuno today

X marks the spot?

Sausage often is mistaken solely as a breakfast food – and let’s admit it, it works well with eggs. It doesn’t feel fancy enough for dinner, or quite solid enough for lunch. I decided to see if something couldn’t be done about that.

So the goal was a solid, tasty, fine-looking meal. I didn't quite end up with that, but something interesting came of it.

In Japan, there’re all these different ways to cut up mini sausages for bento box lunches, so I figured that was a good starting point. The octopus cut gives the wiener its eight legs, and I used this to make flowers. As you can see though I only managed four legs because of the meat density difference between mini wieners and chorizo.

Since they were top heavy, I needed something that they could stick in like a mashed potato or a pâté. I decided to go with a purée when I discovered that I was out of potatos.

Because I used spicy chorizo, I went with a fresh apple purée – reminiscent of applesauce - to mellow things down. After all, sausage is pork right? The flavors do go well together.

This wouldn’t be enough on its own, but it could work if accompanied by a starch. I don't think it's perfected, but it was good. A work in progress!

can you think of anything that rhymes with tzatziki?

Lately, after reading a post on Chef John’s excellent blog Food Wishes, I have been hooked on marinating chicken with yogurt. Tzatziki-like concoctions are easy to make and make an amazing marinade and sauce.

Now yes I know, real Greek tzatziki is always served cold, and it’s certainly no marinade. But it’s a foodie buzzword and sounds a lot nicer than “yogurt marinade”, you have to admit.

yogurt-marinated chicken over pesto mashed potatos

Usually tzatziki has garlic, cucumber, some kind of herb (like mint or dill), and a few optional dudes (depending on who you ask) like olive oil, lemon juice, salt/pepper, and even nuts in some areas. It’s generally a dip and served with meat or bread. But we’ll blow it apart today.

There are a lot of regional varieties and different names for similar styles anyway, so it’s fair that we use it for a marinade. And on chicken. And still call it tzatziki. Anything goes when it’s good eating.

●chicken thigh meat, boneless or cut from bone but KEEP the skin 
●yogurt*
●garlic 
●herb (dill, parsley, or sage – let’s leave mint out of it for now)
●lemon juice
●olive oil
●cracked black pepper (no reason to buy pre-crushed anymore)
●cucumbers if you want, or replace them with thinly sliced onions (yeah, changing it up)

*Ah, additional note.  The yogurt used in tzatziki is Greek yogurt, which is a lot thicker.  You can strain thinner yogurts by pouring them into a coffee filter and leaving that over a jar (I also like to plastic wrap the thing) in the fridge overnight to make a similar-to-Greek-yogurt yogurt, but we don’t mind the thinner stuff in this recipe because it’s a marinade. If you want to use thick stuff, add in a bit more lemon juice or olive oil to thin it for marinating.

Take the chicken and cut it into strips about the same size. I usually cut about 3 strips per thigh, but it’s a preference thing. When you get thigh meat, it’s this meat that’s been wrapped around the bone so that it’s all sort of radially attached to the skin. If you roll it up like a cigar it’s easy to cut into even strips.

Season the chicken with salt, both sides. This isn’t an ingredient. Ingredients are things you have to go out and buy. If you don’t have salt in your house there is something seriously wrong in the kitchen. And if I’ve said it before, I’ve said it before: all salt is not made equal. Get a nice, good tasting salt full of minerals. You want to eat minerals, right? Not baking salt. Enough said.

Use about 2-3 tablespoons of yogurt per strip, and put it in a bowl, ziplock bag, or whatever your preference for marinating things is. Smash or crush the garlic (perfectionists, feel free to finely mince) and add that mess. Add a squeeze of lemon (I am pushing that as an official unit of measure), a drizzle of olive oil (bit more if you’re using thick-style yogurt), and throw/crack in your black pepper. Chop up your herb, throw that in, and stir it all up.

Dip each strip into the mix and coat it completely. When all the strips are coated, pile them all together and throw the sliced onions (and/or cucumber) on top. Spread that out and plastic wrap it. I’d leave it in the fridge at least an hour; overnight wouldn’t hurt.

Ok now that’s marinated, ready to go, so get your oven preheating to around 200 C. While that’s happening, get a fry pan and get it hot over medium/medium-high heat. Leaving the onions/cucumbers alone, shake the strips off and throw them on there (by throw I mean place carefully, away from you, skin-side down). There should be a sizzle sound, oh yes.

Keep around medium and go until you’re getting some golden brown type of color on the chicken, then flip to the other side. When you get some color there, take off the heat. Don’t worry, the chicken’s not supposed to be cooked yet. Put your onions and marinade into the bottom of some kind of bakeware (pyrex for me), then lay those strips on top. Pop into that oven for about 7-8 minutes. The rich flavors are going to impress you.

Deliciously tender and serves well with bread, flatbreads, rice, or pasta. How can you lose?

honey, I got you some mustard sauce

Honey mustard is an underused sauce. I almost want to say honey mustard is an underused concept. Think about it, it's too often the sauce relegated to McD's and KFC. Fast-food fare. Pushed to the side next to the McNuggets. That's not the image I have of it. This is a sauce that can be elegant, versatile (again my two favorite words), and amazingly poignant. Ham, chicken, salads dressings - there's lots of uses for this basic recipe mixing a spicy tangy seed (mustard) with a sweet natural sugar (honey).

Honey mustard sauce

Pommery, a serious mustard for serious mustard gourmets

●Whole-grain mustard (Pommery, I love you)

●Yellow mustard (or Dijon, which tastes better but is surely less American)

●Soy sauce (just a drop)

●Coarse ground black pepper (accept no pre-ground!)

●Honey (microwaved until thin)

●Something spicy (I like sambala)

●Sea salt (salt is really too obvious to include as an ingredient but hey)

●Ginger powder

Just combine everything in a bowl. Nothing raw here so you can use it immediately if you like as a dip, spread or topping. Super easy and super quick, and of course you can modify the recipe with your own additions.

A note about Moutarde de Meaux Pommery.  This is a French mustard that's been a Pommery family secret since the 1700s. It's a whole-grain mustard, and I'm confident that it's incomparable to any other whole-grain mustard out there. It has the spicy bite of whole mustard seeds, but simultaneously the soft mellowness of Dijon mustard. The recipe is still guarded closely but the ingredients are all natural products from the Meaux region. Even now it comes in an earthenware jar and the wax seal with a distinctly old-world presence to it. By the way, if you're in America and don't recall having seen this one in the store, that's because it's not distributed in America anymore. Import tariffs to America became too high for the small-batch numbers that Pommery produces. More luck for those living in Canada, where it's still available, or if you're like me, in Japan.

Another thing you can do is use it as a marinade for chicken or meat. I also find it to be a nice salad dressing if you emulsify it with oil. If you want to do that, slowly drizzle oil while beating the mixture with a fork or whisk.

You could also pour it into a frying pan and cook it down into a thick drizzle sauce, which will give it rich flavors from the mustard seed. Brilliant.

rare - less medium rare than it once was?

Many people might agree with me about this already, which makes bringing it up controversially as if I were arguing for its cause sort of a feint, but steaks are best rare to medium rare. This has been a recent realization for a lot of people though, with overblown fears of raw meat poisoning and poor understanding about cook temperatures in general driving people to scorch their steaks. But in a meat where succulence is everything I don’t at all understand why you would want to fry through the core to make a burnt-out chunk of what could have been magical.

garlic steak flavored rice crackers - mystery genius?

I remember as a young kid going to this supposedly fancy steakhouse called The Hindquarter, which my parents had somehow procured a gift certificate for. When I was young the family wasn’t invested heavily into red meat, and honestly speaking steak was a virtual mystery to me, something that I only saw on Swanson Hungry-Man and Applebees commercials.

This steak, which based on my childhood memory - mixed with my current knowledge - I am convinced must have been rump roast, was so blackened and cooked to death that my young pre-teen teeth never were able to bite through it. I remember being profoundly disappointed, since the waiter had gone out of his way to recommend it to me. Steaks were supposed to be expensive because they were incomparably delicious.

It wasn’t until a barbecue at a family friend’s house - Leonard's house - some years later that my image of them was revived. Leonard’s steaks were juicy and medium-rare. He hadn’t used rump either (who tricks a kid into thinking that’s a nice cut?), but skirt steak. He wasn’t so afraid of a lawsuit that he wouldn't dare to leave the center soft and pink. His confident steaks were appalling, revitalizing, and eye-opening for me at the time. That juicy, rich color matched the richness of Swanson's commercials perfectly.

By the way getting that perfect pink is all about temperature control. That and a grill pan. You can do it on a flat pan, but get the grill pan - it’s just more awesome!

salted pork cutlet with avocado mung bean puree

This one should have been up a while ago, but you know, this led to that. Back when I was talking about yin-yanging food together, I mentioned the idea of putting two separate flavors together on the same plate so that they could be joined harmoniously together in the mouth.

This time, I decided to go with an interesting complementary pair - salty and soothing. The pork is slightly over-salted in this recipe, and to compensate for that there is barely any sodium in the rest of the meal. The salt drives you to taste the avocado and mung bean, which is soothing and refreshing to the palate. Mung bean sprouts are naturally filled with a large concentration of water, and blending them up with a tiny bit of oil leads to a smooth paste.

The pork is seasoned and left to marinate in sea salt with no additional flavors, so if you get a good cut of meat it will make a big impact on the end result here. We are showcasing the meat by keeping it simple. After-flavors from the soy sauteed Napa cabbage and the avocado bean sprout puree will then add complexity in the mouth. This is the basic idea behind the yin-yang approach.

I added little piles of Mothia - a favorite Sicilian sea salt of mine - in front of each cutlet so that diners could choose to give it an extra salty punch if they wished. I prefer it with the extra salt but this way I don't have to force it on anyone, and it makes the meal more interactive. If you're worried about sodium, compare this to any soup you may have made with one cube of bullion from the store and I think you'll be quite surprised at what you find. Also note to balance the overall salt concentration of the meal the avocado dip has only the slightest pinch for seasoning.

Tell me what yin-yang flavor ideas you can come up with!

pottery continued - and to be continued

my first attempt here at making a bowl on the wheel

As promised I have to update you on my newest endeavor - Japanese pottery making. Mr. Sano runs a small workshop out in the foothills on the outskirts of Takamatsu, and he kindly agreed to teach me some of his methods.

Since food and plateware share an obviously integral connection, I thought it'd be nice to learn some techniques while thinking about what could be plated on them.

One thing that I always notice about Japanese earthenware like pottery is that it tends to be more natural in shape - rougher and more reliant on it's materials. The potters are clearly not always aiming for that perfect round shape; plates that look like torn sheets of paper and unspun handmade cups with thick one-sided glazes. Mr. Sano's pottery is a prime example of this, pottery that doesn't deny what it is - dirt and clay.

This time around managed to finish up some bowls, sauce dishes and little things but they still need to be glazed. Update and finished pottery after they get fired.

food graffiti on the bottom of a sauce dish

warabi hunting

up in the hills over the Seto Inland Sea - a good place for warabi hunting

This weekend I was out rooting for warabi - edible bracken fern sprouts -  in the mountains above the Seto Inland Sea. You have to pick them while they're young, before the leaves unfurl and open up and they apparently become inedible. They sort of bury themselves under the dried leaves of the previous year's fern fronds, so you have to search them out.
 

warabi growing in the mountains

To prepare warabi for eating, you first boil up a big pot of water. Keep the sprouts in another bowl. When the water boils up, add a little baking soda to it.

Pour the boiling water over the sproutlings and leave them to soak overnight. Wash them again in cool water, and they're ready to go.

You can also then leave them in a mixture of water, soy sauce, mirin, and rice vinegar for a few hours if you want an authentic Japanese flavor to it.

Warabi sprouts are filled with a sticky, okra-ish fluid and might be considered an acquired taste, although the flavor isn't very strong in any particular direction.

In Japanese cooking, warabi generally plays the part of small side dishes served with rice and fish. I'm also planning on coming up with some original dishes for this unique ingredient, but I'll get back to you on that later. For now, good hunting!

sakura roll cake

Over at Morino Café, a cake and coffee house in southern Takamatsu, they're serving up some delicious desserts and seasonal entrées. This being the sakura - cherry blossom - season, I'm seeing pink everywhere, and not just on the trees. Along with delicately patterned wagashi (Japanese confections) like daifuku and manju, cakes and even lattes have been put in pink to celebrate the season. And it's not only locals that catch the flower fever - The Starbucks uptown had sakura-flavored scones and macarons.

front - sakura roll cake, behind - matcha green tea roll cake at Morino Café

The roll cake wasn't nearly as sweet as I had imagined it would be, and this was quite a pleasant surprise. Light flavors in the sponge went very well with just a thin layer of pink whipped cream as a frosting, and they rolled the cake around the same frosting to create the filling, adding strawberries and the ubiquitous red adzuki beans.

Sakura flavoring, which can be bought as an essence, does have a unique flavor. The flavor is nothing like the flavor of cherries, and tastes somewhat like the smell of a flower mixed with lychee berries.


I do plan on talking about roll cakes more, since they are one of those versatile (one of my choice words, that) desserts that can be made easily and with lots of different results, by varying the filling. Roll 'em out!

hanami bento

It’s blooming season for sakura – the Japanese cherry tree. When Japanese people think of cherry trees, they tend to think about blossoms, not berries. These trees do not fruit. For about two weeks out of the year, they blossom fully and beautifully, and then the petals quickly fall off as green leaves sprout and take their place. There is a word that exists to describe this one seasonal moment, when the pinkish-white petals scatter from the trees in swirls through the air – hanafubuki. Read literally the word would mean “flowers blowing like a breath of snow”, and that’s a good idea of the impression that you get by watching these trees. It's a beautiful time of year and a perfect chance to picnic.

for some reason the theme appeared to be cats

In good tradition everyone goes out to picnic under the flowers, with blue plastic mats, near-ridiculous amounts of liquor, and bento boxes full of food. This year the blossoming of the flowers seems to have timed itself up with the haru ichiban – the first warm spring wind of the year. Here’s the bento we had for lunch, made by the diligent and lovely Takako Nakayama. The stacking form of the bento box is a great way to keep food separated and to include a variety of items in your picnic basket. This has really put me in just the right mood for posting on some traditional bento side dishes, as well as picnic items!