sweet strawberries Batman, a salad!

Sweet strawberry spinach salad yin-yang-ed with balsamic vinaigrette chicken scaloppini

The yin-yang effect - the sweetness and color of the red strawberries will contrast delightfully with the tangy, deep-maroon colored balsamic.

Let’s marinate our chicken, and then make the salad. To rightfully give it the scaloppini tag, we’ll need to flatten the breasts out a bit. Sandwich the breasts between sheets of wax paper or plastic wrap and lightly pound them down with a mallet, the goal being to get an equal thickness throughout. Once that’s done, season your scaloppini with salt and pepper and set in a tray or bowl. Pour enough balsamic vinegar to nicely cover (3-4 tablespoons should do it). Add a drizzle of olive oil. If you have it, sprinkle some fresh tarragon or sage leaves on top. I didn't at the time so there's none here in mine. Mix lightly and put away in the fridge.

Get some nice ripe strawberries (often smaller ones are sweeter, don’t be fooled) and slice them up finely. Sprinkle a bit of salt on them, and put aside in a small bowl. Wash your spinach thoroughly, and either use  whole leaves (my preference, if the leaves are small) or cut them into large pieces. Back to the bowl and add in either a bit of white wine or (if you’re avoiding alcohol) some white wine vinegar. Just a small bit, and then stir together gently. Now, drizzle some olive oil on your spinach leaves and toss. A pinch of sea salt adds a great crunch and taste. Add half of your strawberry mix and toss again gently. I recommend waiting until serving to put the other half of your strawberry mixture up on top to give the salad its beautiful color.

They've been marinating for long enough by now, so whip out your breasts like it's half-time at the Superbowl. Get a frying pan hot but don’t put in any oil – there’s enough of that already in the marinade. Shake off excess juices before putting it in the pan. There should be a sizzle! At this point, turn the heat down to medium / medium-low so that our thinned chicken doesn’t dry out. The key here is to not overcook the chicken. The cooking time is very short because of the thinness. When color comes half-way up the side of the chicken, turn them over. A good thing to keep in mind is that the chicken will continue cooking in its own heat even after you take it off the pan, so it’ll be done before you know it.

When plating, I tried to showcase the different dishes as individuals rather than combining them. Simple, light, and totally delicious - try this one out!

off days - not to be confused with days off

what is that mess?

Believe me I have my share of off days. Shrimp, bacon, mushrooms with kale and a glass of grape juice might not look pretty, but leftovers and exhaustion can force you to be creative. At least that's the idea. Sometimes even when you love cooking you just don’t feel like doing it. Long day at work, the whole story - you’ve heard it, you know it. But you can’t give in to the Big Macs of the world. Cooking isn’t just good for your body, it’s important to make your own things - to have control over what you’re eating and not to give in to fast food alternatives. It’s satisfying to not be reliant on some teenager sitting over an at-best-weekly-oil-changed fryer. Even if the stuff that you make does come out a little…unorthodox, sometimes.

We all need a few ideas for super-quick things to make when we've waiting too long and we're already hungry. I'll continue to post my impressions on quick and dirty meals here on the blog; for now take a look at rmcrayne's great article on HubPages, containing ideas for super fast and super simple meals.

handmade pasta

handmade pasta

It’s easy to buy pasta. So many varieties, rather inexpensive, and it keeps near indefinitely. Making pasta by hand is not something that crosses everyones’ mind when planning dinner. Even so it’s a basic kitchen skill, only needs dos ingredients, and is satisfying to make from scratch. So let’s get to it!

The general idea seems to be about 100 grams of flour to 1 egg, which makes just about a 1 person serving. So if you have 3 people, 300 grams of flour and 3 eggs is easy as math!

Sift the flour into a bowl (or pour it into a bowl and cheat-sift after with a whisk). Make a well in the middle of your flour and crack your egg(s) in there. Using either a fork or a whisk, mix the egg up and slowly start pulling the flour together from the sides. There are a lot of people that do this right on their work surface with the flour well, but it can turn into a mess real quick if the wall of flour surrounding the egg gets messed up, so hey I dig the bowl approach.

When you get all the flour mixed in into a ball, you’ll notice it doesn’t come together very nicely. It’s flaky and hard. So to make nice, smooth pasta, the idea is to fold the dough on itself and flatten it down a number of times. There’s a couple of ways of doing this. If you are into pasta all the time, a pasta machine of some kind might work for you. But if you only want to do this occasionally, just use a rolling pin. Roll it out as best you can (as thin as you can) then fold it in half, half again, and repeat. Do that 5 or 7 times until it’s very smooth, the last time, to get it very thin, follow this trick:

Roll the ball out roughly into a circle, then roll the dough around your rolling pin. With the dough rolled around the pin, rock it back and forth while pulling the dough out from the center towards the outsides of the rolling pin. You can get it really thin this way. Lastly, you have to cut the dough. Nothing fancy required since you can just use a knife. Take a look:

ichigo daifuku

it's not butter, but a traditional candy served with matcha

Today I attended a class in Japanese confectionery instructed by Mr. Suzuki of Shibayama Japanese Confectioneries in the city of Takamatsu. It was hosted in the commercial kitchen of their shop. The theme of the day was Ichigo Daikufu, which is an excellent dessert featuring fresh strawberries. Traditional Japanese cooking, including confectionery, cannot rely on ovens, and is mostly created in a pot over fire or with steam in specially made appliances. The confections at Shibayama are all handmade, focusing on seasonal flavors and traditional recipes.

Ichigo Daifuku (ichigo meaning strawberry, and daifuku meaning good fortune or “big luck” literally) is made by first encasing a whole ripe strawberry in anko red bean paste. This is then wrapped inside of a soft layer of dough made with mochi rice flour (a highly glutinous rice), water, sugar, and egg white whipped stiff. The wrapping is all done by hand and since the dough is extremely sticky, it’s very difficult to get the perfectly shaped balls that the pros produce.

strawberries, anko, and mochiko flour

The anko we used is only one of a variety of sweetened bean pastes that can be found in Japan. Shiroan for example, a white velvety variety, is made from lima beans. It may be strange to some palettes to think of mashed beans as dessert food, but sweetened beans can be found in many places all around Asia. 

Thinking about it though, even pork and beans tends to have an amount of sugar in it, so maybe it's not really that strange. Many beans have very neutral flavors and absorb the flavors around them well, so really they can go either direction towards savory or sweet. The beans used in making red anko are azuki (sometimes spelled adzuki) beans, with the largest growing region in Japan up north in Hokkaido.

 

the not-so-perfect result, but delicious!

Trying it out myself, the mostly difficult part was definitely wrapping the mochi dough around the inner core. It has to be done with speed, precision, and a soft touch – as the hot dough begins to cool, it becomes less flexible and harder to pinch together to finish the seam. And if things go wrong, they go wrong very quickly - that mochi rice can stick like hot glue. Suzuki-sensei described it as not pulling, which will tear the dough, but rather pinning it down with one hand and pushing with three fingers while working around the ball. The dough itself is made in a large rounded pot over a flame. First the mochiko flour and water are combined with sugar. Then, the mixture is poured into a large steaming machine and steamed so that the dough becomes super sticky. It is then returned to the pot, where the now heavy, thick mixture.is constantly stirred so as not to burn. The stiffened egg whites are folded in last.

Here are my rather imperfect results, which were none-the-less extremely delicious. I have developed a healthy appreciation for the pros, whose speed and accuracy in producing these perfect treats hides their years of acquired skill.

Me and Suzuki-sensei

Good times with strawberries! Oh as a last note, there is a variety strawberries of strawberries here known as Sanuki Hime - the Sanuki Princess strawberries - and they are excellent. Deep red and deeply sweet, this local berry is a real treasure. Bigger is not always better!

designing from symbols: the yin-yang

The yin-yang is already a symbol derived from life – following the yearly patterns of the sun and moon – and has an obvious balance to it. When we design things, we want to find a kind of balance to the design as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to talk to you about the yin-yang as the Chinese representation of the celestial universe. I needed an easily recognizable symbol that we can talk about, and we’ll be talking about it from a food design perspective.

sweet strawberry salad with balsamic scaloppini

When I start talking about food, there are two distinctions here: balance in appearance, and balance in flavor. Flavor has all the nuances of a painter’s palette; it’s just that we see all the colors and tones with our tongue rather than our eyes. The methods of design are also similar: choosing colors that harmonize as well as colors that contrast is what will intrigue us and keep us interested.

It’s also a simple way of working with meals – choosing dishes in pairs - with each complementing or contrasting the other. Keeping them separate also takes away the worry of trying to blend complicated flavors. Choosing something with color-contrast as well as flavor-contrast will be sure to get all of your senses going. That’s it for the theory, let’s take a look at some ideas:

Sweet strawberry spinach salad yin-yang-ed with balsamic vinaigrette chicken scaloppini

Salt pork cutlet yin-yang-ed with avocado bean sprout purée and Chinese cabbage

Cucumber cod fillet yin-yang-ed with spicy-hot red bell pepper soup

salty pork with avocado bean sprout purée

Basically, you just want to let yourself be creative; thinking about groups of flavors and colors instead of constraining yourself to the names of vegetables. You might be concerned about melon with lamb, but if you thought about caramelized brown with a deep rich green? You might be afraid to put grapefruit with honeyed chicken, but would it bother you to put sweet with sour? Free your artistic palette as well as your sensory palate. Oh yeah, recipes for the dishes pictured here soon!

tsunami (not food)

Tsunami damage and nuclear holocaust aside, it has been a fairly uneventful week. That has to sound strange, callous, and backwards, but look. Western Japan was not hit as hard as the north: in fact this area is unaffected to such an extent that my only experience of the situation is coming from the news. And even the news has started to trickle out, and now normal programming is resuming on TV, with only intermittent interruptions for announcements and broadcasts from the emperor (THAT was not normal). Regardless of the fact that Fukushima is still not under control. Regardless of the fact that people are waiting in the snow for water and blankets.

I am unable to help them, of course. I understand that on an intellectual level.  Even if volunteers were being accepted, which they are not (since they would also have to be fed and blanketed, as well as directed), my profession does not lend itself to emergency situations. Maybe just like Ryo Ishikawa said, doing your daily job the best you can may be the only thing to do right now. But it doesn’t sit well. Of course I’ve also donated, which you can too. I donated directly to the Japanese Red Cross. But then, I live here, so all I had to do was drop it in a box. For those overseas, online methods are also available. If you are donating, I recommend caution in selecting only well-established organizations like the International Red Cross and Salvation Army. I’m sure you’ve been flooded with links to these sites by now, so I don’t need to post them here, but please, consider donating.

white day double-dip

the hardest part is not eating them

It's White Day here in Japan and for those not in the know that means a second round of Valentines-esque candy and gift giving. Whereas Valentines Day has girls giving their favorite boys (or office women their fascist bosses) chocolates, White Day is the day - held one month later on March 14th - when boys are supposed to give back. This year on Valentines, in defiance of gender and for the betterment of food practices in general, we had celebrated with chocolate cakes and brownies of various kinds given wantonly to both sexes. So for White Day, I decided to go with a more intimate, classic double-dipped strawberry. The white chocolate makes them legit for this holiday, I think, but I'm a little shaky on the rules. At any rate, Valentines and White Day must be a powerful incentive in Japan for buying chocolate - between these two holidays, Japanese chocolate manufacturers make fifty percent of their annual profits. Oh by the way, these were paired with an Asti Spumante, which went over very nicely.

salad in a dress

Most salad dressings are, essentially, acid and oil. I’m only saying ‘most’ to guard myself from the inevitable “don’t you mean vinaigrettes”-s and “my favorite dressing is mayonnaise”-s. Anyway since there are many of both acids and oils, endless arrays of combinations can be made to spice up any old leaf into something unique - without the nasty preservatives and unnecessaries store-bought varieties contain. Consider the following list:

Acids                                         Oils

Lemon juice                              olive oil

Apple vinegar                            grape seed oil

Red wine vinegar                       flax oil

Balsamic vinegar                        sesame oil

Rice vinegar                              chili oil

Grapefruit juice                         avocado oil

This is by no means exhaustive since there are an amazing amount of oils, vinegars, and other acids (think citrus fruit) available these days. Just mix and match - even doing it at random is bound to give you something more interesting than a bottle would. It’s like those old toys where you could rotate the alligator head onto the dog body.

give him the alligator head!

For the ratio, I seem to recall reading a Jamie Oliver book that mentioned 3 to 1 oil to acid, but basically you just want more oil than acid. There’s 2 ways to mix these guys together, since the oil will separate if you just pour them together.

Method 1 – broken vinaigrette style

Pour your acid first into a jar (one that has a lid), then pour in your oil. If you use a clear jar it’s easy to measure the ratio. All you have to do then is shake it like a paint can (or a James Bond-style cocktail?) until it comes together. Use it immediately after shaking and you’re solid.  Wait and it’ll separate again.

Method 2 – emulsified stylin’

Again pour in your acid first. This time, slowly, as slowly as you can, pour a constant thin stream of oil in with one hand while whisking with the other hand. This might take a bit of practice but the result is beautiful – emulsification means the dressing becomes one inseparable liquid. Good cheat is to do this in a blender, then it’s hands-free.

The last thing here, of course, is seasoning. You’ll want some salt: I really recommend sea salt or mineral salt – not baking salt – something tasty. For fancy flavors feel free to chop up herbs (anything – basil, dill, cilantro, fennel, even dried stuff will work), finely mince up vegetables (onions, shallots, bell peppers), or get creative (chervil + sherry wine vinegar + strawberry jam = kitchen magic).

After this, you won’t need to eat the same salad twice. Get creative!