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!

I know I am, zaru you?

Recently I found myself hiking through the mountains in the rurals, when I happened across this udon and soba shop. Kind of a strange thing about Japan, but delicious places are often out in the middle of nowhere sitting all by themselves. I went inside to find a narrow hallway of a place already filled with families and a soccer team.

what could be simpler?

This area isn't known for soba - Japanese buckwheat noodles - as well as other areas, so it's somewhat rare to find. I ordered it zaru, which means it comes as is, cooled noodles on a big plate with a pot of tsuyu broth for dipping. Soba tsuyu is basically a thinned dashi with some soy, and then they often give you wasabi to mix in as you like. Yes, I happen to like a lot, thanks for asking.

I know some people are confused by a giant plate of noodles and only noodles. Isn't there supposed to be a sauce or a chicken breast on it or something? But I've come to appreciate the simplicity of it. If the noodles are made well, it's quit delicious. As a lunch, the simple carbohydrates keep slow-burning away until dinner when you're feeling pleasantly hungry again. And hey, if the amazingly culinary Italians like pasta with just a little olive oil on it (and they do), this doesn't seem so strange.

mascarPOne (and caramelized balsamic pear)

Mascarpone is already fantastic on its own, just as it is. Still, having a few simple – yet elegant – recipes for it will make you feel fancier about yourself and raises your overall sexiness. Caramelized balsamic pears with mascarpone on crostini - this is one of those versatile entries that would be equally fit on a picnic, as an appetizer to a meal, or for a light dessert. 

The caramelization of the pears can be aided by sprinkling a handful of sugar over top. Of course you may consider peaches, nectarines, or apricots, but remember before caramelizing that you want to take out as much of the liquid as possible from the fruit. Caramelizing food, as with searing it, is a dry fry technique.

Caramelization, as it happens, is the reaction that occurs as water molecules are drawn out of sucrose through evaporation, and high temperatures are reached within the component sugars. You can caramelize something even if it’s juicy to start with, but you might end up with a syrup. And, since you’ll be burning off the water anyway, the process will be much quicker if you remove the excess liquids before putting it in the pan.

just get some color on that fruit

After drying out your fruit as best you can on paper towels, get your frying pan hot over medium / medium high heat. Place your fruit in the pan and let it cook for a bit, before pouring over your balsamic vinegar. As that begins to bubble away, sprinkle a bit of sugar (brown for sticky fruit!) over the fruit and turn them over.

You can sprinkle a bit more sugar here before turning them back over. They should start to become dark and syrupy. When you see that the sugar has melted and the fruit looks shiny, take the slices out and put them on a plate to cool. You can use them warm, or leave them in the refrigerator for nice chilled slices. The texture is quite different but delicious either way.

 
The mascarpone, as we have already confirmed, is good as it is, but let’s take it up a notch. Add either a bit of honey, Grand Marnier (or similar liqueur), or lemon juice to the cheese and stir until well blended. Toast your thinly cut bread, scrape some of the mascarpone mix over it, and finish by placing a couple slices of caramelized fruit on top – magnificent.

 

sudden whim or pottery barn?

So, I decided to take up pottery. I figured, I spend all this time plating food, right. How far back can you take that? Well, I guess it doesn't get much further back than making the plates. The last time I tried this out though was as a student in high school, so I knew I'd need some help.

Fortunately that's where living in rural Japan comes in handy. I have found a teacher, now I just need to get my hands dirty. I'll shoot out another update on this when I have some work to show.

shippoku at Marugame Udon

I guess I should explain some of these words here. Udon is a type of Japanese noodle, made with wheat-flour and saltwater, which is characterized by its thickness and stiff bite (what the Japanese refer to as having 'backbone'). Shippoku is a style that that udon is sometimes served in. Imagine a hearty soup crammed full of mountain vegetables and swirled with these thick noodles to get a good idea. Actually you don’t have to imagine, here’s a shot for you:
 

shippoku udon

The udon over at Marugame Udon is made to order and will definately fill you up, although locals complained to me over wait times (10-15 minutes? Which didn’t seem like a big deal). Probably this is because most udon joints, which serve it up as-you-order-it quick and cheap to boot, have created an image of udon as a kind of fast food. Salary men in business suits rush in alongside workers in rubber boots and paint splattered garbs, throw down a few coins, and slurp away. In a flurry of chopsticks they’re all rushing off again – maybe they sat down for 3 or 5 minutes - to get back to their jobs. I guess there's a lot of people that just don't have the patience to wait around for noodles while on their tight schedules.

While sipping on hot tea given to us by the hostess, I found the wait at Marugame Udon - with its old-fashioned atmosphere and relaxed pace - to be a refreshing change to the eat-as-you-stand debacle I often encounter. Sometimes a little wait can make food more tantalizing, giving your taste buds time to consider what’s to come. And the price, which was a few hundred yen more than other places, didn’t bother me much when I started eating the hearty home-styled goodness.

bacon explosion – mini coupe version

And afterwards, you might consider eating a salad

First of all, credit where credit is due. The original Bacon Explosion recipe comes from two barbecue geniuses: Jason Day and Aaron Chronister, writers of BBQ MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER - the title is literally in all-caps even on the book - and creators of the site BBQ Addicts. Apparently, you can even order ready-to-eat versions of the Bacon Explosion at their site now. The only problem I have is that the recipe is massive, about the size of a football, and I wanted to come up with an individual portion scale-down. Thus the birth of the mini coupe version. The ingredients, as well as the process, are largely the same as in the official version.

thick-cut slices of bacon (short, you can cut normal slices in half)
sausage meat (preferably Italian)
bbq sauce
bbq rub*

*If you are making a rub, there’s lots of ways but basically these ingredients:

5 paprika

4 brown sugar

3 sea salt

2 black pepper

1 cayenne pepper

1/2 dry mustard

The numbers indicate ratios that I recommend, but everyone’s tastes are different. I like this one because it’s sort of a descending scale – if using teaspoons, use 5 teaspoons of paprika and so on; if using tablespoons, likewise.

1. Reserve a couple slices of bacon, and weave the rest into a square lattice (think apple pie). So you need equal amounts of bacon for the X and Y axis of the lattice. If you don't have at least 4x4 it's a no go.

2. Preheat oven to 225 degrees. Fry the bacon you saved in a frying pan and cook until crisp. Sprinkle latticed bacon with bbq rub. Remove sausage meat from its casings (if you couldn’t buy it as just meat). Evenly spread the sausage meat on top of the bacon lattice. You want enough to cover to the outer edges.

3. Crumble fried bacon into pieces and sprinkle on top of the sausage meat. Drizzle some bbq sauce on that and sprinkle with some more bbq rub.

4. Separate the front edge of the sausage layer from the bacon weave and roll the sausage away from you. The bacon weave should stay where it is. Press sausage roll to remove any air pockets and pinch together.

5. Roll toward you, this time with the bacon as well, until it is completely wrapped. Turn it so that the seam faces down. Sprinkle with a bit more bbq rub.

6. Place the roll on a baking sheet into the oven. Cook until internal temperature reaches 165 degrees F, about 1 hour for each inch of thickness. When done, glaze the roll with more sauce. Like the original recipe, I recommend serving in slices.

 
This is a taste-splosion of flavor, so keep your dose low. I did notice, however, that it's much lighter feeling in this mini version, probably because the juices don't have all the time and space to move around in the center of the roll.