i hope you eat good food, grow beautiful things, and have more love than you know what to do with.
If you don’t like natto (like my husband), this isn’t the post for you and you should probably pretend it doesn’t exist. If you are absolutely obsessed with natto (like myself and our cute little daughters whose palates clearly take after me), this is a …
One of the places I always wanted to visit with the kids, but didn’t get to until last week, is the Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery and Aquarium. It used to supply the state with trout for stocking in public ponds, but became a not-for-profit …
One of the things I’m committed to is supporting both my local economy and mindfully reducing waste—this includes the meat that I eat which means if it’s edible on the animal, I will find a way to enjoy it. I don’t shy away from organ meats, since not only are they nutritious, but quite delicious. Unfortunately, they tend to be thrown away or viewed as garbage rather than the delicacies they are. You can use thinly sliced pork chops or beef for this if you’d like.
For shogayaki, I actually prefer beef (although pork is more popular for this dish in Japan), but I had two pork hearts from R&K Homestead that came with my lamb order and they are a great in between.
Heart has an undeserved reputation for being a tough organ meat, but when thinly sliced, it reminds me in both taste and texture of beef tongue, which makes it a precious commodity in my book as I am a fiend for gyutan. Once the pig heart is thinly sliced, I don’t worry about it being too tough since the springy mouthfeel is exactly what I love about it.
Here, for shogayaki, a soy ginger sauce is thrown in at the end so that the flavors are absorbed by the slices of meat that have developed a slight char on the edges. I like to garnish it with shiso from my garden, but scallion is fine too. Serve with white rice and cabbage salad for an simple and delicious meal.
Salmon Ochazuke (rice steeped in tea and dashi) is my oldest daughter’s favorite style of ochazuke—it has several of the things she loves: Salmon, ikura (salted salmon roe), seaweed, and rice. It’s one of my favorites too as it’s a breeze to put together and …
The holidays are around the corner and while this year it looks like we’re not going anywhere or hosting anything, I still enjoy creating spreads as if I were. This deviled egg recipe is very simple, using a normal deviled egg base but elevated to …
Fall is here and with it comes sweet and crisp vegetables and a huge bumper crop of my shiso! What better way to showcase seasonal cool crop veggies and herald the arrival of the Autumn salmon than kakiage ikura don?
Kaki-age is a type of tempura made by mixing up ingredients in batter and then frying them—it can include shredded vegetables and seafood (like shrimp, crab, or scallop), although in general I usually only use vegetables for this. This is mostly out of habit since my mom never made kakiage with anything but veggies, but I imagine shrimp and shredded kani would be delicious additions.
I have included a long list of things you could use as ingredients, but in my particular case I used what I had on hand: delicious and starchy sweet potato, cool crisp cabbage, earthy potato, eye catching carrot, fragrant shiso, and some tasty onion.
If you get your hands on fresh salmon roe, you can make ikura feel free to pile it high since ‘tis the season for fat sacs of sujiko to make their way to specialty Asian markets. But if you can’t find any, or if you’re vegetarian, leaving it out is fine too! You can also have this with soba, ramen, and udon!
I make my batter slightly thin because I want just a crisp barely there outer shell so it doesn’t mask the flavor of the vegetables. You can also purchase tempura batter mix. As far as sauce goes… well there’s quite a few choices and I’ve included my favorites.
I love O-chazuke/Cha Pao Fan, which is rice steeped in hot tea. When I was young, if we stayed over at my grandparent’s house, my grandma would give us each a bowl right before we went to sleep. It was the only time we could …
Akebia is such an interesting plant, and for those who like bitter gourd (which I really hated as a child but has since begun to miss in my old age), the thick rind is like a perennial version of it. It’s tender and juicy, despite …
The fruit on my akebia have split open, smiling with their seed and pulp glistening on the inside. I find it too much work to sit and eat it directly from the pod, so instead I decided I’d separate the pulp from the seeds with the help of my food mill.
All those akebia and it amounted to about a cup of pulp… but that’s alright, I made a tasty side dish (Akebia Miso Itame) with the rind, which is just like a very tender bitter gourd.
I mixed in some of my rose and berry jam, a bit of water, some sugar, and iced it all up—the creamy Akebia almost creating an ice cream consistency! Unfortunately, I only got to have a little before my cute children downed the whole cup. Traditionally it’s mixed with lemon juice, but either way I feel really enhances the delicate flavor.
If I had to explain the flavor of Akebia pulp, I would say it tastes like the flesh of a soft and ripe persimmon.
Now that things have settled down a little in my life for this moment in time (including the terrifying ordeal of getting the dojo inspected for NYS COVID compliance), my creative juices are flowing so I decided to make a simple, but elegant pasta dish …