i hope you eat good food, grow beautiful things, and have more love than you know what to do with.
I forgot to post this the past summer—when we fished up a large Northern Kingfish (Menticirrhus saxatilis), also known sometimes as whiting or kingcroaker. It’s a relatively common fish we can catch here on the south shore of Long Island, and although most people catch …
This… is not your normal New Year’s resolution post (or it is, maybe you have a lot of friends as crazy as me)—it’s about starting a project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time but unfortunately have very little experience in: Aquaponics! That …
This is the dish of my husband’s dreams, not because it’s particularly difficult but because the sauce is one he had never again been able to find outside after the sushi restaurant he used to always order them at closed down.
It’s a restaurant that had fond memories for him, as it’s where the dojo members and Hagihara-sensei would go to. The food was always top notch and this was no different.
Try as he might, ordering “garlic oyster” after “garlic oyster” at any subsequent Japanese restaurant we’ve been to failed to yield anything like it. He’ll still eat them, but I’ve seen him disappointed enough times that I knew eventually I would have to do something about it. It’s taken so long because I wanted to make sure I had the time to dedicate to both writing and making it.
The good news is that I had tried it a few times before their closure and was able to recreate the garlicky, tangy, buttery sauce. I often make it as gravy for Japanese hamburg steak but this is the first time I truly sat down to make this dish as we remembered it.
The most difficult part of this recipe is actually sourcing fresh and plump oysters but winter is a FABULOUS time to do so, as they are sweet and fat. At a dollar a piece, my local fish monger made a good two dozen bucks off of me today.
You can instead broil the oysters and top with crispy Japanese panko because frying them is an ordeal. It’s also easier to shuck that way–you just pop the top off after they open on their own. My pictures however, show the original way of making them. Another shortcut I take is making the whole sauce into a corn starch slurry first so I don’t have to take that extra step later.
I hope you’ll try it!
If you ask me what my favorite kitchen purchase this year has been, the mini kitchen torch is definitely it. It imparts a smokey charred flavor you would normally only get on a barbecue and it’s so easy for me to use. This is a …
Chicken nanban is a popular dish with a tasty tartar sauce from the Kyushu Island. It’s a relatively easy recipe with lots of things that I usually have ready in my pantry and freezer. The tartar sauce to me is almost like deviled eggs in …
I LOVE beef small intestine, and I most commonly get to enjoy it at Korean barbecue restaurants where it’s grilled until a bit crispy as it bastes in its own fat. Called “gopchang”, it can run a pretty penny especially in comparison to how low cost the raw product is… except I hadn’t known where to get it until I stumbled upon Wild Fork Foods where they were about $2 a pound. I was very excited, and so was my mom, so we’ve been buying pounds of it to make at home. I store it in my chest freezer for those days I’m craving it.
And then after a lot of trial and error and going down the rabbit hole of not finding any english sources, I realized the reason it can get up there price wise is because it takes a bit of energy to process. Done wrong, it just has the texture of rubber bands with very little flavor. Done right and it’s a treat that both myself and my youngest (who likes organ meats) enjoy very much. What does it taste like? It’s a flavor all on its own, with the interior having a pate consistency that’s a little bitter, reminiscent of liver, but rich and delicious and the outside a little chewy but crispy.
To start with, I defrost it and pull off the outer membrane off each of the intestines, which have been cut to foot long pieces—it’s pretty easy and comes off in one piece. I don’t pull off the fat but you can if you’d like. Then I use butchers twine and tie each end of every piece and prick a couple of times with a needle—this was an idea my mom came up with after we lamented that the interior kept spilling out during the steaming process (it loses a lot of water and the water from within the intestine pushes the filling out, this way it loses the water and not the inside). I rinse the exterior gently, rub with some salt, and then put it in the steamer to steam for about an hour. You can do less time but this makes an absolutely tender intestine (which, if you have had the rubbery kind, you’ll appreciate.)
Then you can marinate (most commonly in a soy sauce, red pepper flake, garlic, ginger, onion, and pear sauce), cut into one inch pieces, and grill. Or… you can do what I did which is without marinating, roasting it in the air fryer and making it into a delicious sandwich (almost like a Bahn mi) with a sesame cumin seed sauce I borrowed from a restaurant that served bbq originating at the border of China and Korea.
Lettuce, salad burnet, jalapeño slices, pickled daikon, mint, and cilantro all from my garden, with a homemade baguette, some sunny side quail eggs from my quails, the sesame cumin sauce, thin onion slices, and a smidge of mayo with these delicious morsels, it’s not only a frugal way to eat but a garden to table affair.
The only “recipe” I’m really providing (since I explained the process of cooking the intestines above) is the sesame cumin sauce—if you don’t have sesame paste available, peanut butter works too! Otherwise you can construct this as you prefer, or just with a bowl of hot white rice.
I had a big hunk of leftover wagyu fat from my sister and the time she bought like 11lbs of A5 grade wagyu. I looked around for what to do with it and every recipe was about rendering it. Except to me that would be …
Hot spring eggs are fun in that in Japan (and elsewhere where hot public baths and springs exist), you can purchase a couple of eggs to cook while you… cook. The unique temperature result is an egg with runny silken tofu-like whites, with semi firm …
I love ganjang gejang which is Korean raw marinated crab, but my mom introduced me to Chiang Xie/嗆蟹 (although pronounced chiang ha in the regional dialect) which is Chinese style raw marinated crab. She bought it from a side dish take out place in Flushing and BOY OH BOY it is just as delicious and puts away rice like nothing else. It’s quick marinated, so more like raw crab sashimi with a sauce.
In some ways, I like this better than ganjang gejang for the ease of storage—my issue with gejang is that after marinating it for a day or two, it sometimes goes bad before I can eat all of it. You can freeze it after marinating, but it doesn’t taste as good to me. Once washed and quick brined with a water, high alcohol, and salt mixture for an hour or two, I store the chiang xie individually wrapped in the freezer, taking out only one at a time, chop it, and marinate in the sauce for about 30 minutes prior to eating. This way I only make as much as I can/want to eat at a time.
I don’t know why I couldn’t find any recipes in english for it, considering how popular it is the China, so I started looking in Chinese… only to find there are so many variations of this dish, some being family specific. So I tried to recreate the one my mom bought. I did add my own twist to it via freezing the crabs which some chefs claim makes the meat extra sweet and tender.
As always, consuming raw seafood increases the chances of foodborne illnesses.
Some years there are so many blowfish in the water you can’t catch anything else because they are voracious and will take any line with any bait at any time. Then there are years where they don’t show up at all, for whatever reason may …