i hope you eat good food, grow beautiful things, and have more love than you know what to do with.
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 …
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 nice way to use wagyu trimmings, and one of the easiest ways to eat it. You can use seaweed or not (I didn’t have any) or furikake. The wagyu is diced small, torched, and then mixed with a sukiyaki sauce (sugar, soy sauce, mirin). Then stuffed into a rice ball, be it hand made or in a mold, garnished with some chives. It’s unnecessary for me to bullet out a recipe for this I think, as it’s super simple, so enjoy the pictures and video!
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 …
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 a bit of a waste, especially since I discovered that thinly sliced and torched, paired with another slice of a tougher cut (in this case I used beef tongue because it’s what I had) and it was pure wagyu heaven again. The drippings from the torching and the heat from the rice underneath meant that whatever fat rendered from it would seep into the grains of rice, making it even more delicious. Several cultures eat fat and blubber on its own, and I can now see why—it is a bit chewy, but due to the absolute scrumptious grade of beef, it is as if I get to relive a wagyu steak, whose flavor is all in the fat it has.
A simple sukiyaki sauce, some minced scallions from the garden, and a single gently poached quail egg adorned lunch—I always have my trusty shichimi pepper flakes. So if you weren’t certain what you can do with wagyu fat but didn’t want to grind it into burgers or render it out for tallow, you can try this!
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 …
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 strike their fancy. This was an odd year because some days I could catch a lot, and some days there weren’t so much as a ghost of them. When I finally set my sights on making satsuma age, which is Japanese fish cake, I couldn’t find any for weeks (and you know, I never buy what I could get for free or reduced price.)
So I gave up and on the last day of summer, myself, my husband, and the kids went to go catch some crabs. I chopped up some chicken leg bones (I had cooked the meat itself but saved the bones) to release the marrow, and lo and behold! We pulled up about two dozen in an hour.
Excited, I ferreted them home, filet’d them, and then set to making and storing satsuma age for the winter—they freeze well and can be used in a whole bunch of other dishes. Fish cake (and fish balls) are a staple in oden and hotpot, but they’re delicious freshly fried on their own. This is a no frills recipe, with only blow fish (but you can sub with any white fleshed non-oily fish), but if you want it bouncier, squid and shrimp should be added.
I had a lonely baby carrot, chives and a pepper from the garden, as well as quail eggs so I was all set.
I’ve had smoked trout and smoked cheese conserves in a Costa Rican resort when we visited my parents last year and had wanted to do something similar, and then in passing I saw a recipe for Hungarian smoked quail eggs in oil. Try as I …