i hope you eat good food, grow beautiful things, and have more love than you know what to do with.
It’s spring and one of the first things to pop up in my garden is garlic chives—different than onion chives, the leaves are flat and the flavor similar to ramps but less intense. It’s a popular Asian vegetable and dead easy to grow. With my …
It’s no secret my kids are fiends for sushi so I often make handrolls at home for them—usually avocado and smoked salmon or some California since they keep well. They also love steak tartare so I always have some nice sirloin or skirt in the …
Mugwort—just the name drives gardeners into a fearful frenzy because of how insanely invasive it is. From just a small root grows a dense, waist high perennial that covers the ground in a span of a season. It’s difficult to get rid of once established, and can be the stuff of nightmares. Young though, it’s also an absolutely delicious spring green. A little later in the year, the medicinal flavor strengthens and becomes somewhat overwhelming and the greens turn bitter. I cultivate a small patch of it and remove the rest, because perennial greens can be hard to come by. It is sometimes confused with ragweed (which is also edible) due to the deeply lobed leaves, but the silvery underside is unmistakable.
Historically speaking, it’s a medicinal and culturally significant herb—part of the artemisia family. In Asia, it’s used as both vegetable (ssuk in Korean and yomogi in Japanese) and medicine (Ai Cao in Chinese), and in the west as a deworming/antiparasitic agent (hence its other name—wormwood.) Nobel peace prize winner Tu-you-you extracted artemisinin from its close cousin (artemisia annua) which went on to become an important antimalarial medication used around the world. Mugwort itself also contains artemisinin.
As I weed the garden in spring, before it becomes an unmanageable mess, I collect the young mugwort greens to make a simple dish. Delicately flavored but not slimy, it’s excellent as a blanched green (about two minutes and then rinsed under cold water with the liquid squeezed out), simply dressed in soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic (optional) , and sesame seeds. A pinch of sugar to taste and you got yourself a delicious side dish recipe of a once despised weed.
Disclaimer: The following post contains accounts of raising and processing poultry for food. If that makes you uncomfortable, please navigate away from this page! We had a quail processing day (guide to raising quail) which is always a somewhat somber and work heavy day. A …
Yes yes, this dish is normally done with chicken or fish, but I’ve been experimenting with vegetables and seafood to delicious success. Nanbanzuke is the Japanese version of escabeche, a Spanish and Portuguese dish of cooked fish marinated in a spiced vinegar sauce which was …
My kids love potatoes in most, if not all forms—so warm, crispy Japanese potato croquettes disappear quickly in this house. It’s pretty easy to make with a rice cooker that can steam the potatoes, and also easy to jazz up by mixing in different things: hotdog, ham, chorizo, shrimp, imitation crab, ground beef, chives, jalapeno, and cheese are just some of the many ways you can make these deep fried delights special. I prefer steaming the potatoes so it’s not too mushy or watery.
You can also use different sauces on them—curry, tonkatsu, Worcestershire, gravy, ketchup, mayonnaise, tartar sauce, mustard etc. all to deadly effect. They also easily reheat (especially if you have an air fryer.)
Well that’s a mouthful… quite literally! Today is Chinese New Years Eve and since my parents and sister are in Costa Rica, I won’t have as much to do (nor as much to eat)—so I decided to treat us and make a quilt bento. I …
I love both pupusas and arepas (but must confess I didn’t really know the difference until recently)–they’re both corn cakes made from corn flour, but pupusas are stuffed before they are grilled, while arepas are stuffed after. They also use different flours, with pupusas using …
Persimmons are a fun fruit to grow, the trees get pretty big and loaded with bright orange fruits and remain productive for decades. In the Fall when they drop their leaves, the fruits stay on, looking like bizarre Christmas ornaments against the bare branches.
There’s two types of persimmons: astringent and non-astringent. Astringency is that feeling when you bite into a banana peel and your mouth suddenly goes dry. The astringent type, like Hachiya, are often elongated and pointed and need to be fully ripened (bletted) before it turns soft, sweet, juicy, and syrupy. Usually we leave it out on the porch or outside a window until it ripens, sometimes going through a frost or two. I grow the astringent type (although I’m now at a new location and started over with another tree—they are sensitive to transplant but once established, super hardy.)
Fuyu persimmons on the other hand are non-astringent and can be eaten as is, crispy and juicy and sweet. Both types can be dried although Hachiya are more commonly used. They are called shìbǐng (柿餅) in Chinese, hoshigaki (干し柿) in Japanese, and gotgam (곶감) in Korean
In order to do so, normally you’d skin them, string them up by the stems (I use butchers twine), and hang them in the eaves of the house during winter, squeezing them every day as you pass by to make sure they turn out tender. When dried, they’re like dates, and can be used much in the same way. Depending on how dry it is where you are, it can take between 3-6 weeks to fully dry them. Due to their high sugar content, they aren’t very likely to go bad unless you live in a very humid area.
If you don’t have eaves upon which to hang them (I don’t), a clothes drying rack in the garage or kitchen works too! Serve it with tea on a chilly afternoon, or diced and mixed into rice to make a sweet and savory rice ball.
A single lobster goes through many iterations in my household, until every last drop of flavor gets extracted from all its parts—lobster bisque being the last stop on that train. The first of which was ganjang lobster (soy marinated tail meat and tomalley, raw), next …