Oki Eats! 大きい　イーツ！

Okithaindian Curry

2011-04-06T20:22:00.000+09:00

Curry Kim-stye is different every time, but apparently this time gets a nod of superiority from the eaters, so I shall attempt to record what odds and ends made it into the pot this time. Since my stint in Okinawa, I've always used my huge + deep skillet that's half frying pan, half wok, and half giant nonstick pot. And my favorite knife to this day is the one left by my predecessor in my apartment: not too big, not too small, the perfect shape, and super-sharp! With these tools and a cutting board, this is what I put in m Oki/Japanese Thai Indian Curry today:

1 small Okinawan Purple Beniimo Sweet Potato, sliced thin and skinned
1 Onion, chopped/sliced
5 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
Peanut Oil, about 4 tbsp
1 can Coconut Milk
1 can water chestnut
costco-size box of mushrooms, coarsely sliced
2 chicken breast, cubed
small handful mixed party nuts
handful spinach
half red bell pepper, chopped
half bag frozen peas
1.5 cups jasmine rice
handful baby carrots
sour cream (hey, it was in the fridge!)
1/4 cabbage, sliced

Spices!
1 box Hot Golden Curry paste (or other Japanese curry paste)
mirin, a few dashes
1 spoon cumin seeds
a big pinch each of coriander, cardamom, cloves, garam masala, mustard powder, tumeric
2" fresh ginger, skin cut off
a few spoons of Caldo chicken powder, to taste, if wanted
garlic salt, if wanted

Heat peanut oil in your big pot/skillet on med high. Put in some garlic. Put garlic salt on chicken if desired. Brown the chicken on all sides, being careful not to overcrowd the chicken. Make sure it gets yummy and brown. Store in separate bowl.
Reusing skillet, on med heat brown the garlic, throw in some whole cumin seeds (Indian influence). Add onion. Let halfway cook.
Use some of this garlic oil onion mixture to make jasmine rice in separate pot. Add pinch each of coriander, cardamom, cloves, garam masala, mustard powder, tumeric. Add rice and some chopped carrot. heat. Add equal parts water to rice. bring to boil, cover, let cook.
Cook mushroom and beniimo and cabbage with onion. Add splash of mirin. Add can of coconut milk (the Thai influence!) + 1 can water. Add all powdered spices (that's where the Indian part comes in) beforehand. Let cook a few minutes until potatoes are almost done but still retain hard texture.
Add curry paste. Add water chestnuts, peas, let cook until done. Add chicken back in. Bring to boil. You're done! Garnish with chopped red bell pepper. Booyah!

It took over an hour for me to make this, but it turned out very tasty!

Corn on the Cob with Garlic Butter

2009-06-22T07:49:00.003+09:00

Now that corn is in season, I make this for myself as a snack (and, on more than one occasion, as a meal) at least once a week. It is ridiculously simple to prepare and requires only three ingredients. It's also pretty hard to mess up--just don't overcook the corn. Total time: less than 10 minutes!

Sweet corn on the cob, husked and de-silked
garlic salt (the kind with a green cap, big garlic chunks, and parsley flakes)
slivers of pats of butter, or a big chunk of butter.

Put an inch or two of water in the bottom of a big pot, and place a steamer rack in it. Don't boil the corn directly in water--it loses flavor and nutrients! Sometimes I add a bay leaf or a lemon to the water before putting in the steamer tray. Put the corn in, turn it to high heat, cover, and steam until you smell the corn from across the room or until it changes color slightly and looks done, but still crispy and firm. I never time it...maybe five minutes? a little more?

Put a few pats of butter on a plate about the diameter of the length of the corn cobs, and roll the hot cobs in the butter pats, covering nicely. You might want to use tongs or a fork since the corn will be very hot. Sprinkle garlic salt to taste on your corn. EAT!

Wonder Bars

2009-06-21T10:46:00.006+09:00

In Haleiwa on the north shore, there is a small bakery (Waialua Bakery?) that serves the BEST smoothies and the BEST wonder bars I've ever had. The smoothies are made with REAL, live, delicous tropical fruits, such as passion fruit, guava, mango, and yummy honey. There really is nothing better on a hot day. They also make amazingly delectable wonder bars. Also known as 7 layer bars or magic bars. I had most of the ingredients on hand, so I thought I'd make them. I had to pick up some butterscotch chips, and I admit that this is my first experience with them, but what the heck, right?

I baked this in 2 pie pans so I can give one to my dad tomorrow for Father's Day in a pretty glass dish.

I took my recipe from http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2009/06/17/seven-layer-bars/ after seeing the luscious photo on photograzing.com. It had to be slightly modified, I think because of the 2 pie pans.

The 7 Magic Ingredients (Makes 2 "pies")

2 sticks butter (1/2 lb.)
1 cup walnuts
1 can condensed milk
30 graham crackers (how the original recipe called for just 7, I will never know)
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup white chocolate chips
3/4 cup butterscotch chips
1 1/2 cup flaked coconut

How to do the wonder bar

Preheat oven to 350. Put graham crackers in a plastic bag and smash them with a rolling pin. Or do what I did and use a bowl and a big dowel like a giant pestle and mortar. It takes forever!! Melt the butter. Mix with graham crumbs in the bowl. Grease your pie pans with oil. Press graham crust into bottom.
Smash walnuts using the same procedure. Sprinkle on top of crust.
Sprinkle on all the chocolate/white/butterscotch chips. Top with coconut.
Pour condensed milk over the whole thing.
Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes, or until top is golden brown.

Next time, I will add more condensed milk. Perhaps an entire can. And eat half before baking. I cannot get enough of the stuff.

Bacon Corn Potato Chowder

2009-06-21T10:28:00.003+09:00

I have become a good cook! Foods I create come out edible! Of course, I feel like this every time I make a success . . . but the success rate is really about 50/50. Last time I cooked, I created a roasted eggplant/hummus/yogurt/sesameoil/oliveoil salt monstrosity that lacked in taste, texture, color, and every possible scale of food meritocracy. Good thing I made it on the same night as the seared alaskan sea scallops with seashell pasta.

Anyway, this time, I made a winner. Sometimes, a disregard for all the fancy spices and flavor enhancers actually detract from the heady natural flavors of fresh produce. Corn chowder has always been one of my favorite things to eat. It was actually the very first thing I ever cooked all by myself. I was about ten and I think I used the JOy of Cooking book. I had to walk to the store and ask my mother for money. Those were interesting days.

The success of this chowder comes from the enormous amount of fresh vegetables, and the enormous amount of thick sliced, slow-fried, crispy bacon. I used an entire pack of bacon, minus 4 slices that were mysteriously eaten beforehand....

You also have to give credit to the dubiously large amount of onions. When I added them, my big ole soup pot was literally half full of onions and bacon. But never fear, little dears. I drained the bacon fat before getting dirty with my chowder. If I ate this in a restaurant, I would have no qualms about licking the bowl.

Ingredients:
1 pack of bacon
1 big russet potato, cubed
1 red potato, cubed
1 jumbo-sized onion (the size of 2 normal), chopped
1/2 bunch celery (about 7 stalks? including the heart?), sliced/chopped
1 can creamed corn
8 mini bell peppers, diced (about 1 cup)
1/2 bunch parsley, chopped
organic chicken broth to cover, about 3-4 cups
1 cup whole milk
plain yogurt for garnish
cheddar cheese for topping
garlic salt, cayenne, and black pepper

Instructions:

With scissors, cut the bacon into strips (1/2") into a big fat soup pot. Turn on medium heat. Let sizzle until crispy, draining liquid when it gathers. I drained it twice. Bacon should be carmelized and crisp crisp.
Add onions. Stir occassionally and let cook. Add celery, potato, bell peppers. Let them get about halfway done. Then add corn and broth to just cover ingredients. Simmer or boil until potatoes are done. Turn off heat. Add parsley, pepper, garlic salt to taste, and milk. Stir. Serve with shredded cheese and/or yogurt. I eat it with both.

North Indian Potatoes

2009-06-19T15:27:00.004+09:00

Adapted from this aesthetically unappealing recipe, http://fooddownunder.com/cgi-bin/recipe.cgi?r=175603, I ended up making enough food for 8 people that 2 people gladly ate all by themselves. It's a little like mashed potatoes, but with all the Indian spices you love, plus some extra vegetables for color, texture, and nutrients!

I didn't take any pictures because the consistency is nothing to brag about. It looks like tumeric-colored mashed potatoes with chunks of vegetable. The real secret is in the taste.

First, place eggplants (I used Japanese) right under the broiler on some foil. Don't remove anything, just rinse them, prick them with a fork, and stick them under there. Wait about ten minutes until the skin is black, then turn them over to get the other side. They're done when they smell delicious and when the skin is blackened. Be sure to prick them, or they will quite literally explode in your oven! Remove when done and set aside to cool. When cool, peel skin off easily. Chop.

At the same time, boil a big pot of water. Cut 2 potatoes in half. Salt the water. Add potatoes. Boil for half an hour or until a fork goes all the way through the potatoes easily. This always takes longer than I expect. Remove and peel potatoes. Mash.

Whilst the eggplant and potatoes and cooking, heat some olive oil in a pan with a whole chopped onion and several minced cloves of garlic. Add about half an inch of minced or mushed ginger, as well. Proceed to dump in 2 generous heaping teaspoons cumin, 1.4 teaspoons coriander, 1 teaspoon garam masala, 1/2 teaspoon cloves, 1 spoon tumeric, cayenne pepper to taste. Add four coarsely chopped mushrooms and a handful of chopped carrots. Cook til tender. Shake a few generous shakes of garlic salt. Add the eggplant.

Mash potatoes with a masher and add the vegetable ingredients. Add chopped or shredded cheddar cheese. Continue mashing. Add crumbled feta cheese, if desired. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve the gloriousness!

Garden in the City

2009-06-19T06:46:00.003+09:00

We started a vegetable garden! It has neat rows and everything! I've never had a real garden before, and this one is quite promising.

What do we have? Parsley, cilantro, jalapenos, thyme, rosemary, chives, green onions, spinach, basil, mint!

Sandwiches

2009-06-19T06:29:00.002+09:00

I love big, burstingly beautiful sandwiches. Here are a few I've made recently:

Start with good ingredients and everything wonderful is possible.

super onion bagel toasted, grilled onions, bacon, avocado, smoked salmon, lettuce, cream cheese, vine-ripened grape tomato.
toothpicks required

Sundried-tomato roasted turkey breast, feta cheese, avocado, grilled msurhooms and onions, lettuce, tomato, milton's bread, plain yogurt, taro and sweet potato chips.

Israeli Food Festival

2009-06-19T06:20:00.005+09:00

First of all, Guy and a few other Israelis came over to our apartment and had an epic falafel-making session. I can tell you that it was enlightening and very, very tasty! I have a few dozen pictures of the process that I'm too lazy to upload right now.

Second of all, on the Israeli Independence Day, there was a big festival downtown. They had food, food, food, and a bad guy singing folk songs accompanied by a girl in a blue evening gown who looked much better than she sang.

I had falafel in a pita from the guy who used to own the falafel place in Manoa! (eg the only kosher place in Hawaii. It has since closed). I also got to try a lot of other Mediterranean food, which apparently was not as good as the real thing.

Seared Alaskan Scallops with Seashell Pasta

2009-06-19T05:32:00.004+09:00

I'd had a bag of jumbo Alaskan sea scallops sitting in my freezer for about a week (thank you, Costco). I'd just not yet had the chance to make them. Yesterday left me starving by evening, because I'd eaten my new favorite breakfast of pineapple cottage cheese, sliced apple banana, handful of blueberries, plain yogurt, and quaker oats granola. It beats the Jamba Juice Acai Bowl as far as ingredient quality and taste are concerned. I love it to snack on, too. Anyway, I had just the bowl and one piece of fried chicken snuck ravenously from Safeway around noon. In between, I'd had a 3-hour business meeting, run errands, went shopping, and went to my turbo kickboxing class. It was 8 p.m. and my Guy wasn't going to be home until 9 or 9:30.

Great! Time to make myself even more starving by wafting delicous cooking smells all over myself! I took two very well-reviewed recipes for scallops and edited them a little to my liking. What turned out was surprsingly simple to make, and dare I say restaurant quality. The pasta was my first experience concocting a non-tomato-sauce-based pasta, ever. My mother always, always made pasta as "spaghetti," and it always, always, involved stretching a store-brought can of tomato sauce with her own ingredients. Never had I known that you could make tomato sauce from scratch with ease, and never had I known that you could eat pasta with something other than marinara! My first attempt turned out so well I ate it for breakfast this morning :)

This meal is very impressive and deceptively easy to make. Try it!

Seared Alaskan Scallops
Deceptively delicious for something so easy to make

8 jumbo alaskan sea scallops, thawed
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons lemon juice
garlic salt

Preheat oven broiler. melt butter and mix with lemon juice. Drench scallops in mixture.
Place in shallow baking dish. Sprinkle liberally with garlic salt. Broil for 7 minutes or so. Do not overcook! Scallops become rubbery and unappetizing when overcooked!

Seashell Pasta

1/2 box Barilla Medium Shells (or pasta of your choice)
olive oil
1 or 2 onions, chopped (I used a jumbo costco-sized onion that must've been 3 lbs by itself)
4 mushrooms, sliced
8 cloves garlic, minced fine
1 tomato, diced
1 teaspoon Parsley flakes
Black pepper and/or cayenne pepper to taste
grated parmesan cheese (Optional)

Boil a big pot of water. When it comes to a rolling boil, add seashells and a dash of olive oil and some salt, if desired. Stir occassionally to prevent sticking. When almost done, drain in colander.
Meanwhile, heat enough olive oil to cover the bottom of your widest pan. Remember that this will be the sauce for the pasta, for use more oil than usual. Fry onions on medium until translucent. Add mushrooms and garlic.
Turn off heat and stir in tomatoes, parsley flakes, and pepper. Stir in seashells. Top with parmesan.

Accompanying Salad

organic spring greens
sundried tomatoes
italian herb dressing

tear greens, finely dice sundried tomato, and toss all in a large bowl with a drizzle of dressing.

Quickdraw Avocado Sandwiches

2009-06-12T15:45:00.003+09:00

It was one of those days when suddenly it was 5 in the afternoon and all I'd had was half a papaya with yogurt and honey. Not good. I popped some veggie burgers (far superior to boca burgers, if you've ever tried either) under broiler (my new favorite method of cooking), when I discovered half an avocado in the fridge! Not able to wait 10 minutes for the burger patties, I snuck one of my pieces of bread an concocted the best 2-minute sandwich of the year.

Luckily, I was still hungry enough to eat the veggie burgers when they came out. Goes great with Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ Sauce, avocado, tomato, and pickles.

2-minute Avocado Sandwich Idea:
(makes 1 sandwich)

Milton's 7-Grain Sliced Bread
1/2Avocado
1/4 tomato
handful crumbled blue cheese
small handful lettuce

Put 1 slice Milton's 7-grain bread in the toaster. I love this bread for the nutty sweetness
Peel half an avocado with your fingernails
slice avocado fast kine. Try not to eat it all before it makes it to the sandwich.
Slice 1/4 tomato with the same knife
Fold bread slice in half, and dump avocado, crumbled blue cheese, tomato, dill pickle, and spring lettuces inside. Devour.

It's good to keep in mind that the simple things are often more delicious than complicated ones. I was listening to an NPR podcast about reviving recipes from The Great Depression, and the hosts did a taste test of some of the dishes. Back then, there were no such things as cookbooks or recipes. No ingredient lists or numbered instructions. You cooked with what you had on hand. The few recipes that did survive were more guidelines than recipes as we know them. The most appealing one was called chowder. The ingredients were salt pork, onion, salt, potatoes, and water. Four ingredients. The tasters were amazed at how flavorful and tasty the chowder was, which did not contain any dairy. Perahps we should hearken

Stuffed Blue Cheeseburgers

2009-06-09T07:15:00.004+09:00

I really, really wish I had my camera for this one. You have not experienced a blue (bleu?) cheeseburger until you have had a stuffed blue cheeseburger. If you like blue cheese and you like burgers, this is definitely for you. Something about the novelty of deliciously cheesy sauce oozing out of the center of your burger patty screams summer to me. Make it classy with fresh ciabatta rolls, stuffed sauteed mushrooms and onions, and some yummy aioli (great to kick around a fancy word for mayo, neh?)

Stuffed Blue Cheese Burgers

For the burgers:
ground beef (I got the organic 80/20 from costco)
ciabatta rolls (costco!)
onions
olive oil
crumbled blue cheese
plain yogurt
salt and black pepper

For the Sandwich Construction:
sliced apple
more blue cheese
vine ripened tomatoes
salad greens
pickles
mayo

Mush together blue cheese and a little yogurt until the consistency is creamy. Set aside.

Dice onions, and mix into meat by hand along with a little mustard powder, salt and pepper and maybe some parsley.

Form 2 thin hamburger patties a little larger than your ciabatta rolls to allow for shrinkage. Spoon blue cheese mixture evenly over center of patty. Put second patty on top and press edges together to seal. Repeat with all meat and blue cheese sauce.

Grill, broil, or fry burgers.

Meanwhile, sautee some chopped mushrooms and diced onions in oil on the side. Chop some salad, too.

Construct your burger! I love blue cheese, so I spread my ciabatta with the leftover blue cheese and plain yogurt mixture. I decked my burger with pickles, chopped salad greens, tomato, sliced lady apple, etc. Maybe add a potato chip or two.

Serve with a crispy beverage and hearty sweet potato & taro chips. Enjoy the blue cheese oozing hotly out of your burger. YUM

Hunky Bunch Mango Bread

2009-06-09T07:03:00.006+09:00

Mango season and lychee season are one of my favorite parts of living in Hawaii. We have two huge mango trees in the backyard, but it's a late-fruiting tree, so still no fruit. I'm a little worried because the house next door burned to the ground when the trees were still flowering, and the flowers might've gotten burned/smoked off.

Luckily, mangoes are 8 pounds for $10 at Safeway. I kid you not. I don't know how they can afford to sell them so cheaply, but everytime I go shopping I leave with two heaping bags full of mango. I'm a big lover of the ever-glroious breads disguised as cakes, most notably banana bread and mango bread. In Okinawa I made banana bread with monkey bananas at least once a month. Now that it's mango season in Hawaii, I can finally get some mango bread goodness!

I found this recipe called Hunky Bunch Mango Bread from the Honolulu Advertiser. Based on the name alone, I knew I had to use it. Just wait til you check out the backstory:

Former Tiser-ite Paula Bender e-mailed to say that her favorite mango bread was one she recalled from some years ago with the intriguing name of "Hunky Bunch Mango Bread."

I delved back into The Advertiser files and never found the recipe — that showed up in an online search — but I did find out who the Hunky Bunch was.

It was the family of the late Dr. Hing Hua "Hunky" Chun and his wife, former legislator Connie Beltran Chun. Theirs was a second marriage and each brought three children to the union — Hunky's three boys and Connie's three girls. In the 1970s, when Papa Chun decided that it would be a great family-building exercise for the eight of them to run together in the Honolulu Marathon, they got tagged with the name "Hunky Bunch," a play on TV's "The Brady Bunch."

Reached at her Foster Village home, Connie Chun explained she would bake as many as 80 loaves of the bread and serve it with homemade liliko'i juice as a post-run snack for runners in various races. It was a standard recipe that she changed around to suit her tastes. She's got three mango trees in the yard and a freezer full of mango right now, but, she said, "I haven't baked mango bread since my husband died (in 2002) because I know I'd cry."

Hunky Bunch bread freezes well and makes good toast.

And here's the recipe, slightly adapted for my tastes by the addition of many yummy add-ins and even more mango:

FAMOUS HAWAIIAN HUNKY BUNCH MANGO BREAD

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 cup grated coconut

1/2 cup raisins

1/2 cup broken walnuts

3 cups fresh mango, diced

3 eggs, slightly beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup vegetable oil

Prepare four loaf pans (2 1/2-by-5-inch or larger) by buttering them or using nonstick spray.

Very important: DO NOT OVERMIX. Your bread will be dry and hard!!! Mix dry ingredients well: flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon, cayenne, ginger and baking soda. In separate bowl, mix mango, raisins, walnuts, coconut. Mix well. add eggs, vanilla extract and vegetable oil until blended. Don't over-mix!

Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Stir with your hand (yes, it's fun and messy and you get to lick your fingers!) until JUST BARELY mixed, meaning the flour just barely disappears. DO NOT OVERMIX!

Fill prepared pans two-thirds full and bake at 350 degrees for 55 minutes for the smaller pans or 1 hour for the larger pans; tops should spring back when touched and a toothpick should emerge from the loaf's center clean.

Makes 4 loaves, about 10 slices each.

I actually made 12 muffins and 1 pie tin. I love the muffins because there's more of that much-savored crispy outside crusty layer. It was hard not to eat all the mango as I diced it! It took 4 big mangoes to come up with 3 cups of mango flesh, if that helps when you buy your mangoes. Here's another good mango bread blog post you might want to consult for proper mango-cutting techniques.

Simple Miso Eggplant & Sunomono (Cucumber Salad)

2009-06-06T03:32:00.005+09:00

I've been back in Hawaii for awhile now, and I've thoroughly enjoyed cooking with "whatever is on hand." It's a near-impossible feat to accomplish in Japan, because the way the grocery stores are set up, you buy only what you need. There is no such thing as going to Costco and buying 12 eggplant. Eggplant come in packages of 1 in Japan, and they are at most half the size of the "Japanese Eggplant" sold in America/Costco.

I absolutely adore eggplant. NPR recently hosted a short story reading called "An Eggplant Alone," read by a well-loved author of Gourmet Magazine who had recently died. I've been making all kinds of wonderful eggplant dishes. One of my favorites is eggplant, onions, and garlic diced and stir fried in a pot with a little olive oil. Add feta or goat cheese at the end and stir. It is heavenly with just those ingredients and maybe a little salt and cayenne pepper. Perfect as a sandwich spread or yummy side dish. And so so simple!

I've also made pomodoro alla mellanzana, baked eggplant parmesan, miso glazed eggplant, grilled/broiled eggplant, eggplant in stir-fries, and roast eggplant. All of them tasting deliciously of eggplant.

For dinner last night, I made this simple miso eggplant stir-fry along with sunomono. The eggplant is reminiscent of an ongoing special they had at Yukino, my favorite neighborhood restaurant in Nago. I ordered it during my first "girl's night out" with a few young Okinawan teachers. I found it delicious, and I believe I've created a healthier (less oily) version that tastes just as good.

Note: During the cooking process, I probably consumed about 10 Gummy Bear Vitamins. These things are the best vitamin discovery of my lifetime. They are a multivitamin that tastes even juicier and more delicious than regular Gummy Bears at the store--to satiate my craving for vitamins, I brought a bag of real Gummy Bears, only to leave the package half finished because the real variety were small and hard and too unforgiving compared to my luscious children's vitamins. Buy them at Costco at $9.99 or Safeway for $19.99!

Simple Miso Eggplant (serves 2)

Ingredients:
2 large Japanese eggplant (nasu), halved and cut into sixths (1.5" pieces)
1/2 an onion, coarsely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2" ginger, minced (you might want to grate this--I really love my ginger but feeling pieces of it in their food isn't for everyone)
3 large mushrooms, cubed
1 heaping tablespoon white miso
1 tablespoon oil (I use olive)
salt and pepper to taste

The "How To"

Cut eggplant and salt it to drain the excess water. It will absorb flavor better. Chop the rest of the vegetables while the salted eggplant rests.
Heat oil in a wok. Add garlic, onion, and ginger. Cook until onions are nearly cooked/translucent. Add eggplant to wok. Cook until half done. Add mushrooms.
Cook.
Add miso and turn off heat. mix well. Season to taste, maybe with some chili garlic sauce or black or white pepper. Serve!

Sunomono (Japanese Cucumber Salad)

1 costco-sized Japanese (English?) Cucumber
2 tablespoon rice vinegar or thereabouts
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon sesame oil
salt

Thinly slice cucmber. Paperthin if you can. Use one of those grater things if you have it to make very delicate slices. Salt cucumber and set aside for a few minutes.
Come back and squeeze cucumber with paper towel to get out the excess water. Mix in rice vinegar, sugar, and sesame oil. Let rest in fridge or serve immediately. Simple and delicious! I ate the entire huge cucumber all by myself, it's that refreshing on a summer evening :)

Grocery Store Sushi

2009-04-10T00:17:00.002+09:00

This grocery store sushi was 398yen. It sure beats what they give you in America. Even in Hawaii.

Spinach Mousse

2009-03-13T07:54:00.004+09:00

GREAT BALLS OF MOOSE! IT'S SO DELICIOUS!

We got it in school lunch. Many of the kids wouldn't touch it. In fact, they told me it would be bitter and gross. Lies! I tried it, and it tastes nothing like spinach. It's a slightly strange/pleasant green color, and the name and ingredients are off-putting, but it's better than any packaged pudding I've ever had in America, save perhaps kozy shack. But I'm sure this one is much healthier than kozy shak--it has spinach! It tastes creamy, milky, and smooth. It's just plain good pudding.

I think this company just needs to find a way to market itself, so more people will eat it. The idea of "spinach mousse" is a little off-putting. Especially since it conjures ideas of truly moussey concoctions made of "pure" spinach at hoity toity restaurants experimenting with molecular gastronomy. This spinach mousse tastes so much better.

So, who knows where I can buy me some of this stuff? I have yet to see it in the store. I would seriously eat it every day if I could.

Good Earth Tea

2009-03-09T08:00:00.003+09:00

My favorite tea of all time: Good Earth Tea. My taste in teas runs two ways: to delicate, scalding-hot Japanese green teas, and to those huge, bold teas that can stand up to big douses of milk and sugar (or better, condensed milk!) Good Earth Original Sweet & Spicy flavor tea fits the bill of the latter perfectly. It advertises itself as SWEET & SPICY. I couldn't agree more. Perhaps it's this Indian food kick I'm on, but this tea is truly sweet enough not to have to add sugar--even given my sweet tooth! I cannot believe it contains "no natural or artificial sweeteners." It's also powerful enough to taste great at a ratio of 1/2 cup brewed tea to 1/2 cup milk. You know how I love to add a dash of chili powder to everything? I swear they do something like that to Good Earth tea. It tastes like my ideal tea. A tea shop would be hard-pressed to brew me something better. I used to be a fan of the Starbucks Chai Latte, but no longer can I have that poor excuse for sweet & spicy & creamy tea after having Good Earth Tea. I also love the Organic Caffeine-Free version of the Original Good Earth flavor, which uses Red Rooibos* tea instead of black tea. What are the other ingredients?

Organic Red Rooibos, Organic Spice Blend, Organic Chicory Root, Organic Rosehips, Organic Honeybush, Natural Flavor, Organic Lemongrass, Organic Peppermint, Organic Chamomile, Organic Orange Oil and Organic Orange Peel.

*Red Rooibos is a red tea from Africa. I've had it by itself from other brands, and it's pretty good as a standalone, too.

And let me tell you this: after drinking the Good Earth Chai, I could barely drink the Starbucks version of a chai latte. It was worth bringing two boxes to Japan with me in my suitcase!

On top of the excellent tea taste, Good Earth teas try to be environmentally friendly, given that they're individually packaged bags of tea. The company makes their packaging from 100% recycled materials, and uses soy-based inks.

On a semi-related note, when you make hot chocolate, please use common sense and add milk to the powder packet instead of water. It will taste 100% better, believe me.

Spaghetti, Sans Spaghetti

2009-03-08T18:29:00.004+09:00

Growing up, "spaghetti" always meant mom would doctor a can of store-brought Prego with browned ground meat, onions, garlic, and a variety of vegetables. Thanks to her, I always start every dish with garlic and onions. She might add a bit of sugar or salt. It always tasted the same, and it's the only sauce we ever had accompanying pasta. It was sometimes watery, and never as tasty as in the Italian restaurants.

In late high school, I took to piling my spaghetti on top of salad veggies. This made the vegetables more palatable. At the height of the "carbs are evil" media blitz, I began forgoing noodles altogether, and putting the sauce directly on top of the salad (usually lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and cheese). I still prefer this method of downing raw vegetables, but I have not yet acted upon it in Okinawa.

Which brings me to another question: What is the difference between spaghetti sauce and chili? Meat sauce and chili? Tomato sauce and spaghetti sauce? Spaghetti sauce and meat sauce? Especially made local (Hawaiian) style, the different varieties are probably pretty interchangeable: all are a slightly tomatoey excuse for eating ground beef. With chili, I suppose you sometimes had the red beans, which most of my friends would pick out because for some reason they hated beans--I, on the other hand, hated meat).

I believe that after several attempts at tomato-based meat sauces, I have finally got it right. It is a big improvement over my mother's spaghetti, at any rate. (Spaghetti was probably my most-requested, and most-favorite food growing up. I always added extra sugar to my sauce...and I have always liked soft vegetables melding into sauce like beef stew, pot roast, spaghetti, etc.)

Anyway, I have a few slight edges over my mother with respect to the preparation of this favorite childhood food of mine. I've lived with an "Italian" (in scarequotes because this "Italian" only ever lived in Italy for medical school) for a few months, and I had the chance to both observe and taste some of the delicious pasta sauces that tasted better than any Italian restaurant on Kauai, and very different in theory from what came out of my mother's kitchen. I also have that vast and wonderful resource the internet. Most European-based pasta sauces are much simpler to prepare than I ever could have thought. With quality ingredients, simple can indeed be grand. However, I've recently been experimenting with so much Indian food, I can't stay away from the spices. And this, I believe, is where to find the terrific flavor I love so much. The final edge: a (for practical purposes) unlimited budget for herbs, spices, and other ingredients. What did I do?

3-5 T. olive oil
277yen worth of leanish ground beef
298 yen of little sea scallops
1 onion 50yen
1 entire head garlic (~a dozen cloves)
2 small green peppers 128 yen
2 Japanese eggplant 128 yen
6 shiitake mushrooms 258 yen
140yen of micro cherry tomatoes (about 1 pound? or is it more like 1/2 pound?)
1 can diced tomatoes
1/4 of a quart of previously frozen ginger chicken carrot pumpkin soup

You could really use any vegetables that you personally like in your tomato sauce. It's a good way for getting rid of odd leftover vegetables you may have sitting in your fridge. These are just my favorites. I imagine spinach could be nice and healthy and melt down to nothing in the sauce. Or no vegetables at all, if meat is your thing.

100 yen of sweet basil, about 20 leaves
several tablespoons cumin
black pepper to taste (1 T.)
chili powder to taste (1/2 t.)
at least 1 tablespoon paprika (has nice red color without the hotness)
1/4 t. tumeric
1 t. oregano (not sure how much I like it, so I only add a bit)
small sprinkle thyme (I hate it, but I feel bad that I never use my jar of it, so I add just a little bit)
1 T. salt, or to taste
2 bullion cubes
1/4 cup sugar, or to taste (add it with the tomatoes, unless you like your sauce really sour)

Dice garlic. Sweat on low heat in a large, flat, open-mouthed bowl-pan in olive oil. Using a large-mouthed pan reduces cooking time! Chop onion and add a bit at a time. While it's cooking, add cumin, black pepper, chili powder, paprika, tumeric to ground beef. Mix it up.
When garlic and onions are translucent, add meat and spices. Brown the meat, breaking it apart into tiny pieces with a wooden spoon (I dislike chunks of meat. I prefer it to flavor the sauce). Take it all out of the pan and hold it in a separate bowl.
Add salt to scallops. Add them to the already-hot pan with a bit of olive oil. Fry them for a few seconds until a bit undercooked. You can eat scallops raw, and they get stringy if overcooked. Save them to add to the finished sauce at the very end. Remove and set aside. Add meat onion garlic back to pan.
On medium high heat, chop eggplant into 1/2" pieces. Add. Chop shiitake into 1/2" pieces. Add. Dice bell pepper. Add. Mix all every time you add a new batch. Cook.
Remove tops from tomatoes, slice them in half. Add. Stir. Add canned tomatoes. Stir in sugar at the same time as the tomatoes. Add all other herbs and spices except for fresh basil (oregano, thyme, parsley more cumin or whatever you want). Stir, reduce.
Let it simmer on low for at least half an hour or so, until all the vegetables and meat come together into a single stewy tomato sauce. I covered it and added the previously made chicken carrot kabocha soup and bullion cubes. When I saw it was too watery, I left it uncovered and evaporated away the liquid. I like my sauce full of chunky vegetables, and not watery at all. Remember, it won't have any pasta to absorb the liquid. Just lettuce. Plus, if it's chunkier, the flavor will be more condensed and overall more tasty.
At the very end, add salt and pepper to taste. Then stir in scallops and torn basil. Serve over torn lettuce salad. I recommend a mild lettuce such as butter lettuce (which I just so happened to have in my fridge). Also great as a sandwich. Or, of course, with pasta. Or plain . . .

The sauce will probably be better after resting a day in the fridge--if you can wait that long. I swore I wasn't hungry when I made this, because I'd just gone to a curry buffet (Indian, Thai, and Japanese curries!) and stuffed myself to the point of "it hurts!" Then I'd seen a beautiful pastry filled with whipped cream, covered in blueberries and raspberries. Then I'd seen a horn danish filled with strawberries and whipped cream. Already full, I ate them. I told myself I would cook spaghetti for tomorrow and the rest of the week, but alas, I ended up eating two bowls of the stuff. At least it has lots of vegetables?

Midnight "Snack"

2009-03-07T09:30:00.004+09:00

My friends sent me a box full of American food for my birthday! Included was a bowl of apple jacks. Hence I ate cereal for the first time in over six months. And there were some "Exotic Vegetable Chips," which were a really good excuse for eating potato chips. A little harder in consistency, a little tastier, and very colorful. I always liked those.

There was also a big jar of Nutella! I have long loved Nutella, but in Okinawa, it has been a long lost love. I made a delicious nutella and lilikoi sandwich on toasted brown bread. The tangy kick of the lilikoi and the crunch of its seeds were the perfect offset to the heavy, creamy, chocolately, cloying nutella. Would definitely do that again! Sorry, I scarfed it down before I thought to take pictures.

...and then I was still hungry, because I was up late watching cooking videos from vahrehvah.com. I've decided that Indian food is the best food to eat out, because it's so complicated to prepare (and OH SO TASTY). I will be frequenting Indian restaurants more often (in the states, where they exist).

SO, I made some carrots and onions with pineapple, inspired by the Indian use of many many spices. This did not turn out very deliciously. Will probably not do this again--something is missing. Perhaps protein?

3 carrots
1/2 onion
1/4 of a pineapple
olive oil (should've used butter)
maple soy milk
thai sweet chili sauce (you know the one--red with the rooster on it)
cumin
coriander
cardamom
garam masala
tumeric
cinnamon
nutmeg
clove
allspice
1 cube bullion

I first sauteed the onions with some of the spices, then added carrots, then milk, then steamed it for a few minutes with the chili sauce and bullion, then added the rest of the spices, then the pineapple at the end. This particular pineapple was a bit too sour for me to eat plain, but it stayed sour in this concoction. I'm eating it anyway--there's so much of it!

Anyway, all that food made for a very large midnight snack!

Carrots & Onions, simple asian style

2009-03-06T21:00:00.005+09:00

Soft, sweet, and slightly salty. I made this one on the run and out the door!

It's a "stir fry," but I don't believe in wokking onions, because they just get burnt without getting soft and sweet. Same with carrots. So, here is my asian sautee of sweet root vegetables, adaptable to pretty much anything:

peanut oil
1 medium carrot
1/2 onion
sesame oil
soy sauce
sugar (you probably don't need it if you don't have my sweet tooth)
a few big pinches of sesame seeds

Heat peanut oil in a heavy pan. Chop onion. As you chop them, add them to the pan in batches, so it stays hot all the time. Do the same to the carrot. Small pieces cook faster, and that's what we're going for here. Cover for a few minutes and wash the dishes.
When vegetables are about soft enough, stir in a dash each of sesame oil, soy sauce, and the optional pinch of sugar. Mix in sesame seeds for garnish and extra flavor. Serve!

BLT in Okinawa, with extras

2009-03-06T20:26:00.008+09:00

This is the first time I've been in a rush to cook dinner. This is also the first time I realized it may be possible to make my favorite American home foods in my Okinawan kitchen. I'd just picked up some lovely produce from JA, and I decided I needed to eat some uncooked vegetables. They're harder to chew, and they're not as mellow, but they're (supposedly) better for you because the cellulose walls, vitamins, and nutrients haven't been broken down by cooking heat. I disguised them with the clever ruse of bacon, cheese, and eggs. Not that I don't love these

Micro Cherry Tomatoes (see chopstick for size comparison), a big bag of cuteness of

One of my schools gave me fresh butter lettuce from their garden!

Here's my version of a BLT in about ten minutes:

cheese
tomato
1 slice bread
bacon
lettuce
egg
salt, pepper, basil flakes

First, to sate my appetite (or maybe stimulate it--tangy things will do that!) I ate a lilikoi. As one Kauai adventure tour guide once said to a ten-year-old me, a lilikoi is nature's juice box! Also known as passion fruit (ポッション　フルツ）, lilikoi is one of those extraordinary flavors you usually don't find in a grocery store. Fresh ones are hard to come by, and ones as big as my hand for 100yen each were too good to pass up! I cut off the top and eat the lilikoi out of the "cup" with a spoon:

Meanwhile, fry bacon on low heat to make it extra crispy. If you use high, or even medium heat, the bacon will curl up and the fat won't dissolve. It'll just get soft and burn quickly. Bacon = low heat! It's worth the extra time. Bacon in Japan does exist. It comes packaged in 250g packages of neatly arranged half-slices. This is about half a pack:

About 10 minutes later, when brown and crisp, remove from pan and set aside.

Prepare your cheese! I love the taste of smoked cheese. Heck, I just love cheese. Cheese in Japan is very expensive, and comes in bite-sized morsels wrapped to resemble candy. And, all of it, no matter what, is simply called "cheese." There are no varieties of cheese. I am very disappointed in this. However, this cheese is a close approximation to smoked gouda, in miniature. Mini cheese:I sliced a few pieces to melt onto my bread:

Then I popped the bread into the "fish grill" part of my stove. This is a wire rack with flames that broil from the top perimeter. It's very useful (and FAST) for toasting bread. My cheese didn't appreciably melt, but what the heck, it's Japanese cheese, right? I halved some micro cherry tomatoes and added those: (notice how MINI everything is! Oh, Japan)

In the unwashed bacon pan, crack an egg. Sprinkle on some salt, pepper, and basil flakes. By the time you're done, so is the egg!
Slide the egg on top of the bread cheese tomato bacon layers:
Add lettuce as the top layer. I like open-face sandwiches, because I don't especially like the dryness of bread. This one required a knife and fork. I ate it with some fresh pineapple, a very good choice. Whoever invented the ham and pineapple pizza had the right idea!

After I'd mangled half of it:

Of note: this brand of preserves labels their stuff "Blueberry Jam," but actually puts blueberry JELLY inside the jar!
jelly, not jam (but I'm not complaining too much)

Mole Chili Portuguese Bean Soup Conglomeration

2009-02-27T22:30:00.005+09:00

My first ever attempt to make chili from scratch wasn't very guided. I made it on the principles of spaghetti sauce, soup, and Indian food, coupled with all the lore I'd heard from the frequent chili cookoff contests in the media. I get the idea that chili elitists hate beans, and use only meat. Then there's the meatless vegetarian chili enthusiasts. I hear the latest chili contest winner made pumpkin chili, which sounds like something up my alley. Another cook swears by chocolate as the secret ingredient. Many believe you need to let the chili "rest" for a day or two in the fridge for perfect flavor. I made a combination of all these floating ideas through a very complex process spanning several days. It began with a trip to the store to get all the vegetables on sale. I used:

A whole head of garlic (10 cloves?)
1 yellow onion
2 ears fresh corn kernels
2 packets mushrooms (shiitake and that flatter flowery one...?)
cilantro (5 stems)
1 carrot
1 bag (about 4 cups?) dried kidney beans, soaked overnight
297yen worth of lean ground beef (maybe a cup?)
1 can crushed tomatoes
1 can whole stewed tomatoes
1 can Japanese spaghetti sauce base

I believe I added these spices at various intervals throughout the cooking process:
3 cubes bullion (chicken and beef)
2 cups chicken soup (from yesterday)
4 cups water
4+ tablespoon salt
4+ tablespoon maple syrup
1/2 cup (maybe more?) sugar
2 t. cumin
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (it scared me at first because it made the whole place smell like dessert)
whole red hot chili pepper
1 teaspoon red chili powder
2 teaspoon paprika

At least a teaspoon each of:
cinnamon
coriander
nutmeg
clove
allspice
parsley
black pepper
white pepper
tumeric

I honestly probably don't remember everything I put in the pot. My basic method:

sweat minced garlic in olive oil on lowest flame. Add diced onions. Add lots of cumin, paprika, less coriander, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove. Add meat. Brown meat on medium heat. Add tomato products. Add sugar. Cut carrots into small pieces, add. Add quartered mushrooms. Add beans. Add everything else, tasting as you go. Next time I will probably use a more even meat to bean ratio. It's harder to make things tasty when you have SO many beans and not so much meat, especially since chili kind of lacks the strong spice base of Indian food...I didn't want my chili to taste Indian. Still pretty tasty, but I did have to keep adding salty seasonings at the end like bullion and salt. I didn't know I would end up with so many beans! Add cilantro near the end.

Serve over white rice with plenty of grated cheese.

To concentrate the flavor, next time I will not add as much water or broth. I will use more tomato product, and also real tomatoes. as well as cannned corn, which I believe is sweeter than fresh corn, which really is best eaten as buttery corn on the cob. I might not add the chocolate in as great a quantity. I will use more onion if I'm going to make so much. Perhaps some bacon. Cooking is still a big experiment, and I need experience. I'm glad it came out tasting good, but it was missing something. That something was satisfied by a sprinkle of grated cheese (the only type of cheese they sell in Japan, I might add). With cheese, perfectly acceptable, even good enough to be eaten very slowly, savored, and enjoyed. Tried it out on a few friends tonight because I made so much. They ate it, so it must be all right!

Peanut Butter Banana Cream Cheese Honey Toast

2009-02-26T07:47:00.005+09:00

Toast and slightly warm bananas. Half with chunky natural peanut butter and honey. Half with cream cheese and cinnamon sugar. Something I frequently enjoy variations on for breakfast and snacks. Also popular with small children.

Chicken Winter Vegetable Soup

2009-02-25T00:44:00.008+09:00

Feeling a bit sick, so I made chicken soup with winter vegetables. Chicken Vegetable soup is really just about the easiest things you can make. I don't know why anyone would want a can of soup full of preservatives and lacking in vegetably nutrients when they can just throw a bunch of ingredients in a pot, add some salt, and serve. It's bound to make you much better than anything from a can with a shelf life of several years.

Seriously, it really is that easy.

Hot and steamy chicken winter-vegetable soup with chicken breast chunks, celery, kabocha (Japanese Pumpkin), carrot, fresh corn kernels, crimini mushrooms, garlic, onions, and cilantro.
I cut all the ingredients into small pieces, threw it in the pot, added enough water to cover everything, and let it simmer for a long time. You can add rice if you want to make juk/chuk/congee. Oh, and add some salt and whatever spices you want. I personally like miso, basil, and black pepper. I may also have added a bit of cinnamon, nutmeg, 2 bay leaves, and coriander. However, the natural goodness of the chicken and vegetables makes it unnecessary to add anything but salt if you're not in an herby mood.

Just after adding the mushrooms to the pot:
There is literally an entire wall of miso at every grocery store. I have no idea how to choose the "good" miso, but this one tastes pretty good, even if it doens't taste like your typical US restaurant dissolved-powder miso soup. Miso is very versatile and very healthy. Many Okinwans swear by it for breakfast. They also sometimes serve a spoonful of miso with rice for lunch. Add a scoop of it to stir-fries, or use some in your next marinade. Very versatile.I like this miso:

I was so excited to see fresh corn on the cob! This is the first time I've ever seen it on the shelves in Okinawa! At 100 yen/ear I got two. I like the way it's wrapped, with a peekaboo exposure so I can check the quality of the kernels on the ear I want to buy:

In conclusion, Join me--Let's boycott canned chicken soup as a cure for colds!

Japanese School Lunch PICTURES

2009-02-25T00:28:00.010+09:00

Finally, some pictures of my much-talked-about obsession:　

brown sugar bread in plastic:

ポタト　コロケ　Potato Croquette:

白花まめ汁　White Bean Soup (surprisingly lacking white beans! lots of potatoes and carrots, though!):

春豆と　ほれんしょと　しいたけと　にんじんと　牛肉　サラダ　glass noodle, spinach, shiitake mushroom, carrot, and beef salad:

Cutting Garlic and Onions

2009-02-25T00:14:00.005+09:00

Once you dice garlic this way, you never go back. It's much faster and more precise than doing the mad dance with the knife I used to do. It seriously takes less than a third of the time, and the diced pieces come out more uniform and organized than my old method. How do you do it?

With a sharp knife (I use my giant kitchen knife), slice the garlic, not cutting all the way through to the root end. I find it easier to hold the garlic on its side between my left thumb and forefinger, bringing the knife down between them to slice. Try to start with the "round" side (there is usually at least one flat surface you can lay the garlic down on).

Then, place the garlic down on one of its flat side. Make slices the other way, not going all the way through the root end, kind of like a checkerboard. I find this easiest while squeezing together the already sliced parts so that they don't fray when you slice the other way.

Then, dice, beginning from the end:

Voila! Beautiful pieces of diced garlic!

If you're picky or if you're not in a rush, you can cut the garlic in half first, then remove the green sprouty part by digging it out with your fingers or a knife. Proceed as before, using the sliced edge as the flat side.

This technique also works well with onion, but cut them in half and remove the rooty ends first. With onions, you can also eliminate step 1. Just go straight to making the cross-ways slices, since onions already have natural layers that act as your hatch-ways slices.

May your chopping and dicing be forever faster and more precise, henceforth!

Mister Donut

2009-02-22T16:44:00.006+09:00

One of the few, if not the only, places in Nago one can buy a donut as Westerners know it. They have a high-traffic location at the entrance to Jusco, and they keep changing up their donuts. This month the featured donut appears to be the Easter Egg donut:

I haven't personally tried it, but I am personally not a fan of Mister Donut. There are much better desserts out there, if you ask me. The donuts look pretty, and they appear to be the donuts you grew up with, but they are usually too dry and cake-like for me. I guess I'm not a fan of dry, dense, donuts. They offer an assortment of 6 donut holes in a cute little box for 210yen. Dry. I've also tried their matcha-frosted donut that looks like a baby's teething ring. Mister Donut appears to be the premier donut source in Okinawa food courts and the like, so I've had it a number of times, but I've never been impressed. I'd rather go to a bakery and eat a pastry or something.

Despite my unenthusiastic opinion, quite a few of my American friends regularly patronize Mister Donut. They even have point cards, which allow you to win prizes in return for loyal patronage. Real food is also on the menu. They have ramen, won ton, and soup. I personally would not eat real food from a donut shop. The dishes I saw looked rather plain and uninteresting.

I do like it that they give you real glasses of water, with ice cubes. And if you eat your donut there, they will put it on a pretty white ceramic plate. And they'll come clear your dishes for you before you have a chance to get up and put it in the trash can yourself. Yeah Japanese service.

They also greet you from behind the racks of donuts with "Irrashaimasse, dozo!" Irrashaimasse is the standard welcome greeting from store workers, and dozo can be translated as, "please help yourself," "after you," "please go ahead of me," "here you are" (when serving a drink or giving someone something). I found it especially warming to hear, even if the donuts aren't stellar. Don't get me wrong, the product isn't bad. It just isn't good.

Overall: D
If you're a donut shop, mediocre donuts don't cut it

Thai-Inspired Omlette

2009-02-21T16:51:00.005+09:00

I'm not entirely sure why this omlette is Thai-inspired, but I definitely beat in an enormous dollop of that sweet reddish-orange chili sauce they put on Thai BBQ Chicken. Doesn't everyone love that sauce? I've been so excited about it since I picked it up at JUSCO, and this is the first opportunity I've had to make it. So, omlette and soup for dinner!

It came out tasting much better than omlettes I've made in the past, possibly because I added a lot more flavor than my usual breakfast omlettes. Omlettes are usually one of those foods that I can eat a few bites of before getting turned off and stopping because it's not tasty enough. Fried egg by itself just isn't that interesting. This one was different. And very quick to make, especially considering that it normally takes me at least an hour to cook my dinners.

Thai-Inspired Omlette with Bacon and Bell Pepper:
Total time: 5 minutes
(serves 1)

half slice bacon (they sell it that way in Japan)
olive oil
2 eggs
thai sweet chili sauce
chinese soy sauce
dried basil flakes
1 mini green bell pepper, about 1/4 cup (again, Japan-sized!)
white pepper

Chop up half a slice of bacon and sautee in a bit of olive oil on low heat.
While bacon is cooking, beat two eggs with thai sweet chili sauce, chinese soy sauce, basil flakes, and white pepper. Chop up one small green or red sweet bell pepper.
Add chopped bell pepper to cooked bacon and olive oil. Cook about a minute. Pour egg mixture over all. Cook. Push back edges of omlette and tilt pan so that egg runs to exposed pan surface. Fold into a nice omlette shape when egg is mostly cooked. Serve.

I ate it with a bowl of Sweet Potato Carrot Ginger Miso soup I had saved in the freezer. Hit the spot.

The Secret to Crispy Moist French Toast

2009-02-21T12:56:00.005+09:00

I eat French Toast for breakfast at least once or twice per week. I recently discovered the secret to making excellent, crispy French Toast that isn't burnt!

FLOUR!

Yes, just add some flour to your liquid mixture.

I've found that the soft, perfectly square-shaped Japanese bread works quite well, whether sliced thick or thin. It requires a minimum of dishes (fork, bowl, and frying pan) and a minimum of ingredients for such a yummy thing. Here is a quick way to make a good, hot breakfast (or snack, or dessert) for yourself in 5 minutes, prep time AND cook time included:

Tools:
fork
smallish, shallow bowl/dish, about the size of 1 slice of bread
heavy skillet, about the size of a slice of bread or bigger

Necessary Ingredients:
1 egg
dash of flour (about 1-2 tablespoon)
large dash of milk or dairy creamer (about 1-2 tablespoon)
1 slice bread (I like Hawaiian Sweetbread best. Japanese bread is pretty good, too)
pat of butter (or other oil--but butter is the best!)

Bettering Ingredients (I always use them all):
dash of vanilla extract
2 shakes red chili powder
3 shakes salt
4 shakes cinnamon and nutmeg or to taste
maple syrup/whipped cream/crushed nuts/jam/powdered sugar/other toppings of choice

How-to:

Beat together all ingredients except bread in a shallow, flat plate/bowl.
Dredge bread in liquid. First put in slice and wiggle it around, poking holes in bread with fork. Flip bread and wiggle bowl, trying to saturate liquid completely into the bread. One slice, even a thin slice, should absorb all the liquid. Try wiggling the dish, wiggling the bread around with the fork, and poking holes in the slice to absorb it all.
Meanwhile, melt butter in pan on medium-high heat. When hot, slide bread from dish to pan. Pour excess egg mixture on top of bread (there shouldn't be much). Sizzle until golden brown and crispy, approximately 2 minutes. Flip bread to other side with fork. Sizzle until golden brown and crispy. Serve with maple syrup.

Crispy, chewy, fluffy, moist, and sweet!

Cafe Rainbow Bridge

2009-02-21T09:34:00.012+09:00

Cafe Rainbow Bridge is a beautifully earthily decorated restaurant in Chatan, Okinawa. You access the place by frolicking down winding (naturally formed?) steps of porous black rock, to reach the door with a little waterfall and fountain just outside. The restaurant appears to be set on the edge of a steep, black rock cliff. However, I have only been there at night, so I cannot say for certain. The setting is lovely, at any rate. It's the perfect place to discuss a good book.

And Rainbow Bridge just so happens to be the location of our monthly book club meeting; this month we discussed Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. I loved it and I still live in its world. Others abhorred its apparent lack of ending. I found it funny that they thought it was inconclusive. For me, the story was like a rope unravelling then ravelling back together again.

The place is made entirely of wood, with raised tatami platforms for guests to sit on in the Japanese style. Interesting Okinawan art decorates the walls, the bathroom sink basin features a fiberglass inlaid rainbow. The entrance has a display of handmade Okinawan crafts such as fabric slippers, keychains, cell phone decorations, hair accessories, and purses. The menu proudly proclaims, "No Smile, No Life!"

Along with entrees and meals they serve Okinawan specialty dishes such as sesame tofu, goya champuru, fuu champuru (250-1000yen), a variety of coffee/latte/milk/fancystuff drinks for 400-450yen, desserts such as raw chocolate gateau cake (420 yen), New York cheesecake (420 yen), honey toast (520 yen), pizzas (1000-1300 yen), sandwiches, pasta (600-1000 yen), and soft drinks. Not your typical Okinawan restaurant. Then again, it is located much further south than where I live, and much closer too the American military base influence.

I had the "Avo Taco Rice" this time, which is taco rice with the addition of avocado. Taco rice is a uniquely Okinawan invention, and a much-loved Okinawan food. It's basically an American taco with rice instead of tortilla. The main components are white rice and ground beef with taco meat seasoning. The better versions will give you shredded lettuce and tomato. If you're lucky, you'll get some shredded cheese (Japanese cheese is so often so disappointing). This one came with the added bonus of salsa, avocado, and a single dorito triangle chip, broken into smaller triangles for decoration. 600 Yen. I did not like the taste of the taco meat. It tasted "beefy" and there were lumps of salt. The avocado and cheese saved it from being completely mediocre.

I was still hungry after my taco rice, so I ordered the honey toast, which cost almost as much as my taco rice (520 yen)! It was delicious. Then again, it's hard to mess up honey toast, which I believe is a Japanese invention. It was not quite like the honey toast at Shokudo in Hawaii, but it was still tasty. There was a large scoop of vanilla ice cream, and small triangles of toast saturated with butter and honey. Please make this at home.

In the past, I have had the Margherita Pizza, the creamy tomato sauce pasta with bacon and mushrooms, and the tofu salad with sesame dressing, and Okinawan sesame tofu.

The pizza has remained popular over the months with book club members because of the stark dearth of pizza in Okinawa. Cheese is hard enough to come by; pizza is an impossibly expensive and mayonnaise-laden exotic foreign food. Here the pizza is fairly reasonable, and is actually prepared in a Western fashion, with tomato sauce, basil, and cheese. The crust is very thin and crispy. 1000 yen. There is also a ham and salad pizza, which doesn't look like it has as much cheese as the margherita, and an Okinawan special pizza.

The Creamy Tomato Sauce Pasta with Bacon and Mushrooms was disappointing. Don't those ingredients sound delicious and promising to you? I have never had good non-Asian pasta in Japan. The sauce wasn't creamy at all. In fact, it was barely there. And I don't think they used tomatoes--it tasted a bit like canned tomato sauce, no frills added. The least they could have done was add some garlic, onions, basil, oregano, anything! I don't think cooking in that fashion is part of the Japanese cultural knowledge base. I don't blame them, they make Japanese food quite well. The mushrooms were disappointingly of the Enoki variety; not what I expect in "creamy tomato sauce" pasta. The bacon was all right, at least it was there. 800 yen. Disappointing, but all right if you're expecting the Japanese version of Italian food.

The best thing I've had at Rainbow Cafe was the tofu sesame salad. It was a bed of greens with chunks of medium firm tofu, covered with sesame dressing and sprinkled with sesame seeds. I love sesame dressing. 650 yen. However, because this dish could have been made at home with only three ingredients (tofu, lettuce, and sesame dressing), I have to deduct points on the goodness scale. Granted, it was very nicely presented, healthy, tasteful and tasty. I would eat it again.

I also enjoyed the tofu with sesame/peanut oil. I'm not sure what the Japanese name is, since it's always in Kanji and I can't read it. The tofu is of a special variety that is a bit like a cross between very chewy mochi and gelatinous tofu. The consistency is a bit gummier and firmer than mochi, because it's actually tofu! They always serve it with this special peanutty oil/sauce. You can buy containers of it of various qualities from all supermarkets in the tofu section here. As one friend said, "It's so weird--but somehow so good!"

Of course, I also enjoyed the Raw Chocolate Gateau Cake (420 yen). Rich, deep, dark, Western -style and delicious. It even had a bit of creme fraiche (or perhaps it was just whipping cream). Maybe it's because I've been starved for real chocolate desserts, but this was great after the fluffy Japanese sugarless cakes I've been eating. It would have benefitted quite a bit from some vanilla ice cream or raspberry coulis. It was a bit dry, and could've used a contrast of tang or lightness from a saucy element. It was still good. However, this time I decided to try the Honey Toast. Next time I may try the homemade New York Cheesecake.

Overall rating: I would go back. Good decor and ambience. Know what foods to order and you'll be golden. Prices decent.

School Lunch for US

2009-02-21T09:18:00.003+09:00

This article in the New York Times screams resoundingly truthful in my ears, especially after experiencing the wonderfully orchestrated, wholesome meal that is the Japanese school lunch. All my suspicions about the supreme processed ickiness of US school lunch is confirmed and condoned by US policy. It's disgusting.

All of my public schools at least had a cafeteria, but even my affluent private high school served rather unhealthy items for lunch and snacks. Fruits and vegetables were definitely lacking in any quantity, much less the 50% of the tray they fill in many of my Japanese school lunches.

I remember that when I was in school, lunch would be the only meal some children would eat, because their parents were derelict or poor or just plain unresponsible. Some of the kids were on the free lunch or subsidized lunch program and they had to make the meal last them until the next day at school breakfast. I was such a snob that I usually didn't eat all my lunch, deeming it fatty, nutritionless, and disgusting as early as middle school.

Eventually, my middle school did create a Salad Bar Island as an alternative to the hot lunch. This was pretty popular, but lacked balance as it did not contain starch or meat! I usually brought home lunch, only occassionally getting the school lunch when I knew I would be able to palate the menu of the day.

The US should look to the Japanese system of lunch distribution if they need a new structure. Under this system, not every school has to be outfitted with a cafeteria. The food will be prepared in a central cafeteria and delivered to the schools at lunchtime. I do wonder, though, if American students will have the discipline not to pillage the best parts of the lunch, hogging and squirreling and perhaps even deliberately spilling the food for the sole purpose of making a mess and causing trouble.

By the way, yesterday's lunch was curried chow mein, chicken peroshki (a russian bao or meat-filled bun is the best way I can desribe it), salad with creamy dressing, peaches, and pineapple, and a small packet of salted almonds. The kids went nuts for the almonds!

I also really enjoyed Thursday's lunch: there was a cooked green bean salad with sesame dressing, loaded with sesame seeds, fried rice, and white fish katsu that was cooked in what I can best describe as oyakodon style, fried with a clear brown gravy, plenty of onions and big chunks of mushroom, and egg. There was also half a banana and milk, of course.

I dread ever becoming a teacher in an American school and eating the school lunch.

Chicken Vegetable Penne Casserole

2009-02-16T11:23:00.006+09:00

When I went home for winter holidays in December, my guy made a concoction of cream cheese, parmesan, and gouda with mushrooms, baked with spaghetti. As you can imagine, it was extremely tasty, what with the immense quantities of cheese. You might call it a cheese cake. It actually came out tasting rather like the tuna and green pea casseroles my mother used to make when I was growing up.

Since then, I've been keeping the casserole idea in the back of my mind. I picked up a hard-to-find can of cream of mushroom soup last week, and this week, I created my chicken vegetable casserole. I guess you could call this the healthy version, since it features so many vegetables. I'm not sure about the nutritional information in one cream of mushroom soup can, but that's really all the fat you need. One thing my casserole lacks is the delicious cheddar cheese or crispy fried onion crinkle topping. I really miss cheese. It is so essential to most foods that I love. Nevertheless, I can live without it, and this dish still tastes good without cheese.

The beauty of this dish is that you could probably use any vegetable that happens to be on sale or that you happen to have left over in your fridge. It's also quite easy. The basic idea is to barely cook the pasta, set it aside, then barely cook the rest of the ingredients and mix it all together with creamy soup. Bake everything, top it with something crunchy or unhealthy like cheese, chips, fried onion crisps. or bread crumbs. I recommend using at least some sweet vegetables, such as peas or carrots, in addition to whatever else you want to throw in. I also added some cinnamon and coriander. I bet some nutmeg would be good as well. American food is so bland compared to all the Indian food I've been making recently. The contrast is startling. Onto the recipe--

Ingredients:
Cubed chicken (350 g) and cubed vegetables, cut to about twice the size of a pea
1 can cream of mushroom soup
+ 1 can milk
1 diced onion
4 diced cloves garlic
small package penne pasta
chicken bullion
1 t. dried basil
salt and white pepper/black pepper to taste

My Vegetables:
3 small green bell pepper - 100 yen
1 carrot - 30 yen
1 package green beans - 198 yen
1/4 package parsley - 25 yen
1 head broccoli - 158 yen
6 shiitake - 128 yen

What to do:

Boil water, cook pasta until a bit under al dente firmness. Drain and rinse with cold water to prevent pasta from getting too soft. Preheat oven to 350F.
Sweat garlic and onion in olive oil. Add cream of mushroom soup plus 1 can milk. Add carrot, broccoli, and chicken. When chicken is halfway cooked, add remaining vegetables. Season with salt, pepper, herbs, and bullion to taste. Mix in penne pasta when chicken is just barely undercooked.
Transfer to 9 x 13" casserole dish and bake for 30 minutes.

Quite healthy and easy to eat because there are so many vegetables in the creamy sauce. I just wish I had some cheese!

Creamy Rice Pudding

2009-02-12T15:39:00.006+09:00

At a lack for what to do with leftover rice? Have a hankering for rice pudding? Need a somewhat healthy dessert? Need a dessert that tastes as creamy as the restaurant variety?

I suffered from all of the above problems, so I made rice pudding! It tastes extraordinarily creamy and rich, and is far easier than other homemade rice puddings that require you to cook the rice in milk.

Surprise! It tastes equally as good with leftover rice, cooked in plain water. It is extremely versatile, and even works with brown rice! Just make sure to use short or medium grain rice. If you're in Japan, like me, then this shouldn't be a problem.

The taste of sweetness and the taste of cream are my two favorite tongue tantalizers. When I get cravings, it is always for sweet, creamy things. This easy dessert hits the bar. I've determined that this penchant of mine is the reason I don't care for Manjula's Indian food recipes--she professes that she loves food sour and hot. Hot sour soup (Chinese) is pretty much the worst thing you could treat me to in a Chinese restaurant. I'm not going to use her recipes anymore. I like my Indian food to have some creamy to balance the bite.

Anyway, this rice pudding recipe is so good I've made it several times. And eaten it all myself! It uses only a few ingredients, all of which are usually on hand in the kitchen:

Ingredients:
1.5 cups cooked Rice
2 cups Milk
1/4 cup Sugar
pinch of salt
1 Egg, beaten
Vanilla Extract

You can also add these optional ingredients, in any combination you see fit (I like them all!):
1 pat butter
Cinnamon (will make the pudding darker in color)
Nutmeg (will make the pudding darker in color)
Raisins (add before last step for plumper raisins)
Almond Extract
pinch of Chili Powder
Bananas (add after the last step)

Directions:

Combine rice, milk, vanilla, sugar, and salt in heavy saucepan over low/medium heat. Stir until mixture thickens, about 10 to 15 minutes. If you don't stir, the rice will stick to the bottom and burn! Also, do not boil the milk to death, or it will curdle and result in yucky little cottage-cheeselike curds floating in yellowish watery liquid.
Pour some of the hot mixture into a cup with the beaten egg. Mix well to heat the egg a little. On low heat, stir the egg mixture back into the main pot. Make sure to do this step or the egg will cook and create stringy egg white pieces in the pudding! Cook for about 2 minutes. Serve warm.

Isn't it easy?

I also made bread pudding the other day. It features much the same ingredients, except that it is baked in the oven. And it's so easy! Since I wasn't using a recipe, I could make it just the way I like it: extremely moist and dripping with creaminess, with a crispy top. If there's one thing I hate, it's dry bread pudding! Some of the best restaurants have completely turned me off of them with their dessicated bread puddings. A good bread pudding needs to be dripping with milky sauce, and does not need extra saliva to moisten it before swallowing.

Ingredients:
1/2 loaf stale french bread, cubed
1/4 cup sugar
2 cups milk
vanilla extract
raisins
1 egg
pinch of salt
pinch of chili powder

Method:

Preheat oven to 350F. Beat sugar into egg. Beat with milkk, salt, chili powder, vanilla.
Pour over cubed french bread. Turn, mix, shake, and do whatever you have to do to make each bread morsel sopping wet. There should be a lot of extra liquid on the bottom of the pan, at least halfway up. If not, add more milk. Toss raisins inside the mixture (do not leave exposed on top--they will dry out and burn!). Cover.
Bake covered at 350F (or a little under) for about 40 minutes. Bake uncovered for last 5 minutes for a crispy top.

Mattar Paneer

2009-02-11T10:50:00.003+09:00

Mattar paneer, take two! The second attempt is much better, but still doesn't taste as good as the restaurants. However, I discovered that avocado is the perfect silky-smooth complement! I love avocado. I could make a meal out of straight up avocado.

The paneer in my version is actually tofu, because they don't sell paneer in Okinawa, and because I am not ready to attempt to make my own paneer (yet?). By the way, paneer is a type of hard cheese that you can make by boiling milk with lemon juice, then squeezing dry the curds that form. Mattar is green peas. I used a recipe from Manjula's Kitchen, complete with YouTube video!

I made a few changes because of the ingredients I had on hand. For one, I used tofu instead of paneer. First, I dried the tofu a little to make it firmer so it wouldn't break apart in the sauce. I wrapped it in paper towels, put it under a heavy dish, and stuck it in the microwave for a few minutes. Much water sweated out! Then, I pan fried the tofu using more oil than Manjula.

I also added some sliced shiitake mushrooms at the last step. They add a yummy bit of butteriness to the acidity of the tomatoes. And I added some ground almonds to the final thing, to see if that would make it creamy. I didn't have enough almonds!

I'm proud of this dish because it's vegetarian and it's darn tasty for being meatless and low in fatness. *mental note to make more dishes like this.

I ate it over brown rice/grains, and, of course, avocado!!! This is the first avocado I've had in Japan, because they're so expensive. They're worth the 100-yen. Just like the 498-yen architechturally pre-cut fresh pineapple!

I made two batches of bread pudding in the last three days. Suffice it to say, I'm getting pretty good at it. I think french bread makes terrific bread pudding because it adds fluff but also a bit of sourness to offset the sweetness. I attempted to make banana pudding, but the egg ended up cooking and becoming all grainy. Will attempt a banana dessert this afternoon, since I have so many monkey bananas!

Thai Dark Green Curry

2009-02-08T14:37:00.004+09:00

I call it dark green because of all the spinach. I added at least a pound or two of dark, leafy green spinach because hey, curry is an excellent way to eat vegetables! The vegetables end up tasting like the sauce instead of their somewhat unexciting selves. And, spinach is so much easier to eat when it's melted down into soft nothings!

And if you need a good way to cook chicken, simmering it in coconut milk-based anything is a terrific idea to make it tender and juicy.

This was really easy to make, too.

Ingredients:
1 can Thai Green Curry with vegetables (bamboo, mushrooms, baby corn, etc.)
6 Garlic
1 Onion
1 red hot chile
chicken breast, cubed
hard tofu, cubed
3 small Red Bell Pepper
6 extra large, dense, heavy mushrooms (I think mine were shiitake)
3 carrots
1-2 pounds spinach, chopped
1 bunch parsley, chopped

soy sauce
dashi (fish-based)
coriander
cardamom
chili powder

Sweat a whole lot of garlic and a whole onion.
Start with a can of Thai Green Curry.
Add all remaining ingredients
Stir and let simmer. Serve over rice.

It turned out tasting a LOT better than it looks. I ate it with a sweet potato I steamed with the rice to cut down on the spiciness. I made the mistake of adding too much chili, because I didn't realize that (duh) the canned curry was Thai and therefore SO HOT you could barely taste the curry behind the pain.

Next: Banana Pudding!

"Chowderlike" Miso Soup: How do they do it?

2009-02-06T20:43:00.004+09:00

Today's school lunch was outstanding! Every time I look down at my neatly-arranged tray, I think to myself, "how balanced!": about half vegetables, half carbohydrates, meat mostly as a flavoring device, AND it looks tasty! I remember school lunches in Hawaii being mystery meat sloppy joe, a cottony roll, canned fruit cocktail, and forlorn frozen peas. The cafeteria workers basically just opened a bunch of cans and emptied them onto our trays. It was pretty unedible and unhealthy most of the time. Today in Okinawa:

half a fresh mikan, or tangerine/mandarin/clementine/something like that

Heaping pile of Mugi-Gohan, or chewy, white, short-grain rice with a touch of wheat in it. Japanese rice is always exceptional, no matter where I get it. Even in Hawaii, rice is nowhere near as good.

Salad consisting of soft, melding flavors of daikon, carrot, and other unidentified things. Also a bit of fish, in very small, flaked form. It didn't taste fishy at all. How did they do that? I love love love the way they do vegetables.

A small, golden-brown fried "cake" made from fishcake (kamaboko), infused with plenty of green onions, sweet yellow onions, and corn. Very tasty and flavorful. Something to savor.
A rich, rich bowl of miso soup with big pieces of shiitake mushroom and that clear white stuff that's kind of crunchy but looks like a noodle and is big. Maybe it's some kind of fungus? It reminds me of jellyfish you eat in Chinese restaurants, but I don't think it's jellyfish.

Anyway, this miso soup was superb. When they were spooning it out, I thought it was chowder, it was so incredibly rich and creamy, yet I know it doesn't have an ounce of dairy in it. How do they make it so breathtakingly delightful?

Believe you me, I have had my share of miso soup, but I've never really taken to it. Especially the way they do it in America, what with the dense cloud of gritty miso that always settles to the bottom and the lack of anything substantial, it feels like I'm drinking salty water with grit in it. In Japanese (in Okinawa) restaurants, they always at least add a few chunks of star-shaped kamaboko, and some substantial knots of seaweed. Still, most of the time, I don't like it because it feels empty. I like soups of substance. And I never thought I'd say that the best 味噌 soup I've ever had in my life was in a school lunch.

The secret of the chowder-like miso soup is still a mystery that I would love to solve.

Scallop & Shiitake Stir-Fry

2009-02-03T11:07:00.004+09:00

Whole scallops, shiitake mushrooms, baby bok choy, translucent onions and fragrant garlic. Served with yellow sweet potato (which I recently learned is a very different thing from a Yam), and brown rice with grains, made haole style.

I've had the bok choy sitting in my refridgerator for over a week. Most of it was rotting, but I salvaged the good pieces. I am a bit disappointed with the scallops. They are much fishier than expected, but the texture is wonderful. I'm also quite pleased with the rice. The whole thing feels very healthy, and just salty enough.
The Rice

Ingredients:
oil
1 cup brown rice and grains (I believe there are kidney beans, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, black/purple beans, oats, barley, and a package of what basically looks like bird food)
1 cup water
1/2 an onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 package dashi
black pepper
parsley
1 small sweet potato

How:

Soak grains in water, at least 30 minutes. This makes them softer and more palatable later. Drain.
Fry garlic on very low heat until fragrant. Add onions. Add sugar if desired. Cook until translucent, about 10 minutes. Add pepper to taste.
Turn heat up to high. Add drained grains. Stir until crackling and translucent. Add 1 cup water. Add dashi.
Add whole sweet potato to the pot. Cover and cook until done, about 20 minutes.

And the scallops, mushrooms, and bok choy were made in pretty much the same way. My favorite stir-fry sauce is as follows:

Favorite Stir-Fry Sauce
Approximately equal parts of:

light soy sauce
sesame oil
oyster sauce
sugar

You can also add the following:

miso
chinese 5-spice
white pepper
black pepper
dark (regular) soy sauce

Mix ingredients in a cup, then add to your stir-fry at the end. Use a wok and a real flame for best results.

French Toast & Canadian Bacon Sandwich

2009-02-02T20:16:00.003+09:00

Total time: 7 minutes.

I believe in eating breakfast. If I didn't eat breakfast, I wouldn't be able to get through the day til lunch. As it is, I snack on chocolate, senbei, and other おかし that they always have lying around the teachers' rooms. I can't do cold breakfasts, and I recently splurged on a bottle of real Canadian Maple Syrup for 753円 (The bottle is a wee bit smaller than my hand), and I love French Toast. I was already 10 minutes late for work, so I figured 10 more minutes couldn't hurt.

Plus, don't YOU love the way maple syrup always gets all over your bacon? Sweet and salty is a key spice of life. I'd also like to say that french toast is not as bad as folks make it out to be! It can be delicious, and just as healthy (and quick) as any other "toast"-based sandwich (e.g. PBJ, butter and cinnasugar, cream cheese and something sweet, nutella, etc).

Ingredients:
1 slice bread (older is better. I keep my bread in the freezer, so I popped it in the microwave for a few seconds [and then the fish grill part of my stove] so that it would absorb)
1-2 tablespoons milk
1 big egg
dash vanilla extract
cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, chili powder (yes!) to taste

a bit of butter

3 slices canadian bacon
Maple Syrup

The Way:

Fry bacon in pan. Meanwhile, mix milk, eggs, vanilla, and spices in a dish (I have a shallow soup bowl that is almost exactly bread-sized. It works perfectly!) Soak bread in egg mixture, poking holes with fork, shaking, and flipping bread as necessary. Try to get it to absorb all of it.
Remove bacon. Set aside. Rinse pan. Melt butter in pan. On medium flame, add bread. Flip when golden brown and crispy. Assemble into sandwich with canadian bacon, and drench with maple syrup. Yes!

Thick Carrot Sweet Potato Taro Soup 厚いのスプ

2009-02-01T08:25:00.004+09:00

厚い "atsui" : cordial, kind, warm (hearted), serious, faithful, thick, deep, heavy, serious, abundant, brazen, shameless.

I think Atsui Soup is a fair name for my most recent creation. It's thick, heavy, heartwarming, and shamelessly tasty. It's also surprsingly good for you, with a complex mix of Asian flavors imbued into a classic Western winter favorite. And it's easy to make! This is twenty times better than the carrot soup recipe I tried from the Silver Spoon book. And that one I made after comparing at least a dozen similar recipes on the internet! To be fair, that old carrot soup was also one of the first things I tried to cook here in Okinawa. I guess I must have leveled-up enough in experience to make something truly delicious.

The key to the sinfully creamy quality of this soup is the potatoes, which the first recipe I tried did not call for. Since I had taro and sweet potatoes (and carrots) lying around from the beef stew, I knew I had to make this!

This recipe requires only 1 pot, unlike others that make you sautee onions, take them out, blend the carrots, re-add them, etc, etc. And I think it tastes even better than those more involved recipes.

Oh, and to save time, I usually don't start cutting my vegetables until the cooking process has begun, much unlike the chefs I always see on TV. While something else is cooking, I'm cutting the next thing. AND for this recipe, since everything is going into the blender, you don't have to worry about cutting the garlic and onions as carefully as you otherwise might! Anyway, Now for what I did:

Ingredients:
3 tablespoons olive oil
6 cloves garlic, diced
1 onion, diced
2 tablespoons brown sugar
3 carrots
~1 pound sweet potatoes, peeled
1 medium taro (~0.5 lb)
3" ginger, diced
1 package (~1 tablespoon?) soup dashi--other soup stock can be substituted
1 gouging teaspoonful miso
water
milk

Recommended Spices (Probably not mandatory, but, y'know):
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 t. cinnamon
1 t. allspice
1/2 t. tumeric
1 t. sweet basil
black pepper
red chili powder

Method:

Heat olive oil in a large pan. Add garlic. Add onions. Add brown sugar. Carmelize all. Meanwhile, dice the carrots, sweet potatoes, and taro into small pieces. Add them to the pot.**alternatively, leave root vegetables in bigger pieces, but cook for longer time.
Add enough water to just cover the vegetables, about 5 cups. Add soup dashi, ginger, and miso. Season with maple syrup, cinnamon, allspice, basil, tumeric, black pepper, red chili powder. Simmer until carrots are soft and potatoes are fully cooked, adding water if it dries up too much, about 15 minutes.
Optional: remove a portion of the cooked vegetables from the pot, to reserve as "chewable pieces" in the blended soup. After blending soup, re-add vegetables.
Transfer soup to a blender. Cover blender. blend to desired consistency.
TO SERVE: Just before serving, to thin soup, add milk. My soup was so thick, I added milk in a 1:1 ratio. Optional: garnish with plain yogurt, parsley (it won't need the extra flavor!)

Note: If you're going to save some in the fridge or freezer, do not add dairy! It will separate. (And it takes up too much space in the fridge). Reheat dairyless soup, then stir in milk or yogurt just before serving.

I can't stop myself

2009-01-28T23:42:00.003+09:00

I know I shouldn't post when I have no pictures and when I can't even make what I ate, but I am so continually impressed by Okinawan school lunches that I have to remember them somehow.

Today, we had a marvelous soup. It was a thick, creamy, rich pumpkin chowder made from kabocha, with lots of little pieces of kabocha and potato swimming inside. Very thick and rich. It also had yummy bits of chicken breast, parsley, onion, and other unidentified tasty things swimming in it. The jumpy yellow-orange color was also quite striking.

The other course was just as good! It was a kind of frittatta (spelling?), made with sweet onion, bacon, spinach-like veggies in small amounts, and red beans (sounds weird, i know, but it was really good!). It was covered in something like katsu/barbeque sauce. Delicious.

I ate the above in a sandwich with the seasame-covered dark-what-sweet hamburger-style bun that was already cut down the middle for me. The bread was surprisingly wholesome for Japanese bread.

Salad was marinated won bok, sweet and slightly salty, with grated carrots and some kind of sausage (peppercini-like?), cut into pieces. I love how the flavors of it all melded together beautifully. I need to learn to marinate vegetables.

And, of course, a pint of milk.

I almost forgot to mention! Some very kind friends got me a birthday cake today, made from a fruit (I don't remember the name) all the way from Peru! My goodness! It was delicious. It was a 2-layer cake, with maple whipped cream frosting, and a dark, sweet cream layer made from the fruit, which is apparently like a persimmon but with the texture of an avocado. It was quite delicious.

Really, Really Slow-Cooked Beef Stew

2009-01-27T13:56:00.002+09:00

This beef stew cooked for almost 24 hours. I kid you not.

I decided to experiment with the "slow-cooker" temperature and "slow-cooker" mode on my convection oven (the only oven I have). So, at 6:00 p.m., I slid in the stew. At 10:30 p.m., I checked on it to see if it needed more water. Nope. The carrots weren't even getting cooked! I thought maybe "slow cook" meant 10 hours or more, so I left the oven on as I slept. The next morning, the carrots still weren't cooked! I turned up the heat to 325 degrees and put the oven on "bake" mode instead of "slow cooker." When I came home from work, I had a thick, rich, delicious, flavorful beef stew. This is what's inside:

Ingredients:
olive oil
1 pound beef, cubed
3 carrots, in 1" pieces
1 onion, roughly diced
2 tablespoons sugar
1 package mushrooms
2 small sweet potatoes, cubed
2 taro (about 1 pound), cubed
8 cloves garlic (I really love garlic), diced
1/3 cup cornstarch
6 cherry tomatoes

Spices: (I just liberally sprinkled a lot of all of them into the stew...you can use whatever spices you want, really. I might have gone overboard, but it came out tasting really good!)
2 cubes chicken bullion
1 package Japanese ramen dashi (it was all I had for stock!)
2 cups water
salt
black pepper
basil
oregano
parsley
cinnamon
coriander
cumin
nutmeg
allspice
clove
paprika
chili powder
honey
thyme (used more sparingly than the other because I don't like it)

Method:

Mix cornstarch with liberal amount of all spices. Dredge cubed meat in cornstarch mixture. Heat wok over a huge flame with 3 tablespoons olive oil. When oil is hot, add half of diced garlic. Add beef when garlic is golden. Brown meat, only letting each cube brown once per side. Use chopsticks to turn meat. Set meat aside in baking dish. It doesn't matter if the garlic is burned, it'll still taste good later.
Clean wok. Heat oil. Add remaining garlic. Add onion. Sprinkle sugar over onion. Carmelize. Meanwhile, cut remaining ingredients. Add all to baking dish.
Boil water in UNWASHED wok. Dissolve bullion and soup stock in boiling water. Pour over ingredients in baking dish. Liberally add more spices such as basil, honey, pepper, and salt.
Cover baking dish and cook for a REALLY, REALLY long time on 300 degrees. stirring and adding water occassionally. Turn up to 325 for last two hours. Bake uncovered for 30 minutes if the stew is too water. Add cornstarch mixed with water to stew if it's still too watery, or just bake uncovered for a longer time.

Serving Suggestions:
Eat with french bread. I totally ate half a loaf for dinner.
Because I had a lot of leftover taro (my baking dish was too small), I sliced the taro, pan fried it, and poured pan-reheated stew over it. Mmm!

Captain Kangaroo

2009-01-25T21:37:00.005+09:00

A 2-minute walk from my house, there is the wonderful, laid back, delicious, classy burger joint called CAPTAIN KANGAROO. It's awesome. I love it. I go there about once a week. Their wedge fries and BBQ burger are superb in their own right, not to mention that you simply can't get either good fries or barbeque sauce of any sort in Nago.

Their taco burger is amazing as well. It's a sweet sesame toasted bun with a hamburger, cheese, seasoned taco meat, taco sauce, guacamole, and sour cream. All of the above ingredients are nigh impossible to find in Nago. Get the "set" with fries. Wedges are the best! They also give you a spice rack of about a dozen powdered spices to doctor your fries and burger. My favorite is the Matcha Salt, which is salt with green tea powder mixed in.

You can also get a wide variety of drinks for only 100 yen! Most of these drinks would be 400 or 500 in other restaurants, including various flavors of Italian Soda, Mango juice and Guava juice.

In the picture is my most recent favorite, the chicken rice with a ridiculously long name that I can never remember. The official name is something like Sweet Hot Crispy Fried Chicken Rice, abbreviated on the menu as SHCFCR, which is just as difficult to pronounce and remember. It's delicious, though. They fry their chicken to perfection, and the rice, like all rice in Japan, is exquisite. Top it with the sweet chili aioli sauce, lettuce, tomato, and a garnish of nori, serve it on a large square white plate and you have a winnder, people!

Mediocre food day

2009-01-22T00:40:00.004+09:00

I should really just dedicate a blog to Japanese school lunch. It's so good. Today I went to 水安島　to teach. Their school lunch is great because it's HOT! It's made on the island, and for only 5 students and a dozen teachers. Superb.

Crispy panko-battered salmon fillet

Bacon Potato Chowder soup, thin for chowder but I don't know how else to describe it. Potato, onion, pig/bacon pieces, cabbage, corn. I want to make chowder.

molasses bread (not as good as it sounds. NO Japanese bread is as good as it sounds, I find. It's always fluffy, light, airy, slightly yeasty, and has little to no flavor nor substance.)

cooked spinach (or maybe ong choy?) and corn salad, nice and salty

milk

I have to proclaim it and resolve it here and now. After Lunar New Year and after my birthday (they just happen to be on the same day) NO MORE GLUTTONY. Meaning, my goal is to lose my excess weight by March. Proclaiming it publicly will hopefully motivate me. I need to a) cook less frequently; b) cook less (eg cook portions sized for 2 meals, not ten); c) cook healthier; d) not eat brownies for breakfast, snack. lunch, snack, dinner, and snack; e) eat in moderation. Lofty goals.

Good School Lunch

2009-01-19T17:46:00.004+09:00

The school lunches here never cease to amaze me. They are always surprsingly good considering the mass-production and distance they travel.

Today the main course was Okinawa Yakisoba, which is udon noodles stir-fried with shiitake mushrooms, carrots, greens (spinach?), bamboo shoots, fishcake, and onion.

We also had a taro croquette, which was sweet, slightly chewy, and creamily rich in taste. And fried. Mmmm, fried.

Then there was the salad. It was the good kind of seaweed (dark green, soft, easy to bite, very mild/nonexistant taste, small rectangles...sorry I don't know what it's called), corn, white thingie that I think might be daikon, very tiny slivers of carrot, and little packets of delicious sesame seed dressing to go with it. American salad dressing never tasted so healthy or delicioius. Nor did they ever bother to give it to us in individual-sized serving packets.

Dessert was a mikan, which I cannot differentiate from a clementine, tangerine, satsuma, or other small orange with thin skin. When's the last time you had fresh fruit in your US school lunch? Please don't tell me you're counting the browned, mushy-gross banana chopped into your corn-syrupy fruit cocktail.

And milk. Although today I almost didn't want to drink it because I was cold. Now tell me that doesn't sound more appetizing than many things you've had in a cheap Japanese restaurant. I was reading about the Okinawan diet yesterday, and why the 100-year-olds have arteries with the elasticity of 60-year-olds. Their diet involves meat as a flavor more than as a main course. They add little pieces of it to noodles and vegetable dishes. Most of their protein comes from soy. They eat a lot of sea plants, soba noodles, and goya (bittermelon). But so far, eating school lunch in the quantities they feed me has only made me fat! They give A LOT!

Speaking of which, I ate a lot of chicken tikka masala leftovers already! Heat it up and chop some cucumber into plain yogurt with mint to make raita--the perfect compliment for the flavors in this dish!

Yesterday, I splurged and spent 751 yen (~$8.00) on a tiny bottle of Canadian Maple Syrup. French toast or banana pancakes, here I come!

Chicken Tikka Masala & "Indian" Spiced Rice

2009-01-18T10:57:00.005+09:00

Finally! I cooked an Indian dish that actually tastes good! Good thing it's my favorite one: Chicken Tikka Masala. I did my research on this one. I watched several videos on YouTube to learn some of the techniques, and I searched the internet for many versions of the recipe. I ended up pretty much following this one, with some changes:

Ingredients

MASALA MARINADE*

1 cup plain yogurt
5 garlic cloves, minced (I love garlic!)
4 tablespoon finely grated fresh ginger (I also love ginger--my theory is the more spices, the better!)
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/4 teaspoon ground turmeric
Salt and freshly ground pepper

*I used maybe twice as much of all the above, excluding the yogurt. I watched a few Indian chefs make this dish, and when they said "1 teaspoon," they dumped in about 2 tablespoons of spice. I think the reason all my previous Indian dishes didn't turn out is because I didn't use enough spice! THE MORE THE BETTER!

CHICKEN

450 grams chicken breast, pre-cut into 1 1/2" pieces thanks to the Japanese style of grocery store
Salt and freshly ground pepper
3 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2large onion, finely chopped
5 garlic cloves, minced
4 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1 1/2 tablespoons garam masala
1 1/2 teaspoons pure chile powder
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 dried red chilis
1 tomato, diced
One 35-ounce can tomatoes, juices reserved
1/4 cup of sugar
3 teaspoons salt
plain yogurt and milk

Directions

MAKE THE MASALA MARINADE: Combine the yogurt, garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, cardamom, cayenne and turmeric, ingredients together. Put into large ziploc bag with chicken pieces. Coat well. Season with salt and pepper. Marinate overnight.
PREPARE THE CHICKEN: Preheat the broiler or barbeque grill. Remove the chicken from the marinade. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and spread the pieces on the rack. Broil/Grill the chicken, turning once, until just cooked through and browned in spots, about 17 minutes.
In a large enameled cast-iron casserole, heat the remaining oil and butter until shimmering. Add the onion, garlic and ginger and cook over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until tender and golden, about 8 minutes. Add the garam masala, chile powder, red pepper, and cayenne and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Add the tomatoes with their juices and the sugar and season with salt and pepper. Cover partially and cook over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is slightly thickened, about 20 minutes. Add the leftover yogurt marinade and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until thickened, about 10 minutes longer. Stir in the chicken; simmer gently for 10 minutes, stirring frequently, and serve.
Variation The marinade and sauce here are also delicious with shrimp, lamb and vegetables.

Make Ahead

Indian guy making it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPCwH8uJawA&feature=channel. I wish I could make his version, but I don't know where to find fresh spices. I know dried ones are inferior!

It took me two hours to make this and the accompanying "Indian" spiced brown rice & grain mixture. I got this nice mix of brown rice and other grains from Jusco, and this is the first time I'm using it. Because I only have 1 burner on my stove, here's what I did:

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup rice and grain mixture
1 1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon each of:
cinnamon
cardamom
coriander
black pepper
sugar
1 teaspoon tumeric
2 tablespoon salt
dash of clove, nutmeg, allspice
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 an onion
2 tablespoon sugar
4 cloves garlic
2" ginger, grated, plus the pieces you couldn't grate because your fingers would've been minced

Method:

Wash rice & grains. Soak in water for 20 minutes (next time, I will soak it longer). Drain water off.
Mix cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, clove, nutmeg, allspice together in a little cup.
Heat butter and oil in a heavy pot.
Add dry spices mixture and stir for a few seconds.
Add garlic, ginger, and onion. Add sugar to onion to carmelize it. Stir until slightly golden brown. Add tumeric and pepper.
Add drained rice & grains. Stir about five minutes, until the color change to kind of translucent.
Transfer to rice cooker pot, add 1 1/2 cup water and turn on rice cooker. If you are lucky enough to have more than 1 burner on your stove, cover and cook for 15-20 minutes in the same pot on the stove.

Serve with Chicken Tikka Masala and plain yogurt with mint! (Halfway through eating, I also added some of those organic greens from Kushi Elementary, just to force myself to eat salad)

Wow, that was really involved and seriously took me over 2 hours. I listen to podcasts as I cook. Today I heard about the slave trade in young girls in Cambodia. It's TRULY HORRIFIC. I wanted to cry. They electrocute the girls, beat them, hold them in dungeons, don't pay them anything, force them to act like they're enjoying it. One girl, tricked into slavery at 13 and the victim of 2 abortions at 15, was in so much pain she asked for some time off. The brothelmaster gouged her eye out with a piece of metal. WTF. I also heard about a mariner who is certain China "discovered" the New World a thousand years ago, and the evidence for and against his theory. He made a lot of anthropologists very angry. This week is also the birthday of Darwin, so I heard from Scientific American about evolution and little-known facts, as well as some myths about Darwin. Then I heard an interview with a man who wrote a book about Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream speech," where the speech's influences come from, who King borrowed from, how the actual speech is different from King's written version, and why all of it is significant. Podcasts, learning, and cooking. What a good Sunday!

I have to go to work to teach a special English class for 3rd graders--I'll be back later for tikka masala leftovers!

Wokked Shiitake and Baby Bok Choy Stir-Fry with Bacon

2009-01-17T15:58:00.005+09:00

Finally, something I cook turns out GOOD!

All this experimentation with Indian food has been rather depressing--but I haven't given up yet! I'm going to make Chicken Tikka Masala (my all-time favorite) tomorrow. Back to the dish at hand. I think it turned out well because these are the flavors I've grown up with, and I know how I want the dish to turn out at the end, and I am using cooking techniques well-known to me through watching my parents.

At JA (which I JUST discovered!), I got 6 beautiful shiitake mushrooms for 190 yen. Awesome! Today at Jusco they had the bag of 5 heads of baby bok choy for 138 yen, and the bacon was 500 yen for 6 packs of 2 slices each. Hooray for beautiful fresh vegetables!

Now, then!

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, finely diced
2-inches ginger, cut into finger-joint sized pieces
1/2 onion, chopped
2 slices bacon, cut into pieces
2 slices canadian bacon, chopped
4 heads Baby Bok Choy,washed and cut into 3" pieces
6 shiitake mushrooms

Sauce:
2 tablespoons Oyster Sauce (Lee Kum Kee brand. It's the most expensive by far, but it is far, far, superior in taste and quality to the other brands)
2 tablespoons Chinese Soy Sauce ("light/less dark soy sauce")
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons sesame oil
(I mix it all together in a cup)

Method:

1. On LOW heat, fry bacon with olive oil. If your pan is too hot, the bacon does not get crispy, it just stays soft! While bacon is frying, chop garlic, onion, and ginger then add them to the pan, in that order. I always wait until the garlic is golden brown before I add the onions. Optional: add a pinch of sugar to the onions to make them extra sweet and carmelized. Wait until garlic and onion are carmelized in color.

2. Add shiitake mushrooms. Meanwhile, wash and cut baby bok choy. Add to pan. stir occassionally for a few minutes so that it doesn't burn. When the bok choy has almost all turned dark green and when the shiitake look slightly limp, pour the sauce over everything. Let cook a few more minutes.

Serve over rice. Or just eat it plain like I did, if you forgot to make rice in your excitement over the quality of your fresh vegetables! The walnut flower-bread you see in the picture was more like dessert. It was dense, sweet, pastry-like, and full of yummy nuts!

Total price: 544 yen + whatever it cost for the sauce ingredients

Banana Breakfast and Leftover Lunch

2009-01-17T15:48:00.004+09:00

The 2-minute breakfast:

Banana
Crunchy Natural Peanut Butter (impossible to find in Japan--I had it shipped to me)
Raisins
Cinnamon for dusting
microwave for 13 seconds, or until just barely warm

Sometimes, when I'm really in a hurry, I just grab a banana, slather peanut butter all over it, and fly out the door.

Leftover Lunch:
Toasted Ham, Cheese, and Herb Bread (180 Yen for half a crusty loaf) with cream cheese. I use the "Fish Grill" nook in my stove to make toast. It is at least three times as fast as a toaster or toaster oven. Plus, you can make open-faced sandwiches!

Mattar paneer minus the paneer, on a bed of fresh Kushi Elementary School salad greens, with yogurt garnish.
I love dairy products. They make everything better.

Sweet Roasted Kabocha (Japanese Pumpkin)

2009-01-17T13:31:00.003+09:00

Kabocha is available year-round in all the stores here. I had half of one sitting in my fridge for 3 days, so I decided it was time to eat it.

I slathered it with olive oil, liberally sprinkled cinnamon, sugar, clove, nutmeg, and allspice on it, then I roasted it for 45 minutes on 375 degrees. I took it out, cut it into 2-inch sections, poured butter all over it, added more of the same spices, then returned it to the oven for 7 more minutes. It turned a nice, carmelized brown color. It made for a healthy dessert!

The merits of taco rice and Japanese school lunch

2009-01-15T20:05:00.002+09:00

Next, I want to make Chicken Tikka Masala. I'll do some more poking around in recipes. It's my favorite Indian dish, and apparently it's become the national food of Englishpeople. "The" international food of India? Interesting. Kind of like how orange chicken and sweet-sour sauce have become the national foods of China, even though "No self-respecting Chinaman would touch such git hey things" (<--in the words of my mother) . . . kind of.

Today at school the lunch was far above my expectations for a $2 meal, as usual. I am daunted by the amount of food you get. I wish I could remember my camera every day, so I could document the care, presentation, and overall healthfulness of Japanese school lunch. Today was an Okinawan original, taco rice. Taco Rice is shortgrain white rice, topped by seasoned taco meat (chili, basically), chopped lettuce, tomato, and tiny 1-milimeter cubes of cheese (white, almost tasteless cheese of the variety you also find in Latin America). That could have been a meal in itself, especially considering the heaping portion they gave me. And honestly, it was at least three times better than the watery, cheap, lackluster taco rice I paid 950 yen for in "Jammin' Taco Cafe." The school lunch version had a bit of sweetness, a bit of kick (and a packet of hot sauce, if you so chose), and quality meat, spices, and veggies. It wasn't "superb" by restaurant standards, but it was damn good for school lunch.

The lunch also included a yummy rendition of egg flower soup, loaded with delicate, flavorful egg flowers, transparent sweet onion, a bit of corn for creaminess, parsley, and green onion. I approved. This soup was at least a bushel's worth of flavor and heartiness better than any I've had in a Chinese restaurant, cheap or not.

We also got a ring of sliced pineapple, milk, and a packet of slightly salted almonds in our school lunch!

...sigh. I wish the US would stop feeding the kids fake chicken patties, terrible meatloaf, limp frozen french fries, and corn syrupy fruit cocktail for lunch. Where does the Japanese school lunch system go right when the US system went so, so wrong? I mean, even if the US lunch tastes ok (dare I say sometimes good?) to the kids, it is far less healthy and takes far less time to prepare than Japanese school lunch.

Pineapple, of the store-bought variety

2009-01-13T19:42:00.005+09:00

Pineapple from an Okinawan grocery store:
You would think that this image says it all . . .

. . . and it does. But not quite. This piece of machine-wrought (FRESH) pineapple architechture came in a vacuumed, air-sealed plastic bag. It was labeled with a date and the price of 498 JPY (~$5.50 USD). I was tempted to build an athenaeum out of it.

I know it's the middle of winter,
but this pineapple was delicious.

"Vegetable Korma"

2009-01-13T19:21:00.004+09:00

"Vegetable Korma," in quotes because it doesn't taste quite like any vegetable korma I've had before. This is the second time I've had it. I re-heated it in a pan, and stirred in some yogurt just after I turned off the heat. I ate it on a bed of fresh organic greens from one of the elementary schools I work at, alongside some ham-cheese-pesto bread (not as tsaty as it sounds, probably because of the thyme sprinkled throughout).

Speaking of the salad greens--there are so many!
Each grade in the school has a plot in a little garden. These salada na (サァダナー "salad leaves") are a little spicy, very fresh, and totally organic. Nice!

Plain Yogurt: Discovery of the Week

2009-01-13T10:11:00.007+09:00

The discovery of the week is . . . *drumroll please* . . . PLAIN YOGURT (138 yen for about 2 cups)! I never thought something so plain and frankly unedible on its own could be so good as a condiment for savory foods. Just about everything I've eaten as a meal this week has benefitted from a dollop of plain yogurt. I've always wondered why it comes in giant (for Japan) containers at ALL the grocery stores!

This morning, I mixed some of it into my omlette. It made the eggs much fluffier than usual. The omlette also contained tomatoes and carmelized onion. I added some basil and garnished with another dollop of plain yogurt. The creamy tang of the yogurt really compliments most foods.

From Oki Eats - 大きい　イーツ！

Yesterday, I spread the yogurt on buttered French bread toast and topped it all with honey. Delectable! Sweet things really benefit from a little sour.

It also went well with lasagna, as well as my Vietnamese chicken vegetable rice.

From Oki Eats - 大きい　イーツ！

And this doesn't really count, but I will admit to a longstanding love affair with "sour" frozen yogurt such as Fiore, Pinkberry, and Red Mango. It's funny that there is a complete dearth of anything remotely resembling this supposedly "Asian" phenomenon in Okinawa. Walking through Westwood last May, I couldn't help but notice that there was a "healthy/sour/plain" frozen yogurt shop on at least every block!

By the way, Fiore and Red Mango are far superior in taste to any of the other sour froyo places I've tried. Believe you me, I've tried plenty. There was a kiwiberri a few blocks away from my dorm in college, and I went there an average of twice a week for two years. Despite such loyal patronship, I will say that the somewhat icy flavor of kiwiberri is inferior to most others. On the heirarchy of sour frozen yogurts, as far as creaminess and depth of flavor, this is the heirarchy:

Fiore >Red Mango > Pinkberry > Kiwiberri > Yogurtland

Someone should really open a franchise in Okinawa.

From Marrow to Pore: Ripe is the Flavor of Life

2009-01-12T16:21:00.003+09:00

From marrow to pore:
ripe is the flavor of life,
and sweet it will be forever.

That's been my motto for a few years now, and my time in Okinawa has given me ample opportunity to explore one of my passions: food! I've been living here for a few months now, and while I've always been big on food tourism, food photography, food blogging, and gluttony in general, I've never gone food-nerd in the way of chefdom before.

Today I attempted to make Vegetable Korma, one of my favorite dishes when I eat Indian food. Why did I attempt to make an unfamiliar dish from a cuisine I had no experience with? Well, let me tell you something about food in Japan: It's Japanese food. No, really, it's all Japanese food.

I never knew there were so many different varieties of Japanese dishes! Japanese was always my favorite cuisine, so I'm happy to have access to the myriad dishes that Japanese people eat, instead of the Westernized and overpopularized versions of the boring things we're all too familiar with: chicken teriyaki, california rolls, sashimi limited in variety to maguro, tamago, and ebi, lackluster miso soup, ramen, shrimp & vegetable tempura . . . before I walk into almost any given Japanese restaurant on the US mainland, I can already tell you what will be on the menu. As a teacher in Okinawa, I can tell you that the school lunch (you heard me--school lunch!) in Japan beats the food at many a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles County.

One thing I miss about Hawaii (and the US in general) is my ability to go out for Indian, Thai, Mexican, Italian, Korean, and Chinese food. You would think that as a former tributary of China, The Kingdom of the Ryukyus (aka Okinawa) would have a few Chinese restaurants. Instead, they have taken some aspects of Chinese culture and simmered them down into the larger Okinawan stew. Basically, if you want anything other than Japanese food, you have to learn to cook it yourself.

I got my Vegetable Korma recipe from Manjula's Kitchen, but modified it for the vegetables I had on hand (carrots, cabbage, and peas). However, even with the instructional video on YouTube, I managed to screw it up and curdle the milk, resulting in a decidedly non-creamy korma. The photographic evidence is too unappetizing to post here. I will be attempting similar dishes again, hopefully with better results. Here is Manjula making Vegetable Korma in her kitchen:

Oki Eats! 大きい イーツ！

Okithaindian Curry

Corn on the Cob with Garlic Butter

Wonder Bars

Bacon Corn Potato Chowder

North Indian Potatoes

Garden in the City

Sandwiches

Israeli Food Festival

Seared Alaskan Scallops with Seashell Pasta

Quickdraw Avocado Sandwiches

Stuffed Blue Cheeseburgers

Hunky Bunch Mango Bread

Simple Miso Eggplant & Sunomono (Cucumber Salad)

Grocery Store Sushi

Spinach Mousse

Good Earth Tea

Spaghetti, Sans Spaghetti

Midnight "Snack"

Carrots & Onions, simple asian style

BLT in Okinawa, with extras

Mole Chili Portuguese Bean Soup Conglomeration

Peanut Butter Banana Cream Cheese Honey Toast

Chicken Winter Vegetable Soup

Japanese School Lunch PICTURES

Cutting Garlic and Onions

Mister Donut

Thai-Inspired Omlette

The Secret to Crispy Moist French Toast

Cafe Rainbow Bridge

School Lunch for US

Chicken Vegetable Penne Casserole

Creamy Rice Pudding

Mattar Paneer

Thai Dark Green Curry

"Chowderlike" Miso Soup: How do they do it?

Scallop & Shiitake Stir-Fry

French Toast & Canadian Bacon Sandwich

Thick Carrot Sweet Potato Taro Soup 厚いのスプ

I can't stop myself

Really, Really Slow-Cooked Beef Stew

Captain Kangaroo

Mediocre food day

Good School Lunch

Chicken Tikka Masala & "Indian" Spiced Rice

Ingredients

MASALA MARINADE*

CHICKEN

Directions

Make Ahead

Wokked Shiitake and Baby Bok Choy Stir-Fry with Bacon

Banana Breakfast and Leftover Lunch

Sweet Roasted Kabocha (Japanese Pumpkin)

The merits of taco rice and Japanese school lunch

Pineapple, of the store-bought variety

"Vegetable Korma"

Plain Yogurt: Discovery of the Week

From Marrow to Pore: Ripe is the Flavor of Life

Oki Eats! 大きい　イーツ！