Food
Time to Fish
Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to get on a boat, to challenge my sea legs and to test the tensile strength of the combination of rod + reel + spectra / mono / flouro lines + swivel + barbless hook on a (approximately) 20 pound king salmon. Though the bite wasn’t hot in Avila Beach … Continue reading
Hammer Time! Making Mochi
Once upon a time in Japan, the making of mochi was not performed by automated machines, but rather by people using large wooden mallets/hammers to pound rice in heavy-duty granite bowls. Pounding was performed to a rhythm, pulverizing the rice into delicious submission. Though mochi machines now exist, my family continues the old tradition with … Continue reading
It all starts with butter…
…or a cube of beef fat into a big, hot pan, followed by thin, delicate slices of well-marbled beef. Then comes the vegetables, tofu, mushrooms, scallions and yam noodles. Toss on some sake, mirin, shoyu, dashi and sugar and let simmer until the meat is just done and the veggies are tender. Scoop up on … Continue reading
Fort Ross and Stillwater Cove
It turns out that there are a lot of camp sites available in the Fort Ross area of the California coastline, and the beginning of September during the mid-week is an ideal time to get a place to yourself. We returned to a place that had yielded some pretty good results on a previous trip … Continue reading
China Bowl: The Best Al Pastor?
On the way up from Huntington Beach, Kohei and I picked up some fresh, wild-caught shrimp in a small town right before we reached Santa Barbara. If you are familiar with that stretch of coast line, it’s the place that used to have the banana plantation back in the day. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any … Continue reading
Cooking With Green Butter
Avocados are only 100 yen right now, and so I have been using them a lot lately. My favorite ways to eat them are sliced with shoyu (California-nisei style), as part of a sandwitch/cheeseburger, or as guacamole. Fresh tortillas are worth their weight in silver over here, but tortilla chips are abundant and cheap and … Continue reading
Cooking With Goya
This weekend I cooked with goya(bitter melon) for the first time, and it turned out awesome! I first tried goya in Okinawa as a component in a chop suey-like dish, and made it with the help of a friend. After you try this dish, you might grow to love the bumpy-cucumber-like hunk of bitterness. Goya … Continue reading
A Gaping, Unfilled Niche
There are a few things that I used to depend on for everyday cooking and I still use many of them over here, but I sorely miss Mexican food ingredients. I miss the abundance of tortillas, both flour and corn (I can get flour tortillas at Costco in Fukuoka periodically, but it is a pain … Continue reading
Lost Bread Topped With Fried Bananas
Everyone knows how to make French Toast, but I consider my version to be top shelf. My favorite thing about FT is that I almost always have the ingredients, and it is a quick meal. Try this version out: Ingredients: bread, left out from the night before or toasted to get rid of moisture eggs … Continue reading
Ode To Inaka Ninniku
On a routine after-work drive, deep in the country I spotted an unattended shack with a sign that read “yasai (vegetables), 100 yen”. Nestled among the daikon and shiitake mushrooms was a mesh bag containing two choice clusters of garlic. For some reason, the garlic caught my eye, and so I dropped my 100 yen … Continue reading