Tag: japanese

So, there's this sushi bar down the street, on Flamingo and Fort Apache. The itamae there are part of some sort of sushi cabal, and they look at you like you're a freak if you can't put away at least fifty bucks worth of sushi in a single sitting. (For the record, that's about eight or nine orders of nigiri. You could choke a small dog with that.)

Savory, Tarthead, and I, brave adventurers all, decided to brave the rapids there. Savory was my secret weapon, my revenge for getting the you no eat sushi very often look. In the course of a typical workday, I've seen Savory pack away four donuts, two submarine sandwiches, and a plate of pad thai. Like most men with the capability to ingest several times their own mass in meat, he's freakishly small.

After dropping off the kids with a random stranger, we converged upon the restaurant and were presented with one of those sushi tick mark sheets.

I hate those sheets. First of all, I'm perfectly capable of ordering sushi in Japanese (I don't speak Japanese, but I do speak sushi). Second of all, with three people, two tick marks can be easily mistaken for an eleven. I've seen people mow through eleven orders of hamachi nigiri before, so that is totally not an uncommon scenario. And thirdly, yes, please, let us all handle a piece of random paper and then hand it to the guy who touches the uncooked belly meats that go in your mouth.

All of this has nothing to do with this particular sushi restaurant. I just need to rant sometimes. And it's going to be freaky in the future when you have to ICQ your itamae just to get your maguro pronto.

Anyways, having been given the paper bullet, we had to plan ahead. No problem; by the time we all had one order of something to eat, we had a traffic pile-up of little plates. This is a situation that the Japanese call frickin awesome.

And the fish? Yeah. The fish was great. I wouldn't say they're particularly above par on the fish I like to eat (for instance, the closer Hikari sushi bar has the best, butteriest yellowtail ever invented). The unagi was pretty standard, the tuna, delicious. Of course, I didn't order what the others ordered, and I can tell you they both have a pretty hefty recommendation for you. When they get around to posting...

One of the most interesting things one will find on an internet bender is that throughout the world one will find poultry to be pretty much canonical wherever Christmas is celebrated.

In most of the western world, poultry is defined as turkey. However, children in Japan apparently wait in long lines outside of their local KFC in order to get a bucket of fried chicken. Ukraine families celebrate with a gigantic, twelve course meal in the name of the twelve apostles, devoid of any meat except for fish, while children wait for Father Frost to visit their homes. In the United Kingdom, duck or goose may replace roast turkey, depending on the number of guests.

Before the turkey was introduced to the UK in the 1700s, the traditional medieval dish was either peacock or boar. In modern Hawaii, it isn't uncommon to see Japanese influences such as turkey teriyaki. The Christmas chook, meaning chicken or fowl, is a common sight in Australia.

Obviously, one of the things we're going to have to delve into during this month is the preparation of poultry dishes, in celebration of Christmas tradition and fantastic cuisine. We're looking forward to it.

I'm still formulating my article for my Greek Night dish, but in the meantime I thought I'd share something I had stumbled on the other day while making steaks.

First, a little background info. We bought some Omaha steaks from some wholesaler for pennies on the peso, and as a sort of celebration, we decided to have them with a pan sauce.

I get home, throw the cast iron 12 in the oven at 500 degrees, wait until its rocket hot, and start searing my steaks. While it's sizzling along, I start to look for things for my pan sauce. Button mushrooms, sure, those will work, butter, got that, garlic salt, check, white wine.... crap. There wasn't any white wine in the house. I did, however, find an old bottle of Nigori Sake, so I decided to give that a shot. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Sake-wise, go here.

Anyway, I finish up the steaks, a la Alton Brown style, and throw the cast iron back on the stove. I put two tablespoons of butter in the pan, and waited for it to melt completely before adding the mushrooms. I know, some of you are screaming "YOU SHOULD'VE DEGLAZED FIRST!@#!#!". The reason I didn't? Sake is acidic, acid + nicely seasoned cast iron = bad. Editor's note: You wuss. It's cast iron. Just do it.

So, I started with the mushrooms to provide some cover for my nicely seasoned pan. I digress. I garlic salted and peppered the mushrooms while they were doing the saute mambo. Then, carefully, I added about 4 tablespoons sake, and deglazed the pan with that.

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p>After deglazing was finished and the kitchen was filled with a smell not unlike a Japanese bath house, I added 2 tablespoons (approximately) of heavy whipping cream and combined. All in all, the sake made a fantastic substitute for white wine. It had a subtle sweet sake flavor, paired with the earthiness of the mushrooms and creaminess of the, well, cream. It just goes to show that necessity is the mother of.. something.

One sushi bar ingredient I have a love-hate relationship with is kappa, known in English as the cucumber. Apparently, the Japanese term is based on a river goblin, named Kappa, who has a fondness for cucumbers. Nice circular logic, there; if I were going to name members of my family for the things they ate, I could name my daughter Random Scraps Of Paper and my wife Tasteless Vegan Filth. But I digress.

Cucumbers aren't exactly my favorite sushi ingredient, mostly because the fresh taste and crispness seems somehow wrong inside something made of raw fish; it tends to make me think I just bit willingly into a bone left in by some sadistic itamae, getting revenge for me not pointing my chopsticks towards magnetic north when I put them down on my plate. But in cucumber salads or sunemono, they come into their own.

Looking at online recipes, I saw an awful lot of recipes that include sake and rice wine vinegar. Since I'm too lazy to drive to Chinatown for one ingredient, and my children don't really need any extra sake in their diet (says the woman; personally, I believe that drunk children are sleepy children), I decided to play with the recipe a bit. And by 'play', I mean get retardedly creative.

I like rice wine vinegar, and I use it in an awful lot of foods. In fact, it's my second favorite vinegar upon God's slightly fermented green earth. However, I do hold true to the belief that the Japanese would have never invented rice wine vinegar if they'd had the miracle that is balsamic vinegar. I'd gush and all, but I believe the Masochist detailed his unending love for the purple here.

Now, people who know stuff about cooking, like to complain, and have way too much time on their hands to search the internet for blogs may interject that "balsamic vinegar is nothing like rice wine vinegar", on the basis that the first is sweeter, thicker, and much more complex. Thanks. Gee, I didn't know that. Of course balsamic and rice wine vinegar are different. Read the previous paragraph.

However, there is a very important factor here- the differences mean that you can't adulterate balsamic vinegar with salt and sugar in the same proportions as rice wine vinegar and end up with a similar salad topping. In fact, Italian cuisine purists might even argue that to adulterate balsamic with anything at all is akin to blasphemy, like some massive malediction called down upon Vatican City.

Luckily, I'm Protestant.

After cubing two cucumbers and mixing them with alfalfa sprouts (no mung beans... darn), I contemplated the balsamic like some sort of scrying pool. And the oracle revealed to me that mixing the vinegar with one third its volume in sugar and microwaving to combine was, as it were, All Good. And there was a tiny amount of salting and peppering, but not enough so as to offend the NeoRomans.

For a final flavor kick, I put about two tablespoons of sesame seeds on foil and put it under the broiler on high for about four minutes, just to toast them for salad purposes. And you know what? I thought it was superawesome. Our resident Tartologist thought it even better the next day (today).

So maybe I'm crossing roads that aren't meant to be crossed. The point is, make do with what you have, be aware of subtle (or blatant) differences, and always smile like a killer when someone else takes their first bite.