ťọ śêê ŧĥîņĝş ďįffěŗêńţĺý

07Feb10

http://1tess.wordpress.com
There is pressure at work for me to become Wonder Woman; my low-stress job looks very different when ten time-consuming projects must all be finished instantly, if not yesterday! I laid out a poster with an image of the words, “dreaming of a greener tomorrow.” I emailed it to everyone, then corrected the typos. Big sigh of relief, until the following day: some how I’d erased the word “of” from the sloganand no one had noticed… We’d all been looking at the type but missed the whole picture!

Today’s post is inspired by the wafu spaghetti recipes in which Japanese cooks look at Western-style spaghetti but use Japanese ingredients. I looked at spaghetti and meatballs and I wondered how that dish would be with Japanese flavors. I liked the technique of dropping chicken meatballs into liquid from the tori-nabe recipe. I liked the flavors of  umeboshi and shiso with chicken in this yakitori recipe; thought it would be easy to put the umeboshi past inside each meatball. I wanted a little richness and remembered walnut miso dressing. I didn’t scientifically write down amounts as I cooked so if you try this recipe, use common sense.
Japanese Spaghetti and Meatballs
serves about 3 to 4
♀ 12 ounces ground chicken
♀ shiso leaves (about 2 Tbs. chopped)
♀ 1 egg
♀ 2 tsp. shoyu
♀ 1 Tbs. saké
♀ 1 Tbs. sugar
♀ about 2-3 Tbs. umeboshi paste (remove pits and mash)
♀ 1 Tbs. mirin
♀ about 2 cups water or chicken broth
♀ 1 package of ekoki mushrooms, sliced
♂ Combine chicken, shiso, egg, soy sauce, and sugar. If the mixture looks too runny add some panko bread crumbs.
♂ Mash the umeboshi with the mirin. Now, my plan was to put a little of the ume paste into each meatball, but things got out of control time-wise so I mixed that into the meat.
♂ Bring the water to a nice simmer, and drop the meatballs from two spoons into the water (see the tori-nabe recipe linked above for technique).
♂ Cook a few meatballs at a time so the water stays at a simmer. As they turn white remove them to a plate and drop more meatballs into the liquid.
♂ Once all the meatballs are partially cooked, return them to the liquid to finish cooking. They will be tender so be gentle.
♂ A few minutes before serving, put the mushrooms to simmer in the stock.
♀ ¾ cup walnut meats
♀ 2 tablespoons white miso
♀ 1 TBS mirin
♀ 1 teaspoon sugar
♀ 1 teaspoon soy sauce
♂ Toast the walnuts and rub the bitter inner skin off. Reserve a few nice looking specimens for garnish. Grind the walnuts in a suribachi (or small food processor) until they look oily.
♂ One at a time, add the miso, mirin, sugar, and soy sauce. Add water/stock from the meatballs to make a soupy sauce.
♀ 12 ounces thin spaghetti or capellini, cooked
♀ a bunch of spinach, blanched
♀ nori cut into strips for garnish
♂ Toss the hot pasta with the sauce / dressing. Line pasta plates with the spinach. Top the spaghetti with the meatballs. Garnish with the nice looking walnut halves and nori.

My husband and I have come to an age when we must begin to see things differently. He been talking about retiring for a year or so, and he just got his first pension check: that makes it official. Doesn’t that put the future into a new perspective? And my father is reaching a point where my sister is afraid to leave him alone while she is at work—he forgets where he is. What if he goes outside without shoes…
But truly, at every age we must begin to see things differently: 1st day at school, first chocolate, last time you saw your first lover, the first snow of the year, the last time you spoke to your mother… Hey, fill in the blanks.  Ćĥẫńģể ǐś ťhẹ óñŀỵ ĉọņšŧặñť.
To see things differently even after 30 years of marriage is normal. I am very nervous about this retirement issue, while he is optimistic about finding other work to keep us in miso. Trying to arrange in-home ,or assisted living care, overwhelms me while he takes one bit at a time.
To see things differently has caused some stress between us, and sometime words spoken under duress have caused pain.

~~~ cup of coffee for you, tessie.
err… morning… ooohhh… thank you
slides his hand along my side shoulder to ankle; stretch awake
he lays down beside me and says, “I had a dream just before i woke up…”
sigh his or mine?
“…There was a big brass band, well not big—
like one that walks around playing. trumpets trombones tubas”
starts humming, sits up, a false start more musical than throat clearing
sings a capella
Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money, maybe we’re ragged and funny
But we’ll travel along, singing a song, side by side
I don’t know what’s a-coming tomorrow, maybe it’s trouble and sorrow
But we’ll travel the road, sharing our load, side by side
Through all kinds of weather, what if the sky should fall?
Just as long as we’re together, it really doesn’t matter at all
When they’ve all had their quarrels and parted, we’ll be the same as we started
Just traveling along, singing our song, side by side
Yeah, now, through all kinds of weather, what if the sky should fall?
Just as long as we’re together, it really doesn’t matter at all
Now, when they’ve all had their quarrels and parted, we’ll be the same as we started
Just a-traveling along, singing a song, side by side

Filed under: Japanese Food, Miscellaneous, Noodles   |  4 Comments
Tags: spaghetti, umeboshi

Mushrooms, Noodles, Love, and Kisses

31Jan10

. Recipes which use shiitake: snow at the bottom

In a cooking forum recently someone asked how many fresh shiitake to use instead of dry. Several suggested how much to substitute. (Note: names have been changed, but the conversation was real (ok virtual and really, paraphrased or edited in parts).) Achen: The two are not interchangeable. Dried mushrooms should be soaked the night before, not the 30 minutes in warm water most recipes instruct. The long soaking makes them a luxuriously plump and yielding product not unlike softly biting into a person’s lip. They have a smoky pungency, a huge hit of flavor, and the soaking water can be used as a base for braising liquids or sauces in Asian cooking. Fresh shiitake have a wine-like complexity to use in western style dishes and gravies. Tess: Dried shiitake are very different from fresh. Substituting one for the other will yield very different results. … The big difference is the texture and the bonus of flavorful liquid from the dried shiitake… braised dishes are nice with the dried shiitake/or even just the liquid for dashi… Does that umami taste/flavor/sensation (??) make you just sort of click your tongue? GAK or am I nuts! Achen: Click, click! You and I must be from the same nut. Tess: You know, that is funny. Husband has a jaw-tapping impulse for greens: cabbage, kale, chard, any leafy greens… me, I like those things but have no click click kiss kiss sort of reaction or longing for them. Neither does he have that tongue desire for the foods I crave. Mari: What foods do you crave, Tess? Just curious. ;-) Tess: LOL— the “tongue desire” part may be a bit of artistic ‘over-exaggeration’? Is that why you ask me about foods I crave? Mari: Yes, that is exactly why I asked what foods you crave. I crave different things at different times, and I have food allergies, so right now I’d love some good crusty rye bread. I used to make almost all of our bread before the advent of my allergies. I crave summer melons, especially watermelon but only if they’re perfect. Whole wheat matzoh with sweet butter. I’m driving myself crazy, which is not too difficult at the best of times. I do often crave rice of different kinds and I can eat all sorts of rice. Tess: #1 without a doubt would be pasta of any sort, anytime! Even the act of eating long noodles or spaghetti involves sort of kiss-shaped lips to eat them. When I was 4 that my mother served spaghetti one night. I wanted seconds because it was so so so delicious that I didn’t want to stop eating it. But my mother wouldn’t give me more until I drank a glass of milk. My grandmother must have been there because my mother didn’t usually force us kids to eat anything we didn’t like. So I drank the milk as fast as I could…gulp, gulp, gulp…so you can guess what happened: my stomach did not feel good at all. After the mess got cleaned up, I still wasn’t allowed to have more spaghetti! I’ll even admit to loving chef boyardee raviolli, that’s how much I love pasta!Spaghetti sauce was the very first thing I learned to cook by myself. I was 10 and got distracted by a TV show (Leave it to Beaver?) and the sauce almost boiled away—water to the rescue just in time. I didn’t care, and everyone else ate it so it was probably adequate. I didn’t have much sauce so I would have room for more pasta. I do ramble, don’t I? Your post is charming. A discussion of food preferences followed with an agreement that, “Food is so personal, yet we don’t understand why one person likes this and another prefers that…” It’s that sort of forum: advice, recommendations, chat, and friendliness.

Filed under: Japanese Food, Noodles, Udon, Western Influenced food   |  Leave a Comment

Cats can’t complain!

26Jan10

My cats can’t complain! The cats have been feasting!
(inspite of Gracie’s recent exposé)
But after almost a week, I think even they are getting tired of it.

I haven’t been able to blog lately because
——someone gave us a 19 pound turkey, ——
and there are just no Japanese recipes for such a bird,
and
I thought learning about image mapping might come in handy…
(click on each cat to read about how each came to live with us)
Click here if you want to skip the story
and get to the recipe right now!

I say that is a generously sized bird. A friend commented,
— ”Confucius might also say: bird most difficult to reciperocate.”—*

Well, the bird was certainly difficult to reduce to its component parts—
almost enough to make one a vegetarian. At least I didn’t have to kill it myself.

— No need to reciprocate: —
Husband works for a family-owned company about 4 hours away from where we live. They give employees a turkey every Thanksgiving
(I believe it might be considerably cheaper than a cash bonus lol).
The family includes something like 12 or 13 children (I don’t know the precise number), who now have spouses and children of their own;
in their eyes one li’le ol’ 19 pound bird is not big enough…

Husband was working in Buffalo, NY around turkey-day so we didn’t get our turkey, and I thought we were safe. But no, one of the family kept it in a freezer until someone had to drive to Ann Arbor. That was sometime between Christmas and New Year when it was almost 0°F (-18°C???) so we put it in the grill outside (no, we have not yet put the grill into the shed) and that was fine until the temperature got above freezing for a few days… and no, there is no space in the freezer.

As I said, the cats can’t complain,
but I wasn’t about to cook 19 pounds of bird meat for only them. Really, I do like to eat turkey! But roasting a bird that size, then spending many following days trying to make it into things that don’t taste like turkey—such as turkey burritos, turkey casserole, turkey pie, or any of the 603,000 references that Google has collected—
is too much to ask!
My plan was to cook the bird 3 different ways from the beginning.

That’s why I was wrestling a big, cold, slippery beast in my kitchen sink with a very sharp knife and extra heavy kitchen shears: breast to roast, thighs and various other chunks not to be named for a French stew,
and legs and wings for a teriyaki treatment.

Phase 1, I began roasting the breast in the oven, but when J got home he lit the grill (yes, in the snow) and smoked it with applewood. It was bigger than I thought so we finished it off in the oven. We had lots of gravy, mashed potatoes, noodles, sandwiches. Not all for one meal.

Phase 2, Dindonnneau au Vin, the French stew was wonderful as always. The recipe comes from Family Circle magazine, cira 1976, which I stole from my mother-in-law.. Googling dinde au vin brings up lots of recipes, mostly in French.
Hover here to read why Googling dindonneau au vin shows only 1 site.

Phase 3, well didn’t happen before the turkey went south…

Please click here
to try this most wonderful recipe for a French turkey and red wine stew.

.

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Filed under: Miscellaneous, Non Japanese Food, Poultry, chicken   |  12 Comments
Tags: image map, turkey

Tess Exposé

22Jan10

I’m not into tearing stuff down, but how ’bout some balance here. First, I don’t get ANY credit at all. Then, why do we NEVER hear about what’s really interesting; what do Japanese cats eat? Plus, people should know: Tess is NOT a very good cook!
http://1tess.wordpress.com
~~guest post by Gracie

So, I hate to break it to you people, but that handsome orange avatar is not Tess. That’s me, Gracie. I never gave permission for her to use my picture, but I guess it’s OK. Tess doesn’t like the way she looks, though me and Mr. Tess do. (I guess he must; it sure couldn’t be for the food that he sticks around)

I’ve been around from the days when Tessie actually knew how to cook. I was just hanging around the neighborhood once upon a time, and this awesome fragrance pulled me like a dog leash into the back yard where this red-haired lady had a huge salmon on a barbecue grill. Even then she was developing bad cooking habits, but I ignored the stink of dill, onions and garlic, ’cause the salmon smell was overpowering and I was really hungry. I don’t ‘member if I got any of that fish, but I never left.

I used my charm on Tess and her family. I have this really cute purr and this sort of submissive approach (’til I get what I want anyway) that got them to start letting me in the house when the snow got deep outside. I guess that’s why they started calling me Gracie, when they would let me out at night and would say “G’night Gracie,” because they thought only a girl cat could be so cute. Plus, when they tried to look under the fur between my back legs I was not a bit submissive.

Big surprise when they took me to see the vet for the first time! But by then it was too late to call me by some boy name, and I don’t care what they call me, ’cause girl cats only have a vague interest for me since the time… well, let’s not go into that.

But this is s’posed to be a food blog right? So listen up, foodies! All those pictures my mom, Tess, posts; how come there’s never any pictures of what she makes us cats eat? I mean Friskies Liver and Chicken Dinner has a heady bouquet with delicate hints of entrails, but how ’bout presentation for Pet’s sake! Does she think we don’t care how our dinner looks?
Tess spends so much time arranging weird, useless stuff like tofu and daikon so she can take pictures of it. Then, when it’s time for our one meal of wet food, it’s “Glop! Plop!” Scoop it out of the can, throw it in some old bowl that Mr. Tess found at the recycle center, and put it on the floor  I hope cats in Japan get better aesthetic treatment.

I’m not sure I want to hear about what those nekos eat, though. Tess tried to give me that Tofu stuff once. Is that what Ms. Shimbo gives her cats?
Don’t give Tessie any ideas!

The best thing I can say about her cooking Japanese food is she doesn’t ruin good food with garlic all the time now. She finds other ways to ruin it now. Like the time she got this beautiful, pink piece of tuna and soaked it in stinky wine and vinegary stuff and rolled it around in some black sesame seeds before burning the outside of it. What a waste! Sashimi is about the only good thing so far , but it seems like they make me go outside whenever they have that at dinner.

I know Tess likes raw meat, and she doesn’t like to share, because whenever she sees me catch mousies, (and sometimes I even bring them to her, ’cause I do like to share and she’s always promising me that she’ll fry them in butter for me). If I leave them alone for a second, they disappear before I get a chance to eat them. She tells Mr. Tess that she doesn’t want me to get parasols or something, but I’m pretty sure she eats the little delicacies all by herself.

So, dear readers, just because my mom makes her meals look pretty don’t assume she really knows how to make it taste like real food.

…that’s my tale, and I’m sticking to it…

Filed under: Miscellaneous, Non Japanese Food   |  26 Comments
Tags: position:absolute, position:relative

Meal Ready to Eat: MRE

17Jan10

click on the pictures above to see details

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Filed under: Miscellaneous, Non Japanese Food   |  2 Comments