So I’ve had this dangerous affinity for meringues in the last year or so. I like them on cakes and pies, I like them on savory dishes, and I sometimes like them all by themselves.

This occasionally results in something approaching culinary genius, but more often than not, something goes slightly wrong. The most common problem is usually my piping effort. My technical mastery of piping can, more often than not, be fairly compared to the artistry of a six year old. Occasionally I just over-bake them by a few minutes and they come out far too dark.

This one decided to explode.

You may not see it here, because I tried to find the best possible angle, but my meringue mostly deflated before it ever finished baking. It spread out more than it puffed up.

In fact, it’s technically more of a soufflé than a meringue. What I did was roast a Japanese sweet potato, slice it in half lengthwise, and scoop out a good amount of flesh, which I mashed. Then I mixed the mashed flesh with egg yolk while the flesh was still warm. Separately, I beat egg whites into a meringue, adding a small amount of sugar and a heavy pinch of salt. Then I gently folded the sweet potatoes back into the meringue, and filled the scooped out part of the potato with the mixture. To finish it off, I piped a bit more of the mixture on top with a star tip, and sprinkled black sesame seeds on top. I then baked the dish at about 375F until it was nicely browned.

I think I used a bit too much egg white. But the result, even if a bit ugly and quite technically flawed, tasted pretty nice. I added enough salt to the mixture to make this a savory side dish rather than a dessert, but you could certainly adjust the preparation to make it work either way.

Done right, it could look quite elegant, but I’m almost happy with my admittedly rustic results. It’s a little wafuu without being something you’d typically find in most Japanese mothers’ repertoires, and compatible with both Japanese and American taste sensibilities.

Next time, I want to make some adjustments to improve the stability of the foam. But it’ll go on one of my menus again.

I’ve had a few brushes with fleeting, mostly inconsequential fame.

My very first letter to the editor was published when I was about 14 years old in Knoxville, Tennessee. Something that was ostensibly my own writing, heavily edited, was first “published” in a computer magazine when I was about 15 years old, for which I received about $50. During college I was quoted in the West Coast edition of USA Today because I said some silly but, well, quotable thing about the 1992 Vice Presidential debates in the Media Fellows lounge at my university, which happened to be Dan Quayle’s Alma Mater. I had a few decent articles and some not so great ones published in my college newspaper and in a Seattle Asian American newspaper. Once I was even featured in a Japanese newspaper in Japan for dressing up as Santa Claus at a friend’s family’s nursery school. And, of course, when I started my business, a few local papers published an article or two about my project.

Photo source: Soy Source, shot by Hiro Yamada. I’m on the right side.

But I’ve never been featured in a newspaper just for doing the most ordinary of things… making a nice lunch.

This week Hiromi and I were in a local Japanese newspaper called Soy Source, which was doing a feature called “Otoko no ryouri,” or Men’s Cuisine, featuring four different Seattle-area men who cook, and who presumably have some sort of connection to Japan. Teruyo Koshimaya, an editor at the paper, and Hiro Yamada, a photographer and member of my Japanese speaking social group, dropped by for lunch about a week and a half ago, and I made a few dishes while we chatted about food, travel, ceramics, work and other things.

I served a potato-based focaccia topped with mizuna pesto (later used in this fettucini and morel dish), a simple blanched broccolini topped with hot browned shallots, garlic, and good balsamic vinegar, a marinated mushroom dish, and a cannelini-cheddar soup topped with fried gobo (burdock root). Nothing turned into a disaster, which is always the thing I worry about when I have unusual amounts of attention paid to my food…

Two recipes, which are probably approximations of what I made because I almost never work from exact recipes and I had to estimate quantities, were included here (in Japanese) as a sidebar to the article. I did try to measure things out somewhat carefully, so they shouldn’t be too far off.

It was a lot of fun. I look forward to someday being semi-famous again.

No matter how hard we try, the two of us cannot eat a large pot of what amounts to be little more than mashed potatoes, regardless how many greens are involved.

So I decided to repurpose the leftovers a little bit. I melted some butter in a 6” skillet and added a spice blend (Kashmiri garam masala, I think) and turmeric, then poured it over the remaining colcannon in the refrigerator. I also added some frozen peas.

I improvised a dough by rubbing some of flour and salt with a bit of butter, then added just enough water to combine. I worked the dough together and let it rest for a while in the refrigerator.

I then rolled out the dough and cut it into small pieces, and Hiromi and I got to work stuffing them.

The first night I prepared them as just a little snack to go along with a couple of other dishes, but tonight I noticed I had some ungracefully aging pears in the refrigerator, and thought I should make quick use of them before something nefarious happened. I put together a simple chutney built on fenugreek, allspice, a little black pepper, and coriander, along with some fresh young ginger, onions, and a couple of fresh chilies, along with a bit of salt and unrefined sugar.

A couple of nights ago, I prepared some cranberry beans with some Chinese spices like star anise and some large white seed I’ve never learned the name of, and some fennel seed. I thought I was going to use these as a little bean side dish that never quite happened. By the time I needed them again, I had a far different craving, so I mashed the beans with some egg, flour and breadcrumbs, and pan-browned them in a nonstick omelet pan with a little oil. (They could just as easily be deep fried).

I was ever-so-slightly worried that the vaguely Chinese seasoning of the beans would fight with the vaguely Indian seasoning of the chutney, but actually they worked quite nicely together. The star anise and fennel added a nice depth to the bites of the cranberry bean cakes, and the chutney added a nice gently-fiery sweetness. We also found that the baby spinach underneath, motivated mostly by color, proved to be an useful utensil for carrying the bean cakes to our mouths, and added a little textural contrast.

We self-indulgently bought a pasta roller last summer. It’s a single-purpose device, and I don’t have many items like that, at least not when they take up as much room as that, but pasta is a staple food for us and I wanted to have a tool that made it easier to produce pasta of a consistent thickness and texture.

I’m still not quite at the level where I’m going to beat anyone’s Italian nonna if we undertook some sort of pasta death match, but it’s surprising how little practice is required to develop perfectly respectable results.

One of the guys at Sosio’s happens to go to the same gym I do, and he’s there nearly every day. He noticed me fighting the dumbbells little over a week ago and told me I needed to come in and get some morels, which seem to have come in a bit early this year. So I went in on the weekend and grabbed some.

I thought it was a good excuse to break out the pasta maker. It’s really not too time-consuming to make a small amount of pasta, at least in the amount required to serve 2-4 people, so it’s even manageable on a weeknight. The only difficult thing is allowing the prepared dough to rest 30-60 minutes before attempting to roll it out. If you don’t do that, it fights with you, and you get these crazy holes inexplicable places. But once it’s reasonably well rested, the gluten in the semolina relaxes and the dough cooperates nicely. It just requires a little patience, and, when possible, another pair of helpful hands.

We had plenty of pesto I prepared for a lunch meeting on Sunday afternoon. The particular pesto I made was not prepared from the usual Genovese ingredient of basil, however. I turned to mizuna, a Japanese green with a flavor similar to, but slightly brighter than arugula. This is one of my favorite versions of pesto, and turns out to be ever so slightly cheaper than the basil version, since it comes in roughly one-pound bundles for $2.80 at Uwajimaya; I usually have to pay at least $4/pound for basil when I buy it in bulk, if not more, and it’s crazy expensive when purchased on those obnoxious $3 one-ounce plastic containers at the supermarket. So it not only makes a refreshing change of pace; it’s also surprisingly frugal.

I suppose that’s kind of moot after paying for morels, but they were surprisingly inexpensive for ones sold so early in the season. I’ve paid more in the peak of the harvest in past years, so we must have a particularly prolific crop in store.

Under the more relaxed conditions of weekend pasta-making, I like to let the rolled and cut pasta dry out a touch, maybe an hour or so, before I try to boil it, but for fettucini, it’s not really necessary. We once tried the spaghetti cutter on a weeknight and tried to serve that with a tomato sauce before letting it dry at all after cutting, and we produced something very similar to ramen-shop ramen instead of spaghetti. I might be wrong, but my limited experience seems to tell me that, when under time constraints, wider noodles like fettuccini or tagliatelle work better.

The morels were just cooked with a generous knob of butter and salt as the pasta cooked. I drained the pasta after cooking it for 2-3 minutes in salted water, leaving just a touch of water in the pan, and tossed the pasta, morels and mizuna pesto together until combined.

It’s best served hot, and pesto cools quickly, so get it right out there on the table and eat!

We had it with a nice serving of lentil soup, which was part of dinner a couple of times last week, and maybe a little salad.

There’s not much of a recipe, as it was really about having everything around when I needed it and adjusting seasoning as required, but the mizuna pesto goes a little something like this:

Mizuna pesto

Ingredients

• 2/3 of a bundle of mizuna, about 300g (2/3 lb)
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tablespoons raw pine nuts
• Good extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese (about 50g)

Technique

1. Toast pine nuts gently about 5-6 minutes on low heat in a pan. Set aside to cool.
2. Wash mizuna. Remove sprout from garlic, if present, to avoid unwanted bitterness. Add mizuna to a blender with garlic, pine nuts, and a little olive oil. Pulse the blender with the "chop" mode (medium speed). Add additional olive oil through the lid opening until an emulsion forms. You should still see small pieces of mizuna, but all the leaves should be broken.
3. Grate parmesan and stir into the pesto.

As a vegetarian, I don’t eat the most common variations of okonomiyaki, which involve pork or other animal bits.

I’m quite fine with the “modern yaki”, as one Tokyo restaurant called their wackier, contemporary spins on the dish; okonomiyaki is really a modern dish itself, and crazy variations are totally in keeping with the convention. One of the first two versions I ever tasted involved chunks of cheese mixed in the batter, and that suits me just fine. But one aspect I haven’t given serious thought to is a suitable replacement, either visually or in terms of flavor, for the katsuo-bushi, shaved dried skipjack tuna that is nearly always sprinkled on top.

Until now. I made fried shaved burdock root (gobo chips) for an unrelated purpose earlier in the day, and had some left over. Since we had a really heavy lunch at Lunchbox Laboratory earlier in the day, and some snacks for a photography gathering on Sunday, we decided to go with ostensibly lighter fare for dinner. Or rather, as light as a savory pancake covered with mayonnaise can be. Mine had an overdose of kizami-shouga (pickled matchstick cut ginger), because I can, and pieces of aged cheddar and gruyere inside.

I’ve certainly done other versions of this, but the gobo worked very well. Obviously the burdock is a lot earthier than katsuo and doesn’t have the same kind of aroma as the katsuo, but it’s sliced thin and adds a nice crisp texture that works really well. It’s also at least as visually interesting as the katsuobushi.

Hiromi had a pork craving, so we made a more conventional version for her. This one was basically chopped pieces of pork loin cooked with salt and pepper in the frying pan briefly before the cabbage mixture is added. It’s also made with the usual pickled ginger, but more importantly, this version has the standard katsuo-bushi topping (but Hiromi wanted some of the burdock too, because there’s nothing quite as dangerous as fried gobo).

Katsuobushi placed on top of hot okonomiyaki has one visual advantage, only recognizable with full-motion video or by sitting right there at the table when it’s served. The extreme thinness and large surface area plays with the heat from the pancake, and the dried fish writhes and dances around as the okonomiyaki cools.

We have a somewhat implicit bias favoring simple, seasonal food that requires minimal forethought, but generally I’m willing to do a bit more work to step up the drama.

But it’s nice when it’s really just a little extra work.

Gefüllte Mangoldblätter, or stuffed Swiss chard, appearing in many German cookbooks when I lived there, but I’m pretty sure I never once made it myself in the entire time that I was in the country. It’s not so much that I was intimidated; I suppose i just didn’t see the point. Or maybe I just didn’t know what to do with the vegetable when I saw it.

Hiromi has a strong affection for rolled cabbage, though, so it was inevitable that I’d eventually apply the same treatment to Swiss chard. Actually, we’ve probably done it before, but I can’t quite remember when, so I’m going to say it’s still new to us.

Hiromi trimmed the leaves and we blanched the chard briefly, giving it just about one minute in the boiling water before draining and transferring to a big bowl of ice water to stop the color change.

I prepared a filling inspired loosely by Hiromi’s preferred style of ganmodoki, which has some black and white toasted sesame in it. I basically sauteed some nira (a sort of Asian chive commonly used in Japanese-style gyoza) and diced shiitake with a couple of serious spoons full of black and white sesame seeds, and. Once the mushrooms were suitably browned, I added this mixture to some crumbled medium-firm momen tofu and stirred everything together. Hiromi stuffed the leaves, and skewered them with short kushi, or kebab sticks, to hold them together.

I made a simple vegetable stock just before we had gotten started on this, using a mirepoix as a foundation, so the last bit came together quickly. In a saucepan I lightly browned shallots and added stock, a little splash of wine, and salt and pepper and maybe a few other herbs.

We then put the stuffed chard rolls into the saucepan just for a couple of minutes to let everything mingle together, and we served them.

The robustness of the chard turns out to help the rolls stay together; they were far less fragile than the cabbage variants we’ve made before. The sesame, shiitake, nira and fresh tofu in the filling removed most of the commonality with all but the most contemporary of German versions, but provided a great source of flavor, and was comforting for the Japanese half of the family. And the shallot-enhanced broth married the earthy chard together with the savory filling.

I’d say I prefer this version over the vegetarian cabbage rolls I’ve previously made, since the wrapping itself is a star player; cabbage tends to be much less assertively flavored, and probably wants even more powerfully seasoned fillings. I felt like I could have gotten away with a slightly milder filling compared to what we ended up with, but it turned out just about right.

OK, I’m a little late getting around to posting St. Patrick’s Day food, but let’s just say we were busy eating.

While my family tends to identify mostly with the small ostensibly Italian fragment of our ethnicity, mostly thanks to the way most of us look, and our attachment to Italian foods, we’re actually far more Irish than we are Italian. So it’s probably unfair to ignore that part of our background entirely.

I’m not a beer guy, so there was no green beer for us, and for various reasons which I’ll explain at some other point, Hiromi’s not drinking. So, just for me, I went with a traditional recipe of Irish whiskey (on ice since it was just Bushmill’s), much like this guy.

I’m also not a meat eater, so the conventional Irish American corned beef and cabbage was out.

But there are a few semi-Irish things I can eat.

I had a lentil soup leftover from a previous dinner, so I figured I’d just use that as a protein and make an Irish soda bread and something resembling colcannon.

We didn’t have much in the way of kale or cabbage, and I’m not much of a purist when it comes to unplanned attempts at ambiguously Irish themed meals, so I took advantage of what I did have on hand: mizuna greens, scallions, and bok choy. Mizuna doesn’t love being cooked to death, so I chose to break with tradition and just work the greens into the hot mashed potatoes, rather than precooking the greens. I also threw in a bit of garlic because I didn’t have quite enough scallions around to fully flavor the dish.

I did want to give the greens some heat, though, so I let the mixture bake, covered, in a hot oven for about 15 minutes, after adding suitably heart-challenging amounts of butter and cream.

The greens maintained a bit of crunch, which is certainly very different than the standard versions of this dish, but provided a nicely refreshing contrast

The Irish soda bread was more conventional: butter, buttermilk, flour, baking soda, salt, maybe a touch of sugar.

I may have baked it just a tad too long, but it still had a great aroma and it looked quite nice upon slicing.

We served the bread with a nice Tickler cheddar and some good Vermont Butter, the soda bread was crusty with a pleasingly tender crumb.

The lentil soup could perhaps pass for Irish, but it’s probably a bit of a stretch since it involved fair amounts of an orange peel and tarragon blend and a bit of smoky chilies.

The downside is that this was a fairly heavy meal for a weeknight, and fairly heavy on the carbohydrates. But I guess that’s authentic enough: When I visited Ireland on a business trip many years ago, I overheard the staff at the company cafeteria asking people if they wanted “chips with that” no matter what they ordered. Including pasta. And in one case, a baked potato. So yeah, we were Irish like that.

We had a nice dinner tonight, but it wasn’t terribly heavy, and I was craving something sweet to finish the evening.

I was thinking a thin cookie would do the trick, so I remembered the basic tuile ratio, which is roughly 2 fat : 2 flour : 1 sugar : 1 egg white. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any skinny almonds around, but I did have some almond butter handy, and I had a surplus of egg whites left over after making hollandaise sauce a few nights ago. I decided to use a blend of butter and almond butter so that I’d have a touch more flavor than if I skipped using nuts entirely. I also added a touch of vanilla and a bit of salt.

The best thing about these is how quickly they come together. They just need to be spread out as evenly as possible on a non-stick, flexible surface… A Silpat-style mat or baking paper would do the trick.

At the last possible second before baking, I realized I had some hulled pumpkin seeds (pepitas) in the freezer, so I sprinkled a few on top before baking in the oven at 425F (400F in convection mode) for somewhere around 8-10 minutes, basically stopping when the edges were nicely browned.

For a little drama, I bent them around a rolling pin just after pulling them off the baking sheet.

They made a nice little treat. Give them a try! There’s a lot of room for variation. One of my favorites incorporates black sesame seeds, somewhat in the same vein as these financiers. I’ve also made an aniseed version that works great as an ice cream cup; just spread them out as rounds and pinch over a small teacup. They’re great with tea or coffee, too.

I recently mentioned my weakness for the seductive smokiness of Spanish paprika. It turns out that, in my kitchen, precious little of my supply ever makes it into anything remotely resembling proper Spanish cuisine. But there are occasional exceptions.

While seasoned chickpea and tomato dishes are rather common in pretty much every country that’s ever seen both ingredients, one of my favorite preparations is a Moorish-style preparation full of Spanish paprika.

Even within that realm, I’m sure there are a ton of variants. Some are garlicky, some are mostly seasoned with onions, and a few of them incorporate additional greens like spinach. I like them all. If it’s on a tapas menu, I’m a guaranteed sucker for it… We’ve ordered versions at Txori in Seattle, at Jaleo on a recent trip to DC, and probably anywhere else we’ve seen it.

Granted, it’s a humble dish, and maybe a bit homely, but it’s a fantastic way of adding a bit of protein to a cuisine which isn’t heavy on purely vegetarian protein options, aside from Spanish tortillas and various cheeses.

I did this version sans garlic and perhaps overemphasized the tomatoes. Thanks to Jaleo’s menu I stumbled on to the brilliant suggestion of topping it with a sunny-side-up egg. I cleverly forgot to butter the egg ring, so it’s not quite as pretty as it might be.

Thanks to the pressure cooker we picked up this winter, the dish comes together rather quickly. Precook the chickpeas to the point that they are soft, but not mushy. If you want garlic, toast a clove or two in olive oil gently until the garlic is just slightly browned. I then add plenty of chopped onions to the pan and cook them until transparent. Once the onions are nice and soft, I throw in a little splash of wine and add chopped or pureed tomatoes, a serious pinch of Spanish paprika (don’t waste your money on the not-at-all-similar Hungarian style paprika for this dish), salt and pepper, and the mostly-cooked chickpeas. Simmer until you’re ready to eat them, but not less than 15 minutes.

For something more verde, add blanched spinach just a minute or two before serving.

Someone may eventually convince me otherwise, but I’m pretty sure that most wild Northwest mushrooms benefit the most from a minimalist treatment.

I’ve found no better confirmation of this than the chanterelle, and the similar, but slightly homelier hedgehog mushroom.

The most reliably pleasing treatment of these mushrooms, for me, requires only four ingredients and a little attention to detail. I mince a shallot, coarsely chop the hedgehog (or chanterelle) mushrooms, and stick these straight into a small, hot cast-iron skillet. In just seconds, you see an unlikely amount of water emerge from nowhere.

After the water cooks off, add life-endangering quantities of good butter, and some nice salt. I love to use alderwood smoked salt that I pick up at World Spice Merchants below the market in Seattle, but this time I used a fennel salt that I prepared myself. Fennel salt is exactly what it sounds like: equal portions fennel seeds and coarse salt, ground in a spice grinder until the fennel turns into little specks. If you want something fancier, give this one from Ritrovo a try; it’s got fennel pollen, whatever that is, and a few other herbs and spices, and it’s very good, but it’s also $15 or so a jar. Fennel and most of the herbs in that mix are not usually more than $3 an ounce.

You may want to add a little pepper, and maybe a touch of freshly ground nutmeg. If you don’t have fennel around, it can’t hurt to use a bit of fresh thyme.

Cook the mushrooms until they’re slightly caramelized, and serve.

Hedgehog mushrooms and chanterelles are picky about how they are cooked. If you make the mistake of adding the butter to the pan before adding the mushrooms, you’ll find that the moisture never quite disappears and you waste crazy amounts of money buying wild mushrooms only to end up with a rubbery mess. If you wait to add the fat until they’re slightly dry, you get magic. Personally, I prefer magic.