This is why, given a choice, you should either learn to cook or find someone to spend your weekend mornings with who can cook.

Crullers with cinnamon sugar

Crullers have nearly disappeared from the shelves of most donut shops, mostly due to the fact that they’re seen as a bit more labor intensive than ordinary donuts. I find it hard to believe that there no machines exist that could reduce the burden, but the fact that they’re now so hard to find presents opportunities for the industrious home cook.

And here’s the thing: They’re not really that much work. Perhaps they pennies don’t work out when you’re making them on the scale that a bakery would need to, but I was able to go from nothing to having them on the table in about 35 minutes. I only made six, but I’m sure I could have scaled up the recipe to about 24 pieces without adding more than a few minutes work.

This is just a classic pâte à choux with a little added vanilla. I added salt and sugar in roughly the same ratio I would use for cream puffs, with perhaps a bit more salt than usual. I pipe the dough out onto waxed paper. There are a few ways you can pipe them, depending on the visual effect you want; I piped small stars in six segments. An alternative would be to use the star tip, twisting gradually, making one continuous round shape.

After piping, I stuck them in the freezer for just about 10 minutes to firm up, which makes them easier to drop into the fryer. They could have easily been kept in the freezer for a week or so. This time, though, I took advantage of the simplicity of the ratio and made just the amount I thought we’d need, which was about 60 ml water, 30 grams. butter, 30 grams flour, and 60 grams eggs (about 2 whole eggs). This makes slightly more than 6 crullers.

Last winter, the first time I made these, I underestimated how much they would expand in the fryer. The steam pressure causes them to blow up into about four times their original size, so make sure you keep that in mind when shaping them. Think small.

I fried them for about 5 minutes total, flipping them about half way through to let them brown evenly. They continue to darken a bit after they’re pulled from the oil.

This time, I dusted them with sugar mixed with cinnamon and a pinch of salt. They could have just as easily been glazed, or chocolate dipped.

What I really like about crullers is how sweet they aren’t, even after they’re dusted with sugar.

Blood orange scones

Not that long ago, I posted about some very basic scones served with blood orange jam.  Hiromi was craving scones for breakfast yesterday. I remembered that I had recently prepared a pseudo-marmalade of blood oranges meant to serve over waffles not that long ago. The leftovers contained only a little liquid, and a lot of blood orange peel.

So I thought I might make good use of them by incorporating them into the basic scone pastry. I placed the peels on a cutting board and chopped them a bit more finely than I had them originally, then added them to the dough just before the final splash of milk that holds them together.

The result? Success! The scones needed only the slightest splash of milk since they still had a little residual liquid from the blood oranges. The blood orange added a great aroma and a little bitterness. I was worried that they’d get a little tough since I was adding another step to the process, but they turned out tender yet crisp, just as I wanted.

Rare only for me, of course. As regular readers know, I’m as close to vegetarian as possible for someone who travels to Japan on a regular basis.

Hiromi’s doctor said she’s got somewhat low iron levels. We’ve been mitigating that a bit with supplements and with a heavier use of beans and darker greens, and Hiromi’s been consuming a fair amount of orange or tangerine juice to help absorption. But it’s a lot easier to deal with this kind of challenge by incorporating more red meat and liver in to a diet than to rely on vegetarian sources of iron, and Hiromi only practices vegetarianism when I cook, and I’m far from dogmatic. So we’ve made some little adjustments.

Cooking is usually my job, though, and since Hiromi usually cleans up after the aftermath of my food, I don’t mind making the occasional carnivorous dish for her benefit.

I took some aniseed, coriander seed, allspice, black pepper, some dried smoky chilies, and the seeds from a couple of cardamom pods and ground them in my spice grinder, then mixed this with a bit of salt. I rubbed the pork with this mixture and some olive oil, then I added the seasoned meat to a hot pressure cooker. I let the meat brown a bit, then turned each piece to brown on at least two other sides. I pulled the browned meat out of the pan and let it rest while sauteeing some onions with some young ginger.

I tossed in some quartered mushrooms  with a bit more salt. Finally, I added some rolling-cut carrots and a stick of chopped celery to the mix, completing the mirepoix trinity. Then I added a half cup of read wine and a half cup of water, and restored the meat to the pan. I put the pressure cooker’s lid in place. Once it reached full pressure, I let it cook for 10 minutes.

Hiromi discovered it wasn’t quite perfectly tender when the valve released, so I brought it back to pressure and reduced the temperature to the lowest possible setting that would keep the pressure up. I’m not quite sure how long we let it cook, but it was probably about 25 minutes total.

When the valve released the second time, it seemed ready to serve. When Hiromi tasted it at the table, she reported it was surprisingly tender. We only served about half of it, and it was more than enough with the other dishes we had prepared, so she had a bit leftover for lunch the next day or so.

It was pretty easy to pull off, apparently satisfying enough, and probably no more complicated than anything else we made that night. Braised pork. Pressure cooker. I can work with that.

Last night we visited a friend who had planned a sort of traditional lamb dinner, to be followed by Easter egg decoration. I don’t really remember much about Easter dinners from my childhood, since we focused more on the egg thing, so I brought some gougeres made with Valdeon blue cheese (which I’m sure I’ll make again, but I didn’t take a photo), and pressure-cooked baby artichokes prepared with shallots, Meyer lemons, garlic, butter, olive oil, and a splash of wine, and a broccolini dish.

The one child present fell asleep before we got to the egg decoration, so the adults took over that very important responsibility. We took a few of them home with us for breakfast this morning.

Hiromi made Doraemon. Mine is the ugly one in back. It was supposed to be an owl, but turned out to look more like Frank Zappa.

For breakfast, I made an apple coffee cake with a little allspice, black pepper, cinnamon, clove, and grains of paradise. It’s topped with a simple salted butter streusel. I was a little careless, so it turned out slightly underbaked, so it was a bit pudding-like, but still perfectly serviceable. I used very little sugar, so it was more spicy than sweet. Next time, I should let it bake a bit longer.

Hiromi always says that when I’m trying to use up ingredients, the results are often more exciting than when I do something more planned. I think that’s been the case since I was in college, when I would sometimes change course after I started cooking if a particular whim struck me as a good idea.

Usually on weeknights, I’ve got a few ingredients in less than ideal condition that have been sitting around too long. The purple mashed potatoes from my previous entry were in that category, and the ton of bell peppers in that Pope’s bean dish were also completely driven by excess.

I don’t know how many times I’ve made some variation of this simple side, but we always like sautéed green beans. This one had onions, mushrooms, red bell peppers, garlic, and smoked paprika, and was made with those skinny so-called French style green beans sometimes called haricots vert. “Green beans” apparently sound much more sophisticated when rendered literally in French.

Normally I don’t attempt to make anything remotely like insalata caprese this time of year, but we had some better-than-average-for-this-time-of-year strawberry tomatoes, which are slightly larger than cherry tomatoes and a bit more flavorful. If I were a little more industrious, I might have roasted them a bit first, but this was still pretty good for a completely out-of-season dish. I’d be a little embarrassed to serve this for company, as the tomatoes were a lot more tart than they were sweet, but they beat anything you’d find in a supermarket this time of year.

Ganmodoki, a deep-fried tofu dumpling, are kind of a staple of Kyoto-style tofu cuisine, and find their way into nimono, among other things. I’ve made them before, but this time, I took a slightly different route.

Inspired by a crazy cheap deal on burdock root at Rising Sun Produce in Seattle’s International District, I decided to emulate a soup Hiromi and I tried years ago at Del Cook, a French restaurant in a rural extension of Osaka in the Nose valley, made with Japanese burdock root, called gobo.

I took bunch of burdock roots and roasted them in the oven with a bit of salt until the burdock softened up a bit, probably around 20-30 minutes. Then I broke out the blender and busted up the roasted roots with some milk and vegetable soup stock. The process took a bit longer than I would have liked, but even after all that pureeing, I discovered that the texture of the mixture was far chewier than I’d want in bisque-like soup. At first, in denial, I tried pressing on, seasoning the liquid with salt and some “Balinese Seasoning” that I first discovered at World Spice Merchants a few months ago, cooked in a bit of butter. But I realized chewy wasn’t going to work for this, and I needed to find some workaround.

So I pushed the liquid through a sieve, extracting as much as I could manage. I realized I had a lot of burdock fiber that might still be put to good use. If we eat all this roughage in kimpira-gobo, there must be some way to make it edible, right? That’s when ganmodoki came to mind. I got myself a block of momen-doufu, medium-firm tofu, broke it up, and mixed it with the solids from my sieving efforts, along with black and white sesame seeds. The ratio was probably about 1:1 burdock fiber and tofu, without considering the seasonings. Even before I fried them, the mixture tasted pretty nice, so I had some confidence that things would work out. The chewy texture that had caused me consternation in the soup was nicely mitigated by the custardy texture of the tofu, and in a solid form, whatever fiber in the texture remained was far less disconcerting.

Using a couple of spoons, I made small balls out of the solids and placed them into the deep fryer.

I was surprised at how deeply the ganmodoki browned. There’s a touch of sugar in the spice blend I used, and probably a reasonable amount of sugar in burdock root itself, but I have never had this kind of result when making more conventional ganmodoki. Even deeply browned, the little balls were pretty tender inside, and just barely held together.

I modified the soup from my original plan, incorporating some pureed cannelini for protein, so in many ways, save for my use of burdock root in place of the cheddar in the version of the soup that was recently featured in Seattle’s Japanese newspaper, Soy Source, it was not a huge departure from that. The roasted burdock totally transforms the flavor from rich to earthy, so they’re certainly not identical. Certainly, the little tweaks are proof that you can make very small changes to a dish and turn it into something nearly unrecognizable. The white beans contributed protein and some iron to a dish that would otherwise best serve as a small side dish, making it a more substantial part of dinner.

To serve, I ladled the liquid into onion soup bowls, and placed three pieces of the “gobodoki” (half gobo, half ganmodoki) on top. I was convinced Hiromi would groan at my bad Japanese wordplay when I unabashedly mashed two unrelated words together, but she embraced the name unreservedly.

To finish, I topped the soup with deep-fried, salt-sprinkled burdock root. We served it with some gnocchi alla romana, which I’ll try to feature in a future post. A little bread and a nice green vegetable side dish would make a nice alternative.

I really like the Balinese seasoning spice mixture that in my cream-style soups. I have no idea if it even resembles anything actually used in Indonesia, but that’s beside the point; the dishes I’ve made with it so far simply aren’t indigenous to any particular country, so I feel free to do whatever tastes good. I dig the shallot, lemongrass and peanut base notes that it provides in anything creamy. There’s a little cinnamon, white pepper, and chili in there, and a hint of dried ginger, so it adds a little magic to anything it touches.

The last couple of weekends we’ve been taking advantage of the fiddlehead fern fronds found at Sosio’s. Go get them before they disappear for the rest of the year!

We’ve been preparing them using our usual nimono-style treatment… Blanch briefly in a boiling solution of water and baking soda to remove aku, or bitterness, shock in ice water, then gently poach in dashi (or really, any soup stock), soy sauce, sake, a little mirin, and, if needed, additional salt and sugar.

Maybe I’ll do them another way before the season ends, but somehow this simple version pleases me the most.

I’ve written about them before, but the easiest flavor comparison to make is to white asparagus. They’re slightly bitter, as you’d expect from white asparagus, and some of the sweetness and you’d expect from asparagus, but they have a bit more of a foresty aroma.

They usually only have a 4-8 week run, depending on factors that I don’t yet know how to predict. I think they’ve come in a bit early this year, as I’ve gradually been trained to expect them sometime in April. But if morels can be early, so can warabi. In any event, if you want to give them a try, get them while you can.

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.