I was a bit at a loss on what to make for dinner Thursday night, but I had a few things in the refrigerator that I wanted to take advantage of. I was home a little late and wanted to keep it simple, so I just cut some vegetables up and prepared them for roasting.

Roasted artichokes, sunchokes, and acorn squash

We had a medium-sized purple artichoke handy, some acorn squash, and some sunchokes, sometimes called Jerusalem artichokes. I tossed the sunchokes in a bit of salt, and everything else just went in a grill pan straight into a hot oven. While the vegetables were roasting, I whisked up a harissa-seasoned mayonnaise. I also toasted some walnuts, chopped finely and seasoned with salt, and pressed some soft chevre, which has been sitting neglected in the refrigerator since I first used it last weekend, and it needed a sense of purpose.

I also made a quick pesto pasta, taking advantage of some leftover pesto.

Actually I wasn’t very excited by this meal, because I put no thought into it. I didn’t think roasting vegetables was anything to write home about, but Hiromi was far more enthusiastic… Simplicity is also rewarding.

Last night I also kept things simple,  I made a few slightly tweaked Japanese dishes, including a nimono of acorn squash, a suimono or clear soup of fiddlehead fern fronds and tofu, some kyuuri no sunomono with iyokan no kurosu (cucumber marinated in citrusy black vinegar), and some grilled tofu drizzled with soy sauce seasoned with yuzu-koshou (yuzu peel and chilies). Each dish just requires a couple of minutes of attention, and it all comes together when it’s time to eat.

Nagaimo no negimiso dengaku

The most interesting dish of the night was sort of izakaya-ish. I lightly broiled some slices of nagaimo, the starchy tuber that is an essential component of good okonomiyaki and a breakfast staple served as tororo-imo with rice and soy sauce. I boiled miso, mirin and sugar together until it was bubbly and thick, then added some minced scallions into the mixture. I flipped the nagaimo, topped them with this negimiso concoction, and put it under the low-heat broiler again just long enough to bubble. Topped with a little more chopped negi, it’s a pleasing twist on dengaku dishes. The yamaimo took on a slight softness, retaining an almost juicy quality, without providing much of a hint of its nebaneba (sticky) tendencies, and the sweet-salty topping provided enough flavor and contrast to balance the starchy base.

Tuesday night Hiromi and I set out to join a Japanese language meetup group that I’ve been fairly regularly attending for the last year or so, but which seems to have quietly fizzled in the last couple of months. We’ve tried to attend the last few weeks but they’ve been rather sparsely populated and the one or two people we do see usually lose their inspiration to stay when they see how small the group is that week.

Well, we found ourselves the only ones there this week, and decided to duck out and find dinner after a few minutes. Not terribly inspired by the Belltown options we stumbled upon, we headed toward Pike Place Market and made our first trip to Matt's in the Market, a place often spoken of reverently by its devoted followers.

I'm a little bit late to the party, as I've known about Matt's for years but never found my way there for dinner. Even though the Pike Place Market is a quintessential Seattle institution, I'm primarily dependent on the market as a source of local and unusual fruits and vegetables, and I just never think of it as a dining destination.

For those who haven’t encountered Matt’s, there are three things you should know: the menu is short, simple and seasonal. This is not a place filled with fancy kitchen equipment, as the space is simply too small and the ventilation just too limited. Including counter seating, only about 23 people can squeeze in to the place. Most dishes are cooked on one of three butane burners, and some are at least partly finished in the oven. The atmosphere is a bit like a dinner party at a private home. Nobody rushes; there’s no point, because the food just takes as long as it takes.

If you want to impress someone with over-the top improbable towers of culinary audaciousness, it’s not the place for you, but if you appreciate simple preparations of top-quality, incredibly fresh ingredients, it’s a good bet.

We shared a grilled asparagus salad, served with some pistachio-encrusted soft chevre. It was served with some marinated peppers and a tart vinaigrette featuring small bits of pickled lemon. Hiromi wasn’t expecting much from the restaurant, and then she tasted the salad… she quickly changed her tune.

Halibut, I learned Tuesday night, is apparently Hiromi’s favorite fish. Despite brief temptation to try the night’s salmon special, she polished the plate of a harissa-seasoned halibut with olives and a potato-fennel base. I had the sole vegetarian main, which was a superbly comforting, if somewhat heavy, baked macaroni dish with mushrooms and cheese. Both are served with broccoli rabe, which Hiromi appreciated because they remind her of nanohana, the bitter greens of rapeseed plant. It’s somehow not spring in Japan without nanohana; rabe provides a decent proxy.

We also dug into a lime cheesecake, prepared off-site by another company, but quite respectable; it had just a hint of acidity, and was just sweet enough to bring out the richness of the cream cheese.

Atypical in our Seattle dining experiences, we left exactly sated, without feeling incredibly stuffed, and without leaving mounds of leftovers behind.

Expect to wait for a table, even on a Tuesday night…Stop in next door at Chez Shea for a cocktail, and, if the staff isn’t too distracted, they will come and get you when seats are available.

Now considered kind of quaint and old-fashioned, an donatsu or sweet azuki paste stuffed donuts were once a staple of Japanese-style bakeries. Increasingly, mushy, cloyingly sweet, preservative-laden versions sold at convenience stores have displaced the fresher incarnations of this sweet, but it’s worth indulging in when you find the real thing.

An Donuts

I can’t think of anywhere in Seattle to buy a decent an donut. But I can make a fairly decent interpretation myself...

Sunday morning, after realizing I had no more yeast left, I abandoned the idea of making anpan, the baked bread stuffed with the same kind of red bean paste. I did, however, have eggs, baking powder, and milk, so I put together a cake-like dough, incorporating a bit of melted butter and sugar. The dough was slightly sticky, but solid enough to allow for wrapping the dough around the filling.

The day before I had prepared some ogura-an, sweetened, coarsely mashed cooked azuki beans. I broke the usual convention of using about 50% sugar in the bean paste, preferring to use just enough sugar to taste the sweetness. I probably used no more than 25% sugar.

The main challenge is to make the outer layer thin enough that the dough can cook through, and almost all of them turned out just fine. After frying, I tossed the balls with some granulated sugar to add some textural contrast and an initial hit of sweetness.

We made a couple of lattes and indulged in a late breakfast.

Fresh from the fryer, our homemade an donuts were a totally different experience than I’ve even been able to have in Japan, since those are almost always sold after they have cooled down to room temperature. A tiny hint of crispness as we bit into each piece yielded to a soft cake texture, followed by the warm, sweet bean center.

Last week Hiromi and I decided to take advantage of one of the packaged foods we picked up at Takaragawa-onsen called houtou, which are fantastically wide noodles typically served with fall or winter vegetables.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to completely ignore the fact that we’re already seeing the bounty of springtime. I picked up some fiddlehead fern fronds, and thought a simple warabi no nimono, simmered fiddleheads in seasoned soup stock, would be nice.

And then I thought I’d like to have a little protein in the dish, and my mind turned to a favorite oden classic, which is ganmodoki, a sort of tofu fritter. I started looking at packaged ganmodoki, and wasn’t inspired at all. I realized it wasn’t that hard to make ganmodoki, and so I decided to make it at home.

Homemade Ganmodoki

Ganmodoki often has some hijiki in it, but I discovered I was completely out. Instead, I used some shredded gobo or burdock root, along with the typical shredded carrots. Hiromi told me that she’s partial to ganmodoki made with sesame, so I also used some kurogoma (black sesame) and the slightest hint of sesame oil. The fried ganmodoki went into the seasoned soup stock, perhaps not quite long enough to get the incomparably oden-like quality of pervasive soupy richness, but just about right to bring out the freshness of the tofu.

Houtou

Houtou is seriously rustic. You are probably less likely to find this nabe dish in a U.S. Japanese restaurant than you are to find a fortune cookie in China, which means the odds are almost infinitely improbable.

Our favorite nabe is sadly leaking a bit, but houtou would normally be prepared on top of a portable konro at the table. We had to improvise, and prepared it in a pot on the stove and transferred it into my largest Hagi earthenware bowl.

Houtou aren’t really substantially different than udon, except that they are cut thinner and substantially wider. The soup usually has root vegetables such as carrots and satoimo (small taro), along with Japanese kabocha squash.We also used strips of abura-age, loosely translatable as tofu puffs. They have a slightly spongy texture that just loves to absorb tasty liquids like broth. The seasoning base of our broth is miso, along with, of course, some dashijiru. Although the gift package Hiromi found at our ryokan’s convenient omiyage-ya-san includes some miso-based seasoning, she wanted some more miso intensity, and we used a blend of hatcho-miso and a lighter miso.

The result is rib-sticking comfort food. It’s the kind of food someone’s grandmother would make: not terribly fancy, but somehow incredibly satisfying. We look forward to devouring the other half of our stash of houtou sometime soon…

Hillel of  Tasting Menu has issued a bit of a challenge to himself to elevate the average quality of U.S. dining experiences. It's a frustration I share... I know a few places in Seattle that make me very happy, but most of them are out of the reach of everyday dining prices, and it's incredibly hard to find things that do a few simple things very well, and make me want to go out of my way to get a modest lunch or dinner there.

In Japan, countless television shows will obsessively document what it takes to make the most perfect omelet, which soba places do the best job of making buckwheat noodles (a fundamentally simple, but deceptively challenging task), or which ryokan is best taking advantage of their local ingredients. In the U.S., the closest thing we have to that mentality on TV is Alton Brown, and maybe Cook's Illustrated in print. In Japan, it's pervasive.

In the U.S., we are more excited by drama than by perfection. That's why people like Emeril, unfamiliar towers of incongruous ingredients at trendy fusion restaurants, and big fat California rolls. In Japan, more often than in the U.S., the pursuit of perfection is the drama.

In my first few years cooking regularly, during college, I followed a predictably American pattern of rebelling against bland foods from my childhood and I overseasoned absolutely everything. It was an improvement over what I had eaten before, but it's not necessarily worthy of much praise. After 8 years of regular visits to Japan, I increasingly strive for minimalism, trying to find ingredients that do most of the hard work simply by being wonderful and fresh.

Often enough, when I give an example of this, it's something as simple as a blanched spinach dish with a little freshly grated ginger and a splash of good quality Japanese soy sauce. When I explain it, it doesn't sound interesting, but when it's done right, it's easy to understand its simple poetry.

To elevate the U.S. dining scene, we have to give appropriate due to small places with short menus that get the food right, and take what they are producing very seriously. I can point out a few examples in Seattle, but mostly in a liquid context: Vivace and Victrola coffee, Sambar's signature cocktails that often feature house-squeezed juices and purees, tea at Floating Leaves.

Every Japanese restaurant in Seattle seems to feel obligated to offer sushi, tempura, donburi, and an assortment of over-sized side dishes, all in the same place. Nobody does just ramen, just okonomiyaki, just soba, just kushiyaki, or just udon. It seems like there's some sort of unwritten law that, even if you've hired 3 decent sushi chefs at $80,000/year each and contracted with a first-class interior designer, the restaurant has to devolve into some sort of family restaurant style of having something mediocre for everybody.

And I can pick on most cuisines in this regard: we torture Italian food the same way, not to mention Thai, Mexican, and others. If I'm in Japan, I don't think "I want to go to a Japanese restaurant," I think "I want to go to an izakaya", "I'd like some good soba", or "I'd like to have a teishoku lunch at that little vegetable shop near the office for lunch."

We need to reward the places that are obsessive about getting details right, from perfectly cooked pasta sauced with just the right amount of liquid, to serving just the amount of food that makes you wish you had just a little more, rather than making you feel guilty that you don't want to take the inedible leftovers home. Japan does have a certain level of uniform expectations that means there's far less variation in what's considered "perfect", and the benefit of generally high population density, but in the U.S. we usually have lower rents and more tolerance for idiosyncrasy, so the restaurants can be more maverick-like if they build a passionate audience.

Japanese cooking shows typically show professional cooks as careful, serious, diligent and avoiding wasted motion, respectfully repeating orders and executing them, and the guests are the ones who get all excited. In the U.S. the same kinds of shows have clanging pots, chaotically moving employees trying to avoid bumping into each other, kitchen staff telling jokes of questionable taste, and often haphazardly tossing food onto plates, often portraying the dining room is an ocean of calm customers. We want our celebrity chefs to be exciting; Japanese would rather the food and the guests do the talking.

Restaurants also have to get better at telling their own stories, explaining why they don't have 300 menu choices and why they serve their zarusoba with just a little bit of dipping sauce and a few pickles. The story-telling is part of what makes unconventional restaurants succeed in the U.S.; they have to teach their guests to do their marketing.

We can improve the taste of average restaurants by expecting better... When one place starts making the perfect taco, stop spending so much money at the big-as-your-head burrito place. More realistically, I imagine we will have to take more incremental steps, since we might be trapped in a part of town where we don't have better lunch options... So I'll give more money to places that make me happier, even if they aren't flawless.

And hopefully the occasional web rant or rave will help people find better food, so I'll spend some time writing about the good stuff...

I’ve been sleeping very little the last week or so, but not so much from jetlag… just a lot of stuff going on, and my insomnia truly kicks in when my little mind is fully engaged. I might be back to normal this week, but I think I’m going to need to spend a lot of time at the gym to take my mind off things.

We did eat reasonably well, but I was usually completely dead after dinner, save for the inability to sleep.

Orange cauliflower gratin

Sometime last week, Hiromi took the second half of our orange cauliflower and made a wafuu gratin, complete with a toasty panko topping.

Purple potato pizza

I wasn’t quite finished with my stash of lavash, so we covered it with some blue cheese and something else mild and meltable, now long forgotten, with just the slightest brushing of olive oil, and some pre-roasted purple potatoes. Hiromi thought that I had bought purple sweet potatoes, because the concept of an ordinary purple potato never entered her mind.

Although purple potatoes are slightly less sweet and creamy than a typical white-fleshed potato, that worked out as a strength when played against the creaminess of the melted cheese. Hiromi devoured her half.

Larry Anne plum crumble

We had two spectacularly beautiful Larry Anne plums, and two that were so sweet they bruised a bit on the way home. We turned the less pretty ones into this plum crumble. I usually wouldn’t torture such lovely fruit by cooking it, especially since the season for these Chilean plums is so painfully short, but we risked losing the damaged fruit so some more nefarious forces if we didn’t make immediate use of them.

I took a little butter, oatmeal, flour, sugar, and toasted soy butter, in roughly equal parts, to make the crumble topping. I would usually use peanut or almond butter, but I happened to have this toasted soy butter Hiromi and I bought a few weeks ago as a bread topping. It reminds us of kinako, which is toasted ground soybeans, and a frequent source of flavor for Japanese sweets and for boiled mochi. It turned out to be a great foil for the sweetness of the plums, providing a nutty contrast without competing for attention as aggressively as peanut butter does.

Nothing puts fear into the hearts of perfectly capable cooks as the thought of making Hollandaise or Bernaise sauce.

I occasionally get Hollandaise sauce spot on without really trying. A few weeks ago, for the first time in months, if not years, I made a hurried attempt at a Hollandaise sauce that worked out spectacularly well: not too thick, not too thin, and not curdled or otherwise compromised. I made good use of it with some poached eggs on an English muffin with a little cheese, for a truly heart attack-inducing weekend morning calorie bomb.

But in my post-jetlag fervor, not to mention a serious craving for butter in the immediate wake of my Japan trip, I revisited the idea again, and it was a disaster. I was a bit short on time, or maybe it was actually eggs, otherwise I would have rescued the sauce, but instead we just suffered through my un-emulsified butter-laden travesty.

Attempt three, and I was more attentive. Hiromi found this lovely orange cauliflower at Sosio’s in Pike Place Market, and after a week of elaborate meals and occasional extravagant pieces of fruit, $4 for a head seemed perfectly reasonable; we weren’t at all distracted by our awareness of perfectly serviceable cauliflower at half the price.

Orange cauliflower with thin Hollandaise

Alas, I got a bit distracted when trying to combine the sauce with the cauliflower; some of the water content from the cauliflower turned the Hollandaise a bit thin. If I were smarter, I would simply have poured the sauce on top of the plated dish.

As the first weeknight after returning from Japan, complete with a full work day and then some, I got home a little late. I wanted something else simple but attractive, so I grabbed some lavash from Trader Joe’s and made a pseudo-pizza.

Lavash pizza

Garlic, olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke crowns, olives, and some basil, with a bit of mozzarella and parmesan, made a suitably indulgent, yet not terribly heavy accompaniment to our cauliflower.

Eggs Florentine

I didn’t give up on my Hollandaise fix… Somehow I felt the need to convince myself that the success from a few weeks ago wasn’t a fluke. I was, of course, tempting fate. It predictably curdled. Fortunately, I had another egg handy, and I just started over again warming the egg yolk and rescued the sauce. For a flawless result, I should have melted a bit more butter, as the extra yolk made for a very thick Hollandaise sauce, completely unnecessary for a poached egg.

Served with baby spinach on a crumpet instead of an English muffin, this slight tweak to brunch standard made for a luxurious, if slightly unimpressively executed, Tuesday morning breakfast.

We departed Japan on Sunday, but not without a valuable trip to Takaragawa Onsen, a hot spring ryoukan in Gunma prefecture.

After a quick lunch at a Meguro-station cafe on Saturday, Hiromi drove us through a mysterious maze of toll highways about three or four hours, but I managed to sleep through about two hours of road time, oblivious to my surroundings. Only when traveling internationally do I seem to magically acquire the ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime.

For me, a stay in a ryokan is an opportunity for an extravagant simple meal, but it also offers an ideal bathing experience…

We stopped briefly at a highway service area for a snack, and after resting a bit upon arrival, we made a quick trip to the rotenburo (outdoor hot springs bath). This hotel’s rotenburo is one of the largest konyoku-buro (mixed baths). Although in other konyoku-buro, people generally enter the onsen naked, people at this onsen are advised to cover themselves with a towel (men with a tiny towel, women with a larger towel), as one sign indicated, so that “nobody has to be embarrassed” using the konyoku-buro.

We didn’t feel comfortable really photographing the baths themselves, of course, but here’s what we found along the way…

Lukewarm spring water

The irouri as ashtray

In old Japanese houses, people sat around the irouri to share dinner and discuss the day’s business. For the contemporary onsen-goer, it seems to be a destination for an ippuku (rest, but actually a euphemism for a smoking break).

Tengu

This hall is filled with tengu and tanuki, mystical creatures with exaggerated body parts.

In the ryokan eating area

After soaking a bit we sat down to dinner. In this particular ryokan, most floors have two or three eating areas, at least in the steerage class, although in the most expensive rooms they serve fancier meals in the room.

Shokuzen-shu

The apertif seemed to be some sort of shiso-based shochu infusion, heavily sweetened and only lightly alcoholic.

Kinoko sumibi-yaki

Sumibi-yaki, char-grilled foods, seemed to be the theme of our stay. For a spring meal, the selections we were offered were surprisingly full of various “wild” mushrooms, but we had some fresh spring bamboo shoots as well.

Each table has a small shichirin, or clay grill, placed atop a concrete trivet with a wooden base to buffer against heat damage to the table.

Note to us

Each diner receives a note describing tonight’s menu. You can see from the “yamame” (small fish) and “joushuugyuu” (local beef) items that this is Hiromi’s menu.

Mame

A rare sweet-savory bean side dish, apparently typical for this area. Most of Japan prefers beans as a dessert, but this dish is prepared with enough salt to make it a pleasant side dish for a savory meal.

Maitake no itame-ni

Several standard side dishes, such as ohitashi (blanched vegetables), pickled vegetables (nozawana, for example), and other obligatory ryokan fare, such as nabemono, were also featured. I had a cold dish with a kind of abura-age in clear soup, as well.

Sleepy Hiromi

After the meal, Hiromi became a bit sleepy.

On the banks of the river

We somehow managed to fall asleep around 9 in the evening, but the next morning, we awoke to this view outside our room’s window.

The bridge to the hot springs

We took advantage of the hot springs once more in the morning… a bit of snow started falling upon us while we were bathing.

Breakfast

Breakfast included miso soup, salad, bamboo leaf-wrapped nattou (fermented soybeans), more of the sweet-savory local beans, yogurt, an orange segment, and a soft-boiled egg, as well as some pickles and nori, not pictured.

Grilled potatoes, green beans and carrots

This marks the first time I’ve been served ketchup at a ryokan, but my breakfast featured a sort of Western-themed sukiyaki, in lots of butter, meant to be dipped in ketchup.

Shake no sumibiyaki

Salmon for Hiromi. We had a lot of fire at our table.

Breakfast window view

From our seats at breakfast, we could see the tall winter accumulation of snow that hadn’t yet sublimated or melted.

Display hearth

I’m guessing this irouri, not terribly well ventilated, doesn’t get much use in practice.

Goodbye!

We had to rush back to Narita airport, where we met Hiromi’s parents one last time, and started the long journey back home.

Hassaku Orange

A somewhat dry-fleshed, thick-skinned orange, possibly from Ehime prefecture, popular for its sappari or refreshing taste. It’s a bit bitter and perhaps a bit similar to a Seville orange.

Matcha madeleine

Not quite shaped like a traditional madeleine, this was a conceptual sample from one of my green tea suppliers made with a madeleine-style batter.

Matcha cake

This matcha dessert was more of a pound cake style.

Zundamochi and Ayamemochi

Zundamochi are daifuku made with edamame paste. They’d probably be more impressive in cross-section, but we were hungry already. We found them at Mura-kara-machi-kara-kan.

Smoked egg

One of our smoked eggs, before peeling. We ate the smoked eggs for breakfast in the hotel.

Okayu

A few years ago a chain of okayu restaurants sprouted up around Tokyo, even offering brown rice and multigrain versions. With modest 200–300 calorie portions and optional add-ins, the restaurants are popular with women in their 20s and 30s. There are no unaccompanied men in most of these, and I was one of perhaps two in the restaurant. Hiromi had the yuba and greens okayu in the foreground, which had 5 grains; mine was a brown rice okayu with fried onions and greens, with an add-on onsen tamago (soft-boiled egg).

Kabocha mushi cake

I’ve forgotten what they called it, but this is essentially a steamed cake with chunks of kabocha, and ever so slightly sweet. It’s actually in the “yum-cha” or dim-sum part of the okayu shop’s menu, rather than their dessert section.

Annin-doufu

Almond “tofu”, a flavored gelled dessert.

Sakura ice cream

Cherry-blossom ice cream, from an old-school kissaten near Meguro-station that serves average quality vacuum-pot coffee and various sandwich-like nibbles. The ice cream appears to be a lightly-flavored cherry ice cream served on a cherry leaf and topped with shiozuke, or salt-pickled cherry blossom. This one wasn’t terribly salty, so they may have rinsed it first.

For people who appreciate food and would like to take a bit of Japan home with them, Yurakucho (Yuurakuchou) is a dangerous place. It’s home to the regional food specialty shop Mura-kara Machi-kara Kan, which features fresh and packaged foods from all over the country, as well as alcoholic drinks, and Hokkaido Dosanko Plaza, which features lots of treats from Hokkaido. A short walk from here will take you to another shop that focuses on all things Okinawan.

If you’re easily tempted, it might be best to avert your eyes as you walk by these shops.

We left with soba karintou (buckwheat sweet crackers), haru yutari karintou (a wheat snack), black sugar peanut crunch, a shiso drink base, yomogi senbe (mugwort-flavored crackers), Hokkaido Tokaji wine caramels, Hokkaido hascup caramels, Hokkaido’s famous raisin butter cookie sandwiches (not from the most sought-after brand, but still quite tasty), murasaki-imo senbe or purple sweet potato senbe from Okinawa, another purple sweet potato snack also from Okinawa, some yuzu-flavored konpeito (hard candy), shiikuwasaa kokutou (Okinawan citron flavored black sugar), shiikuwasaa Calpis, some snackable salted konbu (kelp), kiritampo (rolls of mochigome toasted sort of rotisserie style, often used in nabemono or hotpot meals) from Akita, some heart-shaped cookies, umi-budou (sea grapes) from Okinawa, smoked eggs, yuzu-miso, yuzu kanten, yuzu-sake, ume-shidzuku (chewy Japanese apricot kanten candies) and two bottles of yuzu juice. Hiromi also picked up some drinking yogurt from the Hokkaido shop flavored with hascup berries, but we drank that before even getting back to the hotel.

Most of these items found their way into our luggage, but the Hokkaido raisin butter sandwiches have long since disappeared, because, of course, they are so perishable and we couldn’t possibly keep them…

For the most part, these shops carry items that are not widely distributed even inside Japan, so if you want to suprise someone with a little gift with minimal probability they will find the same thing in their local Asian market, this is the place to go.