During the last week or so most of our home meals have been minor variations of things I’ve made recently, and on late nights, arriving home quite hungry, I haven’t felt much of an urge to photograph the “reruns.”

Tonight, though, I made a first attempt at a brown nougat, made without egg whites, flavored with a bit of kirsch and vanilla. I embedded some almonds in the nougat. My hands weren’t quite happy, because I worked the sugar while it was still hot enough to produce some blisters on my hands. The Silpat mat helped me rein in the sugar as it started cooling initially, but I wanted to incorporate some air into the candy.

The shiny stretched sugar mass

Cutting the nougat into bite-sized bits

 I should have used a lower final temperature when I boiled the sugar mass. I got a fairly crunchy-chewy result; I really would have been happy if it were merely chewy.

Dusted with cornstarch

I dusted the candy with cornstarch so that I can store it without the pieces sticking together. The end result isn’t bad, but I think I have to experiment a bit more before I develop much confidence in candy-making.

I finally got around to shooting some photos of Masa and Lisa’s Matcha White Chocolates, a product that evolved from a promotional concept I developed back in the late spring or early summer. After months of struggling with packaging options and some variations of recipes, they got the chocolates ready just about a week before Christmas, and we got it into the hands of a few customers before the holidays, but we will probably mostly be promoting the product leading up to Valentine’s Day.

Alas, I wasn’t quite happy with my own photographs tonight, so I’m continuing to borrow some of Masa’s and Lisa’s for my YuzuMura project.

Hiromi says that she can’t readily find matcha chocolates of this quality in Japan… most of the Japanese products I’ve seen so far use a fairly low grade of matcha and a blend of other ingredients to simulate the matcha… Masa and Lisa decided to use the same matcha they use to produce their matcha latte, so it’s a fairly nice result. I’ve gone with a somewhat more assertively matcha-y flavor profile in my own matcha white chocolate enrobed fortune cookies, so their chocolates have a slightly sweeter touch than my cookies, but I like them as a small indulgence, so the sweetness isn’t terribly overwhelming. The little foil packets help me with portion control…

I’ve tended toward silence in the last few months. My apologies for that; I’ve explained most of the reasons for that in recent posts… Beyond the usual, for a few weeks, Hiromi was in town, so I preferred not to spend all my time in front of a laptop (though both of us have a habit of doing that from time to time…)

Since I’ve not been particularly photographically-inclined, and I’ve surely been neither eloquent nor remotely verbose of late, I’m just going to make a list of things I’ve enjoyed in the last four weeks. Somehow after 8 weeks of relatively austere eating habits I practically overindulged by comparison.

• A number of nice meals Hiromi and I cooked at home.
• Impressive cocktails, holographic lighting and nice nibbles at the bar of Vessel. I should have stolen Hiromi’s Vessel 75, topped with a maple foam.
• A birthday party rougly in the German tradition. That means one that I hosted myself and cooked for other people to celebrate my birthday (though really it was a much broader, less thematic party… for me a birthday is just another excuse to eat). I took the cooking a bit far by spending so much time in the kitchen (though I got out more often than average) and Hiromi was left with most of the hostessing obligations, but I have fun in different ways than most people.
• A nice late lunch at Seattle Ethiopian restaurant Meskel.
• Some overly-garlicked but otherwise tasty sundried tomato savory cream puffs. I brought most of them to a Christmas Eve party at my aunt’s home way out in Sultan, which, by the way, is a lot further away than I remembered. I saw my sister for the first time in a few years, and somehow didn’t immediately recognize her. I’m a bad brother.
• We had a nice leisurely Christmas afternoon when Hiromi and I helped out with Christmas Day dinner at grandma’s house by preparing green beans and garlic with cream, mashed potatoes, the gravy (not vegetarian, but I know my sauces), and some Laugen rolls.
• Nibbles and wine at Harvest Vine.
• Hiromi’s apple pie.
• A lazy New Year’s Eve watching the Space Needle fireworks from my window and on a 7–second television delay, just after eating Toshi-Koshi Soba (buckwheat noodles served for the New Year’s transition, roughly).
• A surprisingly well-done late lunch at Tamarind Tree. If you haven’t been, go here.
• Hiromi’s New Year’s day party featuring osechi (Japanese new year’s foods), for which she was fully occupied in the kitchen for two and a half days before the event and a fair amount of time on the day.
• Another respectable dinner (slightly marred by the lack of cell-phone enhanced seating that I previously depended on) at La Carta de Oaxaca, followed by quirky, and mostly clever cocktails at the newly-reimagined Copper Gate in Ballard. A Scandinavian lounge. Who’d a thought?
• Dickensian-themed cocktails and small, simple, satisfying plates at Dan Braun’s Oliver’s Twist in Phinney. If you ever are in the neighborhood and want to give it a try, give me a call.
• A pleasant, simple lunch at Le Pichet (with some slight compromises to my vegetarian habits).
• An unforgettable dinner at Lampreia, where my usually reasonably-educated palate was regularly surprised and maybe occasionally slightly embarrassed.

I was mostly in rush-everywhere-mode today, going from customer to customer and errand to errand. I got a fair amount done but I’m still behind on a couple of things.

Actually, until tonight, I didn’t even get around to sending out shipping notifications for the large number of internet orders I sent out on Monday and Tuesday.

I never ate a proper dinner. I just nibbled on good bread from Le Fournil and dug in to some Brie. If I had been doing this on a park bench or at the dinner table, that would have been perfectly respectable, but actually I was mostly eating it while underway this evening, between tasks.

I got a bit hungry late tonight but I remembered I have some kuri-kinton, or sweet potato puree with chestnuts, that I made a few days ago.

Kuri-kinton is one of the humblest of Japanese confections. You won’t find a lot of middle-aged Japanese mothers who make the kinds of sweets that appear at fancy wagashi-ya-san, even if it’s as simple to replicate as dorayaki. Daifuku (usually ambiguously referred to as “mochi” in the U.S.) are rarely made at home except for special events. But a fair number of people are willing to attempt kuri-kinton.

I have attempted to make daifuku at a nursery school in Japan that a friend’s family managed. This was about 7 years ago, and my Japanese was even worse at that time. The teacher gently scolded me for making them inadeqately elegantly; the 4 year olds had more experience and seemed to understand the instructions on kneading the dough better than I did, and they managed to massage out any hint of seams in the bottom.

Homemade Kuri-Kinton

Kuri-kinton, however, requires no such attention to detail. Boil some Japanese-style sweet potatoes, peeled and in pieces, until fork tender. Drain. Add a fair amount of sugar to taste, and optionally, a splash of mirin; I recommend adding a pinch of salt to add some richness. Smash with a fork or potato masher while still quite hot (about 160F sounds good to me).

When you have a nice, smooth paste, you will then incorporate some chestnuts. For convenience, canned or jarred chestnuts preserved in syrup work well; the syrup should be drained, and may used in something else if you so desire. Otherwise, you’re welcome to attempt to make them from scratch by boiling in your own syrup; this requires very careful peeling, and even with my nifty Japanese chestnut peeler I rarely quite get that right. I’ll save the chestnut peeling for roasted chestnuts or things that require a less sweet starting point.

You can serve the kuri-kinton warm, but it’s more typically served at room temperature or slightly chilled.

Kurikinton requires no artfulness in presentation and can simply be spooned onto a plate. If you feel so inclined, however, you may shape the kurikinton into little balls or other shapes. I chose to highlight one chestnut in the center.

 Serve with some good Japanese tea.

I’m off in demoland this weekend, as usual. I can already see my Monday will be full based on incoming internet orders, but I’ll try to take care of them quickly.

I was hoping to make this nice matcha flan in time for Sugar High Friday, but alas, I didn’t get started on it until Friday night, and it didn’t have enough time to set before it was way past a reasonable hour to be serving sweets. So it turned out to be a very indulgent breakfast, and aside from a brief mention yesterday on my blog, mostly theoretical. But you can see the other participants on Simply Recipes. (Edited 19 September 2005: Note: Elise was kind enough to include my belated entry in the list in spite of my tardiness).

When I made the matcha flan, I used about a cup each of cream and milk, about 4 egg yolks, maybe 1/3 cup of sugar, a tiny bit of vanilla, and 2 slightly heaping teaspoons of matcha for cooking. I chose to oven-bake this flan, which may explain the slighly odd-looking texture, compared to a steamed one, but it did taste fairly creamy.

I served it with some tsubu-an, which is simply sweetened smashed red beans, and a little powdered sencha.

It really would have helped to have the rest of my shipment, because the first day I sacrificed a lot of full-priced candy in sampling. Word got around, so this got very expensive. Our rule of thumb for the first day was to give a sample to people with sample coupons, or to those that appeared engaged and interested in the story of the product. Due to the power of word of mouth, this got a little out of control, but we did sell more than we gave away.

On the second day, we changed the rule of thumb to accepting the coupons, or taking $1 for a sample to defray a portion of our costs. Those that actually bought full boxes received a credit toward their purchase. By the end of the day today, we were selling slightly better than Saturday, but with a much lower cost of sales.

The JACL, Japanese-American Citizens League, had a booth next to us, and Sharon Tomiko Santos, the Democratic Whip of Washington's state house of representatives, was helping the JACL booth out. She bought a nice quantity of our product.

The attention that Northwest Asian Weekly and Seattle Chinese Post helped bring to our booth was apparently quite high, as many people remembered reading the article or seeing our ad. Even Yuuyake Shinbun of Portland and, to a limited extent, Soy Source helped attract a few customers.

Maggie, my Cantonese-speaking assistant at the festival, helped explain and convert a lot of Chinese visitors into customers. Erin, who speaks Korean, helped draw in a lot of people who had by approaching them and telling them the story of the product, and Kazue was good at explaining the product to people who approached the booth. Maggie also facilitated making connections with people who have retail stores or other networking value. She was operating on very little sleep, because she was also busy doing night club promotions Friday and Saturday nights.

All-in-all, we did reasonably well on sales and very well on the promotion side of things. It would have really helped to have the impulse-buy size (single tube with three pieces of candy) and the big box, because we received a lot of requests for lower-commitment options and also for the bigger boxes. One gift set sample with 4 kinds of tea and 4 tubes of candy appealed to a several customers who wanted to buy it outright, but, alas, it was my only production sample and isn't yet being produced in quantity, so we were unable to sell it.

It's been a pretty rough weekend. I was up late on Friday preparing, up early on Saturday packing everything into my car, and really exhausted at the end of the day each day. On Saturday, Amelia, Erin and I went to Tutta Bella in South Seattle, which is a pizza place run by some people who apparently studied in Naples. It was pretty nice pizza: wood fired, thinner than typical American internpretations, but a little pillowy in texture; relatively simple, relatively sparing use of toppings. They also served a caeser salad, which was too big for one person; we shared one between three of us.

I think I might be repeating myself, but I usually refer to vegetarian quiches as “tartes”, on the advice of a French neighbor of mine during my student days in Germany. Apparently she considered a hamless quiche a savory tart.

Call it what you like; the resemblance to the classic version is faint… I’ve taken a page from my mother’s version of this dish, completely eliminating the usual wheat-based pastry. In its place, I use some shredded potatoes and onions, soaked briefly in acidulated water and squeezed, then tossed with butter, salt, and recovered starch from the soaking water. This is baked until somewhat golden, then filled and baked again.

Quiche with leeks, chevre and hedgehog mushrooms

This variation features some sauteed leeks and hedgehog mushrooms, and some soft chevre and a milder Gruyere cheese.

The side dish is something that I know 5 years from now I’m sure will be as ubiquitous and passe as balsamic vinegar dressed salad. It’s a simple dish of shaved fennel, tossed with coarse salt and yuzu juice. We ate it right away, but it tastes even better marinated for an hour or overnight.

Yuzu marinated fennel

I started making this two or three summers ago, and, despite a couple of attempts to make a more dramatic version with more ingredients, simplicity absolutely wins. It does make a nice topping for pizza, however, and lemon works almost as well.

You wouldn't know it yet considering how much I'm still focusing on my Japan trip (just a few more things to write about...), but I've actually been back home for a couple of weeks already. I've been eating fairly simply most of the time, but perhaps a bit unhealthy.

A simple dinner

After a week full of bread, cheese and asparagus, I was craving something hearty and dense.

I thought it might be fun to try my hand at some crispy flatbread. I'm a fond of roti canai, the flatbread served with a simple channa masala or even a "gravy" made with chickpeas. But I thought it would be nice to give the dough itself a bit of a protein boost, so I used half all-purpose flour and half besan, or chickpea flour. I add a fair amount of ghee and  a generous pinch of salt, combine the flours, and add just enough warm water to create a smooth, pliable dough. The dough needs to be rested for a half hour or so.

Besan roti

I cooked them on a big, hot, cast-iron skillet until they were puffy, lightly brushed each side with oil and cooked each side a bit longer. Then I folded each roti over twice so that they become pie-shaped wedges.

They weren't quite flawless, as the edges are a bit rough, but they came out just slightly crispy and the chickpea flour added a nice flavor.

I didn't really know this until looking up other roti recipes after I was all done with this dish, but some versions of besan roti add spices right in the dough. However, I was mostly looking for a structure to serve with dal, rather than something with its own complex flavor.

Channa dal

I made a simple chickpea dish seasoned with an onion jam (caramelized onions with added liquid), tomato paste, fresh ginger and garlic, turmeric and chilies, along with an explosion of ghee-cooked spices including cumin seeds, mustard seeds, coriander, and a garam masala blend. I take this ghee-cooked spice blend and pour it over the soup when both are very hot, causing furious frothing and bubbling, and allowing the aromas of the spices to spread throughout the dish.

The chickpeas come split, and don't take terribly long to cook. I also added a few potatoes about 25 minutes before I expected the dish to be done.

Upon serving, added some cilantro to add a fresh, cooling flavor.

Mango Pickle

The mango pickle is nothing special... just a store bought thing, used to provide a little tangy contrast... It goes well with the besan roti as well, but I later discovered that the local-to-Seattle Taaza's tomato garlic chutney, by Sunita Shastri, is particularly good with the roti.

I have been craving spicier food the last few days, so I think this won't be the only South Asian food on my table this week.

It was a quiet day at Bellevue’s Uwajimaya, but I did my first demonstration of Three Tree Tea’s matcha latte mix.

Customer reception seemed mostly positive, but there are some folks who don’t like matcha, some who don’t like sugar, and some who don’t like milk…We’re not talking about an outrageously sweet drink; it’s not like a typical bubble tea. But there’s a wide range of tolerance for sweetness. Occasionally someone would say it wasn’t sweet enough (which is a more solvable problem: add more sugar)… Tea is a very personal beverage, and everyone responds differently. I’m quite fond of this particular blend, because it’s not too sweet and not too bitter… most of my Japanese friends say “choudo ii” (just right.) But Uwajimaya’s customer base comes from all sorts of regions… Today a Thai customer said that the dragon beard candy wasn’t as sweet as she prefers. Indian, Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese taste preferences tend to run a little sweeter than Japanese and Korean preferences, and Japanese and Koreans tend to like more sweetness than Chinese customers.

One bit of disaster struck. I started out serving hot matcha lattes, steaming the drink with an espresso machine’s steamer attachment. At some point the power indicator light went out, and I thought maybe the machine overheated and shut itself off. But it never got back to normal… I couldn’t turn it on again.

I improvised. The weather was moderate today, so it was no problem to start serving “iced” lattes… I just used cold milk and shook it up in a plastic pitcher supplied by Masalisa.

The big surprise of the day was that the medium size outsold the smallest “impulse” size. It is a bit cheaper per serving, but that’s quite the opposite experience with the dragon beard candy; I usually sell way more 3–pc. samplers than any other size. I’m happy about that, because the 1/2 lb. size will likely have some more elegant packaging in the future, and if it remains the bestseller, that will be a good coincidence.

I needed to get one final business license completed yesterday for the City of Seattle, so I made my way downtown and paid yet another fee. Actually, the City of Seattle license costs about three times as much as the state license that I arranged a couple of months ago. The only fee more expensive is the LLC registration with the state, which I believe is just a one-time event unless I neglect to file timely reports on the management structure.

Afterward I took care of a minor errand, and went to the Pioneer Square area's First Thursday “Art Walk” event, during which most galleries are open a few extra hours. My acquaintance Dave's photo show was opening. He's also a software guy who escaped corporate drudgery; in his case, he does a mix of freelance coding and things like his photography. The show was pretty nice... a lot of captures of surprising contrasts in lighting and color on dilapidated military buildings and other abandoned industrial totems, sometimes with unconventional framing. It looked like his work was selling at a pretty good clip, also.

I also visited a Japanese art-focused gallery where another acquaintance of mine works. I didn't actually expect her to be there but we chatted a bit and I re-introduced myself to her manager. This may turn out to have been a smart thing to do, because the owner is interested in expanding her line a bit and would like to see if any of the ceramics I brought over match her taste. I will try to show off the stuff mid-next-week.

This afternoon I met with Kazue, who just came back from Japan, to talk about the Hong Kong sweet and to give her a chance to sample it.

The weather is pretty hot outside, so I've been jogging again the last few days. My endurance is getting better... I'm averaging about 5 miles a run. I just hope it doesn't ruin my knee.

Tonight's dinner was a simple pizza with fresh heirloom tomatoes, basil, garlic, mozzarella, and parmesan. Earlier in the week I made some gnocchi with tomato cream sauce and basil chiffonade, which turned out pretty nicely. The first hints of decent tomatoes, apparently only at Sosio's produce in the Pike Place Market, have been sneaking into my cuisine. Another surprise was some early peaches that had a great texture and flavor; I snuck a couple into a rhubarb-peach sorbet I made on Tuesday.

Wednesday I finished up the body of a ceramic train series (engine, cargo, and a third car with windows) at the pottery lab. Assuming the wheels don't break, it looks like it will turn out nicely; the only trouble is that pottery class ends very soon and I won't have time to glaze them because next Monday is the last class. There's no way they'll be bisqued in time.

Uninspired weeknight cuisine...

Lack of inspiration doesn't have to result in dreary food. When I made this, my lack of motivation to cook led me to procrastinate until the only practical options were either to go out and grab some mediocre takeout, or to throw something edible together with the least possible effort.

My cupboard full of noodles, various seaweeds, dried mushrooms and other staple goods is often neglected... It's got an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" problem. But it's a potential treasure chest of easy weeknight meal options.

I dug through my Asian noodle stash and discovered I have some dry udon, Japanese wheat noodles. In my refrigerator I've got an undisturbed head of cabbage. I've still got some wild leeks and a few verpas, and I've got some ordinary onions and ginger handy, and some fruit sauce usually used for croquettes or tonkatsu. I just bought some eggs.

A vague plan coalesces in my little head.

I get to work chopping vegetables and boiling the water for the noodles, and about 15 minutes later, dinner is on the table.

Out of nothing emerges an improvised yaki-udon, served with a fluffy omelet on top...

There it is, omu-udon.