Apple fritters

Yesterday I made apple fritters with some Macintosh apples. I improvised the proportions of ingredients, so I didn’t quite get the balance of flour and liquid right, and they turned out a fair bit oilier than I had hoped. The oil temperature did drop a bit, but even when I controlled the temperature precisely I didn’t quite get it right.

Of course, it set the tone for the day… I had a similarly high-fat, though fairly modestly-portioned lunch, of macaroni with a blue cheese bechamel sauce. We had a quick and dirty dinner the night before, and our top priority was to use up a few ingredients, and so I made a fairly heavy sauce and the only pasta I had handy.

Knowing I’d have a day of heavy, fatty food ahead, Hiromi and I thought aloud that I should probably make something healthier for dinner. But it wasn’t in the cards… Hiromi had a flash of inspiration, and just asked me to obtain some fresh tofu on the way home.

Vegetarian stuffed cabbage rolls

She used kanpyo (dried gourd*) to tie blanched cabbage leaves together and stuffed them with a mixture of very fresh tofu, mushrooms, carrots and onions. She made a Japanese-ish soup stock with dried kelp and porcini, then added some western touches with some celery seed and onions.

Jaga bataa with almonds

I converted a baked potato into jaga-bataa, which is nothing fancier than cut potatoes with a bit of butter, salt and pepper. I added a touch of sour cream for the Eastern European vibe we had going on, and some almonds for aroma contrast.

* The original version of this post mistakenly referred to gobo/burdock rather than gourd. That should teach me that it's a bad idea to write at midnight... but it probably won't stop me.

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…

We had planned to make a day trip to Vancouver on Boxing Day, before I remembered something about a signature that most students need to get on their I-20 before departing the country… alas, I realized this just about an hour before we were hoping to take off, early in the morning, and of course Hiromi hadn’t quite formally enrolled in school yet, so it wasn’t even possible to get the signature had we planned for it.

Fortunately, we were able to make up for it this weekend. Instead of my usual supermarket demo routine, we drove up to Vancouver Saturday morning. Somehow we cleared the border in record time, and we walked the usual Robson stretch as Hiromi hunted for post-holiday discounted clothing. We also stopped at a tea shop that offers a lot of aromatized teas (I didn’t expect my kukicha to be fruity… that’ll teach me) and instant chocolate fondue with various fruits, marshmallows, and, well, gummy bears.

We also got some roasted chestnuts from a street vendor, whose shells we discarded at every trash bin on the way from Sears back to our hotel off Granville Street.

At night we tried to find something to bring along to a potluck party at the home of one of Hiromi’s friends near Gastown. We discovered, much to our dismay, that restaurants in Vancouver Chinatown are pretty much shuttered at night, so we abandoned our thoughts of bringing along some vegetarian jiaozi or other nibbles. Fortunately, I had a stash of matcha chocolates and matcha-white chocolate enrobed fortune cookies to contribute. We were able to eat our first semi-nutritious meal of the day at the party, as other guests brought more than the usual bread and chips… the party also had a spectacular view, facing the water, in a common room on the roof of an neat residential project in an industrial part of Gastown.

After a late night it took some work to extract ourselves from the hotel, motivated primarily by ever-increasing hunger pangs. We took a short hop from our hotel to the Granville Public Market, where we overindulged in pastries from La Baguette & L'Echalote, a samosa-like filled pastry from Laurelle’s, and some passable teas from Granville Island Tea, along with a nice aged Gouda from Dussa's.

We noticed a coffee shop offering employment only to people literate in Japanese.

Actually we subsequently noticed two similar signs the same day at non-Japanese restaurants. Apparently Japanese-speaking staff are in demand in Vancouver.

We had dinner at one of the many Vancouver Greek restaurants… somehow Greek is neglected in Seattle, but we had a pleasant enough meal at Taki’s, along Davie, with another pair of friends Hiromi is connected to from her working holiday era.

Somehow, we sailed through the border control again on the way back home… the miserable weather and lack of significant holiday-like events must have reduced the line-up at the

I’m usually more involved in our nightly dinners, but I don’t deserve any credit for tonight’s New Year’s Day dinner. I put my best effort into photography and lighting, but I didn’t contribute much to preparation.

Hiromi wanted to make a vegetarian version of the classic osechi New Year’s meal, and I’m not nearly as competent in this area as I’ve only spent New Year’s Day in Japan once, and it was at the very early stage of my development of passable Japanese cooking skills. Traditionally, these dishes are made a day or two before New Year’s day, because nobody wants to cook on New Year’s day. It’s supposed to be a restful day, so people historically spent way more time than normal making foods a few days before the New Year, finishing on New Year’s Eve. Accordingly, vinegared dishes such as sunomono are common, and other dishes with a fairly high salt content, especially fish, make frequent appearances. Now, of course, both the common dishes and the pattern of preparation have changed, because so many fancy options for osechi meals can be purchased at department stores in Japan and even at local souzai-ya-san, a growing industry of neighborhood pay-by-weight side dish vending shops.

Actually most people in Japan wouldn’t go through as much trouble as Hiromi did. But the standard Uwajimaya osechi wouldn’t have been much fun for me as a vegetarian, and the quality would not be that impressive for her. So instead, she made a seriously labor-intensive meal.

This rolled konbu or konbumaki contains blanched green beans, carrots, and daikon. Usually it would have a bit of cured or salt-seasoned bits of fish, but we ate it with some pickles instead.

This is one of the sunomono I make on a regular basis, though usually less elegantly presented than Hiromi did tonight. We don’t have fresh yuzu available, so we substituted Meyer lemon for the shell, which has a passable aroma and contributes the right overall shape. Hiromi splashed the daikon and carrot with a bit of yuzu juice to give it the desired aroma. My one significant contribution was running the daikon and carrots through the mandoline…

Hiromi prepared koyadoufu (freeze-dried tofu), carrot, shiitake and mizuna for this year’s ozouni, and I nearly set my Silpat mat on fire trying to toast them with the oven’s broiler set to “low” toasting the frozen mochi. In substitution for the usual katsuo-based broth, a dried konbu and dried porcini based dashi contributed a nice body. I stumbled upon the porcini alternative to dried fish a few years ago, and now Hiromi swears by it for any dish where the soup stock needs to have the kind of fullness usually provided by katsuobushi or niboshi.

My only experience with tamago-yaki tends to be the saltier types served at izakaya as a drink accompaniment, or that made by sushi chefs, but this version, a classic New Year’s dish called datemaki tamago, is substantially sweeter. Datemaki tamago is typically made with a fish cake called hanpen, Hiromi substituted rehydrated koyadoufu. I provided the token contribution of beating the rehydrated koyadoufu into submission, chopping it into extra tiny bits. Hiromi sweetened beaten eggs and incorporate the koyadoufu, and made a thick omelet in a tamagoyaki pan, rolled up using the same kind of mat that can be used for sushi.

The egg was plated together with this dried-persimmon based side dish. The custard-like filling is made with steamed yamaimo (mountain yam), a starchy tuber, which Hiromi combined with egg yolks while the yamaimo was still hot, and a fair amount of sugar. The dried Hachiya persimmons were stuffed with this custard, and eventually sliced. Hiromi says this is essentially a Kyoto-style osechi dish.

Hiromi blanched renkon (lotus root) for a few minutes, just enough to retain a nice crispness, and added vinegar, sugar, a bit of salt and some shredded Korean chilies to make another kind of sunomono.

I’m not usually terribly fussy about how my vegetables are cut, even for Japanese food; I use mostly rustic style rolling cuts for carrots. But osechi is as special occasion, so Hiromi slaved away cutting and faceting red and orange carrots for this nimono, or simmered vegetable dish. Our shape cutters, even the smallest ones, are too big for the scrawny American carrots typical in U.S. supermarkets. The nimono also features takenoko (bamboo shoots), renkon, satoimo, gobo (burdock) and shiitake.

Hiromi opted not to buy off-the-shelf kuromame, or sweetened boiled black beans, as most Japanese would do. For some reason, they didn’t quite stay black, but they tasted nice. She boiled them with yakimyouban (alum) and salt, then later added a serious dose of sugar. They would typically be boiled in a cast-iron pot, but my cast-iron pan doesn’t have a cover, so it was cast aside. It’s possible that the iron in the pot would make the beans shinier and blacker… we’ll try again next year.

A couple of months ago I made my second or third attempt at making kurikinton, sweet potato paste with chestnuts. It might have been a bit early in the season, because they had a slightly whiter color than Hiromi’s. These are thankfully less sweet than most of the commercial kuri-kinton available in Japan, so they make a nice side dish even among savory things.

Hiromi spent more than a day on this elaborate meal… Here was the reward:

After all that work, I suspect I’ll be doing most of the cooking for the rest of the week…

This week we had another nabemono craving, this time a reprise of my last kimchi soon dubu jjigae, with a couple of tweaks. I made it with some shirataki, or konnyaku jelly noodles.

The next day we made a bibimbap, but in a clay pot, rather than stone. I don’t have a dol sot (stone bowl) handy, but I have a huge clay pot that works atop a gas burner… you’ll recognize it from most of my nabemono. As an alternative, it works reasonably well, but the “okoge” (crusted rice) is harder to extract because we fear breaking the pot. We were abe to cook the rice reasonably well, though this time, I think we had a touch too much water in the rice.

We made the bibimbap with some dotori muk, which I had previously used as a side dish dressed with sesame oil and soy sauce.

This was all fairly easy to prepare, but a fair amount of chopping and shredding was involved in our bibimbap…

Tonight, we had Hiromi’s carefully crafted osechi meal, which I can’t take any credit for, except for the photography, and a last minute run for some missing ingredients… I’ll post it shortly.

I thought the last couple of days before Christmas would finally calm down, but I didn’t quite get to rest. I had a flood of late orders, some of which may have been meant for after-holiday purposes, that kept me up late. This combination of working a contracting gig (a.k.a. a job) and operating a business has already been fairly overwhelming, even though I haven’t quite done a “full” work week at Revenue Science yet… Due to holidays and competing commitments, I’ve only been “on the clock” 28–38 hours/week for the first few weeks.

The good news is my web orders this month have now beat any previous month, so the “Christmas magic” seems to have done its job. Because I had quite a boost from previous months between July and November, and relatively conservative Google and Overture/Yahoo ad spending, the jump wasn’t quite as dramatic as it is for some retailers. I also failed to get much in the way of self-promotion done this season because I was just so overwhelmed with other work from November on, so I think I can do a better job with some advance planning and maybe some hired help next holiday season.

Hiromi and I took my brothers, stepfather, and stepgrandfather to the Christmas Eve Seahawks game last weekend, where I narrowly avoided a parking ticket. I thought Christmas Eve was a city holiday, but watched some other cars being ticketed on the way to the game, and made a beeline to my car to get it in a garage. My mother couldn’t make it to the game because she had to take care of my grandmother, and due to some misinterpretation I didn’t quite realize this until about 45 minutes to kickoff… we tried to offer the ticket on the street at face value, but most average folks weren’t interested in a single, premium 200–level ticket when their main goal was to get inside the gates, and the scalpers that came up to me wanted to pay less than face value so that they can claim they had to pay $74 or whatever for it; my rush back to my car made any further negotiations complicated, so we didn’t get anything out of the extra ticket.

I actually had a couple of deliveries to make on Christmas Eve, since I had a few locally-destined internet orders that I had planned to hand-deliver, but couldn’t squeeze in during the week. I liked bringing such orders in person, but it’s no longer feasible unless it’s a very large order. Under my current circumstances, I think I’m going to have to go back to using FedEx Ground for local shipments, because I can’t deliver in as timely a fashion as they can, and it doesn’t save me any money right now when it takes so much time out of my day.

We went to a family party at my grandmother’s house after the game, which involved about 20 dessert options and nothing savory, so I threw together a frittata to have some kind of protein source… Hiromi and I took my little brother out to dinner at a corporate restaurant in downtown Bellevue late at night.

In spite of a pretty hectic schedule, we’ve usually taken 30–60 minutes a night to make a passable meal, and a few times I’ve made some more interesting things.

The night before Christmas Eve we made some pleasant manicotti, with San Marzano tomatoes; the filling involved chevre in addition to ricotta fresca. I used fresh oregano and basil, and some shiitake mushrooms in the sauce.

On Christmas Day, I made a pizza with a potato-based dough that, in my small circle, I’m known for… We roasted bell peppers in a hurry, and served it with some very nicely caramelized brussels sprouts, seasoned with garlic.

I’m not quite caught up… more good food to come… and probably some end of the year thoughts.

We’ve been on something of a Japanese food kick of late, and this has extended into breakfast.

Yesterday, we had an instant suimono (clear soup) made from magically expanding dried fu, a puff of wheat gluten. This is from a fancy gift set that Hiromi received as a farewell present on her way here.

This morning, I made two pancakes, which I turned into dorayaki by adding anko (sweet red bean paste) and returning the first pancake to the pan before the second one was completely cooked, creating a “sandwich”.

When made on a suitable pan, or with 3–4” pancake rings, the portion size is just about right for one serving, but these were made with an 8” omelet pan and needed to be cut into wedges.

Usually dorayaki are made with lots of honey and more eggs than normal pancakes, and tend to be almost too sweet to enjoy without the aid of some accompanying tea to provide some slightly bitter notes. I made mine with some honey, but a lot less sweet than normal dorayaki, making them suitable for breakfast instead of an afternoon tea snack.

During spring about a year and a half ago Hiromi and stopped at a kamameshi-ya-san, or cast iron pot rice restaurant. They served us a simple dish of seasoned bamboo shoots with rice, but on a cold day it’s very comforting. It’s a classic one-pot meal, usually featuring big chunks of vegetables.

We don’t have a lidded cast-iron or similar pot to make kamameshi, but we do do have a nice clay pot, or nabe, with a sturdy lid. We decided to make takikomi-gohan. Last night, I prepared some dashi with soy sauce, mirin and salt yesterday, and started soaking some hijiki. Tonight Hiromi soaked some rice and chopped some carrots, and I sliced snow peas while she prepared some water for blanching.

It cooked with the lid on, topped with seasoned hijiki, aburage and carrots, for a bit over 30 minutes. After the rice had cooked the rice was stirred a bit to incorporate everything somewhat evenly, and we added the blanched snow peas.

Before I got home, Hiromi also prepared another nimono, this time with our remaining quarter of kabocha. I’m a big kabocha fan.

A few years ago, one of my Japanese friend’s mother explained that Japanese men who lived through World War II tended to dislike kabocha because it was one of the few sources of nourishment that was widely available. I fortunately don’t suffer from any such hangups, but the only way I ate squash growing up was baked with brown sugar and butter. Japanese preparations of kabocha, as simple as they tend to be, opened my eyes up to all sorts of possibilities.

I always crave kabocha croquettes in the fall and winter. I think I first experienced them at some chain izakaya in Japan, but even there they made an impression. I now seek them out anytime I am in Japan during in the cooler months. The sweet nuttiness of kabocha squash, mashed with potatoes, contrast nicely with the crunchiness of panko.

Unlike the usual Japanese croquette presentation, served with tonkatsu sauce or a similar fruity thickened worcestershire-enhanced sauce, I served mine with an apple-ginger chutney from a Washington apple orchard (Woodridge Farms, perhaps).

Hiromi and I collaborated on tonight’s meal, and she made this beautiful satoimo to gobo to ninjin no nimono (simmered baby taro root, burdock and carrot).

Since we went through the trouble of frying foods, we also decided to make agedashi-doufu. I’ve made this occasionally, but usually I’m so intent on getting what little crispiness I can from the experience of eating it that I don’t want to distract myself by letting it absorb the soup stock while I’m trying to take a few pictures. Today, though, I caved in, even though this is not one of my best agedashi-doufu. It would have been a bit nicer with some daikon-oroshi; all I could find in my refrigerator was some negi and shouga (scallions and ginger). It was reasonably crispy, though.

We also had some dotori muk, a Korean dish made from acorns. I served it with nothing more than a little soy sauce blended with sesame oil, which is just about right to bring out the nuttiness of the starchy dotori.

My vegetarian variations of okonomiyaki are necessarily limited, but Hiromi and I decided to make okonomiyaki for dinner today, and we happened to have a nice kabocha on hand at home.

I stole this idea from a serviceable but unremarkable (save for the cheap drinks) okonomiyaki chain in Japan. This okonomiyaki variation features thin slices of kabocha in the cabbage and batter mixture, and some pureed steamed squash added after both sides of the okonomiyaki have browned.

It’s topped with some cheese (I used some good gruyere, but ambiguous white processed cheese would be more likely in Japan), and the usual mayonnaise and okonomi sauce.

The sweetness from the kabocha makes this a pleasant but relatively mild-flavored variation of okonomiyaki.

Neither Hiromi or I have any religious reason to celebrate Christmas, but in Japan Christmas is a purely secular event, partly an excuse for fancy meals and hotel packages. For me, it’s part of an annual family reunion of sorts, but mainly a chance to wind down after difficult work schedules.

In the U.S., I haven’t usually decorated for any holiday, but Hiromi thought it would be fun to set up a tree this year.

We found a reasonably healthy, apartment-sized “living holiday tree” at Target, though we originally went there for accoutrements, expecting to pick a cut tree somewhere else. This small potted tree should be able to survive under my neglect out on my balcony after the holiday season passes, because our climate favors evergreens.

We decorated the tree with some lights, ribbon and ball ornaments we picked up at the same time, and I extracted the ornaments collected during my childhood from storage.

Since we got a small tree, the huge satin ornaments I had from my childhood didn’t quite match the scale of our youthful tree, and the other small ornaments I had tended to be too heavy for our tender branches. But I found a couple of pieces that still worked.

I can’t quite remember where it came from, but this walnut-backed ornament was made by a family member when I was young. I wasn’t much of a baseball player, so it was probably a distant relative, but it’s still somehow cute.