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.

Chi goo is a slightly crunchy potato-like vegetable. It's called a "river potato" in some translations, and seems to share some textural qualities with lotus root. Apparently the name means "belly button mushrooms" in Cantonese, but it's clearly a root vegetable, sometimes called arrowhead.

I couldn't really decide what to do with these, and I lost one or two of them due to neglect.

When I finally got around to preparing them, I thought they might respond well to some leftover brown butter I had from making financiers. First boiled like potatoes, then quartered lengthwise, the chigoo are added to a pan with sizzling brown butter. After they've cooked for a minute or so, I add a serious dose of sake and moderate splash of soy sauce. When the liquid reduces substantially, I toss in some fresh blanched fava beans (soramame in Japanese) and heat them just long enough to to warm up.

Slightly salty, a little nutty, and imbued of the aroma of sake, the slightly crisp chigoo featured a hint of artichoke flavor. The dish is very simple, but serves as a nice sake accompaniment.

I got to bed a little earlier last night, but it was only after I composed and sent a response to my latest source of irritation.

Late Friday, a Chinese company sent an email to me by way of YuzuMura.com claiming that my use of the phrase “dragon beard candy” runs afoul of a trademark they registered in 2001 in China. Somehow, the 2000 years of prior use as a common phrase (in Chinese) got past the Chinese trademark authorities; perhaps they considered it a novel usage since they registered the mark “Dragon Beard brand cotton candy” in English rather than Chinese.

Translations of common phrases are, to my knowledge, not well protected by trademark law, but the more amusing thing is that they are making a claim against a phrase that existed in English in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore for a fairly long time prior to their registration.

Also, their company, “Nutra-Swiss,” does not appear to have any trade presence in the United States. They don’t have much to protect; if a trade name is not in active use, it’s not protectable, and this should be doubly true for a weak mark. These days, their online presence appears confined to search engine spamming and domain name resale, although I do recall seeing some photos of some artificially-colored plastic tubs of cotton candy on some trade directory last year. I’m not selling cotton candy or even comparing my product to their artificially-colored goo anywhere on my commercial site, since it’s irrelevant to my market.

I expect there may be one or two more rounds of email, after which I’ll probably publish the entirety of the exchange here for popular amusement. They don’t show a very sophisticated understanding of trademark law.

Dinner

I needed to take advantage of leftover ingredients today. I still had a bit of ricotta in my refrigerator, which would not likely survive much longer than today; it was still in decent condition. I also had some tomatoes, onion and mushroom, in addition to a bit of parmesan. It turned out that Central Market, where I did my matcha latte demo today, had a little sale on manicotti shells, which is quite fortunate, since I had already thought of making manicotti on my way to search for pasta. I was lower on tomatoes than I remembered, so rather than incorporating the mushrooms into a filling, I made them part of the sauce, which was heavy on onions, deglazed with a little fume blanc, and seasoned with garlic and basil. I chopped the roasted peppers into confetti and included them in the ricotta-parmesan filling.

For a dish which was composed primarily as an excuse to use up ingredients, it turned out fairly well. The wine and mushroom sauce turned out more interesting than the tomato sauce I had planned. But I only have about 6 weeks left in Washington’s tomato season…

Technorati tags: China, trademarks, law 

Omotesandō is a very brand-conscious, upscale, fashionable district in Tokyo. It's home to boutiques by Pierre Hermé, La Maison du Chocolat, Louis Vuitton, and Hanae Mori, among others. It's part of Minato-ku, one of the most expensive wards within Tokyo.

A few years ago Hiromi read something about a fancy crêpe shop in Omotesando serving galette, or buckwheat-based crêpe, an idea which fascinated Hiromi. In Seattle, where savory crêpes are less unusual, they're a bit easier to find, but most of Tokyo thinks of crepes as a street dessert food for Harajuku-haunting junior high school girls.

We wanted to go out to brunch after returning from Aomori, and Hiromi was in the mood to revisit Le Bretagne, the crêpe shop in question, so we made our way to Omotesando without bothering to look it up, as Hiromi was sure we could find it by memory.

As a rule, if you aren't living, working, or regularly shopping in a particular neighborhood in Tokyo, don't ever make this assumption. We were quite on the wrong side of things, and only with a bit of expensive fancy web searching on my rental cell phone (thanks Softbank Telecom!) were we able to locate the address and realize the error of our ways.

There it is!

If you aren't already familiar with Tokyo, you need to know two things: 1) it is easy to get lost in a city full of small alleys of which you have only the vaguest memory, and 2) none of said alleys, or even minor streets, have actual names. Only fairly major thoroughfares and highways have meaningful designations. People in Japan give directions almost entirely using landmarks and notable features.

Le Menu

It took a while to get in... On a sunny Tokyo day when everyone in the city with a non-service industry job has the day off, the place was packed, and we had a 20 minute wait to be seated even after our long odyssey.

Pear cidre

It was brunch, but we wanted a little taste of sparkling pear cider, which is fermented much like beer and has a similar percentage of alcohol... 3-6%, depending on variety. The small cups let us taste without feeling overly indulgent for early afternoon.

Roquefort and walnut mixed greens salad

Hiromi loves blue cheese, so we decided to order a little side salad made with roquefort and walnuts.

Both of us were somehow craving eggs... Except for a great chawan mushi at the last onsen where we stayed and that fantastic egg cooked in a shell, I guess we just hadn't had our fair share of ovoid cholesterol delivery vehicles of late.

Galette de sarrasin with spinach, artichokes, tomatoes and egg

Galette de sarrasin with ham, egg and gruyere cheese

As you'd expect, I had the vegetarian thing and Hiromi had the ham and cheese.The nice gently fried egg helped pull the galettes together. The texture was crispy and the taste was nutty, and the filling was pleasingly decadent.

Facing the kitchen, dreaming of pear cider

After skipping breakfast with the intention of doing an early brunch, then walking around hopelessly lost until our early brunch turned into a fashionably late lunch, we were still craving a bit of dessert. On our previous trip here three years ago, we were satisfied with a single rhubarb-orange dessert crepe, also made with the buckwheat flour, shared between the two of us.

But this time, we were a bit hungrier. So both of us ordered dessert...

Buckwheat times three

My dessert was this buckwheat crêpe served with a buckwheat ice cream and drizzled with buckwheat flower honey. As expected, the texture and flavor of the crêpe was nothing short of spectacular. The ice cream was interesting and I've been known to use a bit of buckwheat honey myself, but the overall impact comes across as just a little bit healthy... nice, but not overly indulgent.

And then I tasted this...

Crêpe with "milk" ice cream and salted butter caramel sauce

Oh. My. God. It could inspire religion in the hardest-core of agnostics. It alone serves as proof that the divine exists right on this little green planet. Hiromi jealously guarded this, but I definitely stole my fair share... This had the most fantastic caramel sauce ever... a little buttery, and apparently a little salty, and very deep and rich in flavor. I didn't know it was possible.

The ice cream was simple and creamy and made with remarkably good milk. It provided just the right balance to the intensity of the caramel.

Thanks to our self-indulgence, we ended up with an extravagant JPY 9000 lunch ($80-90). A similar lunch (though not quite at the same level of quality) at one of Seattle's few crêpe  shops wouldn't have gone for much more than $50, but somehow, in Omotesando, where madamu go to spend their mid-level executive husbands' excess income on lunch and shopping, it seemed just like another day... and not a yen wasted.

Two asparagus dishes in a row?

Yes, but it's that time of year. I suppose there will be at least one or two more. 

Actually, I haven't eaten asparagus all that often lately, and local asparagus hasn't quite kicked in. But most weeknights I've been too lazy to take any photos of dinner, and on weekends... well, I guess I've been lazy on weekends too. In fact, Friday night I was so lazy that, straight off the bus on the way home, I went straight to Paseo, the Cuban-ish shop in my neighborhood, and grabbed dinner to go. I almost never grab dinner to go.

Today I made a brief stop at Thanh Son Tofu, followed by some vegetable shopping at Uwajimaya. I originally had planned to make some Japanese foods, but I was really feeling weary once home... all I really wanted was a gin and tonic.

I kicked off the rice cooker, but I didn't do anything at all that would result in a Japanese dinner appearing on the table... A few minutes before the rice finished, I chopped some asparagus, scallions and garlic, sliced some shiitake, and halved some fried tofu. I prepared a very hurried porcini-konbu soup stock. A quick saute, a splash of soup stock, a little piqin chili oil, a drizzling of vegetarian oyster sauce, a few grindings of black pepper, and suddenly dinner was on the table. Not fancy, but flavorful and satisfying...

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.

I’ve really not been getting enough sleep recently… it’s impacting my work a bit. I sent off a bunch of internet orders in record time this afternoon, but I had a hard time doing everything else I had planned for the day.

After shipping everything I wanted to go to the Isamu Noguchi exhibit at SAM. It’s the last chance for me, since the show closes around September 5. It should have taken 10–15 minutes to get down there from Ballard, but some stalled truck awaiting a tow and an unrelated SUV-Taxi collision turned the Queen Anne leg of my trip into a crawl. I think it took me about 40 minutes from the Ballard post office to the time I parked my car downtown.

I got home later than I expected… remembering I was out of everything vaguely vegetable-like except some salad greens, I wanted to get a few more items. Among other things, I got a decent, heirloom tomato, which I devoured before I had a chance to photograph it; it was surprisingly lacking in seeds and water; very fleshy. I squeezed a little lime juice and pico di gallo seasoning (salt, chilies, cumin, I think). I had a little mixed greens salad with my usual dressing but with a handful of roasted pepitas.

While I ate the greens and tomatoes, I roasted some slices of potatoes, which in this case are seasoned with the same pico di gallo seasoning and a little extra salt; I topped with bits of raclette cheese just a few minutes before I finished baking, and ground some pepper on the potatoes just after they came out of the oven.

Eringii mushrooms have great visual appeal. It’s possible to compose dramatic looking dishes with them, but I think they taste best with simple preparations.

I usually serve them as a side dish with two or three other options.

This dish only takes a minute of active preparation, as I can just slice some in half, set them in a skillet with a bit of sizzling butter on medium heat, let cook until slightly browned on one side, flip, and after a minute or so, finish with a splash of soy Japanese sauce.

Butter and soy sauce is a magical combination.

On eGullet an innocent inquiry by a restaurant-savvy Manhattan denizen about disposable chopsticks turned into a lively discussion about Japanese food-related taboos.

Namely, Japanese seem to be resistant to reusing chopsticks, and people are far more comfortable with disposable chopsticks than reusable alternatives (unless they are using their own pair). Chopsticks become strongly associated with the person that uses them. On the eGullet thread, I suggested that the origin of this is in old taboos about touching other peoples’ belongings, and also tied to Shinto rituals related to chopsticks.

Actually, although Japan has a reputation for elaborate ritual, it’s not so difficult to learn basic Japanese dining etiquette. Most of the rules about how to behave when eating are just related to chopstick usage.

You don’t need to worry about the order of utensils to use since there’s usually only one to choose from. You don’t really need to worry about where your left hand is. You don’t even need to worry about the order of what to eat, although it’s more delicate to take a bite of rice, when present, between tastes of different side dishes.

I think you need to worry more about whether you have holes in your socks than the way you eat.

Gourmets may argue about the preferred order to eat certain foods, but it’s not necessary to follow such rules to be polite; it’s sort of like knowing the preferred order to eat cheese in the U.S. or Europe. It might reflect on your sophistication or lack thereof, but doesn’t make you a barbarian.

I have sometimes tended toward nervousness when eating with unfamiliar people in Japan, perhaps from some anxiety that I may do something inappropriate. This is perhaps slightly amusing or occasionally endearing but completely unnecessary. Except for some easy-to-follow rules about manipulating chopsticks, you don’t need to worry much.

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.