Finding washoku in Hirosaki for lunch was actually suprisingly tough... the streets perpendicular to Hirosaki park were mostly full of meaty youshouku-ya-san and kissaten. Finally we settled into an unremarkable department store restaurant floor, which had three choices.

We both had some sort of soba dish. Mine was a sansai soba, or mountain vegetable topped soba. Usually sansai soba in Kanto is a slightly more elegant looking dish with just a few vegetables on top, but this place used a surprisingly generous amount of vegetables.

Sansai soba

It wasn't the nicest version of this dish I've ever seen. The vegetables probably came in foodservice packs and the soba was a little overcooked. But we were hungry and tired, and this was comforting and warm.

Driven by sunnier weather, we had done our second day of hanami, but we didn't do enough snacking at yatai to feel full. So a couple of orders of noodles helped fill us up.

I also did a little bit of shopping, making my first serious investment in urushi. I really like nurimono, or lacquerware, but I've never really been brave enough to commit to anything beyond some cheap wooden misoshiru bowls and chopsticks. Aomori's style of urushi is very distinctive, and appeals to Hiromi's love for visual drama and my own quirky tastes. I actually have some older chopsticks from Aomori given to me many years ago by a friend, but I bought my first lacquer serving ware and two really nice sake cups... I promise they'll make an appearance on my blog in the future, but I didn't take any photos in the shop.

We headed off to the mountains...

Sublimating valley

Dirty snow pocks

Somehow trees absorb just enough heat from the spring sun to help melt away small circles of the old snow.

We made our way to a tough ski destination... you have to trek your own gear up the slope, as there are no mechanical lifts. Our purpose for making this trek was to go to a hyakunin-buro, 100 person bath, with a highly sulfurous composition. Unlike most onsen in Japan, this hot spring spot has only konyoku buro (gender mixed baths) and has been that way for a very long time.

And unlike most konyoku buro I've been to in Japan, it was also very crowded.

You just pay a a small fee for entry... I think about 600 yen per person ($5-6)... if you're smart, you will come with a couple of towels; we neglected this and had to buy some tiny ones.

Hiromi scoped out the other women to decide whether she'd be brave enough to go with just the small towel as cover... After a demographic analysis, she caved in and bought this sort of bathing suit that loosely covers her body. Most of the women in their 20s or 30s, at least the ones without children, wore something similar; older women and women who came with children in tow concerned themselves less with such modesty, though most draped themselves with a large towel when entering or exiting the baths.

The men, for the most part, used their small towels when moving in and out of the bathing area, and some covered themselves when outside of the baths. It's a strangely communal experience, but I think the experience was so unfamiliar to most contemporary Japanese that I'm sure most people were fairly self-conscious most of the time.

In theory, the baths typically had a male and a female side, but the dividing line wasn't strictly enforced; I think it was just to give people some semblence of separation to create a small suggestion of privacy.

On our way out, we had some warm soba manjuu (buckwheat cake stuffed with sweet red bean paste) and some surprisingly decent sumibi-yaki coffee from the onsen gift shop.

We started heading toward Hachinohe again, where we wanted to get a quick dinner in before taking the long train ride back to Tokyo. In the mountains, plows had dug through several meters of old snow, but the roads were clear... as we headed down toward the base of the mountain again, I snapped a couple of photos, though the snow wasn't nearly as high down below.

Layers of old snow

I was probably too sleepy to remember to take pictures up higher, where thick layers of old snow were piled up even higher.

When we got back, we had a slightly rushed meal at a little train station robata-ya. I had packed away my camera in my luggage in the rental car, but we had a few memorable things... Hiromi had senbe-jiru, a soup made with puffed grain senbei and chicken, if I understood correctly; it's a regional specialty. I've kind of lost track of everything we ordered, but it was pleasing... I had a glass of a surprisingly whiskey-like aged shochu made with buckwheat. We also had some good tamago-yaki served like nigiri-zushi, grilled shiitake, and some really nice miso grilled yaki-onigiri. I'm such a sucker for charcoal grilled rice balls, because I can never get them quite right when making them at home on an electric appliance.

Everything was shutting down early that night, including gas stations, but somehow we managed to refuel and return the rental car just in time to make our train back to Tokyo.

I had some return contact from some of my favorite potential suppliers today, so that was gratifying. I also sent some inquiries out to some freight and web hosting companies since I’ll need to have some solution for transporting products and I need a better solution than I have now for the web retail presence I’ll be establishing. I have one meeting scheduled for tomorrow with a company that mostly deals in Korean beverage products (yuzu tea, ginger tea, date tea and so on); the representative is someone I encountered at FoodEx.

This weekend I want to go to Osaka and Wakayama, so today I finally bought plane tickets and hotel vouchers. I haven’t dealt with making my own domestic travel reservations without the assistance of Japanese friends before, so I realized how little I remember from the trip reservation conversation drills I had in Japanese classes in 1995. I guess I have to learn sometime…

In Machida, we were lucky enough to get seats at Ume no Hana, a tofu restaurant at the top of the Lumine department store there. They had told us there would be a 30 minute wait, but we were offered seats before we could finish calling another restaurant to find out if we had a prayer of getting in there.

The food was pretty nice… freshly made yuba and tofu nabe, various small nibbles, and all the elegance you’d expect… nice clean, refreshing flavors, very fresh foods, nothing overwhelming, nothing under-seasoned, beautiful presentation. They also made vegetarian substitutions for me where possible (dashijiru and a single piece of shrimp being minor exceptions). Restaurants that make substitutions are somewhat unusual in Japan, unlike the hyper-accommodating US world which will sometimes over-accommodate to the point of disastrous culinary results. So I was pretty happy when I got mostly what I asked for with good food quality. Some of the drinks that they do there are interesting, though some are a little sweet; we tried a few different things and shared tastes.

Tomorrow I need to call Yamato Transport in Seattle and try to set up a meeting or two in Osaka so I feel like I’m getting some business value out of that side trip.

After a run of Japanese food, I started craving pastas and breads again. Somehow an  urge to do something with mustard greens kicked in. A weekend trip to the supermarket with no particular time pressure put me in a playful mood.

I thought about the Nagano specialty oyaki I sometimes make with mustard greens.

I tried making some beggar's purses on a whim, but realized the wrappers I rolled out were a little too thick. So for the next batch, I chose to make thinner, ravioli-like dumplings.

When I go through the trouble of making stuffed pasta at home, the last thing on my mind is recreating something that I could easily acquire at a supermarket or local Italian specialty shop. So I either go the route of using much better quality ingredients than I'd ever find in the fillings made by one of those fresh pasta making companies, or take the opportunity to play with combinations that I'd be unlikely to find anywhere else.

This was an occasion for the latter.

For the filling, I rub some washed mustard greens with coarse salt and let them sit for five or then minutes, then I come back to rinse them and squeeze out excess moisture. They shrink nicely, and I add some soft manouri cheese, a tangy sheep's milk cream cheese from Greece. I grate a little nutmeg in, then work an egg yolk into the mixture, along with a spoonful of bread crumbs. I might have added a little black pepper.

Soft ravioli filled with mustard greens and manouri cheese

I chose to make these with regular wheat, rather than hard semolina flour. Durum wheat pasta, or semolina pasta, is more common in the US, thanks in part to the strong southern Italian influence in Italian-American cuisine, not to mention its advantages to pasta manufacturers. But much of northern Italy actually prefers pasta made with ordinary wheat, and both Chinese and Eastern European cooking is full of noodles made with soft or hard all-purpose flour.

Unlike those with the luxury of an extravagant, beautiful exhibition-like kitchen, I have no room for a pasta maker in my home. I'm not really sure I even have room for the things already spilling out of my tiny cupboards. So I relied entirely on manual labor.

I start with a hand-kneaded pasta dough made from flour, egg yolks, a hint of freshly grated nutmeg, and a pinch of salt. The dough rests for an hour or so.

Then I divide the dough into manageable chunks that I can roll out on my limited counter-space, dusting with flour as needed to keep things from getting too sticky. I flip the dough a few times and do whatever I can to achieve a fairly even thickness.

A cookie-cutter comes to the rescue when I want to cut out round pasta shapes. Or rather, it would have, were I able to remember where my one round cookie cutter was stashed. The urgent need for improvisation leads me to a suitably-sized plastic lid from a spice jar, which has just enough sharpness to do the trick.

I top one half of the pasta circles with a small amount of filling, rub each outer edge with some water, and seal the ravioli shut with one of the unused circles.

During the summer I often want lighter sauces than I typically rely on during colder weather. So rather than some heavy cream sauce, or even a big marinara sauce that might compete with the flavor of the filling, I played with a sauce constructed upon an inexpensive, moderately dry Chateau Ste. Michelle Gewurztraminer.

I simmer the wine with a little porcini-kombu soup stock for several minutes, then added some butter and salt. Initially, the flavor is a bit acidic, but the butter goes a long way to mellow out the wine. As the pasta boils, I toss some shimeji mushrooms into the wine sauce.

When the pasta looks ready to go, I strain the ravioli and let them simmer briefly in the sauce.

You may want to add a little shaved parmesan or black pepper. Since dinner had other sources of cheese, I kept it simple.

The sauce is lively with slightly herbal notes, and just rich enough to cut the acidity of the wine without weighing it down.

The Gewurztraminer has enough complexity to mitigate the need for aromatics like garlic or onions, especially with those intense mustard greens. I also had an audience that appreciates light, sappari flavors and I was serving a few other dishes to provide a balance of intense and light flavors.

However, if you wanted this to be the main focal point a meal you might work in some caramelized shallots, either finely minced and worked into the sauce, or simply sliced and presented as a final touch to top the pasta.

My last reasonably complete meal in Seoul was a late lunch last Thursday... Somehow, after a week of sleeping six hours a night I didn't have quite the energy level required to search for something more substantial, and I was only moderately hungry that night... I ended up just grabbing an overpriced smoothie and some more of those addictive but deadly hoddeok.

Anyway, Thursday afternoon I found this little spot, Waelbing Buchu Nara, just a short stretch from Namsangol Hanok Village. It's extra tiny, and only has room for a bit more than a dozen people to sit. But I was drawn in because of the short, simple, reasonably healthy-looking menu. More importantly, they had gimchi-jeon (kimchi jeon), which is one of the few vegetarian-ish jeon I hadn't indulged in on this trip.

The restaurant offered up a few simple banchan, though I skipped the one that involved a bunch of fried tiny fish.

Mu gimchi

Common enough, but this pretty daikon kimchi was quite nice.

Minari

I might be wrong about this, but I believe this is minari, similar to garlic chives.

Kong namul guk

The jeon comes with a bean sprout soup... It's fairly strongly seasoned with bits of what appears to be dried mackerel. Thanks to my vegetarian habits, it was a bit difficult to for me to eat much of this, but it was a nice touch.

The main event

I ate way more of this than I should have... but the kimchi jeon was pretty nicely done. On previous trips to Korea, at a couple of restaurants the kimchi jeon I've had somehow seemed slightly undercooked. I think that owed itself to the complexity of identifying how well cooked a very uneven batter covering copious amounts of kimchi might be.

At Waelbing Buchu Nara, however, I was pleased with my order. The surface of the jeon just teeters on crispness, while the pancake itself is almost fluffy. The kimchi adds a lot of flavor without being overwhelming.

Even with my almost nonexistent Korean ability I was able to make myself reasonably well understood, and they understood my badly worded request to make sure the jeon was devoid of meat. (It's not all that common to add pork or seafood to this type of jeon, but some places might).

Today I spent most of the day chasing down items that I’m supposed to be sending off to customers… One of my vendors hasn’t been able to come to Seattle to me for a while and we finally met halfway, so that I could get some product samples and this week’s local and internet customer orders.

I’ve also been trying to get an item from another vendor of mine who was waiting for a container to be delivered and faced three days of delivery truck delays and complications. It then turned out that the item in question was not even on that container because the styles have changed so dramatically since the previous shipment. They sent me to another one of their customers that still had the old style in stock, which required another cross-town run.

Unfortunately, this and every other errand meant that I missed the cutoff time at Kinkos; since one of the items I had to ship was in fact the thing that I ran all over town after, this was tough to avoid. Anyway, I braved rush hour traffic to drop off the package at the south Seattle FedEx facility. Of course, this took 30 minutes longer than typical due to an accident blocking part of Highway 99.

When I got home, it was very late. I set out baking some bread I had started early in the day and oven-steaming some squash. I prepared a meal of ambiguous ethnicity.

Soymilk Bread with Caraway Seeds and Coarse Salt

In Japan bread made with soymilk became somewhat trendy, and, when made with a good, heavy, Asian-style soymilk, actually tastes quite nice too. A lot of breads are incorporating soy flour anyway, and I thought it would somehow work well with caraway seeds. I rarely remember to use my caraway seeds, so this half whole-wheat bread was a good opportunity. The result was nice; a dense loaf with a crackly, capricious seasoned crust.

Kabocha Soup

I used the other half of my kabocha to make a simple squash soup, with a little cream, pumpkin seed oil and toasted pepitas.

Tofu with Mustard Seeds, Sichuan Pepper and Sambal Manis

I pan-fried some tofu along with some sichuan pepper and mustard seeds, then seasoned with a bit of salt, a splash of soy sauce, and mirin. I topped each piece with some sambal manis, or sweet chili paste.

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 craving coffee and bread in the morning, although I'll certainly dig into a heavy Korean or salt-laden Japanese-style breakfast from time to time. Fortunately, Seoul and Tokyo, more so than Seattle, have an insane number of mostly French-influenced bakeries, all with local touches, so I often have the chance to find such treats in the morning. The main caveat is that in Tokyo, bakeries often don't really open until 10am. As for coffee, both Japan and Korea are heavy consumers of coffee, but with big chains like Dottoru and various Korean Starbucks knock-offs, it's sad to say that quality is not usually a priority.

Tokyo, in spite of an extended reign of coffee superiority vis a vis the land of Maxwell House and Folgers, is really not that great a place to drink coffee. During the economic bubble, it's said that Japan had a number of cafes with owners fanatically devoted to the art of coffee, but these days it takes a special effort to locate anything substantially better than the ubiquitous "blend coffee" or watery "America coffee". Espresso, save for places like Macchinesti, is generally more a milk delivery mechanism, and tends to be bitter and undrinkable, often even more so than what Starbucks produces.

Seoul, in my limited experience, is even worse. Most places I've had coffee (and there haven't been that many even over several trips so I may not be fair) served something that was not only painfully bitter, but tasted stale and faintly metallic.

Paris Croissant latte, Gangnam-gu station

Fortunately, I've had just slightly better luck this time. A cute little flower-shop/cafe, just inches from my hotel, suffered only from having slightly stale coffee and oversteamed milk; it wasn't the bitter mess I had encountered on previous trips. Another bakery (Paris Croissant at Gangnam station, I believe) seemed to almost understand milk foam rosettas, though the milk was also slightly too hot and the coffee had that faint stale flavor I've come to associate with drinking coffee in Korea.

I was even more pleased yesterday morning, when, in my urge to caffeinate myself, I ended up buying coffee at a chain bakery, Tous Les Jours, also a stone's throw from my hotel.  It wasn't as pretty as the one at Paris Croissant, but it was flavorful without being unnecessarily bitter, appeared to be made from reasonably fresh beans, and was well-balanced enough that I wouldn't have been surprised if someone told me it came from a local Seattle indie coffee place. Even better, the drink was notably cheaper than the Big Green Monster's Seoul offerings, from what I understand.

The one constant this time for coffee in Seoul, it seems, is that nobody ever uses a thermometer to check the milk temperature and it's always life-threateningly hot.

As for the pastries (because Roboppy always wants to know)... well, Tokyo still seems to have a slightly higher standards overall, but in Seoul prices seems slightly more reasonable. Both Korea and Japan almost always cheaper than Seattle when it comes to laminated doughs and such, thanks to saner portion sizes and higher volume.

I usually try to go for flavors that are hard to find outside of Japan or Korea when I come to this part of the world, and I certainly found plenty to choose from.

Sweet potato roll

A pastry with sweet potato puree in the center from Paris Baguette, Gangnam-gu station...

Marron cherry puff

Puff pastry with the unlikely but pleasant combination of marrons glace (candied chestnuts) and cherries.

Tous les jours trio

Sweet potato-filled pastry, mini-croissant, and red bean stuffed soft bun with walnut.

Black sesame tapioca roll

Nice. Chewy, mochi-mochi, slightly salty, and, well, black sesame-y. Good with cream cheese. You want one of these.

Chocolate streusel bread

A lot less sweet than it looks, this one was a pleasant surprise.

One caveat to pastry and bread in East Asia, though: Savory, hearty breads are relatively rare, and even items that sound savory are often made with a sweet bread base or heavily sweetened laminated dough. Ham, processed cheese and sweet mayonnaise seem to be a favored combination in both Korea and Japan, as are things baked with sausages, and, of course, corn-mayo.

Kimpira (alternately kinpira) is a small category of side dishes in Japan typically involving finely sliced or shaved root vegetables. I don't think there's a strict definition, but you sort of know it when you see it. It typically involves sesame seeds or sesame oil, soy sauce, sugar or mirin, and often but not always includes some kinds of chilies. The technique is similar to braising. It might be compared to chorim in Korean cuisine, though the foods typically used for this technique differ between Korea and Japan.

Kimpira renkon

Kimpira gobou, made with burdock root (gobo) and carrot, has made an appearance here. It's the most typical preparation of burdock root in Japan.

For this kimpira, I heated up a bit of sesame oil in a nonstick pan and added sliced renkon. Renkon, known as lotus root in English, is crispy and juicy when cooked briefly. Typically, for kimpira, it would be a good idea to blanch the renkon for a minute or two and then ice shock it. This time, I just used some packaged renkon, which has been boiled in the packing process.

The sesame oil adds a lot of flavor, but it would burn at high temperatures... While I usually prefer to sauté things at high temperatures, that doesn't really work for sesame oil; however, it actually quite matches the goal for kimpira, where the oil is being used more for flavoring than to aid cooking. The oil certainly sizzles and bubbles, but it's not a true "sauté". I'm just kind of heating the renkon and tossing it around occasionally to help it cook evenly.

I season the kimpira with Korean dried chili flakes, because they're handy; other chilies work too. It's not meant to be incredibly spicy, but a little capricious heat is a good thing. Mirin, sugar, soy sauce and occasionally some vinegar are added to taste, and many people would put additional sesame seeds into the dish. It's very forgiving... I can't remember making the dish exactly the same way twice.

The sesame flavor, the nice little crunch, and moderate heat all work together to add a little "stamina" to meals that might primarily feature mild flavors. In small quantities, it will help balance out the rest of the flavors in your meal.

When I studied in Germany, my friends and neighbors were always surprised that I could make dinner out of “nothing.” What they meant was that I could scrape together something interesting from available ingredients, even if the ingredients might not be particularly inspiring… it was fairly common for my selection of vegetables to be consumed fairly quickly, so I might have had only half an onion, some previously cooked vegetable, and maybe some lentils or something in my pantry; suddenly I’d produce a seasoned lentil soup.

Tonight was one of those nights. I didn’t have anything special planned, but I had remnants of a dense bread, a tomato, some leftover roasted cauliflower from a few days ago, and some previously fried bell peppers. I also had a bit of smoked mozzarella left, which I bought on a whim about a week ago, probably used for something else baked in the oven last week.

So I just toasted some bread on one side under the broiler, turned it over and brushed with olive oil and rubbed with garlic, and layered on what was around; the cauliflower went on one, and some bell peppers on the other, then everything else. I used a little salt and pepper to season. I wasn’t trying to be delicate; I used thicker layers of vegetables than if I had planned a bruschetta or a pizza or something. I just wanted to use up things. So this was not delicate in any way. But it did the trick, and tasted pretty nice.

Last night I was out on a run… Rather than going up to Greenlake, for the last couple weeks I’ve just been jogging past the zoo up Phinney. I go up to about 70th and then my energy has been pretty much exhausted, so I come back alternating between walking and running. Actually I made it up to about 75th this time, but I stopped running and walked most of the way back home.  Along the way back, I ran into Etsuko at Fresh Flours, who had just closed up shop for the night and was locking the door as I crossed 61st. I said hello, and chatted about 30 seconds. She offered me a few little fruit tarts and a kind of cream puff.

It sort of undermined my whole reason for jogging, I supposed, but I was happy to have something nice for breakfast this morning. Half of the cream puff served as dessert tonight as well. Although a little soft after a night in the refrigerator, it had a nice custard filling. The tart was just what I needed to start the morning… that, and a standard Seattle dose of cafe latte, which I made at home.

I don't really know what these little cakes should be called, but in Germany something similar was called a Frikadelle... traditionally something like a flat meatball, but sometimes an alternative version was listed the token vegetarian dish at the university cafeteria.

These were my first home-cooked meal after returning to Seattle from Japan... I really didn't have much in my refrigerator, and only arranged to obtain some lettuce and a little Manchego cheese on my way home... The rest depended on my pantry.

I just crushed canned cannelini beans, added some masa harina (ground cal-treated cornmeal), salt, chilies, and some shallots sauteed with cumin, mustard seeds, and a little turmeric for color. I formed three small patties and pan-fried them until crispy on both sides.

They're served on rice with some tonkatsu sauce and a simple salad with Manchego cheese.

It sounds offensively fusiony, but tasted surprisingly decent. It also took only about 10 minutes of effort (and some cooking time)... and the corn flavor worked pretty well with the cannelini. I had planned to use canned black beans or pintos, but none were handy; fortunately, the slightly sweet flavor of the cannelini worked to a small advantage.