It wasn’t a very restful weekend, perhaps, but I did skip my usual demo routine. Today, I had a slow-paced afternoon, a relative lack of productivity.

I didn’t really have lunch today, but I made some mochi-mochi an pan in the morning, which I ate around 11am or so. It was just a milk-based yeast dough with a bit of mochi-ko in it, and I made small balls filled with anko, sweetened red bean paste. I made two flat savory rolls also: gomashio, black sesame and coarse salt.

Somehow I was craving a savory, quichelike tart today, but I didn’t want to have a meal mostly composed of butter, cheese and eggs, especially since I’ve been slightly dairy-heavy this week.

So I made a little salad, and I roasted halves of delicata squash stuffed with shredded satsumaimo. The satsumaimo was still tossed with a modest amount of melted butter, and a little black sugar and salt. It allowed me to serve a lighter portion of the tart.

I made the tart with a half-wholemeal crust, a lot of butter, and a little mace. I caramelized some shallots with some thyme, and I sauteed some incredibly cheap chanterelles with garlic. For the cheese, I used a cheap, unremarkable raclette from Trader Joe’s. I usually expect raclette to be a bit more aromatic, but this was a pretty bland one; that turned out to be just fine for the purpose of making a quiche, but I would have been disappointed if I actually made raclette.

My crust turned out to be fairly crumbly. I think my beads were a bit too fine to produce a very flaky result, but the texture worked out to be pleasant enough.

I slept around 2 am last night, which is in fact earlier than I have been sleeping recently, but not healthy. I don’t know why, but I’ve just been unable to get to sleep at night for a while. I’ve often had issues with insomnia, throughout my life, but it’s been worse the last 6 months. Personal and business stresses conspire to keep me awake.

Unfortunately, eventually, this sleeplessness catches up with me. I headed off to Bellevue Uwajimaya for an in-store demo but I wasn’t feeling very well, and due to some side errands required to do my demo I ended up arriving a bit later than I expected. I went in to say hello to the grocery manager, and he said I wasn’t looking well…

I’m not sick, although a few days ago I had the first hints of a cold. A few sneezes later, my morning congestion disappeared, and I thought I was back in the swing of things. Even if my immune system is still functioning, though, my body appears not to be.

Anyway, I set up a little store display and took his suggestion to skip my demo, though I ignored the part about getting some rest. Having driven to the Eastside, I felt I should at least make good use of my mileage, and stopped at my grandmother’s house for a bit.

Afterward I went to check on another customer, wandered a bit, and found myself talking another shopkeeper’s ear off, and finally made my way back to Seattle, where I coincidentally ran into Eugene of MyGreenTea, who was taking a rest after a hard day constructing a walk-in cooler in his new warehouse facility, where he will store his tea in a carefully climate-controlled environment.

I never did get a “rest,” but I ended up with a rather improvised day, which is almost as good.

I don’t know how I got so busy today, but a huge number of Internet orders came in last night, and I also had to rush off an order to a special event on the East Coast. A company picked up my green tea white chocolate enrobed fortune cookies (made with matcha) for a film premiere.

It didn’t help that I had a bit of an office supply shortage. Yesterday I ran out of ordinary paper and started printing invoices and shipping labels on bright yellow paper. This meant that at some point today I also needed to make a trip to get more paper.

After making my final dropoff, I met up with a friend who is attending classes with Urasenke Seattle, and I played the role of clueless guest at one of their Thursday night classes. In Japan I usually consumed matcha in tea shops, not tea ceremony, so I have a lot to learn even just to be a properly dignified guest. Fortunately, the instructors are both patient and informative. Since I had a fresh batch of cookies, I left some behind for other people to enjoy.

Of course, I got home quite late, and dinner was ready around 9:30 pm. I was in the mood for comfort food, though I suppose something Spanish would have been appropriate considering the hour.

I made a quick macaroni and cheese, using pennette instead of elbow macaroni, and topped with buttered panko. I snuck a little bit of wasabi in there because I was out of regular horseradish.

Chanterelles seem to be fairly plentiful right now… I got some on Sunday, thinking I got a deal, but the price seems to be even better today.

Mine were apparently locally-grown. Chantrelles always seem to have a fondness for butter, so of course I used some, and shallots, garlic, thyme and cream. I served them with spaghetti.

I don’t really use spaghetti all that often… for some reason, the ubiquity of spaghetti works against it for me, and I just never think of buying it. But a while back I got a strange craving for long pasta, and I bought some and used it a few times when I needed a quick lunch.

I thought today was going to be relatively light-duty, but it turned out busier than I expected. I took care of a bunch of things that have been suffering, but new tasks came in before I got very far. Tomorrow will be more eventful, because I have another very time-sensitive order and a long list of new internet orders that came in tonight.

Some kinds of busy are merely distracting, but I made good progress on a lot of fronts today. The only downside was that the post office was closed, which, for someone who doesn’t take government holidays, is easy to forget. I don’t even get weekends…

I was too weary to make anything exciting for dinner, but I made a simple pajeon, for which I used a friend’s trick, incorporating milk and egg into the batter.

Unfortunately, as is frequently becoming the case, my day involves a bit of driving across town to accomplish certain tasks… I kept it to a minimum, planning my tasks to land at spots the most efficient way possible, but I didn’t quite succeed in getting everything ready to ship off before I got started on this, so I had one more stop than would have been ideal.

I made a variation of kimchi dubu jjigae today, as the weather has been turning a bit cooler.

I usually get the kimchi from a north Seattle Korean market or, when I lived on the Eastside, from a little one in Factoria. This time I just got it at the Central Market location in Shoreline, where I was doing a demo.

This one has some maitake mushrooms, yu choi (like natane), soft tofu, scallions, simmered daikon, and bean sprouts in addition to the kimchi, and I later added some eggs to poach in the soup.

There were, of course, some leftovers.

I watched my database-driven web sites, including this blog and my web store, YuzuMura.com, suffer from a 40 minute outage tonight.

That was painful.

The database server apparently went offline for a longer than cozy period of time… I think the hosting service sometimes restarts the database server on weekends at night, but the impact is usually smaller than 3 minutes.

I hope it didn’t negatively impact any customers who came to the site.

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.

I am not a big fan of Japanese-style curries. They usually aren’t vegetarian, anyway, since they are usually made with beef fat and bits of various animals, and the “vegetable” curries are usually some unmemorable hodgepodge. In a pinch, though, I’ve been known to take the vegetable curry when handed a hotel food voucher, or when lacking other options at some roadside “service area” along the highway in Japan. My preference at such places is just to get a snack like O-yaki or some taiyaki or dango.

I was trying to make use of ingredients that were on hand tonight, and my initial impulse was to make some kind of squash soup, and then I was at a loss on what to do with a bunch of fried tofu (atsuage) I got on the weekend.

Finally, I decided to make some sort of spicy vegetable dish, and I used a base of ghee, garam masala, some cumin, coriander, fenugreek, cloves, a little amchur powder, mustard seeds, fresh chillies, and possibly some other spices… I sauteed onions and created a roux, which I usually do not do when making Indian style dishes. This turns the dish into a more Japanese-style curry; roux is really the defining feature.

I added raw ginger and some liquid, brought the sauce to a boil to thicken, and simmered kabocha and atsuage until the kabocha was soft. I had to adjust salt and seasoning a bit. I guess it was moderately comforting, but not very exciting for me.

“Obachan” recently reminded me of the joys of fresh pita bread when she talked about a cross between hummus and baba ghanouj on her blog recently. A couple of months ago I made some pita just because I felt like having some flatbread but didn’t want to drive to the supermarket just to get some stale-tasting, chemically stabilized flatbread when it only takes a few minutes and pennies to knead some dough.

It does take a bit of time to rise (45 minutes to an hour is fine), but in this case, I was able to prepare other things while I waited.

I took a quick picture just a short time after the second batch of bread came out of the oven. I made a total of 8 pita, and my roommate and I quickly devoured half of them.

Fresh-out-of-the-oven pita

My impetus for making pita was a craving for a hummus-like spread often rendered in English as “foul mudammah” or “foul medammah”, but the ambiguity of Arabic vowels results in numerous additional possiblities.

A few years ago when I was still moderately happy with my job at Microsoft, an Egyptian woman working for me, who had recently brought her family to one of my dinner parties, treated me to some homemade fava bean spread. She gave me a recipe and a verbal description of the technique. Not too long ago, I acquired a small amount of dried fava beans at PFI with the intention of making this dish.

Mine doesn’t really look the same as I remember hers; I think hers had a greenish hue and was probably made without tomatoes. It may have been a completely different dish. I’ve long since misplaced the recipe she gave me, but I was happy with the results.

Foul Mudammah

I used a bit of tomato puree in addition to cooked dried fava beans (soramame for my Japanese readers), and onions both in the foul and caramelized on top. I ground some coriander and cumin seeds then cooked them in bit of olive oil with some ground chillies, which I mixed into the foul as well, and of course some salt. I used a blender to puree everything, but I’m sure I could have gotten satisfactory results from assiduously smashing the beans with a fork.

Upon serving, aside from adding those caramelized onions, I sprinkled some dried ancho chillies and drizzled olive oil on top. It might have been nice to squeeze a bit of lemon juice on top, but I forgot to buy lemons.

I also served some sliced cucumbers, feta, and a decent tomato.

The only remotely expensive part of the dinner was the feta, which I really didn’t need, but I was craving it somehow.

The foul mudammah has a pleasant sweetness… I think the beans, tomato, and onions all contributed to that. I want to eat it more often.

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