I foraged for pine needles in upstate New York two weeks ago to try a delightful, traditional autumn dish: Matsuba-yaki. Matsuba-yaki is a dish in which seafood and/or mushrooms and vegetables such as Matsutake mushrooms are placed on fresh pine needles and cooked together in a stove-top pot or in the oven. It is a fundamental principle that Japanese cuisine respects and honors the seasonal changes in nature. Chefs and home cooks alike try to bridge nature and dining...
Read MoreGingko Nuts: Hard to Do, but Limit to Ten
When something is delicious it is hard for us to stop eating. When it comes to gingko nuts, we should limit consumption to about ten nuts at a sitting. Over-eating can bring a reaction to methyl pyridoxine, a chemical found in the nuts. This can cause a stomach ache and, in extreme, vomiting. On other hand, gingko nuts has been used as a constituent of Chinese medicine to cure some illness for centuries, so limiting to about ten nuts a day seems to be a good idea. This...
Read MoreAwesome Shiogama Blue Fish
The Shiogama , salt encrusted, technique is used for the remaining filleted blue fish described in my previous blog and it produced a gorgeous and delicious result. French do it. Chinese do it. And also Japanese do it. Legend has it that this particular cooking technique in Japan is said to have been developed during the civil war era of the 16th century. Before leaving for the battlefield, a prominent warrior sent his mother a whole gorgeous sea bream cooked in a solid...
Read MoreAwesome Local Blue Fish & Yuan-yaki
No to butter. No to olive oil or any other cooking oil. Blue fish enjoys a Japanese treatment. The fish shines in the traditional Yuan-yaki style of grilling producing a dish that is moist, juicy and flavorful. The ‘Yuan-yaki’ grilling method is timeless. See my Instagram Yuan-yaki grilling video. Here you see the photos in which fish was prepared in ‘Yuan-yaki’ grilling and takikomi gohan. Blue fish from the Atlantic waters was a bit of a disappointing “oily”...
Read MorePlease Taste True Flavor of Me!
“Don’t call me ‘fish flakes’, Don’t call me ‘bonito flakes’. Please understand me better! Please shave me into flakes from a solid block of katsuobushi and taste the true flavor of me.” Well, if I were katsuobushi, I would be screaming at you like that. Recently my friend Chef David, brought to my kitchen a katsuobushi (block of dried and smoked skipjack tuna). David obtained it 3 months ago on his trip to Makurazaki-town – the town famous for katsuobushi in Kagoshima...
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