Turning Japanese

Dinner was okonomiyaki, daikon pickles, and Japanese cress salad with sesame dressing. It was good. Okonomiyaki is a very yummy Japanese fast food - it's basically a mixed pancake of whatever you want. I ate some really good ones in Kyoto shopping mall food courts a decade or so back. They decorated them with fancy mayo and sauce swirls and spiderwebs - try a google image search...

I added this to my regular repertoire last year, when our temporary housemate, Akiko, taught me how. It's good for using odds and ends of leftovers - ham, bacon, chicken, tuna, prawns, tofu etc. It must include cabbage, but the other ingredients are pretty free. I didn't actually find my proper recipe from Akiko, but I sort of remembered, and it worked OK.

I made a salad with some mixed greens, about half of the greens being Japanese cress. This is like watercress but larger, and even more peppery. You can buy Japanese sesame salad dressing from Asian grocers, but I didn't have any. I improvised with a spoon of tahini, a teaspoon of sesame oil and soy, mixed in to a tablespoon or so of commercial lime vinaigrette. With the pancake, salad and pickles, I'm now well stuffed.

Recipes follow
Recipe 1: Okonomiyaki
1 cup plain flour
1 egg
1 cup dashi
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 wombok cabbage, shredded (about 2 cups)
5 spring onions, chopped
1 cup chopped ham
1/2 yellow capsicum, shredded
2 tablespoons sesame oil
Japanese mayonnaise
Okonmiyaki sauce
Bonito shavings (optional)
Mix the flour, egg and dashi to a batter, and season with mirin and soy. Beat well to get rid of any lumps. Stir in the cabbage, meat and vegetables. It will look very coarse, not like a smooth pancake at all.

Heat up a tablespoon sesame oil in a smallish non-stick frying pan. Add half the mixture, and cook until golden underneath. Turn over, cook the other side, and then repeat with the other half. Swirl over some Japanese mayonnaise and okonomiyaki sauce - make pretty patterns if you feel so inclined. Sprinkle on some bonito flakes, if you like them. I do, the bloke doesn't.

Note: If you're lucky & careful it won't break when you turn it, but no harm done if it's in pieces... The specialist ingredients like dashi (stock powder), bonito shavings, mayo and sauce are available quite widely - even in some supermarkets. The sauce is based on hoi sin, and if you don't have any, some hoi sin thinned with soy will do. Or go fusion, and try barbecue sauce.


Recipe 2: Daikon Pickle
1 daikon
1/4 cup salt
water
3 green chillies
1 cup rice vinegar
3 tablespoons mirin
3 tablespoons white sugar
Slice daikon finely into half moons. Sprinkle over salt, then cover with cold water. leave to soak for a few hours. Drain, rinse well, and squeeze out excess moisture. Put in a nonreactive heat resistant container - a large jar, or glass bowl or the like. Chop chillies coarsely and mix in. Bring vinegar, mirin and sugar to boil in a saucepan, stir until sugar is dissolved, then pour over the daikon. Leave for at least 12 hours before using.

Note: This is a fresh pickle, and probably won't keep more than a couple of weeks in the fridge.

P.S. Yes, I know what the song actually refers to. It wasn't quite that good :)

The Salmon Report

A quick lunchtime post - the cured salmon worked well. I'm currently eating slices of it, together with a rice salad made of leftover brown rice, capers, cornichons, spring onion & mayo. I also have some radishes and sugar snap peas. Yum.

I left it to cure for a day and a half. When I lifted the salmon out of the brining bowl this morning, it seemed a little hard around the edges. But just sitting in my lunchbox in the fridge for a couple of hours has evened it out nicely.

Later edit: it keeps really well once it's cured. I finished the last chunk on the 15th.

Sorrel and Salmon

... though not together, which now I think of it is a pity. They ought to match rather well.

I got to the Growers' Market at EPIC yesterday, for the first time in months. Some changes are dramatic: with the November rains and the spring growth, prices have come way down on salads. Stone fruits are making an appearance, and the cherries are in, hurrah! I got me a kilo of beautiful dark Rons for $7, and I'm half way through them already. I have no restraint with cherries. The only recipe required for me is "Rinse. Eat."

I bought some sorrel, which I have never cooked before, and I ran a small experiment. After looking in my cookbooks and googling, I found that some people recommended cooking it for 10 minutes, and others recommended using it raw, or nearly so. I tried a small leaf, and it is deliciously lemony and tart, but with a slight astringency. This would make it unpleasant in bulk in a salad, but it should work as a herb accent.

I made myself a test sorrel omelet for lunch. First, I rinsed the sorrel, de-stemmed it, and shredded it finely. I cooked half of the sorrel well, by pan frying it gently in butter for 5 minutes. The other half I just blanched by pouring boiling water over it in a colander. The pan fried version reduces very quickly - two cups of very loosely packed shreds reduced to under two tablespoons of puree. I put the blanched version on one half of the omelet, and the puree on the other half, folded it up and ate it with some beautiful grainy sourdough toast. The result was unambiguous - well cooked wins! The lightly blanched half had more volume, and more in-your-face attitude, but it was also notably more watery. It also retained some of the astringency of the raw leaf. The pureed half balanced much better with the eggs, and was more delicate, while retaining a good lemony bite.

The salmon part of this post is another experiment, but even more uncontrolled. This month's Delicious has a cured salmon recipe, while Good Taste has a gravlax one. They are drastically different - one hour cure vs 2 days; 25og salt/sugar mix for 1kg salmon vs 750g salt/sugar for 300g salmon! Well, how can you go wrong with that range of options? I decided to make up my own.

Recipe: Cured Salmon
375g coarse sea salt
250g white sugar
rind and juice of one lemon
2 tablespoons limoncello
400g skinless salmon fillet

Mix the salt, sugar, lemon rind, juice and limoncello together in a non-reactive bowl. Pin-bone the salmon and cut into 3 or 4 even sized pieces. Coat the pieces in the curing mixture, cover and refrigerate for some time: 1 hour to several days... When ready to serve, rinse well, and dry with paper towel. Slice finely.

Notes: I can't tell you how well this works, because I only put it in the fridge before lunch. You could leave the salmon whole if you have a nice even chunk. Also, that pin-boning thing is a pain. It's easy enough to detect the fine bones by running your fingers over the fillet. But getting them out isn't so easy. It helps to get a solid grip on them - my tweezers were not effective - and notice that the angle is determined by the grain of the flakes in the fish.