The Sashimi Festival

 My family tripped to Shirahama, Wakayama pref. for enjoying swimming in the beautiful sea, taking a nap on the white-sand beach and having a gorgeous dinner in a local seafood restaurant.

The Shirarahama Beach

  I believe most of Japanese love to eat raw seafood especially Sashimi ( sliced raw seafood ). My family also love so much Sashimi and we visit a local seafood restaurant whenever we visit tourism spots near the ocean. Those restaurants have their own seawater pool for keeping fish and other seafood alive and fresh. We can pick up our favorite fish and the chef cook them into our favorite dish. At this dinner, we selected a Japanese spiny lobster, an abalone and a stripped beakfish for Sashimi and a snapper for a deep-fried fish.

A Japanese spiny lobster, a abalone and a snapper 

A stripped beakfish

 I think some bloggers could recognized yellow flowers besides sashimi. These are edible chrysanthemum, which are used not only for decoration but for condiment. At the bottom left of the sashimi dish, something green can be seen. It's a Wasabi or a  grated Japanese horse radish, the most popular condiment for sashimi in Japan. The spicy taste goes well with raw fish.

Assorted sashimi.

A deep-fried snapper

A Japanese spiny lobster boiled in miso-soup.

Harvesting "Chisha"/ leaf lettuces.

-- from iPod touch

Today I harvested "Chisha lettuces" or leaf lettuces which were planted 2 month ago. That kind of lettuce doesn't form a head. I found their leaves are about 30cm/11inch so I believe it's the time to harvest them.





 When I harvest them, I have to be careful because the leaves don't roll inside like cabbages or usual lettuces and they are so fragile that they break and snap easily.






 I and my wife prepared the lettuces with removing dirt, soil, bugs and their roots and,,,,




 Today's dinner was BBQ on a electric heating plate! You can see the lettuces and other vegetables, which were grown in my garden,  beside the plate.

 We rolled a grilled beef and gochujang (Korean red chili paste) with a leaf of the lettuce.
You can eat more vegetables with grilled beefs and expect well-balanced nutrition in that way.

Harvesting in a rainy day

 I had a plan to harvest all of my potatoes today but seasonal rain (梅雨/Tsuyu) didn't allow me to do that and I had to wrap up today's work in my garden with harvesting just 5 cucumbers.
 I get worried about my potatoes in soil because if they are left in soil with a lot of water, they can be easily rotten or infected with disease.


 I believe the best way to enjoy taste of fresh vegetables is eating sliced or cut ones with simple seasoning like "cucumber-sticks" with mayonnaise. Now I'm drinking highball and the cucumber-sticks go well with sparkling alcohol....





-- from iPod touch

Fresh bamboo shoots

 Bamboo shoots are used so often in Japanese dishes and now it's a good season to enjoy fresh bamboo shoots. My colleague in my office have a bamboo forest in the backyard of his house and brought fresh bamboo shoots for me.

 Bamboo shoots have some amount of tannin which is bitter taste so we usually boil bamboo shoots to get rid of the tannin after peeling them off.

After boiling them and throwing out boiled water, my wife added fish broth, soy-sauce and scraped dried bonito to the boiled bamboo shoots and boiled them together for a while.
It's my best favorite way to enjoy bamboo shoots.


-- from iPod touch

Harvesting my onions

 Onions, which I've been looking forward to harvesting since I planted them last year, are big and ripen! The grasses falling down shows it's time to be harvested.
 Today I harvested 6 onions and brought some to my mother and my younger sister. My wife is also so happy that many onions are successful since onions are so multipurpose that they can be used for various dishes.







Growing onions are easier than other vegetables I harvested, I believe. They need less care like watering and giving fertilizers.





Those are today's harvest.

①　6 onions
②　10 spinaches
③　8 pak chois
④　10 komatsunas





I believe the best way to enjoy fresh onions is shown below! That is sliced bonitos with sliced onions. Say sauce with citrus juice was added as condiment. Oh,,yummy!




-- from iPad

Recipe collection vol.2 ( Kiwi fruit jam )

 How would you deal with extra ripen fruits after you've enjoyed them?As I introduced ripen kiwi fruits harvested last year, we have preserved extra kiwi fruits even after our family ate a lot of them. They can't be preserved any more and my wife made kiwi fruits jam using all of them.
-Ingredients-
1. Ripen kiwi fruits 240grams2. Sugar 120grams
-Recipes-
1. Peel the skin off.2. Mash the kiwi fruits in a bowl3. Add sugar to the mashed fruits. You can change the amount of sugar to your taste. My favorite proportion of sugar and kiwi fruits is 2 (kiwi) :1(sugar)4. Microwave it for around 4 minutes.5. Preserve it in a fridge after bottling it up. 
-- from iPad

Recipe collection vol.1 ( Komatuna saute with hams )

 I know some followers are curious about our dishes and recipes. Therefore I decided to start the series of my recipe collection on my blog. In the collection I'll introduce dishes made by my wife and I (mainly by her) using our vegetables, the recipes and delicious foods I eat on a travel. I put a tag named "Recipes" on each post in the collection to let you access to it easily. I hope the collection posts would be the place where you can gather your own recipes and respond to them after you've actually made the dishes.
 Today I would like to start the first memorial post with "Komatuna saute with hams". The dish is so simple that everyone can cook it swiftly while you can enjoy komatuna making the best use of it and salty hams.
-Ingredients-
1. Komatunas2. Ham ( Beef or pork is also OK.)3. Salt and pepper

-Recipes-
1. Wash komatunas with a plenty of water to get rid of soil.2. Cut the komatunas and hams ( you can use beef or pork ) into bite-size (3～4cm)3. Heat a pan and add cooking oil.4. Grill the komatunas and hams for 1min.5. Season with a bit of salt and pepper. 
-- from iPad

Harvesting all komatunas and cooking them

While my radishes ended up with poor result I and my daughter enjoyed harvesting all of my komatunas and cabbages.




Since I found some snails on komatunas and I am planning to change layout of planting beds, I decided all komatunas should be harvested soon.
We harvested plenty of komatunas today and we have to consume them before our fridge will be filled with vegetables. How could we can cook the amount of komatunas? My wife answered the question by today's dinner.




You see most space of the pot occupied by vegetables!
My wife knows steaming in a pot is a good way to decrease volume of vegetables.




Look at the layers of vegetables! Our stomachs have been filled with komatunas and cabbages!

-- from iPad

Today's dinner

The Menus of today's dinner are

1. Cabbage, daikon, carrot and sausages boiled with consommé soup
Soup coming out of the vegetables are so delicious than you don't need
to add any salt.
2. Salad of shredded cabbage
That is the best way to enjoy fresh and crispy cabbages, I believe.











-- from iPad

Osechi - New year feasts in lacquered boxes

Many Japanese prepare Osechi-dishes, which contain various kinds of dishes in lacquered boxes which are designed for the Osechi. My wife cooked 2 boxes of Osechi and Zoni, which is a miso soup with baked mochi and vegetables.


Osechi consists of dishes which is shown below which have auspicious meanings and we celebrate the new year's day by eating the dishes.

from above left
1 chestnut boiled with syrup. The golden color of the chestnut is associated with economic fortune.
2 black soy beans, which represents wish for health.
3 bamboo-shoots boiled with broth. Growth of bamboo-shoots upward to the sky is associated with well growth in many fields like business.
4 carrots boiled with bamboo shoots in broth. Red color of carrots is seen as auspicious color.
5 boiled arrowheads. The sprouts coming out of them is associated with growth.
6 vinegar-pickled renkons or lotus roots. Renkons have many holes which you can "see through" the other side, which literarily means seeing or predict what will happen in the future.
7 sardines cooked in say sauce. In ancient days in Japan sardine was used as a fertilizer for rice so the fish are associated with a good harvest.
8 giant butterburs boiled in say sauce and broth. Butterburs in Japanese is homonym of wealth or good fortune in Japanese.


While preparing miso soup for zoni we baked mochis with an oven toaster.
Mochi get sticky and bigger when cooked so we sometimes have a trouble in picking them up if mochis combine with others as you see in a photo shown below.


It's interesting to know that different kinds of zoni soup are preferred in different districts in Japan. In Osaka white miso soup is preferred, which is sweet and mild taste while in Tokyo fish broth.


-- iPad

謹賀新年 - Happy new year

Happy new year, everyone! I hope the year of 2011 will be great to all of you.
I would like to start the first blog of this year by introducing how our family spending the new year holidays in Japan.

The first photos shows "Shimekazari" or a new year day's ornament to be displayed on an entrance door.



Mochi or a rice cake is one of important foods for new year holidays. We enjoy not only eating Mochi but also displaying it for celebration of a happy new year. The second photo shows " Kagami-Mochi " , one of important ornaments for the new year's day. But that mochi looks odd doesn't it? Do you think that is real?



The answer is that is a NOT real Mochi but a plastic-molded Mochi!
We used to display real mochi during new years holidays but easily get moldy so one of Mochi manufacture invented that plastic mochi and that contains smaller vacuum-packed mochis which we can deal with.

-- iPadから送信

Today's dinner

Today's dinner is hamburger steaks, which is my most favorite dish among all dishes made by my wife. I know westerners like to dip them with tomato ketchup or demiglace sauce but many Japanese including me like to use ponzu sauce ( say sauce with citrus juice ) and grated daikons.
I grated the daikon radish which I harvested and mixed it with ponzu sauce.
The sauce is so refreshing that it goes well with many oily dishes like beef steaks or grilled fish and we make the sauce whenever we eat those kinds of dishes. If you can get ponzu sauce around you, I recommend you make the sauce.









My wife made salt-pickled turnips. The recipe is just slicing turnips, soaking them with saltwater for 1 hour. If dried konbu ( dried kelps ) is available, i recommend you add it to the soaking water since delicious broth come out of the kelp.










-- from iPod touch

Today's dinner

If we can get Chinese cabbages in winter, most of us in Japan usually enjoy Nabe ( a dish cooked in a pot ) adding the cabbages , meet, fish and other vegetables. I have been having a dream of cooking a Nabe dish using Chinese cabbages we harvested and today the dream has come true!



Today's nabe was boiled with chicken stock. But we added our home-made Hot chili oil as a condiment to the dish. The oil can make the taste so hot ,spicy and delicious that we could warm ourselves warm.



Beside the Nabe, we enjoyed " Daikon steak ".
My wife grilled thick sliced white radishes with butter. Salty butter go well with daikon's taste.






After enjoying Nabe, we usually cook porridge in the same pot.
The soup with tastes coming out of pork and chinese cabbages can be absorb by rice.


Our hot chili oil took a important role in the porridge, too.



-- from iPad

Grill, baby, grill!!

As the Christmas or year-end are upcoming, we might have some opportunities to hold parties where we can enjoying eating, drinking and talking with your family members, friends, colleagues.
In Japan we customarily hold what we call "the forget-the past year-party" at this season. The party is held literally to forget whatever unpleasant things, bad lucks and difficulties happens in the year.

Today my family held the party at my favorite Yakiniku ( grilled beef in the Korean style ) restaurant near my house.


Sliced strips of beef are served on our table with the special sauce.






At first, we enjoyed slice row cow liver as an appetizer with dipping them with salt and sesame oil. That is a favorite menu of my family.



We grilled the beef on a heated iron net, which is the Korean style.
"Grill, baby, grill!


Another source of our stamina is sliced garlics boiled in sesame oil.



We should not forget eating vegetables when we eat beef for balance of nutrition. That is "Kimuchi" or cabbages which are picked in hot chili based source.


-- from iPad

Making hot chili powder and oil

Do you want to use a new electric tool to test it as soon as you've bought it? Yes, I do!

We made hot chili powder and oil using a new electric blender which my wife bought.



After we've got rid of seeds from chilies, we put them a glass case of the blender and turned it on and then,,,,,?


Here is a hot chili powder!


Besides the powder, we made hot chili oil, which is my favorite condiment, with adding boiled sesame oil to the chili powder.




-- from iPad