Udon/Salmon/Tomato-Stewed Chicken

Monday: Udon noodles with pork, seaweed, tofu, fried bean curd, mushrooms, and looooots of ginger. Warms you up.



Tuesday: Salmon night with lots of veggies. Always so soft and juicy.



Wednesday: Chicken stewed with fire-roasted tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, parsley. Chicken was ok - made us want to eat a yummy clam linguine.

Niku Jaga

Niku jaga, literally meat and potatoes, is like the poster child for "mom's flavor" in Japanese home cooking. As a hearty dish with a warm and kind flavor, it's not hard to understand why. The dish is stewed in your usual dashi, soy sauce, mirin, and sake plus a little bit of sugar. Here's an interesting story about the birth of nikujaga: an officer in the Japanese navy who studied abroad in England loved the beef stew he ate there so much that when he came back to Japan, he asked the cooks in the navy to recreate the dish. The cooks had no idea what beef stew was and ended up creating their own yummy Japanese version.

Salmon Oyako Gohan

Another rice dish, only tonight I cooked the rice by itself and broiled the salmon separately and mixed it all up together with shiso leaves later. "Oyako" means parent and child, which is why Oyako-don usually refers to chicken and egg over rice, but I looooove the salmon version of oyako-don, mostly because of the salmon roe. The shiny, squishy, salty, juicy presence of the salmon roe when added on top of the salmon rice - YUM!

Takikomi Gohan

Tonight I made takikomi gohan, rice cooked along with seasoning and meat and/or veggies. Often when you have this in Japan, the ingredients are a reflection of the season - like bamboo shoot rice in the spring, and chestnut rice in the fall. The seasons don't make much of an appearance here in Hawaii (although it is feeling a couple of degrees cooler lately which must mean it's winter), so today's ingredients were also very seasonally neutral - chicken, carrots, and dried mushrooms, along with dashi, soy sauce, sake, and sugar for seasoning. The rice came out yummy - it's kind of cool that the rice cooker by itself can produce a dish that can stand on its own. I'd like to try another takikomi gohan recipe sometime, maybe something that uses Hawaii specific produce? To be researched...

A New Salad Udon

Today we discovered how compatible black tea pork tenderloin and salad udon are. When I marinated the pork in the sauce, I put half of it in the fridge to eat right away, and the other half in the freezer. After sitting in the freezer for about a week, when I took it out today the flavor of the sauce had seeped into the pork so well that my mouth is still watering just thinking about it.

Chicken Salad / Anago Daikon Stew

For lunch I used the remains of our Costco chicken to make a chicken salad with lettuce, apples, celery, walnuts, and tomatoes. Eating this reminded me of how much I like this combination of sweetness, crunchiness, and protein. No wonder I love to order chicken salad sandwiches wherever I go!


Tonight's main dish, the anago daikon stew, was a first try at a recipe similar to the pork-daikon-greens stew. Anago (salt water eel) is the less rich and fatty cousin to unagi (freshwater eel). I usually only have it in sushi, so was curious how it would be as a part of a stewed dish. It came out ok. I think H and I both like the pork version of this dish better.

Thanksgiving Part 2

Maybe Costco Chicken is not exactly the symbol of Thanksgiving, but ever since an old coworker mentioned that her family had it instead of turkey for Thanksgiving, the two things have been somewhat linked in my mind. Besides, their chicken is so plump and juicy that it's hard not to get a craving for it every once in a while. So after a not-very-Thanksgiving-like-dinner last night, we enjoyed our simple pseudo Thanksgiving with chicken, mashed potatoes, bread, and soup. We were also tempted to get a pumpkin pie from Costco - they make H's favorite version of the dessert and it's only $6 for a giant pie - but the thought of the two of us eating that pie for days and days to come was just a little too overwhelming.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! Our original plan for this year's Thanksgiving Dinner was to go stuff ourselves with food at some Thanksgiving buffet. We realized that we were a bit behind the game though when we started calling places this afternoon and were told a couple of times that they were already full with reservations. So we asked ourselves: where would people be less likely to go for Thanksgiving Dinner? A Japanese restaurant! We ended up having a very Japanese but very enjoyable meal at Tokyo Tokyo, the Japanese restaurant at the Kahala Hotel. Pretty appetizers, a satisfying meat dish (sukiyaki for me, shabu shabu for H), soft and fatty pieces of sushi, and a creamy dessert - what more could you ask for? Even H, who started out a little sad at the thought of no buffet, seemed to be won over by the end of dinner.

Minestrone Soup

Tonight's dinner wins the-most-veggies-ever-packed-into-a-single-meal-at-our-house award! I packed in onions, carrots, celery, bell peppers, corn, kidney beans, parsley, and tomatoes, and was pretty astounded by the growing mound of veggies piling up before me as I continued to cut up vegetable after vegetable. At Foodland I also picked up a small can of sausages as an afterthought, to add a tiny bit of meat to a veggie-ruled soup. Who knew that this tiny sausage can would turn into the hot topic of the night? First, H surprised me by correctly guessing the exact kind of sausage I had bought. We agreed that there was something not quite right with the sausage...and realized that the problem was that it just didn't really taste like sausage at all, and was nearly indistinguishable from the veggies. Our conclusion: next time we will try bacon instead. Or maybe I'll just add even more types of veggies =).

Black Tea Pork Tenderloin

Hello hello!! Our blog has been neglected for a while due to some traveling and my parents being in town, but here we are again, just in time to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. This is a dish that my mom showed me how to make during her recent visit, after we saw some nice-looking pieces of pork tenderloin at Nijiya (she usually uses the huge ones from Costco). I like how simple yet tasty this recipe is. You start out by just putting some black tea bags into a large pot of boiling water to make tea, and then stewing the pork tenderloin in the tea for 40-50 min. After stewing, slice the pork and marinate it in your typical Japanese sauce mixture (equal parts soy sauce, mirin, sake, and rice vinegar). We marinated/refrigerated it for a day before eating, then ate it with seaweed and tomatoes with the sauce poured over everything. Yum yum.

Pork-Daikon-Greens Stew

My mom makes this often, and I like this recipe a lot too. Usually daikon requires a lot of stewing time for the flavor of the broth to really seep in, but with this recipe the idea is to slice the daikon into paper thin pieces so that stewing time can be cut very short. It's yummy with tofu too, but today I just used pork, daikon, and greens (the daikon leaves plus some kind of locally grown Chinese cabbage). There's something about this dish that just tastes like home.

Make-your-own-sushi Party

Last night we had a guest over for dinner, so we decided to make it make-your-own-sushi night. Our meal consisted of octopus salad, temaki (hand roll) sushi, satoimo (taro) miso soup, and the famous coco puffs from Liliha Bakery, which S kindly brought for dessert. According to the Liliha website, they sell between 4,800 and 7,200 of these coco puffs every day! H was so excited to finally get a chance to try these puffs and I was equally excited to get a chance to talk with S, who recently finished her MA in Japanese Linguistics at UH. Good food, good company.

Purple, Green, and Brown

Keeping this blog is helpful because it provides a clear picture of our current cooking/eating trends. I noticed while looking at today's meal and previous blog entries that recently we seem to be seeing a lot of purple, green, and brown. Today's menu: miso soup with onions and Okinawan potatoes (purple), napa cabbage and tuna stewed with soy sauce and sugar (green and brown), and mixed rice (purple). I remember hearing somewhere that the more colors you can incorporate into a meal the better, because it shows a good representation of different ingredients and nutrients. Maybe that will become my new theme for menu planning once I have graduated from my purple potato phase.

Kitchenless Adventures

We have been having some issues with our kitchen, so this weekend we used our kitchenless state as an opportunity to go out and try some new restaurants in the neighborhood.

Cafe Miro
A quaint French-American restaurant done by a Japanese chef, located in the Kaimuki neighborhood. I chose a 3 course Prix Fixe and H chose a 4 course one. I think that the appetizers (seafood salad with yuzu orange dressing, yum!) and dessert plate were the highlights of the meal for both of us. The entrees were ok. My conclusion: I'd come back for the yummy appetizers. H's conclusion: He would rather go to Roy's.


































Diamond Head Market & Grill
Serves yummy plate lunches similar to Kaka'ako Kitchen, where we always have satisfying meals. H got a BBQ special and I got an ahi steak with wasabi ginger sauce. Both were very yummy. This place also seems to be famous for yummy pancake breakfasts and delicious scones. We'll definitely be back, maybe next time for breakfast after we hike Diamond Head (eventual goal).

Inaba
This is one of our favorite restaurants here so it's not really new, but tonight was the first time we went for dinner and it was fun to try a slightly expanded menu compared to lunch. What we love so much about this place: the delicate and crisp tempura that's sooooo good, the fresh made soba noodles that go so well with the tempura, and although it is carb overload, the rice that they serve here is very good, too. By the time we finished off our meal with a mizu-youkan (a traditional Japanese sweet jelly) dessert, our love of Inaba had only grown deeper.

Yakiudon

Tonight's dinner was yakiudon, udon noodles stir-fried with anything you want. Today I used pork, spinachy greens, carrots, and onions, and added some soy sauce and pepper for flavoring, plus some bonito flakes on top. I love udon in any form - hot in soup, cold in salad - but this is a nice simple and yummy variation, too.

Mackerel and Napa Cabbage Miso Stew

Yay! A recipe that really is as simple as it sounds! And pretty tasty, too. Cut up some napa cabbage and put into a pot. Then add a can of mackerel, some sake and water. After stewing for about 5 minutes, add some miso and stew some more, then you're ready to eat! The soup is a bit salty from the salt in the canned mackerel and the miso, so maybe it's not meant to drink, but the dish itself is pretty yummy. It's nice that it can be made so easily, as long as you have a can of mackerel onhand. Lots of healthy omega-3 fatty acids!

Tuna-Potato Patties

The recipe made it sound so simple (and maybe it really was), but by the end of Step 1 - grate large potatoes into a bowl - I felt like my arms were ready to fall off. The good thing is that after the grating, all you do is add a can of tuna plus some salt and pepper, and then you're ready to fry the batter as little patties on a frying pan. Luckily H is the expert fryer in our household, so he took over to make these cute little patties. Because of the potatoes, the patties had a nice mochi-like texture which made them pretty yummy fresh off the grill. Maybe we'll use this recipe again if I can get a hold of a food processor to do the grating for me next time.

Matcha Aisu and Azuki / Top 5 Rankings

We rarely have dessert at home, but whenever we have leftovers for dinner, dessert seems to rise in importance. Tonight we had the standard but delicious combination of green tea ice cream with azuki red bean.

Speaking of standards, we were reminiscing this weekend about all of the new restaurants we've tried out in 2 months and which we would call our standard-go-to restaurants. Our overall impression has been that while there have been lots of yummy places, much of it has been a bit pricier than expected and doesn't quite land on our favorites list in terms of value. So here are our favorites, in no particular order:

1. Rokkaku - Nice elegant and authentic Japanese place. Always so satisfied after eating here.
2. Maguro-ya - So excited to find another Japanese place we like as much as Rokkaku.
3. Kaka'ako Kitchen - Tasty and cheap local lunch plates. Good to go when we're really hungry.
4. Inaba - Great soba noodles and tempura. Feels like we're in Japan.
5. Roy's - We've only been once since it feels more like a special occasion place, but the prix fixe meal here was so memorable for H that now it has become almost like a monetary unit for him. "I'd rather eat at Roy's twice than spend money on (fill in the blank)."

Purple Tonjiru

I was feeling a little under the weather today - it might have been because of the flu shot I got yesterday, overstuffing ourselves with maguro at dinner last night, or a combination of both. In any case for lunch I just wanted a simple, comforting meal, so I chose soup. My default soup to make is probably the dish that I have cooked more times than any other in my life - tonjiru (a miso-based soup with pork and veggies). I still had the purple sweet potatoes from the Farmers' Market, so of course I used those and of course the soup turned more purple than I had ever seen before. But the potatoes, along with the onions and other veggies, added a nice sweetness and yummy flavor. I discovered that the purple potatoes were not from Okinawa like I had originally thought, but actually from Molokai, which is the 5th Hawaiian island with a population of about 7,000. I guess I will now call this purple soup my Hawaiian tonjiru.

Maguro Fest @ Maguro-Ya

Tonight we headed out to Waialae Ave in Kaimuki, which we'd heard was like a less yuppie version of University Ave in Palo Alto - basically a street lined with many yummy restaurants. We decided to try Maguro-Ya, literally "Blue fin tuna shop." As we looked at the menus (and stared at lots of fish specials plastered on the walls), I was enticed by what a great selection of fish they had, but H and I both ended up getting all tuna dinners. I got the Magurozukushi where the maguro comes in 3 forms - sashimi, grilled, and deep fried - while H got a maguro special with sashimi and maguro rib karaage (fried). I don't think that either of us had ever seen so much tuna on a table at once, but everything was very tasty, especially the sashimi! Another thing that made us very happy (and very full) was the many side dishes that came with the meal - their chawanmushi (a steamed egg custard dish) especially was so soft and tasty. We agreed that this was a definite come-back-to restaurant. Since we ate a year's worth of maguro tonight, maybe next time we will try another kind of fish =).

Salmon Foil Yaki and Lettuce Soup

Today we had one of our favorite simple dishes - salmon foil yaki(grill). Just put the salmon in aluminum foil, put any veggies of choice on top, stick into the toaster oven to grill, then eat with ponzu sauce when done. So simple yet always turns out so juicy and tasty. Also discovered a new ingredient for miso soup today - lettuce! After accidentally walking into a farmers' market down the street, I bought some lettuce and wondered how it would be in miso soup. I went to my new favorite cooking site and discovered that tons of people were recommending lettuce miso soup, so I had to try it too. Now I think that lettuce may be among my top five choices for yummy ingredients to put in miso soup. The crispness of the lettuce in the soup is somewhat addictive.

Taiyaki and Leftovers

Since we were having leftovers for dinner tonight, I went to Shirokiya to see if I could find anything interesting to spice up dinner. Shirokiya is like a mini-department store and has a nice food area with many ready-made food vendors, kind of like you see on the bottom floor of a department store in Japan. I bought a pack of croquettes to have with the curry from last night and also taiyaki (fish-shaped cakes filled with red bean) for dessert. Since we rarely have dessert at home, the excitement in the air was almost tangible (H's eyes were shining!) as we quickly finished up dinner to have our taiyaki. Yum yum.

Purple Curry

We had some yummy-looking satsumaimo (Japanese sweet potatoes) from the Farmers' Market, so I thought that I would try making chicken curry with satsumaimo, carrots, and onions today. I like the way satsumaimo in miso soup really adds sweetness and found an online recipe that convinced me that the curry version would be quite nice too. A couple of surprises during cooking tonight: when I cut open the satsumaimo, the inside was purple instead of yellow. Apparently I had bought a special Okinawan type of satsumaimo. Then when I started stewing all of the meat and veggies together, the soup turned into a very colorful purple! Too bad that once I put in the curry, the brown stamped out any trace of purple. But in memory of the brilliantly purple soup, the curry was served over purple rice. Nice flavor, sweet and mild.

Pasta Lunch / Dinner by H

It may look like we only eat Japanese food in this blog, but there has recently been a mini-Italian food boom going on in this house. It started when we bought multiple jars of marinara sauce and boxes of pasta so that H could easily bring pasta lunches into work. Then last night we watched a Japanese food show where they featured several Italian restaurants in Japan. Unable to get my mind off of Italian food after a full night's sleep, today I decided that I would need to do my own version of Japanese Italian for lunch. So here it is: angel hair pasta with chopped clams and clam juice plus a random mixture of leftover veggies from my fridge (tomatoes, lettuce, eggplant, mushrooms), all topped by a few shavings of parmesan cheese. I'm not sure if this is Italian, but it sure is satisfying! Now I'm ready to go back to Japanese food again.


Tonight's dinner featured H as the main chef as he prepared cod using our barely-ever-used-steamer. We had some frozen cod, and he thought steaming it would be the best way to prevent it from getting dry during cooking. The fish was steamed in a bowl with a little soy sauce, chopped ginger, green onions, and a dash of sugar and sesame oil. Both H and I really like the combination of a steamed white fish with ginger and green onions, like they serve in many Chinese restaurants. Looking forward to H's next appearance as main chef.

Tuna Belly and Papaya Salad

What a nice feeling it is when, instead of agonizing endlessly over what to have for dinner, something just jumps out at you. Want-to-eat-you at first sight. We had such an encounter at Nijiya today when the tuna belly sashimi looked so fatty and shiny that we scrapped our original plans and decided to just have sashimi with a salad and soup. While the tuna belly was quite tasty and as fatty as we had hoped, the surprise star of dinner ended up being the papaya salad - made all from veggies we bought at the Farmers' Market yesterday. All the veggies were fresh and tasty, but the papaya was unbelievably ripe and sweet, adding a touch of Hawaii to the whole salad. The apple-bananas we tried this morning with yogurt were also very sweet and satisfying. We will definitely be going back to the Farmers' Market for more yummy fruit!

Farmers' Market Salad Udon

We finally checked out the Farmers' Market @ Kapiolani Community College this morning. When we arrived around 8:30, the place was PACKED with people! Apparently it's one of the biggest farmers' markets in Oahu, and with all it offers to see and eat, it seems to attract a lot of tourists too. Some of the highlights of our visit were:

• The many beautiful flowers.
  
• Lots of local fruit like apple-bananas, papayas, lychee, mangoes, pineapples...definitely different from our usual fruit shopping at Costco. Looking forward to trying them this week.
  
• Tasty-looking food vendors. The longest line was for fried green tomatoes, and the hot Hawaiian breakfast plates people were eating looked very good, but we ended up just getting a kalua pork slider on a taro bun (very tasty) and a blueberry cranberry muffin(average).

So for tonight's salad udon we used a lot of the veggies we got at the farmers' market this morning, plus some seaweed and shabu shabu pork slices. Yes we piled on the veggies so high that you can barely see the udon underneath it all, but it's there. After a nice light dinner, we stuffed ourselves with the blueberry cranberry muffin and decided that we missed the muffins from Arizmendi.

Unagi Chirashi

I like my mom's unagi chirashi recipe - so simple yet so satisfying. Today I cooked mixed grain rice - I call it gokokumai, which means five grain rice, but the packet that I use says that there are actually 16 different grains used - which is why the rice is a purplish color. I love this kind of rice, because it's not only healthy but it tastes really good, too. So cut up some cucumber, shiso leaves, and heated up unagi, mix it all into the rice, and you're ready to eat. Yum! Buying unagi at the supermarket can be a baffling experience when you encounter the huge price range of the eel depending on where it came from. My choice today was between a $20.00 eel from Japan, and a $4.99 eel from somewhere else. I had to go with the non-Japanese one. Now H and I can go have a nice $15 meal somewhere. For a side dish, I tried an eggplant gomaae (a sesame seed dressing), which was pretty yummy.

Pumpkin with Chicken Soboro

Tonight's dinner: pumpkin with chicken soboro (crumbled meat, fish, or egg that's usually been seasoned), izumidai sashimi, and miso soup. For me the highlight was the pumpkin - sweet, soft, and velvety, melting away in your mouth.
News of the night: Tonight my dear friend Y started a food blog of her own!

Pork and Cabbage Mille-feuille

Mille-feuille, French for a "thousand sheets," usually refers to a pastry with alternating layers of puff pastry and a sweet filling. I was googling for good ideas on how to use up some napa cabbage, and came across this pork and cabbage mille-feuille recipe. As you can guess from the name, all you do is spread out a layer of napa cabbage, then pork, another layer of cabbage, and so on until you've used up all your ingredients. Who knew that this process would be kind of fun? As I piled layer after layer on top of each other, I got the kind of feeling you get when you play with Legos, when the pieces seem to fit together well and you feel happy with your creation. So anyways, add a little water (I added some sake too) to your layered castle, heat it up and your dish is done in no time. We ate it with ponzu sauce, which was yummy.

Tako Salad

Since we still had some leftover pork spareribs from 2 nights ago, today I just made a simple tako (octopus) salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, sesame oil, ponzu sauce, and ginger. What I learned from today's salad:

• The Marukai octopus is more tender and works better with this salad than the Nijiya one.
• Ginger makes this salad yuuummier! Maybe I'll use twice as much ginger next time.
  

For dessert, we had strawberries with yogurt. The Costco strawberries we bought this weekend were quite sweet and yummy. They were also already quite ripe, so we need to eat them quickly! Since we've been eating so healthy at home, I wondered if H was suffering from sweets withdrawal since coming here - he told me not to worry because work is always full of sweets and the nurses had just given him a taro malasada today.

Korean BBQ @ Toraji

It is hard to ignore the presence of BBQ in our lives right now - on the common grounds of our apartment, we can see and smell groups of people bbqing meat almost every single night, and there is a pretty yummy Japanese BBQ restaurant just across the street from us (the same Gyukaku that was in my neighborhood when I lived in Japan!) So last night, after the delicious smells of grilled meat wafted up to our apartment from the common grounds, we tried to get into Gyukaku but were told that the wait would be an hour, so we ventured a little farther and tried out a BBQ place called Toraji, which is also a chain from Japan. We ordered a set menu, so we got little veggie/side dishes and also a generous portion of meat. The meat was very yummy and we were pretty stuffed at the end. The only thing we missed was the super sweet and yummy Gyukaku ice cream: scoops of ice cream drizzled with black sugar syrup and powdered with kinako soy bean flour. Maybe we'll make that at home next time.

Pork Spareribs

This is a hearty recipe that I used to make when I lived in Japan - pork spareribs with daikon and konnyaku. Whenever H sees the jelly-like konnyaku, he likes to ask, "Is this pure fat?" But it is actually a very healthy and popular diet food in Japan because it's high in fiber and low in calories, not to mention some other health benefits. It doesn't have much taste on its own, but is nice in a stewed dish. So H sauteed the spareribs to a nice brown color before I added the daikon, konnyaku, and flavoring - a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, mirin, and dashi. We ate it after stewing for about 40 minutes. Everything was yummy, but we are looking forward to tomorrow and the day after when the sauce really starts to seep into the ingredients (especially the daikon), making them soft and juicy - good thing we have lots of leftovers!

Leftover Soup

I love soup because you can throw in just about anything you want and it becomes a nice, hearty meal. I had some leftover ground pork, kuzukiri noodles, and various veggies, so I googled some soup recipes for using up all of those ingredients. I ended up sauteing the pork with some ginger, then pouring in chicken stock and adding all the veggies and noodles. The ginger made it quite flavorful. I think that I will be googling for many days to come, because there are still many many leftover veggies in the fridge. Good way to discover new recipes!

Pork Shabu Salad

Made a simple pork shabu salad today to go with leftovers from last night's dinner. Some random discoveries from today:

• I tried using kuzukiri in the salad today - they're glassy, transparent noodles and I really like the texture they add to salads. They come as dry little sticks and need to be put into boiling water, just like pasta. With pasta I usually end up with more noodles than I planned for because of their unexpected growth spurt during boiling, but with the kuzukiri I was surprised in the opposite sense, and kept on having to boil more sticks to get 2 salads' worth of noodles. The effort was worth it, though.
  
• Tofu steak ingredients still taste good on day 2!
• I should shop at Nijiya more often - their pork shabu slices are much nicer than the Marukai ones.