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!