"A-I-U-E-Onigiri!" - おにぎり

"A-I-U-E-Onigiri!" - so goes the happy tune the onigiri case at my supermarket plays on loop, and so goes my head now that I've started thinking about onigiri. Over and over and over again.

Onigiri (also known as omusubi) are a packed lunch and conbini staple, easily over-throwing that western champion, the sandwich, as Convenience Food #1. Just like the sandwich they're easy to wrap and carry, no heating or cutlery is required and you can buy them almost anywhere, with a huge variety of fillings, for around $1.50. Plus, they're made of rice. The sandwich never stood a chance.

There are a million and one guides to making onigiri on the web, using moulds, your hands or plastic wrap to pack and shape them. I usually use a plastic mould I bought at a local kitchenware store for around 200yen but the top has gotten lost somewhere in the flurry of hanami packing and unpacking.

This seemed like a good chance to read up on different techniques and go it alone. After a bit of research, I went with Maki's plastic wrap method and my memories of our swift-fingered riceball vendor in Taipei. I also found some step by step photos for using a mould or hand shaping here.

A cup of uncooked rice and a small salmon fillet, grilled and flaked, gave me four nicely sized onigri and a handful of leftover rice. You could probably get 6 onigiri with more fillings, or make some plain ones. I also tried sprinkling one of the onigiri with furikake - packets of flakes for flavoring cooked rice. In the past I'd mixed a little into the rice mixture before forming the balls, which added a nice salty touch, but I kept seeing photos of pretty onigiri coated in sprinkles or patterns. Blehgh. To me it was too salty and totally overpowered the salmon in the middle. Perhaps everyone else is using a milder kind of furikake.

Anyway, over seasoning aside, the instructions were really easy to follow and produced some delicious onigiri. The next day I put the leftovers in the fry pan until the sides were browned and called it yaki-onigiri.



Mmmmm, warm and crunchy. Yaki-onigiri are usually basted with a little soy sauce and grilled, and they're a great side to order at a yakitori place when you're drowning in meat.

I'll probably buy another mould, if only so as not to waste plastic wrap, but it's good to know that even my uncoordinated hands can shape an onigiri without one. There are no excuses now.

(For some impossibly cute onigiri presentation ideas, try a search for onigiri on flick: hearts, faces, hello kitty, and blue ones!)

Shimo-Kitazawa

Shimokitazawa is ten minutes from Shinjuku on the Odakyu line. On a sunny Sunday its maze of alleys hiding quirky boutiques and cafes remind me of the best parts of inner Melbourne.

I had come to shop for summer clothes, but was easily distracted by the the display at the Deli & Baking Co.



Their lunchtime deli plate is great value for 1000yen, with a choice of hot mains (I got pork and onion stir fry and lasagna) served up with dressed greens and your preferred vegetable side dish from options like bean salad, fresh tomato salad, simmered pumpkin or spinach sauteed with bacon. There's also rice with 5 grains or a toasted slice of that hearty, chewy rye bread that is so hard to find in this country.

The house specialty seems to be the 'popover', a pastry puff topped with a cream cheese dollop in a wide variety of sweet flavours or served plain alongside soup and salad. The Apple Cinnamon one was very tempting...

... but I opted for a (delicious but slightly too sweet) strawberry muffin and (perfect) soy chai latte for dessert as I frantically tried to finish my book before meeting with my bookclub later in the afternoon.

There are so many quirky little cafes, bakeries and bars in the area (including a tapas bar!) that I need to stop coming back to this place and try something new (I found a blog called Shimokitareviews. I'm starting to think there's a blog for everything) but the tiramisu looks like it needs further investigation. Next time.

Deli & Baking, Co.
1F, 2-29-2 Kitazawa, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 03-5453-1313
(Or take the North exit and wander around until you find it)

Lazy Yakiniku-style Lamb - 焼肉ラム

Call it yakiniku, Korean barbecue, Mongolian barbecue, jingisukan or whatever, it's fun to grill your own meat at the table.

From the pricey and upmarket to the casual chains, the typical set-up looks something like this... (excuse the blurry cell phone pic)

... with a hotplate built into the middle of the table. You order plates of raw meat, seafood and vegetables, then cook and eat them at your own pace.

Sometimes the meat comes in a marinade, and sometimes you grill it plain and dunk it into a dipping sauce (tare) just before you eat it. (Various internet discussions point to the first method as more Korean, and the second as a Japanese invention, but most places in Japan do both.)

I don't have a charcoal grill or hotplate at home, but the cheap lamb I picked up at the supermarket the other day was cut for yakiniku and I didn't have any better ideas, so I put together something similar to this recipe and just browned the meat in a hot frypan.

The garlicky sesame marinade reminds me of good times out at yakinuku, but turning the meat at the stove wasn't quite as fun as drinking beers at the table with your friends. Next time I'm planning on getting together with someone who has a grill and trying out a few different seasonings, including these dipping sauce mixes (scroll down).



Recipe: Yakiniku-style Marinade
Serves 2 with rice and side dishes.

200grams lamb or beef, sliced thin into mouth-sized pieces
1 tsp sesame seeds
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tsp soy sauce

• Place ingredients in a bowl or plastic freezer bag and combine thouroughly.
  
• Refridgerate for an hour or two. Overnight would be fine.
  
• Spread out (cook in batches if necessary) over a hot grill or frypan, turning once.
  
• Serve as is or with a splash of chili oil. Eat Immediatly.
  

Fun Facts - Did you know that August 29th is the official "Yakiniku day" (yakiniku no hi)? I didn't either. See Wikipedia's entry on yakiniku for more.

Ramen - らめん

I don't usually make ramen at home. I prefer to leave fast food to the professionals, enjoy my dose of grease and starch while I'm out and prepare healthier foods in the kitchen. But I had that pork simmering liquid lying around, and so I mixed it together with a little chicken stock, shoyu and all my ramen favorites - sliced pork, boiled egg, menma and negi (with a few nameko mushrooms I had to use up).



It was good stodgy, warming fair when the weather was being so mean to us last week, but the noodles were just the slightest touch overdone and the flavour wasn't anything to change my opinion that half the fun of ramen is going out to some obscure little whole in the wall to watch someone else make it for you.

My friends and I have our favorite ramen place here in Tokorozawa, in a little alley off Prope, that's known for its tomato ramen. The char siu pork is thick and marbled and the staff remember us even though we only go in every month or two. I get tonkotsu ramen myself, that creamy looking pork stock thick with collagen (and calories), but if it's not available my order of preference is miso, shoyu, then shio (salt). Shio ramen just isn't that great.

I wouldn't mind learning how to make a good miso base though. I found a few recipes here and here, but I somehow doubt I'll find the motivation until I'm back in Australia and I can't just walk down the block for a fresh bowl in five minutes.

Links:
Passion and ramen identification - The World Of Ramen
An unusually long and detailed Wikipedia entry.

Sake Steamed Clams - あさり の 酒蒸し

These asari no sakamushi were amazing, and all thanks to the recipe and cleaning instructions posted by Amy on Blue Lotus. Since I was only cooking for one, I just added the barest dab of butter. Even so, the leftover cooking liquid was still so rich and delicious I couldn't bear to throw it away, so I poured the leftovers over some rice and sprinkled with more negi. Mmmmm. It's like a Japanese moules mariniere without all the homesickness for the dirt cheap fresh mussels of Australian markets.

Unlike the travesty that is allrecipes.com*, I've found some truly excellent recipes and meal ideas on food blogs lately. I find myself preferring them over my cookbooks for everyday cooking, probably because they're also written by real people with other jobs who don't have 3 hours to work on a weeknight dinner for one or two, who sometimes have to make ingredient substitutions and occasionally use packet stock. I like that readers can ask questions and get clarification about parts they didn't understand, or comment about their own attempts and variations they made. It also helps that the writer is free to be honest about the process 'this part was difficult', 'this is a pain in the ass and you could probably leave it out', 'I think I overcooked this, but next time I'd do X instead'. It's a sort of continual, communal process of refinement.

I've also been a little disappointed with the quality of the few Japanese cookbooks I own and their obvious lack of thorough proofreading or testing - ingredients listed and then never used in the cooking instructions, processes omitted, the same cooking time or temperature given differently in 3 places. I think it's time to do some research on better hardcopy references. If you have a recommendation, could you please leave a comment or send me an email? (よろしく　おねがいします！). Otherwise, check back in a few weeks for the results.

*Where every second chocolate cake recipe requires 'one box of chocolate cake mix'.

Rice with bamboo shoots - たけのこ ご飯

I think I've mentioned before how much I like Yasuko-san's Home Cooking, for the simple home-style recipes and cute step by step illustrations. I often check back to her daily food diary on the front page for inspiration, and this recipe for Takenoko Gohan, rice cooked with bamboo shoots, recently caught my eye.

Bamboo is in season at the moment, and whole shoots fresh from the ground, like these, have starting popping up at the local supermarket.

Unfortunately, they need to be pre boiled with rice bran and all sorts of things before you can use them. Since I was both lazy and unable to find instructions that didn't involve a pressure cooker, I bought my bamboo shoot pre-boiled. It was incredibly soft and squishy and smelt a little like tahini. Look for something like this:



or in a plastic bag, labelled たけのこ水煮. If you want this year's spring crop (and trust me, you do!) make sure the kanji 新 is involved somewhere.

Fresh bamboo is nothing like the canned shoots I used to buy in Australia, which seem stringy and hard in comparison, and this simple, fresh and crunchy dish was a pleasant reminder that the days of weary winter produce are over. Now if only the weather would catch up.

Sakura Cream Puff - 桜チュー

From Cosy Corner. I like my cream fillings heavy and smooth, but this one was airy like a mousse. It had a very subtle, sweet candy cherry flavor that somehow managed to have a faint trace of that 'cherry cough syrup' taste I hate so much. (Two months of Bronchitis in grade four, Cherry Broncadon three times daily. I still feel like gagging when I eat cherry Lifesavers).

It wasn't quite the taste of spring that I was looking for, but the new bamboo shoots with rice I had for dinner more than made up for it. Photo and recipe tomorrow.