Tai no kabuto-ni. A helmet of sea bream.

A Japanese meal with tai no kabuto ni as a main.
Yes, kabuto means helmet, and the resemblance is clear. Well think about those samurai helmets that everybody wears to ride a bicycle in Japan… er, no, but that’s this type with 2 ear flaps :

source :blog from the place where they make them (click here) . Visit the page for more details. They are display models for Little Boy Festival in May.

That’s an economical dish as they sell fish heads cheaply. And they sell them ready for this dish. I mean the scales are grated (roughly), and it is split in two. Well veggie readers (I doubt you’re still here) sorry for the view. But for us that eat animals, it’s better to avoid wastes. That said I would eat fish heads anyway. Because there is a lot of flesh in it, and it is of finer texture and tastier.

Recipe :

-Rinse the fish. What you can do is put it on a grill and pour boiling water on it, just once. It makes the fish white and the scales very easy to notice, so you can finish the fismonger’s work. For myself I don’t care if I have scales in my plate, anyway, you need to pick the bones and bits.
-Then it’s a classic nitsuke sauce 1:1:1 , sake, mirin, shoyu soy sauce. And a small piece of kombu seaweed. Put these in a pan with a little water, bring slowly to a boil.
Add the fish. Make a foil cover. Pass to moderate heat. Cook about 15 minutes.

The veggies are steamed separately. Here 2 colors of carrots. And I had frozen garlic stalks. Let’s get the sides :

I had kintoki red beans, and kimchi ready.

A grated veggie salad. A soup, a drink-soup. It’s really water, veggies and black pepper. No salt as there is enough for the meal.

Genmai, brown rice.

Sansai. Japanese mountain vegetables in a meal

Here is the meal that completes the black tofu and agedashi taro in the previous post.

Let’s talk a little about 山菜 sansai mean litterally mountain vegetables. That’s a generic name for many plants wild or cultivated in small amounts that are used in Japan, but also in Korea and China. The hermit Buddhist monks were counting on them to diversify their dishes, and they are often used in the shojin ryori (monk fasting meals) and kaiseki ryori (refined meal before tea ceremony). You can go and gather yours if you live in the countryside. I’m not sure that what I’d pick up near Osaka would be edible particularly with the current level of air pollution. So I usually find mines in the store, and they are cultivated.
There is no complete list of the varieties of sansai. It’s whatever you can eat. 　

I had a mix containing nameko (orange mushrooms), enoki (white long mushrooms), warabi (in green, it’s fern sprouts), zenmai (in brown), small takenoko (bamboo sprouts, slices), kikurage (in dark brown, wood ear mushrooms). And I had renkon (lotus root).

They were boiled. So I rinsed and reheated them with dashi (fish broth), a little mirin and soy sauce.

Grilled komochi shishamo fish, with yuzu-kosho citrus pepper condiment.

Pastel salad : cabbage, kabu turnip and vinegar pickled ginger.

And genmai (brown rice). Well, that makes a nice Japanese meal. That’s not so long to prepare as the tofu was made in advance, the rice is done in the cooker, the veggies were pre-cooked.

3 simple sushi

A sushi lunch. Whole and basic.

The rice is genmai (brown rice), simply flavored. This first is a makizushi filled with goya bitter squash, wrapped in nori.

Ginnan (ginkgo nut) and natto.

They are the fruits of ginkgo tree, that I always mispell. They are gathered and cleaned Autumn (the outer part stinks, really).

I broke the shell, took it away, boiled the nuts and took out the little skin. It’s also possible to slightly break the shell and then roast them. They have to be eaten in small amounts to avoid toxicity. Well 4 is OK.

Natto sesame. It’s an uramaki, with the rice rolled around.

With wasabi and pickled ginger. Soy sauce too. Served with sencha green tea.

Risotto style sekihan (red rice)

A creamier version of the Japanese classic, ideal for chilly weather.

o-seki-han, Japanese red sticky rice.
sekihan

I had that velvety broth from boiling azuki red beans.
So I have added it to the rice cooker with brown rice. Roughly, I’ve doubled the amount of liquid and cooked on Chinese okayu (congee) rice porridge mode. I’ve added a few beans too of course.

This amount of sauce was left when I opened.

Oishiso ! I want to eat it like that.

Flavoring are natural sea salt and freshly roasted sesame seeds.

Arròs negre, black is the new rice…

That’s another style, the black paella. But it’s called arròs negre meaning black rice. The color is of course calamari ink.

other paella posts

I’ve used brown rice and made it small size in a pie dish. That dish was too thin to go directly on my induction stove, it was starting to melt… so I have placed it on the cast iron plancha.

That’s how I made it. I used a dose of nero di sepia (bought) and the juice that got out of the seafood as broth.
That’s slow food… like 3 hours of cooking on low heat.

The rice is cooked. It didn’t take the color as much as polished rice would.

I added the topping put on high heat to get the bottom crust.

Sweet red pepper to contrast the color.

The seafood is nothing great, a frozen mix (shrimp, clams, calamari) so I’ve stir-fried in olive oil with paprika and turmeric till crispy.

Yummm…..