An old fashion Japanese dinner.
Steamed daikon radish greens, with a little chrysanthemum.
That’s konnyaku flavored with aonori seaweed. It’s from the farmer market, it looks less processed than the one from the supermarket.
The sauce is very easy : sake kasu (sake lees) and umeboshi flesh, plus a little broth. The umeboshi is very salty, the sake kasu not at all, the mix is well balanced.
Grilled salted hokke fish.
Genmai brown rice.
Miso soup with lots of tofu.
A classic Japanese meal around a dish of sashimi. I prepared the sides.
Steamed kabocha pumpkin and ninniku no me garlic stalks. With soy sauce.
**I simply place the veggies in a steaming basket on top of a boiling water pot, or in the steaming mode of the microwave. Thin kabocha slices take 8 to 10 minutes. Garlic stalks only need 3 o 4 minutes to be at my taste. I add sesame seeds and soy sauce when I serve them.
The sashimi : ika (calamari), buri (yellow tail) and ama ebi (nordic shrimps).
An umeboshi (salted plum).
Tofu with oboro kombu (seaweed), seasoned with the soy sauce left after the sashimi dipping.
The miso soup with hijiki seaweed, shimeji mushrooms and kintoki red carrots.
Add rice. That’s a complete Japanese menu.
That’s the second part of this meal. Here are the small plates that make the charm of the Japanese table and nicely balance the diet.
More about Japanese style meals and recipe list
Suimono is the soup-drink you find in any Japanese meal. A very simple Spring time version :
In a bowl, put thin carrot slices, stalks of mitsuba, shavings of dry fish (kezuribushi), a few drops of soy sauce, hot water.
You can replace the fish with a few seaweeds (dry wakame).
Garnish with a few leaves of aromatic :
Japanese onion. A country of rice is a country of onion as they are cultivated in the rice paddies to rest the soil. Let’s make a salad.
If you don’t want a pungent onion salad that gives you a breath able to kills flies, mosquitoes, wasps, hornets… well, cut them thin, add salt, mix well, let one hour and rinse well.
My fix of natto, with baby leaf mizuna.
Kabu tsukemono. Pickled Japanese turnip. I grated turnip, cut some leaves, added salt. That’s after 24 hours.
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.
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.
GOURMANDE in OSAKA 