Buta no shogayaki – Ginger pork

Two easy and tasty Japanese dishes.

Of course, the most important ingredient is ginger.

You can use any cut of pork that can be cooked quickly in a pan, but the easiest is to use these very thin slices.

Here are the proportions of the sauce. You need about 1 tbs per person, but use as much as you wish. The ginger is peeled and grate, you can also mince it thinly. Just mix.
First, you can stir fry onions, and keep them aside.

Cook the meat fully on both sides. Add the sauce, and a little water, let simmer about 10 minutes. Put back the onions. Reheat together.

Serve with raw veggies. Here cabbage and kintoki red carrot.

Furikake is a dry powder mix used to give flavor to white rice, or other plain food. There exist many types. This one is called yukari (purple), it is made of mostly dried akashiso (red shiso). The other ingredients of the mix vary. Here : umesu (pickled plum vinegar), salt, sugar, yuzu lemo. It’s ready to use. So just put on boiled spaghetti and that’s a side dish.

A flavor of caramel with hints of shiso, shiitake and fish…

Sweet’n salty for a surprise stir-fry. With chesnut rice.
It’s my invention, but that’s not so creative as I mixed different Japanese dishes.

That’s really a delicious dish : tofu, fish, sweet potato, shiitake mushroom, carrot, onion, chili, shiso blossoms in a sweet glaze.
You can’t do a random stir-fry as if you throw in the ingredients, you will get a big mess, the tofu crushed, the sauce sticking, the potato not cooked.
So there is an order to make it, and things go smoothly.

Preparing stir-fried tofu
1. dry your tofu.
I have used silky tofu. It is very soft. There is a way to harden it. Don’t press it, it would crack. Cook it. You can either boil the whole block, or cook in microwave (I do 3 times 1 minutes, taking away water in between). Then I let it cool.
2. frying.
Cut cubes of cooled tofu. Heat a pan with a little oil. Roll each cube in starch (corn or potato starch) and place them in the pan. Put moderate heat. After 30 seconds, with a spatula and a fork, make them roll on another side. Do the 6 sides.
3. golden glow
Pass on high heat, and cook the cubes while you move the pan to make them roll.

Prepare ingredients :
I prepared the sweet potato too by baking it with the chesnuts.
I rehydratated dry shiitake.
Sliced carrots, onion, red chili.
Added all that to the fried tofu.

I also added komame (small dried fish).
komame cooked for New Year

Caramel soy sauce :
After stir-frying everything together a few seconds, I added the water from the shiitake, plus a tbs of soy sauce. Put a lid. Let Simmer.
Then I mixed 1 tbs of starch + 2 cups of water + 2 tbs of mirin + 1 ts of shiso blossoms. Added and stirred till the sauce became thick and transparent.
Ready !
Serve hot, with more shiso blossom on top.

My shiso blossoms (shiso no mi) are the flowers you could see on this soup :

I dried some and they have kept a great shiso flavor. Otherwise yukari, flakes of dried shiso, leaves can be used, and you can buy it in Japanese groceries.

about yukari

Grilled kuri (Japanese chestnuts).

On top of new koshihikari genmai (brown rice). The season’s presents.

Garden lunch : bento chirashi

The rose sushi goes to the park for lunch….

making the chirashi

Steamed : Okra, leek whites and a shiitake.

Raw sliced Japanse turnip.

Grilled : miso sawara mackerel , with kinome.
seikyozuke sawara

Ready to go under the Sun.

Chirashi, composing a bouquet of sushi

Bara sushi (rose sushi), chirashi covered with decorative items like the ground is covered by flowers in Spring.
The rice is also flavored. This is not the most classic version.

Classic vinegared sushi rice.

+ shrimps
(dried rehydrated in Awamori, cooked with soy sauce)

+ koya-dofu
(freeze-dry tofu, rehydrated and cooked with yukari and mirin)

= chirashi rice.

Threads of egg (see more here).

Umeboshi (pickled plum) for the center.

My sweet Korean sashimi

Second sashimi plate of Hokkaido hotategai (scallops). I “butterflied” this one.

The Koreans often serve the sashimi seafood with a sweet sauce. I think it’s gochujang (spicy miso), and some kind of sweetener (honey, sugar, syrup…), and water to make it at the same texture as ketchup. I am not a fan of this version, but the sweetness goes well with white seafood. That’s less common, but in a fancy shop, I have seen them associated to fruits, like nashi pear. And that was really great.

The season of nashi is over. I took apple and sudachi lemon. And I made pearls of gochujang.

The sweeteness and acidity of the fruits was perfect.

The strings are the best. Serve them after as the taste of sea is much stronger. Maybe that’s not for everybody’s taste. I usually prepare them after too. You need to rub the strings in salt, wait a while and rub again, so you get perfectly white and clean strings. Rinse well in water. They can be served that way (with wasabi and soy sauce in Japan). Here I mixed a little gochujang and a little shochu alcohol.