Turning Japanese

I love Japanese food but have always found it too daunting to prepare. So when my friend Moizza suggested we make a Japanese meal, I had some trepidation. Fortunately she has experience cooking Japanese food and knew where in the Asian grocery to find Japanese ingredients.

We started out with Miso soup.

Ingredients:

• Dashi soup stock (warning: this smells bad, but don't let that scare you off)
• 1 block of tofu
• 3-4 tablespoons of miso paste
• 1/4 cup of chopped green onion

Overall the recipe was easy and tasted delicious.

Next, we made Japanese curry and short-grained rice.

Rice:

I don't have a rice cooker, so I've struggled to make decent rice. Here were some of Moizza's tips:

• WASH the rice. I sort of knew this one. I'd seen some friends do it before, but never understood what they were doing or why. Nor did I understand how they determined the rice was clean. (You rinse it until the water is clear.) This gets all the excess starch out of the rice.
• It'd difficult (but critical) to determine the correct rice-to-water ratio. With white rice, for every cup of rice, you should use a cup and a half of water. Or you can fill the pot/rice cooker with water up to your thumb knuckle (this is the method we used and it worked well).
• If you are cooking rice in a pot, use one with a thick bottom. Thin-bottomed pots will increase the risk of burning your rice.

Cooking rice is pretty straight-forward: Bring rice to a boil. Once the rice boils, put on a lid and lower the heat. Let the rice simmer with the lid on for about 20 minutes (give or take ten minutes depending on the type of rice you're preparing). If keep a close eye on the rice and taste it throughout the cooking, you will better time how long it should simmer. Next, remove the pot from the heat and live the lid on. Let the rice fully absorb the liquid for about five minutes.

 

Japanese Curry

This was the only dish we didn't make from scratch and it was a very easy dish. We went vegetarian (potatoes and carrots), but you can use beef, pork, or chicken:

After adding water, boiling and then adding the curry mix, we were ready to eat:

The curry has a semi-sweet, tangy taste. Definitely not Indian or Thai curry, but still good. It paired nicely with this Japanese Plum Wine:

Tea Cake

This was the most complex recipe of the night. I’m not sure it is possible for one person to make this cake. There was way too much whisking. At one point I found myself stirring a sugar/egg mixture over simmering water waiting for it to turn a creamy color (this never happened). The end result was tasty, but not easily repeatable: