Everyday Harumi :: Tsukune

Now this is what I'm talkin'bout. Don't those babies look tasty? Tsukune. Hands down my favorite type of yakitori, or grilled chicken. When you eat yakitori, you usually get a choice of either plain salt and pepper or tare, a teriyaki like sauce. You can almost always find yakiyori at an izakaya  (Japanese pubs) staple, and I could (and have) eat it all night long. (Specifically, at Oh! Taisho on St. Mark's in NY) Who doesn't love eating chicken with cold beer? Tsukune are usually made with minced chicken, so even though Harumi's recipe calls for pork, I went with chicken. Raw ground chicken, by the way, is my absolute least favorite thing to cook with. It is just...too fleshy looking and the texture is gnarlsburgh. However, I love tsukune so much that I powered through and overcame.

This recipe is again, really simple...so simple that I can recite the recipe off the top of my head: 300g minced meat of choice, 2 TB plain flour, 1 medium egg, 1/2 an onion roughly chopped, 1 celery stalk roughly chopped, 5 basil leaves roughly chopped. Salt and pepper to taste. Mix all the ingredients in a bowl but add the basil at the very end to maintain a nice color. Make 5 cm wide balls. Cook in a lightly oiled pan - brown both sides. DONE.

Ok, not quite done. What gives tsukune flavor is teriyaki sauce. While the meatballs are still hot, dip them in teriyaki sauce. The meatballs absorb the sauce and they become super juicy. Teriyaki sauce is really easy to make - dilute 2 TB of sugar in 50 ml of soy sauce and 50 ml of mirin. Bring it up to a boil then simmer for about 10 minutes. As it simmers, the sauce thickens and starts to look like the teriyaki sauce you know and love.

Meeting Harumi!

A friend let me know that she saw Harumi Kurihara this weekend at Isetan in Shinjuku (my favorite department store in Tokyo) and "almost started squeeling like she was a goddamn Beatle". (Actual text) She was doing a cooking demonstration for her 10th anniversary of...being famous, I guess. With nothing to do on a rainy Sunday, I decided to see if she was still there and lo and behold - SHE WAS!

I had walked in at the tail end of a kids demonstration. The room was filled with some of the cutest, most fashionable children I have ever seen. They were all drinking milk boxes and asking questions. It was adorable. A few of the questions asked:

Little boy: Nan no tabemono suki desu ka. (What kind of food do you like. -- She likes fish a lot because she is from Shimoda (I've been there, NBD) )

Little Girl: Watashi wa rok-sai desu. Kurihara-san wa nan-sai desu ka. (I am 6 years old. Miss Kurihara, how old are you? -- Everyone laughed of course and she avoided answering)

Along with cooking demonstrations, there were tons of food samples being passed around. I managed to get passed all the old ladies with sharp elbows and snagged a sample of rice with her banno soy sauce. It was simple and tasty, which is her style.

They were only selling the Japanese language cookbooks, but I bought one of her lifestyle magazine-books (a "mook" - no really, that is an actual category in Japanese publishing) to sign. Now, I've been to a few book signings in my time - people I really admire too. Jamie Oliver, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chuck Klosterman...I was totally cool at those book signings. Duuuude...I totally freaked out on Harumi. Maybe because you know, I don't really speak Japanese and felt awkward speaking English in front of everyone, but I just couldn't really speak properly and just had a goofy grin on my face. I told her that I'm not Japanese (duh) and that I bought her book in New York (a lie) and love her (total truth). She told me she just went to New York to do many events and asked if I knew Kinokuniya near Bryant Park. Then she shook my hand. Swoooon! Then for some reason I bowed a couple of times...because you know, this is Japan and a bow can never really hurt and I was ushered away.  I wish I had told her that I was cooking all her Everyday Harumi dishes, but I guess it wasn't meant to be. 

Isn't she adorable?

Everyday Harumi :: Fried Chicken and Spicy Eggplant

I decided to make the fried chicken again after catching the Your Japanese Kitchen, the Harumi Kurihara cooking show on NHK World. On the show, she cut the pieces smaller - nugget sizes - which did make it much easier to cook. She also said to lift the chicken out of the oil 3-4 times while frying to make the nuggets extra crispy. It works, but is a little scary - one slip of a chopstick and SPLASH - fried oil cannonball!!!

I'm a little tired of rice eight now so I made cold udon noodles instead - kind of unorthadox for fried chicken, but yummy nonetheless. This was my first go at the spicy eggplant side and must say, I'm
blown away at how delicious it is. I don't actually like eggplant all that much, but this was really flavorful. The texture is my main issue, but this tasted so good I didn't care about the mushiness. The eggplant is deep fried then tossed in a dressing of soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, minced leeks, ginger, garlic and chili peppers. I used it as s topping for my udon bento today and it was a great combination.

Everday Harumi :: Tofu Steak

After the deep fried chicken, I decided to go vegetarian the next day. I really like tofu. I like the many textures it comes in - super silky to firm and crispy and I like both sweet and savory tofu dishes. I also like that you don't even have to cook it - I'm not so great with judging when meat is done. This is a really easy dish to make. The hardest part is handling the soft tofu from dredging to pan frying. It breaks easily so if you can make smaller "steaks", the better.

Everyday Harumi's recipe calls for banno sauce which is just mirin and soy sauce simmered together with kombu seaweed. The kombu thickens up the mixture, making it a little syrupy. If you don't want to make the banno, you can top the steaks with soy sauce.

Everyday Harumi :: Deep Fried Chicken with Spicy Leek Sauce

 

I'm in a big Japanese cooking phase right now for dinner and mostly using Everyday Harumi as my guide. I am finding that I'm saving a lot of money and also eating healthier. Granted yes, a lot of things are deep fried and seem to contain a lot of sodium from all the soy sauce, you eat a more diverse plate - meat, veggies and rice. Since I already stocked my kitchen with all the basic Japanese ingredients, I usually only need to pick up my protein and veggies at the grocery store. 

Last night I made deep fried chicken with a spicy leek sauce and a side of quick pickled cucumbers. I don't do a lot of deep frying and I have to say, I kind of hate it. It's kind of dangerous, scary and if something has a lot of butter or oil in it, I prefer not to see how it is made. As much as I love Paula Deen, it kind of makes me cringe. Don't get me wrong, I'll eat it and love it -- I want to be ignorant to the process. The chicken was really good -- once I threw out all the undercooked pieces. One thing I dislike about Everyday Harumi is that her instructions are sometimes vague. "Deep fry until cooked through and golden brown." Apparently, my definition of "golden brown" would give you salmonella. 

The pickles were pretty good, but I made it a little sweet. The recipe calls for sesame oil to taste and I would suggest a teeny tiny itsy bitsy drop of it.

Everyday Harumi :: Green Beans with Pork and Kinshi Tamago Crepes

My desire to experiment with new recipes comes in waves. Sometimes you want to try something new, but on busy weeks, you just want to make something easy and familiar. Every now and then though, you make something new that tastes like something old and homey. Tonight was one of those times. I dusted off my Everyday Harumi cook book and made a simple dish of white rice topped with green bean and minced pork. Super duper simple, healthy and oh so tastey. I suspect this will become a weeknight staple in my home. I enjoy her recipes because most are simple with few ingredients and they always make great leftovers for lunch.

To liven up the dish, and to use up some soon to be questionable eggs, I made kinshi tamago (egg) crepes. It's basically a very thing egg omelet that is then thinly sliced to make really delicate egg "threads". Egg omelets and scrambled eggs are popular bento options in Japan. I like the color it brings to your plate and they taste good too. They're sweet because of the sugar and light because of sake. Cooking them on a lower temp will help keep the bright yellow color.

I'm looking forward to my leftover bento lunch tomorrow!

Harumi Kurihara :: The Japanese Martha Stewart

I'm not shy about my love for Martha Stewart so when I heard about Harumi Kurihara, I couldn't wait to learn more about her. She is often referred to as Japan's Martha Stewart. She is a self-taught cook from Shimoda, and she specializes in classic Japanese homestyle cooking. She was encouraged by her TV anchorman husband to write a book, so she did, and now has numerous successful cookbooks, a magazine and a cooking and clothing line. Impressive! I got one of her English cookbooks (Everyday Harumi) for my birthday and couldn't wait to try out the recipes. I have been trying out simple Japanese dishes for the past few months so I'm not a total Japanese cooking beginner. In fact, I can probably whip up Japanese food better than I can bust out Vietnamese. FOR SHAME!!

Japanese cooking is very simple. Once you stock your kitchen with a few key ingredients (rice vinegar, soy sauce, sake, miso and mirin) you can make tons of healthy, tasty and easy dishes. There is a great website called Just Hungry that teaches awesome Japanese recipes and the stories behind them. Some of my favorites from Just Hungry have been the Soy Sauce and Butter New Potatoes (addicting!) and the Miso Pork. I have been a little frustrated trying to make recipes out of my American cookbooks because I can't find the right ingredients here in Japan but now that I am experimenting with Harumi's book, things have gotten much easier.

My first stab at her book was the Ginger Pork over a bed of Bok Choy and a side of Sesame Dressed Green Beans. The pork was as simple as mixing 4 ingredients for the marinade, dipping the sliced pork in the marinade and pan frying it for 2 minutes. You let the pork rest on the stir fried bok choy, and the juices from the pork dress the veggies. SO YUM. Everything turned out great and I have been eating leftovers for days. If you're in a cooking rut, try cooking some Japanese dishes! They're very well balanced and it's fun to try something new in the kitchen.