I think it was 4 years ago when I got hooked on cold tofu somen noodles. It is not a traditional Japanese dish but a product that was probably dreamed up by a company a few years ago and I guess has quite a bit of a fan base since grocery stores still sell it. Since normal cold somen noodles are a summer dish, these somen noodles made out of tofu also usually come out right before we hit the summer season. I use to eat it like a maniac because I loved both tofu and somen so this product seemed like a dream come true. Plus it was low in calories and I was trying to lose pounds and pounds of weight back then so this was perfect and it sure did work.

So now it is right before summer and the tofu somen are displayed nicely on the grocery store shelves. I was reminded of my love for this product and decided to give it another shot. I ate it with green onions, grated ginger, and broth with your basic Japanese ingredients like dashi, soy, and mirin like I would normally eat cold somen noodles. It tasted fine but something felt wrong.

It took me a bit to realize this but I think I’ve started to like the flavor of soy in real tofu so much that not being able to taste the soy enough in the tofu somen just didn’t seem right. So it wasn’t like the tofu somen noodles tasted bad but I think I just had to consider this product more of a new type of somen that happened to be made with tofu than a tofu product.

So I guess my taste buds have changed but I still think tofu somen noodles are a good healthy midnight snack. Much better than the homemade Oreo cheesecake leftovers (or may I say calorie overload?) I ate the other day! Yum but yikes!

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.

When I eat my standard Japanese steamed rice at home I usually have my jurokkokumai (十六穀米) which means rice with 16 grains. I have a huge stock of small packets with these 16 grain mixes I get from the supermarket. These individual packets have a long list of grains including foxtail millet, germinated brown rice, black rice, black soybean, amaranthus, sorghum, quinoa, azuki bean, black sesame, white sesame, adlay, red rice, proso millet, barley, corn, and Japanese barnyard millet, and I mixed them into my white rice. Apparently the grains have lots of fiber and is very good for you but I honestly just like it because it tastes good.

However, there are days when I do a little something different. Today my husband felt like takikomi gohan so I made this dashi and soy sauce based rice dish in my rice cooker. All I needed to do was make the base flavor for the rice with soy sauce, mirin (sweet rice wine), dashi stock, and salt, and today’s ingredients happen to be chicken thighs, aburaage (deep fried tofu), carrots, shimeji mushrooms, and gobo (burdock) which I cut up into small pieces and placed over the rice to cook.

If you look around for takikomi gohan recipes on the internet, there are ones that use other types of mushrooms, use konnyaku, hijiki sea vegetables, among other ingredients but today I felt like having chicken thighs, aburaage, and gobo for sure so the above was just what I used. I normally like hijiki but if you buy good hijiki the flavor is quite strong so on a day when I wanted to really taste the chicken I decided not to put it in. I also see a few recipes that use sugar or some other sweetener but I usually like a more subtle sweetness so I replaced it with mirin. Lastly it was already past 8PM when I started cooking so I chose a shortcut and used granulated instant dashi instead of making homemade dashi.

When you make this dish, make sure you can find gobo where you live because the earthy taste that comes from this root is very distinct yet nice. Plus preparing it is fun since you use the sasagaki cutting style which literally means to cut something as fine as a bamboo leaf but basically you are cutting the burdock like you are sharpening a pencil with a knife. You can also find instructions on the internet on how to do this so give it a try!

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.

I never understood why sausages in Japan are often packaged in 2 separate inflated bags. The really cheap sausages are most of the time just stuffed in one bag probably to keep costs down and the fancier kind which are usually larger or have herbs or other flavorings inside are in vacuum packs. However, for some very odd reason the ones the general consumer usually buys are in 2 bags that are always taped together and sold as a set. Japan is often criticized for its excessive packaging like for their overpriced fruits, but these inflated bags, not only are these balloons a bit annoying when you are trying to place them in your fridge, but the packaging just made no sense.

So I did some research and found out that the bags are inflated because they are filled with nitrogen to prevent food spoilage. The fact that they are in separate bags then allows for double protection against oxygen because most consumers don’t use all the sausages at once. Apparently these bags of nitrogen are slightly better for keeping the juiciness of the meat than the vacuum packs. However, this sort of packaging is probably only possible because the sausages that the average Japanese person eats are small and a bunch can actually fit in a small inflated bag.

Now not only does it makes sense that all the other larger sausages are in vacuum packs, but also the vacuum packed ham and bacon since they will lose their shape if they were placed in these inflated bags.

So I suppose this solves my silly riddle but not the slight headache of having to deal with these balloon like packaging in my fridge?

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.

Story by Alisa

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.

When you look at the Nagomi Kitchen site you might only see the two of us, Megumi Kusunoki and myself, Alisa Sanada, on the about us page, but we are actually supported by many amazing advisors. Among these wonderful advisors is Megumi Kusunoki’s mother Masako or “Margaret” which is what her lovely daughters call her as somewhat of a joke. If you are a past participant in one of our cooking programs, then you might have met her. She’s the one with the camera snapping away making you feel like a superstar during our sessions. And if you are going to be participating in the near future, make sure to get all your Japanese food and Bali scuba diving questions ready because she sure knows a lot about both and is ready to share.

She is from Yamanashi Prefecture, most famous for Mount Fuji. However, in my eyes it’s the land of the yummy regional dish houtou. It’s a flat udon noodle dish with vegetables in a miso soup broth that is normally eaten at a restaurant if you are not from the region. But of course the locals eat it at their homes and mmm-hmm it sure is delicious!

I had the pleasure to try her homemade houtou, which was my first one outside of a restaurant. What I liked about it most was the fact that we were eating it nabe hot pot style instead of each person with an individual bowl. It was great seeing the soup get thicker and thicker because you cook the noodles still covered with flour unlike other noodle dishes where you need to pre-cook using another pot. That combined with the broth that comes from the ingredients like chicken, kabocha pumpkin, onions, fried tofu, carrots, mushrooms, daikon radish and of course miso, mmm-hmm is all I can keep on saying! Even if you can’t get a hold of houtou noodles, at least try making it with udon noodles. You will understand how great miso is, and how it is not just for miso soup!

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.

Megumi Kusunoki, (@nagomistation) currently a cooking instructor in Tokyo started Nagomi Kitchen in hopes for people around the world to learn more about real Japanese food. Combining her passion for tourism as a former scuba diving instructor, bus tour guide, and marketing and sales manager for an online guide for tourists coming to Japan, and food, Nagomi Kitchen was born out of a labor of love. She hopes that through Nagomi Kitchen more people will become more familiar with Japanese food and ingredients and be able to incorporate Japanese home cooking into their daily meal.

Last Sunday we had a past participant from our kyaraben class from December come back for our Japanese basic cooking class. What was great was that her Japanese husband came with her to participate in the program this time! Like our other expat participants, she told us that it’s the basic things that are part of a person’s daily routine like grocery shopping or cooking that are some of the most difficult obstacles to overcome when you first settle into a new country.

Having personally experienced trying to cook in various countries where I could not speak nor read the language, I can understand how it is difficult to adjust. During the lesson it was great to see her pause and reconfirm from time to time to make sure she was understanding and remembering everything.

Learning how to cook the dishes that are part of the Japanese basic cooking class is important but getting familiar with the ingredients is what really opens you up to new dishes so we really hope all our participants will not hesitate to ask us anything and everything. Not only will we do our best to give you the best answers and advice during the program but please always feel free to contact Nagomi Kitchen afterwards. We are always here to help. In return, just make sure to participate in all our programs and we’ll be happy for sure! (sort of kidding?)

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.

Megumi Kusunoki, (@nagomistation) currently a cooking instructor in Tokyo started Nagomi Kitchen in hopes for people around the world to learn more about real Japanese food. Combining her passion for tourism as a former scuba diving instructor, bus tour guide, and marketing and sales manager for an online guide for tourists coming to Japan, and food, Nagomi Kitchen was born out of a labor of love. She hopes that through Nagomi Kitchen more people will become more familiar with Japanese food and ingredients and be able to incorporate Japanese home cooking into their daily meal.

Last Wednesday we had two very friendly expats from Poland and Malaysia participate in our cooking program. Right now most of the Nagomi Kitchen program participants are travelers visiting Japan so not only was it great to see that we are attracting a wider audience but it was fantastic for personal reasons since they reminded me of when I first started living in Japan.

When I first started living in Japan, although I know I had an upper hand compared to others since my cultural upbringing was Japanese, I still had a lot to learn to navigate through the supermarkets in Japan. Even simple tasks like choosing the right miso was very difficult at first. Where I grew up in the States, there were only a couple of brands to choose from so seeing all the options of white, red, and mixed miso was quite overwhelming. Watching lots of cooking shows, searching the Internet, flipping through food magazines, and attending classes that taught me the basics of dashi soup stock, soy sauce, sake, Japanese vegetables and many other topics were what helped me in the kitchen.

When one of our cooking program participants asked about all the basic mushrooms that are sold in Japanese supermarkets and how it was difficult to figure out which one was a shitake mushroom, I could very much understand her struggle. Since I ate shitake, enoki, and nameko mushrooms when I was growing up in Texas, I could at least distinguish those three at the supermarket. But the others like the eringi king trumpet mushroom, the maitake Hen-of-the-Woods mushroom, the buna shimeji brown beech mushroom, and the bunapi shimeji white beech mushrooms, I learned about while living in Japan.

I also noticed that the Nagomi Kitchen cooking program helps expats to learn the Japanese words and packaging of familiar ingredients like sesame oil or potato starch. A lot of them struggle trying to find the ingredients they need to make food from back home so by the end of the lesson they know what to look for and also know how to use those same ingredients to make at least one or two Japanese dishes.

So my hope for the Nagomi Kitchen program is to not only be a program for those visiting Japan to get exposed to Japanese food, but to support new expats in Japan so they can get a head start and become more comfortable in their new kitchen.

We’ve actually had a few people in the past participate in our program because it was given to them as a gift from friends or family so maybe the Nagomi Kitchen cooking lesson might be a good gift idea to welcome fellow expats to their new life in Japan?

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.

This Thursday we had a lovely guest from the US and his father participate in our Basic Japanese Cooking lesson. They were such fun and enthusiastic guests that I, myself, very much enjoyed my time with them.

It was fantastic seeing families like them really trying to dig deep into Japanese culture during their short stay in Japan. Especially the father, who although it was his first time in Asia, he really made an effort to learn Japanese by listening to language CDs. Honestly I’m never usually that easily impressed by people being able to speak Japanese but this time it was special since every now and then he would blurt out a Japanese word or phrase he learned and it wasn’t just once or twice! Subarashii! Very good. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I made a Japanese style soup with bacon for dinner. I suppose if I still were in the States I might have made the soup with potatoes, cheese, leeks, or beans but this time since I am in Japan using Japanese bacon, the soup had a light chicken broth base with mizuna, enoki mushrooms, and green onions.

I suppose everyone has their opinion of Japanese bacon depending on where they come from. Coming from the States you might be surprised at how it tastes more like ham. But as long as you know how to cook with it, I’m hoping you will crave more of these new set of flavors rather than just longing for whatever is back home.

Using bacon with ingredients like asparagus, spinach, potatoes, and cheese is quite common in Japan but I love it when I find bacon recipes that really have an obvious Japanese twist to it like bacon and nanohana blossoms pasta. You can either make a simple version with just basic flavors like olive oil, garlic, red pepper, and of course salt and pepper, but a cream sauce would work well too. Add any sort of Japanese mushroom you find at the supermarket that day that is cheap like maitake mushrooms and voila!

I honestly cannot imagine my Japanese mother making this dish at home since it definitely is the younger generation that has incorporated this new ingredient into their diet for better or for worse. However, it is not uncommon for quick and easy East meets West types of dishes like these to appear in a modern Japanese home cooked meal. So although it is definitely good to learn about purely Japanese ingredients, sometimes it is fun to learn how these perhaps more familiar ingredients are used in Japanese home cooked meals.

Make sure to ask us about seasonal vegetables like nanohana during our Nagomi Kitchen cooking lessons because spring is coming to Japan and it’s definitely an exciting time for food here!

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.