Archives by Tag 'japanese cooking'
Revisiting an old favorite, tofu somen noodles

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.
Lazy late dinner with takikomi gohan

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.
The riddle of the Japanese sausages

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.
Cooking lovers must go there
Story by Megumi, Nagomi Kitchen
If you like cooking like me, I think you MUST visit Kappa-bashi(合羽橋)during your stay in Tokyo.
Kappa-bashi is the street and there are so many shops which provides cooking and kitchen tools such as plates, paper thing, pot, knives, cookie templates, chopstics and so on, I love this place verymuch!
There is not only for the consumars but also professionals like chef or manager of restaurant it means sometimes you can find and get staffs cheaper than the other place. When I go to Kappa-bashi,usually I need more than three hours to take a look for all the shops I’m interested in because there are tons of nice goods for cooking lovers. 🙂
I have thought that I want to introduce this place to all the guest of Nagomi Kitchen, but I have always forgot to take pictures because I always concentlate to my own shopping 😀
But few weeks ago, my boyfriend’s mother and aunt visited us from Denmark and we took them to Kappa-bashi so finally now I can introduce you my favorite place with many pics!
Many kind of design of tiny plates, it called “Mamezara” in Japanese. The price is just around 100-300 yen.
Tea pot, price is about 1,000 yen. You can find many kind of green tea easily at the supermarket and just put them into this pot with hot water.
Cups, price from 500 yen to 1,000 yen.
Nambu Ironware, it’s the Japanese traditional craft. Looks nice!
If you visit Takayama during your trip in Japan, maybe you can find this one at there when you served original dish at Takayama, “Hooba-Miso”.
Kappa-bashi is also famous for the food sample.
I will show you something I got at Kappa-bashi 😀
Kappa-bashi is nearby Asakusa (about 10 minutes on foot) so you can schedule to visit this wonderful place at the same day as Asakusa.
Good luck for your shopping!
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.
YouTube taught me how to open a sea urchin

A few weeks ago some nice folks gave me fresh uni or sea urchin since they just came from the Tsukiji fish market. This was definitely a very lovely gesture but also very unexpected. Because honestly, the only time I actually cut an uni open was when I found a bunch somewhere in the beaches of Mexico I think. Since coming to Japan I’ve been spoiled with the affordable fresh but already prepared uni in the stores so I just never had to go through the whole preparation process. It would have been great to slice these suckers open on the spot and offer them a piece too but I seriously was not ready.
When I was finally ready for the challenge, I was too excited to wait for any of my kitchen savvy friends to respond to my dilemma that I decided to rely on YouTube. My husband and I have actually learned a lot through YouTube. It has saved us from having to pay someone to install our built-in electric cooktop because a video tutorial showed us how to do it ourselves among other things so I thought it was the perfect solution. Sure enough there were a bunch of Japanese (and English which I found afterwards) videos on how to properly scoop out the uni.
Most of the videos tell similar instructions where you either use a knife or some other tool that will help crack open the uni and then you are to pull out the black seaweed that is covering the lovely orange jewels. But the one video I found later on said that you could actually eat that black seaweed separately so will have to try that next time.
So the lesson for today is, be like me and use YouTube to solve all your problems! Or at least all your Japanese food related problems because it’s sometimes easier to understand than written recipes.
And yes of course, if it weren’t for the lovely folks that gave me these uni in the first place, I wouldn’t have had this yummy experience. Arigato very much and next time, I will be prepared for sure!
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.
Margaret and her yummy houtou noodles

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.
An old Nagomi Kitchen friend comes back

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.
Bonito!

Today we held ” Learn basic Japanese cooking lesson ” with four guests.
Deanna from France, she live in Japan for just 2 month and her friend in France booked this lesson as a gift for Deanna. (We are really glad that Nagomi Kitchen was choose as a gift!!)
Additional Pablo, Pedro and Marcos from Spain, they are TV crew and joined our cooking lesson for shooting for their program, EL INTERMEDIO (channnel : LA SEXTA )
So, today’s lesson was proceeded with very mixed languages, French, Spanish, Japanese and of course English 😉
Before cooking, I told them about the Japanese soup stock, Dashi. It’s made from edible kelp and dried bonito. Then Pablo said “Bonito? It’s mean beautiful in Spanish!” I didn’t know about that but
it’s interesting the same word means fish and beautiful 😀 Read the rest of this entry »
Hello kitty or Pikachu bento box?

Making a basic healthy Japanese bento box for your next lunch is already a creative process but a kyaraben will definitely add a little more fun.
In a kyaraben, the food in your bento can look like cute cartoon characters, animals, or even beautiful plants. Making a kyaraben used to be just a trick to get children excited about eating their bento but it has now turned into an art form where even competitions are held. It’s popularity has actually spread across the globe but there is always room to recruit more kyaraben enthusiasts. Read the rest of this entry »