My Japanese Week-end

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Miso soup, Agedashi Tofu with radiccio & white raddish, and sushi rice with Salmon sashimi

I just love, love Japanese food! I’ve been a Japanophile since my cosplaying days, when my obsession with anime pulled me out of a funk (aka as depression) during my early 20s.

I would not really want to live in Japan, but it does seem like a nice place to visit, and I love its food! It’s so sad to realize that people only think of sushi when they think of Japanese food, but it is sooo much more than that! If I had a million dollars, I would go to Japan and eat at Jiro’s restaurant from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the only 3-star Michelin sushi restaurant in the world. Eating 12 pieces of sushi for 300 euros isn’t exactly a bang for your buck deal, but it’s about the experience, baby! Then try everything my hosts would put in front of me.

I’ve been cooking Japanese for some time now, but when the urge really hits me, I always cook a four-course meal for me and a few other people and put up a Japanese-themed night.

Thursday last week. I was determined to cook Japanese since I’ve been jonesing for Tempura a few weeks now. That Japanese restaurants in Erfurt don’t serve Tempura even that one owned and operated by a Japanese person, boggles the mind.

One of the people invited was a friend who had spent two years in Japan working as an English teacher. I was so interested to watch her and hear how Japanese food is cooked and eaten in Japan.

We had: Miso soup, salad made with julienned zucchini, smoked salmon bits, red caviar and mayo, Zucchini and Mango Sushi, Agedashi Tofu, Salmon Teriyaki, Shrimp and Eggplant tempura, Sushi Rice, and white wine to facilitate girl talk.

On Mother’s day, my friend and I went to EGA Park, where they were having Japanese Appreciation Day. Tea ceremonies, Taiko Drums, Bonsai plants, a Tokyo Shock Boys-type show, and geisha-inspired make-up made up for the weather, which couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to rain. The free banana chocolate sushi roll was not so bad, either. Germans trying to be Japanese is a funny thing to behold.

With that, Japanese week-end was over. It certainly won’t be the last!

Sauce Hollandaise ala Julia Child

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I have tried many sauce hollandaise recipes, but Julia Child’s is the only one that gets me the same results and the same consistency every single time. I tell you, go grab her cookbook. The damned thing is foolproof, I tell you.

You would need:

A 225 or 250 g block of butter, the yolks of 3 eggs, salt and white pepper (preferably freshly ground), 1 Tbsp. cold water, 1 Tbsp. lemon juice. A wire whisk. If you are doing this for the first time, I recommend a tub (palanggana) of cold water big enough for your saucepan to fit into be on standby.

Slice the butter into 1/4-3/4, or into 50 g/200 g halves. Set aside the 50 g butter, and cut the 200 g butter into smaller squares. Melt them over low heat either in a cup in the microwave or in a saucepan. Set this aside. Separate the eggs. You can freeze the whites for later use.

In the inner saucepan of a bain marie or a small saucepan, beat the egg yolks until they become thick and sticky. Add the water, lemon juice, and salt, then beat about 30 seconds more.

Cut a square from the 1/4 part of the cold butter, about a tablespoon of butter. Place it in the yolk mixture. Place the saucepan over very low heat (in bain marie: over barely simmering water, 75°-80° C). whisk the egg yolks until it turns into a cream. At the slightest sign that the yolks are starting to curdle, immerse the bottom of the pan in the tub of cold water, mixing the whole time, and re-place over heat once the pan is cold enough. If the mixture is thick enough that you can see the bottom of the pan between whisks, and sticks to the wires of the whisk, then remove from the heat and place another tablespoon of the cold butter in the yolk mix to halt the cooking process.

Using a spoon, ladle the melted butter into the sauce with your left hand, slowly letting it trickle into the mixture.(DO NOT dump it in by the tablespoon! You need to coax the yolks to absorb the oil!) Simultaneously whisk the sauce with your right hand. When the sauce thickens into a heavy cream, you can pour in the butter a bit more rapidly. Do not add the buttermilk at the bottom. Season with salt and pepper to your taste. I like adding cayenne pepper in my sauce to give it an extra kick, and use the buttermilk the next day in my pancake batter.

The sauce is so thick it seems like mayo. This can only serve 3 people, so you can extend it with stiff-beaten egg whites, the water from the boiled asparagus, and garnished with tarragon or chervil.

Spargelzeit!

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Another reason why I love spring is because of asparagus season. Asparagus is sold in Germany is from end of April until beginning of June, and stands selling them pop up everywhere, next to the stands selling strawberries.

They are white because the Germans like their asparagus like that.They grow underground, in a raised bed so they never see sunlight, and thus do not develop chlorophyll. The downside is that white asparagus has to be peeled because they develop a tough outer skin. They are so ubiquitous that Germans think white asparagus is “normal”!

I don’t mind the funky-smelling afterpee because I can’t get enough of the stuff. Boiled in salted water, paired with ham, boiled salted potatoes and sauce hollandaise, it is something that makes me look forward to springtime.

I always make sauce hollandaise myself. The sauce makes the meal very calorie and fat-intense, thank goodness I only have one season to indulge. This meal, coupled with the seasons first strawberries, really announces that spring has indeed sprung.

Dandelion Salad

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Now that spring has sprung, dandelions and daisies are making a wonderful comeback! Did you know that they are edible? Neither did I until I read the Hunger Games. In the book, Katniss the protagonist was on the verge of starvation when she saw a dandelion which gave her back the confidence to care for her family by scavenging for edible wild herbs and vegetables and by hunting. She made dandelion salad that day.

This piqued my interest and decided to try it out by picking a few dandelions from our backyard. Î fried some bacon bits, added some home-made croutons, blanched the dandelions shortly in hot water to get the bitterness out, dressed it in olive oil, pepper, and salt.

It was very pretty to look at, as you could see from the photo. But how did it taste like?. Uhmm…let’s say it was an interesting experience. Blanching didn’t completely remove the bitterness, and I was only able to counteract it by chewing the salad with bacon bits. The leaves are really tough. And I swear it stayed in the pit of my stomach for a day. Oh, and did you know that dandelion is also a diuretic?

My conclusion is:  I think that dandelion leaves are better suited for cooking than for a salad.  Why bother with dandelion salad when rocket (aka rucola) also grows wild in Germany? Katniss  must have been really desperate to have eaten dandelion salad.

Easy-Peasy Leche Flan

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Now that asparagus season is coming up, which means that I whip up a batch of Sauce Hollandaise every time I make them, also means that I have to be creative with what to do with egg parts that are left behind.

Egg whites are not a problem. They can be frozen or chilled, and are in fact all the better for it, since cold egg whites are faster to whip than those in room temp.

But what to do with egg yolks? You can turn them in to flan, known in the Philippines as Leche Flan, which was introduced to the Philippines by the Sapnish by way of Mexico. Filipino flan uses only egg yolks. As a child, I was fascinated at the ceremony of making this dish. Making the caramel, straining the egg yolks, rubbing dayap (lime) rind, then steaming them seemed so complicated, I never thought that I’d get them right. And duck eggs! Purists always argue that duck eggs make the best flan. It is rich enough to give you a coronary.

Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express saved me from all that trouble by giving me a flan recipe that is so easy, preparation time is 10 minutes, excluding the 45 minute cooking time.

zuckerrubensirupAnother time-saving product for me is Zuckerrübensirup, or syrup made out of sugar beets, also available in Australia as golden syrup. This saves me from making the caramel top of the flan, which I keep on burning anyway!

The recipe comes from Nigella Lawson, and instead of a traditional llanera, I use a round aluminum cake pan 8 inches in diameter. The recipe below is enough to fill the pan.

 

The flan requires: 1 340 g can evaporated milk (known in Germany, strangely enough, as Kondensmilch. I use one with 10% fat, which is the fat content of evap milk in the Philippines), 1 397g can of sweetened condensed milk, 3 eggs, and 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.

Put enough of the golden syrup to completely line the bottom of the cake form. Add all of the ingredients of the flan in a bowl and whisk until well incorporated. Pour into cake tin.

Now there are two ways to cook the flan, both of them involve steaming. In Nigella’s recipe,  the cake tin should be placed in a bigger pan filled with freshly-boiled water, then place in a pre-heated oven, baking it in 170°C for 45 minutes.

I’m lazy by nature. I figured out that my cake tin fits snugly in my biggest cooking pot. Even if I have a double boiler, I have never used it for the recipe. I just half-fill the pot with water, place the cake form over it, then cover the form with the pot’s lid. Forty-five minutes later, I have flan! Always test the readiness of the flan by inserting a toothpick in it. If it comes out clean, then you know it’s done.

This flan is always a welcome pot-luck gift at Filipino parties. So every time I am invited to one, I always bring flan. Who has to know that it  also has egg whites in it?

Martha Stewart’s Lion Cake

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The one cake that started it all

I started with the whole baking thing because of cakes. I was so inspired by my consistency in baking a good Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte that I decided to up the ante and offered to bake the birthday cake of one of my son’s friends.

When I asked the boy’s mom what was his favorite thing at the time, I thought I bit off more than what I could chew when she said “Lions.”

Alrighty then. I decided to roll up my sleeves and after some research, I decided to bake Martha Stewart’s Lion Cake.

It was this time when I bought my 4 1/2″ springform pan. Though many people think that a small springform pan is useless, I have no regrets! The trickiest part here is making the Caramel Buttercream icing. I mean, 9 egg whites for icing?! But the effort was so worth it. The icing tasted like Goldilocks icing, and it was addictive.

The boy was ecstatic after seeing his birthday cake. It made me so happy, it encouraged me to bake even more.

My next post will tell you what I did with the egg yolks…

My Shopping Personality

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Campo di Fiori, Rome

I’ve lived in three cities in three different countries so far, and I have noticed that how I shop radically changes depending on where I live. I’ve noticed the same about my parenting style and my personality, which is even more extreme because my personality when speaking German is radically different when I speak English.

In Germany, I am a skin-flint to the point of being wasteful! I hoard anything that is on sale! Anything that has a red tag on it, anything that I have a coupon for, goes into my cart. And then it goes bad in my fridge because I end up not using them. I tend to patronize the same stores, and only go to a different supermarket if I am in the area anyway, and need a few items. I go to Asian markets every couple of months and stockpile what I need.

In the Philippines, where nothing goes on sale, I tend to shop more seasonally, since seasonally available products are cheaper. I become a comparative shopper, meaning if something is cheaper at SM than at S&R, I will buy that thing in S&R, traffic be damned. I go to the wet market with a shopping list, something that I never do in Germany. I already have a menu planned for the day, which is different in Germany, because my menu is determined by my whim and what is in the fridge. What I end up hoarding are hard-to-find or European ingredients.

At the farmer’s market in Germany, I am trying to develop a suki relationship with a few of the sellers, especially the butcher and the herb seller. Suki is a Philippine concept of becoming a regular patron of a particular shop. Once you have developed this relationship, you become friendly to each other and the seller throws a few freebies for you as a thank you for your patronage.

In the Philippines, I used to live near the wet market, and so I became lazy and just popped into the market whenever I needed something, without planning the ingredients I would need for a particular dish.

In Spain, I lived near a Consum and a Dia, and there was a Lidl not so far away too, so I had a choice of places to go to. Since vegetables, olive oil and almond milk were cheap, they were a staple of my pantry. I ended up not cooking so much in Spain because I was out so often, I rarely had time. I tended to buy things that caught my fancy rather than cheap items, because I wanted to taste the difference between the “motherland” (Spain) and Philippines.

Polvoron, Chorizo, Barquillos, Chocolate…I needed to try them all!

How about you? Did you notice a difference in the way you shop in the different countries you’ve lived in?

 

Catching the Bread Bug

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Thanks to Ian and Cliff, I’ve become addicted to baking bread! I’ve been so encouraged by my efforts, thanks to Cliff’s recipe recommendation, that I’ve been brewing some sour dough to make sour dough bread. I was surprised that it was difficult to find the right type of rye flour to make my starter, but i was finally able to get my hands on Type 997 at Tegut.

On the right is flour and water from this recipe (in German)

On the left is 1 tsp dried yeast, mixed with 3/4 cup lukewarm water, let to stand for 15 minutes, then mixing in 1/2 cup flour with a whisk. Recipe from Low-fat Baking by Linda Fraser.

The yeast starter smells sweeter, while the flour one smells decidedly sour. I’m so excited for this weekend!

Jein.

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Jein is one of my favorite German words. It starts with a soft “y”, and with the sharpness of the  ”ein,” at the end, makes it sound like an ache you cried out.

It is a combination of the words for yes, “ja,” and no, “nein.” The closest English equivalent is “yeahbut…”

I’ve been thinking about the move. If the commune were willing to give me the space in the attic, then I would definitely say JA. But the thought of downgrading my life to 16 square meters is  exhausting, especially with everything that has been going on in my life right now. A kitchen of my own, I’m sorry to say after self-examination, is a non-negotiable. I really searched within myself if I were willing to share a bathroom with somebody not in my immediate household. Yes, and I’ve done it before. Not having even a teeny-tiny tea kitchen? No.

The space in the attic, they said, will be used as a common space, and they don’t have the money to build it anyway. If I were able to come up with the financing and be a member of the e.V. and not just be a renter, that would solve that.

The biggest equation in the “yeahbbut” debate was my current job situation. I am willing to move to other parts of Germany, and overseas, if need be. That would make the whole commune living argument moot. In fact, that makes even moving to a different part of Erfurt, which my father-in-law has been asking, and I have been resisting for different reasons, moot.