Since New Year’s is upon us.. that means New Year’s cooking! There’s a lot of tradition associated with New Year’s in Japan, it’s probably about the equivalent of Christmas back home–really a big deal! If you’re interested you can take a look at some of the traditional NY foods over at wiki–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osechi.
J’s mom doesn’t like all the fuss so while we did have zoni (mochi in soup), anko mochi, ad (cup noodle) toshikoshi-soba, we celebrated with sushi last year (and apparently about the same every year before that). So I basically know zilch about cooking and preparing New Year’s food. In comes in the start of the story that started the BOE explosion–my ex-boss’ wife is a great cook and sometimes comes in to the JHS I work at to teach a cooking class. When I first came she was really kind and gifted me a yukata (and came to help me put it on for the summer festival), she also made me a futomaki (big fat rolled up sushi eaten in a certain direction for luck) on Setsubun back in February 2011. Really nice woman!
So before I get ahead of myself, she asked me if I’d like to learn some new year’s recipes, she knows that I’ve been trying to understand Japanese food (and how to make it) for a while. J’s mom does all the cooking at home and always tells me “yasumain” (“take a rest!” in our magical Tohoku dialect) when I get home and want to help. She won’t even let me cut things, in case I cut my fingers off! While that’s good for my lazy bone, it doesn’t help me in the “you’ll one day take over the house and have to magically know how to cook EVERYTHING” dilemma.
So off I go to Town W (she lives in Town S where I work but her hometown, though originally Yokohama, is about 30 minutes away) and she teaches me how to make a few new year’s dishes: datemaki (on the wiki page), zoni (on the wiki page as well), chawan mushi (a steamed egg custard with lots of stuff in it), and kinpira gobo (a stirfry of burdock root and carrots, with tarako [mmmm, fish eggs] added to make it New Year’s fancy).
I don’t know that anyone at home would want to eat any of the above (and personally I’m afraid of choking and dying when I eat zoni so I don’t really enjoy it), but I thought I’d post a couple recipes I learned–maybe mostly for myself to remember.
Datemaki (sweet rolled omlette with fish paste.. is your mouth watering yet?) Makes 2 rolls.
Special tools: sushi rolling mat (or anything that you can roll that can also withstand heat)
Ingredients
- 4 eggs
- One package of hanpen (pounded fish cake)
- 50g sugar
- 1 T sake
- 1/2 T shirodashi (kind that comes in a bottle)
- pinch of salt
- Whip eggs, sugar, sake, dashi, and salt in a bowl and set aside.
- In a separate bowl, use a mixer to turn the the fish cake (might require some pounding to get it to break down from it’s enticing square shape) into a paste.
- Slowly add the egg mix to the fish paste and mix well (with the mixer), you want it to be fluffy when you cook it!
- Pour half of the mixture into a preheated (medium heat), oiled pan.
- Much like an omelet you want to gently break up the mixture and let the raw bits make its way to the pan bottom so it can all cook evenly–but make sure when you’re breaking up the egg that you don’t do it too harshly. Just until it all starts cooking, you don’t want it to lose it’s wholeness.
- Once the runniness subsides begin to roll the egg over on itself until you roll it all up, like a roll cake! You might need to tilt the pan towards yourself to let gravity help you.
- Push it gently together with the spatula and use whatever raw goodness that spells out to “glue” the roll together by placing it over the heat.
- Gently remove the roll from the pan (don’t break it in half like me) and place it on a saran wrap/wax paper covered bamboo rolling mat (used for makizushi, rolled sushi). Roll up the egg (as circluar shaped as possible) and let it cool (this is done to give it a better shape than “haphazardly rolled up in a frying pan”)
Chawan-mushi (steamed magical egg custard filled with stuff) Makes 5 servings, probably.
Chawan literally means “tea cup” so this is usually prepared in small tea-cup style bowls. But in Town W, they prepare it in bowls, so the serving is much larger! I feel like this probably serves more than 5 people in your typical household (J’s family uses small cups), but who knows.
Tools needed: Steaming pot (that’s a pot with a bottom for boiling water and holes at the top to allow for steam to rise into the upper compartment, typically used for making steamed buns in China or steamed veggies in the US). Forgive me that I can’t, for the life of me, think of a proper English word for it.
Ingredients
- 4 eggs
- 50g sugar
- 25cc sake
- 25cc mirin
- shirodashi 50cc
- usukuchi shoyu (light soy sauce–if you don’t use this you’ll get brown, unattractive egg pudding) 30cc
- 750cc chicken stock
- pinch of salt
- typical goodies inside of chawan mushi: chicken, kamaboko [steamed fish paste cake], shelled Japanese gingko seeds [ginnan], bamboo shoots [takenoko], Japanese yams [yamaimo], sweet chestnuts (typically found in a bottle of sweet yellow syrup), cooked shiitake mushrooms (no idea if raw is OK, but we started with precooked ones), parsley
- Mix eggs completely you don’t want to have any raw white hanging around as the point of this dish is that it’s a custard, not separate. H showed me a technique that included grabbing the whites with my chopstick and trying to break them up.. I wasn’t very good at it (chopsticks, durrrrr). I don’t know if using a mixer would be ok (would they get too fluffy?).
- Add alllllll of the stuff to the egg (minus the goodies). H told me that the typical breakdown was about 1 egg to every 200 cc of liquid, just round about.
- Laddle the mixture into cups (I should mention that you should have your water boiling for your steamer already, over medium heat) and put the goodies into the cup as well — there really aren’t any rules but the standard is to put in one of each (but feel free to add lots of MEEEEEAT, I know a lot of chawan-mushi includes oysters too, blech).
- Place the uncovered cups/bowls into the steamer and let cook for 20 minutes. You should place a wet towel under the lid of the top (but not drooping into your egg mixture) and tie it up, getting water into the chawan mushi would be disaster.. apparently!
- EAT (but don’t burn your tongue like me).
H told me her taste is “usui” or very light, so you can up the flavor as you like (usually the trifecta of mirin/sake/shoyu are usually kept about the same in Japanese cooking, unless you’re adding mirin for sweetness). In fact J did comment that the datemaki was too usui.
So there you have it, I have a cousin at home that speaks Japanese/taught Japanese and pretty much was my inspiration and partner in crime growing up when it came to Japan and Japanese so hopefully it’s something she can use (though it might be hard to find the ingredients!.
I took leftovers back home and we ate them with dinner last night, J’s mom was very exciting by the traditional burdock root dish as it’s typically not a style prepared (or known) by younger people! Bless her soul, it wasn’t anything other than ordinary, but she’s such a kind hearted woman.
I’m gonna try and make the chawanmushi on the 31st at home.. will let you know how that goes! I learned a lot with H, she let me taste things step by step–I find the flavor base to be the hardest thing to get and she let me try it as she made each addition. J’s house is all about strong flavors so it won’t help me there.. but it’s a start!
and her inaka life 