It's Tuesday morning here and about time I got around to blogging last night's dinner. I took lots of pictures because I realized that many of the ingredients I used would be unfamiliar to some folks and are also quite attractive.
On the left is abura-age (thin sheets of deep-fried tofu), beside it takenoko (bamboo shoot) and behind is rice (regular Japanese short grain rice mixed with mochi-gome, or glutinous short grain rice) draining after being washed. The takenoko and half of the abura-age will be added to the rice along with water and seasonings: sake, soy sauce, mirin (sweet cooking sake) and salt. They all get cooked in the rice cooker to make takenoko gohan (bamboo shoot rice). The rest of the abura-age will go into the soup.
Takenoko is a spring vegetable that is now available in some form all year long. It's still a bit early so this one comes pre-boiled, but I'll know when spring has truly arrived when fresh bamboo shoots start showing up at the markets.
Renkon (lotus root), one of my favourite vegetables. Little flavour but a wonderful crunchy texture that water chestnuts only wish they had.
Shin gobou. "Shin" means new, gobou is burdock, a long root. In spring there are all sorts of shin vegetables, in the same way that we have new potatoes in North America. Shin vegetables are sweeter and more tender than their regular counterparts.
The shin gobou and renkon will be sauteed with thinly sliced carrot to make a dish called kimpira.
Nanohana. This vegetable seems to have dozens of names: I know it as rapini but it's usually called rape blossom or other names in English. Another spring vegetable, it will be parboiled, soaked in ice water and then breifly simmered in dashi (Japanese stock) flavoured with soy sauce and mirin to make nibitashi.
Wakame, a type of seaweed. Wakame is sold fresh, semi-fresh (slightly dried and packed with salt) and dried, and in this case it's semi-fresh. It needs a quick soak before slicing off the "spine" that holds the strands together, then cutting the strands down to size. This will go into miso soup and also garnish these:
Hotate (scallops), in their natural state. These kind of frightened me the first time I saw them as I was used to seeing the pristine, bleached white muscle only. I had no idea there was all that other stuff. I bought these whole, which means I had to slice the muscle from each shell (not easy as these guys are strong) and remove the wata (guts), which you can see in the bottom scallop. The two on the top are ready to go as the frill and roe* are both edible.
They cost 140 yen apiece, by the way.
* Or is it milt? As far as I know scallops are hermaphrodites; when the sac is beige it's in a male stage and when it's coral pink it's in a female stage. If anyone knows better please pipe up.
I've placed a bundle of wakame next to them and drizzled it all with a mixture of soy sauce, dashi and sake and topped with a pat of butter, then I broiled them for about 5 minutes.
Here's dinner. Clockwise from left: nanohana no nibitashi, garnished with katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes); renkon to shin gobou kimpira; hotate kaiyaki; homemade tofu (made from prepared soy milk using Kristin's directions from her soy tutorial) dressed with katsuobushi; miso soup with maitake mushrooms, abura-age and wakeme; takenoko gohan dressed with gomashio (black sesame and salt).
Seems like a lot of work but most dishes have leftovers so there'll be less work for the next meal. We eat a meal like this a few times a week (although the hotate is a bit fancier than usual).
We rarely have dessert during the week but I had all those cheap strawberries so we had a pack of those. They were good-- about as good as Japanese strawberries can be (more on that another day).
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