cafe yuka

most recipes for osechi ryori (traditional japanese new year’s dishes) make enough to feed a family of four for three days. my family is only two people (paul and i) so far, so i didn’t want to make too much. we were just planning to eat osechi ryori for one day, because we can never do the same thing again and again.

so, i did some research and found a japanese website that shows you how to make osechi ryori for two people. i think it’s kind of romantic…

even though i was just making osechi for two, it took a lot of prep work and cooking to make all the various small dishes. my admiration for my mother’s effort in preparing osechi for my family every year grew and grew…

while i was cooking, i amused myself by thinking about how osechi is actually a bit lame. i might offend some japanese people by saying so, but it’s true. osechi is full of “dajare” (bad puns) and “oyaji-gyagu” (”old man gags”, corny jokes). so many of the dishes have names that are meant to bring health and good luck, but they sound like really bad jokes.

for example:

• black beans are “kuro-mame” : “mame ni ikiru” means “live healthy”
• kelp (kobu) : “yorokobu” means joy
• snapper (tai) : “medetai” means joyful, fortunate
• japanese sour orange (”daidai“): “daidai” also means “generation after generation”
• shrimp : we eat shrimp in order to live until our backs are curved with age (shrimp’s back is curved, so…)
• gobo (burdock root) : just like gobo, live thin and long with roots spread in the earth.

…what can i say. it might be hard for english speakers to understand the jokes, but believe me, they’re lame. maybe we’re supposed to start the new year with a good laugh, but i’m not sure if i can laugh without raising my eyebrows a little or thinking of a rimshot at the end of the each joke.

the good thing is, the jokes are so lame that they’re kind of adorable. at least, i’m used to it.

recipes (clockwise from the left of the photo)

pirikara-konnyaku

• konnyaku 1/2 cake
• soy sauce 2 tbsp
• mirin 1 tbsp
• chili flakes
• sesame oil

1. blanch the konnyaku in hot water
2. slice the konnyaku (about 7mm). make a cut in the center of the flat surface. take the top and pull it through the hole to make a weave effect.
3. heat the oil in a pan. add konnyaku, soy sauce, mirin and chili flakes.
4. saute for a couple of minutes, just for flavor
5. garnish with carrots cut into decorative flowers

tataki gobo (pounded burdock)

• gobo 2 stalks (thin)
• rice vinegar (dash)
• white sesame seeds 3 tbsp
• sauce: rice vinegar 50ml, mirin 2 tbsp, japanese soup stock 2 tbsp, pinch of salt

1. wash gobo, pound it lightly with a rolling pin, and cut into pieces 4-5 cm long. if the pieces are too thick, cut them lengthwise in half
2. put the gobo in a small pot, cover with water and add vinegar. bring to a boil and cook for about 10 minutes, until soft. drain.
3. toast white sesame seeds in a pan. cool, then grind.
4. add the ingredients for the sauce to a pan, bring them to a boil. add the gobo and cook until the liquid reduces by half.
5. turn off the heat. add the white sesame.
6. garnish with snow peas

kobu maki (kelp roll)

i improvised this one, so if i remember correctly…

• kelp 2 x 10cm cut pieces, soak in a water for about 10 mins. save the water
• kanpyo, soak in water for 5 mins
• gobo, 4 small pieces (saved from the tataki gobo recipe after blanching)
• carrot, 4 small pieces, blanched
• sauce: soy sauce 2 tbsp, sugar 2 tbsp, sake 1 tbsp

1. put two sticks each of gobo and carrot on top of a sheet of kelp and roll it
2. tie the kelp roll with a short strip of kanpyo. trim off the uneven ends
3. place the rolls in a pan. cover them with the water used for soaking the kelp
4. simmer on low heat for 20 minutes or so
5. add the sauce and simmer for 15 minutes

among the other osechi dishes, chikuzen-ni is one of my favorites. first of all, it’s good for you. it’s full of fiber. it contains gobo (burdock), renkon (lotus root) and konnyaku. second, it’s delicious. my mom makes killer chikuzen-ni. i tried last year too, but it turned out only okay. i probably didn’t cook it slowly enough…

this year, i wanted to make it as close as my mom’s chikuzen-ni as possible. so i cooked it slowly, like she does. i also used chicken thighs with bones, so that bones added more flavor.

chikuzen (筑前) was the name of a local administrative area in the west of fukuoka prefecture, from the nara period to the meiji period (710 ~ 1871). chikuzen-ni is a local dish from this region, but now it’s popular all over japan.

it is very hard to cook authentic japanese food in a small canadian city like saskatoon, let alone osechi ryori. it’s hard to find the right vegetables. luckily i was able to get some ingredients from the asian markets in winnipeg when i was there over the holiday. and i also had some japanese food that my parents sent me. so in the end, i managed to cook up some dishes for the new year. paul was very happy.

i ended up making only nine dishes. so i call it “petit osechi” :)

chikuzen-ni recipe (for four)

• four slices of chicken thigh with bones
• sake to marinate the chicken
• 1 carrot
• 1 gobo
• 1 small renkon
• 4 dried shiitake
• 1/2 konnyaku
• 8 snowpea
• some flower shaped carrots

—————————————

• 1 cup of the liquid from shiitake
• 1 1/2 dashi (japanese soup stock)
• TBSP 6 soy sauce
• TBSP 4 mirin
• TBSP 4 sake
• TBSP 4 sugar

also you need parchment paper
—————————————

1. cut the chicken into bite-size pieces and massage the chicken with sake. set aside.
2. rough chop the carrot, gobo and renkon. (cut the vegetables at an angle and rotate the vegetable and cut again, so that the pieces have more surface area.) soak the gobo and renkon in a bowl of water with vinegar to prevent them from discoloring.
3. remove strings from snowpeas. blanch in hot water, then transfer to cold water.
4. boil the konnyaku and cut into bite-size pieces.
5. re-hydrate the dried shiitake in one or two cups of water. remove the stems and cut in half. strain and save the liquid.
6. heat oil in a pan and add the chicken. when it’s cooked, add all the vegetables except the snowpeas.
7. add the dashi and all the seasoning.
8. make a lid with parchment paper. place the lid directly on the food cooking in the pot.
9. skim off any scum that forms. turn the heat to low.
10. cook slowly until reduced by approx. 30%.
11. decorate with snowpeas and flower shaped carrots.

(photo: stack of homemade dorayaki, Doraemon’s favorite snack)

oh, boy… today was absolutely the craziest day. when i woke up in the morning, all i could see was the whole white world. on the weather channel, there was a blizzard warning covering almost all of saskatchewan. the strong wind and the blowing snow completely blocked the view from my apartment window. i couldn’t see across the street.

i spent my afternoon drawing, but i got distracted by the noise of the strong wind so many times that i had to take a break a couple of times. we have some plastic chairs and a patio table on the balcony and they kept getting blown around. they were wild. one of the chairs got blown into the corner of the balcony and kept banging its head against the railing — it looked like self-mutilation.

anyway, this wild canadian weather almost made me forget that it’s a special day here — it’s the 1st anniversary of my blog! my very first post was one of my loud silence photos. for that first month, the only people who knew about my blog were me and paul :D i didn’t tell anyone about it until february, around the time i was setting up my solo drawing show. at that point, i was getting about 20 visitors per day (now it’s 250, average).

i’ve had so much fun with this blog for one year. i’ve met lots of interesting and nice people — thank you to those of you who leave comments or wrote to me using my contact page. some days were really exciting here, like the time that i got linked from metafilter and the site crashed. since then, paul redesigned my blog and i opened my shop and my gallery.

there will be a couple of new things happening in the new year. i’m preparing for a show this spring that i’ll be writing about. there will be some more updates here, including moving to a new server. and i have some personal news that i’ll be blogging about, and showing photos.

so, thank you for coming to visit. let’s have another great year!

happy new year, everyone!

i hope your 2007 is filled with joy and excitement :)

these are two happy boiled eggs that i peeled and dyed pink. i sliced off part of the tip and added happy faces, using black sesame seeds for the eyes and food colouring for the mouths. i got the idea from a japanese website that shows how to make osechi ryori, the traditional new year’s meal. of course, pink eggs with happy faces are not traditional at all. but we like to use bright colored food for decoration on the serving dish. and red and white are the colors of good fortune for new year’s and any occasion.

the chef made these with quail eggs, but i didn’t have any so i used ordinary eggs. they sat happily on my osechi ryori plate. paul said they were too cute to eat, so they’re back in the refrigerator tonight. i might have to surgically remove their faces so we can eat the rest of the egg.

i’ll be posting pictures and recipes from more of my osechi ryori dishes this week.

in japan, the last day of year is called “omisoka” - new year’s eve. usually people spend the time preparing our traditional new year’s meal (”osechi ryouri“) and cleaning the entire house (”osouji”, meaning literally “big cleaning”).

when i was growing up, my mom was in charge of cooking and my dad was in charge of cleaning. he and i would tackle the house inside and outside, including some spots that don’t get usually cleaned — behind furniture, etc. the big cleaning is supposed to purify everything so that everyone can make a fresh start for the coming year. it’s also said that we clean because toshigami (the god of the upcoming year) will visit every house to bless us.

my mom makes at least twenty dishes for the new year’s meal, osechi-ryouri. most of them are vegetable and fish dishes, which require a lot of prep work. i would be in charge of prep work and testing :) all the dishes are made before new year’s and served cold so there won’t be so much work preparing meals on the actual holiday.

in the evening, we’d all sit down to watch “ko-haku uta-gassen” (”red vs white” song battle tv show) on NHK. this is a very popular yearly event where stars sing the most popular songs from that year (with some older and traditional songs too). by that point, you’d think we’ll be too tired to stay awake until midnight listening to people sing. but surprisingly, it’s really fun. the house is incredibly clean and smells like the osechi ryouri dishes - thanks to our hard work. everyone is pretty happy… and hungry :D

a year never ends without eating toshi-koshi soba (”year-bridging” buckwheat noodle soup). you can eat it hot or cold. in my parents’ house usually we eat it hot with sansai.

it is thought that we eat soba because:

1. soba noodles are thin and long. so you live long, humbly .
2. soba noodles are easily cut. so you can say good-bye to bad luck and unfortunate events that might have occured during that year.
3. soba noodles are made of buckwheat, which helps clean your digestive system. clean body for the new year!

my mom says the main reason is #3. i’d like to add a new theory:

4. because it’s tasty.

we eat soba and we talk about how healthy we’ve been and wish the same for the coming year.

jyoya no kane (new year’s bells) begin ringing around 10:40 pm, continuing past midnight. all the bells in Buddhist temples throughout japan are rung 108 times to anounce the passing of the old year. they ring really slowly, so it takes an hour and a half. everyone goes to their local temple to say prayers on new year’s day.
when i was living in japan, i would go back to my parent’s house in wakayama for the new year’s holiday (dec 28 ~ jan 3) and we would visit kokawa temple.

one time when i was living in kyoto for college, my parents visited me there for new year’s eve. this was back in 1993, and on that night kyoto was packed with even more people than usual to celebrating the city’s 1200-year anniversary (kyoto was established as Japan’s capital under the name “Heian-kyo” in the year 794). my parents and i went to chion-in temple to see the famous bell-ringing. as expected, it was extremely crowded. we got carried along involuntarily by the wave of people trying to go forward. the sound of the bell echoed low in my body. it’s probably still echoing inside now.

you can listen to the different sound of the jyoya no kane on this website. just click on the red boxes with a speaker.

i hope you all have a happy new year!

(click the image to view close up)

many canadians ask me if i miss japanese food for the past six years. my answer is YES. but when i say “japanese food”, i’m not talking about sushi, or tempura, or green-tea ice cream. they are japanese food and i like them, but i don’t miss them, i guess. i like sushi, but i’m saving my sushi-craving for edohei japanese restaurant in winnipeg. edohei is the best sushi on the prairie.

anyway, when i say “japanese food”, i’m talking about umeboshi. if i could have umeboshi for breakfast every morning, i might not miss japan… as much. umeboshi are pickled plums (”ume” means plum and “hoshi” (”boshi”) means to dry). they are sweet and extremely sour. mmm… just to think of umeboshi makes me feel sour. most commonly you eat umeboshi with rice. you can put it on top of a bowl of rice or you can put it inside of an onigiri (rice ball).

i had a huge craving for umeboshi a couple weeks ago. i needed to eat something sour. i could have eaten lemons, but i didn’t want to eat rice with lemon — too weird. i went to the asian market here in saskatoon, but they don’t carry umeboshi. it’s really more like a chinese market, they only carry a handful of japanese foods. i guess there probably isn’t a big enough japanese population here to support a japanese market.

my craving grew and grew…

so i phoned up my mom :D my parents live in wakayama prefecture, which is famous for… UMEBOSHI! they make the best of the best umeboshi in japan, more sweet and sour than salty. they make a special type of umeboshi with honey in it, that we call 優しい味 “yasashii” (kind + gentle) flavour. i love them. i asked my mom to send me some umeboshi along with some of my other favorite japanese foods.

a few weeks later, the package arrived! actually, i just got the notice from the post office to come pick up the box. the notice said that i wasn’t at home at the time of delivery, which is not true — i was home all day that day. i guess the mailman would rather make me carry the big box in my hands than put in on his nice red truck.

anyway, picking up the package and running a couple of errands was just enough time to make some rice. so i put the rice in the rice cooker and went out. it was a cold and snowy winter day, and when we got back, paul and i were ready to cuddle up and have some warm rice with umeboshi. this must have been the best umeboshi i’ve ever had. thanks mom!