Anger Burger

The next item I wanted to share is a something I am very excited about.  I have wanted to make takikomi gohan for a long time now, but for some reason I believed it was much harder than it is.  My mind is like a fruitfly.  Takikomi gohan is “mixed rice” made in a rice cooker and could not actually be any easier at all.  In fact, aside from the fresh vegetables, I have all the ingredients on hand as I type this.  However, one of the items in Amy’s care-package is this thrilling and delicious-looking all-inclusive packet for takikomi gohan:

I don’t even have to add any sauce now.  She’s enabling my laziness!  Have I mentioned that I think I love her?  I’m also deeply pleased that while I was googling takikami gohan, I came across this video:

It’s fucking mesmerizing, man!  The narrator’s voice had me poised between laughter and total devotion for five straight minutes and the woman is so cute and why is she cooking with a dog? Oh my god, I think I’ve found my new favorite YouTube channel.  [UPDATE: Confirmed, favorite YouTube channel.  Spent an entire day learning how to make Japanese food from a woman and a dog and I'm not ashamed.]

At this point I became overwhelmed with how exciting this all is for me and took a self portrait.  The is the first and only unedited shot I took:

See?  I’m insane.  Anyway, the next two packages were sort of what started this whole thing (at least in my mind, I can’t speak for Amy) — my inability to find quality, MSG-free instant dashi.  Dashi is right alongside soy sauce in Japanese cuisine for flavor importance.  It is a stock that can be made from a few different things, but most commonly kombu (kelp) and bonito (a tuna-like fish).  For nerds, dashi is exciting because it led to the discovery of the fifth flavor profile accessible by the human tongue, umami.

And what would I do without furikake?  Be sad, that’s what.  Furikake makes everything¹ better and I don’t need to read Japanese to know that the tiny shrimps and little pieces of egg in this stuff are going to make it my new favorite.

And scallop… powder?  Yes!  Indeed!  Scallop powder (or scallop extract, to be specific) and what exciting mad scientist uses will I have for it?   MWUH-HAHHA-HA-HA!

Once more, my personality is boiled down into a specific condiment: ume salt.  Sour salt, basically, and both my favorite state of mind and my favorite flavor combination.

Last and far from least is this painfully, agonizingly cute container of shichimi, or more commonly seen in America as togarashi.  When you get udon, you know that little red-capped bottle they give you?  Of the spice powder?  Well, that’s this stuff, except, that red-capped stuff is the cheap shit.

I didn’t take a photo of it yet, but the container has a forehead-slappingly simple mechanism for becoming a shaker.

So there you have it!  I’m deeply grateful to Amy for her generosity and tolerance (we basically agreed to meet like three times but my plans kept changing) and I expect to, over the next week, talk about nothing else.

¹ Well, rice, primarily.  A lesser extent to everything else.

I have this dream…

Other than the one where Chris Knight asks me to marry him.  This other dream is where I’m famous in Japan and they want me to come over there just so we can go grocery shopping for condiments together and translate the labels for me.  AND GUESS WHICH ONE JUST CAME TRUE?  More or less.

Basically, a kindly woman named Amy took pity on my pathetic fumblings with Japanese cuisine and HAND-CARRIED ME AN AMAZING ASSORTMENT OF GOODS FROM JAPAN.  Mega-Christmas, pretty much.  But like, a surprise-party Christmas.  And I didn’t have to listen to a certain domestic partner of mine throw a tantrum for the entirety of November and December.  I’m sad that Amy and I didn’t get to meet in person, but I did get to go to her hotel after she left and tell them I was picking up a package.  I pretended like we were spies and this was a data transfer.  I even put on sultry make-up.  True story.  I may have ruined it by exclaiming “YAY!” when they handed me a heavy paper bag.

Amy is practically a total stranger to me, but I imagine she’ll roll her eyes when I say that even her handwriting is good and kind.  I should also point out that Amy sent an incredible PDF explaining — with images! — what each item was, all the ingredients, how it is used and when it expires.  I mean, for reals, at this point, if Amy were a man, I’d be telling Mike it was fun but I have to go.

Now, c’mon.  Someone packed all this in their luggage for me.  Are your eyes misting?  Mine are.  Also, I’m actually getting shaky with excitement at this point.  Totally true, and good insight as to why I have high blood pressure.

Item the first!  Well hello, what are we?  And can I say: the Japanese may kick our asses at many things, but I’d like to motion for package aesthetics being at the top of the list.  All those in favor say aye.

Closer inspection reveals — hey, I know what that is!  That’s an enoki mushroom.  A jar of some kind of mysterious enoki mushrooms, which in Amy’s letter reveals itself to be… Indeed!  Jarred, seasoned enoki.

And I know what this is, too!  This time I have witnesses to my shouting “HOORAY!”  The actual word, like I’m a comic strip character or a greeting card.  Because this, this is one of my favoritest condiments ever, yuzu kosho, and for some inexplicable reason I’ve never tried to find it here in the US.  It is a paste of yuzu peel (a lovely citrus) and chili pepper.  Kind of spicy, salty, bitter/astringent and a little goes a long way.  Very fresh and invigorating.  Oof, my stomach grumbled while typing that.  Hush, you!

Next up, something that I don’t recognize at all.  And I can’t read a thing on it.  Amy says: concentrated chige-nabe, and yet again, what a coincidence –  I had my very first (sort of) chige-nabe not one month ago.  And it was fantastic, a hotpot made with a healthy dose of kimchi.  And for those that don’t like kimchi, I’m afraid I’m going to pull the ol’ sushi line out on you: you’ve just never had good kimchi.  And this bottle of hotpot soup stock is making me salivate.  Glaaar.

This is golden sesame sauce for shabu-shabu, which is kind of like hotpot.  In hotpot, you make what amounts to an interactive stew, while shabu-shabu is named after the sound of swishing very thinly sliced meats and vegetables through rapidly boiling water, cooking them in a matter of seconds and then transferring them to a small dish where you have an ongoing condiment experiment. I love it because you get to play mad scientist, mixing up mutant sauce from all kinds of stuff (like this gorgeous-looking golden sesame sauce) and then quickly dipping a piece of, for example, lightly cooked beef in and then slurping it up awkwardly and burning the shit out of the roof of your mouth.  Maybe that’s just me.  I have a suspicion that this sauce will also make a killer salad dressing.  Stand by!

And here this looks like soy sauce.  But it has art on it that appears to be oysters:

And indeed, Amy says it is:

Soy sauce, sugar, mirin (sweet rice wine), shaved bonito extract, salt, oyster extract, konbu (dried kelp) extract, shiitake mushroom extract, alcohol

Okay, no joking now, I’m getting sort of woozy with hunger.  My stomach is gurgling, my blood sugar is dropping and I can think of 1001 uses for this oyster-dashi soy sauce.  Amy points out that it is used for making dashimaki, a Japanese rolled omelet that I love and keep trying to make to clumsy results.

Can you believe all this?  And I’m not even halfway through the package yet.  I’m like the Julia Childs of Japan, but without the skill, just the oafish disregard for etiquette.  Stay tuned for more!

Okay, so, pizza.

I’ve got this issue with pizza.  I love it.  And I love a very specific kind.  This comes up over and over again, so much so that I find myself having a questionable sense of déjà vu every time I talk about it – wait, did I talk about this before?  I’m pretty sure I did.

The easy version is that I love New York style pizza; Chicago is good, but not what I want when I want a slice.  That whole Sicilian/thick crust thing is the same: yum, bread with cheese.  But not so yum as pizza.  And then we come to Los Angeles, a city on which I’m certain Philip K. Dick modeled his scramble suit after.  It’s all people, all places, at all times.  The pizza is all pizza, from all regions, for all of history.  Sometimes within the same pie.

A while back I read that D’Amore’s of Los Angeles was a top contender, and indeed if one were to believe their own webpage, they are THE NATION’S #1 RATED PIZZA.  An unfortunate claim.  Now there’s nowhere to go but down.

Still, their new location on 3rd is nice and small, like a pizzeria should be, and the first thing that happened was owner Joe D’Amore getting up from his table and saying, “Welcome to D’Amore’s, I eat here, but I’m also the owner.”  It was so earnest and slightly rehearsed that we immediately altered our plan to get a test slice and instead ordered a whole pie.

We ordered a Quattro Colori, a pizza I must have badly misread because I was startled to discover both the presence of pork and mushrooms.  We like pork and Mike tolerates mushrooms, but for some reason I thought I was ordering a primarily basil and tomato pie.  No matter!  It smelled good, we were starving and short of a dirty kleenex, nothing on that pizza could have kept me from ripping out its throat and howling at the moon.

And hey, it was a tasty pie.  The price was still a bit rich for my blood ($20 fed Mike and I for lunch with no leftovers), but the ingredients were pretty impeccable and the service was tight.  The negatives are predictable: their small needs to be $5 cheaper and it seemed undersalted to me.  Luckily the pork was very, very salty and contributed to an overall pleasurable pie.  Without the pork I would have been shaking on the kosher.  The other negative was our fault: after 30 minutes in traffic, the pie suffered in texture.  Still, as good a pizza as I have had in this city.  The best in the nation?  Alas, non.

A week ago I was with my mom at Uwajimaya in Seattle when I spotted a package of Hurricane Popcorn.  Hey!  That looks familiar!  I’m simple-minded and gluttonous, so when I see things I’ve only seen on the internet I get a thrill not unlike meeting a celebrity.  And so, there I stood, hopping up and down and telling my mom, “I saw that on Tasty Island! I saw it!”  She was already putting a packet in her basket.

But holy shit!  $5 for a packet!  It had better actually blow roofs off, because that’s a lot of money for a bag of popcorn.

At first glance it seems like the “mochi crunch” or Japanese rice crackers are all that are in the bag, but the nori and flavorings are just hiding underneath.  But it helps to bring home that Hurricane Popcorn is easily reproducible in your own kitchen, provided you have nori and/or Japanese rice crackers.

Still, it’s nice that everything is included in one package, right down to a large plastic bag to shake the toppings and butter¹ onto the popcorn.

After all is said and done, well, we couldn’t stop eating it.  And the best part?  Popcorn is officially on my DON’T EAT list because the fiber aggravates my Crohn’s Disease too much.  And I still ate a fair portion of it.  Because, as already mentioned, I’m an irresponsible teenager. ²

¹ Not actually butter.  But my mom and I both believed it was real butter until we read the package, and mmm, oil and artificial flavorings – but it didn’t have that “butter popcorn” flavor at all. I’ll be damned, it tasted like the real thing.

² Not actually a teenager.

Things are very exciting for me lately, in some bad ways, but mostly good.

Primarily, through the Dad Bank of Washington, I got a loan to get a sorely needed new laptop.  Basically, I had a slightly mobile desktop.  I loved my giant big-boned Lenovo, but the battery stopped working after about 9 months (and I was too lazy to deal with a warranty replacement) and as each month passed a  new obsolescence cropped up, everything from being unable to use Quicktime, to more recently being unable to even read a text document from someone with a computer newer than 2007.  Lame.  And all things that can be fixed, ultimately, but things I was too terrified to do for fear of bricking my laptop.  That, combined with the fact that it almost literally weighed 10 pounds made it, as I said, not so much a laptop.

But! There are exciting things on the horizon for me (and you!), and I’ll get to them eventually.  In the meantime, awesome dinner!

My mom and I have made a tradition of “seafood dinner” at the end of my bi-yearly visits.  This time we tried a new seafood vendor because our usual folks just didn’t salt the crab enough when they boil them (which can be fixed by yes, boiling our own crab, but that kind of homesteader crap can stay with the people grinding their own flour).  Anyway, the new guy recommended boiling the crab again when we got home to warm it up, and it was lovely.  We got a pot of very salty water to a simmer and dropped them in for no more than 2 minutes, just long enough to season and get warmed through.  Perfect!

And oh my god, that was good crab.  Fresh and salty-sweet, I ate an entire one myself.  In addition to, ahem, about 4 giant oysters panfried by my lovely mother.

We were concerned that the oysters would be “milky” as my mom calls it, since we’re at the tail end of a bad oyster month.  “Milky” is when the tissue inside almost melts when disturbed — not tender, but an unpleasant mushiness — and I have no idea what causes it.

But they were pretty good.  One oyster in a batch from Shelton was milky, but the rest were tasty.  I was also a little weirded out that while we purchased both medium and small oysters, several were distinctly of the large grade.  When oysters are very large they need to be sliced open and lightly cleaned.  Certainly not good for eating raw, but still excellent for cooking with.

They were so good, in fact, I failed to photograph them cooked!  They were breaded in a simple crushed saltine cracker coating and then fried in oil on high heat until deep brown.  It was ambrosia.

Then my mom yanked out a heart-stopping Elberta peach pie just to show me who is still boss.  Yes ma’am.