Takenoko Gohan Bento
One good thing about working in a small office in a rural town is that you often get rewarded with fresh seafood, fruits or vegetables for your hard work. Well, actually the quality of your work does not really matter. It’s just a temporary food surplus. Almost everyone around you has at least a farmer or a fisherman in his/her relatives, and you often find yourself involved in an endless barter trading among kind-hearted grannies and aunties (and sometimes uncles, too). This time what I got was these two fresh bamboo shoots.
I like bamboo shoots, but I have to admit that it’s a pain in the neck to cook fresh ones properly to get rid of the harshness. How to do it? You need to
pre-boil them in hot water with a lot of rice bran added. And you need to hurry; the longer you leave them in the sheaths like this, the stronger the harshness will be.
If rice bran is not available, you can use rice rinsing water instead. That’s what I did this time. And my mom told me to leave the bamboo shoots in the rice rinsing water overnight after boiling them in it. If it was only my mom who said that, I
wouldn’t have believed it, but I found the same advice on the
internet, too, so I followed it. But perhaps rice rinsing water is not as effective as rice bran… I
didn’t recognize much harshness in
takenoko gohan (Japanese pilaf with bamboo shoots), but after eating my
takenoko no tosa-ni (bamboo shoots simmered in
dashi and extra bonito flakes), I felt strange sensation on my tongue for a while.
* Some say that if you boil bamboo shoots long enough and soak them in running water long enough, it is not really necessary to use rice bran or rice-rinsing water. I don't know how true it is, though... Takenoko no Tosa-ni
But I really enjoyed the crunchiness of the fresh bamboo shoots. :) Thanks, boss.
I guess I'm going to chop up the leftover
tosa-ni and use them for another batch of
takenoko gohan.
Categories: Japanese
To be honest, I have never made strawberry jam before. The jam is too popular, thus has never tempted me. But when I saw some strawberries on sale at a nearby fruit shop yesterday, and remembered the recent comment by Ireney, I knew that I HAD TO make chunky strawberry jam and have it for breakfast in order to fully appreciate my days off in this beautiful time of the year.
Yeah, the financier was a great success. But this time I wanted to try something else. So this was the kumquat marmalade version of an “orange marmalade and crumble muffins” recipe that I found on the net.
