Tomato Spinach and Tuna Salad

Tomato and Spinach Salad with Tuna Dressing (I can't see much tuna in this photo, though) Mmmmm... I think I like this salad better than the cabbage and tuna salad I posted about before. For this one, lemon juice is the key. The original recipe is here (in Japanese). I'm feeling a little down today. I started practicing driving at a driving school yesterday because I haven't driven any cars with manual transmission for more than 15 years. My hometown I'm moving into has no public transportation except a few buses a day, thus almost everybody needs to be able to drive there. And yes, my parents' cars have manual transmission. That's all they have. Fine. So I didn't mind going to a driving school at all. There's no way I can practice on my own anyway. But Gosh! It was amazing how I forgot everything and lost almost all my driving skills! I thought it would come back right away once I started, but I guess that only applies to younger people... AHHHH... The instructor was nice. He tried to find something I was doing right, but the poor guy was obviously trying very hard and I felt almost sorry for him... Oh well. Maybe I'll do better with the clutch next time. I should be able to do it -- Even my mom can do it. Why not me? Categories: Western-inspired

Soy Milk Mayonnaise

Soy Milk Mayonnaise Maybe some of you have heard of macrobiotic diet or macrobiotics? It's becoming more and more popular here in Japan. I don't know much about it at the moment, and probably would not go too deeply into it in the future, either. But macrobiotics seems to suggest many healthier substitution ideas, which I welcome very, very much. Recently I have been doing a net search on such ideas not only for myself but also for my parents who I will be cooking for in the near future. I didn't know this before, but a good number of people here in Japan are on this macrobiotic diet now and trying those substitution ideas. I bet some of the ideas make you go "Yuuuuck! But I should put up with it because it's supposed to be healthy..." and others make you give thumbs-up. It looks like yogurt in these photos, but the real color is more yellowish. Now here is this idea of using soy milk in place of egg yolks to make mayonnaise. Almost all Japanese posts about this mayonnaise I read praised it, except the ones who used olive oil. So I thought it was a right bandwagon to jump on ;) This morning, as soon as I finished breakfast, I made an experimental batch based on a recipe (Japanese) I found last night. Mmmmm.... I give a thumb up to this idea. The taste and the texture are pretty close to real mayonnaise, I think. (I used food processor to whip it up well.) When I first licked it, I thought the salt and vinegar tasted too sharp for me. But it was alright when I tried it on sliced tomatoes. Then later I found out that the idea was already popular outside Japan among vegan people, and hundreds of English recipes of "vegan mayonnaise" are out there on the net. How nice. It seems that vegetarian or vegan diet did not make a great breakthrough in Japan right after it became popular abroad, though Japanese people have been crazy about losing weight for decades. Then now, the needs of young moms with atopic kids, as well as the growing interest in the prevention of cancer or metabolic syndrome, brought macrobiotics into the spotlight, which lead to the introduction of many vegan recipes in Japan. Macrobiotics and veganism are not exactly the same, but they seem to suggest many similar recipes. I could be wrong, but to me it seems that way. And some say that the vegan diet is actually close to the common Japanese diet before the period of rapid economic growth. So now the macrobiotic chefs must be combining Western knowledge with the good traditional Japanese diet. How nice it is to be able to share the benefit through books and the Internet. :) Anyway, the experiment today was a success. The only thing was that I got so carried away that I forgot to reduce the recipe to half, and ended up with plenty of mayo. AHHHH...!!! The soy milk mayonnaise is said to keep for about two weeks in the fridge, but I don't know if I can use this up in two weeks... When I make the next batch, I might try coloring it to make it look more yellowish. No, not by using termeric. I'm thinking something less expensive... IIRC, Laura Ingalls's Ma would color her homemade butter by using grated carrots, right? I think I read that in Little House on the Prairie... or was it in Little House in the Big Woods? Anyway, I may give it a try next time. ;) P.S. * This does not sound very healthy, but I always drink or use the soy milk with additives. I don't like the taste of pure soy milk... Categories: Western-inspired

Ume Miso

Ume Miso (First week ) Yep, this is one of those food fads in Japan AGAIN. Every now and then, a certain home-made food or a drink becomes very popular throughout this country and you find the food/drink in almost every household, such as Caspian Sea yogurt or shiso (perilla) drink -- just to name a few? (Well, maybe the shiso drink was popular in rural areas but not so much in big cities? Shiso is expensive when bought at the stores, so the juice was popular among those who grow the herb themselves.) Now it’s time for this “ume miso,” and I was able to jump on the bandwagon at the very, very last minute. Usually I don’t join a fad too easily. I did try Caspian Sea yogurt but I didn’t care for the taste very much. As for the shiso drink, I had to -- still have to -- consume some of the result of my mom’s persistent work every summer, so there is absolutely no need for me to make it myself. But this ume miso is different. I decided to make some right away when mom told me that she made a great success at the feast for a Buddhist ceremony in my hometown. She made nuta (blanched green onions and boiled squid dressed with vinegar-miso dressing) with her ume miso dressing. The salad bowl was emptied quickly, according to her, and a few female relatives came to her asking for the recipe. Gosh, then I’ve got to give it a try right now! I guess some of you may know “ume miso” as miso (fermented soybean paste) mixed with umeboshi (very salty, pickled Japanese ume plums) paste. That’s the traditional one often used for traditional Japanese dishes. But this “ume miso” is different; it is made from fresh ume plums and seems to be used as a versatile dressing. What you do is VERY simple. You wash and pat dry fresh ume plums and pickle them in miso and sugar. The proportion of the weight of the ume, sugar and miso is basically 1:1:1. If you use 1 kg ume (unseeded), use 1 kg miso and 1 kg sugar. You might want to use less sugar when using ripe, yellow ume instead of green ones. That’s it. Now some instructions on the net say “Cook ume with miso and sugar,” but others say “Just place ume, miso, sugar alternately in a jar and let it rest.” Of course mom and I went for the easier method. Mom said she didn’t even stir it at all, but I do stir the paste once a day as recommended on some recipe websites. It looked like this photo in the beginning, and in a few days, the juice came out from the fresh ume plums made the paste quite runny as in the top photo. Some say that the miso will be ready in a month and others say half a year, so I'm going to try it in three months or so. :P I wanted to use green ume so badly, because the paste would be more fragrant that way, but it was already the end of ume season when I gave it a go and I couldn’t even find ripe ones anywhere. I was so delighted when I finally found one stall at the Sunday Market selling a few bags of the last ume plums of this season. The old lady at the stall said, “Oh, you’re going to make ume miso?” as she gave me the change. Yeah, a bandwagon. Really. ;) Categories: Japanese

Is My Salad Burning?

Leftover Veggies with "Firemen's Salad Dressing" This is a long weekend here in Japan with Monday being a national holiday. But for many of us, it was not a great one because of the typhoon, and for some people, big earthquake. I really hope that the earthquake this morning did not cause a terrible damage (esp. to the nuclear power plant there). Anyway, for me, it’s a cloudy and eventless national holiday today. To cheer myself up, I tried out the salad dressing recipe that one of my readers had sent me a couple of weeks ago. Yep, he kindly emailed it to me in return for the onion dressing recipe. How nice! :D I loved this recipe, and he said it is OK to post it on my blog, so here it is. A nice salad dressing recipe from Hawaii. Firemen's Salad Dressing 1 cup oil 1/3 cup apple cider vinegar 1/4 cup sugar or to taste, depends how sweet you like your dressing 2 bay leaves, uncrushed since it's hard to chew on 2 cloves of garlic, grated fine with Japanese grater 1 tsp. French's brand mustard (I never tried it with Dijon) 1 tsp. Worcheshire sauce 1/2 round white medium size onion grated fine with Japanese grater 8 Tbsp. mayonnaise optional: garlic salt (Recipe by the firemen of Hawaii) Did you think, “Why firemen?” I did. Well, according to him, this is the recipe that his brother got from fellow fireman. Sounds like, in Hawaii, firemen (or some of them) take shifts to cook for the whole crew, so they are usually good cooks. He even said that there may be “firemen’s cookbook” out there, so I googled and got more than 50 hits. Mmmmm… I didn’t know this before. Live and learn, right? He also mentioned about adding a little white miso to the dressing, and that’s what I tried today. I agree. It “added another dimension,” as he wrote. I think this addition made the dressing go well with “typically Japanese” ingredients. I’m going to try this with tofu salad tonight. BTW, I googled about Japanese firemen and found this site. Yeah, they, too, seem to take shifts to cook, and they seem to make donburi pretty often. ;) Categories: Western-inspired

Wakame and Kanikama Salad with Onion Dressing

Wakame Seaweed, Crab Stick and Daikon Radish Salad with Onion Dressing I have heard that kanikama (crab stick?) is known and used even outside Japan and often called "surimi" in some of European countries, right? I love it in salad or rolled sushi, though I was not too crazy about its artificial red color. (This crab stick in the above photo was colored with lycopene. At least, that's what the package says.) Anyways, I bought some newly harvested onions last weekend to try this onion dressing recipe (Japanese) I had found on the net recently. It sounds like using newly harvested onions makes a big difference for this recipe, so I bought four of them. Actually I didn't need that many, but it was four-in-one bag deal, so no other choice. This dressing is so good but a little too sweet for me. Next time I'm going to use less sugar. When using as-is, I love it so much with tomatoes, cucumbers and daikon radish. It's very good with seafood/fish-cake products, too, like in the photo above, but I wasn't too impressed when used it with kaibashira (eye of scallop?) and corn. Also, according to many "reports" from the readers of that site, this seems to be a versatile dressing. It must be handy to keep this in the fridge in a big plastic bottle so that I can add different flavors when I use it for different types of salad. I'm looking forward to playing with different ideas. Maybe herbs or sesame paste, soy sauce... even mustard or wasabi?... ;) Categories: Western-inspired, Japanese

Carrot Dressing

Green Salad with Carrot Dressing Pretty color, isn’t it? This is the dressing I made today. It’s carrot dressing. I bought a couple of carrots today to make a carrot cake, but I found myself too tired after I came back from shopping. So I went for something a lot easier and probably healthier (because I was going to give my carrot cake a thick cream cheese frosting). I started with a Japanese recipe I found on the net, and the ingredients were grated carrots, grated onion, grated garlic, salad oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and sugar. But I found it too sour, so as usual, I added some twists of my own. I added soy sauce, olive oil, sherry, more sugar and even finely chopped pine nuts (leftover from my previous basil pesto attempt). Perhaps I added too many ingredients… I think they pretty much hid the natural sweetness of the carrots. But the dressing tasted good with these cucumbers and lettuce, and even better when used as a sauce for fish meuniere. :) Sorry, I forgot to take a shot of the meuniere... BTW, some of you might be interested in this… I passed the test that I took about a month ago. Yay! Categories: Western-inspired

Green Blog Project - Caprese-style Salad -

Mozzarella & Tomato Salad with Pan-fried Gnocchi and Basil Pesto Ever since I read the post about Green Blog Project by L.G. of Ginger and Mango, I had been looking forward to posting an entry for it. It's such a lovely project of growing something in your own garden, making a dish using it as a main ingredient, and posting about it on your blog with the recipe. And finally, the day has come. Here is my entry – Mozzarella and Tomato Salad with Pan-fried Gnocchi and Basil Pesto!! And this basil pesto was, of course, made with the basil from my balcony garden. :D This morning I picked almost all the leaves on my little basil plants. Actually my original plan was making basil pesto and slathering it on fish fillet to grill… well, until I stumbled upon this Japanese site last night. Looking at this beautiful color combination of red, white and green, I just HAD TO jump on this idea and try it out myself. To make basil pesto, I chose this Fresh Basil Pesto recipe on Simply Recipes. But my basil harvest was much less than 2 cups, and the amount of pine nuts and grated cheese left in my kitchen was very limited, so I ended up making my pesto with these: Fresh Basil Pesto (obachan's version) -- Ingredients -- Apx. 1C fresh basil leaves 20 g grated cheese 1/4 C olive oil 15 g pine nuts 2 medium-sized garlic cloves, minced Salt and black pepper to taste Unfortunately my cheap electric blender could not handle such a small amount of ingredients... I had to rely on my good old mortar and pestle again. :O Making pesto with these old-fashioned tools was some work, let me tell you. Now, for the gnocchi, I was going to follow the pan-fried gnocchi recipe on the above-mentioned Japanese site. But since the dough turned out too mushy and sticky (I wonder why), I needed to add much more flour than the original recipe called for. So what I did was more like this: Pan-fried Gnocchi (obachan's version) -- Ingredients -- 2 potatoes (150 g) 4 to 5 Tbsp flour 1/2 egg, beaten 2 tsp basil pesto Salt and black pepper to taste I boiled and mashed potatoes, and added basil pesto, salt, pepper, egg and flour. Then I rolled out the gnocchi dough, cut out small round pieces using a cookie cutter, and pan-fried them with olive oil. After all the gnocchi were done, I placed them on a white plate with mozzarella cheese and cherry tomato slices and topped them with my home-made basil pesto. It was such a shame that I was too hungry to be more artistic. Now looking at these photos, I think I should have shown more olive oil on this white plate. But such a thought didn’t come to my mind then. As soon as I took these two shots of the salad, I just dug in. Oh, this salad was soooooooo good! Today’s lunch with this Caprese-style salad was definitely one of my best Sunday lunches. What I had read was right. The combination of tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, olive oil and garlic is simply divine! And the basil-pesto-mixed gnocchi were really delicious! So after lunch, I happily started working on this entry for the GBP. Then, when I tried to upload the photos, I realized for the first time that I forgot something important: I forgot to take a photo of my basil before making the pesto!! :O AHHHHH!!! There was nothing else I could do but to take this shot of my naked basil plants. I hope this photo meets the criteria of the GBP. Is this OK, LG? Categories: Western-inspired

Mizuna and Sasami Salad

Mizuna and Shredded Chicken Breast Fillet Salad My first harvest of mizuna turned into this salad today. Compared to the mizuna I see at stores, mine is a lot softer and the color is much lighter. The mizuna and shredded chicken was tossed with wasabi-mayonnaise this time. It was one of a variety of mayonnaise dressings said to be good for mizuna salad. Other than the wasabi version, I saw mustard-mayonnaise, ponzu-mayonnaise, soy sauce-mayonnaise, sesame-mayonnaise, tofu-mayonnaise and mentaiko-mayonnaise, etc, etc… Wow! :D Categories: Western-inspired

Because I Couldn't Find a Ripe Avocado...

Soybean Tomato Cucumber and Shiso Salad To be perfectly honest, what I really wanted tonight was avocado and shrimp salad. But I couldn't find a ripe avocado, so I changed my mind and made this salad for my late night supper. After supper, I found a recipe for honey ginger dressing on the net. Now I'm curious -- really curious. Maybe tomorrow... ;) Categories: Western-inspired

More Mizuna (Potherb Mustard) Dishes

Mizuna no Shiraae Another dish with mizuna (potherb mustard). If you are looking for a Japanese vegetarian recipe, this might do. It’s called shiraae (salad with tofu dressing), one of Japanese traditional salad dishes. This time I used potherb mustard, but it can be replaced with spinach or other greens. With some exceptions, the veggies used for shiraae are usually blanched briefly. Mizuna no Shiraae Ingredients (For 2 to 3 servings) 2 bunches…..potherb mustard (or spinach) 1/4 carrot A little bean sprouts 1/2 tofu (=150 to 170 g) 1 Tbsp….miso 1 Tbsp….sugar 1 Tbsp….soy sauce 1 Tbsp…white sesame seeds + a pinch optional: (1 Tbsp...dashi stock or a dash of instant dashi powder) (2 teasp...sake) * Amount of seasonings to be adjusted according to the type of tofu and vegetables used. If dashi is not available, it can be omitted. Drain tofu well. I usually wrap it with a kitchen paper, place something flat (like a plate) on top, put a small bowl filled with water on it and leave for about 10 minutes. If in a hurry, you can crush tofu, wrap with a kitchen paper and microwave for a few minutes. Cut carrot into apx. 1.5-inch-long thin strips. Blanch mizuna and the carrot briefly and cool in (ice) water. Drain well. Wash bean sprouts and drain. Cut mizuna and sprouts into apx. 1.5 inch long. Grind white sesame seeds with sesame grinder. (Either mortar-and-pestle or plastic sesame seed grinder is fine.) Mix ground sesame seeds, miso, sugar, soy sauce, (dashi & sake) and coarsely mashed tofu until well blended. (If no sesame grinder is available, microwave sesame seeds about 30 seconds, wrap with plastic wrap and roll a bottle or rolling pin over them. * Add the vegetables into the dressing and mix. Serve with a pinch of sesame seeds sprinkled on top. There are many shiraae recipes, but I usually start with 1 Tbsp of each seasonings, as in the recipe above, and make last-minute adjustments according to the taste of the vegetables used, or the type of tofu used (and how well it was drained), etc. Also tried mizuna stir-fry for lunch yesterday. Ingredients: mizuna, sausage and shiitake mushrooms. Seasonings: sesame oil, soy sauce, sake, salt and pepper. A dash of lemon at the end. Though the taste was just so-so, I loved the crispiness of mizuna VERY much. (Actually I overdid it a little.) I think I love this vegetable the best when it's stir-fried : ) * This idea was originally introduced in a TV-show.

Healthy Present!

Greens from My Boss's Neighbor　--- Thanks! :D When I was about to leave the office after work yesterday afternoon, my boss’s neighbor dropped by. He gave us loads of fresh green vegetables: mizuna (potherb mustard or California peppergrass) and spinach! I was really happy, but I wasn’t sure what I should use mizuna for. When I came back to my apartment, I met the lady living downstairs. I gave her half of the greens and she was totally delighted. (So what’s in the pic is half of the greens he gave me.) Back in my room, I googled for a while to find a good way to use the mizuna. This green vegetable is commonly used for nabe (hotpot dish) in winter, but it’s still too hot for that. Salad seemed like a better idea, so I picked a salad recipe with an interesting dressing. Here! The greens turned into these dishes. Spinach Cheese Omelet Oh, this was heavenly :) Sorry, I'm a ketchup freak. Mizuna Salad with White Fish and Parmesan Cheese Though the recipe I found on the net used raw mizuna, I softened mine by powering hot water all over. The good thing about this vegetable is that its stems stay very crispy even after being heated. But mizuna has a slight bitterness and that's why I was not too crazy about this vegetable. The ingredients for the dressing was: sesame oil, vinegar, miso, soy sauce and sesame seeds. The white fish was sea bream (raw). And the cheese sprinkled on top gave this dish a little Western touch, which was pretty good. The slight bitterness of mizuna didn't bother me at all : ) I still have some of the greens left… I boiled and froze the spinach, but I don’t think that works for the other one. Hmmm... I'm gonna have to look for a few more mizuna recipes...

Peach & Cottage Cheese Salad

Peach & Cottage Cheese Salad When I posted about my ruby red grapefruit & cottage cheese salad, carlyn gave me an idea, in her comment, of making the same kind of salad with peach. So I tried it out for my brunch this morning. I think the lemon juice really played an important role in this otherwise just-sweet dressing. The overall sweetness with the soft texture of ripe peach gently woke up my sleepy stomach and it was a nice way to start the day. :)

Ruby Red Grapefruit & Cottage Cheese Salad

Ruby Red Grapefruit and Cottage Cheese Salad Boy, it’s hot…..!! I hate coming back to my room which I won’t hesitate to call “the most unpleasant sauna on the face of the earth.” The stress I feel the moment I open the door must be affecting my mental health in a very negative way. To cope with it, I guess I need to feed myself with something refreshing and nutritious. So here it is. Ruby Red Grapefruit and Cottage Cheese Salad. For the dressing, I mixed juice of the ruby red grapefruit, olive oil and yogurt, then seasoned with a little sugar and herb salt. This idea was, again, from a Japanese website, but I didn’t follow the recipe, as usual. (I almost doubled the amount of the grapefruit juice.) Yes, the salad was very light-tasting and refreshing. I liked the way the dressing complemented the taste of cottage cheese. I finished one bowl real quick and wanted more. Oh well, why not? This is one of those GUILT-FREE dishes, isn't it? : )

108 Gods in Salad

Rice Salad Just like many other Japanese people, I LOVE RICE. Just like many other Japanese people, I feel very attached to rice and have a special feeling towards it. When I was a kid, my grandma did not get mad at me when I couldn’t finish the meat/vegetable on my dish, but she never let me leave the table with any rice left in my bowl. She strictly made me finish the rice, literally all --- without leaving any single grain in the bowl. According to her, there were gods (or spirits of nature) living in rice, so we should never throw them away. She said, “If you throw away rice, you’ll get punished and be blinded.” I wondered why the spirits were only living in rice and not in other foods, but I couldn’t ask her. Anyway, that kind of childhood experience sort of molded my view on rice, and I had eaten rice only in conventional ways until I went to the U.S. (Of course I didn't believe that eating it in an untraditional way would make the Gods angry. It was more like --- to me, rice was just something different from other grains and beans.) After my stay there, I got very flexible about how I eat rice. I even tried chocolate rice pudding and I liked it. But still, I didn’t care for the idea of using the sticky short-grain rice in salad very much. Then about one year ago, I started bringing back some leftover rice from where I work at night. There they mix some barley when cooking rice. This barley-mixed rice tastes OK when it’s warm, but it doesn’t smell or taste good when I eat it at home after work. I asked around for ideas to use the cold and smelly barley-mixed rice, and someone gave me an idea of making rice salad with it. (I can't remember exactly who it was. Sorry!) This time it sounded OK to me, because with the barley mixed, the rice wasn’t as sticky as regular cooked rice. So I gave it a try, and I loved it!! Now this is one of my favorites. Corns and soy beans are the key ingredients here; they HAVE TO be in my rice salad. These give some sweetness that goes very well with the sour dressing of olive oil and vinegar. And most important: the finely cut green perilla leaves on top. The flavor from this herb makes the salad something really special! I'm sure of one thing, though. My grandma would've never ever approved of this.