Mt. Myogi Hike November 8, 2009

In June we went an a sort of “farewell hike” with some of our friends who were leaving Gunma. We went to Mt. Myogi, which is one of the three important mountains of Gunma (along with Mt. Haruna and Mt. Akagi). As you can see, the trail is quite challenging, but the views are great. We had a great hike, and managed to avoid any rain. After the hike we enjoyed some strawberry soft cream and went to a nearby onsen for a relaxing post-hike soak. To see more pictures from our hike, check out Alex’s photoblog.

Torikomachi October 18, 2009

Torikomachi’s jidori tsukune

Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted any local restaurant reviews and I’ve been thinking it’s high time. So let’s take a look at Torikomachi, my favorite neighborhood spot for yakitori. You can find Torikomachi just south of Maebashi Station on the same road that leads to Keyaki Walk (the Kinokuniya entrance). Although you can find Torikomachi in Tokyo and other cities around Japan, the sign next to the grill says that they use Joshu jidori (Gunma-raised free-range chickens).

Torikomachi’s bar

If you come with a group you can get a table, but on busy nights, singles and couples usually sit at the bar. If you sit on the far side from the door you can watch the grill-master at work.

If you’re feeling hungry and not wanting to try picking and choosing from the Japanese-only menu, you can choose one of the two set courses in the back of the menu (for two). The “Ume” course includes chopped cabbage, jidori tsukune, one sumi-yaki chicken half to share, yaki-onigiri, tebasaki to yasai nikomi and vanilla ice cream or chicken soup. The “Take” course is all of the same items, except that you get an order of the hitsumabushi rice dish instead of the yaki-onigiri. The set courses are a good variety, but it’s certainly a lot of food, so if you’re not starving, you might want to put together your own selection from the menu.

If you’re ordering a-la-carte, here’s what I’d recommend: first thing after you sit down, order one stick of the jidori tsukune (above) for each person in your group. The jidori tsukune is basically a chicken meatball that’s been slowly grilled and then served with a sweet soy sauce and a raw egg yolk that you can use to paint on another layer of richness on top of the sauce. It’s like a yakitori take on “oyako.”

Sumi-yaki jidori half

While you’re at it, order the sumi-yaki jidori half or whole. Order it right when you arrive because it takes about 30 or 40 minutes to cook. This is one of the best roast chickens that I’ve ever had. It’s slow-grilled over charcoal. The skin is delightfully crispy and seasoned with salt and garlic and the meat is nicely flavorful.

From the grill (clockwise from top left): yaki-onigiri, chicken liver, hanpen-cheese, aspara-maki

After you order your sumi-yaki chicken you have some time to check out the rest of the menu. There is a great selection of yakitori and kushi-yaki skewers. In addition to the usual chicken or negima skewers, don’t overlook the sunagimo (gizzards) and liver, which are nicely browned and smoky tasting around the edges and tender in the center. Mmm… I also like the hampen-cheese skewers (steamed fish cake with melted cheese), aspara-maki, and meat-stuffed shiitake mushrooms. There’s also a full-page list of flavored tsukune, but I think that the classic jidori tsukune is the best.

The yaki-onigiri is browned and crunchy on the outside and topped with a salty-sweet sauce. The charcoal grill gives it a little smoky flavor too.  You might be thinking, “oh, it’s just a grilled rice ball,” but trust me, it’s a darn good grilled rice ball.

ume-jiso sasami

One of the yakitori items that you shouldn’t miss is the sasami. These are chunks of the chicken tender that are seared on the outside but rare in the middle. They’re juicy and delicious. My favorite is ume-jiso sasami.

close-up view of ume-jiso sasami

Side-dishes (clockwise from top left): tebasaki to yasai nikomi, marinated okra (otoshi), hitsumabushi , torikomachi salad

Finally, why not try some delicious side dishes? You will get an otoshi (starter) when you sit down: it’s a small side dish of vegetables or sometimes spicy konnyaku. The best side dish (I think so anyways) is the tebasaki to yasai nikomi. It’s a stew made with long-simmered chicken wings in a miso broth with vegetables. The chicken wings are so tender that the cartilage is like gelatin and the broth is super thick and rich. It’s fantastic! The torikomachi salad is made with slices of barely seared chicken with Italian dressing. It’s pretty good, and when you’re eating so much chicken it’s nice to have some greens. If you didn’t get the yaki-onigiri and you’re craving some rice, the hitsumabushi is made with crispy chicken skin, slices of chicken, takuan, green onions and chile threads. First you stir it up and eat some, then you can pour the hot chicken broth on top and eat it like rice porridge.

Torikomachi is open every day except Sunday. There is another Gunma location in Isesaki.

Shiso Juice August 5, 2009

shiso juice

After making ume jam last month, I got caught up in what I call “the cycle of gifting.” You see, a gift isn’t just a gift in Japan. Often, there is an unspoken obligation to reciprocate with another “return gift,” usually worth about half the value of the previous one. Depending on the manners of the parties involved, this can develop into a long series of exchanges.

So after I gave Mr. Y two jars of jam made from his ume, he brought me some homegrown plums as a return gift. Unfortunately, I was on vacation that day, so I got some frantic calls from my supervisor wondering when I would be back and where was a good place to leave the plums. In the end it was decided that a bag of immaculately ripe plums was not going to be edible after three days of Japanese summer heat, so I imagine they were passed around the staff room or met some other delicious demise. (I took the call at a rather noisy train station, so I actually thought he said “a plant” not “some plums” so I was really surprised when they told me they’d been eaten).

Feeling guilty for causing stress to my supervisor and Mr. Y over my absence, I made sure to bring them both some dadacha-mame omiyage from my trip to Yamagata. Omiyage is another longstanding gift-giving tradition where you bring your coworkers a small edible treat from wherever you’ve just returned from. This has led to a profusion of mediocre individually-wrapped cakes in pretty boxes from every town in Japan, but there are some good ones out there if you can get some advice from local folks. For example, this dadacha-mame cake was quite tasty.

dadacha mame

In return for the omiyage (a gift with so little value it never obliges a return gift), Mr. Y brought me a bottle of his wife’s homemade shiso juice. “It’s very healthy,” he told me. You just mix the concentrated juice with some water and enjoy. The resulting drink is a beautiful ruby pink and tastes refreshing and summery. It’s also a good way to use up the forest of aka-jiso (red shiso) that many people grow to make umeboshi with if there’s a bad ume harvest like this year.

I enjoyed this new taste so I asked for the recipe for the juice. A search online produced a few alternative recipes too. Since aka-jiso grows like a weed here and it’s used in great quantities for making umeboshi, it’s very cheap—a big bunch is typically only 100 yen or so. Following the recipe, I stemmed and washed the leaves and boiled them in 2 liters of water (I had to split the recipe into two pots since even my biggest pot can’t accommodate 2 liters of water and 2 bunches of shiso leaves). The leaves blanched from maroon to green in the water’s heat and the liquid turned a murky purple hue (dried splashes turned a bright violet, but in the pot it wasn’t very appealing). I stirred in a teaspoon of citric acid, and the color instantly brightened to a lovely deep pink. Finally, I was about to add the sugar and citric acid when I took a look at the 1-kilo bag of sugar in my hand. I couldn’t bring myself to use the whole bag, so I quickly reduced the amount of sugar that I’d use by 30%. That still meant that my “healthy drink” had almost the same amount of sugar as my other favorite cold beverage (which has earned me the nickname Coca-Lora).

I bottled up the juice into two 1-liter jars (which are also great for iced tea and mugi-cha, another delicious summertime drink). If you take a look at the top photo you can see my favorite storage jar. I love that it’s Pyrex, so I can fill it up with hot liquids or brew tea right in it and that there’s no handles or hardware to catch nasties in the sink or get rusty. What a great design, and it was only 500 yen. I think everyone could use one of these. The last surprise was that the finished juice was significantly more than two liters, so some of the liquid must have come from the shiso itself.

After we’d finished drinking most of the first batch, I thought I’d try again to make a more healthful version. I mixed up the juice (this time just a half batch to save room in the fridge) and slowly tinkered with the ratio of sugar and citric acid until I was satisfied with the flavor. The final amount was 225 grams of sugar and 1 1/2 teaspoons of citric acid. I’m not sure if it’s really healthier or if I’m just diluting it less when I serve it, but it’s a change that I can feel good about at least.

To serve the shiso juice, you just dilute the concentrate with 1 or 2 parts water. Mixing it with club soda instead makes a refreshing summer sparkler, and the soda somehow gives the drink a more berrylike flavor than water alone.

aka-jiso

Shiso Juice

1 big bunch aka-jiso (red shiso) leaves
1 liter water
pinch salt
225 grams sugar or honey
1 1/2 teaspoons citric acid

Your bunch of shiso should be quite large, about 350 to 500 grams. Remove and discard the large, woody stems (the remaining leaves should weigh at least 200 grams). Put the leaves in a large bowl, bucket, or sink, and wash them thoroughly with cold water. Bring one liter of water to a boil. Put the shiso leaves and water in a large pot and boil them together for about 10 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the leaves steep in the hot water for at least 10 minutes more (the longer you wait, the more intense the color will be). Stir in the citric acid and sugar. Strain the juice into jars, squeezing the leaves to extract as much of the juice as you can. The juice can be stored in the refrigerator for several months, if it lasts that long.

To serve, mix with water or club soda and drink chilled.

Ume mania! July 25, 2009

This year, the rainy season seemed to start pretty early this year. The clouds and drizzling rain tend to make me think of ume, which comes into season during the rainy season. Remembering all the good stuff that I made from ume last year, I couldn’t wait for the harvest. At first, the ume are small and green, and they are imported from the southern parts of the country. Of course, Gunma has plenty of ume trees, especially around Mount Haruna, so I waited.

Early June became late June. “The time is right,” I thought. I asked Mr. Y., who had brought a crateful of his own ume to school to share with the teachers if he would have them this year as well. “Of course, I always have too many so I will give them to you. You know, young people these days don’t know what to do with ume so it’s so nice to see someone your age making ume-shu and ume jam,” he told me in return. But being the tennis coach means that Mr. Y. doesn’t have much time off on the weekends to harvest 20 ume trees. By the time term exams rolled around, it was pretty late in the season. I was opening the last jar of last year’s jam and really looking forward to having more.

The Monday after exams started, Mr. Y. brought the ume. It wasn’t the usual crate though, it was just a small box. “These are for you,” he told me. “Every year, I harvest 300 kilograms of ume. It’s so hard, it takes all day. But this year, it only took 10 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like this.” I was really touched that he had saved some of his harvest for me even though it was much smaller than usual.

It looked like one or two kilos. They were quite ripe, but that’s just fine for jam. I had dinner plans already that night, so I decided I would make the jam the next day. Some recipes say that you should soak the ume for up to a day for “aku-nuki,” that is, to remove the harsh flavor of the underripe fruit. I also figured that being submerged in water would keep the oxygen off of the fruit and slow its ripening. I was wrong. By the time I was ready to make the jam, the fruit could barely keep itself together. It seemed like the ripening had accelerated and the fruit was so soft it fell apart if I touched it too hard. I got out the paring knife and trimmed off the bad spots. By the time I was done, I barely had 500 grams of Mr. Y.’s precious fruit. “Well I can’t just waste it,” I thought, so I got out my pot and made the world’s most pathetically small batch of jam. In the end I had one jar of ume-shiso jam to put up and another third of a cup that went into the fridge.

The next day, I was on a mission. I was going to find ume to finish my preservation projects. First I checked at my usual grocery stores, Ito Yokado and Apita. Apita usually has a nice display of ume along with all of the supplies you need for ume-shu, umeboshi, and jam, but alas, they had already packed it away for the season. Next, I rode my bike across town to check at my favorite farm-market, Shoku-no-eki. They had a display for ume, but they were already sold out. I asked a clerk, but she said I might be able to get them the next day between 9 and 9:30, but the ume had been extremely popular lately. Being that I have school from 8:30 to 4:30, that wasn’t going to work out unless I could find a way to sneak out for an hour or two without being noticed. Not a good idea. Almost ready to hang my hat up, I went across the street to the local mega-mart, Besia. Lo and behold, they had ume; imported from Wakayama prefecture and quite ripe, but ume nonetheless. At least I could make some more jam with them. I bought a kilo and a bag full of canning jars.

On the way home, I passed by Fressay, a smaller grocery store that I rarely shop at. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine store, but there’s not one near my house, so I don’t usually think to go there. I remembered that I needed another bag of sugar to make the jam. I went in and thought, “What the heck, I should see if they have any ume here.” I passed by most of the fresh produce displays. Just as I thought, no luck here…. wait a minute… what’s that tucked into the corner next to the refrigerated section? If it wasn’t the last two bags of ume. And not just any ume, but plump, firm, green ume harvested right here in Gunma. Well it was turning into my lucky day. I got my sugar and both bags of ume and was on my way. On a whim I ducked into a small, run-down looking drug store and found the sarashi cloth (traditionally used for many things including straining dashi) that I haven’t been able to find at any of the big markets and chain drug stores. Score 2 for me!

I got home around 7 and I didn’t want these ume to suffer the same fate that the last ones had, so I got to work right away. Clean and soak yellow ume. Take photos. Start cooking yellow-ume jam.  Clean and soak ao-ume. Bottle half of yellow-ume jam. Add shiso and shiso vinegar to remaining jam. Bottle ume-shiso jam. Start cooking ao-ume jam. Pack ume-shu jar with layers of ao-ume and rock sugar. Bottle ao-ume jam. Bottle ao-ume jam. Take more photos. Clean up. It was nearly midnight by the time I’d finished—hot, exhausted, and spattered with jam. Maybe I went overboard buying three kilos of ume, but I’m really looking forward to a year of delicious ume jam and ume-shu.

The next day I took a jar of the yellow ume jam and ume-shiso jam to school for Mr. Y. to thank him for sharing his ume with me. I made up a little white lie that I had mixed the ume he gave me with some from Wakayama so that I could make enough to share. Imagine my surprise when he said, “Really, that’s amazing. I thought they would have all gone bad!”

this year’s finished products: ume-shu, ao-ume jam (green ume jam), ume-shiso jam, and yellow ume jam

recipes: ume jam and ume shiso jam
ume-shu at Blue Lotus

I got a great tip from a former teacher from school the other night while we were talking about my ume projects. She said that you can make umeboshi using any recipe and instead of putting the umeboshi in a large ceramic crock with weights to pickle, you can put them in a zip-top plastic bag and weight that instead. If you eat them quickly you don’t have to sun-dry them, but if you want to keep them for a long time dry them according to your recipe. I’ve never made umeboshi myself, but this sounds like an interesting trick that I might have to try next year.

Early summer’s bounty June 24, 2009

June in Japan: spring turns to summer. The winter wheat turns golden and bows under the weight of the plump heads of grain. The harvested fields are replaced by new-grass-green rice seedlings. The glorious pink azaeleas spill their blossoms onto the pavement below shopfront window boxes. Ajisai (hydrangea), possibly my favorite Japanese blossom, unfurls it’s cheerful pom-poms of color. And welcome too to the rainy season. Everywhere there is color along the ground, but the sky is mostly grey.

The bounty of early summer provides a much needed contrast to June’s drizzly grey skies. In June we say goodbye to the last of the spring vegetables and welcome the early fruits of summer. So what’s in season now? Here’s a sampling of what I bought on the first weekend of June. Almost everything was grown in the city of Maebashi or in Gunma prefecture (except for the citrus, which is from Wakayama prefecture, and the biwa (loquats) from Nagasaki).

Spring fruits and vegetables:
strawberries
kara oranges
ama-natsu oranges
kiwi
biwa (loquats)
spinach
komatsuna
broccoli
gyouja ninniku (I think these are ramps)
radishes
shallots

Summer vegetables:
baby corn
corn
tomatoes
cucumbers
green beans

By last weekend, the citrus and strawberries were finished but the cherries, melons, and eggplants have come into season now. I’ve especially been enjoying delicious watermelons from Ota city in Gunma. I also have some onions, carrots, new potatoes, and daikon that I harvested from the Kobayashi’s organic garden at the sweet potato farm that I’m looking forward to.