Blue Lotus

Spring dinner

Now that spring is here the markets are overflowing with spring vegetables, and although the sight of them should cheer me it usually makes me feel rather guilty. They all look so fresh and pretty, and I know they are tasty, but many of them require a lot of preparation. Bamboo shoots need hours of work, butterbur requires 10 fiddly steps, and everything else needs soaking, parboiling, or other fussy preparation. So I tend to hurry by those edible heralds of spring and head straight for the year-round, fuss-free vegetables.

But when I've got a little extra time to cook dinner I can be easily seduced, and when these greens called out to me, I answered. On the left is kogomi (fiddleheads) and on the right are some rather ratty-looking gyouja-ninniku, which I've never noticed before but looked a lot like ramps. Neither were particularly cheap, but at 130 yen for the kogomi and 300 yen for the gyouja-ninniku (reduced in price because they were a bit old) they weren't prohibitively expensive either. I'd never cooked with either, but I do know that kogomi is one of the few haru no sansai (wild spring vegetables) that don't require a soak in ashes or baking soda or other weird preparation, and as for the gyouja-ninniku, as a reader of food blogs I've been exposed to dozens of posts about ramps, and figured finding a recipe would be no problem. So into my shopping cart they went.

It turns out that kogomi are from the ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris, prized all over the world; recipes abounded in both English and Japanese and the preparation was as easy as I'd hoped. The gyouja-ninniku, however, turned out to be Allium victorialis var. platyphyllum, which are different from Allium tricoccum, or what are called ramps or wild leeks in North America. Thinner bulbs and leaves, and the stalks were purple on only the outer layer, which had to be removed. But otherwise they are quite similar, both popping up for a brief time in the spring and much loved by gourmets, and I decided to go with a western recipe rather than a Japanese one.

Dinner turned out to be a celebration of spring: new potatoes simmered with onions and dashi, fiddleheads sauteed with garlic, and spaghettini with ramps. The recipe for the potatoes is here, and I've just realized that new potatoes contradict what I said above about the difficulty of cooking spring vegetables: they are one of the easiest things in the world to cook, easier even than regular potatoes. So thank goodness for new potatoes.

The pasta was based on the recipe described in this Gourmet article, which is actually more of a description than a recipe. I didn't blister the whites because they seem much more delicate than the more bulbous ramp whites, and I added a pinch of red pepper flakes at the beginning and some of the pasta water at the end. The bread crumbs were panko that I'd toasted with olive oil, and the cheese was grana padano. And normally when I read a description like I've just given, of all the substitutions and changes someone has made to a recipe (the comments that go with Epicurious.com recipes are full of hilarious examples), I imagine the results were awful, but this was delicious.

The gyouja-ninniku didn't have any of the earthiness that ramps are said to have, and tasted like a mild version of nira (garlic chives). I'd like to try this again if I can find fresher examples, and am curious to see how they're prepared in Japan.

The fiddleheads were parboiled and sauteed in olive oil and butter with garlic and parsley, flavoured simply with salt and pepper. They were good and had a wonderful crunch, but tasted incredibly mild, with none of the bitterness I'd expected. I actually wish there was a little bitterness too them, or some earthiness or something (this has to be the first time I've wished a vegetable was more bitter). Obviously the parboiling had been unnecessary, so I'll try these again with a different preparation to see if I can get more flavour out of them.

So what do you do with spring vegetables?

Mentaiko

Mentaiko (polluck or cod roe preserved with salt and red pepper, often called "spicy cod roe" in English) is one of my favourite foods in the world, but we don't eat if often because it's expensive. Or at least the good stuff is expensive, but as I've discovered the cheap stuff is cheap for a reason and just not worth buying. And then there's the really good stuff, mentaiko so rare you can't buy it in stores: you have to buy it where it's made, or by mail order, or have a very kind person send it to you as a present. Which is how we got this stuff:

It arrived in a refrigerated delivery truck, shipped from Hakata (a city in southern Japan famous for its mentaiko) inside two boxes. The inner box is meant to look like the wooden container mentaiko used to be sold in, and was actually reinforced on the inside with real wood. Typical Japanese packaging, with incredible attention to detail but rather excessive (and a real bitch to tear apart for recycling).

Inside were seven sacs of roe (you can only see six here because I'd already taken one out for sampling). These were bigger and more beautiful than anything I've ever bought, and according to the package made without artificial colouring (cheaper mentaiko is often dyed red).

There's a lot you can do with mentaiko, but the best thing to do with top quality roe is simply serve it over rice. So that was the first thing we did, and it was delicious. It tasted rich without being fishy, had a good level of spice, and although the texture was creamy, each roe managed to hold up well and pop in the mouth. Unfortunately it also had a strong sake odor, which my husband liked but I wasn't crazy about.

The rest of the mentaiko was served in ways that would reduce the sake smell. Here is rice with yakimentaiko (grilled mentaiko), cooked whole and sliced. The picture didn't turn out well so it's hard to see, but it is cooked on the outside and pink in the centre: I love the contrast of the creamy inside and firm outside. Yakimentaiko is also a great filling for onigiri (rice balls), which is exactly what happened to the leftovers from this meal.

My other favourite way to eat mentaiko is as mentaiko spaghetti. This is one of the simplest recipes in the world (although the dish has a million variations, some of them quite complicated), and involves nothing more than scooping out the roe from a sac or two of mentaiko, mixing it with melted butter, and tossing with spaghetti. Toppings, like chiffonade of shiso (perilla), crumbled nori seaweed or the sliced negi (long onion) shown here, are optional.

For a dish with such a short ingredient list, mentaiko spaghetti is ridiculously good. I'd eat it all the time if I could, and next time we're lucky enough to get a box of mentaiko I'm stocking up on spaghetti and butter. Or maybe I should just move to Hakata.

More budget cooking

The first rule of budget cooking is to use what you have, and that means not only using up leftovers but going through your cupboards and using all those canned, jarred and boxed foods you forgot about the instant you put them away three years ago. Well, I'm a champion hoarder and based on a recent kitchen excavation I think we could survive for a month without shopping if we had to. I've already been through some of the stuff and am happy to have re-discovered a few ingredients, like beans (and also sadly discovered, after encountering a batch of beans that just wouldn't soften, that they have a surprisingly short shelf life). Another recent discovery is polenta.

I thought I hated polenta, and the opened and half-used package I found at the back of the cupboard was actually used to make tun cornmeal, a Jamaican dish. But I remembered how much I loved the tun cornmeal and figured Italian style polenta couldn't be much different, and decided to try it.

And now all I can think of is "Polenta, where have you been all my life?" Yup, I really liked it and feel silly for not appreciating it before. What's not to like: it's cheap, healthy, comforting and delicious. It's also still a bit of a mystery food, and I had no idea how to prepare it or incorporate it into a meal, so I just cooked it with some sauteed onions and garlic, turned it out in a baking dish to set (similar to tun cornmeal up to this point), cut it into squares and sauteed it in olive oil, then cut it into strips and placed on top of a salad. Odd? Maybe, but I liked it. I also liked it earlier on, when I ate the leftovers that didn't fit in the baking dish straight from the pot, still hot and porridge-like.

My husband is less keen on it, and I think maybe he felt the same way I felt years ago, the first time I tried polenta and hated it. He did like the crunchy bits on the outside, so there's hope.

The polenta salad was followed by fusilli in tomato sauce. I recently bought a huge amount of pasta from Costco, perhaps a full year's worth, and this fusilli is part of that stash. The sauce started with the leftover sauteed mushrooms and onions from the carbonara I made a few days ago and finished with canned tomatoes from Kaldi (Kaldi has better tomatoes than Costco, usually for 99 yen per can but sometimes on sale for 90 or even 70 yen).

I ended up with plenty of leftover sauce, which means I had leftovers within leftovers. I do like to be frugal and reuse things but there's got to be a point where it just gets unsafe, so I knew I had to use the sauce up quickly.

Which turned out to be easy, seeing as I also had plenty of leftover cooked polenta. I lined the bottom of two oven-proof dishes with the polenta, spooned over the leftover sauce, topped them with some grated grana paderno (also bought at Costco, in a huge block that will likely last half a year) and baked them. Is there any kind of leftover that isn't improved by being covered in cheese and baked? Maybe, but I don't want to know about it.

This was actually a lunch for one, and the other dish is in the fridge waiting for a hungry person to bake it. It's a leftover within a leftover within a leftover, so I hope that person gets hungry soon...

814 Yen

Below is the booty from a recent shopping trip to a local grocery store, one I haven't been to in ages (since they stopped carrying lamb). It's small, not very conveniently located, and has unimpressive produce and seafood sections, but they do have a discount produce shelf that is usually well-stocked with slightly aged or damaged produce. This is one thing I love about Japan: the discount stickers get slapped on for the tiniest of flaws, whereas back home produce practically has to actually be rotting before it gets moved to the discount area.

The discounted produce was two packs of shiitake for 138 yen each, a few of them starting to go soft but still definitely usable; a package of brussels sprouts for 80 yen, slightly brown on the cut portion (but I've never seen the full priced version, usually 400 yen for the same amount, without brown bottoms); shelled soramame (fava or broad beans) for 100 yen, a bit old but no worse than what usually happens to them in my fridge after a few days, and how could I complain when the same amount is usually at least 400 yen (and still and still need to be shelled); and five ponkan (a tasty variety of mandarins) for 200 yen, half the usual price due to one of them being a bit soft (but again, the same condition as it'd be after a bit of time in my fridge, and it turned out to still be totally delicious). The two iwashi (fresh sardines) were not discounted but were going for 79 yen each, a very good price. All went towards that night's dinner (and dessert, in the case of the ponkan), with leftovers.

The soramame and brussels sprouts were parboiled then sauteed in olive oil with garlic and parsley (bought on sale on a previous shopping trip). The iwashi were sliced into boneless fillets then marinated in ponzu, good extra virgin olive oil and black pepper, then served over spinich, mizuna greens and arugula salad (I prepare big batch of mixed salad greens every week or so with whatever greens are the cheapest). I'm not quite sure what to call the fish: ceviche, carpacchio, sashimi? But it was tasty.

The bones and scraps leftover from the iwashi were simmered to make stock. With the addition of a few chunks of meat pried from the bones, the crunchy bottoms of the mizuna greens, a few  wilted cherry tomatoes and some parsley it became a soup. Not a fancy or photogenic one, but tasty.

The mushrooms were sauteed, along with button mushrooms (usually the most expensive mushroom available but bought cheaply on a previous shopping trip), with onion and coppa di parma ham and then mixed with parsley, beaten eggs and grana paderno cheese and tossed with spaghetti. The result was spaghetti carbonara with mushrooms, as tasty as it was cheap to make. Eggs and onions are always budget friendly, and although this dish can be made with very good--and pricey--reggiano parmigiano cheese and prosciutto or pancetta, making it with grana paderno and coppa di parma (parmigiano and prosciutto's poor cousins) makes it much cheaper. Actually, bacon is the most most sensible pancetta substitute, but I had some coppa di parma that I'd stuck in the freezer a while back when it had reached its expiry date. This was a great use for it.

From this meal, I had enough leftovers to make a few more meals: the sauteed vegetables went into the next day's bento (yes, I now make a bento for myself once or twice a week). I had so much of the onion/mushroom/ham mix that went into the pasta that I removed half before adding the eggs; it became the base of a tomato sauce three days later. And the pasta itself made two small servings for lunch the day before that.

Nearly every single thing used to cook this meal was bought on sale or as discounted damaged goods (like the produce); comparison-shopped for the cheapest possible price (like the salt and onions); a leftover or part of a double use item (such as the fish scraps and mizuna bottoms); or something that I'd been tempted to throw away as it was at the end of its life (like the cherry tomaotes and coppa di parma). It was so satisfying to turn it all into a tasty meal, with more to spare. I'm going to have to be quite a bit more frugal in the next few months, but at the same time with Hideaki home to help out around the house I have more time to shop, which means I'll be finding better bargains. It also helps that we have shelves and shelves of hoarded food. I'm totally up for the challenge of budget cooking, and think I may even enjoy it.

Eating out

Some recent meals out:

One thing I like about Japanese supermarkets, or at least suburban and rural ones, is that they usually have a little cafeteria-style seating area where shoppers can grab a quick bite to eat. The food comes from an adjoining bakery or fast food counter, or right from the supermarket shelves, and besides the free water and tea there is hot water for instant noodles and a microwave for heating up bentos or other take-out food. It's not the fanciest setting in the world but it's a nice way to take a break from shopping and have a cheap snack.

On a recent weekend shopping trip I had fries and fried chicken and Hideaki had okonomiyaki (savoury pancake). It looks more like a taco than okonomiyaki, but this is a common way to serve it at yatai (food stalls) and fast food-type places: a thin wrap topped with cabbage and the usual okonomiyaki stuffings, plus in this case squid and mentaiko (spicy polluck roe). Very typical Japanese style junk food, it hit the spot perfectly.

Pasta is enormously popular in Japan, or at least spaghetti is (it's the default pasta, with other shapes being relatively rare). There is authentic Italian, bastardized Italian (like "Napolitan", a ketchup-based sauce), and Japanese style (think soy sauce, umeboshi, fish roe and the like), and I love it all. One thing I don't love is eating it with chopsticks, which is certainly not the norm but sometimes happens, like at Goemon, a chain restaurant that offers nothing but spaghetti. It's not that spaghetti is hard to eat with chopsticks, it's just that with a fork it's so much easier to get the right sauce to pasta ratio in each bite.

Luckily their pasta is good, which makes the chopsticks forgivable. On a recent visit with a friend I had spaghetti with a simple tomato sauce, topped with eggplant, fresh mozzarella and shimeji mushrooms, a very tasty combination. At 1000 yen it's not terribly cheap, at least for a chain, but it comes with a tiny bowl of soup and the quality is high enough to justify the price.

Taishoken is the name that dozens of ramen shops go by, all run by former apprentices (or blatent imitators) of the famed Taishoken Ramen shop in Ikebukuro, which pioneered the tsukemen style of noodles. That's tsukemen above, and it's basicly deconstructed ramen: the noodles are served seperately, to be dipped in the broth. The broth is more strongly flavoured than usual, and the appeal seems to be that the noodles stay firm and chewy. It's also nice in the summer when regular ramen is just too hot to eat.

We have a Taishoken near us, which my husband is pretty happy about. I usually let him go by himself, as I'm not a big fan of tsukemen, but on a recent hot day I consented to a visit. I ordered wantan tsukemen, which came with "wontons" that were closer to suigyoza (boiled dumplings), with lovely thick chewy skins. Tsukemen is not very photogenic, as with no noodles to hold them up most of the toppings sunk to the bottom: aside from the wontons, nori seaweed and naruto (fishcake) visable in the picture above, there was charsiu (bbq pork), ajitsuke tamago (boiled egg flavoured with soy sauce) and menma (bamboo shoots) at the bottom of the bowl. It was good, but mostly because of the wontons: if they just served the wontons without the noodles I'd gladly come again.

This latte art was a completely unexpected treat that brightened my day. It was at Excelsior, a Starbucks style coffee chain, and it was done right in front of me while I waited. I have no idea why: it's just a regular coffee place and I payed the usual 360 yen, and I've certainly never gotten latte art at Excelsior (or any chain cafe) before. Maybe the barista liked me? Anyway, I was thrilled, and almost didn't want to disturb it by drinking it. But I did, and yes, the little little hearts made it more delicious.

Oxtail ragu

Oxtail ragu with fettuccine egg noodles, a recent freezer-cleaning meal. 

I've fallen into the habit of making chicken stock every week or so, which comes in handy for hearty soups that can be made in huge batches and reheated throughout the week. With Hideaki now coming home any time from 7:30 to 10:00 (and that's earlyfor a salaryman in Tokyo) it's really nice to have something in the fridge ready to eat at any time.

At the same time I've been conducting freezer excavations in order to clear up space for future visits to the new Costco in nearby Iruma. I recently found treasure in the form of a small bag of oxtails, so the next time I made chicken stock I also made stock from the oxtails, and then put it aside until I could figure out some way to use it. And a few days later I made one of my nicest cleaning-out-the-freezer dishes ever: the oxtail ragu shown above. I didn't follow a recipe but it was quite similar to the sauce in this recipe, with a few differences as I was starting with already cooked oxtails and some very nice tail stock.

I wonder what other treasures lay buried in my freezer?

Pasta and noodles

Perhaps my favourite category of food, if it can be considered a single category, is noodles and pasta. I love carbs in all forms but noodles are just extra special-- there's something comforting about them, yet the endless ways they can be cooked makes them exciting. I could eat noodles or pasta every day for the rest of my life but with the amazing variety of both the noodles themselves and the sauces (or soups, or toppings) that accompany them, I'd never ever get bored.

Recently I have indeed been eating noodles or pasta every day, or at least almost every day. Mostly it's stuff I've blogged before (like tomato-based sauces or simple spaghetti with eggs) so I don't bother taking a picture, but here are a few I thought I'd share:

This is kamo-nanban soba (soba noodles with duck and long onions), one of my favourite soba dishes. I often order it at soba restaurants but have never made it before as duck can be hard to find and tends to be pricey. But when I saw a single duck breast on sale recently I knew it was time to make my first attempt.

The broth turned out perfectly, with a rich ducky flavour and thick slippery texture. The duck itself was less successful: although I'd sliced the breast thinly, the pieces were rather tough, so I postponed the meal until the next evening. But the long simmer and overnight sit in the fridge that usually manages to tenderize the toughest cut of meat failed to help the duck-- it went from hard and chewy to slightly less hard and stringy-- and almost flavourless to boot. But the broth, having absorbed all of the duck's flavour, was fantastic so I can't complain too much.

I was afraid something like this would happen, as when I was checking out recipes online I noticed that they all called for ai-gamo (which I believe is a kind of hybrid duck), but what I had bought was hon-gamo (true duck). So next time I'll try it with ai-gamo and see if I can't get both tasty broth and tasty duck.

A bit about the name "kamo nanban soba": kamo (or gamo when used in a compound word) means "duck", and nanban means "southern barbarian". I assumed the dish is so named because visiting barbarians (the name nanban was used for foreign traders of entering Japan from the south, especially Southeast Asians and Europeans) introduced the practice of eating duck to the Japanese, to whom meat was officially forbidden until relatively recently. But while searching for a recipe online I discovered one site that claims that negi (long onions) were called "nanba" or "nanban" in the Edo era, and a dish called nanban soba, consisting of negi and soba in hot broth, was popular.

It sounds a bit dubious, since the word "nanban" is already used to name a few dishes originally introduced or inspired by foreigners (like the escovitch-derived nanban-zuke). But then again, the two other "nanban" soba dishes, tori-nanban soba (soba with chicken) and kare-nanban soba (soba with curry broth) are chock-full of negi. So who knows. I'm probably the only one intrigued by food etymology mysteries like this anyway.

Next up is fusilli with asari clams. I believe the classic pastas for vongole sauce are linguine and spaghetti, but somehow I love it with fusilli (heck, I love any sauce with fusilli).

Clams are in season now, and while I love them enough to never tire of them, it's nice to occasionally have a break from my two favourite ways to eat them (which are the pasta above, and steamed with sake). So here is asari udon (udon noodles with asari clams). It is really just udon noodles topped with my regular steamed clams (the clams are steamed in sake, then splashed with soy sauce, a small pat of butter and finely chopped negi) with just a little more liquid than usual. But a small change makes a completely new dish, and now my clam repertoire has expanded.

Three recent dinners

OK, back to food:

A recent dinner consisted of, from bottom left: onsen tamago (egg poached in its shell); okara to kyuuri sarada (tofu lees and cucumber dressed with shiso, ponzu and olive oil); daikon no happa to kawa no itame (sauted daikon leaves and peel with soy sauce and sesame seeds); haru-kyabetsu no katsuobushi-ae (spring cabbage dressed with bonito flakes); komatsuna no nibitashi (komatsuna greens simmered in dashi and soy sauce); daikon to tebamoto no nimono (chicken drumettes and daikon braised with shiitake); mame to shirasu gohan (rice with green peas and baby sardines).

The chicken and daikon dish is delicious and economical, and I was about to share the recipe when I found a very similar one in English on the Kikkoman website. Either wings or drumettes can be used, and the kombu is optional (good additions would be whole shiitake and peeled boiled eggs).

A sale at the meat aisle inspired this man-pleasing dish: double meat curry with butter rice. The rice (Thai in this case, as plain long grain rice is hard to come by in Japan) is flavoured with butter and turmeric, and the curry uses both ground pork and chunks of stewing beef. It is a hybrid curry, half-way between Japanese style and western style: I start off cooking it western style, with the spices added at the beginning, and then finish it with a butter and flour roux to get the properly gloopy texture of a Japanese curry.

Curry is one of those foods that gets better with age, and this stuff kept my husband (and me) happy for half the week.

Here I tried Mark Bittman's recipe for spaghetti with fried eggs-- a fast, cheap and easy cousin of spaghetti carbonara. With a salad of spinach, cherry tomatoes, sauteed mixed mushrooms and toasted pine nuts. This was the first time I've spent longer on making salad than making pasta, but both were very good.

Mentaiko spaghetti

What to do with a large amount of poor-quality mentaiko (spicy cod roe): make mentaiko spaghetti.

I recently bought a tub of very cheap mentaiko because, well, it was very cheap. Turns out it was cheap for a reason, and now I've added mentaiko, and presumably tarako (the non-spicy version), to my list of "you get what you pay for" foods. Cheap mentaiko is artificially coloured (check out the bright red stuff on top of rice in my last post, and the pretty bubblegum hue of the pasta sauce above) and has the wrong balance of salty and spicy-- either too much or too little of either. Worst of all, it lacks the rich creaminess and oceany flavour of good roe.

So my cheap mentaiko was no good over rice, but I figured that when mixed with other ingredients, as in a pasta sauce, it would be fine. Mentaiko spaghetti is a favourite around here, and I usually just make an ultra-simple sauce of melted butter and mentaiko. This time I added the roe to a basic bechamel sauce in the hopes that the extra creaminess would cover the mentaiko's faults. It worked, and topping it with some finely shredded nori seaweed added some of the briny flavour I was missing. And I'm really glad I didn't have to throw away the mentaiko.

Still, I'm not crazy about heavy or creamy sauces, so next time I'll go back to my simple butter sauce and make sure I use good mentaiko to start with.

So what are your ideas for using up poor quality ingredients and other shopping mistakes?

Pot roast

Loin of pork pot-roasted in a tomato red wine sauce, with penne. Based on Mario Batali's Braised Pork in the Black recipe, with extra tomatoes to make a more pasta-friendly sauce. I don't know if it's the recipe, my fantastic cooking skills or the high quality of Japanese pork, but this always turns out so soft and tender. No knife was necessery, and my husband's poor teeth weren't bothered.

Penne alla vodka

A big favourite around here is penne alla vodka, a classic Italian-American pasta that combines a simple tomato cream sauce with vodka, which gives it a subtle kick. It is just lovely and would be on our table a lot more often if I wasn't so cream-phobic. But Hideaki has been requesting it lately, and since he's now sick with a cold I thought that cooking up a batch might have a therapeutic effect.

It seemed to work, although at first I thought he didn't like it. He was eating it so slowly, and when I asked why he said he was eating a single piece at a time, in order for it to last longer. Cute. I just wolfed mine down as usual.

So here is the recipe. The pancetta (or bacon if you live here in Japan where pancetta is a luxury) and red pepper flakes are optional. The cream, vodka and Parmigiano are not.

Penne alla vodka 

• 3 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 150 grams pancetta or bacon, thinly sliced
• 2 to 3 cloves garlic, minced
• pinch of red pepper flakes, or to taste
• 2 400 gram cans whole tomatoes, pureed
• 100 ml vodka
• 250 grams penne
• 150 ml cream
• 2 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
• pinch of salt, or to taste
• 4 Tbsp grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus more for garnish

Heat the olive oil in a large heavy pan, add the pancetta and cook on medium-low heat until lightly browned, about 5 minutes. Remove half of pancetta for garnish.

Add the garlic and red pepper flakes to the pan and saute for 2 minutes over low heat. Carefully pour in the pureed tomatoes and salt to taste, stir and increase the heat to medium. Bring to a boil, add the vodka and let simmer for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the penne in a large pot of salted water. Drain when al dente. Add the cream to the sauce and mix in well, then add the penne and parsley. Bring to a boil and cook over medium-high heat about 5 minutes, or until the sauce is reduced and clings to the pasta. Stir in the Parmigiano and taste sauce, adding salt if necessary.

Spoon onto plates and top with the reserved pancetta and a sprinkle of Parmigiano.

Serves 2 to 3 

Spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce

• Salad of shrimp, broccoli, sweet peppers and edamame dressed in a dressing of ponzu (citrus soy sauce), olive oil, black pepper and sesame seeds
• Crusty bread with extra virgin olive oil
• Spaghetti in fresh tomato sauce with katsuobushi and shiso

The sauce is part of my ongoing experiments with fresh tomatoes, which started here. This time I tried to add a Japanese twist, adding some katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes) leftover from the yakisoba my husband had cooked the day before. I figured the katsuobushi would add a bit of umami as well as a nice smoky flavour, and it did. I liked it so much that I added another pack, and decided to continue the Japanese theme by adding some thinly sliced shiso (perilla, a unique Japanese herb). The shiso didn't add much to the dish at all though, so I think I'll have to try this again with basil. And maybe mozzarella. Expect a recipe soon!

The great tomato sauce cook-off

Inspired by a TV show we saw on Wednesday (NHK's Tameshite Gatten), I conducted a bit of an experiment in the kitchen yesterday. The show was about tomatoes, specifically Japanese tomatoes, and how to cook a good tomato sauce with them. Not a rich meat sauce or arrabiata, but a simple fresh sauce, the kind that is popular in the summer, loved by the Japanese, and very hard to recreate at home. Unlike the restaurant version, the home-cooked version tends to be watery and to lack flavour.

I paid attention from the beginning, since I've always complained about the tomatoes here, much to the surprise of most Japanese: people here are very proud of their toms, especially the momotaro variety. They love the sweetness of these tomatoes, but I find the flavour bland and un-tomatoey, the pinkish colour unappetizing, the texture mealy, and the quality unreliable. Even during peak tomato season there are still duds. Whenever the subject of Japanese tomatoes comes up with my students (more often than you'd think, since food is a perennial favourite topic), you'd think we were each talking about a completely different vegetable. (Or fruit. Depends on your classification system).

Turns out we kind of were. According to the TV show we saw, the typical supermarket Japanese tomato is grown in a greenhouse and picked while still green, which could explain not only the mealiness and blandness, but the fact that they never seem to come into season. What my students are probably talking about is the home-grown version, or the expensive kind that have to be ordered privately (nearly all of my female students are gardeners, and many get their produce delivered from private food co-ops). Roma tomatoes, however, are usually vine-ripened, and although this doesn't necessarily affect the sugar content (tomatoes will continue to ripen and sweeten on the shelf) it does affect the glutamic acid content. Both types of tomatoes were measured, and the vine-ripened romas had a far higher level of the stuff. Which may mean nothing to you, but glutamic acid produces the savoury flavour compound called umami, one of the five basic tastes. Think of it as nature's MSG.

Still, this show claimed to have found a technique to produce a good sauce with typical shelf-ripened Japanese tomatoes. Skeptical, I headed to the supermarket yesterday morning to find tomatoes for a taste test.

Here I should mention that the variety of tomatoes in Japan has improved a bit recently: years ago the only choices were the pink Japanese tomatoes and cherry tomatoes (called mini-tomato). Now you can buy midi-tomato, which are a bit bigger than cherries but taste the same; fruit-tomato, which are extra sweet and very good to eat raw; and roma tomatoes, which are usually called ryouri-yo-tomato or italian-tomato. The selection is still nowhere near as good as back home, but I was confident I would be able to find what I needed.

And I was able to find roma tomatoes. But strangely there were no regular Japanese tomatoes at all. Or perhaps not so strange at all: foods often sell out after being mentioned on health or cooking shows. What I bought instead was koutoudo-tomato (high sugar-content tomatoes), which seemed to be a special variety of momotaro, and were also likely vine-ripened. Both were domestically grown, a bit more expensive than regular tomatoes (and tomatoes are already very pricey here), and were in good condition, although the Japanese tomatoes seemed a bit fresher.

When I got home, I tried both of them raw. The roma was bitter and yucky, which I expected as it's not meant to be eaten raw, and the Japanese tomato was delicious: amazingly sweet and juicy and I was tempted to cancel the sauce cook-off and just make a salad. I finally understood what my students are talking about. This is a tomato that the Japanese can be proud of.

It seemed a little unfair to use these special tomatoes against the romas, but I went ahead anyway. The picture above shows the sauces being made: the Japanese tomatoes on the left, and the roma sauce on the right (the seeds and liquid that were removed are in the bowl at top right, and you can see how omitting them makes much less sauce).

With the romas, I followed the regular technique for a simple fresh tomato sauce: I peeled them, removed their stems, cut them in half and scooped out the seeds and liquid with a spoon. Then I pureed them in a blender and simmered them in a pan for a few minutes, until the sauce was reduced with there was no separation of water and sauce.

The Japanese tomatoes, however, weren't peeled or seeded. Normally the seeds and skin are removed for two reasons: they are bitter and hard, and they make the sauce too watery or cause the sauce to separate. But the show explained that, contrary to popular belief, the seeds don't really contain more water than the flesh (this was measured, with the flesh consisting of 94% water and the seeds 95%, a very small difference indeed). Not only that, but the skin of the Japanese tomato is thinner and softer than other varieties, with the skin and seeds being just as tasty as the flesh (the featured chef even said the seeds were the tastiest part of the tomato). Finally, the skin and seeds contain pectin, which if you've ever made jam you'll know is a gelling agent and would therefore help thicken the sauce and keep it together.

So I simply removed the stem and pureed them, and simmered the sauce in a pan. The show recommended 20 minutes, but it was thick enough in 15 and I thought any more cooking would ruin the fresh flavour.

Both sauces were finished with a pinch of salt and splash of good-quality extra virgin olive oil, with freshly cooked spaghetti added to the pan and mixed up to distribute the sauce evenly.

This is the sauce made from roma tomatoes.

And here is the sauce with the Japanese tomatoes. Although my presentation skills leave much to be desired, you can see that the two sauces look quite similar.

But they couldn't have tasted more different. On the first try, I vastly preferred the Japanese tomatoes. The sweetness was immediately appealing, and it was balanced with a sharp acidity, which I hadn't noticed at all when I tried them raw. The roma sauce didn't have the same big impact, and seemed a bit dull by comparison at first. But after a few more bites, I noticed that what the roma sauce lacked in aggressive sweetness and acidity was made up for by its tomato taste: that summery, viney, slightly bitter flavour that conjured up memories of sitting in the garden on a sunny late-summer day and biting into a just-picked tomato. (Never mind that I don't actually have such memories, since I used to hate raw tomatoes and always shunned the lovely ones my Dad grew. This fake memory just goes to show you how tomatoey this sauce tasted.) And after a few more bites, I noticed this sauce also had a certain hard-to-describe depth of flavour, which must have been the umami from the glutamic acid.

The Japanese tomato sauce I liked less and less. Its initially pleasant sweet and tart flavours intensified until it started to taste like ketchup, with little depth or true tomato flavour.

By themselves, I think both sauces would have been excellent, but trying them together sharply highlighted each sauces strengths and weaknesses. The main drawback to the roma sauce was a slight mushy, mealy texture. This could be due to the quality of the tomatoes, so I'd like to try it again with really good romas. And my tendency to use too much sauce probably contributed to the ketchupy flavours I found with the Japanese tomatoes, and a better sauce/pasta ratio would likely help a lot. So would using regular Japanese tomatoes, which probably have enough sugar already-- the high-sugar variety was likely overkill.

So overall, both Hideaki and I preferred the roma sauce, but also really liked the Japanese tomato sauce. For now I'll make fresh tomato sauce with Japanese tomatoes, unless I can find good romas. And I want to do several more experiments: I still want to try it with regular Japanese tomatoes, not the high-sugar kind. I want to see what happens if I use whole roma tomatoes, without removing the skin and seeds. I want to compare fresh romas to canned. And I want to try mixing romas and Japanese tomatoes, to get a sauce that hopefully highlights the best of both types: sweet, tart, and full of umami and tomato flavour.

Spaghetti alla carbonara con fave

Spaghetti carbonara with fresh fava beans.

This is my usual creamless recipe, with fava beans added to the pasta during the last few minutes of boiling. Soramame (what favas are called in Japan) season is nearly over here so I'm enjoying them while they last. Last year I ran out of ideas and kind of got sick of soramame, but after recently discovering how good they are with pasta I don't think there's any danger of fava bean burn out.

Pasta primavera

Pasta primavera (spring pasta) with fresh green peas, snow peas, asparagus and fava beans, and topped with parsley, toasted pine nuts and Parmigiano. Made with pink and white bunny shaped pasta, this was just a few days too late for Easter, but that's OK. This was a fantastic dish no matter what day it is, and I'll be sure to try it again.

This is the first time I've done pasta primavera. I've always been a bit confused by this popular pasta, since it is supposed to be made with spring vegetables but is always full of stuff like zucchini, tomatoes and broccoli. Those are definitely not spring vegetables, and since I'm not a zucchini fan I've never bothered with the dish.

Then I found this cute pasta and when trying to think of a good sauce to go with it, pasta primavera was all I could come up with. So I figured that since the markets are full of beautiful spring produce, I'd do an all-spring version. Shucking the peas and fava beans was a bit of a chore, and parboiling and cooling everything separately was a wee pain in the butt, but it was so worth it. It turned out so well that I have no idea at all why anyone would ever consider adding zucchini to it. Unless it was summer and the garden was overflowing with the stuff, but then why call it "pasta primavera"?

See what I mean about confusing? And I haven't even mentioned the pine nut dilemma (I mean, what season are pine nuts anyway?).