Learning to Cook

Yesterday Shane's (Credo Shane) friend Teisuke brought over Shane's stuff which he had left here last year so I went out to buy a few of the basic things needed to cook Japanese food. There's basically a handful of ingredients that are widely used: Sake, Mirin (sweet Sake), Soy sauce, Miso (Soybean paste), dashi soup stock, sugar, salt (pepper not so much). I still haven't bought Miso and although there are several ways to make dashi soup stock I chose the simplest which is soaking dried Shiitake mushrooms. I also got some four and breadcrumbs so I can give stuff like tempura and tonkatsu a try. At some point I also found a recipe for noodles but for now there is one dish I'm focusing on.

In Japanese cuisine geographically speaking there is a traditional practice to cooking meals that include ingredients which are in season. This is a very good practice for a few reasons, ingredients that are in season are fresher, tastier and in abundance which also makes them cheaper. So fresh, tasty, cheap food (or which ever order you prefer) sounds might good to me! The dish that I first want to accomplish is Takenoko Gohan, which is basically Bamboo shoots in rice. The bamboo needs to be prepared a few hours or even a day before it is used so from here I'll explain my cooking adventure this morning.

Since the bamboo shoots takes the longest cooking time I started them first. The bamboo section that is used for this dish is layered like an onion. What you want to do is wash the whole thing, then make a lengthwise cut about half the radius of the whole, and subsequently peal those layers away. This goes into a saucepan, filled with enough water to cover the whole, along with rice bran (nuka) and two pieces of small chili (the first time around I'm not using chili). Bring this to a boil and then turn down the heat to a simmer for about 40-50 minutes depending on the thickness, ideally you want to be able to easily pierce the bamboo with a skewer. I did this and put the rice (2 cups) to cook in the machine.

Bamboo actually finished before the rice so I turned off the heat and let it cool down by itself. When the rice was nearing completion I started on my Bacon-Omelette. Simple dish that I do all the time with bacon, ham, almost anything works with omelette. Three small strips of bacon and 3 eggs (quite high fat content be careful, its about 15-20 grams of fat total), beat the eggs seperately and heat some oil in a pan, mediumish heat. Put the bacon in first by itself, let it absorb some oil and just quickly saute, if it's thin this won't take more than a minute. Once it looks thoroughly cooked pour the beaten egg over the top, salt and pepper to taste and turn down the heat, Side note, the smaller the pan, the thicker the result and longer cooking time. I love half to one inch thick omelettes so I used a smaller pan. If it's still runny on the top but cooked down the bottom flip it but make sure the uncooked stuff doesn't go everywhere. Once that and the rice was done, pour the pan contents onto about half the rice serving and EAT :D At this point I didn't have miso soup but it would go great with some soup.

Now notice that one half of the rice is still in the machine, what to do....Onigiri baby! One cup of rice will make 3 small onigiri, I didn't think about this before hand so I didn't bring a stuffing with me but its trivial to buy some tuna/salmon in a can, or some umeboshi (I'll try this soon). Wet hands and rub in some salt before you pluck the rice out, this stops rice from sticking to your hand, cools your hands from the hot rice, salt helps sterilize/preserve the rice and adds flavour. Basically you can use what ever technique works for you, but I clenched my 4 fingers together and used the thumb to oppose them, in a kind of V formation. One hand goes ontop of the other, the underhand controls the thickness of the onigiri, whereas the overhand molds it to shape. The trick for me to getting the right shape was to shuffle it around alot and subtly mold it each time. After molding I wrapped some Onigiri seaweed around the underside and folded the excess to size. By the time I ate them (lunchtime) the moisture from the rice soaked up seaweed flavour so even though they had no filling they were the best! I stored my Onigiri in the fridge and then drained my bamboo shoot. Changed the water, stripped back a few more layers and put it in the fridge too.

All in all I made breakfast and lunch for about 300 ish yen. Another side note, RICE IS SO EXPENSIVE. Japan doesn't allow rice importation to protect domestic production. So I paid basically $25 for 5kg, and that's the cheapest I found...I'll let you all know how my bamboo rice goes later :)