Obentou - a mistery food for us, normal life for japanese people

The obentou (in japanese 弁当) is what we would translate as packed food, but in asian cultures, and specially Japan, it has become not just part of the culture, but also has reached quite an important status.

And that's because nowadays, how's your packed lunch reflects your family/social life, and you can tell a lot just by being able to see "how good is someone's bentou". In school it may have a lot of meaning around your family status, and when you work it usually reflects your marital life.

We wouldn't, in most cases, take all this myths surrounding bentou so seriously, but it still an important point in Japan.

A bentou normally consists of:
- White rice or substitute (if not rice it may be noodles, but it will be rice 80% of the time)
- Main dish, normally fish or meat
- 2-3 side dishes
- Decoration, a lot of decoration. Most of the time decoration is also made with food, so it may be included in some of the other groups.
- Depending on how complete you want your bentou to be, you can also plan desserts.

This topic can really go really really long, so for today we'll just show some pictures. Theses ones are taken from the japanese site http://www.yoppi.ne.jp , I hope I can detail you guys some of them afterwards! :)

This first bentou is soccer-themed. As you can see, there are flags and rice balls that mimic real soccer objects. This bentou would consist of rice, mini-cheese hamburguers, a little bit of vegetables and so, and a little bit of fruit .. This is what children get from their mums from time to time :P---

This would be more like a traditional-adult type of bentou. The one that you typically would bring to work. You can clearly see the different parts, rice, meat (tonkatsu in this case), and side dishes with a little bit of fruit. Quite a normal one! :)

Ok, the last one I'm showing today is from the blog http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/kasumin_yorosiku which has a quite huge amount of bentou recipes and photos, this girl sure is great! It is quite difficult to see this kind of staff in real life, but if you have the time you can try to make something similar. Ingredients are not very difficult to find, rice, vegetables, meat balls and some colouring natural ingredients for getting your cooked rice some colour! And some weed also for the faces! Gotta try this some time, mmm....

See ya' all in next post!

Japanese Chicken Curry

Here it is one of the most commonly used recipe in Japan, japanese curry. As it can be prepared in multiple ways, we are now going to use the chicken curry version. Be aware that you may need some japanese ingredients not available in a normal supermarket but just in specialized stores!

In normal curry you would use red meat and a lot of ingredients, that's what most people think. In this version, using chicken, you'll get a delicious, healthy and really cheap typical japanese dish!

*Note: Taken from the original recipe by funya on the japanese site cookpad.com

INGREDIENTS for 6 servings

* White Rice - 3 cups
* Chicken - 2 breasts
* Dried cayenne peppers - 2 units (use less if you don't like spicy)
* Onion - 2 units
* Pepper - to taste
* Salt - to taste
* Japanese curry package - 1 package / 6 servings worth
* Vegetal Oil

PREPARATION

Note: Prepare cooked rice and start preparing the curry sauce soon so that the ingredient's don't have time to become cold!

1. Theses are the ingredients. First of all we need get one onion cut finely chopped and the other cut in mouth-sized pieces. After that, we have to cut the chicken breasts in mouth-sized pieces.



2. Get the finely chopped onion fried until it gets golden-brown. We use a pot so we can use it to mix it up with the curry sauce afterwards. Put the fried onion aside once it's done.




3. Use a frying pan and get the chicken breasts cooked. You don't need to use much oil, as it usually has a little bit of fat on it. Use salt and pepper to taste.





4. Take the larger onion pieces and put them into the previously used pot. Get them cooked for around 4 minutes and then mix the chicken in it. To avoid the use of extra fat, put the chicken piece by piece and don't use the frying pan's oil. When the onion begins to take a darker colour, put the previously fried onion (point 1), the 2 dried cayenne peppers (don't cut them so you can remove them afterwards if you want) and mix it all up.

5. After preparing and boiling the curry mixture (sauce) for about 15 minutes, mix it with the other ingredients and it's done. Serve it on top of cooked rice!

Yummy!

Baby Bok Choy in Garlic Oyster Sauce

It's been three months since my last update. This time I have a real excuse. My wife and I bought our first home, and we have been super busy renovating it to have a nicer kitchen. When I say nicer kitchen, some of you may picture luxurious looking kitchen you see in movies, but if someone hadn't seen how it looked before, they probably wouldn't think much of our "new" kitchen.

First of all, for an odd reason, there was a laundry machine next to the fridge, and that took up a lot of space. There was also no venting fan for the range. When I make stir-fry, I definitely need the fan on. We also didn't like the cracked floor. So what we did was put a brand new tile on the floor, which raised our floor a bit, meaning we had to lower the cabinet so the refrigerator can still fit under the cabinet. We then moved the washer/dryer to a separate room, and installed fan vent. And those were a lot of work. But now it's done and I'm able to cook again.

IN JAPANESE: Chingensai no Garlic Oyster Sauce itame
CATEGORY: Vegetable
COOKING METHOD: Stir-fried/Steamed
DIFFICULTY: Medium
SERVES: 2 people
LENGTH OF TIME: 10 min



INGREDIENTS:
2 Baby Bok Choy (Chingensai)
1 TBsp of vegetable oil
1 clove of garlic chopped
1 tsp of salt
4 TBsp of sake
2 TBsp of oyster sauce

HOW TO:
Peel the bok choy into individual pieces and rinse. It's ok if they are still wet.

Pre-heat your wok (about medium high) and once the rim of the wok is hot to touch, add a tablespoon of vegetable oil.

When the oil is heated, throw in chopped garlic until they turn slightly brown.

Add bok choy into the wok (be careful for the splashing oil), and stir fry for about a minute.

Have a lid that is big enough to cover all the bok choy (the lid does not have to be as big as the rim of the wok), pour in the sake and close the lid right away. This will steam the bok choy in sake, which gives nice flavor. Keep it steamed for about 2 minutes.

Take the lid off, add salt and oyster sauce to the mix, and stir for about a minute until the sauce is warm, and you are ready to serve!

Shrimp Seaweed Salad

I haven't had much chance to cook recently. I've been going out to lots of concerts. In the past month, I must've gone to at least 5 shows. I got to see KT Tunstall, Yoshida Brothers, and at the Sasquatch Festival I was able to check out R.E.M., The Cure, Tegan & Sara, Death Cab For Cutie, just to name a few. In the next week, I am going to three more concerts! That's a lot of money I've been spending on concerts, so I need to stay home and cook some.

I was trying to cook something healthy for a side dish, and I realized that I didn't have any fresh vegetables. But I did have some dried seaweed that can expand when you soak in water for 10 minutes, and some shrimp and edamame in the freezer. So, here's what I came up with.

IN JAPANESE: Ebi to wakame salad
CATEGORY: Salad
COOKING METHOD: Boiled
DIFFICULTY: Easy
SERVES: 2 people
LENGTH OF TIME: 15 min

INGREDIENTS:
6 uncooked shrimp (see TIP: Shrimp)
12 edamame (green soybeans)
2 TBsp of dried seaweed cut wakame
Ponzu (citrus seasoned soysauce) for dressing

HOW TO:
First and foremost! Be sure to get the right kind of dried seaweed. Don't get the kind you see on the sushi. This is the kind that's in miso soup, and it's the kind when you soak it in the water, it expands into kelp like seaweed. With that said, soak the dried seaweed in water. Normally those things take about 10 minutes to rehydrate.

While the seaweed is being soaked in water, boil water in a pan with about a teaspoon of salt, and once the water is boiled, add edamame and shrimp (still in shells) together. Both of those only take 3 to 4 minutes to fully cook, so be sure to not overcook them.

After they finish cooking, rinse both edamame and shrimp under cold water. Place them under several ice cubes to make sure they get really chilled for a couple of minutes.

Once they are chilled, peel the shrimp, and slice it in half length wise (so that it will be thin).

Take the beans out of the pod.

When the seaweed is completed rehydrated, drain all the water, and add the thinly sliced shrimp and edamame beans and mix together.

Serve on a small bowl, and add the ponzu dressing to your liking!

Mushroom Tofu

A lot of the people in Seattle have been forgetting what month it is. Yes, it is in fact May, but the weather hasn't been too kind to us, and the temperature had been somewhere from 10 to 18 degrees celcius, except this past weekend, the temperature was 31 degrees celcius.

We had some tofu and mushroom that had been in the fridge for some time, and wanted something warm, so I decided to improvise and make mushroom and tofu with sweet thick sauce.

IN JAPANESE: Mushroom to Tofu no ankake
CATEGORY: Vegetable
COOKING METHOD: Boiled
DIFFICULTY: Medium
SERVES: 4 people
LENGTH OF TIME: 15 min

INGREDIENTS:
1 package of Tofu (cut in blocks)
1/2 lb of mushroom sliced (15-20 mushroom)
2 TBsp Soy Sauce
2 TBsp Sake
2 TBsp Mirin
1 half inch piece of ginger (see TIP: Ginger)
1 tsp of dashi powder
1 cup of water
1 TBsp of corn starch
1 green onion (optional)

HOW TO:
On a heated wok, add about a table spoon of vegetable oil, and when the oil is also heated, add the sliced mushroom and cook.

When the mushrooms look fully cooked, lower the heat to low-medium and add the blocks of tofu. You are mostly trying to warm up the tofu, so there's no need to stir too hard and destroy the tofu.

Add the soy sauce, sake, mirin and the shredded ginger and stir the wok gently not to break the tofu (instead of using chopsticks or spatula, just lift up the wok and twirl it around). Once that sauce gets mixed, add a cup of water and some dashi powder.

While that water heats up in the wok, take 1 Tablespoon of corn starch and mix that with enough water (about 2 Tablespoons should do it) so all the powder dissolves.

When the water (more like soup now) begins to boil, slowly add the dissolved corn starch to the wok and stir gently. As the wok continue to boil, the soup should get thicker.

Serve on a bowl with chopped green onions on top

Miso Chicken

I was craving some chicken, but I didn't want anything greasy. I tried to think of what I could possibly do with chicken breast pieces we had in the freezer, so I tried to bake it with a miso sauce, which turned out to be better than I expected! The photo makes it look like crossaints or some kind of dinner rolls with cheese on them, but it's chicken with special miso sauce.

IN JAPANESE: Tori no Miso Yaki
CATEGORY: Meat
COOKING METHOD: Grilled
DIFFICULTY: Medium
SERVES: 4 people
LENGTH OF TIME: 30 min

INGREDIENTS:
1 lb Thin sliced Chicken breast (about 12 pieces)
2 TBsp of Miso (white would be better, but red is fine, too)
1 TBsp of Sake
1 TBsp of Mirin
1 tsp of Sugar
1/2 tsp of lemon juice

HOW TO:
Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.

In a bowl, mix miso, sake, mirin, sugar and lemon juice until you get a creamy sauce.

Lightly grease a baking pan (9x13inch pan), and spread the miso sauce on each side of chicken pieces and spread them into the pan.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until the chicken is cooked. You can cut the fattest piece to see if the juice from the meat is clear instead of red (clear means fully cooked, red means still bloody and raw). That's it!

Boiled Tofu Salad

Growing up when I was a hungry big appetite teenager, this was one of my least favorite dish as it was so brand, boring and most of all, not meaty! But yudofu, which I don't know the good translation, so I will call it Boiled Tofu Salad, is a popular traditional dish in Japan. Yu means hot water, and dofu, is tofu.

But now that I am an older man, who no longer can eat two Big Macs, I have more appreciation for this kind of food than McDonalds. If you want to get really into it, you can get a fancy kelp to get dashi and fancy tofu, but simple kelp powder and tofu from your local grocery store will do plenty good.

IN JAPANESE: Yudofu
CATEGORY: Vegetable
COOKING METHOD: Boiled
DIFFICULTY: Easy
SERVES: 2 people
LENGTH OF TIME: 10 min

INGREDIENTS:
1/2 pack of tofu (firm or soft, it's up to you)
1 tsp Kelp powder
2 Green Onions
2 TBsp of fish flakes [katsuobushi]
1 half inch piece of ginger (see TIP: Ginger)
Soy sauce or preferably Ponzu for dressing

HOW TO:
Fill a sauce pan up with water (about 3/4 full) and add the kelp powder. Heat the water in medium high.

While the water heats up, chop the green onions into tiny pieces.

When the water is close to boiling, add the tofu, which should be cut into small enough size that it can be scooped up by a regular sized spoon.

While the tofu is cooking in the kelp-based soup, add the chopped green onion into a small serving bowl. Shred some ginger and add a table spoon of fish flakes (katsuobushi) per bowl. Pour some Ponzu (or soy sauce if you don't have Ponzu) into the bowl, and that's pretty much it.

Serve with the pan/pot with tofu in middle of the table, and have each person scoop up their own tofu into their bowl. Use the spoon with holes in them so you are only scooping up tofu and not excessive amount of soup. Be careful when taking a big bite. The tofu gets really hot inside! When done eating, I normally add the kelp soup into my bowl and drink that as soup.

*Ponzu is a citrus soy sauce based dressing that is really good!