Ryan's tanjoubi

This week was Ryan's birthday (or "tanjoubi" in Japanese). Without much planning, I decided to go home a little early from work and bake him a cake before he got home from his lessons. You may recall I only have one tiny pan, so decided to make it a square layer cake by making one square at a time. I guess I rushed it a bit trying to remove the first square. This pile of bits comprising the first layer didn't leave me very optimistic about the rest of the cake, but I decided to push forward anyway.

While the second layer was cooking, I looked online for a frosting recipe. I found one for bourbon cream cheese. I figured a little Jack would do the trick just as well. I made a big batch of it and used it to fill in some of the holes and cracks in the first layer. I added some chopped roasted almonds for texture and because the bourbon reminded me of New Orleans and pecans. But I didn't have any pecans. or bourbon.

The second layer came out much much better. More frosting. Oh shoot, that part about waiting until the cake cools to frost it was rather important. The frosting on the top started to melt and droop precariously off the sides. I quickly put it all in the fridge until Ryan got home.

Then I threw on a whole bunch of nuts on the top and sides to hide the misshapen, melty mess and set it out with a candle and all of his presents that had been coming in the mail during the week.  Yay!

But before we ate cake, we went down to our local Italian/Japanese restaurant. Our favorite waitress greeted us at the door and even knew it was Ryan's birthday since we had filled out our info on a previous visit.  First course was an appetizer of, from left to right, ham and cheese blintz, wagyu beef, thin sliced white fish with a pesto sauce and foie gras creme brulee. 

For mains, we each had incredibly tender Japanese beef. Ryan's was grilled and served with a croquette and a pile of herbs...

...and mine was slow roasted and served with mashed potatoes. Oh my, it was just melt-in-your mouth goodness! We also had pastas with mushrooms and a scoop of fois gras cream, but I was so full by that time that I forgot to take pictures.

And actually, we were so stuffed from dinner that we didn't even break into the cake until the next day. Despite my winging almost the whole thing and not having much faith in it, the cake was pretty darn yummy, so I am going to link to the recipes. For the cake itself, I used this funny one that called for a cup of coffee. The only change I made was to replace about 1/4c of flour with almond flour because I had some left over that I wanted to use. Oh and I added some cinnamon. And here is the recipe for the frosting. Jack Daniel's works just fine too.

February cooking class

In this month's cooking class we finally were able to study Japanese food. We made three dishes. The first dish called for miso sauce, which we made from sauteed onions and mushrooms and boiled carrots, pureed in a blender and added to dark brown miso paste from Nagoya.

 We then lightly steamed lots of beautiful vegetables...

 ...ladled a big mound of miso sauce on the plate and then arranged the veggies on top of it.

Then we started the second dish by grating daikon and adding some seasonings and spooning this mixture over quickly cooked, super thin soba noodles.

And the final dish was a simple dashi, or fish broth, with some fresh herbs (mitsuba I think) and these funny little decorated beans that puff up in liquid. 

And of course rice was served.

Here is the whole meal. Kojima-san's award-winning pickled greens are in the bowl there. Yum! And isn't that veggie plate pretty?

And to finish it off we enjoyed some nice sweets and green tea made with traditional tea ceremony implements.

New Orleans-style cooking class

I still have many more photos from our trip to Kyoto and Hiroshima, but first I thought I would share some pictures of cooking class that someone just emailed me. Originally they hoped I would rope my Norwegian climbing friend into cooking (no pun intended), but unfortunately he had to head back to his home country. I decided instead to attempt to make some of my all time favorite dishes from the Big Easy. Here I am setting up with the gal who organizes the events. Notice I finally broke down and bought my own pretty earth-toned apron, so no more pink frilly things.

Due to the high cost of some of my ingredients (particularly that pile of crab legs you see below), I only went with two dishes this time.

This was good because both turned out to be pretty labor intensive. First dish was chicken and sausage gumbo adapted from a recipe by Emeril. Here I tell them about that all important first step of making the roux. I guess I get pretty animated. Then we spent the next 20 minutes whisking that flour and oil. My only regret is that I wimped out and stopped before it got to be a dark chocolate color. I was so afraid of burning it that I stopped at milk chocolate.

After the Roux was done, we tossed in the "holy trinity", broth, spices and some chicken that had been browned. Here they are all showing great restraint in allowing me to do this part with the giant unwieldy chopsticks by myself. The Gumbo then went to work simmering for a good hour+.

Meanwhile, some other students removed great piles of crab meat from shells and combined this with mashed potatoes and bread crumbs, etc., to make crab cakes, which they fried to a nice golden brown.

The crab cakes were placed on a bed of lettuce and smothered with a tart and creamy Remoulade sauce. Sausage was eventually added to the Gumbo with some parsley and green onions and it was ladled over white rice like so.

Voila! And here is the final artery-clogging, indulgent meal.

September cooking class

This month's cooking class was Turkish food and I am just going to cut to the chase: everything was delicious! Below Kojima-san browns the pasta for the rice pilaf as sensei looks on. Folks were pretty amazed about the orzo for the rice. Lots of exclamations of "sugoi!" Guess they don't eat a lot of rice-a-roni in these parts.

Here the small eggplants are fried in oil...

so that they can be stuffed with some ground chicken and spices...

...topped with some vibrant veggies and baked for about 20 minutes.

Here is the whole meal. In addition to the pilaf and the stuffed eggplant, we had a yummy cucumber and yogurt salad and lentil soup. Doesn't the olive oil on the yogurt look nice? Maybe I should drizzle olive oil on everything I photograph.  So that was our cooking class. The nice thing was that I got to try out some of my japanese on people in a relaxed environment. The folks in class are all incredibly kind and just rave about any little thing that I manage to say correctly.

German cooking class

Oh, I have fallen so behind and haven't even shared pictures from this month's cooking class.

This time we had a German computer scientist who is getting his PhD at Todai share some treats from his homeland. I think right from the start, the ladies were messing with him. For instance, despite having multiple aprons to choose from, (including the nondescript yellow one I was given), the head lady gave him this tiny pink number to wear. Here he is overseeing the dessert, a kind of bread-pudding-like pancake with raisons. 

The next dish was schnitzel, or as they call it here, katsu. First you pound the pork flat, then dip it in egg, then flour, then panko (bread crumbs) and then you fry it up nice. Mmmgood.

                               

Then came the would-be piece de resistance: the special liver dumpling soup. I received the translation for this recipe early in the week and was told that reporters were coming to check out the dish and everything (!?!) To make liver dumpling soup, one starts with approximately 500 lbs of raw ox liver. Or so it seemed. That is a lot of liver. There's no turning back now.

The liver is mixed in the food processor with softened bread and parsley and salt and pepper. Meanwhile a vegetable broth is being made from scratch. Leaving the skins on the onions gives the broth a nice yellow color. That was a new one for me. Below they strain the broth to remove the solids.

                                            

At some point when I wasn't looking someone made an awesome mayo-less german potato salad. So here the final meal, clockwise, which corresponds to the descending order of my preference, is the potato salad (it rocked!), the schnitzel/katsu (tasty), the pancake kugel thing (could use more sugar) and the liver soup (hard to keep down). I feel bad about that last one, since it took quite a bit of energy to make and everyone was so hyped up about it. But I'm sorry, no amount of parsley and broth is going to hide the fact that this is liver. And liver is disgusting.

Cooking class: project Mexican food

This weekend I held my second cooking class for the local community center. This time I shared with them some Mexican recipes. Finding all the ingredients was a little bit challenging. Avocados and cilantro are kind of hit or miss at my local grocery store but refried beans, tortillas and green chiles required a special trip down to the International market in Azubu Juban (~45 minute train ride each way).

The class format is very informal. I basically provide the recipes and supervise and we all dig in and do the work together. Here folks are stuffing tortillas with shredded chicken and rolling enchiladas.

Now, this is the fourth of these cooking classes that I have either attended or taught. Typically there are about 12 retired ladies in the class, all of whom are primarily there for a social outlet and to have a good time. One thing that I have learned is that they really don't like anything spicy and aren't particularly adventurous (they hated the Thai food because it was too hot and in their opinion had weird flavors). For this reason, I wanted to keep things simple and homey and maybe even a little bit americanized. I decided to make White Enchiladas, the recipe for which I got from my favorite food blog, and which was a big hit with my family when I was home for christmas. The only spice comes from canned mild green chiles.

Well, it turns out that for this particular class, we had 20+ students, a couple of whom were ringers. This man below is apparently a french chef. Suddenly I became incredibly self conscience about my cream-bomb enchiladas and hokey casserole and really wished I would have tried a relleno or a mole or at least salsa verde from scratch. It didn't help matters any when, after I finished the sour cream-based white sauce, he asked to taste it and out of the corner of my eye I could see him grimace and wash his mouth out. Here he is dicing the hell out of that red onion for the guacamole.

For the second dish, I decided to go with Huevos Rancheros because they specifically said they didn't want a lot of meat. When I learned that I had 20 students, I decided that making so many fried eggs would be impossible, so I opted for a Huevos Rancheros casserole recipe that I found online. You put the corn tortillas on the bottom of the pan, then the beans, a little salsa, whisked eggs and finally cheese. You bake it for a half hour and then top with red sauce. Super easy and it tastes like the real thing even though it doesn't really look like it.

They always serve some sort of tea with the meal and when they asked which tea would go well with Mexican, I thought about how I really like horchata with mine. They have a rice milk drink called amazake, so I had them prepare that and I added a little vanilla and cinnamon. Amazake is far chunkier than horchata, but it had the same general sweet, cooling effect (although there was unfortunately nothing spicy enough in my menu to require cooling).

At the end we dished all the food out equally onto plates and sat down for a feast. Lots of second helpings on the guacamole made me feel good, as did the "oishee"s (which essentially means "yummy"), though maybe they were just being nice. Pretty fun day on the whole.

Next they want me to rope my Moldovan friend into things and have her supervise while I make Russian food. They really want some borscht and wouldn't be dissuaded by my saying that neither she nor I have ever made it. We'll see.