Sukiyaki Party!

Ever since my dad bought a small electric hot plate in his recent efforts to raise shiitake mushrooms, I've been itching to use it to make Japanese sukiyaki for my family at our usual Sunday night dinner gathering. Tonight was the night! I lived in Japan for two years studying Japanese and then teaching English at a high school on a small island south of Kobe. One of my favorite Japanese dinners was nabe, a family-style meal where meat, vegetables, tofu and mushrooms are cooked in a flavorful broth right at the table. Sukiyaki is a version of nabe that calls for extra-thin cut pieces of beef, a sweet-savory soy sauce broth and a small bowl with a beaten raw egg for dipping. I still fondly recall cold nights with one of my best friends, Eriko, and the rest of her family, eating nabe at their kitchen table up in the mountains of rural Japan. It's a dish that invokes togetherness and warmth and it's deceptively easy to make.


The fun of making nabe is that it is participatory. Everyone adds more ingredients as they are used up. I prepared a nice spread so that we could easily put more things in the broth while we were eating dinner. I loosely followed this recipe, so I opted for grass-fed flank steak cut extra thin, yakidofu (fried tofu), fresh firm tofu, green onions, napa cabbage, shiitake and enoki mushrooms, and shirataki noodles (described here as having a 'gelatinous' texture...I love gummy, slightly chewy things so I particularly enjoy these). I also put in a bit of kimchi, since I had found a jar of authentic korean-style kimchi. Kimchi is not traditionally part of sukiyaki recipes but it is sometimes included in other nabes and in my opinion nothing is better than that sour, spicy, living flavor of lacto-fermentation.

I heated the nabe pot right on the electric hot plate, then sauted some of the beef in a little oil to brown it and infuse the broth with that delicious flavor. I added the broth right after that first round of beef had cooked through. Here is the recipe for the broth:

1/3 cup soy sauce
3 tbsp sake
4 tbsp sugar
3/4 cup water

I doubled this recipe to make enough. Once the broth was simmering, we added the other ingredients and allowed them to cook. Then we prepared the most important part of the sukiyaki meal: the eggs. Each person cracks one egg in a small bowl and beats it with chopsticks, creating a yummy yellow dipping sauce for the pieces of the soup. Once everything was cooked through, we grabbed tofu, veggies and meat out of the hot pot with chopsticks and dipped them in the egg before slurping it up and enjoying that sweet-savory flavor. It may sound gross to coat your food in raw eggs, but I promise you, it is the best part of this dish. I recommend using farm-fresh organic eggs for this, so you will not have to worry about salmonella. As the ingredients were used up, everyone contributed to efforts to add more to the pot, and we all thoroughly enjoyed this delicious Japanese dinner.

My return to Asian cooking has been, at best, incredibly slow. After living in Japan and desperately missing cheese, bread, good wine and the density of American and European cooking, I needed a long break from the light, simple quality of Asian meals. Now I'm slowly re-learning what I once knew about Asian flavors. I'm looking forward to incorporating my best memories of Japan into the cooking I do this season, and this sukiyaki meal was a wonderful start. I encourage you to try it too -- the time for warm dishes is winding down and we're looking at the last few weeks of soups and other hearty recipes before asparagus season begins!

Borscht Salad

I am calling this one Borscht Salad because...well, it reminds me of borscht. The beets imbued the entire dish with a beautiful reddish-pink color, and the cannellini beans give it that dense, warm feeling that accompanies a cup of soup.

This salad is a follow-up recipe to the White Winter Salad, and it serves as a demonstration of how to strategize and use ingredients you already have on hand.

1/2 bulb fennel
1 gala apple
1/4 onion
1 bunch beets, greens removed
cannellini beans

red wine vinegar
sugar
mustard
salt, pepper
olive oil

fennel fronds

If you already made my previous salad, you should have extra cooked cannellini beans on hand. If you don't, start them first. Make sure to include seasonings in the water (bay leaf, garlic, onion, thyme). Meanwhile, set the oven to 400 and peel and cut up the beets (I cut each beet in half lenthwise then cut them again into thin half-circles). Toss them with olive oil, salt and pepper, then roast them until they are nice and tender. You could also boil or roast them whole, but roasting the individual slices makes them slightly chewier, lending a pleasant texture to the salad.

While the beets are roasting, slice the fennel, apple and onion paper thin with a mandoline slicer. Mix up the vinaigrette (my method: put about 1/8 to 1/4 cup of vinegar in a bowl, then add sugar until you've mellowed out the vinegar just enough. Add salt, pepper, vinegar, taste the mixture and adjust accordingly. Now add the olive oil while whisking so the mixture emusifies.) When everything is ready, combine it all in a bowl, adding as many beans as you think is necessary. The more you stir, the pinker the salad will become. Add fennel fronds as a garnish.

White Winter Salad

In recent weeks I have changed the way I operate in the kitchen. I used to be all about planning. I'd schedule the week's cooking all in advance, buying all the ingredients I needed in one fell weekend swoop. There was a sense of security in that cooking regimen, but also a feeling of limitation, banned as I was from letting the moment inspire me. This winter, it seems, has been all about letting go, and I have now abandoned my to-do list in favor of my internal compass, allowing myself to be pulled through the kitchen until I arrive at a sufficiently satisfying meal. The results so far have been delicious.

White Winter Salad

Cannellini beans
1 onion, diced
4 cloves garlic
Bay leaves
Dry thyme

1/2 bulb fennel
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled
1/2 daikon radish (daikons vary in size -- you will need about the same amount in volume as the apple or the fennel, since you'll want a 1-1-1 ratio of these three ingredients)
1/4 onion

Juice from 1/2 an orange
1 tsp ginger
1-2 cloves garlic
olive oil
dash red wine vinegar
salt, pepper

Fennel fronds

Dry beans take about an hour to an hour and a half to cook, so you will want to make them first. Cover in water and add 1 bay leaf, a bit of the dry thyme and two smashed garlic cloves. Simmer until beans are soft. Now slice the fennel, apple, daikon radish and onion nice and thin with a mandoline slicer. In another bowl, mix together the liquid ingredients except for olive oil. You should be adding just enough vinegar to give you a tangy taste in the back of your mouth. Add the olive oil while whisking in order to emulsify, putting in as much as you like. A 2-1 ratio is traditional for vinaigrette, but I don't think you need quite that much here. Toss dressing with the sliced ingredients and fennel fronds and allow them to marinate. Meanwhile, saute the diced onion in olive oil until nice and soft. Add garlic and saute for a couple minute more until aromatic. Then add in a good helping of cannellini beans and more olive oil and toss with onions and garlic until warm. Plate with orange slices!

Williamsburg Winery in Flavor Magazine

My article on the Williamsburg Winery is now out in the latest issue of Flavor Magazine. I had a great time spending almost half a day at the winery interviewing the viticulturist, winemaker, and president. It turns out they'll be installing a mostly pesticide-free vegetable garden in 2010, with the goal of supplying the winery's two restaurants with some fresh, seasonal produce raised right on location. I'm proud of that effort, and also of the winery as a whole for trying to put Virginia wines on the map. They've recieved some major recognition by international wine gurus and are supplying stores and restaurants in Europe as well as those all over the US. I loved the reserve Chardonnay I tried at the tasting (can't remember the year though).