Crazy about Japan (and my first guest post)

What do you think about Japanese cuisine? Do you hate it? Love it? Or maybe you have just never tried anything else apart from sushi? I don’t know if I have never mentioned it (if I don’t, I am doing it now), but I am in love with Japan ♥. I love its culture, its language (I have even tried to learn it when I was ten years old. As I suppose you have already guessed, I didn’t succeed) and of course its food.  Contrary to what people thing, Japanese cuisine is a very simple one and it focus on fresh products and the flavor of each ingredients (instead of a concoction where they become unrecognizable)

I have been a big otaku for years ; now I just don’t have time to read manga or watching anime, but I still like it. Actually, two of my biggest hobbies began with manga: drawing and website/graphic design. I could spend all the day drawing the characters of my favorite series. Luckily enough, my teachers didn’t care about the fact that I had all my notebooks full of faces and little drawings. And of course, my first websites were (you guessed it) about manga and anime. I began to design websites when I was only ten years old!

Now, I have too many books from school to read and too many homework to do, so the only way I have to put in practice my interest in Japanese is cooking; I can live without TV (actually, I don’t watch it anymore), cinema, computer games or even without going out on Saturdays nights, but I need doing at least some cooking to relax.  

Well, writing a post (my first guest post!♥) about Japanese culture for some friend of mine (who is even more a lover of Japanese culture than me) is another good way to take a break from schools :) I cooked a Mushroom miso soup and wrote the recipe, which you can read here. By the way, you can visit his blog, NihongoUp: it’s about Japanese language and culture. Philip is a Russian New Media developer & designer (check out his game to learn Japanese!) who has been living for years in Czech Republic. He has got a small section about food and recipes, and I tried one of them: Stir-fried tofu with green beans. Maybe I can’t afford going to Japan, but at least I can eat a tofu with green beans at home :)

Check out this mushroom miso soup recipe on NihongoUp blog!

By the way, I have created a Twitter account (I couldn’t resist it!) Now I have to get the hang of it. What do you think about Twitter? Do you think that it will suppose the disappearance of blogs  (yeah, some people think it will) and that microblogging is the future? Or that it is just a passing fashion? In any case, I succumbed to the temptation, and now I have a Twitter widget on the right side of the blog :)

Stir-fried tofu with green beans By Philip, from NihongoUp Blog(recipe here) I have introduced very little changes in this recipe because it’s incredibly easy. It’s the perfect everyday dish: healthy, balanced, tasty and quick. The only ingredients I omitted are fresh minced ginger and mirin because I run out of this ingredients (visiting the Asian store is in my “to do list” since September). The original recipe calls for extra-firm tofu, but mine was frozen. I would say it worked as well as regular tofu. I forgot unthawing it, so I put it in the steamer for five minutes and it turned out perfect. Then,  press it between two plates and something heavy on top as you would do with a non-frozen tofu block (it allows the tofu to absorb better the flavor) and marinate it in the mix of tamari (soy sauce), mirin, sesame oil and maple syrup for 15 minutes.

Vietnamese Dessert Pudding with White Beans and Sticky Rice in Coconut Milk

It seems like I’m not the only one who has got a food blogger’s block, judging by the last post of The Sophisticated Gourmet (who despite having a food blogger’s block, has cooked some New York-style bagels that look more than appetizing). I suppose it has something to do with my lack of time (and creativity). School is absorbing all my time and energy like a sponge! So it’s logical: if I don’t cook anything blog-worthy, how can I write a good post?

Today’s recipe is  Che Dau Trang and, and it iss my contribution to the october’s Tried&Tasted, the blog event created by Zlamushka. This month the featured blog is Wandering Chopsticks (what a lovely name!), and the hostess is Trupti of Trupti’s Food Corner.  Wandering Chopsticks is a food blog specialized in Vietnamese dishes, although there is plenty of non-Asian dishes too. Among the dozens (or maybe hundreds? The recipe index is vast!) of recipes, I decided to try this, the Vietnamese Dessert Pudding with White Beans and Sticky Rice in Coconut Milk, or Che Dau Trang (Ok. I think I will follow calling it just rice& beans dessert pudding)

Vietnamese Dessert Pudding with White Beans and Sticky Rice in Coconut Milk I won’t copy the recipe here again: you can get it here. Actually, I cooked this many weeks ago….and now I regret it. Why? Because I bought coconut milk for the first time in my life a week ago. And I don’t know why I haven’t done it before because I loved it! Taking advantage of my visit to Barcelona, I stopped by the Asian supermarket and bought a couple of cartons of coconut milk. I have drunk my morning coffee (I think I am becoming a caffeine addict) with coconut milk since then. It adds a delicate and slightly creamy touch that I love. Why I am talking about that now? Because my coconut milk pudding…was without coconut milk. Yeah, I cooked it with soy milk, and I would not recommend you doing the same. It tastes great anyway (I ate the full pot in two days), but it will curdle. So if you have coconut milk, use it. I have also used brown rice instead of glutinous rice. I don’t know if glutinous brown rice exists, but I have only seen white glutinous rice. Because I try to avoid anything refined, I opted for the brown variety. I reduced the amount of sugar. The original recipe called for ½ cup, but I added only 2 tbsp, and it was enough for me. The verdict: I sincerely liked the dish, even with soy milk and with non-glutinous rice. I suppose you can eat it like a dessert, but I think it would be a wonderful breakfast. Actually, this was the way I ate it. It is an easy and tasty way to combine grains and beans in the same dish (and get complete protein) without resorting to the typical rice and lentils combo.

I love this photo :) It was taken during the party we did in the beach to say goodbye to Summer and Summer holidays. I have not posted it until today because although we began school a month ago, the weather has been abnormally hot during all September and part of October, so nobody had the feeling that it was fall….until a couple of days ago. I was freezing yestarday while waitng for the bust! So, see you next year, summer :) Me with two of my friends (I'm the one in the middle)

 

Stewed hijiki seaweed with carrots recipe

Today is my last day of that short May school break. It's incredible how fast the time pass when you are on Holidays! The pity is that I didn't take advantatge of those days as I would like to. I didn't rest at all! My biggest problem is that I have to get up very early every morning, at 6AM, and on weekends and holidays I get up at 6AM too, even if I am tired and I want to sleep more. It doesn't matter if I read the night before until late, or I worked until late...I will wake up at 6AM. Well, or sometimes even before (actually, I don't get up at six o'clock. I get up five minutes before the alarm of my mobile rings). I also have insomnia, so the result is that I sleep very little. Working out can help a little bit, but it's not enough (I run 45' many times a week) Does anybody suffer from the same? I really envy people who can sleep until almost midday (like my brother)
After participating in "Tried and tasted" April blog event, I decided it would be great to take part in some other blog event. Looking through Is my blog burning? I found one I liked a lot: A Worldly Epicurean's Delight - Japan, hosted this month by Lavi of Home Cook's Recipe's. The original idea is from DK's Culinary Bazar. The idea is simple: cook a japanese vegetarian dish and post it. It finishes the 5th of May, so if someone wants to participate too is still possible, but hurry up!

The recipe I chose is inspired in one I found in Just Bento, "steawed hijiki seaweed with carrots and tofu", but I left out the tofu because I already had my Vegan Hollandaise sauce leftovers in the fridge. I am very interested in Asian cuisine, but among all them my favourite is the Japanese one because of it simplicity. Also, yesterday at least I finished my History's project about Japan. We could choose the theme we wanted too, and I chose Japan without dubt it.
Exactly, I focused on Japan's miracolous recovery after the WW2. Many books have been written about it (although no one of them was available in the little library of my town, so I had to go to Barcelona to Asia's House to borrow a couple of books about Japan's history) and people still debate how could a country that was in the poverty become the second economic power, only after USA. It should be emphatized that Japan was isolated from the world during the Tokugawa era, from 1600 to middle 19th Century. In 1868 the Meiji restauration opened the country to the world, and a fast modernization and westernization proces began. But it was nothing compared to the growth of it economy between 1960 and 1990, when the GNP passed from 16 milions dollars to more than 440 milions.


Tokyo in the 1950'

Although the State contibuted in a big proportion to that growth, with the called "administrative guidance", the social factos were no less important. A high loyalty towards the company, a high labour discipline, very skilled labour, high saving rates and the sacrifice for the wellbeing of the nation were crucial. The character and mentality of the Japanese nation is fascinating, and in many ways very different from the Western one. And the changes that the society began to suffer during the last decades are even more fascinating. Traditional values coexist with the new one, more Westernized. I think that if I have to do another project, that will be the theme.

Stewed hijiki seaweed with carrots


Seaweed is a staple in Japanese cooking, and due a good reason. Not only they are delicious, but also packed with a lot of minerals that usually are difficult to obtain. Japanese eat it almost every day. Kombu and wakame are used in soups and broth (the base of the famous dashi broth is kombu), hijiki is stewed or cooked with other ingredients and nori is used to hold the rice balls (I love them! They look so cute...) I didn't use mirin because I didn't have, but you can use it if you want: it will improve the flavor. Use about 2 tablespoons.

Ingredients:
- 4 tablespoons of dried hijiki
-3-4 medium carrots, shreded
-1 teaspoon of olive oil
-1 tablespoon of soy sauce
-1 teaspoon of sugar (optional)
-a few raisins (optional)
- 2 tablespoons of mirin

Preparation:
*Soak the hijiki at least for an hour. It must increase its size in many times. Strain the water soaking water, and put new water to cover it. Boil it for 15 minutes on low heat.
*Heat the olive oil in a sauce pan, and add the shreded carrots. Sauté them for a few minutes, and add hijiki (with its remaining water, if there is any), sugar, soy sauce, raisins and mirin if using.
*Cook it for a few minutes, stirring, and add a little bit of water. Cover it, and cook for 10 minutes or until the water is evaporated. Serve with rice, or if you want an authentic Japanese meal, with a onigiri (rice ball)