Tag Archives: cookbooks

A week of washoku

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Japanese Cookbooks

Some time ago, we realised that we were somewhat cheating at dinner time. While not limited to spagbog, tikka masala or sausage n chips, our cooking was not exactly exciting. Cue the LA Times Book Festival, where Kinokuniya had a stand, and where the top book in the stack above reminded me that Japanese food is not that difficult to prepare, given some practice and preparedness as far as ingredients went. Cue the pulling out of the three other books and much scratching of heads over the ingredient lists. Some of the times we cheated and bought prepared simmered dishes and pickles to supplement the meal, bringing up the dish total to the preferred 5. But some other times, we even “pickled” our own, and were pleasantly surprised we didn’t muck it all up.

In no particular order, the results:

Miso Soup with Daikon and Tofu Miso/tofu soup Spinach and harusame soup Snow peas, daikon and egg soup
Celery+Shirasu Salad Marinated rock clams Hijiki salad Wakame+Kuri salad
Chicken teriyaki Asparagus and green beans Miso-ed Sole Squid  
Barley Tea Gyoza Futomaki Marinated octopus
Butter beans and edamame in ume dressing Hijiki salad, take 2 Celery in miso Nibitashi|Lettuce and mini fish
Enoki and tofu miso soup Aubergine Salad Nameless miso soup Ika geso karaage
Gyudon Udon Yakisoba Daikon leftover soup

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Feeling the heat in LA, both weather- and work-wise. Going through a depressive slump as a result. What’s a girl to do to combat the resulting insomnia when crosswords aren’t doing the trick? Buy some new cookbooks, that’s what!

After a particularly cruddy day at work (and I mean this in the literal sense; omg i’m never going to do anyone a favour again), the satisfaction from opening the Amazon box sitting on my desk was close to that gained from tearing off the wrapping of an anticipated Christmas present. For within the box were two impulse purchases: Harumi’s Japanese Cooking and Washoku- recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen.

Harumisan

I spent 20 minutes waiting for my agar to set salivating over the photo and recipe for Buckwheat Noodle Roll, an insane-looking maki sans rice, but made with buckwheat soba. That’s definitely one to try one of these weekends.

Wa Shoku

Happy now…