今季初 First haze of the 2008 season

のハゼ天。お彼岸すぎたのでいつもの船でハゼ釣りに行ってきました。まあまあ釣りました。釣りものハゼの天ぷらの美味しさはなんともいえない。

今晩呑んじゃった。

Made the trip to Kisarazu to catch gobies for the first time this year.  I made the traditional dish haze tenpura for dinner.  They were quite good.  I shall be catching these creatures until December.

真鱈の西京漬け

残ったタラの切り身を西京味噌漬けにしました。まず西京味噌を購入。鳥越の「おかず横丁」にある郡司商店さんへ買いに行ってきました。大川渡ってすぐですからうちから歩いて４５分ぐらいでいい運動になりました。

　途中浅草橋の名店「蛇善」さん。蛇酒好きな私は営業中の時よってみたいですね。

　おかず横丁の入り口。

　西京味噌２キロ買いました。

　切り身がうすいため１日でできあがりました。おいしかった。これで今回のタラ完食。

Chappli Kebab Reshmi Tikka Kebab

After nearly a week of eating cod and flounder, I had a hankering for some spicy and/or meat dishes. With a typhoon over our heads in Tokyo and me being pretty fagged out from my Iwate trip, I stayed in and made kebabs. Not the rather sordid variety you find in the lower sort of fast food restaurant back home in the UK, but one of my favourites of all time: chappli kebab. I also had some cream leftover from my cod cooking so I bought some chicken and made reshmi tikka chicken kebabs also, which provided a suitable accompaniment. One rarely finds the chappli kebab on offer in restaurants in the West, and my particular variety is as tasty as it is simple to make. Containing plentiful green chillies, anardana seed, tomato and cheaper cuts of beef I minced myself by hand, they came out quite spectacular. The secret is of course, not to grind the coriander or cumin seeds too finely, to leave a nice texture, and to use browned besan flour rather than egg to bind them. A real chappli kebab should be deep-fried in the lard rendered from the dhumba fat-tailed sheep, and be enriched with plenty of beef bone marrow, but I could not reproduce either of these conditions at home for obvious reasons; instead I shallow-fried the kebabs in ghee and used a cheap cut of stewing beef for a bit of extra fat and connective tissue. Otherwise they came out quite authentic and probably not very different from the kebabs eaten today on the northwest frontier, since antiquity. I ate mine with unleavened flatbreads, straight off the fire, and with copious lashings of hot walnut-mint chutney (if you haven’t tried this, do, as it is incomparable) on the side.

The Special Stuff

You get a prize if you can tell me what this is.  Incidentally, it comes from the cod I caught last Tuesday.  I ate it as tenpura, although there are a number of ways of cooking it here in Japan.

 

釣ったタラに少々きくが入っていました。即消費しました。きくがたくさん入っている時期にまた三陸へ行きたくなりました。

Japanese ingredients, English food

When I was a child sometimes my dad would drive us to Southend, for a day of mucking about on the Thames estuary.  At low tide one could walk amongst the rockpools and we would go crabbing, using bent paperclips on the end of a piece of string and a chunk of frozen coleyfish (usually reserved for our cat) as bait.  After returning the beasts unharmed to their dwelling, we would get fish and chips from a seaside vendor and sit – avoiding, usually, the lumps of tar on the rocks – on the seaside to eat.  The fish came on little polystyrene rectangular plates, always far too small for the huge fillets of battered cod or haddock, and the chips in cones of newspaper, drenched with malt vinegar and salt.  The fish was always served with those little ridiculous wooden forks, which to me always brought back unpleasant memories of doctors’ wooden tongue depressors (I used to get tonsillitis a lot).  At school we were always served a rather sordid variety of fish and chips on Fridays – in the somewhat lazy tradition that passes for Christian belief in England – for lunch, but for me the best place I remember is a fish and chippie in London called the Seashell of Lisson Grove, where queues would come out of the store as people waited in line for the national dish (these days, a crown held by chicken tikka masala).  We would often get food there on the way back from visiting relatives in the countryside, and unwrap the newspaper parcels at home to eat, with plenty of HP sauce.  The fish was spectacular, and the chips were too; even our cat wolfed them down (I imagine because the chips were deep-fried in the same oil as the fish) as I furtively handed them to her despite my mum’s remonstrances about feeding the cat from the table.  Anyway, after catching a hatful of cod from the beautiful and cold waters of Iwate Prefecture, I took a nostalgic trip down memory lane to make fish and chips.  The batter is made with cold beer, eggs, salt, strong white flour and the secret ingredient - a pinch of cayenne pepper – and the fish deep-fried till golden and crisp.  The quality of the cod – line-caught, bled and chilled but never frozen – did all the work and the result was spectacular.  The batter made a crisp noise as I broke it with my fork (metal, this time) and the tender, moist, perfumed fish fell off the skin in chunks just like I remember.

 

Back from Iwate

Narangi Qeema

An unusual recipe from Hyderabad that uses orange (narangi) to flavour minced meat.   I am always looking to expand my repertoire with new or different dishes and this one was excellent.  Although its appearance is by no means spectacular, the meat is flavoured with both the rind of the orange and its juice, as well as coriander leaf and red chillies; the result is a surprisingly good combination.   I guess this is not too surprising on reflection, as after all both French and Chinese cooking have recipes that flavour savoury meat dishes such as pork or duck with orange.  One thing however, the dish loses a lot of its delicate orangey perfume when reheated, so does not keep well (i.e., you should eat it all in one go).  The credit for this recipe is of course, to Madhur Jaffrey. 

梅干し Umeboshi

８月後半は天気がずっと悪くて今年大丈夫かな～と思ったけどきょうやっと今年の梅が干せた。できた梅干しをバッグに入れて保存。本当は１年ぐらいそのまま熟成するはずですが、２，３個つまみ食いにしたらけっこううまかった。去年のより２％塩分カットしました。

Finally got round to sun-drying my umeboshi today.  This year I made 6kg; I separated the plums into kilo-bags and stowed them away.  Traditionally they should be left to mature for a year or two, but after testing a couple, they are good enough to eat already.  Umeboshi is without doubt one of those natto/Marmite-type foods, that either you love or hate.  Personally I am quite fond of them, particularly their antiseptic properties (if you put one in a bowl of cooked white rice, the rice keeps a lot longer) and was finally converted when I found them to be the only thing to settle my stomach during a norovirus infection.  Incidentally, I find Marmite revolting.