Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Tuesday Night Japanese

Last night I put some of the ingredients from Saturday's shopping trip to Zürich to use.

Our main course was a bowl of sweet rice (oh sweet rice, how I've missed you) topped with gingered minced chicken (from Washoku), matchsticks of Takuan (pickled daikon), matchsticks of braised kombu (from making dashi), and an umeboshi.

As sides we had braised daikon with citrus miso sauce and a bowl of kimchi (I ate this at the end of the meal since it was substantially stronger in flavor than the other components of the meal).

Wine: a 2006 Sauvignon Blanc from Sudtiröl.

2 comments:

Eva said...

sounds good, I'm just cursious what your opinion of Washoku is. I have the first Elizabeth Ando's cookbook and some other japanese ones and was wondering if the recipes are very different from other japanese cookbooks? hope you can help1

greg landrum said...

At the moment Washoku is the only Japanese cookbook in my inventory so I don't have anything to compare it to. I'm going to change that situation in the near future, but it'll take a while before I can do a useful comparison.

The recipes that I have tried have been quite good and capture well what I expect from this style of food. My comparison points there are not, however, to Japanese home cooking. They are to a couple of restaurants in the SF Bay area that I used to go to fairly regularly that had the same kinds of things on the menu (e.g. not fancy Japanese).

Andoh is pretty merciless with the ingredients, but I found most of what I need at either local places in Basel or the bigger shops in Zurich. I haven't found fresh shiso yet, but I have a packet of seeds, so I'm hoping to solve that problem on my own.