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High Fat, High Yum Shepherd’s Pie
This weekend, Tod made an incredible shepherd’s pie. It’s an adaptation of one from Alton Brown and it makes the best I’ve ever eaten. The reason it was so good is the large quantity of lamb fat and cream in it. If you are afraid of fat, this is not the dish for you. Otherwise, it is truly…
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Pigs in a Futon
Remember “pigs in a blanket” from your childhood campfire days? I present Tod’s newest fusion invention, Pigs in a Futon, a Japanese variation where toasted mochi replaces bread dough around the grilled sausages. We had a random set of ingredients that needed to be used last night and puzzled a while over how to combine…
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Pesto Eggplant Bake
This is a variation of a favorite recipe, Baked Eggplant Parm, that I blogged about in 2010. The original has been a staple of our dinners ever since but I think this variation is just as delicious. It came about while I was visiting Heather in Utsunomiya. Her garden harvest while I visited was a…
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Ice Cream Fruit Pie
Summer is full of fresh fruits at the peak of their juiciness. Peaches, plums, melons, and berries of all kinds fill the produce section. Irresistible and so delicious. But after a few weeks, fruit salads and smoothies wear thin. It’s too hot to bake. What to do? Make an ice cream pie with fresh fruit! You’ll create…
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Modernist Dining in Bunkyo
Dessert last night blew me away. Pictured above you see a “deconstructed apple crumble” that involved nitrogen-frozen whipped cream with a hot caramel soup poured over cubes of apple, cinnamon cookie crumbs, caramel ice cream and a slice of dried apple. It was such an impressive presentation and my first experience with “molecular gastronomy.” The rest of…
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Red Quinoa with Green Baba Ganoush and Spinach
I could kick myself for not photographing this, but I wasn’t sure how the dish would turn out and didn’t have a camera handy when I brought it to the table. Moments later Tod, humming happy food noises, asked me to write out the recipe but it was too late for a picture – we’d…
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Chili-roasted Mushrooms (plus bonus recipe)
I made this as part of a tapas spread but it would be a lovely side dish or a rich and flavourful topping for salad, grilled vegetables or steaks. For the chili oil, I used a Japanese rayu with roasted garlic and chilli flakes in it that infused the oil with unbeatable flavour, but if…
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Mutant produce
Absolutely enormous asparagus. Not from Fukushima. 398 yen per stalk. Today in the supermarket, I expected to see some empty places in the produce aisle – conspicuously absent spinach and leafy greens with apologetic signs regretting the inconvenience. But I was wrong. There was as much spinach and other greens as usual. All from Chiba…
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Tropical Fruitcake
Dense, moist fruit cake featuring dried tropical fruits and rum.
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Handy phrases for vegetarians, near-vegetarians, and picky eaters in Japan
How to get what you want to eat.
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