Weekend Menu

Just one "fancy" meal on the weekend with an old classic on Saturday. Recipes to follow.

The first meal is classically Italian, of course, but the ingredients came from a Japanese store. They have higher standards of quality.

The correlative in the Japanese meal is the blackness. It comes from the black rice which is representative of squid ink but there's none of that in the rice. The "toban djan" is Chinese in origin but it's amazing how the Japanese have converted the quick stir-fry to their own tastes. The "burdock salad" has mayonnaise but Japanese-style which is much much lighter and once again umami-laden. Okra is emphatically not Japanese but once again their love of slimy substances (natto!) means they've made it their own. There's very little "Japanese" about the second meal except that they have taken all these influences and converted them into a coherent Japanese meal.

The CC has said this many times but he'll say it again. One of the pleasures of cuisine is to be able to see the world through a different pair of eyes. We're all stuck with our origins but we can surpass them with imagination and empathy.

Cuisine is the fastest and easiest way to get there^†.

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Pasta with mushroom sauce

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Japanese meal

Three-taste mixed rice (white, brown, black)
Okra ohitashi
Burdock salad (ゴボウサラダ)
Squid toban djan
Miso soup
Smashed-cucumber pickle (タタキキュリ); Myoga

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† This is the 1000^th post. No need to get all misty-eyed. There will be many more to come.

Weekend Menu

Two meals. Recipes to follow.

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Soufflé with snails, tomato sauce & chinese chives

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Japanese meal

Fresh bamboo-shoot rice w/ sanshō
Okra ohitashi
Scallop sashimi
Miso soup
Pickles (lotus-root amazuke, carrot shiozuke)

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A Simple Bengali Meal

Okra

Most people have a love/hate affair with the vegetable. The CC naturally loves it.

When he was but a little child, he adored it beyond reason. (Clearly, the CC had advanced tastes even back then.)

The trick with okra that makes it "slimy" is that if it's wet, it has a tendency to leak slime. Cellular-wall decomposition and all that. It needs to be pan-fried at a high-heat and it's absolutely necessary that the okra not be wet. You will get spectacular reaults if you just ensure this simple rule.

You must dry it thoroughly with a piece of cloth or if you are lazy, pop it in a pre-heated oven at very low heat (without allowing it to cook.) Either way, the okra must be bone-dry.

The recipe below is a classic Bengali Recipe. As you might guess, there are similar recipes with variations in the spices all over India with much discussion about which is the "best".

The CC refuses to get into that particular Vietnam. He likes them all and the topic is a bit of a snooze-fest anyway.

This one is quite lovely (particularly because of the fennel and nigella) but why quibble over relative greatness?

Dharosh Chorchori

Ingredients

15 pods okra
1 large onion (sliced into thin quarter-moons)

1 1/2 tsp turmeric
1 green chilli (diced fine)

3-4 fresh green chillies

2 tbsp oil
1 tbsp panch phoran

salt (to taste)

Recipe

Slice of the stem and tip of the okra. Make a couple of length-wise gashes on the body of the vegetable.

Slit the 3-4 green chillies length-wise with a gash.

Pound the turmeric and finely diced chillies with a tablespoon of water and grind to a fine paste.

Heat the oil in a wok. Add panch phoran and cook till the spluttering stops. Add the okra. Stir-fry for about 6 minutes. Add salt, the masala paste, the sliced onions and the green chillies.

Stir-fry for about 2-3 minutes. Add about half a cup of water. Simmer till the pan is nearly dry.

(Note: This is a "dry dish". It would normally be served with rice, a "wet dish" and a daal.)