Boulangerie Burdigala Baguette

I'm no expert on authentic French bread, but the baguette from Burdigala is my current favorite out of the surprisingly wide selection available in my Tokyo neighborhood. Though Japanese bread is sweet and squishy, and French bread is the extreme opposite, baguettes are just one more aspect of the enchanting French culture whose idealized image exerts such a hold on the popular imagination. The French bakery in my office sells baguette sandwiches (a male Japanese coworker complains that they're "too hard," but the shop is extremely popular with the ladies), and all the bakeries in the Azabu area offer them, at various exorbitant prices. I haven't tried all of them, but I do like the one at Burdigala. It has a great chewy crust, really hard to bite into, and a soft but still chewy interior, great for soaking up soup, yogurt, or nutella. Most important, it has real flavor, an earthy, slightly tangy, taste, which is conspicuously lacking in the baguettes they sell at Panera back home.

My local Burdigala is in Hiroo, but there are other locations in Shinjuku, Tokyo Station, Kyoto, Osaka, Yokohama, and Kawasaki. I have to admit that I was disappointed to find out that it was a chain, since I'd feel better if my favorite baguette were the one from the tiny little bakery a few blocks from my house, which bakes its bread in a tiny little kitchen right next to the shop. The Burdigala bread, along with the various croissants, pastries, and cakes they sell, gets delivered each morning around the time I'm passing by on my daily walk, making the whole street smell sweet. Even though the ovens aren't on the premises, it seems the bread is pretty freshly-made, and it's definitely tasty.

Boulangerie Burdigala Hiroo

Minami-azabu 4-4-66

Minato-ku, Tokyo
http://www.burdigala.jp/burdigala_ff/top/top.html

Meat Market

I don't really understand why anyone would want to look at pictures of meat when they could look at beautiful pastries, but nonetheless, that's the request I've been getting repeatedly from a certain reader. She knows I've been mostly a vegetarian for the last 10 years, and I have a suspicion that this begging for blogs about meat is part of a ploy to bring me over to the dark side, but to be honest, eating meat just doesn't appeal to me that much. Nonetheless, I will make an effort not to discriminate against the carnivorous and to post a meaty picture or two from time to time. I won't be able to say much about the taste, but you can use your imagination.
The photo at the top is the rare piece of meat I actually had a hand in cooking. It was a New Year's brisket, a piece of beef weighing five or six pounds, so big it took two people to brown in an undersized frying pan before it was transferred, somewhat shrunken, to a roasting pan and smothered in wine, onion soup mix, chunks of onion, and a can of diced tomatoes. It baked, covered, in a 350 degree oven for four or five hours, until it was fall-apart tender. It actually looked and smelled pretty good, even to me.

The photo above I took at the upscale supermarket in Tokyo Midtown. Enlarge the photo (just click on it) if it's too small to read the labels and price tags. I think they speak for themselves. What I want to know is, who in Tokyo is buying these things?
Last one. This is a much more common sight in the grocery store meat case, gorgeous ribbons of marbled beef for shabu-shabu, cooked by dipping one by one for a minute or two into a pot of steaming broth in the center of the table, or for similar communal cooking over a tabletop grill or brazier. The nice thing about Japan is it's not scared of there being any fat in the meat, and thus Japanese meat is much more tender and flavorful than the lean, stockyard American type. Or so I hear, anyway.

Valentine's Day Preview

Yes, there are still several weeks left until Valentine's Day, but conscientious gift-givers don't have to wait to start their shopping. Every confectionary and supermarket in town has chocolate on display, prettily wrapped in colored paper and a ribbon. From the high-end, high-priced European imports to the cheap and chalky mass-produced variety, it's all there, packaged up and waiting to be given to that special someone.
One odd aspect of Japanese culture is its exuberant adoption, followed by total reinterpretation, of Western holidays. For example, while the Valentine's Day displays in the Kroger I shopped at in Nashville were a solid aisle of red and maybe a little pink, you can see that the color options here are much less limited. Another, maybe the most striking, difference between U.S. and Japanese Valentine's Day practice is that here in Japan, the whole point of the day is for women to give chocolate to men. Not other gifts, even flowers or heart-shaped candy, only chocolate. Not just boyfriends, but all the men in their lives, from dads to bosses. (The chocolate you give to your boss and co-workers is called "giri-choco," which means "obligation chocolate" - how romantic!) Men reciprocate with white chocolate (not exactly a square deal if you ask me) on March 14, White Day, so the shops get to put on beautiful white-chocolate displays as soon as Valentine's is over.
There's a strong Martha Stewart strain in many Japanese women. Here's a supermarket display of all the special paper baking supplies and gift boxes you could ask for to make and deliver a homemade chocolate treat for the really important man in your life. Save the factory-wrapped gift boxes for the boss.

Hana-mame (Flower Beans)

When I saw these giant, blush-and-black-speckled dried beans on the shelf at my local produce stall, I was smitten immediately. The produce guy was hesitant to sell them to me - "Do you know how to cook them?" he asked. "You have to soak them first, for a day." I told him I knew, they had to soak first and then cook for a long time. He asked whether Americans eat a lot of beans, and I told him no, but I ate a lot when I was in Italy. That seemed to impress him, and soon I was headed home with the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-worthy legumes in my shopping tote.

I love the smell of beans cooking. The smell of rice in the rice cooker always reminds me of mornings in Kyoto, when the whole street carried the nutty fragrance of countless breakfasts and lunchboxes being prepared, probably by tiny old ladies for tiny old men. But the smell of beans doesn't have any specific memories attached, it just has a wholesome, heartiness that makes me hungry. There's a hint of hot pepper, more than a hint of grass, and a savory essence more like meat than a vegetable - must be all those proteins, amino acids, or whatever else makes beans so nutritious.

These pink and black beauties are called hana-mame, which means "flower bean" in English. I don't know if they come from a particularly floral vine, or if the name is simply due to the unusually rosy coloring. They're huge, about the size of one joint of my index finger, and the Japanese cook them with sugar and eat them one or two at a time, like candy. I boiled mine and added salt, the way I always do. Unlike many pretty beans that become monochrome during cooking, their coloring darkened but remained distinctively speckled. Though they didn't taste like flowers, they were a bit reminiscent of potatoes, with thick, peppery skins and a flavorful, floury inside.

Mexican in Nashville

Mexican is one cuisine that hasn't gotten very far in Japan, for some reason. A new burrito place just opened not far from Azabu-Juban station, and I've been wanting to try it, but from the outside it looks a bit more upscale than the usual Tex-Mex joint in the U.S. That's a common occurrence in Japan, acutally - whereas we Americans are used to Chinese being 99% greasy takeout, 1% P.F. Chang, the reverse holds true in Japan, where a Chinese restaurant is usually a special-occasion kind of place.
Anyway, when I was in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, I was craving Mexican food so much that we had it for lunch not once but twice. Both restaurants were staffed entirely by Mexicans, and both served the same things, but I still got the feeling that this isn't quite what they're eating on the streets of Mexico City. On the other hand, it was exactly what I've been eating at Mexican restaurants all my life, and was spicy and satisfying.
The top picture is a chile pepper stuffed with cheese and served in a special sauce, I want to say adobo but I'm not exactly an expert here. This is what Yuri always gets, and the only difference between the two restaurants was that the one in the picture was quite thickly breaded and fried, whereas the other one was just a naked pepper filled with gooshy white cheese. Both were delicious (I tasted), the pepper spicy, the cheese creamy, and the sauce piquant, but Yuri liked the breaded version best. The second picture is the rest of his meal - a bean taco and some lettuce and guacamole. I got tacquitos Mexicanos - two folded up and fried bean tacos served with Mexican rice, refried beans, sour cream, and guacamole.
Sometimes the chips and salsa are the best part of the meal. Both restaurants we visited had great chips, warm and tasting just-fried. The salsa pictured tasted like it was out of a jar, but the other place had salsa that tasted like it was house-made, with chunky tomatoes and onions and still-green herbs mixed in. It was so good that we finished it up, along with a lot of the chips, before our order arrived. I wonder how you say oishii in Spanish?

Rice Thermos

Japan is famous for its ingenious (or sometimes, plain wacky) inventions, many of which don't translate into other cultures - or haven't yet, but should. Among the latter, I count the heated toilet seat, the self-filling bathtub, and the rice thermos. My own rice thermos is pretty in pink, just the right size to hold a Laura-sized serving, and keeps rice hot from the rice cooker at least lukewarm till lunchtime.
There's a rubber band around the inside of the lid to seal in moisture and heat. It does make a bit of condensation, but that's soon absorbed back into the warm rice. Though I'm happy to eat cold rice on days when I don't have a fresh-cooked batch in the morning (I make 6 servings at a time in my rice cooker, saving the extras in the fridge) it tastes much better, and the texture is much softer, when warm.
My thermos actually came as part of a lunchbox set, and the cloth lunchbox itself aids in the insulation. The padded divider panel velcros to the side and can be folded back if I put a whole bento box, instead of the thermos and the two smaller containers for okazu, side dishes, that came with the set. Interestingly, the Japanese concept of side dishes includes both meat and vegetables - in other words, everything else is considered a side to rice, the main course. Take that, Atkins dieters!

Pancake Pantry

This restaurant is, as it proclaims on its sign, a Nashville tradition, and it's not hard to see why. From six to three on weekdays and from six to four on weekends, it serves up old-fashioned, hearty breakfasts, not just pancakes but also waffles, omelets, sausages, hash browns, and so on, and there's nearly always a long line and a wait of an hour or more. Even on weekday mornings it can take a while to get in. Though I lived in Nashville for three years, I had only been to Pancake Pantry once before, with my brother. But a few days ago Yuri and I went for lunch, after one o'clock, and had no problem being seated and served immediately. I don't know if I'd stand in line in cold and rain for hours on end to try it, but it's definitely a good place to eat pancakes. The menu includes all kinds of delicious choices, some unusual like sweet potato and buckwheat, some ordinary like blueberry and buttermilk. It took me a long time to decide.
Yuri ordered potato pancakes made with potato flour and minced onions and served with applesauce, sour cream, and syrup. Though they were substantial and denser than ordinary pancakes due to the potato flour, they were still fluffy and cake-like, rather than crispy or oily like a potato latke. He loved them - the combination of savory onions and sour cream with sweet applesauce and syrup was amazing.
I finally chose the pecan pancakes, and was extremely pleased with them. Light, airy buttermilk pancakes with pecans baked into the batter and served in a syrup compote on the side as well, they were sprinkled with powdered sugar and came with whipped butter. I ordered a poached egg to break open on top - I love the taste of runny egg with syrup. Yuri copied me and put poached eggs on his pancakes as well. The egg saved them from being too dessert-like and brought them back into the realm of breakfast-for-lunch. Delicious as they were, both of us had to stop with about half a pancake left on our plates.

Pancake Pantry

http://www.thepancakepantry.com/index.html

1796 21st Avenue South

Nashville, TN 37212