Spontaneous Strawberry Sorbet

What do you do when you buy a huge bag of ripe strawberries from the neighborhood discount produce stall, but come home to find your eco-friendly cloth shopping bag and the hip of your khakis dripping with strawberry juice? After plunging said khakis into a sink full of soapy water and toweling off the floor, there is nothing for it but to fish those squashed strawberries out of the bag and make sorbet. Even if you don't have a recipe or any special equipment, your sorbet will still turn out to be icy and refreshing, and if the strawberries were good to begin with, there is nothing to prevent it being perfectly delicious.
I'd never made sorbet before, though I knew it was a simple procedure involving little more than fruit, sugar, and a freezer. Also, as I have made ice cream completely by hand (no machinery involved), I knew that key to the process is stirring once every hour or so as the mixture gradually goes from liquid to slush to solid. This prevents the formation of ice crystals, supposedly, and it's what an ice cream maker will do for you. Obviously you can't achieve the same creaminess as a machine can, since you can't stir constantly as it's freezing unless you're willing to spend several hours sitting up in the freezer yourself.
I rinsed all my squashed berries and then squashed them further, using a table knife and my rice-cooker paddle (it has little raised bumps all over both sides, making it good for crushing). Without measuring, I scooped three large spoonfuls of sugar over the top and mixed it all together, then popped it into the freezer. It takes time for it to solidify, and it was still more like a slushy than a sorbet eight hours later, when I went to bed. But by morning it was solid - a little on the crystalized side, but bursting with sweet strawberry flavor. Next time life gives you squashed strawberries, you know what to do - make sorbet.

Vegetable Love

Isn't this a beautiful summer lunch? I've written before about my affection for the kind of simple meals I can picture a peasant eating in an idyllic preindustrial meadow. But for a long time, for some reason, I hadn't bothered to cook any beans, and had been pickily eating no vegetables besides carrots and pumpkins. A diet peasant-like enough, I suppose, especially in its monotony, but not really worth writing home about. So I finally got out my Italian cannellini beans and blanched some seasonal asparagus and green beans. I love the way the cucumber (kyuuri, which is a much better name in my opinion, for this completely un-cumbersome vegetable) ties the white and green colors of the other components of the plate together. Served with bread (and of course followed by dessert), it made a lovely lunch for a summer Sunday.

One thing I happened to discover, and ended up eating a lot of, while on my green vegetable strike was this bread, my latest bakery addiction. It's the pain de campagne sold by the delicious and tiny hole-in-a-wall bakery Pointage, not far from my apartment. It comes in a convenient half loaf which they will slice up for you. Note the attractive diamond patterns on the chewy, burnished crust. Inside it's spongy and tangy, a perfect vehicle for camembert, peanut butter, yogurt, or anything else with enough character to stand up to this intensely flavorful bread with its wonderful bite.
The real inspiration for breaking out of my beta-carotene rut was this box of fresh organic produce from Kawakami Farms. One of my co-workers told me about a friend of hers who got out of the Tokyo rat race and went off to Miyazaki Prefecture to become an organic farmer. She mails boxes of whatever she's growing at the moment to her subscribers in the city, and will send out a trial set for free to anyone who's interested. My trial set included onions, new potatoes, the tiniest cloves of garlic I've ever seen, and the green beans and kyuuri that ended up in the picture at the top. I know that supermarket organics don't always taste better than the conventional vegetables, but the vegetables in this box were unbelievably good - the potatoes buttery (even without salt or butter), the green beans sweet, the onions and garlic mild, and the cucumbers indescribable. They were like the vegetables that exist in the alternative universe of Platonic forms - all other vegetables are just shadows aspiring to taste this good. Needless to say, I'm going to subscribe. From now on the pumpkins of Japan are a little bit safer. Except the ones grown at Kawakami Farms.

Au Temps Jadis

It's amazing how there are little fragments of Europe tucked away all over Tokyo. From the Belarussian home-style restaurant near my office to the high-end branches of Parisian chocolate and pastry shops, it's all here somewhere, if you know where to find it. Au Temps Jadis is another little piece of the puzzle. Out of the way on a side street between Shibuya and Harajuku, the restaurant is down a little brick staircase from the street. Inside, the walls are covered with French posters, the tables are laid with red checkered cloths, and there are wire baskets of brown eggs on every available surface. The menu is limited to crepes and galettes (buckwheat crepes) but there's a long list of fillings, both savory and sweet, and each is cooked to order. Except for the fact that the chefs and most of the clientele are young Japanese women, it's as if you'd been transported to a cafe on the Breton edge of France.
The savory galettes come neatly folded around the filling, which in my case was oeuf-fromage-tomate and included a dusting of sliced green onions and pink peppercorns. The oeuf was runny in the middle and gushed out satisfyingly, to be wiped up with the edges of the galette. I didn't notice much about the cheese or the tomato, but the fillings were well-distributed to the edges of the square, so that every bite included a bit of everything. I especially liked the pink peppercorns on top, not necessarily for their flavor, though they did give it a certain brightness, but because I don't see pink peppercorns that often, and they're fun.

A buckwheat galette has a crisper texture than a classic plain crepe, and I really noticed and enjoyed the difference here. The dessert crepe (non-buckwheat) was almost stretchy, it was so soft, and the fillings were rich and memorable - a chocolate spread with an almond pastry cream, plus the chocolate sauce drizzled liberally over the top. It was really decadent - worlds better than the crepes they sell on the street all over Shibuya and Harajuku - and proof that there's no need to go all the way to France when you can find an authentic piece of it right in the middle of Tokyo.
Au Temps Jadis

Royal Place Harajuku 102

1-5-4 Jinnan

Shibuya-ku, Tokyo

03-3770-2457

Saint-Honore Pistache Griotte

Long ago, before I had a food blog, I went to Laduree and got a Saint-Honore pastry. It was a revelation - a gorgeous confection just to look at, and more delicious than almost anything I'd ever tasted, with perfect proportions of crunchy, creamy, chewy, sweet, and sour. I was so inspired that I drew a picture, diagramming each element. Well, that was more than a year ago, and there are just so many tasty things to try in Tokyo that I'd somehow never gone back for another one, despite loving it so much, until last weekend. I was a little worried that it would fail to live up to my memory - or that the other flavors wouldn't be as captivating as that first one, rose and raspberry. Nonetheless, I'm a lifelong pistachio fan, so I decided to take the risk and go for the green.
Well, I wasn't disappointed. It was as ethereal as I remembered - a big, piped curl of flavored cream topping a shortbread base, choux ring filled with tart fruit jam, and three dainty puff pastries, filled with buttercream and glazed with jelly. There had been a rose petal atop that first one; this time, there were emerald shelled pistachio nuts lightly sprinkled over the cream. The fruit was griotte, which is apparently French for sour cherry, and was a perfect foil for the rich pistachio, as well as making a pretty red-and-pale green color contrast.
What's most amazing about this pastry, besides the unique and inspired architecture of it, is how vivid all the flavors are. That whipped cream on top is as purely pistachio as the best gelato I had in Italy, as if the nuts had somehow been concentrated into cream form. The cherry jam in the middle was full of plump fruit, and the jelly glaze was hardly less assertive. The pastry itself is rich with the taste of eggs and butter, and holds its own without overpowering the more interesting main flavors. Everything is perfectly balanced. The only thing left to decide now is which was better, pistachio or rose? And I still haven't tried the chocolate...

Ladurée

Ginza Mitsukoshi 2F

Ginza 4-6-16

http://www.laduree.fr/index_en.htm

Mozzarella Sandwich at Paul

One of the nice things about Paul Bakery is the wide range of options available. Not only does it have every kind of bakery item, from tarts and eclairs to croissants and danishes to salads and sandwiches, but each category even includes a variety of choices. And those choices, when it comes to sandwiches, aren't limited to having a nice range of fillings, both meat and vegetarian. The thing I appreciate almost as much, and which is more unusual, is that the sandwiches come in various sizes. There are the long sandwiches, made on a thin mini-baguette, which are just the right size to fill me up at lunchtime; there are the slightly shorter sandwiches on a hot-dog-bun-like brioche, which is very light and isn't quite enough for me; there are the sandwiches on a croissant, which are rich and delicious but don't fill me up at all. And then there's this: a tomato, mozzarella, and pesto sandwich on a short but substantial mini-loaf of olive bread. This sandwich is just right for days when I'm not too hungry, but still want something chewy enough to feel like a meal.
Like everything at Paul, it's a bit on the salty side, but the zingy flavors are worth the thirst you will suffer for the rest of the afternoon. The bread is just as good as the filling. It's thick but soft, lightly dusted with flour, and bursting with slices of both black and green olives. The inside is a decadent three fat slices of fresh mozzarella cheese - the soft white kind that comes in a ball, not the yellow kind that comes in a square - alternating with slices of tomato, all dribbled with pesto and grounded with a leaf of lettuce. Considering that the full-length camembert sandwich also has three slices of cheese, I consider this mozzarella sandwich to be a pretty good deal - less bread, but equal filling. It costs slightly less than the full length sandwiches, too, though the fancy ingredients (and the fact that it's Paul Bakery) keep the price relatively high: 473 yen.

PAUL Bakery

It's a chain with shops around the world - they were all over London, so now I feel a bit of anglophilic nostalgia every time I visit the one on the first floor of my office building.

Dalian

My trip to Hong Kong a few weeks ago really put me in the mood for dim sum, even though (or maybe because) I didn't get to eat any good Chinese food while I was there. A few blocks away from where I live in Tokyo, however, there's a fairly new dumpling restaurant called Dalian, a branch of the Yokohama Chinatown original, whose stylish interior design and terrace defy all expectations about what a dim sum shop should look like. The lights are strung up in black wire bird cages, the windows are criss-crossed by a vaguely Oriental carved trellis, and the chopsticks are green and bamboo-shaped. The menu includes a range of Japan's favorite Chinese dishes, from shrimp in chili sauce to an omelette with gooey gravy. What the restaurant is most famous for, however, is gyoza (potstickers) cooked so that the edges all meld together, kind of like a pancake.
You can get this in either a boiled or a fried version, although unfortunately it's not offered with the vegetable filling available for plain old individual gyoza. It's a beautiful presentation with the lacy batter cracking off between the plump gyoza, which are so juicy they'll squirt all the way across the table if the person eating them isn't careful.
Besides gyoza, the restaurant has a few traditional dim sum choices, served in lovely bamboo steamer boxes, and the most assertive vegetarian spring rolls I've ever tasted - though meatless (at least as far as I could discern), they're filled with gooey harusame rice noodles, strong-flavored shiitake mushrooms, and other shredded vegetables, and served with spicy mustard.
Just to be healthy, we ordered the stir-fried seasonal vegetable, which turned out to be bok choy in a creamy garlicky sauce. It was slippery between the chopsticks, but tender and brightly flavored. If I go back, I'd like to try some of the other dishes on the menu - the hundred year old eggs with tofu sounded like an especially intriguing choice.
Dalian

Azabu Juban 3-6-2

Minato-ku, Tokyo

03-3454-5848

Summer Cakes at Le Pommier

Last week I paid a visit to Le Pommier. Even though I pass it twice every day on the way back and forth to work, I hardly ever buy anything there. The shop's bright orange packaging is so hard to conceal that I feel guilty promenading it right past the other patisserie I pass twice every day, which is smaller and whose two owner-workers always smile at me. I'm also intimidated by the real French pastry chef who sometimes is behind the counter on weekends (the shop has several other branches, which I assume are where he spends the rest of his days). In any case, despite the number of times I've glanced in the window at the jewel-colored rows of pastries behind the glass, this was only my second visit, and as it was almost closing time, the selection of cakes was limited. That was actually more a blessing than a curse, however, as it helped me narrow down my choices.
My mom was with me (she being my excuse for buying cake on a weeknight), and when I had read the names of each option, she promptly chose the one at the top: Glacier. It's a mint-chocolate combination, always her favorite, and even though she was a bit disgusted by the layer of mint-flavored mousse, the minty-clear jelly, and the jelly "ice" cube on top, the chocolate layers (dark and milk chocolate mousse and a thin layer of chocolate cake) did meet with approval. I picked the Mammamiya, a not terribly memorable fruit and cream combination. It had a layer of fig jelly and some raspberries and cream on the bottom, but didn't taste nearly as exotic as I was expecting.

The surprise winner of the night was the violet macaron. Mama had never had these Parisian favorites, and of course I couldn't let her leave Tokyo without trying them. She picked mint chocolate again, and since rose is one of my favorite flavors I decided on violet, without much confidence that it would be any good. We split them so we could each try both. While the mint was okay, it was a little too strong for me. The violet, however, was delicious - fruity and fragrant, almost peachy, distinct from rose without being clearly identifiable as anything I've ever tasted before. If that's what violets taste like, they deserve to become a much more popular flavor.

Le Pommier

Azabu Juban 3-9-2

Minato-ku, Tokyo

California Grill Yoshi

Yoshi's is just a small, second-story room on one of Azabu-Juban's back streets, but it may be one of the best restaurants I've visited in Tokyo. It's certainly one of the best deals. For just under 4000 yen (about $40), they offer a multicourse prix-fixe menu that includes your choice of appetizer, entree, and dessert from the full menu, as well as the seasonal amuse-bouche, soup, and vegetable of the day, and an after-dinner tea or coffee. The first time I went, we got petit-fours with the check, but last time that final touch was missing - although I was so full by then that I didn't regret the loss all that much. The cooking is uniformly delicious, California-style minimalist with a focus of fresh ingredients, with the Japanese accent of local ingredients and some Asian-inspired flavors. There's an extensive selection of wines, beer on tap, and delicious coffee. And with only about five tables and cheerful tomato-soup-colored walls, it's an intimate setting where you can really feel looked-after.

The first two courses, which we didn't get to choose, were an oyster grilled in the shell with a maitake mushroom and pesto sauce and a mysterious pale-green soup, served cold. For our appetizers, I chose the avocado and pumpkin gnocchi salad, and my mom got the Caesar salad with grilled chicken and prosciutto. As pumpkin with avocado is probably my favorite flavor combination at the moment, I knew I wouldn't be disappointed. The gnocchi were extremely light, with a very thin skin and creamy interior, not nearly as chewy as the potato version. The avocado was perfectly ripe, and attractively served cut up in its own shell. The peppery daikon sprouts mixed with the lettuce gave it a nice contrast of textures and flavors.

Next came the seasonal vegetables, which were beautifully arranged on a rectangular plate and drizzled with a buttery sauce. The presentation was like a modernist still life, and wouldn't have been out of place on a museum wall. The baby turnip, bamboo shoot, fiddlehead fern, and endive were all very springlike; the eringi, enoki, and shiitake mushroom were lightened with a vinegar marinade; and the slice of orange pepper was a bit out of season but gave the composition a dramatic shot of color. Everything was tender and delicious.

My main course was the grilled salmon, which came with more fiddleheads, a spoonful of creamy potato, and a loose sauce made with seaweed and sprinkled with crushed pink peppercorns. Mama got scallops (she was initially horrified that they were just barely seared - practically sushi!!!) adorned with botarga caviar and endive leaves. My salmon was reassuringly pale-colored (I'm always wary of artificial color in the very red kind) and very juicy. The seaweed was so mild that I would have thought it was spinach if I hadn't read the menu.

For dessert, we chose the creme brulee and the Manhattan cheese cake. Though I never get creme brulee, a bite of my mom's made me think I should give it another chance - it was very thick and smooth, with a strong vanilla flavor. My own cheese cake, though, was even better, though I don't think any Manhattanite would acknowledge it. Its dainty size and creamy texture were nothing like the thick, artery-stopping version we know in the US, and instead of being smothered in fruit sauce it was served with just a spoonful of strawberry jam on the side, along with vanilla ice cream and a few mint leaves. Our delicate desserts were nicely complimented by the chamomile tea, which was very mild and not at all bitter. We left feeling very full and happy.
California Grill Yoshi

Azabu Juban 2-7-2, 2nd Floor

Minato-ku, Tokyo

03-3470-7778

Belinda's 16th Century Tearoom

My very first full day in England was perhaps the best. I stayed in the quaint riverside village of Arundel in an old-fashioned hotel on the upper floors of a bustling restaurant, with the picture-perfect castle (a Victorian renovation of the Norman-medieval original) towering over the mossy shingles and chimneys of the shops across the street. Before the castle opened at ten, I took a walk through the meadows and around the castle pond, now a wildlife refuge full of swans and various interesting and unusual breeds of ducks. Then I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon wandering all over the castle grounds and through the chapels, bedrooms, state rooms, and portrait-lined hallways. The hotel's ample English breakfast kept me going all day until about 3:00, when I started to feel ready for a light lunch and my first highly anticipated English tea.
A few streets away from the castle I happened upon an old, slightly slanted building with a bay window showcasing baked goods and tea cannisters, and a sign proclaiming it to be Belinda's 16th Century Tearoom. Once a stable, it was converted to a restaurant and is now a popular cafe, serving both traditional English cookery and a wide variety of home-baked cakes and pastries. There was a terrace in the back, but as the day was chilly I was happy to be seated in a corner table near the door but still inside out of the wind.

Wanting to keep up a semblance of healthy eating, I ordered soup before indulging in my scones with jam and clotted cream. The soup of the day was carrot-parsnip (a seasonal combination that kept recurring on menus throughout my trip), served in an attractive tureen-shaped bowl with a deliciously crumbly chunk of cheese-herb bread alongside. The tables around me were all full, and watching the Victoria sponge cake and Bakewell tarts going by almost made me change my mind about tea and scones. But I decided to stick with my original plan, and I didn't regret it. The scones were delicious, soft and warm and just as moistly crumbly as the bread had been. The tea came in a silver pot on a flowery little tray, and the china was all pretty blue and white. It was a lovely meal, and a wonderful place to reflect on my first perfect day in England.


Belinda's 16th Century Tearoom

13 Tarrant Street

Arundel, West Sussex BN18 9DG

(01903) 88297

A Tale of Two Sticky Toffee Puddings

Sticky toffee pudding was one of those decadent-sounding yet obscurely-named British desserts that I'd read a lot about, yet never come across in real life. It was high on my list of things to track down and try while in England, and sure enough I had no problem finding it on almost every pub menu. I guess I'm not the only American intrigued by the combination of toffee (which we don't often see in the US except in its crunchy candy form), stickiness (always desirable in a dessert), and pudding (which I know is what the English call any dessert, but which will always have a creamy, not sticky or crunchy, connotation in my colonial mind). Add the ever-welcome lashings of custard or caramel sauce, and it seems like an experience that couldn't go wrong.

Well, neither of the sticky toffee puddings I tried quite lived up to my expectations. The one pictured at the top, from the Dickens Tavern near Paddington in London, was the more flavorful - moist, nicely spiced, and swimming in creamy sauce. But it didn't have the toffee taste I expected, or quite the stickiness. The bottom picture, from the Duke's Cut in Oxford, definitely succeeded in the sticky-sweet categories, thanks to the pool of caramel sauce and ice cream lobbed on top. Unfortunately, inside was somewhat dry and lacking in any flavor at all - it was just a bland brown cake that was really nothing but a vehicle for the toppings. My ideal sticky toffee pudding (and of course, this is just based on what I've read rather than actual knowledge of what the "real" thing tastes like) would have a caramelized top and almost molten center, needing nothing but a pitcher of custard or cream to balance its deep sweetness. I have a feeling that I might have had more luck finding it if I'd looked somewhere other than pubs - but until I get another chance to visit England, I may have to experiment with the idea on my own.