Homemade Grape Jelly

Look! I made jelly! This was a completely unplanned, unresearched venture inspired by an unexpected windfall of those tiny, annoying grapes that seem to be so popular here in Tokyo. But it worked, and now instead of tiny, annoying grapes, I have sweet, spreadable, jam. I have no bread in the house, but I ate a spoonful by itself tonight for dessert (which, by the way, is perfectly normal if you're a Russian) and it was delicious. Even more miraculously, it was a firm jelly that mounded nicely on the spoon - and I didn't have to add any gelling agent, either. This jelly contains nothing but sugar and grapes.
I came by the two bunches of tiny grapes, which I bought one time long ago and never planned to buy again due to their being about equal parts skin and fruit, by a kind of accident. I had set out to buy fruit from my produce guy, but decided to take a longer walk around the neighborhood first. Up near the station, I saw a couple of guys and a little girl selling peaches out of the back of their truck, which is not that uncommon where I live. I don't know whether or not they're actually farmers selling their own produce, but it looks that way, and I always like to buy as close as possible to the source. The little girl offered me a taste of a peach, and after that I felt like I couldn't not buy something. I asked for peaches. The man on the back of the truck put three peaches into a bag and told me, "Three peaches are 1000 yen, and I'm going to give you a free gift of these grapes as well." I didn't want grapes, so I asked if I could have a nectarine instead. He ended up giving me both grapes and a nectarine, and then he offered to throw in three eggplants as well. I don't quite understand the business model (unless it's to get rid of as much as possible as fast as possible because it's too hot to sit outside with a truck of produce all afternoon), but the outcome was two bunches of tiny grapes I really didn't want.
But I washed them anyway, intending to put them in the fridge and hopefully remember to eat them before they withered away (these tiny grapes wither pretty quickly, too). As I was washing them, a few fell off the stems, and that's when I had that brilliant idea of making them into jelly. I knew that you're supposed to use an equal weight of sugar and fruit, but I didn't have any way to weigh the grapes, so I just threw in a half cup of brown sugar, which seemed about right. I simmered the grapes and brown sugar on medium-low heat, stirring frequently, for about 25 minutes...
... until it had thickened and was starting to look like jelly. Then I poured it into one of the empty jam jars I've luckily saved. I guess the whole jam-making venture was just meant to be, because look at how that jar is filled up exactly to the top, without a drop left over. I'm always astounded when I make something wonderful out of practically nothing, and this jam was a great success. The brown sugar gives it a nice depth of flavor, and those annoying grape skins have become an interesting textural contrast, chewy and sweet, almost candied. And it's beautiful, too, the kind of jelly I would be unable to resist buying if I saw it in a store, with the pearl-like grapes suspended in wine-colored jelly.

Goya (Bitter Gourd)

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was "The BFG" by Roald Dahl. The Big Friendly Giant of the title, due to his friendly distaste for crunching up children, was forced to subsist on a vegetarian diet of a horrid-tasting vegetable known as the Snozzcumber. I can't help but think that Roald Dahl must have encountered the Okinawan bitter gourd, goya, at some point prior to creating the Snozzcumber. With its bitter taste and warty green skin, it fits the bill perfectly, and though I've never seen a giant one, surely what's possible for the zucchini is possible for the goya as well.
The inside of the goya is spongy and full of large, tough seeds. It's easily scraped out, and the vegetable is then cut in slices that are disturbingly reminiscent of curled-up grubs. Because it's so bitter, it's usually fried up and served with something that tastes better, and which the bitterness can accent, like scrambled eggs or stir-fried pork. Since it's an Okinawan vegetable, I suspect that sugar might also come into play in some recipes, though I didn't use any. I fried my goya in olive oil and soy sauce and added it to a hash of potatoes, tomatoes, okra, and egg. Even so, it was so bitter that each time I bit into a piece I had to quickly go for some egg and potato so my mouth didn't have to endure goya alone. It probably isn't a vegetable I'll be trying again any time soon, though I would be interested in ordering it at an Okinawan restaurant, just to see whether they have any secrets to make it more edible!

Oishiness Turns 1!

It was one year ago today that I published my very first post on OISHINESS. I kicked off my blog with a report on the annual Azabu-Juban Matsuri, the neighborhood street festival that transforms the area around the subway station closest to where I live, so it seems fitting to commemorate my first anniversary with photos from this year's Matsuri, taken as I made my way home from work through the crowded streets of food stalls, yukata-clad teenagers, kids with goldfish-in-a-bag, and happy couples chomping sausages on sticks.
This was the sight that greeted me as I approached the neighborhood: a solid mass of people. It was a good thing the temperature had dropped to a relatively cool 30 C - even though the air was full of smoke and the sour smell of beer, it was at least not overwhelmingly hot and humid, and I could enjoy meandering through the crowd rather than becoming claustrophobic. One thing about street festivals is that despite the normal Japanese cultural taboo against eating while walking, during festivals everyone does it, despite the danger of walking while eating things skewered on sticks.
Here's an innovative item on a stick: the Tornado Potato, a variation on the crisp/chip. Thin slices of potato are skewered, deep fried, and sprinkled with your choice of flavored salt. I couldn't get close enough to see what each color was supposed to taste like, but the green in the back that the man is in the process of sprinkling was seaweed-flavored.
Another potato option for those leery of skewers, is the popular bar food, batta jyaga (butter potato). A baked potato, or perhaps in this case steamed to judge from those wooden boxes in the background, is partially mashed and absolutely smothered in butter, and it looks like there are sauce and mayo options in those tubs at the front of the stand, as well, for the truly fearless.
I wrote last year about the octopus dumplings, or tako-yaki, that are ubiquitous at any street fair, but I had to repeat a topic for the sake of including this photo. Look closely and you'll see that's a bowl full of whole octopi. The chopped up version is on ice in the basket alongside - I don't know whether the whole ones are just for display or whether by the end of the night they'll all be in little pieces ready to go into dumplings. It's certainly an interesting cultural difference from America, where people are horrified even by a fish served head-on - people here are happy to see what their food looked like when it was alive, and apparently even at a street stand it's a point of pride to prove freshness by displaying the whole thing.

Speaking of head-on fishes, these are being grilled on sticks stuck in ashes around a live fire - a highly traditional way of cooking ayu (according to the internet, this is "sweetfish" in English, and it's a freshwater fish, somewhat like a small trout). This is what I tried last year, and found that all the bitter internal organs were still inside - I'm afraid this detracted from the sweetness of the experience, and I didn't feel any compulsion to make another attempt this time around. After a year of blogging about food, maybe I've learned when it's best to just take a picture.

Aux Bacchanales Patisserie-Boulangerie

Though I've written before about the Aux Bacchanales restaurant, I haven't mentioned the adjoining bakery, which has some of the best French breads and pastries I've yet found in Tokyo. It sells a variety of baked goods, from sandwiches and quiches to buns and baguettes, as well as sweets like danishes and pie. What I always get, and in my opinion the best thing they have, is the pain au chocolat - more on that below. I do try new things occasionally, however, and last time this fresh-cheese-filled brioche caught my eye. The filling was thick but tart, almost like yogurt, and the brioche was sweet and chewy. Delicious, but a little heavy - I'd do better to stick with pain au chocolat.
As you can see from the photo below, the pain au chocolat goes light on the chocolate - the two slender veins are just an accent gilding the lily. The main event here is the flaky, buttery pastry itself. The top layer, shiny and baked to the very edge of burnt, so that it has an almost caramelized flavor, flakes off on your tongue and melts there. Each subsequent layer is a slightly paler shade, down to the soft white interior swathing those channels of chocolate. It's full of air pockets, so it tastes light as a cloud in spite of the flavor of pure, sweet butter - a truly divine creation.
Aux Bacchanales
Ark Mori Bdg., 2nd Floor
Minato-ku, Akasaka 1-12-32

Kawaii!! Bo-chan Kabocha

My favorite vegetable comes in an enticing variety of sizes, from the cute-as-a-button baby "bo-chan" pumpkin in the photo above up to giant squashed-soccer-ball size monsters that require a meat cleaver to split in half (I let the shop do that part for me). As the flavor varies from one kabocha to the next, and doesn't seem to be much affected by size, I usually just go for whatever my produce man says is good, and what he generally has in stock is the mid-sized variety. Recently, though, I had a couple of mini-pumpkins come my way, and while they both tasted indistinguishable from the larger ones I usually eat, they were certainly cuter - not to mention easier to cut. That teensy one at the top was recommended by my produce man, and it was indeed surprisingly thick-fleshed and sweet - its cavity was so small I could barely get my fingers in to scrape out the seeds. The softball-sized handful in the photo below is from Kawakami Farm, and it too was sweet and succulent. I often let pumpkins from the store age a little after cutting them, as this seems to cut down on the occasional tendency toward wateriness, but neither of these needed it. It's been a great week for this pumpkin-eater.

Indian Spinach

This thick-stemmed, thick-leafed vegetable looks a bit like basil on steroids, but tastes like a cross between asparagus and spinach. It's called Indian spinach, but in fact it's no relation to ordinary spinach at all. I'd never even seen it before I got some in my box of vegetables from Kawakami Farm, but it's quite non-threatening - the stems are easy to wash, the leaves are smooth and waxy, and there are no scary spines or fuzzy bits to deal with. I just rinsed it off, chopped it up, and started cooking.
I wasn't sure what to do with it, so I just did what I often do with other green vegetables: boiled it in a little soy sauce with a sliced-up red pepper for a bit of a kick. In the time it took for the soy sauce to cook down, the leaves were wilted and the stems tender. With its buttery aftertaste, like that of asparagus or artichokes, the hot pepper was a good pair, though I don't think I'd use soy sauce next time - just salt water. It went well with rice, but would also be great with a thick, ribbony pasta. It seems like there's an endless variety of greens in the world, and I'm always excited to discover a new one.

Peanut Butter Yogurt Brownies

The supermarket was having a special on plain yogurt, just 98 yen per container. My cupboard was lush with jars of birthday peanut butter, both chunky and smooth. And my produce man was taking a week's vacation, so no cheap berries were available to make my usual ice cream topping. There was only one thing to do: make peanut butter yogurt brownies. I couldn't find a recipe that used only for the ingredients I had on hand (most call for cocoa powder, but all I had was some bars of dark chocolate; most call for butter, but I had nothing but olive oil and yogurt), so I kind of made one up, adapting from the family standby, Maida Heatter's All-American Brownies. Cutting the sugar to make up for the already-sweetened chocolate, substituting yogurt for the butter, and adding peanut butter to the batter-filled pan, I came up with a relatively good-for-you brownie.
The combination of chocolate, peanut butter, and vanilla ice cream is guaranteed to be delicious, but I think they might both be improved by a higher proportion of chocolate. Perhaps because they lack the 8 tablespoons of butter in the original recipe, and therefore also lack the bond between butter and sugar that gives baked goods their characteristic texture, they were a little too flat and slightly gummy, and the peanut butter (the principle source of fat in the recipe) all sank to the bottom. Also, I think I took them out of the oven a little too soon, because the middle was still pretty raw. That may be the fault of the oven, though, since every cake I've ever made in it has the same problem - if you can call gooey-centered brownies a problem. They still pair quite well with ice cream.

Peanut Butter Yogurt Brownies

75 g sweet dark chocolate

1/2 c plain yogurt

1/2 c brown sugar

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp vanilla

2 eggs

1/2 c flour

1/2 c chunky peanut butter

1. Break or chop the chocolate into chunks and, in a Pyrex measuring cup, microwave in short bursts (20 seconds or less), stirring in between, until melted.

2. Stir yogurt into chocolate, then add sugar, salt, and vanilla and stir to combine.

3. Add eggs, one at a time, stirring well to combine each completely.

4. Add flour in two parts and stir to combine.

5. Pour the batter into a foil-lined 9x9 inch square pan. Dollop the peanut butter over the surface, and swirl it into the batter with a knife.

6. Bake at 350 for about 20-30 minutes, or until done.

Peaches!

It's peach season in Japan, and the sweet fragrance of ripe peaches wafting all the way down the sidewalk from my neighborhood produce stall is an irresistible temptation. Especially as it's such a bargain - giant peaches like these cost at least three hundred yen apiece in the supermarket, but when they're a tiny bit bruised and so ripe that they'll last only for the next day or two, like these, they go for less than a hundred each. I managed to get them home without inflicting any additional wounds on them, and have managed to slurp down the three most in need of being eaten over the past day and a half. They're perfect peaches - very thin skins, pink and yellow flesh that seems to melt into juice between your teeth, and that ambrosial sticky sweetness that's unlike anything else.

Ratatouille

I've heard that there are certain ingredients that should never go into an authentic ratatouille, but I can never remember what they are. And in any case, it's still a summer vegetable stew, whether or not it includes forbidden ingredients, and whether or not you give it a fancy French name. In my book, if it has eggplants and tomatoes and is thickly fragrant and would be equally perfect hotly served soaking into a hunk of brown bread with cheese melting on top, or cold in a lunchbox with rice and chickpeas in their own separate containers (my plan for the coming week), it's ratatouille. It's been a long time since I made it, but with all these lovely vegetables fresh from Kawakami Farm (all except the zucchini, that is), I was inspired.
What really sparked the idea was that the tomatoes in my vegetable delivery box arrived a bit battered, their skins split and their flesh too tender to withstand the dull blade of my old kitchen knife. If I had tried to put them in salad, they would have turned it into soup. The only thing to do with them was a stew, and fortunately almost all the other ingredients were there with them in the box.
This is a very easy stew to make, requiring nothing but a bit of chopping vegetables into big hunks and stirring occasionally as they cook down. I started by coating the bottom of my cast iron Le Creuset pot (the better to make authentic ratatouille, bien sur!) with olive oil (the regular store-bought kind, not the fancy cold-pressed biologique kind from Lucca). I smashed up all the cloves from one of the mini-heads of garlic I got in a previous Kawakami Farm box, and sizzled them around in the oil until they started to smell good, then dumped in all three chopped up eggplants and stirred until most of the pieces had at least sucked up a sip of oil. Then I let them sit for a minute while I chopped up the zucchini into similarly sized chunks and stirred again. I rinsed my three tomatoes and squeezed them in by hand, using the knife to cut down the bigger hunks of skin that were left after the juicy insides had all gone into the pot.
It's important not to add any extra water, as these are all quite watery vegetables, and as you can see, they release plenty of liquid. If they seem to be browning to fast at the beginning, it's better to take them off the heat or turn it down than to put any water in. You don't want them to get mushy, after all - they should cook all the way down without losing their shape completely, and with just they juice they produce themselves, it takes about fifteen minutes or so to reduce from soup to stew. I added some salt after the tomatoes went in, then left it alone while I chopped up the peppers. I don't like the way peppers get bitter when they cook too long, and I think they should retain some crunch, so I always stir them in very last thing, and leave them on the heat for only about five minutes.
Here's what it looks like when it's done - peppers in, adding color and crunch; liquid reduced to just a thick tomato sauce; eggplants and zucchini still in recognizable chunks. It may not be authentic ratatouille, but it looks pretty good nevertheless.

Yellow Zucchini

I don't know why we don't have yellow zucchini in America, at least not that I had ever seen. We have yellow crookneck squash, of course, and at Whole Foods there are all kinds of things like lemon squash and zebra squash and those half-yellow, half-green zucchini that look like they were dipped in paint. But I'd never seen the simple, speckled yellow zucchini (with its green cap, always!) until moving to Tokyo. They taste just the same as the ordinary green kind, but they certainly look better - they don't turn nearly as drab a color when cooked, and retain their pretty speckledness. And like all Japanese zucchini, the real mystery about them is why they cost a minimum of 100 yen each. American gardeners are overrun with zucchini and give them away - so why not in Japan?