Milk potato soup (easy to make but tasty)

1. Microwave a potato for 3-4 minutes.
2. Peel the skin of the potato.
3. Cut the potato into several chunks and put them into a blender.
4. Microwave 200ml of milk for 2-3 minutes (skip this step if you
prefer cold soup).
5. Add the milk into the blender.
6. Add half a teaspoon of salt and a full teaspoon of sugar into the blender.
7. Switch on the blender.
8. Serve the soup and add a dash of olive oil and a pinch of coarsely
grounded black pepper.

Mackerel stewed with miso (saba no miso-ni)

It's time for lesser-known Japanese cuisine again!

Another whole mackerel was in the fridge today (I bought two yesterday). As one day has passed, eating it raw isn't a choice anymore. So I tried to cook it in a very Japanese way. It's called "saba no miso-ni" (mackerel stewed with miso). Here's a recipe:

1. Mix 400cc of water, 200cc of Japanese sake, one spoonful of sugar, one spoonful of soy sauce, and sliced ginger in a pan, and then bring it to a boil.

2. Place 130g of miso paste in a jar, add about 100cc of the "soup" made in Step 1 to it, and mix it with miso paste until the paste is dissolved into the soup. Keep this aside.

3. Add mackerel fillets to the soup made in Step 1. Place a lid onto the pan and heat gently for 5 minutes.

4. Open the lid and add half of the miso paste soup made in Step 2 to the pan. Then place the lid again and keep heating gently for another 5 minutes.

5. Open the lid and add the remaining miso paste soup and a hint of rice vinegar.

That's it! Miso paste is easy to get burned. That's why you shouldn't add miso from the beginning. A hint of rice vinegar in Step 5 makes the taste milder.

I've kept saying this since yesterday. But it was brilliant! I'm happy to be born as a Japanese. :)

Stewing fish in soup like the one made in Step 1 above is a very Japanese way of cooking fish. (The soup is not for drinking. It is just for stewing fish though we can serve stewed fish dipped in the soup.) We don't just eat raw fish as sushi.

Interestingly, I didn't like stewed fish when I was in Japan. More generally, I didn't like cooked seafood meals when I was in Japan. Since I started a life in London, I've begun missing fish. Then here I am, eager to explain a Japanese recipe for cooking fish!

Neginuta

This blog sometimes becomes a Japanese cuisine guide. It's such time again.

After coming home from the Billingsgate fish market, where I bought two whole mackerel for 3.50 pounds, I pickled one of them as described on 21st August 2005. For lunch, I ate a half by dipping in soy sauce. It was gorgeous as always.

For dinner, I tried a new thing: neginuta. I didn't know this way of eating pickled mackerel. But it is brilliant. Here's the recipe:

1. Slice pickled mackerel and chop spring onions.
2. In a bowl, put three spoonfuls of miso paste, one and a half spoonful of rice vinegar, and a spoonful of sugar (you can change the amount to your taste as long as you keep the ratio, just like making cocktails).
3. Add sliced mackerel and chopped spring onions into the bowl, and marinate them all.

That's it! The sweet taste of miso and the sour taste of pickled mackerel along with the crunchy texture of raw spring onions melt together in your mouth, producing a pleasant sensation.

By googling Japanese websites, I found that neginuta refers to marinating spring onions (or, more precisely, negi (Japanese leeks) - but I prefer using spring onions as I doubt Western leeks fit this cuisine) in the miso/vinegar/sugar mixture. Some seafoods like boiled octopus or squid are sometimes added. Adding pickled mackerel is probably not a standard thing to do. Anyway, I'm probably the first person who introduces neginuta to English speakers as googling it in English doesn't yield any result. :)

Toshikoshi soba

I just had a New Year's Day soba noodles, a Japanese tradition.

Sorry I just lied. What's traditional in Japan is a New Year's Eve soba noodles (toshikoshi soba). I simply forgot eating soba noodles last night.

I bought chasoba noodles (noodles made of soba powder and green tea leaf powder) the other day in Oriental Delight supermarket, a newly opened East Asian food market in Chinatown. I boiled it for three minutes. British-managed or American-managed Japanese restaurants, notably Wagamama, don't seem to understand how long you should boil Japanese noodles to serve, by the way. They always boil it too long, serving jellyish noodles to disappoint Japanese customers. Italians know this. Their phrase "al dente" says it all.

While waiting, I sliced spring onions very thinly. In a very small bowl, I poured soba dipping sauce (made of soy sauce, mirin, and dashi soup (soup containing umami) and added the sliced spring onions.

Serve soba noodles boiled al dente, after washed with cold water, onto a large plate with a small amount of wasabi paste put on the edge. Pick up a few noodles with chopsticks and dip them into the dipping sauce. Add a hint of wasabi on top of it. Then quickly put them all into your mouth before wasabi melts into the dipping sauce. The al dente texture of soba noodles, the bitterness of raw spring onions, the umami taste of the dipping sauce, and the distinctively spicy taste of wasabi melt together in your mouth.

Lovely.

The moment I feel happy to be born as Japanese. After eating them all, have a cup of hot Japanese green tea. It clears the umami taste left in your mouth. This is how we Japanese do our thing.

How do you eat mackerel?

The cooking page of The Sunday Times' Style magazine today has a point.

Don't cook mackerel if you want to extract maximum flavour.

I completely agree. And all Japanese people know this. We pickle mackerel fillets (called shime saba, where shime means pickled, and saba mackerel).

The last time I went to the Billingsgate Market, I bought a mackerel for 99p. I filleted it at home, spread a generous amount of salt on a large flat metal plate, placed the mackerel fillet on it, add more salt on top of it, and left it for an hour and a half. Then I washed the fillet with water, dried it with paper towels, soaked it into rice vinegar on a metal plate, placed paper towels over it as a lid, and left it for 20 minutes. That was it. Eating sliced pickled mackerel fillets with soy sauce (just like when you eat sashimi) was full of pleasure.

Everytime I talked about this, people here in London was like "You eat raw mackerel?" They don't understand. Heston Blumenthal, the guy quoted above, understands this. But he is still an amateur when he says, "When the fish is ready, wash it thoroughly to remove all the salt, then remove the skin from the fillets." Come on! The skin of a mackerel is an important part of appreciating the taste of a mackerel.

This is why Japanese people sometimes find it hard to live abroad: nobody but Japanese people seems to understand how to eat fish "properly". I'm always amazed by looking at how small the area for selling fish is in Britain's supermarkets and how unfresh and pricey the fish fillets they sell are. That's why I have to go to the Billingsgate Market from time to time. Japan's per capita fish consumption tops the world ranking, which sometimes troubles the rest of the world, including the whale conservation debate and the environmentally-unfriendly fish farming in Southeast Asia to export fish to Japan.