Japanese Soul Cooking – Joe Cook Me

Winter seems to be the time of year I most like cooking Japanese food. It’s not dependent on locally grown farmers’-market ingredients and it’s a pretty healthy change from all the holiday cooking and eating. It is also right up there with Italian and Peruvian as one of my favorite cuisines. This year I really wanted to push the envelope in trying several new cookbooks and new seafood.

Cookbooks

The top row of books are a great collection for those interested in learning Japanese cooking. Japan the Cookbook (JtC) by Nancy Singleton Hachisu (who is white and moved to Japan in her youth, ultimately writing a cookbook on the cuisine, Fusia-Dunlop style) has oodles of reliable recipes spanning different regions and styles. The vast majority of my recent dishes have been from this one. Rintaro is a reliably yummy and slightly more complicated Japanese-West-Coast fusion restaurant. Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art, by Shizuo Tsuji is an English-language classic on the subject and includes very helpful descriptions of how to pair and serve various dishes to form a complete Japanese meal. The bottom three cookbooks I turn to rarely but have seemed good so far.

Techniques

One technique that is common to almost all of the meals prepared below is making homemade bonito flakes. These are shaved from a dried, smoked, salted, and cured bonito called katsuobushi. The dried fish is so hard that a wood plane must be used. Specialized wood planes are rather expensive, but I found a regular Japanese carpenters plane is much cheaper and works just as well.