Meal 89: Kiribati

Move over, Equatorial Guinea: Kiribati, a constellation of a few dozen atolls in the heart of the Pacific, now holds the title of Country the Least People Have Heard Of, judging from an unofficial tabulation of "huh?"s and "where's that?"s as we told friends and family of this meal. Even if you've heard of it, you geography nerd you, you're probably pronouncing it wrong. Say it "KEE-ree-boss," because it's really a Polynsianism for Gilberts, the British colonial term for the territory they arbitrarily created. That's why it's not called by any native name: as a collection of disparate chains of tiny clumps of land, there was no pre-colonial precedent for what to call it.

Kiribati is right up there in the hardest countries for figuring out the menu. My usual tricks didn't work: No Wikipedia article. No awkward but workable site from an embassy or the Ministry of Culture. No lovingly compiled blog by an expat living there, or a homesick student abroad. No chatter on food discussion boards. Even when I granted myself a temporary reprieve from the prohibition on looking at other cooking-around-the-worlders' sites, much of what I saw didn't ring true (though I ended up borrowing some). When I couldn't find even a Peace Corps cookbook, a trick that rescued me for some smaller West African countries, I took my search to the next level and reached out to a Peace Corps volunteer whose name I found in a newsletter of returned volunteers. Thankfully, Laura Montez quickly replied, and we had a great chat on the phone.

She explained the challenge: there's no cuisine as such, no recipes handed down from grandmothers around the hearth. On the further-flung islands where life is at its most traditional, food is, quite literally, catch as catch can: whatever you manage to pull from the sea; coconuts, breadfruits, and a few sweet fruits from trees; and a limited assortment of roots and squashes. Whatever greens exist are for the pigs and chickens that run around for a special-occasion meal. With that limited assortment, and the notable lack of herbs or other embellishments, it now makes a lot of sense why I didn't find much in the way of recipes. (Note that on the most populated island where the capital is, life is totally the opposite: it's so crowded that there's no land for farming, not even coconuts, so everything has to be shipped in: some from other islands in the country but mostly from Australia/New Zealand. Accordingly, the cuisine is quite different, with canned corned beef, curry powder, and other smatterings of global cuisine.)

So thank you, Laura, for the advice! And to Jaymee, her brother, and Deena for coming. It was a small crowd but we scarfed it all down! (Alas, we were having such a good time we didn't end up getting a group photo. Imagine happy people with their faces stuffed. Done!)

Papaya cocktail

In the spirit of throwing together what you've got, I juiced a papaya, which Deena mixed with some palm juice, lime juice, and rum, and voilà! A suitably tropical-esque drink to get us in the mood.

Te ika | Raw tuna

Laura told me that yellowfin tuna is the most common, but the closest I could find was albacore. I defrosted a few frozen steaks from Trader Joe's — if that sounds weird or unsafe for sashimi, keep in mind it's frozen on the ship very shortly after being pulled out of the water, and much of what you eat in a sushi restaurant was previously frozen anyway. (I also grilled some for those less inclined to raw fish.)

Not knowing how an I-Kiribati would prepare it, I cut the fish into random bite-sized morsels, with little bowls of coconut milk I painstakingly extracted by hand from fruit I cracked, pried out, and shredded. I've done this a few times, and frankly I can't taste much of a difference. From now on, I'll stick to canned, or at least buying it frozen pre-shredded.

Te inai | Fried parrotfish

Fiji Market didn't have most of what I was looking for — dried pandanus fruit, for instance, which I'd read about as being used as a starch — but they came through with a few fun things. A load of this fantastically exotic fish had "just come in last week" according to the friendly owner. A quick search on my phone revealed a parrotfish on a Kiribati stamp, which was good enough evidence for me that they've got it there. I let it thaw overnight in the fridge, removed the scales, and did a halfway decent job at filleting it. Right before we ate, I slipped it into the oil I'd already had going for the breadfruit.

Te mai | Fried breadfruit

We first tasted this peculiar food with the Jamaica meal. Popular as it is in the Caribbean, the tree is actually is native to Polynesia, and appreciated everywhere it grows for providing abundant, filling fruit. It's not sweet, though; like a green plantain, it's mostly starches and needs to be cooked. The tastiest preparation is to boil and then fry it, and that's just what we did, with a generous dusting of salt. Unlike in Brooklyn, I could only find frozen breadfruit at Fiji Market, but my palate, unaccustomed as it is to the food, couldn't tell the difference after cooking. Its artichokey aspect was less pronounced after frying than with grilling, but of course the texture was a whole lot more pleasing.

Te bwaukin | Pumpkin simmered in coconut milk with pandanus leaf | Recipe

Coconut milk isn't just for dipping, it's also a great simmering medium. Coconut milk and pumpkin are both foods that can go either sweet or savory, and in this case tossing on some sugar brings out nice flavor in both. On the islands it'd probably been a palm sap that seems like the Polynesian version of maple syrup; as an attempt of replicating the flavor, I threw in a bit of that palm juice along with regular sugar. (If I'd had my druthers I'd have bought palm sugar, which is easily found at Asian markets.) It's worth noting that coconut and palm are different flavors: while they both definitely have that toasty-nutty undertone in common, coconut is richer and brighter, and palm is muskier.

A new-to-me ingredient showed up in this preparation: pandanus leaf. It's used like bay leaf: added in a simmering dish for the flavor it lends. I later learned that I've definitely tasted it – in the water at Pok Pok, Portland's famous Thai restaurant. I'd always thought the flavoring came from rice, and I wasn't far off: according to Wikipedia, Basmati rice and pandanus share the exact same aromatic compound. So, if you want to impart a Basmati-esque flavor to your next simmered dish, pick up some pandanus from your Asian grocer's freezer.

All this said, a very tasty dish. We gobbled it all down.

Te bua toro | Sweet potato and coconut milk loaf | Recipe (in comments)

Once again to a fellow cooking-round-the-worlder for the recipe — though in this case the insight comes from the comments. (Corrections always welcome on blogs like these!) It's a coconut-milk based casserole wrapped in leaves: we saw this sort of preparation with Fiji, and I suspect we'll see it a fair bit more with more Pacific island nations. I ended up using some sweet potatoes, the drier white variety. The result was again pretty sweet, thanks to sugar, and not terribly impressive. I'll stick to the simmered pumpkin, thank you.

Meal 88: Kenya

We've already enjoyed three meals from the Horn of Africa, but it's taken us until the K's to start into East Africa proper. It looks a whole lot more like Central African, though I'm happy and relieved to report that we found it quite a bit tastier.

As with so many former colonial countries, the borders of Kenya arbitrarily threw a bunch of tribes together. Accordingly, there's not exactly a national cuisine as such, but there are a few dishes that are extremely common throughout the country. So we made those collards and corn mush dishes, and rounded out the meal with dishes chosen from around the counties that stretch from the sea to Africa's highest mountain.

After our small trial run for Kazakhstan, we went big for this meal, taking advantage of our new, large dining room to seat twelve around two tables. Our guests were Hannah, Emily, Frank, Don, Chelsea, Sebastian, Craig, Laura, Kaely, and Brett. The first four arrived a half hour early, due to an error in my email, but they proved super helpful in the kitchen, as I'd once again misestimated the prep time in the dishes and was relieved to have a small army of choppers, stirrers, and washers appear! Thanks, folks!

And extra-special thanks to my buddy Walter, who lived in Kenya for several years, and gave me some excellent and very useful advice on what to serve. I love it when someone can distill the essence of a country's foodways and the culture around it — I still do plenty of research to support and understand, but the guidance and structure is invaluable.

Dawa | Vodka and lime with honey swizzle | Recipe

Dawa is the Swahili word for medicine. In this case, it's got the spoonful of sugar built right in, as this drink is essentially a caipiroska (vodka-lime-sugar) taken to the next level with a swizzle-stick dipped in honey. It's tart, it's sweet, it's boozy. And it's in my hand in the above photo!

Ugali | Cornmeal porridge | Recipe

Just about all of sub-Saharan Africa has some sort of mush as the bedrock of a meal. Kenya's no different. I read in a few places that a meal is considered incomplete without this simple mix of cornmeal and water, mixed so thick that you can stand a spoon in it, and then tear off clumps with your hand to use as a vessel for scooping whatever else is on the plate.

Sukuma wiki | Collard greens | Recipe

If you're the average Kenyan on an average day, that other thing on your plate is probably the humble, tasty, nutritious collard greens, simmered for a long time with maybe some onions, tomato, and a bouillon cube. The name means "to stretch the week," as in, it's the food you can afford to eat when your money's running out before you're next paid.

I was afraid I'd find it pretty bland, given that it wouldn't have the benefit of ham or bacon as done in Southern cooking. Maybe it's because this was some super fresh (and enormous! the leaves were like two feet long!) farmers-market collards, or maybe it's really that easy to bring good flavor with a few hours of simmering, or maybe the MSG in the bouillon saved the day. Whatever the reason, the greens were tasty and popular.

Nyama choma | Grilled goat

Some cultures, such as Chinese, bring romance and storytelling to the names of their dishes. So too with parts of Africa: Cameroon has a dish Poulet D-G, standing for directeur général, since the dish is considered so fancy and tasty it's fit for the boss. Not so much with nyama choma, which literally means "burn the meat." To be fair, that's pretty much all you do: once the meat's on the skewers, all you do is slather it with warm salted water every few minutes while letting the flames sear the outside and seal the tasty juices on the inside.

The meat in question here is goat. Several months ago, someone who I wish I could remember so I could give them the credit said, "Goat is like soccer: popular in most of the world, but not the U.S." Fortunately, it's not too hard to find in Portland. I biked in the rain to a Somali market up on Killingsworth, which offered me a choice of leg or shoulder — and we agreed that the latter is the better choice for kabobs. $5/pound including cutting into kabob size. In Kenya, the sale price would have also included free grilling with a place to sit in the back!

But who cares about what it's called or where I got it. The suckers were scrumptious, embarrassingly so given how little I had to do in terms of cheffing to get them on the table. I'm certainly doing this one again on a warm weeknight.

Kachumbari | Tomato "salsa" | Recipe

Mexican pico de gallo is a great foil for the rich meat on a taco. The East Africans pair their grilled meats with almost exactly the same condiment — fresh tomatoes, onions, cilantro, lime, chili — but it came to them via a completely independent and unlikely source: the English! Just as, in the Egypt nosh, we saw how they introduced a rice-and-lentil dish from India that transformed into the national food, they also brought an onion-and-tomato salad that became ubiquitous on the other side of the Indian Ocean. No point in reviewing: this really was exactly the same as how I'd make a pico de gallo.

Mchuzi wa samaki | Swahili fish curry | Recipe

Whereas the grilled goat was the essence of simplicity, likely borne of the necessity of a nomadic lifestyle, this coastal curry shows off what you can do when you're in a tropical setting on the sea, with both the fish and the trading it entails. It gets its name from the coastal Swahili people, whose Kiswahili language has become the common language of much of East Africa. The dish was quite tasty, with a double-dose of turmeric imparting a pleasing color and a haunting flavor that brought zing to an otherwise simply flavored meal.

Muthokoi | Cracked corn and pigeon pea stew | Recipe

This dish of cracked corn and pigeon peas takes us back inland to the Akamba tribe of Eastern Kenya, and we're back to simple, earthy foods. I wasn't planning on making it, but at Mama Pauline's African Market, I got the two ingredients on a hunch that I'd find something to make with them. As you'd guess, this was a hearty and filling dish, with the flavor again coming from store-bought seasoning, a specific brand name called Royco. It's not even listed in the ingredients, and it's even written in lower-case in the recipe, that's how common the spice blend is. (Should you want to make this dish, you could use a bouillon cube, or look up "homemade royco" to find several variants. I can't remember which I used!)

Tea and cake

Walter, my buddy who'd lived several years in Kenya, gave me all sorts of specific and useful advice on the other dishes. But what he said about dessert cracked me up: "You MUST serve Bad Cake. It's effectively the national dish and national pastime. Kenyans love cake more than any people I've ever known, and they make cake worse than any people I've ever known also." This proved quite a challenge: how to make a cake that'd be intentionally bad? And bad in what way? Well, since I had a few gluten-free folks coming, I took advantage of the opportunity, and simply made a gluten-free yellow cake. Maybe it wasn't bad-to-Walter's-taste in the way Kenyans do it, but it definitely was, well, a gluten-free cake. To make the cake more Kenyan, I decorated it like the flag, which was easier and more fun than I expected.

A surprisingly nice start to East Africa, let's see how things go as we explore farther down the coast.

Meal 87: Kazakhstan

Between the Jordan and Kazakhstan meals, we moved across the country, to Portland, Oregon. We took a three month break while settling in to our new city and a new house, and I took advantage of the time to learn about a country I knew next to nothing about. Powell's Books had exactly one book on the country, a travelogue entitled Apples Are From Kazakhstan. Thanks to the title, you've already learned one true fact about the country. In reading it, I learned a lot more about how this huge expanse — steppes and mountains and desert and farmland as large as Western Europe — went through a wrenching transformation in the twentieth century. A centuries-old lifestyle adapted from the nomadic days, which relied on livestock-grazing and the occasional orchard-growing to get the most out of a meager soil, was upturned by centralized Soviet planning, and large-scale farming efforts led to completely unnecessary famines as well as the emasculation of the Aral Sea as water was diverted to grow cotton. Truth be told, I didn't find the traditional Kazakh cuisine all that appetizing. The much-celebrated national dish, beshbarmak, came out as greasy broth, bland boiled lamb, and slippery noodles. To be fair, I didn't cook with horse meat or sausage, and I couldn't find fermented camel's milk, and maybe steppe-grazed Kazakh mutton has a better flavor and certainly would have been more freshly slaughtered than what I got at SE 122nd and Division in a sack labeled "LAM." So, we didn't have exactly what would have been served in any respectable yurt, but I have to imagine that even those foods would have benefitted from a little spice and some degreasing.

It was a smaller crowd for this first Nosh in the new place: Derek, Alondra, and Rachael.

Baursak | Fried puffy bread |Recipe

How can you go wrong with fried bread? The stuff of street vendors the world 'round, Central Asia has hopped bigtime on the wheat-dough-in-hot-oil bandwagon. Yes, they look like tofu squares. But they were a lot tastier, and went great with tea as an appetizer. Too bad this was the best part of the meal.

Chai | Tea | Recipe

Fermented mare's milk seems to be a very important part of Kazakh culture and hospitality, but my feeble attempts to find the milk of a horse utterly failed. Since there's apparently no substitute, I leaned on another, if not at all unique, tradition of drinking tea. At least the high (cow's) milk content pays homage to the high position of dairy within the traditional nomadic diet.

Kuyrdak | Meat and organs with onions | Recipe

I know a half-dozen places in New York where you could get lamb liver any day of the week. But apparently there isn't the critical mass to keep such a thing in ready supply even at the more ambitious Portland butchers, so calling around the day before proved useful only to learn that I could have gotten it with a few days' notice. I got a little obsessive with the hunt, and skipped out of a friend's birthday party at a bar to check if the fancy supermarket across the street might have something, and they indeed had a little frozen tub of calves' liver — good enough! Except it was hardly worth it, as the resulting dish, a supposed delicacy, was mushy, greasy, and bland. Sigh.

Beshbarmak | Boiled meat and noodles in broth | Recipe

The famous pinnacle of hospitality in this part of the world, this stew atop lasagna-esque noodles is embedded with ritual around giving different body parts to different family members based on superstitions about the effects on each person's virtue. All I had was randomly cut shoulder, I think, but I think that no matter the body part, boiling (without spices even!) really is probably one of the worst ways to cook lamb. Greasy, bland. Oh well, at least it was sorta fun to roll out and cut up the noodles — rolling out dough is something I've gotten a lot better at the past few years!

Chak-chak | Fried dough in honey syrup | Recipe

Whereas I suspect the above dish just is what it is, I know for sure I screwed this one up. It's promising enough: what could be bad about fried dough bits doused in a honey sauce? Well, failed technique, that's what. Rather than mixing the two components first in a bowl and then making the traditional pyramid, I misread the instructions, and made the pyramid before pouring over the syrup. Half the fried bits were oversoaked, half were totally dry, and there was a sticky mess from the spillover. Oops.

Fruit and nuts

I found essentially nothing about Kazakh desserts, but I did read that nuts and fruits are often served, so I scraped together some seasonal fruits (persimmon, apple) and some dried ones (apricots, figs) along with almonds. Went nicely with the tea.

One thing that was a pleasant success about the meal was discovering that Portland holds more promise for ethnic-market shopping than I'd expected. While small, and not particularly helpful for this meal, Roman Russian Food has a lot of the base ingredients I'll need for Slavic foods, and Mingala International Foods where I got the lamb has a surprising variety of global foods. Makes me hopeful I'll find plenty more.

Meal 86: Jordan

When you think of Middle Eastern food, you probably imagine hummus, tabbouli, falafel. While those foods are indeed popular throughout the region, they come from the Levant, essentially the region between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates which contains modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, plus pieces of Iraq, Israel, and Palestine. (Incidentally, confusion about how to translate the Arabic word for this region, ash-Sham, is why the terrorist organization based in Syria is sometimes translated ISIS (where the second S is "Syria") or ISIL (for "Levant"). One of the goals for this project is to highlight what's distinctive about a country, meaning in part what you can find there that's nowhere else. In this case, some of the core parts of the Levantine diet are so pervasive I couldn't avoid them, but rather integrated them in a distinctive way — with hummus as a part of a bigger dip, for instance, and particular local variations of regional favorites like baba ghannoush and mujaddara.

Fortunately, this type of meal scales well. For our very last meal as New Yorkers, we returned to the fantastic Hostelling International on the Upper West Side for two reasons: we wanted to host many more folks than could fit in our apartment, and even if we'd wanted to host there, almost everything was packed up or given away! It was a pleasure to host several dozen people on a beautiful night, and cook with friends old and new in the very ample basement kitchen.

Tremendous thanks to Najeeb, a colleague of mine from Jordan living in Dubai, who summoned the famous Jordanian hospitality I'd read so much about in an amazing and unexpected way — he insisted on paying for the tickets for some people to come and enjoy his country's food! Thanks to Najeeb, everyone who volunteered to cook was able to enjoy the meal at no cost. (And, of course, hundreds of people received meals from the World Food Program.)

Fattet hummus | Hummus dip | Recipe

You know that random mixed-up mess you have left on your plate after trying a bunch of dishes at a Middle Eastern restaurant? This dish is kinda like that, just pre-mushed-up for you, with chickpeas two ways — plain and as hummus — plus yogurt, tahini, pita, olive oil, pine nuts, and parsley. It's like for Levantine food what seven-layer dip is for Tex-Mex, and a tasty way to feed a crowd. Big thanks to Jason for whipping up the hummus and then compiling the dish.

Moutabal | Roasted eggplant dip | Recipe

If this dish of roasted eggplant, tahini, garlic and lemon juice looks a whole lot like baba ghannoush, well, you're sort of right. That's what it's called in Egypt, as well as much of the Western world. But if you order baba ghannoush in several other Arab countries, including Jordan, you'll get something also based on roasted eggplant, but more like a mashed-up salad with tomatoes and onions rather than this creamy dip. Anyway, what the Jordanians call moutabal is the more common one there, so that's what we made. Really not very hard to make, and very easy to tweak the levels of pretty much all ingredients to your liking. Don't forget ample pita.

Mukhalal | Pickled turnips | Recipe

The same mustiness with a hint of sweetness that makes roasted turnip an mild yet intriguing flavor makes for a bigger punch when pickled. The deep, earthy tones play off the bright crisp of the vinegar, all of which is made cartoonishly pink thanks to a few beet pieces that have been thrown into the mix for show. With nothing more than a bay leaf and a bit of chili, and of course a week of sitting on the counter, these few elements interact to create a condiment that is, rightly, hugely popular, a nice palate-cleanser after a bite of lamb, or a texture-enhancer to an otherwise mushy bite of hummus.

Mansaf | Lamb and rice over flatbread with sauce of reconstituted buttermilk | Recipe

Sometimes it's excruciating to choose what to feature for a given country from among so many options, and sometimes you see a certain dish declared in every travel article and recipe collection as the undisputed National Dish. Jordan is the latter type of country, as this bountiful dish of meat over two types of starch bathed in a rich sauce is the sine qua non of that famed Jordanian hospitality.

Mansaf means "explosion" in Arabic, and this dish does indeed look like a bunch of settled debris. But it's all layered for maximum deliciousness and texture sensation, with lamb-infused buttermilk sauce layered amongst the flatbread, rice, and lamb for full tastiness.

The most important, and most challenging, part of the dish is the jameed, which is dried buttermilk. I couldn't find the proper hard balls that the recipe calls for, the best I had was the Lebanese version called kishk, which is similar but ground and mixed with wheat. The advantage is that the powder allowed us to skip the soaking part, but the flavor and texture both felt a little too thin and mealy. I probably put in too much water and didn't stir it enough. It definitely showed promise, with a sort of smoky-tart flavor and, in parts, a lovely creamy texture. It was definitely good enough to eat, thankfully, because I bought over 30 pounds of lamb!

Mudardara | Rice and lentils with caramelized onions | Recipe

I included this to make the meal vegetarian-friendly, but found it quite tasty all the same. As far as I can tell, it's the better-known mujaddara, except explicitly made with brown lentils and rice, whereas other versions of the dish can use green lentils, or even wheat in place of rice. Anyway, it's a hearty comfort food, and while it takes time and care to prepare, it's very inexpensive.

Knafeh | Cheese and shredded filo pastry | Recipe

Take a feta-like cheese out of its salty brine, soak in several changes of water, then simmer to make darn sure all the salt's gone. Tear open a package of shredded filo and fry in ghee until it's crispy. Layer a pan with filo, then that weird cheese, then more filo. Wait, this is dessert? Yup! Because after baking on one side, flipping over, and baking again to ensure even caramelization, you douse the whole thing in a ton of sweet syrup.

You know what? This thing was pretty darn awesome, the runaway success of the night. And congrats to Elly, pastry chef for the night, who followed the spirit of the recipe by "summoning the courage of her convictions" when flipping the trays, beautifully executed.

It was a lovely evening, mild by late-July New York standards, and many of us transitioned out to the hostel's lawn, enjoying last nibbles of sweets, including a whole box of dates I'd forgotten about in the rush. After lots of hugs goodbye and a team effort to clean up, we rushed home to pack — and a week later hit the road to move across the country!

Meal 85: Japan

Japanese cuisine is a real delight of variety of cooking technique, flavor balance, textures and seasonal sensitivity, which is why it’s a shame that most Westerners only know it through the narrow (though tasty!) lens of sushi. Accordingly, for this meal, the last at our Brooklyn apartment, I resolved to get nowhere near the stuff, and instead showcase an admittedly small fraction of the rest of what’s on offer, with an inclination toward traditional summertime foods.

Having come of age during the height of America’s economic intimidation by and cultural fascination with modern Japan, that country had an outsized influence on my childhood. I first went when I was nine years old on a one-week elemetary-school exchange (who knew such a thing existed!) outside of Osaka, then again in middle school, high school, and then a few years ago for work. I went to a Japanese Saturday school for a few years, studied the language in high school and college, and cooked quite a bit of Japanese food with my parents throughout middle and high schools. Alas, I’ve lost most of the language, but I’ve remembered quite a few bits about the cuisine that helped in the research for and preparation of this meal.

I did as much prep in advance as possible, because we had a World Cup match to watch! After the US and Portugal played to an agonizing tie, a bunch of folks came over: Diana, Jeff, Elly, Erika, Carolyn, Matt, Catherine, and more!

Mugicha | Cold barley tea

Having grown up on the West Coast, I didn’t know about humidity, so when I went to Japan in August after graduating eighth grade, I was just about knocked on my ass. The saving grace was this incredibly refreshing, smoky-nutty barley infusion. The standard packaging is enough to make 54 liters of the stuff, which ought to give an indication of its addictiveness. If you’re closer to a Korean market, look for borucha, which is as far as I can tell the same thing.

Hiyayakko | Cold tofu appetizer | Recipe

At the end of a hot day, this simple little appetizer is a lovely way to ease into the meal. The softest tofu is topped with a bit of grated ginger and scallions, and kissed with a bit of a chilled sauce. Easy, gentle, inviting.

Kyuuri to wakame no amasuzuke | Cucumber and seaweed pickles | Recipe

Thanks to the preponderance of sushi restaurants, about the only bit most people experience of the wide world of Japanese pickles is the little bit of ginger — which, sadly, is usually died pink to cover over imperfections. (You know ginger is naturally a very pale yellow, right?) Since I didn’t have time for some of the long, salt-based pickles that can take months or even years, I went for an overnight marinade of thinly sliced cucumbers and the spindly wakame seaweed in a tangy-sweet blend of rice vinegar and the curious sweet rice wine known as mirin. Another refreshing and appetite-stimulating starter.

Goma ai shingiku | Chrysanthemum greens with sesame sauce

Blanched spinach with sesame sauce was a common first course for Japanese meals at home growing up, but I'd never realized until Elly mentioned it that the dish can be made equally well, and in a slightly more exotic fashion, with chrysanthemum greens. They're a bit more bitter and herby than spinach, and more toothsome, but still shrink down to almost nothing just the same. With the thickly textured yet gently flavored sauce, it's another good addition to a lineup of summer nibbles.

Miso shiru | Miso soup | Recipe

As with most simple soups, the key is the broth. At the heart of this and just about every Japanese soup — and, heck, many Japanese foods beyond soup — is what’s known as dashi, made with wide strips of natural-MSG-laden kombu seaweed and impossibly thin flakes of dried shaved bonito called katsuobushi that lends an utterly clean fishy flavor.  While I have cooked dozens of Japanese meals in my life, I’ve never made dashi from scratch, and I’m glad I did: as with so many things, a little extra effort lends a flavor that’s purer and more satisfying. The miso, made from fermented soybeans and adding a bit of body and tang, is but an afterthought, stirred in at the end right before a baptism of tofu, wakame seaweed, and scallion nibbles. Despite the heat, everyone finished their bowl!

Saba shioyaki | Broiled mackerel | Recipe

Some of the best foods are truly the simplest, the ones that combine the good fortune of fresh ingredients with just enough manipulation to bring out its best. They happened to have local mackerel at the neighborhood farmers market (though I think it’s more accurate to call fishermen hunters than farmers!), and all I did was salt the filets long enough to draw out a bit of liquid, and broil them skin-side-up for about ten minutes. I’ll leave it to you to decide if the wedge of lemon on the side was cheating on nature.

Negima yakitori | Chicken and scallion skewers | Recipe

Through this sweet-glazed chicken kabob, Japan has made a world-class contribution to the constellation of grilled meat. In contrast to some other dishes that delicately present subtle flavors in genteel portions, yakitori is bold, brash, and brutish, rich and meaty chunks rippedp with the teeth off a skewer held by increasingly sticky fingers and washed down with a big gulp of beer. And unlike the neatly arranged bento and other precisely apportioned food, yakitori is ordered one after another, the empty skewers totaled up to calculate the bill.

This was certainly the most labor-intensive dish, and one that admittedly most Japanese home cooks wouldn’t do — it’s the equivalent of making your own ketchup. But just as homemade ketchup tastes better than the already-good bottled version, so does this yakitori sauce. Once thickened and cooled, it’s used in abundance, generously slathered time and again on the grilling skewers to lacquer on layers of salty-sweet richness. It turned out great and everyone enjoyed it; my one improvement for next time would be to cook them half-way before the guests arrive, because it took longer than I’d hoped to grill them all up from raw.

Zaru soba | Cold buckwheat noodles with dipping sauce | Recipe

Along with mugicha, the barley tea, my food memories of summertime Japan are full of these cold buckwheat noodles. Slightly chewy and surprisingly easy to grip with chopsticks, they’re run through a  soy sauce-dashi dipping sauce — zaru is an onomatopoeia for the sound the noodles make when sloshed through the sauce — then slurped as a cooling delight. Zarusoba often serves as the end of a meal, a cheap and filling way to top off the tank if the more expensive protein and vegetables didn’t suffice. I love the texture, the flavor, and the temperature, and of course the memories they all evoke. Somehow I always manage to finish my bowl.