Drinking snacks from frozen tuna block 冷凍キハダマグロのさくの酒のあて

One week we could not stop at our Izakaya substitute Tako Grill. So, on the following weekend,  I tapped into our frozen emergency rations, i.e. frozen yellow fin tuna sashimi block to make several drinking snacks.

The first one was tuna and avocado cubes. This was similar to what I have made before; cubes of tuna sashimi and avocado dressed in soy sauce, sesame oil, with grated garlic. This time, however, I garnished it with crispy garlic chips since I had them already made.



The second was pseudo negitoro ネギトロ擬き.  Oh the magic of adding mayonnaise; it really tasted like real negitoro! I was thinking of serving this as a "shime" ending dish either as small sushi rolls or hand rolls but instead, I served it with nori sheets so that we would not get filled up. This worked very well. We made small rolls of negitoro wrapped in nori—excellent!



The third one was our usual yamakake 山かけ. I marinated the cubes of tuna for 1 hour or so in soy sauce and sake mix.



Because of the grated nagaimo yam, this dish is more filling than it looks. At this point we finished the entire block of yellow fin tuna. We wanted one more dish. So I served freshly made non-frozen fish cake or satsuma age さつま揚げ which I bought at our Japanese grocery store. I served it with burdock root salad dressed in sesame mayonnaise and Japanese shishitou green pepper 獅子唐芥子prepared in "Tsukuda-ni" 佃煮 style. I just broiled the fish cake  in a toaster oven until  thoroughly heated up and the surface showed some brown spots.

For this evening, we enjoyed Niigata 新潟 sake Kubota Senju 久保田千寿、吟醸. We were not a big fan of Kubota in the past. I remember the Kubota series, even the higher end ones, tended to be too dry and a bit yeasty but this one was quite fruity and crisp but not too dry and had no yeastiness. Several days, later we had a chance to taste 久保田万寿 Kubota Manju which is daiginjou. This one tasted drier than Senju. For the price, I consider Senju a much better buy.

At this point we were getting quite filled up but my wife wanted a small desert and served some grapes and a mini chocolate something. For a low quality frozen yellow fin tuna sashimi block, these dishes were quite enjoyable. We were especially impressed with the pseudo negitoro.