Cucumber aspic 胡瓜のゼリー

This is the second dish we made using the large American cucumbers we got through grocery home delivery by mistake. Since my wife is into anything “aspic”, this was “the dish” for her. It turned out to be remarkably good. For the picture I added slices of Japanese cucumber as a topping garnish and made an instant dill sauce. My wife later made a different sauce for this dish which is based on dressing for cucumber salad. and it worked well. The cucumber flavor of the aspic was very subtle. Most of the cucumber flavor seems to have come from the garnish of Japanese cucumbers but the aspic had a nice texture and fairly complex flavors.

This is based on the recipe on cooks.com.

Ingredients:
2 large American cucumbers, peeled and seeded, grated (I used a Japanese grater to get a fine grated texture)
1/2 c. cold water (We felt that plain water brings nothing to the “show” so we used lightly sweetened cold mint/black tea that my wife makes for the summer months because it was available. Chicken stock would probably work too).
1/2 c. boiling water
2 tbsp. Knox gelatin
1 tsp. grated onion (we used Vidalia onion)
2 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. sugar
2 tbsp. vinegar (we used sushi vinegar)
2 tbsp. lemon juice
Dash of Tabasco sauce (we used Sriracha)

For sauce
Version 1
1tbs Greek yogurt
1tbs sour cream
1 tsp lemon juice
1tbs chopped dill

Version 21/4 cup sour cream
1/4 cup Greek yogurt
1/4 cup Mayonnaise
2 Tbs. sushi vinegar
1 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1tbs chopped dill

Directions:
Bloom the gelatin by soaking it in the cold water for 5 minutes. Then add the boiling water, stir until thoroughly dissolved, then add all the other ingredients. Put into molds and set in refrigerator to congeal. Yield 6 servings.

This was a very light refreshing dish perfect for a hot summer day. Although the cucumber taste was very subtle the entire refridgerator smelled of cucumber as the aspic was solidifying (which was a very pleasant smell). The flavors were subtle but complex. No single one stood out. For example there was a slight hint of the mint from the tea and a slight hint of the onion. We could have used a bit more hot sauce. The texture was very smooth and pleasing. The sour cream based sauce with the dill really finished the whole dish nicely. Maybe getting the wrong cucumbers wasn’t such a bad mistake after all. 

Cold cucumber soup 冷製胡瓜のスープ

Getting home delivery of groceries is very convenient but one problems that the quality of the fresh produce may be quite variable since we cannot inspect the product before buying. Broken eggs are not uncommon as well the the delivery of wrong items. We have also disable the automatic option for substitutions if the item we requested is not available. This is because the substitutions may not be always appropriate. For example, the substitution of shallots for jalapeno. Talking of wrong item being delivered, we recently received 4 giant American cucumbers instead of a package of 4 mini-cucumbers. (We like these because they are the closest in taste and texture to a Japanese cucumber). Although we do not like regular American cucumbers rather than throwing them out, we tried to use them. This is one of such attempt. We made cold cucumber soup with mint and buttermilk. We had it as a lunch with our usual potato salad and coleslaw. I also served skinned Campari tomato with broccoli and pecan, apricot bread. This was certainly all home-made vegetarian salad and soup lunch which was quite good and filling

Since I had few Japanese cucumbers (from our Japanese grocery store), I garnished the soup with several slices and chiffonade of mint leaves from our herb garden.

For both coleslaw and potato salad, we used home made Greek yogurt (from heirloom yogurt my wife makes regularly) which make it very creamy and also healthier (hopefully).

Since I made miso salad dressing several days ago (recipe from Washington Post, subject of another post), I dressed Campari tomato and blanched broccoli.

Although we jointly prepared the cucumber soup, I peeled, chopped and blended but my wife was in charge and ask her to take over for the recipe.

The recipe came from Southern Living on line.

Ingredients:
21 oz. cucumbers (in our case this was two big American cucumbers)
2 cups whole buttermilk
1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt (we used home-made)
3 tablespoons chopped fresh mint (from our herb garden)
3 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon, plus more for garnish (we did not have fresh, we used 1 tsp dried)
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice plus 1 tsp. lemon zest (from 1 lemon)
1 teaspoon kosher salt

Directions:
Peel, seed, and chop 2 of the cucumbers.
Process chopped cucumbers, buttermilk, yogurt, mint, tarragon, lemon zest and juice, and salt in a blender until very smooth, about 2 minutes, stopping to scrape down sides as needed.
Chill 1 hour or overnight.
We served with slices of Japanese cucumber and chiffonade of fresh mint leaves.


This was a quite nice cold soup. I usually do not particularly fond of buttermilk but for this soup, the buttermilk really tasted great. The slices of Japanese cucumber added nice fresh cucumber taste. One thing that was kind-of odd was that the soup was effervescent. You can see the little bubbles in the pictures above and interestingly the bubbles didn’t go away after the soup had been in the fridge for some time. The bubbles added to texture giving the otherwise velvety smooth soup and somewhat grainy mouth feel. Nonetheless it was a very good cool refreshing soup.

Take-out sashimi from Tako Grill タコグリルからのテイクアウト

We have been taking out omakase sushi and sashimi 刺身と寿司おまかせ from Tako Grill since March of 2020 after it closed for dining-in. I have posted a few of these take-out sashimi and sushi dishes. I usually re-plate them on two plates for one serving each. I usually use rectangular plates but this time, I used round plates we got recently which are currently our favorite.

Today’s sashimi was Oo-tro tuna 大トロ, hamachi はまち and botan-ebi ボタン海老 (could be Argentinian red shrimp). All were quite good. I also use all the trimmings such as the daikon or perilla from the take-out box.

I re-arranged the uni and squid sashimi  rolled in perilla leaves ウニとイカの刺身大葉巻き into a small dish with julienne of perilla 大葉 and nori 刻みのり, dressed with wasabi-jouuyu ワサビ醤油.

We also got 4 deep dried shrimp heads (extra benefit of Botan ebi sashimi) which were also great. We got nearly filled up with these assorted sashimi but we finished with the serving of sushi  (including one California roll with real lump crab) that was the last part of the take-out. We really enjoy this sashimi and sushi feast at home with cold sake. It is a great to kick back, relax and enjoy our meal with sake libation in the comfort of our home without having to worry about a drive back from the restaurant through traffic. 

Tempura 天麩羅

I have posted quite a few tempura dishes. But I have  not made tempura for a long time. My wife wanted to have chicken kara-age 唐揚げ and I had marinated chicken thigh for “Kara-age” but I needed  to use new oil since I discarded the old reused peanut oil the last time I made a deep fried dish. Since fresh clean oil is best for making tempura, as my wife’s suggested, I made a few tempura items before frying the kara-age. I made, shrimp, shiitake and green beans tempura.

I am a bit out of practice making tempura and I made the batter a bit too thin but it came out OK. (Although not great especially for the shrimp.) I also re-fried the shrimp heads we got as part of take-out from Tako Grill. They came out very nice and crispy (better than heating them up in the toaster oven).

I served this small assortment of tempura with green tea salt and a wedge of lemon. After this, I cooked up the chicken kara-age. For dredging, I used half-and-half mixture of rice flour (“mochi-ko” 餅粉) and potato starch (“Katakuri-ko” 片栗粉) which was really good and produced more crunchy crust as compared to my usual potato starch.

Cheese bites, two kinds チーズバイツ、2種類

 My wife is into making small cheesy and eggy appetizers or bites. These are some she made recently. The green one is made with spinach and golden one is slightly sweet with honey. (My wife was not planning on making the golden one but the recipe for the spinach bites was short of filling the pan. She didn’t want to cook a pan that was not full so without a specific recipe to go by she came up with the golden bite.) Both are eggy and cheesy with different flavors and we like these small bites with a sip of  red wine.

Ingredients:
For spinach (green) cheese bites
One bag of fresh spinach cooked and drained
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1/2 cup finely shredded Parmesan cheese
2 eggs beaten
1 garlic clove minced
1/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper


For spinach (green) cheese bites (X2)
Two bags of fresh spinach cooked and drained
1 cup ricotta cheese
1 cup finely shredded Parmesan cheese
4 eggs beaten
2 garlic clove minced
1/2 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper

For golden cheese bites
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1 egg
1 Tbs. honey
1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/8 tsp. salt
1/2 cup grated cheese (I used smoked gouda and Monterey Jack)

For golden cheese bites (X3)
1 1/2 cup ricotta cheese
3 egg
3 Tbs. honey
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 1/4 tsp. salt 
1 1/2 cup grated cheese (I used smoked gouda and Monterey Jack)

Directions:
For spinach bites: Pulse the spinach, garlic, salt, cayenne and eggs in a food processor until finely chopped and mixed. Add the spinach mixture to the combined ricotta and Parmesan cheese. Using the second smallest ice cream scoop put the mixture in mini cup cake tin lined with paper cups. As shown in the picture below I didn’t have enough spinach mixture to fill the tray so on-the-fly I came up with the golden mixture to fill the remaining cups. (As you can see the amount was perfect to complete the tray.)

For golden bites. Blend all the ingredients together and scoop into the paper lined cups.

Cook at 400 F for about 20 minutes until they are fairly firm when touched. Let rest for about 5 minutes and remove from the muffin tins.

These make very nice small bite appetizers. Both versions were very different but very flavorful and light in texture. The spinach bites were savory with a slight garlic cheesy flavor. The spinach flavor came through nicely. The yellow version was  sweeter (obviously due to the honey). The cayenne pepper in this version was much more pronounced than in the spinach version. It resulted in a sweet/hot/peppery combined taste that really made the bite. We also discovered they heat up very nicely in the toaster oven 

Lox and Ikura "donburi" bowl 燻製鮭ロックスとイクラ丼

After making Philly rolls, I used the left over lox from Vital Choice to make a donburi for lunch.  I made the lunch in the form of a Japanese meal set or "teishoku" 定食. I served the lox/ikura donburi with miso soup made with wakame ワカメ, abura-age 油揚げ and scallion as well as cucumber asazuke 胡瓜の浅漬け

I made sushi rice from the rice we cooked a night before. I microwaved the rice first. I also warmed up sushi vinegar in the microwave and mixed them together in a warmed bowl and let it stand for a few minutes covered. I placed the sushi rice in the bottom of the small bowl. Besides the lox, I topped the bowl with scrambled egg, salmon salad (in the center), cucumber and wakame with sumiso dressing ワカメと胡瓜の酢味噌あえ (leftover), "ikura" イクラ salmon roe and garnished with thin strips of nori or "Kizami-nori" 刻み海苔.

The main ingredient "lox" is mostly hidden so I dug it out for the picture (below).

So this was quite a luxurious lunch and we were good and did not succumb to having sake with it and just enjoyed this salmon "oya-ko*" donburi 鮭の親子丼.

*”Oya-ko” means parent and offspring. The classic of this type of donburi bowl is chicken meat and egg on rice. The combination of smoked salmon (lox) and salmon roe could be also considered “Oya-ko” donburi. 

Philadelphia (Philly) rolls "Hosomaki" 細巻きフィラデルフィアロール

Although I have posted  Philadelphia rolls (or Philly rolls) 6 years ago, it was a medium sized (chumaki 中巻) and the nori outside (omotemaki 表巻き). I also said in that post that this could be a thin roll with the rice outside (Hosomaki 細巻き and Uramaki 裏巻き) like California rolls. So this is exactly that version. The reason I made Philly rolls is that the type of smoked salmon we got from Vital Choice which was called "wild salmon lox" was sliced a bit too thick and did not have much of a smoked flavor so it didn’t work well with our usual smoked salmon dishes such as blini, smoked salmon and ikura dish. I made sandwiches using this lox with avocado and cucumber on croissants smeared with cream cheese one side and mayo on the other which was quite good. A few days later I made these Philly rolls for an ending "shime" 〆 dish in the evening. 

I made two rolls. The first one (upper row) came out better. For this, we made fresh rice and made the sushi rice using a Japanese cedar "hinoki" 檜 vessel  called "Hangiri" 飯切りor sushi-oke 寿司桶. We brought this so many years ago when we visited Kiso 木曽 but amazingly it still smells of Hinoki wood. In any case, this Philly roll was made exactly like California rolls but instead of crab meat and avocado, I used lox, cream cheese and cucumber. I also sprinkled the outside layer with white sesame as in California rolls. In this preparation, the lox from Vital Choice tasted great.

As a small side dish I served simmered tender octopus leg 蛸の軟らか煮 (shown below).

I also served cucumber asazuke 胡瓜の浅漬け with salt broth soaked sugar snap スナップ豌豆の塩びたし.

This was a rather large shime dish for us but it was very good and both of us managed to finish it. (Such a hardship…not!)