Japan, Day 3: Miyajima

Posted on August 17, 2023 by Dan

I’m not going to bury the lead – this is my favorite picture of the entire trip:

Isn’t that something? Those deer are jerks, though. Let’s back up.

After our day in Hiroshima, we had an excursion planned to the island of Miyajima, followed by a Shinkansen to Kyoto, where we would be spending the next few days. So we stashed our bags in lockers at the Hiroshima train station and boarded a train to Miyajimaguchi station. Entertainingly, apparently enough people accidentally get off at “Miyauchikushido” station by mistake, that there is a special announcement on the train NOT to get off there if you are going to Miyajima. So we didn’t.

But what’s the deal with the deer? Well Miyajima island is one of two tourist destinations in Japan (along with Nara) famous for extremely friendly deer. They’re still wild animals, but they wander around amongst the tourists. Eating stuff.

Seriously, we watched two different deer eat two different poorly managed kleenex in the space of five minutes. This one tried to take a bite out of our crappy umbrella when I refused to share my maple cookie. (a local specialty)

Other than deer, why come to Miyajima? Well, the number one attraction is the tori gate in the first photo. It’s enormous, and it’s out in the water, so at high tide, you get beautiful photos like this:

And at low tide, you can walk right out to it.

In addition to the gate, there’s some other things to see on the island. There’s a large shrine, built directly out over the water, associated with the gate. Also visible in this photo are a 15th century pagoda (center) and a 16th century shrine commissioned by Toyotomi Hideoshi. (left)

In particular, the last of those, Itsukushima Jinja Senjokaku Pavilion, was particularly welcome, because we were starting to REALLY suffer from the heat, despite consuming copious quantities of vending machine beverages. The pavilion is open, shaded, and on a hilltop, so what breeze there was went straight through. It also has stunning views.

After our encounter with the umbrella-eating deer on the main shopping street, we found a much quieter area with a small, family-run restaurant specializing in eel. It’s amazing how easy it was to go from the packed tourist street to an absolutely quiet residential neighborhood just steps away. The meal was fantastic, too.

After lunch, we set back out in the heat to visit Daisho-in, a large Buddhist temple complex overlooking the town. It was an enormous, picturesque set of buildings ascending the hillside. It included this garden full of buddha statues, all wearing knit hats…

Incredible architecture…

…aand this thing, brought to you by Mazda.

This was our first encounter with the juxtaposition of the spiritual and the utterly corny, but it wouldn’t be the last. And as it turns out, it’s NOT a much of a break from tradition as you might think.

As I learned from Isaac Meyer’s amazing “History of Japan” podcast, a lot of religious sites in Japan were explicitly marketed as tourist attractions for large portions of their history. (Note: if I have borked any portion of this explanation, that’s my fault, not his.) During the Edo period, it was generally illegal to leave your home domain without explicit permission, and one of the few reasons you could get that permission was for a religious pilgrimage.

The keepers of the various shrines and temples realized that since there was a ready supply of people keen to travel, it was up to them to make their PARTICULAR temple desirable for a visit. So in addition to promoting their actual religious significance, sites would try other gimmicks as well. Don’t have time to make a complete circuit of all of the pilgrimage sites on the island of Shikoku? Daisho-in has you covered! We’ve got sand from all 88 of them, conveniently located a few feet apart, so you can do the whole thing in an hour! Then have your picture taken in this Mazda cutout!

I don’t want to sound like I’m dismissing the spiritual portions of these sites. They are still profoundly moving, and we saw solemn worshippers everywhere we went. I’m more trying to say that the fact the big ones all had gift shops as well isn’t a modern innovation – they’re part of the tradition as well.

Rounding off the day, we had one more local delicacy of grilled oysters.

And with the sun gently setting over another jerk deer, it was time to head back to Hiroshima to pick up our luggage and catch the Shinkansen to Kyoto.

Japan, Day 2: Hiroshima

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Dan

Even though we would have liked to spend a bit more time in Osaka due to all the closures on our first day, hotel reservations are a harsh mistress, so off we went to catch our first Shinkansen.

Also known as “bullet trains,” travel on the present Shinkansen network travels at speeds up to 320 km/hr. (For our readers still on the imperial system, that’s nearly forty thousand furlongs per day!) And this network has been around for nearly twice as long as The Simpsons, that’s how old it is.

It’s a cliché to say that we need this in North America, but dear lord do we need this in North America. Hiroshima is roughly the same distance from Osaka as New York City is from Baltimore, but we made the trip in an hour and a half. Just enough time to share a tasty Inari bento, but not enough time to remember to take a picture of it before we ate it. Here’s the wrapper, anyway.

Arriving in Hiroshima, we encountered the weather that would more or less define the rest of the trip. Sunny, humid, and temperatures in the low 300s. (Kelvin. Around the mid 90s F.) It was hot.

For our first stop, we went to the Shukkein Garden. (I mean, our FIRST stop was the nearest combini for cold drinks. This can probably be assumed between every stop going forward for the rest of the trip.) The Shukkein roughly translates as “shrunken scenery.” It’s a whole Japan in miniature – small mountains, small bridges, small rivers. Like the full sized version, it’s gorgeous.

We then took a tourist bus downtown, and went looking for lunch. By this point, we were seriously overheated, so we searched for “cold noodles near me”, and found a delightful lunch of cold udon and tempura. (Once again, with half of the food eaten before I remembered to take a picture.)

And now to be completely serious. While Hiroshima is a perfectly nice city, there’s obviously one particular reason to go there.

This monument is on a quiet backstreet, and shows the exact centroid of the bomb blast. It’s much less well known than some of the other sites.

We didn’t take a lot of pictures here. We didn’t take ANY pictures inside the museum, as they aren’t allowed, and it would have felt incredibly disrespectful to do so even if it had been.

The museum is deeply affecting. It is entirely focused on the horrific effects of this single nuclear weapon. A choice could have been made to provide more context around the broader war, or the decision process to use the weapon, but instead the choice is to focus the entire attention of the viewer on WHY these weapons are so uniquely unconscionable.

Given the present level of political discourse in BOTH countries which control the bulk of the world’s stockpile… I’m not optimistic, frankly. I fervently hope we continue to avoid their use. But I’m frankly shocked we got through the Trump years, and Trump or no, there’s more like him on the horizon, and far too many jingoists under his banner. Time will tell.

After that sobering afternoon, we returned to our AirBnB, which had the unique feature of a lock that we had to open using an app. Which was largely in Japanese. But amazingly, it worked using the link the host had texted us the night before.

For our one dinner in Hiroshima, we had the local specialty of okonomiyaki, which is a savory noodle pancake that literally translates as “however you like it.” There’s an okonomiyaki palace downtown which has roughly 8 restaurants on each of 3 floors, all specializing in the dish. You sit around a hot griddle (perfect in sweltering temperatures) and the cook makes yours right in front of you.

A happy end to a thoughtful day.

Japan, Day 1: Osaka, Interrupted

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Dan

Remember the typhoon? There was a typhoon.

We had one day in Osaka, and well – most of the city shut down. We emerged from the underground entrance of our hotel into what had been an absolute madhouse of people and commerce the night before to find… nothing.

Osaka station was deserted. Every one of the gazillion small shops was shuttered. It was incredibly surreal. We had a breakfast of onigiri, yogurt, and some pastries from a convenience store (“combini” in Japan) because it was literally the only thing open. All of the tourist attractions we had planned to see, including the indoor ones like the aquarium, were closed.

New plan: let’s go find an arcade and spend some time there. Arcades in Japan are cool, right?

Arcade is closed. We wandered around a large ridiculous store called “Don Quixote” for a bit. Don Quixote is hard to explain. Did you ever need to buy whisky, earbuds, sex toys, and a watercolour set in the same trip? Don Quixote has you covered.

We decided to go downtown on the subway and see what WAS open. Turns out the famous covered shopping street, Kurumon, was open. In fact, since it was still POURING rain (typhoon, remember?) the slightly smaller absolute quantity of tourists was packed into a MUCH smaller area, so it was quite packed. Or so we thought at the time. We actually had no idea what packed was going to look like later in the trip.

Half the reason to come to Japan is for the food, so lets get started. On our graze up and down the street, we managed to have the largest oyster either of us had ever consumed, some octopus on a stick and grilled scallops. (As will become apparent, we frequently started eating BEFORE remembering to photograph our food on this trip.)

One thing that took some getting used to is that you don’t eat while walking in Japan. If you buy an oyster, you stand in front of the shop that sold it to you, and you eat it there. No matter how crowded the shopping streets get, you still pack in to wherever you bought the food to eat it.

In our continuing quest to find places we could reach while staying dry, we went to an old school coffee shop for some cake, our first of many shrines to find a geocache, some more covered shopping streets near Dotonbori (frozen fruit on a stick acquired), and finally bought a crappy plastic umbrella which we would haul around for the remainder of our trip.

Dotonbori, by the way, is the famous canal district in Osaka that everyone takes pictures of. For good reason – it’s got some great signs.

The area of the actual canal itself was a bit on the soggy side.

The one other thing we were fairly sure we could check out despite the conditions was Shinsekai, a neighborhood that is to Dotonbori as the old Vegas strip is to the new one. Slightly seedier, but in a way that makes it in many respects cooler.

We had takoyaki sitting on a oil drum in a puddle, and it was the best takoyaki we’d ever had. Burn your mouth hot and everything.

Tsutenkaku tower. Also note the crappy, hastily purchased umbrella.

After going back to Dotonbori to see if the area around the canal would be a little drier by now for sightseeing (it wasn’t) and attempting to go to an arcade (still not open), we gave up and went back to our hotel to see if we could find some Osaka style okonomiyaki. (We didn’t). Eventually we ended up at a chain izakaya that was perfectly serviceable, and turned out to be one of the largest restaurants we would eat in for the entire trip. We ate crispy chicken and gyoza next to some boisterous Italians and went back to our room to try again the next day.

And that was our Osaka experience. Memorable? Yes. Possibly not the precise set of memories we would have chosen, but definitely memorable.

Japan, Day 0: Osaka

Posted on August 14, 2023 by Dan

After three solid months of planning, we were SUPER ready to stop PLANNING a trip to Japan and actually TAKE a trip to Japan. Planning the trip had become a full time hobby, and we were long past “oh my god, let’s just GO already”.

But thank goodness we planned things out, so we were fully prepared for (checks notes) a typhoon?

Wait, what? No… we were NOT prepared for a typhoon.

And apparently neither was Osaka.

The first concern was that we wouldn’t make it in at all, but our plane managed to shave some time off its flight plan, and we arrived at Kansai airport hours ahead of Typhoon Lan. (Which is NOT Typhoon Ian, no matter how many times I try to read it that way.)

Kansai, as it turns out, is actually a bit shabby, as airports go. We were worried that our preconceived notions of Japanese transit as fancy and modern were going to be dashed. Once we got out of the airport, we discovered we needn’t have worried.

After getting quickly through customs (carry-on only, fortunately) we withdrew some yen from the nearest ATM, and made our way to the ticket office to pick up our Japan Rail (JR) passes, buy IC cards (that work on local transit, as well as the ubiquitous vending machines), and get tickets on the train into Osaka.

This is about as Japan a picture as we could have taken an hour off the plane. We’re on a high speed, Hello Kitty branded train, holding a vending machine beverage, with a 7-11 visible in the background.

We arrived at Osaka Station, and were immediately confronted with the absolute INSANITY that is the Osaka – Umeda station complex. As we were to discover throughout the trip, large Japanese train stations are small cities, with underground warrens that go on forever, each zone merging into the next. Something like 47 of the 50 busiest train stations in the world are in Japan.

Osaka station was definitely one of them. The sheer VOLUME of people going every direction in this maze was staggering.

After arriving in our hotel, jet lagged and confused, we went back out to find some food, and ended up at a chain izakaya near the station. Our first meal in Japan consisted of grilled squid and corn on a hot plate, a mixed tempura platter, and a sashimi plate. All of it delicious except for some weirdly gummy shrimp.

We elbowed through the crowds back to our hotel, expecting to plunge back into the maelstrom in the morning to spend our first day in Japan. It didn’t quite work out that way…

Japan, Day -1: The Planinating

Posted on August 13, 2023 by Dan

Regular readers of this blog (hi mom!) may remember that it originally started as a TRAVEL blog, that we updated every couple of years when we went somewhere interesting. When we started documenting our international cooking project, it seemed more logical to add it here rather than starting a whole ‘nother WordPress instance. (Also less work. WordPress is useful, but irritating.)

But given that we’ve now cooked upwards of seventy meals, and it’s been nearly half a decade since our last international trip, it’s great to be able to finally talk about travel again. And this one’s gonna be a doozy.

Leigh had a paper accepted to the biannual (not that biannual, the other one) International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Tokyo, so we decided to make a vacation of it.

I have attempted to travel trans-Pacific twice. When I was in high school, I was a member of the Maryland Youth Orchestra, which planned a concert tour of China. In the summer. In 1989.

So yeah, that didn’t happen.

Thirty years later, Leigh and I decided that we wanted to officiate the largest roller derby tournament in Australia. We booked tickets. We made hotel reservations. We got halfway through our goddamn SCUBA DIVING certification. In 2020.

So yeah, that didn’t happen either.

But given that I am typing this entry while going 200 km/hr on a Shinkansen, it looks like this one finally worked out.

We spent a solid three months or more planning. After two solid years of DuoLingo Chinese, we stomped on the brakes and switched to Japanese. We watched an ABSURD number of YouTube videos, and developed a creepy parasocial relationship with Chris Broad. (Chris, if you’re reading this, we love your stuff. Call us!) We canvassed all our friends for suggestions.

On the one hand, did this take some of the mystery out of the process? Yes, it did. On the other hand, I’m perfectly happy NOT to be confronted with the ineffable variability of life’s rich pageant while attempting to work out where to shove my Japan Rail pass into a ticket gate.

Plus, there were some things we HAD to do in advance, and not just the obvious stuff like hotel reservations. The aforementioned Japan Rail pass, for example, must be purchased before entering the country, and you have to receive a physical voucher that you bring to Japan with you and exchange for the pass at the airport. Studio Ghibli museum tickets go on sale one day a month. (And when we logged onto the website at the hour of truth, there were 2,500 people ahead of us in line. We did manage to snag tickets, so stay tuned for details!)

That doesn’t mean we wanted to work out a minute-by-minute itinerary, but we didn’t want to waste time sitting in our hotel room trying to work out possibilities once we were there.

And Tokyo’s the most populous city in the world. We wanted to be ready. Were we? We’ll find out…

International Meals – Japan

Posted on August 2, 2023 by Dan

If you were to Google “national dish of Japan,” what would you expect to find? Ramen? Sushi? Pocky? Nope. What tends to come back is “curry.” Now, obviously, “curry” is a word with easily hundreds of definitions around the world, but in Japan, it generally refers to this: (photo credit: Serious Eats)

Japanese curry tends to be very sweet, very mild, and really only dates from the mid to late 19th century. We’re not making this.

Instead, we’re going to make some high-effort Tonkatsu ramen. (“Tonkatsu” by itself is a fried pork cutlet. “Tonkatsu Ramen” means a broth made with pork bones. I don’t know where the cutlet went in this etymology.)

As such, I biked over to Granville Island to start the process by seeing how many “misc” UPC tags I could induce the butcher to generate. I’ve mentioned the Granville Island Public Market before – it’s a combination tourist trap / actual useful market, like Lexington Market in Baltimore, the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, or the West Side Market in Cleveland. Unlike those, however, it’s also located on a beautiful island on the water, so my bike ride home looked like this:

My appreciation of the view was SLIGHTLY tempered by the rock-hard, ice-cold pig foot digging into my back. The trouble with doing this by bicycle is that I had just purchased, in addition to the foot, a large bag of frozen bones (“misc”), a substantial quantity of frozen pork back fat (“misc”), and a slab of refrigerated, skin-on pork belly, (not “misc”) all of which had to go in the backpack for my ride home.

But only slightly tempered. I mean – LOOK at that view!

Once I got home, the actual ramenating was a process which would take several days. First off, we wanted to make a pork chashu topping, which involves a long cooking time and then an overnight chill in the fridge.

First, the skin is removed from the pork belly, and saved for later.

Next, a little cha-shibari, and it goes in a pot with soy sauce, sugar, and water, to simmer for 3 hours. (Photo was taken before the addition of the water)

Finally it gets wrapped in plastic to set overnight.

Now, since this makes WAY more chashu than we were going to need for two bowls of ramen, and we didn’t have time to make the broth the very next day, instead we decided to make Japanese curry out of a box. So yeah, I lied about not making that.

We tossed in some apples and corn. It was good! Definitely NOT our official “Japan meal for the blog” however.

For that we needed to make the broth, which was an all day process. Fortunately, Leigh generally works from home over the summer, so was able to babysit it during the day. To start, we boiled the bones and pig foot by themselves for about half an hour to get off the initial round of froth.

After half an hour, you remove the bones, strain the liquid carefully to get rid of solids, and then return the liquid to the pot. The bones and foot get washed, and then they go back in the pot as well. What else goes in the pot? The skin from the pork belly, the back fat, an apple, an onion, and some garlic and ginger.

This is all going on at 7:30 in the morning, to be clear. At this point, I put on the heat and went to work. Over the course of the day, Leigh continued to skim off foam, and top up the water as needed. When I came home, the apartment smelled amazing.

Now, one of the things Tonkotsu broth is known for is its milky white color. The way you get that is by carefully removing the fat and skin, which are just barely still solid at this point, and giving them a whir in the blender.

That gets returned to the pot.

One thing this broth DOESN’T have in it is salt. A bowl of ramen consists of a number of parts. There’s broth, noodles, toppings, and tare. The last one is absolutely critical, as it contains a large part of the flavor of the broth, and ALL of the salt, which is absolutely necessary to bring out the taste of everything else. There are several types of tare, including soy tare, miso tare and shio tare.

We’ll be making the last one, which literally just means “salt tare”. Starting the night before, we soaked some konbu seaweed in water.

An hour or so before dinner, the konbu is joined a pot with the soaking liquid and a whole pile of dried fish flakes. (That’s flaked dried fish, not the things you feed to your pet goldfish.)

After that gets cooked down, the solids are discarded, and the liquid is blended with vinegar, sake, and soy sauce to make the final tare.

The one other topping we decided to make was some burned garlic oil. I’m used to trying to keep garlic THIS color:

Nope – this recipe calls for THIS, and even a little past:

Our other toppings included chopped green onion and some pickled garlic. Here we are, ready for final assembly.

Clockwise from upper left – empty bowl, random hunk of ginger (not going into the ramen), garlic oil, bluetooth speaker (not going into the ramen), shio tare, a chef’s knife (DEFINITELY not going into the ramen), chashu pork, and green onion.

Oh, right – we boiled some noodles too. That took about two minutes. (These are technically soba noodles, but they were the best looking noodles at the Japanese grocer the day we went.)

And here’s the final product:

Whew! That was a lot of work! But LOOK at that result – the broth was beautifully milky, the chashu just dissolved into the hot broth, the ginger, onions, and garlic oil added some nice contrast, and the whole thing was just stunning.

Doing ramen the high effort was is a challenge, and makes me appreciate WHY restaurant ramen is so much better than our usual efforts at home. This was spectacular. Big thank you also to our friends for loaning us their cookbook. (Which does mean no recipes this time around, but if you want to get your own book, it’s this one.)

Next up, we’re going to be using this blog for it’s original purpose for a bit, because coincidentally enough, we’re off to Japan! Once we’re back, it’s on to the last “J” country – Jordan!

International Meals – Jamaica

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Dan

I really don’t like eggs.

It’s weird – I’m fine with French toast, crepes, custard, even tamago, but for whatever reason, I find eggs as eggs completely unpalatable. It doesn’t matter what form they are in – scrambled, poached, benedict – I just don’t care for the taste. Which seriously limits my options at brunch restaurants. I really wish I DID like eggs – that 80% of the menu looks very interesting! But there you are.

So anyway, this week we’re making the national dish of Jamaica – saltfish and ackee.

What are ackee, you ask? They are a fruit which can be quite toxic if not prepared correctly. For that reason, they are only available in the US and Canada canned. So off we went to the Caribbean market for a few cans of this stuff, along with a package of salted cod.

Huh. That’s kind of a funny looking fruit on the can. I wonder what it looks like when we open it up?

Oh. Oh dear. Did I mention I have an absolutely visceral dislike of scrambled eggs?

Now to be absolutely clear – ackee tastes absolutely nothing LIKE scrambled eggs. Honestly, it doesn’t seem to have much of a flavor at all. If anything, I would describe it as being like an extremely mild, buttery cheese. Maybe it’s different fresh?

But oh my goodness did this tweak something in my lizard brain. (“EGGS!” the lizard shouted.)

Let’s press on. Like any dish involving salted fish, the first step is to soak the fish for as long as possible to draw out the salt. We had about five hours, and I suspect more would have been better.

Once the fish has been soaked in a few changes of water, you boil it and then shred it up. Meanwhile, in a pan, you cook onions, tomatoes, bell peppers, thyme (we used something labelled “Jamaican thyme,” but it didn’t seem any different from the regular kind), and a Scotch bonnet pepper.

Once those have softened up a bit, you toss in the fish and the ackee and let it all heat up. We found two recipes for this dish which were nearly identical, except one said to cook the ackee for absolutely no longer than three minutes, and the other said at least fifteen.

Fine. This is like that time we found one set of directions that said we had to set our hot water heater absolutely no higher than 115 F to avoid burning ourselves, and another that said absolutely no lower than 130 F to avoid Legionnaire’s disease.

Fine.

Anyway, to go with the saltfish and ackee, we made coconut rice, which is literally just rice cooked in coconut milk, with some green onions on top. And here’s the two of them together:

My goodness, it REALLY looks like scrambled eggs, doesn’t it?

I will reiterate again, however, that it doesn’t TASTE like eggs. Mostly it tasted like salt. I think we needed to soak the cod overnight, or change the water more, or something, because the salt flavor was really overpowering. The buttery fruit was quite rich, as was the coconut rice – I can see why this is frequently eaten for energy in the morning.

That said – it wasn’t really our favorite international dish we’ve made, and that was probably our fault. If you asked me to tune it to my own parochial tastes, I would probably add quite a few more tomatoes for acidity, or perhaps some lime juice. Just something to cut the richness. But again – that’s my taste, not a comment on the quality of the dish itself.

As always, we want to stress that if one of these dishes turns out not to our taste, we are NOT making any judgements on the quality of that country’s cuisine. Rather, the fault lies either in our taste, or in our own uninformed execution of the dish.

We also made a coconut toto, which is almost certainly not named after the small dog that wrote the soundtrack for the original Dune movie. Instead, it’s a standard cake, made by creaming together butter and sugar, and then adding flour, rum, desiccated coconut, and a LOT of nutmeg.

Not super exciting to look at, but absolutely delicious for dessert.

So that’s the national dish of Jamaica. Everyone thought we were going to make jerk chicken, curry goat, or oxtail for this one, and frankly, we probably still will sometime soon. Not necessarily as an official addition to the blog, but just because we LIKE those things, and this go-round has reminded us of their existence.

Next up, Japan!

Recipes:
Saltfish and Ackee
Coconut Toto

International Meals – Italy, Part 3: Sicily

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Dan

This meal seemed to be cursed.

We decided to celebrate the land of approximately 25% of my ancestors with a dish called Pasta con le Sarde, or “Pasta With Sardines.” So naturally, we needed to acquire some sardines.

The FIRST time I went to get sardines, my car battery died. So not only did I not get sardines, I also missed a brass band rehearsal, and eventually had to pay a LUDICROUS amount of money to have the thing replaced. Thanks, supply chain!

Take 2: Got in my car several weeks later to drive to Granville Island. Car started right up, got to the fish counter, and found out that fresh sardines are no longer a thing in Vancouver. Something about currents. The curse then kicked up to high gear when I LEFT Granville Island, and discovered that a race course had been set up such that I couldn’t get back within half a mile of our apartment. I had to park a long way off, go get my horn, walk back to the car before my parking ran out (in the pouring rain, of course) and go sit in a library for the next two hours.

On the other hand, if I HADN’T gone to fail to get fish, I would have been trapped INSIDE the race route, so that’s something, I guess.

Sooo…. canned it is, I guess. Not the ideal choice, but better than nothing. (We later found out that frozen can be had if you know exactly which specialty grocery store to hit, but the ones I tried didn’t have them.)

We ALSO managed to buy the wrong size pasta, but at that point we just wanted to EAT, darnit.

OK, so what even IS this recipe? Well, it’s a somewhat similar flavor mix to the salad we had last time, but with the addition of this bad boy:

But lets not get ahead of ourselves. Our mise en place starts with soaking raisins and saffron in hot white wine. Sicily really has been a crossroads for a LOT of cultures over the years.

Next up, let’s fry some bread crumbs in olive oil.

And then chop up a buncha other stuff, including the inevitable onion.

That package of pine nuts has now made an appearance in all three Italian meals, so they’re pulling their weight, for sure. In addition to those, onion and fennel fronds on the cutting board, and the aforementioned raisins and breadcrumbs up top, you can also see the jar of anchovies from last week coming back out for another appearance, and the chopped fennel BULB at upper right.

Everything ready, it’s time to start cooking. You start by softening up the onion and fennel, then you add in the anchovies.

This gets cooked until the anchovies have basically completely dissolved into the oil, which is kind of amazing. Next up, in with the raisins and wine, which get cooked until they reduce away.

Finally, in go the sardines and pine nuts.

Meanwhile, the pasta gets cooked separately until just this side of done, and finally everything gets tossed together with a little bit of pasta water.

It’s not actually all that complicated a dish. Did I mention we did this one on a weeknight?

The breadcrumbs go on at the end when the dish is served, along with the fennel fronds. And here it is!

Not my best food porn, which is a shame, because this was actually delicious. The sweet raisins, salty anchovies, toasty pine nuts and bread crumbs, fishy sardines, and pungent fennel, all combined to make something that really felt of a place – there wasn’t any question of “isn’t this the same as what you can get across the border in the next country over?”

It was also delicious. If I ever spot fresh sardines on a counter, I’ll snap them up so we can try this again with the not canned kind.

And after a solid year… that’s the “I”s done! It’s been a long trip. Next up, Jamaica!

Recipe:
Pasta con le Sarde

International Meals – Italy, Part 2: Southern Italy

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Dan

We really tried to resist it as being too obvious, but the fact of the matter is that the most iconic dish of southern Italy is the pizza. So let’s do this. One pizza, coming up.

But we’ll at least try to do it right.

Fancy flour:

Fancy capers, fancy anchovies, fancy cheese, and fancy tomatoes:

The capers and anchovies are for the salad, not the pizza, but I can’t be bothered to clip this into two separate pictures. So we’ll get back to those. The cheese is Fior di Latte, which is Mozzarella made with cows’ milk. Apparently fancy Mozzarella is made with buffalo milk. Pretty sure the shredded stuff in bags you get at your local Safeway is NOT made with buffalo milk, but who knows?

Anyway, this stuff DEFINITELY isn’t. And the tomatoes are San Marzano tomatoes, regarded as the finest canned tomatoes that ARE available at your local Safeway.

Fancy diastatic malt powder:

Don’t ask me what this does, I have no idea. I wasn’t able to find a DOP diastatic malt powder from the Diastia region of Italy, so we just went with this.

For the dough, I was recommended a fancy recipe, which I followed to the letter, but in hindsight, I have serious doubts about the wisdom of that.

First, the flour to water ratio seemed QUITE off. I know pizza doughs can be fairly dry, but this just crumbled. But aggravating that was the problem that the knead time for this recipe was, in hindsight, just absurdly, laughably low. One minute in the stand mixer and three by hand is NOT going develop anything LIKE enough gluten, and in hindsight, it really, really didn’t.

This went into the fridge for two days to ferment, and then it was pizza night!

When I attempted to make the pizza, it was clear something had gone seriously wrong with the dough – it was brittle and crumbly, and there was no way to stretch it out to the desired size. We baked it off for the (far too short) length of time specified in the recipe, and it was basically raw.

However, we were HUNGRY at this point, so we ate the salad (which I will talk about in a minute) and tried again – the dough recipe made three portions. This time we used a rolling pin to get it as thin as possible and just cut the excess off to make a circle. We dropped the amount of sauce from “not much” to “really, really not much”, and cooked it for three times the length of time called for in the recipe. This one wasn’t too bad.

Still not the best pizza we’ve made, but at least over the line into “edible.” What’s madding is that we’ve made much better pizza on numerous occasions with far less effort, but when we tried to pull out all the stops, it seemed to make things dramatically worse.

The tomato sauce was delicious, anyway. As was the salad. So let’s talk about that!

We made Escarole alla monachina, which is a warm salad made with bitter greens (obviously escarole for preference, but we didn’t find that), anchovies, capers, pine nuts, and raisins. (Olives too, but we left those out.) And boy howdy, did the fancy anchovies and capers make a difference. Here’s the salad still cooking:

And here’s the final product with the sad failed pizza cropped out:

This was REALLY the standout of the evening. The second pizza was fine, but the umami blast from the anchovies, combined with the sweet raisins, tart capers, and crunchy pine nuts, was just stunning. Would make for guests, if I didn’t have to buy a 50 gallon drum of greens to wilt down to more than two servings.

So that’s our southern Italian attempt – an excellent salad, and a not great pizza. We know it’s not you, Naples, it’s us.

Next time, Sicily!

Recipe: (not going to bother linking the pizza one)
Escarole alla monachina

International Meals – Italy, Part 1: Northern Italy

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Dan

When Leigh was in college, some of her friends had a really dumb game called “Tour de Beer.” They would go to the crappy campus bar, and attempt to work their way all the way across the taps, having one of each beer. This being a crappy college bar, the taps started easy – Budwiser, Miller Lite, etc.

But in the middle, there was a bit of a roadblock… Guinness, followed by Bass. Not exactly Pappy Van Winkle, but definitely tough to just power through.

I bring this up, because we started the “I”s on this blog last MAY, and it seems likely they’ll take a full year. The “I”s have a LOT of countries that can’t be easily condensed – India, Indonesia, and now Italy. But I’m sure the “J’s will… Oh right – Japan.

We are ONLY making one meal for Kiribati, no matter what, OK?

Let’s get started. There’s some broad generalizations you hear about Italy – the north has more butter, the south has more olive oil; the north has more beef, the south has more pork; the north has more Ligurians, the south has more Sammites. My notes may be a little out of date.

For the north we decided to make a Lasagna Bolognese, a version of this dish characterized by a slow simmered meat sauce with very little tomato. We would accompany this with a loaf of Tuscan bread, some Genoese pesto, and a few different antipasti.

Let’s start with the bread, since that had to be started the night before. Tuscan bread is notable for containing no salt, for historical reasons that I have no idea if they are made up or not. In order to break down the gluten a sponge is made by soaking flour in water overnight, to make a bit of a mush:

Once it’s had a nice long soak, you add in the rest of the flour, and the water that I’m PRETTY sure should have been called for in the recipe, but wasn’t. Also a LOT of yeast. (garlic for scale)

Turns out if you break down the gluten overnight, even though you no longer have any salt to slow the yeast down, you still need a lot of it to overcome that lack. It’s a weird balancing act. It also has a VERY long knead time, which was not aided by the fact that our Kitchenaid overheated after the first minute. Arm day!

A few rises and shapings later, we had some nice loaves. The final product will be at the end.

Next up, Bolognese sauce! You start by making a soffritto consisting of carrots, celery, and onions, processed pretty fine.

Once that’s cooked down, in goes half the meat. This is a trick to allow you to get some nice browned flavor without drying out ALL of the meat. Since I had gone to an Italian grocery store with an excellent deli counter, we went with the fancy option of 1/2 beef, 1/4 pork, and 1/4 veal.

The meat does get a LITTLE tomato paste.

It also gets wine. When I went to the liquor store to look for something Italian that wasn’t too expensive to put in a sauce, but wasn’t too cheap to drink the rest of, the associate recommended a nice Chianti.

In conversation, they also mentioned that the movie “Sideways” had caused sales of Merlot to drop measurably. I just hope that “Silence of the Lambs” did NOT have a corresponding positive effect on sales of Chianti.

Anyway, let’s finish this ragu. It should ideally be hydrated with homemade stock, but failing that, we used store bought with a few packets of gelatin added. And with that, it just goes on the stove to simmer for three hours.

However, there is another sauce in a classic lasagna Bolognese, and that’s a creamy Béchamel. Frankly, ours never thickened, and I’m not sure it actually added anything to the final dish. But we made an attempt.

For the final assembly, we had purchased fresh lasagna noodles, and then had to contend with the massively contradictory opinions as to whether they should be cooked or not. We opted to boil them very briefly and then shock them in ice water.

This seemed a reasonable middle ground between the package directions of “4-6 minutes” and the more common internet consensus of MAAYBE put them in the same room with some lukewarm water.

And then it was time to build the thing. Sauce, noodles, béchamel, Parmesan and on and on…

Lasagna in the oven, it was time to make pesto. It was brought to my attention last time that we made an incorrect characterization of the price of pine nuts, by comparing them to Neodymium. Although it depends on where you source the Neodymium, and what form you get it in, it does appear this was a bit excessive.

Pine nuts, in fact, ONLY cost as much by weight as Holmium. Glad we got that sorted out.

Anyway, here’s the pesto in process.

And here’s the pesto, the bread, and the rest of our antipasti:

Not a bad spread, huh? In addition to the bread and pesto, the plate on the right contains mortadella, Prosciutto Di San Danielle, Parmigiano Reggiano, mozzarella, and olives. The olives are from Peru, but we had them lying around, and they were a perfectly reasonable thing to add.

The bread was just as unsalted as advertised, but the texture came out perfect for soaking up the pesto.

And what about the lasagna?

Gotta say, we were pretty happy with that. And the actual Italian person we invited over confirmed that this was a reasonably authentic approach to a Bolognese style Lasagna.

Said Italian person ALSO provided us with dessert!

This is an ancestor of Tiramisu called Zuppa Inglese or “English Soup.” “Soup” was apparently a relatively generic term in Italian cooking at one point that just referred to things soaked in other things. This particular trifle contains sponge cake or ladyfingers dipped in a liquor that originally got its bright red color from insect wings. And then the “English” part may or may not have been a dedication to Lord Nelson. Take that, Napoleon!

And that’s our first Italian meal! The plan is two more – the south, and then back to my Sicilian roots. Thanks to our guests for coming out and bringing dessert!

Recipes:
Basic Ragu Bolognese
Lasagna Bolognese
Genoese Pesto

Everything But a Mule

In Which Dan and Leigh Occasionally Go on Vacation or Make Dinner