More foods

For starters, I bought these mushrooms I had never seen before and decided to try cooking with them. I should know better than to try cooking a mysterious ingredient without a recipe in hand or at least an idea of what the ingredient tastes like. Luckily, this turned out well. I neglected to take a picture of the mushrooms, but if you want to do a Google image search for "nameko mushrooms", you'll likely come upon some tiny, yellow, slimy mushrooms. That's what these were. Tiny. Yellow. Slimy.

To be honest, I just stared at them after bringing them to my kitchen and thought, "Have these gone bad?" I had never eaten a slimy mushroom before. I had read about slimy mushrooms, but I couldn't recall anything about edible slimy mushrooms. I probably should have researched for details (as I did just before beginning this blog, so that I could tell you the name of this mushroom), but I decided to throw caution to the wind and make a food.

I cut up some chicken and half an onion, put them in a bowl with the mushrooms and added a marinade (soy sauce, sake, mirin, sugar and oyster sauce). After a little while, I dumped it all in a pan, added a little water and cooked it all until the sauce thickened. We ate it with rice. It was rather good, and was really only slimy in appearance.

We've also been eating wasabi-green salads. That's the vegetable in question on the right. They have a mild flavor and just taste good. Mostly, the salads have consisted of wasabi greens, tomatoes and a special, super-thinly sliced ham that the Japanese use just for salads. I've also added shredded carrots and sliced cucumbers. I typically dress the salad with oil, vinegar, grated parmesan and herbs. Not an incredibly exciting salad, but we like it.

I also tried my hand at tempura. For those who don't know, tempura is a Japanese form of battered and deep-fried food. For my trial hand at tempura, I used eggplant, shrimp and na-no-hana (also known as "rape blossoms" - because they are the flowers of the rape plant). Na-no-hana are a popular spring vegetable and really, really good when deep-fried (not when lightly boiled or steamed). As you can see, the vegetable isn't actually in bloom, just yet; only budding. You can sometimes find bunches with flowers on them in the grocery store. As it is, it looks a bit like broccoli or broccoli rabe. It tastes nothing like broccoli. When tempura fried, you batter and fry the whole thing, leaves and all. Even with one tiny Japanese eggplant, one tiny package of shrimp and one tiny package of na-no-hana, we had two piles full of tempura-fried food by the time it was over. We ate a little bit and left the rest for the next day.

On a related note, since most Japanese households do not have central heating, during the winter some people will keep food in a room that does not have a space heater. Prepared foods are "refrigerated" just by sitting on the spare room table. They are always wrapped or lidded, of course. That's how we saved our leftover tempura; we left it in a cold room through the night.

Today, I was feeling ambitious. We've been getting together some kitchen supplies, like a rolling stick and a larger cutting board. Today, I made noodles. I used the basic directions laid out in Joy the Baker's blog. I made a huge mess, but I also made noodles! I'm proud of me. I added some red wine I kept around for cooking in hopes that it would turn the pasta purple. Instead, it turned imperceptibly grayish. They still taste good, though. The recipe made a lot of noodles, though, so we're probably going to have them at our potluck this Friday and maybe pass some out to the neighbors.