Hiroko’s Kitchen | Blog

I found two long (3 1/2 foot each) gobo, burdock, left in my kitchen which I purchased toward the end of last year. I planned to make one more Osechi ryori dish, tataki gobo, but I abandoned the idea. It was too much.

One of the most popular burdock dish is kinpira gobo, whose recipe you can find it in my The Japanese Kitchen. Instead of making this homey traditional Japanese dish, I decided to make something with Western flavors. Here is burdock pasta. I have shredded the burdock with a vegetable peeler into thin and long slices. I parboiled them in the water for about 2 minutes. I cooked the drained burdock in plenty of olive oil (I infused the oil with salt pickled anchovy) with some garlic and chile pepper flakes. I served the burdock pasta with a sausage. The crunchy texture and earthy flavor of the burdock was perfect accompany for the sausage.

Burdock is rich in dietary fibers. It helps to reduce blood cholesterol and prevents constipation. Eating good food nurishes our body. Eating bad food makes us sick. We call it Ishoku Dogen.

Kazunoko (herring roe): Kazunoko is a reconstituted dried herring roe. I love the popping crunching noise which echoes in my mouth while eating them. Kazunoko is an expensive delicacy and is an indispensable part of Osechi ryori. Without it Osechi ryori is not complete. Tiny eggs of herring roe symbolizes family prosperity, and its golden yellow color represents gold. Herring roe is sold dried or salt cured. For this year’s special New Year’s party I have acquire the very special dried variety at the end of last year. It takes 3 to 4 days to reconstitute it properly. After the roe is reconstituted, I carefully remove thin films which covers tiny eggs, and pickle them in the mixture of mirin (sweet cooking wine) and shoyu (soy sauce) sauce. Every year when my mother was preparing the herring roe, she told us not to use a knife to cut each roe into bite sized pieces, but break it with fingers. The knife smashes tiny eggs and allows fish juice (quite strong) spills out of them. We serve herring roe garnished with little fish flakes.

Nishiki tamago is a dish in which boiled egg is separately strained through a fine sieve, mixed with sugar and little salt, packed in a mold and lightly steamed. Bright yellow color of egg yolk in the dish symbolizes gold, and egg white, silver. My mother always asked me to help her to make the dish, because pressing through especially firmer egg white (20 of them at one time) through a fine sieve was quite a job. Pleasure and pain always come together. Here is the recipe;

8 x 8-inch mold
15 eggs, hard boiled
8 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt

Peel the eggs. Cut each egg into half and remove the yolk part and transfer it into a bowl. Set a fine sieve over a large bowl. Press the egg white through it into the bowl with a shamoji spatula. Clearn and dry the sieve and put it over another large bowl. Press the egg yolk through the sieve into the bowl with the shamoji spatula. Add 6 tablespoons of the sugar and 1/3 teaspoon of the salt to the egg yolk bowl and gently fold in with the spatula. Add the remaining sugar and the salt to the egg white bowl and gently fold in. Transfer the egg white to the mold and lightly pack. Level the surface of the egg white with a flat spatula. Cover evenly the egg white with the egg yolk. Gently level the surface with a flat spatula. Transfer the mold to a steamer which is producing high steam, and cook the egg for 5 minutes over medium heat. Cool the egg and cut it into bite sized pieces.

Tazukuri is a candied whole baby sardines. To prepare this dish you need gomame (dried baby sardines), which can be found only Japanese food stores. The reason why baby sardines are the part of celebration is that in the past sardines were important fertilizer for rice paddies, so they symbolized good harvest, therefore prosperous year. Cannot find Japanese dried baby sardine? Come up with alternative – which food item represents prosperity in your culture?

Here is the recipe which I inherited from my Mom.

7 ounces gomame
3 tablespoons water
3 tablespoons sake
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons shoyu (soy sauce)
Chile flakes

Carefully remove the intestine part of each baby sardine. It is quite a task. You need to work on hundred of tiny fish. If you do not remove them, the fish taste bitter. Do this task with your fingers. Do not break the fish. Put a thick bottomed skillet over medium heat. When it is hot add the sardines. Turn the heat to small and cook the sardines until fragrant and crispy to touch. Be careful not to burn the fish. Transfer the fish to a large platter and cool. In a saucepan add the water, sake and sugar and put it over medium heat. On simmering add the soy sauce and cook until the volume of the sauce becomes half of the original. Add the sardines and sprinkle of chile flakes to the saucepan and with forks toss the fish with the sauce. The sauce slightly coagulates as it cools, so do the tossing process quickly. Here you are the Tazukuri.

Next year will be my 14th year of living in America. “Kooin Ya no Gotoshi” This is the Japanese version of “Time Flies”. In the past thirteen years I did not celebrate the New years in the way in which I was raised and cherished – visiting a local temple before midnight of December 31st and listening to a temple bell tolling one hundred eight times; savoring a special New Year’s Feast, Osechi ryori, and ozoni (rice cake soup) with family members in the morning of New Year; visiting a local shrine and welcoming the year of the god and play for family’s health, happiness, peace and prosperous for the New Year. Today I very much miss the way how we celebrate New year in Japan. There is no temple and shrine near me in New York City, so I decided to prepare the proper Osechi ryori and enjoy it with family and friends at the New Year 2012 open house.

Osechi ryori are specially prepared New Year’s food items (served and consumed cold) which are packed in stack-upable jubako obento boxes, which are only used for New Year’s occasion. Every prepared food item goes into these boxes has its own reason to be there. As I prepare some of these items I will post the recipes, so you can join me the preparations. Let me start with Tazukuri – next post.

Today I cooked kuromame thinking of the approach of the end of the year (anyway it was raining outside).  Kuromame are black soybeans whose shape is perfectly round and they are much larger than their yellow colored-cousin.  The flavor of this black variety is robust and much tastier than….

their cousin.  Furthermore, its dark purplish (almost black) color suggests that it is rich in anthocyanin, a well known anti-oxidant.  So, I love kuromame.  The best kuromame in Japan comes from the rich soil of Tanba in Hyogo Prefecture in Honshu and also from Hokkaido, the northern most island.  The beans that I cooked are from Tanba – my first choice.  I brought back some of the bags from Japan on my latest trip (you can order the beans online and I recommend the Mitoku brand).  Cooking kuromame at the end of the year as a part of Osechi-ryori, the New Year’s Feast is like the roasting the turkey, baking pumpkin pie or preparing cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving dinner here in America.  Preparing Osechi-ryori is a ritual based on our tradition.

A part of the annual tradition says that eating kuromame beans at the beginning of New Year will bring a healthy year to us.  Why?  In Japanese “beans” are “mame”.  But, the word “mame”, though written differently but pronounced the same as for “beans” (a homonym for those of you who remember your high school grammer – if such things are still taught in American schools) has several other meanings: hard-working, serious and healthy.  I will post the recipe next week with an explanation of why I am cooking the beans with the egg-shaped iron ball that you can see in the photograph.

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