I’ve been looking at Japanese cookbooks recently. The first one I bought, 英語でつくる和食, is fun to read, since it puts both the original Japanese recipe and an English translation on facing pages. After trying out a few things, however, I’ve come to suspect that the English versions were never tested by people who only spoke English.

So, a few days ago I picked up The Japanese Kitchen, which is meticulously organized by ingredient, and gives sample recipes for each. One of the examples for soy sauce was salmon teriyaki, with homemade teriyaki sauce.

Most teriyaki dishes I’ve had have been pretty awful, and the sauce had a lot to do with that. Obviously, they weren’t using homemade. If you have access to a gourmet or asian grocery store, you should be able to find what you need:

• 3 parts soy sauce
• 3 parts sake
• 3 parts mirin (sweet cooking sake)
• 1 part granulated sugar

(comparing this to the list of ingredients on a few bottles of commercial sauce explained a lot) Bring to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Lower the heat, and simmer until the sauce has reduced by about 25%. Let cool.

Making the salmon isn’t any harder. Heat the oven to 350°. Cover a baking sheet with foil, put a wire rack on it, and lay the salmon fillets (4-6 ounces each) skin-side down on the rack. Baste with the sauce, put it into the oven for five minutes. Repeat until your trusty digital thermometer reads about 145°. Pour some more sauce on the fillets and serve.

I might try grilling them next time, although that’s risky on my nuclear Weber. I will try grilled teriyaki beef kabobs with this sauce. Maybe that’s Monday night’s dinner…

Had a going-away dinner Wednesday night with friends and co-workers (they can decide which are which…), at a small, low-profile Japanese restaurant in San Mateo called Oidon (71 E. 4th Ave, second floor). A Good Time Was Had By All, and the sake was as good as the food.

I stopped by Mitsuwa on my way home this afternoon and picked up a bottle:

I’m sure I’ll find a use for it.

Update. The calligraphy leaves me only 90% certain about the second character in the name, but I think it’s 酔鯨 (“Suigei” for the kana-impaired, meaning “drunk whale”). $40 for 1.8 liters, which is downright cheap compared to a good single malt scotch.

Often when you open packaged foods, the underside of the lid contains something useful, or at least entertaining. A coupon, a contest entry, a “fun fact” that’s occasionally true, that sort of thing.

My latest package of Cup Noodle Curry, on the other hand…

more...

I woke up this morning with the sudden realization that I have never attempted to cook bacon on an outdoor grill. My first thought was that the large amount of grease would cause dramatic flare-ups. My second thought was that, like some other foods, it might not work well on the coarse-grained grates of my Weber Genesis Silver B. My third thought was that bacon comes out best when it has time to render out the fat, and my grill is, well, nuclear.

My fourth thought was to fire up that bad boy and give it the old college-dropout try. I’m glad I did, because not only did the bacon come out perfect on the first try, it didn’t spatter anything with grease, and the cooking odors stayed outdoors. Obviously, there was no leftover bacon grease to cook other things with, but I never really used the stuff anyway.

By preheating the grill on low and turning the heat up to medium after the grease started to render, I was able to keep the cast-iron grates from leaving burn marks. This also kept the bacon from sticking to the unseasoned cast-iron grates (unseasonable, really; at the setting I use for steaks, the grill surface is close to 750°, which quickly burns the stuff off).

I haven’t made my favorite lasagna for a while, so it’s going to be this weekend’s gaming dinner. Soon enough, the advance of the rainy season will lead us to make pot roast and lazy chile colorado as well. We already had the meat loaf last weekend.

Sometime soon I should really revisit my online cookbook project. I actually rewrote all the library routines about a year ago, but never got around to rebuilding the search engine to use them.

Just got back from lunch at Patxi’s, and discovered that Connie had never heard of such a thing as “Chicago-style deep-dish pizza”. Of course, I had to share the leftovers.

There was much rejoicing from her office.

Dinner tonight was based on a curry mix I picked up at Mitsuwa. I think all packaged foods should include the instructions “break sauce into pieces”.