Countering My Acute Cooking Deficit

27 January 2009

It’s been about a week since Simon and I came back from our wonderful extended Christmas break in Austria, Switzerland and various other places in Europe. But as much as we enjoyed almost a month of delicious treats from both our parents, eating out with friends here and there, and being pampered with typical Austrian delicacies on our perfectly sunny skiing holiday in Obertauern we both longed for a quiet meal at home – and I more and more started missing cooking on my own. By the time we came back to Tokyo I was almost desperate to start cooking again, and really looked forward to our first weekend at home.

In an attempt to treat my "acute cooking deficit" I went to Tokyu Foodshow, my preferred place for fish and groceries. Although I am already well acquainted with the store, I am just stunned again and again by the selection of fish and seafood, so super-fresh it doesn’t have any smell at all, and so nicely arranged to really make your mouth water, as well as the vegetable section with yet so many produce remaining to try out (as for the veggies, I also keep being stunned by the prices; better not to be too sensitive there - after all I can’t just stop eating vegetables, and even less so as they are so tasty here…).

I really could have bought the whole shop that day… I came home, among others, with a delicious chunk of tuna filet and some lovely pieces of sea bass. Inspired by a bunch of Japanese cooking magazines (good opportunity to get back into the language, too) I was bubbling over with ideas. We ended up having two Japanese-style meals, with the table full of pretty little dishes; including a rich sesame miso soup with soba noodles, a tuna tartare with avocado, and some yuzu-marinated chicken filet on simmered shiitake mushrooms on Friday, and a daikon and crab salad with a refreshing yuzu dressing, sea bream "nitsuke", i.e. stewed with ginger in sweet soy and sake (this dish, although it was delicious in taste, will need some further practice to get the texture right), Japanese mountain vegetable in a buttery mustard sauce and Japanese rice on Saturday.

I will post the recipes bit by bit, starting off right now with the tuna tartare, of which I took my favourite picture of the weekend. I prepared it right to my taste, coming up with the ingredients as I went on cooking. After adding the curry-flavoured cucumbers I quite liked it, but felt that some little twist was still missing. I spontaneously thought that a few bits of avocado would do the job, so Simon had to do another trip to the supermarket. I can just say it was worth the effort.