A Little Background on Tampopo
Food, Glorious Food! And the thousand ways it ignites the human spirit, from a decadent culinary orgy, to a humble yet perfect bowl of steaming-hot ramen, is the stuff of which Juzo Itami's Tampopo, is made. This bacchanalian, "spaghetti western" romp features Itami's real-life wife, Nobuko Miyamoto in the title role of Tampopo, a noodle shop owner struggling to make a go of it after her husband's death, and Tsutomu Yamazaki as Goro, a rakish trucker whose character might best be described as "Shane-meets-Henry Higgins."
12:17 AM PDT Permalink |

Tracking Down Exotic Ingredients
Thanks to my shopping bonanza on AsianFoodGrocer.com last month, my pantry is pretty well stocked with Japanese ingredients. They had a special, free shipping on orders over $50, so I stocked up on a few extras.

But I’m still missing some things. AsianFoodGrocer.com was out of stock on gari shoga, that delicious pickled pink ginger that goes along with sushi. They were offering it for a great price, so no wonder they were out of it. But now I’m left to find it here in Napa. Most of what I’ve been able to find in the past has been way overpriced and packaged in such tiny jars that my son would easily be able to devour the whole thing at a single sitting. But I think one of our better grocers has half-pint tubs of it for a better price.

Trader Joe’s carries both sushi rice at a reasonable price and big bags of sembei crackers for about $3. I saw fresh daikon radish at the gourmet grocery where I bought my fresh vegetables last month, and they also carry sushi grade tuna, along with a beautiful selection of other fresh fish and seafood. The only challenge I anticipate is finding Japanese eggplant this time of year, and tobiko, those tiny orange fish eggs that are sometimes used as a garnish for sushimaki. I may have to settle for garden variety eggplant, and skip the tobiko, but I hope not, because it's always such a tasty and colorful ingredient.

For those of you who are just getting started with stocking up on Japanese ingredients, here’s a link to an helpful article I wrote awhile back:

Stocking the Japanese Pantry

And once you’re ready to buy your Japanese ingredients, be sure to check out AsianFoodGrocer.com.
12:02 AM PDT Permalink |

A List of Ingredients for my Tampopo Japanese Dinner
When shopping for ingredients for a classic Japanese dinner, it is always important to buy the best quality available. Japanese food is labor intensive, and the amount of work required to prepare it is the same, whether you use the cheapest or the finest ingredients.

Specialty Ingredients: Sembei Crackers, Tobiko (Flying Fish Roe), Nori (Seaweed Wrappers), Sushi Rice, Rice Wine Vinegar, Sesame Oil, Miso, Wakame Seaweed, Tofu, Kombu Seaweed, Daikon Radish, Wasabi, Kazuo (Bonito Flakes), Sesame Seeds, Soy Sauce, Mirin, Gari Shoga (pickled ginger), Sake, Japanese Beer

Fresh Ingredients: Cucumbers, Bay Shrimp, Sushi Fish (Tuna, Salmon, etc), Crab, Scallions, Garlic, Fresh Fruit, Lemon, Avocados, White Fish, Chicken Thighs (boneless), Chicken Breasts (boneless), Thin Sliced Beef, Large Prawns, Ginger Root, Carrot, Green Beans, Green Pepper, Large Mushrooms, Zucchini, Spinach, Japanese Eggplant, Napa Cabbage or Bok Choy

Basics: Eggs, Sugar, Oil, Cornstarch
12:01 AM PDT Permalink |

Deciding on the Dishes for a Japanese Dinner
So...I've finally decided on all the Japanese dishes I want to make for my Tampopo Dinner & a Movie. I still think it may be a little ambitious. The trick will be in the timing. As long as I do all my cold prep and marinades well in advance, and get the preparation order right, with a little help from my son Will, I should be able to pull it off.

Here's the menu:

Cold Dishes: Sembei Crackers, Cucumber Stuffed with Bay Shrimp, Sashimi with Grated Daikon , Assorted Nigiri Sushi, Temaki Hand Rolls, and Stuffed Tamago Omelets

Hot Dishes: Miso Soup, Seafood Dumplings, Chicken Rolls, Yakitori Skewers, Seared Tuna, Ginger Beef, Tempura Shrimp & Vegetables, Spinach with Sesame Dressing, and Eggplant with Miso

Dessert: Green Tea Sorbet with Fresh Fruit
12:14 AM PDT Permalink |

Tempura and Timing
I just realized that one of the the dishes I want to include on my Tampopo Dinner & a Movie menu is tempura. I’ve never produced a perfect batch of tempura, and with all these awesome cookbooks, I think I’m ready to give it another try. The only problem is timing. With all the other dishes I want to make, it may be difficult to get everything to the table simultaneously.

That’s the catch with choosing between serving a meal in individual courses, or serving it family style, with everything appearing on the table at once. With individual courses, the cook (that’s me) has to be up and down all evening, cooking, serving and clearing each course, so there’s no time to relax and enjoy the meal. And with a family style dinner, it’s a minor miracle if everything gets done at precisely the same time. But I do have an extra pair of hands this time, with my son in attendance. I may recruit him to help me pull it off, since I’ve pretty much decided to serve it all up at once.

I’ll have to meditate on this a bit longer, so check back for a definite menu tomorrow.
12:13 AM PDT Permalink |

Narrowing the Field
Okay, so I’ve accepted the fact that no matter how tasty all those recipes look, I can’t possibly prepare and serve them all at a single dinner. So… I’m gonna have to choose.

For appetizers, I definitely want to make the stuffed cucumbers from the Time Life cookbook, and some of the dumplings from The Joy of Cooking. Next will come the soup, and although all the cookbooks had a nice soup recipe or two, as far as I’m concerned, no Japanese meal is complete without a classic bowl of miso shiru. So for the soup course, I’m sticking with the tried and true.

And I definitely want to make some sushi and sashimi. Maybe a few nigiri sushi, some maki rolls, a few slices of tuna and salmon, and I may try some hand rolls or a couple of the more creative ideas from the Periplus Mini Cookbook.

For the main course, I want to make my yakitori skewers as usual, and I definitely want to try that ginger pork recipe from Japanese Homestyle Cooking. And from that same cookbook, I also want to make the Spinach with Sesame Dressing, and the Eggplant with Miso.

I think I’m going to skip the noodles this time, and I probably won’t even serve any plain white rice. Although it just seems wrong somehow. You gotta have gohan.

For dessert, I’m going to keep it simple with a green tea sorbet served with some kind of fresh fruit. Whatever looks best at the produce market on the day I go shopping. There should be no lack of luscious ripe choices at this time of year. For beverages, a steaming pot of green tea, some nice cold Sapporo beer, and of course, a bit of hot sake.

I know this may sound like a lot of food, but I’m going to keep the portions small, and pray for lots of tasty leftovers. My son Will is going to be here for my Tampopo dinner, and that kid has always been able to eat his own weight in Japanese food.
12:04 AM PDT Permalink |

Looking at Japanese Recipes
This evening, I sat down for a closer look at all the Japanese recipes in my cookbooks. As always, my vintage Time Life cookbook called The Cooking of Japan had the most tantalizing recipes. It’s not as glossy and progressive as my more modern cookbooks, but there is something about all those recipes, and especially the photographs, that inspires me. In it, I found recipes for a stuffed cucumber appetizer, and another for seaweed wrapped shrimp. It also has recipes and instructions for classics such as sushi, sashimi, tempura and yakitori.

Second runner up in the cookbook category was the tiny little full-color soft cover book called Homestyle Japanese Cooking, published by Periplus Mini Cookbooks. It has lots of lovely recipes, with eye-popping photos to go with. Appetizers included Sesame Chicken Loaf, and Chicken Stuffed with Scallions. Main courses included Sautéed Pork with Ginger, and Japanese Mixed Grill. For vegetable side dishes, Spinach with Sesame Dressing, Eggplant with Miso, and Cold Somen Noodles with Prawns.

A companion book called Quick & Easy Sushi & Sashimi, by the same publisher, has some creative variations on the old standards, including Temaki Hand Rolls, Inari Zushi filled with Crab, and Fukasa Zushi, little wafer-thin omelets with various fillings, rolled burrito-style into lovely little tamago pillows.

Even The Joy of Cooking had quite a few interesting recipes, the most tempting of which were the appetizers: Chicken Dumplings, Seafood Dumplings, and Beef & Scallion Rolls.

Oddly enough, Essentials of Asian Cuisine wasn’t such an inspiration this time. It was really wonderful for last month’s Vietnamese dinner, but I didn’t find a single Japanese recipe that tickled my taste buds. Ditto for The Gift of Japanese Cooking. Pretty to look at, but much too basic. It also lacks the vibrant photographs, which are always the best inspiration for cooking Japanese.

So, I think I’ve found plenty of recipes for my Tampopo dinner, and of course, I’ll probably end up improvising, as usual. But the only problem is how to narrow them down to a practical menu… I want to make them all!
12:17 AM PDT Permalink |

My Japanese Cookbooks
This evening, I raided my bookshelves looking for all my Japanese cookbooks. I didn't realize I had so many. As a basic bible, the Essentials of Asian Cuisine by Corinne Trang should serve me well again this time. I also have a vintage Time Life Book called The Cooking of Japan. It's got recipes for all the classics and lots of excellent photos. I have two Periplus Mini Cookbooks called Homestyle Japanese Cooking, and Quick & Easy Sushi and Sashimi. And then there's a lovely little one calle A Gift of Japanese Cooking by Mifune Tsuji. I also picked up a funky one at the Friends of the Library Sale last month. It's called Japanese Country Cookbook, by Russ Rudzinski. It was published in 1969 and its pages are printed on brown paper stock with wonderful pen and ink illustrations. I haven't prepared any of the recipes from it yet, but I may just give it a try this time. Believe it or not, The Joy of Cooking also has quite a few Japanese recipes. And just in case I run into any unfamiliar ingredients in the process, I have The Asian Grocery Demystified standing by. Of course, if I don't find what I'm looking for in all those books, there's always the Internet.

I am already so familiar with cooking Japanese food that I hardly need recipes anymore. But this time, I really want to try some new dishes, so I'm going to have to get my inspiration somewhere...and that's going to take a little research.
12:01 AM PDT Permalink |

My Japanese Cooking Experience
I lived for two years in Tokyo, and although I already had an abiding love of all things Japanese, especially the food, while I was there, oddly enough I missed the comfort foods of home, such as macaroni and cheese and Campbell's tomato soup, and also my favorite California nouvelle cuisine paired with luscious Napa Valley Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs. My son Will is practically made of peanut butter & jelly and Wendy's salad bar, as those were the things I craved most when I was pregnant with him in Tokyo.

But since my return to the U.S., I just can't get enough of Japanese food. I cook something Japanese-style at least once a week in my own kitchen, whenever we eat out it's almost always at Sushi Mambo, our favorite neighborhood sushi bar, and every so often, I get the urge to put on a full-scale miso-shiru-to-green-tea-sorbet dinner...not to mention all the takeout sushi I consume on the fly. I sometimes wonder if I would ever tire of it if I ate Japanese food on a daily basis. After all, I also love Italian pasta, Arabic fatoosh, Indian curry, and hey, good old burgers and fries once in a while. But that's the beauty of ethnic food. Unlike lovers, nobody expects you to be faithful to just one :>)

I've been making Japanese dinners in my own kitchen for ten years now. Ever since I've been living on my own in Napa, I've made a Japanese birthday eve dinner for my son Will. He was born in Tokyo, and every year, because Japan is 16 or 17 hours ahead of California, depending on Daylight Savings Time, his actual Japanese birthday happens on the eve of his U.S. calendar birthday. So each year since then, I've been preparing a Japanese birthday eve feast for him (although sometimes we've been known to cheat and go to Benihana instead :>)

When I make a Japanese feast, I usually serve those spicy little sembei rice crackers for nibbles while I'm in the kitchen, and I serve up all the other dishes together, once they're done. A typical menu includes a tiny bay shrimp and cucumber salad dressed with rice wine vinegar, miso soup with tofu and wakame seaweed, gyoza potstickers, yakisoba noodles, plain white rice, skewers of teriyaki chicken bits, and sushi maki filled with cucumber, avocado, and imitation crab. It's a very labor intensive dinner, but the results are always so worth it. And it always makes my son feel special on his Japanese birthday.

This time however, I want to expand my horizons, so I'm thinking of doing some seared fish for an appetizer, some more elaborate and elegant sushi combinations, perhaps a little sashimi with fresh daikon, and maybe even a hot-pot dish like shabu-shabu. I'm ravenous just thinking about it. Somebody hold me back, before I go banging on the door of Sushi Mambo after hours, demanding to be let in for an order of tekka maki!
12:10 AM PDT Permalink |

Welcome to ThingsAsian Dinner & a Movie for the month of June
I’ve decided to go with both a familiar movie and a familiar cuisine this time, since this month is going to be a busy one. In addition to my ongoing writing projects, my son Will is finishing his freshman year of high school on the 3rd, and my birthday is June 15th.

So…I’m going to prepare a brunch of fresh fruit and French beignets to celebrate the beginning of summer vacation, and enjoy it with my son on Saturday afternoon while we watch to see if Smarty Jones wins the Belmont Stakes for the Triple Crown. And my sweetheart Rene has plans to steal me away to some undisclosed location to celebrate my birthday, so I will be playing hooky for a few days a little later in the month.

In the interim, I hope to put together a traditional yet innovative Japanese menu, shop for all the ingredients, prepare a feast for the eyes as well as for the palate, and spend an evening enjoying it while we watch Juzo Itami’s Tampopo, one of my very favorite Japanese films.
12:42 AM PDT Permalink |

Next Month's Dinner & a Movie
It's official: I've decided to prepare a Japanese dinner, paired with the Juzo Itami classic, Tampopo, one of the greatest food movies in the history of film. I've been preparing basic Japanese dishes in my own kitchen on a regular basis for more than 15 years now, so this time I want to try something new...something a little more challenging than California Rolls and Teriyaki Chicken. So, over the next few days, I'll be poking around in my many Japanese cookbooks, and scouring the Internet for some new recipes. I'm even thinking of going 'Pacific Rim' with some contemporary Asian-Fusion flavors. This is gonna be fun!
12:05 AM PDT Permalink |

Deciding on the Cuisine and Culture
After much deliberation, I have definitely decided to go Japanese. After all, it's my very favorite Asian culture and cuisine, and there are dozens of excellent film choices to inspire the event. One factor that swayed my decision is the fact that summer vacation is starting next week, which means that my son Will is going to be with me more frequently, and I'm celebrating a birthday during the month of June. So, I'll be a little preocupied with putting on an end-of-the-year celebration brunch with my son, not to mention a little overnight getaway with my sweetie for my birthday.

With all that in mind, I thought it more practical and prudent to keep the learning curve easy this time. So I'm going to go with a familiar cuisine, paired with one of my many favorite Japanese films. All that being said...I'll return tomorrow with my choice for next month's Dinner & a Movie.
12:17 AM PDT Permalink |

Possibilities...
With the bounty of last month's online shopping trip at AsianFoodGrocer.com, my pantry is full of enough basic ingredients to prepare food from almost any Asian culture. With the exception of an exotic spice or two, probably all I will need are the fresh ingredients. So...eenie, meenie, minee, mo: Pad Thai, Curry, Kung Pao, Pho? Time to dive into the cookbooks!
01:09 AM PDT Permalink |

Looking Ahead Toward Next Month's Dinner & a Movie
I've barely used up the leftovers of my Scent of Green Papaya dinner and my thoughts have already turned toward next month's Dinner & a Movie. And since this weblog project is still in its infancy, the possibilities are positively endless. The choice for the first Dinner & a Movie was such an easy one, since I'd never cooked Vietnamese food, and had never written a review of the Scent of Green Papaya. But now, I'm faced with the task of choosing a new cuisine and a new film for next month.

On the one hand, I'm tempted to go with a familiar favorite like Japan, along with a classic Kurosawa film. On the other hand, I'm equally tempted to go for another totally new experience, like Korean or Thai. Although I've tasted foods from both cultures, I've never attempted to prepare either cuisine in my own kitchen.

Hmmm...such a dilemma. I guess I've got some research and deciding to do, so I'm going to give myself a few days to look over my cookbooks and tune into what my tastebuds and viewing pleasure are craving.
12:07 AM PDT Permalink |

Using Up the Leftover Ingredients
The leftovers of my Scent of Green Papaya dinner were almost as delicious as they were the night before, but I still had lots of fresh ingredients remaining as well. There was mint, there were lots of fresh vegetables and plenty of the garlic-ginger jasmine rice. The Vietnamese dinner leftovers gave me a much welcome respite from cooking the next day, but once they were gone, I was ready for a change of cuisine. So I got back in the kitchen a couple of days later and made up a hearty batch of curry vegetable stew using the leftover carrots, onion, bell peppers, and coconut milk. I also made a variation on the Hanoi Yellow Fish Nuggets, using the remaining orange roughy filets, which I dredged in curry powder instead of plain turmeric. I served the stew and the curried fish nuggets over the remaining jasmine rice with a fantastic (and extremely economical) spicy mango chutney that I found at an online grocer called ishopindian.com. It was absolutely delicious.

While I was in the kitchen, I made up a batch of Arabic fatoosh (sort of like an Arabic salsa fresca) from the leftover mint, cucumbers, onions, and garlic, along with a few diced fresh tomatoes, and fresh parsley from my garden, mixed together and dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. After marinating the fatoosh in the fridge for a couple of days, I enjoyed it with chips made from wedges of lightly toasted pita bread. Yum!

It's amazing how the same suite of ingredients can be used to make such dramatically different dishes. It's all in the spice!
12:03 AM PDT Permalink |