Sweet Tomato Salad (Japanese style)

Recently after catching up with an old friend, she asked (as well as her 9 year old daughter) "what do I usually eat" now that I live in Japan? As often happens with others, she also asked if I eat alot of sushi. In USA sushi might be the most known type of Japanese food. Conversely, when I first came to Japan, my Japanese friends were worrying about if I was close enough to McDonald's often enough, as they thought I surely must be used to eating lots of hamburgers on a regular basis!

Having lived various places on this globe, I can tell you in my experiences, people eat a varied diet of things no matter where you are. Of course certain places are famous for certain types of dishes, preparations and ingredients but what many people don't know is that every where has their own "home style" cooking. This is very true of Japan. Japanese home style cooking is simple, healthy and very tasty, even for a 'foreigner'. It is what most Japanese people will remember that their mom made at home when they were growing up, sort of like Japanese comfort food.

I am going to start posting more recipes of the usual Japanese home style dishes I like to prepare. Hopefully it will be fun for some of you to try in your own home.

Tonight I made this Sweet Tomato Salad which is so simple but very good. I used a bunch of tomatoes from our garden that I had just harvested! This salad is best when made and then chilled at least one hour ahead of serving time. This gives the flavors time to come out very nicely, especially in regards to the onions, which after an hour or so will tone down a bit after soaking up some the dressing (sort of marinating).

**Note about Rice vinegars. There are two main types of rice vinegar used in Japan. The most used one is just plain ol' rice vinegar. The second most used is a SUSHI rice vinegar that is sweeter and is used to flavor rice, especially rice that is used in sushi (but not JUST for sushi rice). Think of it kind of like regular White Vinegar compared to Wine or some other flavored vinegar. This recipe calls for the just basic rice vinegar.

Japanese Home Style Sweet Tomato Salad

Several tomatoes
Approx. 1/2 of an onion, finely diced/chopped
2 tablespoons Rice Vinegar
2 tablespoons Honey (I used a wonderful Wildflower honey from Kauai)
A bit of salt

Boil a saucepan of water. Pierce the tops of the tomatoes and swish around in the boiled water for a few seconds (I usually count to 20 or 30 in my head).

How to use the fork to swish the tomato around in the boiled water.

Remove from the hot water and immediately run cold water over the tomato and set aside (do this one by one). This process makes it easy to peel the skin off of the tomatoes. After peeling each tomato, cut up into bite sized slices (how ever big you like the bite). I like to mostly remove the seeds from the slices, so that that part of the tomato doesn't later end up adding to the dressing (making it more watery than necessary).

Arrange the cut tomato pieces onto a plate (one with some 'lip' on it so that after you add the dressing it won't run off the edges of the plate, I use a glass pie plate). Sprinkle salt on the tomatoes lightly.

The tomatoes sliced, placed onto the plate and lightly salted, next comes the onions. The dressing is already made (in the background).

Add the chopped onion all around evenly on top of the tomatoes then sprinkle a little bit more salt over that. Combine the rice vinegar and honey until evenly mixed, then drizzle it over the tomatoes and onion. Refrigerate until serving.

Note** This amount serves about 2-3 people as a little side dish. Depending on how much you are going to need to serve, you can increase the ingredients accordingly. You can also vary the amount of tomatoes or onions according to your tastes.

A lovely summer salad...

Here is the finished product. We like alot of onions, again you can vary the balance of tomatoes to onions as you like.