Japanese Pickles fresh from our garden!

Fresh picked cucumbers and tomatoes from my garden today. Pickling vinegars and kimchee base in the background, used for making Japanese style pickles.

Today I harvested some veggies from our little garden. We are getting lots of cucumbers, so I am attempting some REAL Japanese pickle creations. Today I tried Shiba-Zuke, translates to "Natural Red Pickles" in English.

This recipe calls for Eggplant and Cucumbers with red and white plum vinegar as well as the regular Japanese rice vinegar . The plum vinegars were a bit harder to find than I thought it would be, but I am handicapped a bit due to not being able to read Japanese. My husband's co-worked kindly helped find the red plum vinegar for me!

I used:
3 Japanese Eggplants, slightly peeled
1 huge Japanese Cucumber (from my garden, about equal amount to the eggplant)

Japanese Eggplant slightly peeled.

Both the Eggplant and the cucumber needs to be sliced up into 1/4 inch (5mm) thick diagonal slices (after cutting the whole thing in half first). The both need to be soaked in brine (2 cups water with 2 teaspoons salt), eggplant separate from the cucumbers (2 bowls) for 2 minutes. Use a small saucer to lightly press down so all pieces can completely soak for 20 minutes.

I used some sliced pickled Miyoga (a kind of ginger) and some red shiso leaves from a jar of Umeboshi (pickled plums). You could probably use some Ume and Shiso furikake if you can't find the former. 1 tablespoon of this.

Thinly sliced the Myoga and squeeze lightly, place in large bowl.

After the 20 minutes soaking is up, squeeze out the water firmly from the eggplant. Lightly squeeze the water from the cucumbers. Place them also into the same large bowl with the Myoga. Add the Shiso (or the Ume and Shiso furikake if you are using that).

Sprinkle everything with the mixed vinegars (2 tablespoons of each of the plum vinegars and 1 1/2 tablespoon of rice vinegar) and 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons of castor sugar (fine not coarse). Mix well and place in a wide bowl (preferably glass but plastic is ok too, NEVER use aluminum for either the container or covering!). Place a lid or saucer on top and weigh it down so that everything is compressed and completely covered in the vinegar juices. I used a large jar of peanut butter with a round lid underneath it.

Compressing the pickles with a lid and a heavy jar of peanut butter.

Mix once or twice to blend the flavors and it will be ready to serve in one day. I placed mine in the refrigerator for this process.

Side view of the pickles being compressed by the peanut butter jar and resting in the refrigerator.

And here are the finished pickles one day later...they are sour, not sweet...pretty good!

Japanese Kinpira Gobo Salad - Carrots and Burdock Root

Kinpira Gobo - Sesame Sauteed Burdock Root and Carrots

Another Japanese 'Home Style" recipe. This is an easy side dish. This can be served cold or room temperature. I recommend after you have finished cooking this, let it sit covered (unrefrigerated) for about 2-3 hours before serving. This allows the flavors to really come out, especially the red chili. Cover and refrigerate any left over portions and eat for up to 3 or 4 days later.

You can leave out the chili pepper if someone you will be serving it to does not like spicy foods.

For those of you unfamiliar with Burdock Root (called "Gobo" in Japanese) I usually describe it to be a kind of white carrot. It is a root like a carrot, but very long and skinny. You may have seen it in the produce section and exclaimed "What is that?". It looks much like a dirty branch laying there for sale. What could we possibly do with THAT?

Here is what unwashed raw Gobo (Burdock Root) looks like. This one piece has been cut, it was very long.

Gobo is crunchy like a carrot and hardly any flavor actually. I love crunchy things so I have always loved eating it. The first time I ever had it was pickled. Pickled Gobo is miniature sized and colored orange like a carrot. Its great on a Japanese salad!

See if you can make this simple dish at home! In English it would probably be called "Sesame Sauteed Burdock and Carrots". You will need Sesame Oil, Cooking Sake and Soy Sauce which can be found at many supermarkets these days.

Kinpira Gobo

1 med/large Burdock Root/Gobo
2 small/med carrots
1 1/2 tablespoons Sesame Oil
2 tablespoons Cooking Sake
2 tablespoons Sugar
2 tablespoons Soy Sauce
1 1/2 tablespoons toasted white Sesame Seeds
1 teaspoon dried Red Chili Peppers (very thinly sliced rings)

Scrub the gobo to clean and rinse under running water. Use an ordinary carrot peeler to lightly peel off the brown outer layer. Cut into julienne strips and place into a bowl of water to soak for 10 minutes.

Peel carrots and also cut into julienne strips. Drain the gobo . Add just the gobo and sesame oil and turn on the heat to medium. Stir around to evenly distribute the sesame soil. Add the carrots and stir again. Cook and stir for about 4 minutes until the carrots and gobo is becoming a little tender.

Add the cooking sake, sugar and soy sauce and the dried sliced red chilies. Continue cooking over a medium to low heat until most of the liquid has been absorbed. Stir in the sesame seeds and place in a covered dish until serving. If you like, you can sprinkle a few sesame seeds on the top when serving for a pretty presentation.

The julienned gobo is soaking in water and carrots ready to slice. Japanese carrots are HUGE. I was using both of these as I was preparing a double batch

Gobo, carrots and sesame oil in the skillet ready to begin cooking.

Here is what the sliced dried Red Chili Peppers and the toasted White Sesame Seeds look like that I used.

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.