Once again we were based at home for Golden Week. Even though COVID-19 had everyone staying home it has always been our family policy to avoid travel during this busy holiday week, and instead focus on cooking some good food and relaxing.

Instead of cooking new dishes that we’ve never made before, we went back to a few old favorites. Most of the menu decisions were based on what looked good when we hit the market in the morning, and what we had in the fridge that we needed to finish off.

The previous weekend we had hosted the Ono family for a wine tasting of Italian Sardinia wines, and we also cooked lots of Sardinian food. We had roasted a big pork loin in the oven, but we had cut the loin to a size that fit in our oven and there was still a rather sizable chunk of pork in the freezer. So the first night of Golden Week was more roasted pork loin, basted with grapefruit juice and honey, and roasted in a skillet over some new spring onions and a head of garlic. We were pretty tired going into the holiday, so this was a simple but delicious dinner.

Friday we made hamburgers out on the grill. We found some domestic beef (wagyu) in the butcher section and I slapped together some patties, while Kuniko made hamburger buns from scratch, and then we grilled the patties, melted Colby cheese over the top, and served them on the freshly baked buns with onions, avocado, and tomato. To get any more homemade I guess we’d have to raise the cow.

Saturday we were leaning more towards Asian food, so Kuniko made some Thai green curry. This was mostly veggie – mushrooms, eggplant, and green beans – but we did put some chicken breast in there as well. Kuniko made her own original curry paste with plenty of galangal, lime leaf, lemongrass, and red onion, and the whole thing was finished with coconut milk. It turned out great!

On Sunday Kuniko had to go to work so I threw together beef and broccoli in the wok. I wanted to experiment more with velveting meats, and also playing with Japanese potato starch ratios to thicken the sauce. It was a pretty easy dish to cook and I was happy with how it came out. Sliced beef is easy to get here in Japan so really a low effort high reward meal!

Kuniko had been craving yakitori recently so on Monday we made the Indonesian version of satay – chicken on skewers with spicy peanut sauce. I brushed the chicken pieces with butter and kecap manis – sweet soy sauce from Indonesia that I had in the pantry – and this made for a really nice outside texture to the meat. Since the grill was going we also grilled (too many) pumpkin slices, a head of garlic wrapped in foil, and some shiitake mushrooms. The real hit was the peanut sauce – we dipped everything in the sauce and couldn’t get enough of it. Dipping raw cucumber in the sauce was refreshing – that could be a meal in itself.

Tuesday was a rainy day, so I made a thick red tomato sauce and let it cook most of the day, and then we fried up some slices of eggplant and made an eggplant parmesan topped with mozzarella and pecorino romano cheese and baked for an hour or so. We dipped in homemade focaccia bread that Kuniko had baked that day – another simple and delicious meal.

On Wednesday we raided the pantry for the last can of green enchilada sauce, and Kuniko made two big dishes of chicken enchiladas. We had so much we ran one of the dishes over to the Yamaji’s house. Then we sat at the counter and just annihilated those poor enchiladas. Kuniko has really mastered the art of enchiladas, and I also kind of regretted giving away the extra plate…

On Thursday the weather improved and we were feeling lazy so we grilled spicy marinated chicken thigh/legs outside, enjoying the weather with cold beer and sunshine.

Friday we tried a couple new dishes, Taiwanese rurohan and sanbei chicken. We had some great ruromen (han=rice, men=noodles) in Osaka a while back, so I wanted to try it out at home. The rurohan we made was a version with pork shoulder instead of pork belly to try to save on calories a little. It was very tasty and the kitchen smelled great while making it, but I think I will add even more spices in the future. The sanbei chicken was surprisingly good. We cut up chicken breasts and then cooked them in ginger, garlic, sesame oil, soy sauce, and lots of spices, then wilted in a giant handful of fresh basil leaves at the end and served it with the rice. I’d like to make this dish again – it tasted very Taiwanese.

Saturday was our final big cooking day, and we made three Korean dishes: yangnyeom chicken, japchae, and kimpa. We’ve made these dishes many times, and we’re getting better and better at it. We served these with homemade kimchi and had so many leftovers that we delivered a plate of kimpa to the Fukumi’s house. Even then we still had lots of remaining food for the last day of Golden Week.

Once again it was a delicious holiday. I think we learned a lot of things while we cooked, and that is all part of the fun. Now we get back to work and back to healthier food for a while.

Besides wine tasting our way through Italy now and then, we’ve also been trying to broaden our cooking repertoire by choosing a country for a month and trying to cook its signature dishes. In November we concentrated on Russian food. It turned out to be a hit!

Before I learned better, my image of Russian food was just cabbage, potatoes and vodka. When we went to Russia we ate a variety of foods, and although the dishes we remember mostly were Georgian food (which sent us on a subsequent trip there), this time we focused on what we thought were “traditional” dishes from Russia.

During the month we cooked borscht, piroshki, pelmeni (described to one of my students as Russian gyoza), beef stroganoff, and blini. On the last day Kuniko even did a bonus (Ukrainian) dish of Chicken Kiev. This was the first time to cook most of these dishes, so we learned a lot about what we would do next time. I think we decided that we’d be happy to make any of these again.

For the borscht, we started with an online recipe that featured chunks of beef and thanks to some very deep purple beets from Nagano it was delicious. Topped with sour cream and fresh dill, the dish really came together. Kuniko upped the amount of cumin which pushed the dish a little to the east of Moscow – yum. We did a second version later on with pork, and I think we liked that one even more. The pork chunks ended up more tender than the beef and so we’ll probably cook it that way from now on.

The piroshki also tasted great, although I need to work on shaping them more consistently. In the interest of science I tried all kinds of different folds to see what turned out well and what turned out… alien. We baked ours rather than frying as a healthier option, and there were enough that I was taking them to work for a few days afterwards. The dough was hard work but the result was worth it!

The pelmeni and beef stroganoff dishes came together smoothly. The big hit was the blinis – ground meat and melted cheese wrapped in a buttery crepe and then slightly crisped in butter – holy shit they were good. If I started a food truck this is the dish I’d focus on – wow!

Kuniko really outdid herself on her day off and cooked up some excellent Chicken Kiev. The last time we had it was sitting on Red Square in Moscow the day before our flight back home – this tasted even better!

In December we have a few parties planned so we’re not cooking a country this month. We’ve been craving Korean food so we might revisit those dishes for a while. I am looking forward to January, though. What country should we cook next?

I may have written in the past of our project to taste through the wines of Italy. Believe it or not it has been going on since the start of 2018 – nearly two years ago – and now we are starting to get close to the end. This past weekend we took another step by tasting wines from Puglia, Italy.

You might know Puglia as the home of zinfandel, namely the primitivo grape native to the area. Thanks to the power of DNA matching we can trace zinfandel’s (ahem) roots to Puglia, and it is still going strong there, with Puglia ranked number 3 in Italy for pure wine volume. But volume doesn’t always mean quality, and I chose wines carefully with the help of a big wine book and a few local blogs translated from Italian.

Although there are a few native varieties grown in Puglia we chose to focus mainly on primitivo because of our love for Zinfandel from California, but we also included a negroamaro in both red and rosé form. In total we tasted six wines, and as always it was fun to compare.

The nice thing about Italian primitivo is that they are very affordable – most of our wines were under 20 dollars, and all of them under 30 dollars. They are big juicy wines that have the fruitiness and intensity of Zinfandel without becoming jammy or candy-like which we’ve found with some lower cost California zins.

My personal favorite was a 2017 Primitivo Di Manduria Ferrine, but they were all great wines that were easy to drink. Not a lot of complexity or aging potential, but great to open and serve with whatever you’re cooking.

And to go with the wine I followed a pasta recipe recommended for the Puglia region focused on cauliflower and panchetta with plenty of pecorino romano cheese and garlic. Since I had some extra cauliflower I cold smoked it, basted it with olive oil and then slow roasted the florets for a couple of hours together with a head of garlic and some cherry tomatoes to make a side dish. Kuniko brought home some excellent bread from one of her favorite bakeries inside Osaka Umeda station, and the food side of the tasting was covered.

So another checkpoint cleared in our Italian wine tour! Just three regions left – we’ll head to Sicily next, Sardegna after that, and we’ll wrap up the tour in Tuscany, saving the most famous (and most expensive) region for the grand finale.

As I write this at the end of July, I’m in for a new experience. Usually at this point we are finishing our last day of work before our summer trip, but this year we’ll be staying home for the next two weeks due to the ongoing coronavirus situation.

The days before our big trip are always exciting. We are doing last minute research into sightseeing spots, good restaurants to try, and how we might get from point A to point B. We would know the next day we’d be on planes and walking through airports, dealing with immigration and customs and overpriced airport bars and all the enjoyment we get out of all those experiences. Finding and checking in to our hotels, slow breakfasts in cafes and dining al fresco in the cooler evenings. Good cheap wine. Local cheese on every menu.

This year is different, but although missing out on travel means a great deal to myself and Kuniko, it is a small sacrifice compared to what millions of people are dealing with around the world, and especially in the United States.

We are lucky to have stable jobs and be able to get through this pandemic in very good shape. So we’ll miss out on travel this summer, but I’m looking forward to our next opportunity and we’ll enjoy it that much more, whenever it is.

We just finished up another excellent Golden Week here in Japan, this time under the shadow of the coronavirus. Fortunately for us, the situation was pretty much the same as usual, since we make it a policy not to travel during Golden Week. This time everyone else had to follow the same policy, and other than a few more people in the supermarkets things went smoothly.

Of course we focused on cooking delicious foods during the long holidays, but there was more than just cooking and eating. Of my twelve days off, eleven were sunny and clear, and the temperature was perfect for outside activities. We spent a lot of time on our back porch grilling, sipping cocktails, or just reading books. I weeded and replanted our herb garden out front, this time adding some French tarragon to see how it works out. In a usual Golden Week we’d have a party with the neighbors, but instead we maintained a social distance and just waved at them across the way as we passed.

The real joy of the long holiday is to wake up whenever you like, stroll to the store to buy fresh vegetables and ingredients, and then cooking them up and enjoying a leisurely meal of exactly what you wanted to eat – usually while discussing what you should try to make the next day. You can attempt making things that take a little longer or require more effort, and if it doesn’t work out it is no problem at all – you just have a chance to learn from the experience.

Besides making meals each day I also tried out a recipe for peanut butter cookies spiced with Chinese five spice. As a kid I never had much interest in spiced cookies, but the more adult and Asian taste really hit the spot this time. I don’t think I can go back to regular peanut butter cookies again.

We also exchanged gifts with Yoshi and Mamiko. Since we couldn’t get together we had sent over a nice bottle of sake for them, and they responded with a porch delivery of homemade masks, homemade bacon (!) and homemade bamboo shoot rice. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to get together soon.

So here’s a (long) list of meals we ate during the long holiday, for posterity’s sake:

4/24: Yakitori skewers – This one was the only time we ate food from outside. We wanted to support the local yakitori place that we like so I put in a big order for take out and picked it up on the way home from work. The “shiotsukune” sticks are always the best!

4/25: Caveman steak with green salad and mushrooms – Earlier in the week we had bought this big chunk of beef on the rib bone in a French cut. I salted it up three days in advance and left it to dry out exposed in the fridge before grilling it up. We got two meals out of it and it was a great cut of meat.

4/26: Leftover steaks with roasted veggies – We still had two big strips of steak leftover so Kuniko roasted a bunch of veggies (tomatoes, heads of garlic, broccoli and onions) and everything fit together nicely.

4/27: White jambalaya and cornbread – This was Kuniko’s request. We had some high quality rice in the pantry, so I made up a sofrito, added homemade stock, some fresh shrimp, chicken and sausages, and Kuniko baked the cornbread. The jambalaya came out a slightly saltier than I would have liked so I’ll try to be more careful next time. We still went back for seconds and thirds so it passed the test, I guess!

4/28: Grilled veggie sandwich with cilantro and onion quinoa salad – Kuniko had to go to work this day and she wanted vegetables when she got home for dinner, so I grilled some big shiitakes, pan seared two sweet red peppers and them combined them with tiny sprouts, melted Okinawan cheese and brown mustard on bread from the local bakery. They turned out great!

4/29: Whole roasted Akashi snapper – We did a wine tasting of five different wines from the Italian region of Le Marche, and since the coastline there has a lot of whitefish, we roasted this one up. We found a whole snapper at the local supermarket already cleaned out, so I stuffed it full of fennel, garlic, Italian parsley, olive oil and salt, then we roasted it whole until the skin got crispy. I want to do this more often – so good!

4/30: Cajun shrimp skewers, grilled corn, mushrooms and paprika peppers – Still on a Cajun kick, so we bought some extra big shrimp and grilled them outside slowly while drinking cold beers on the back porch. The great weather this holiday contributed to a lot of grilling decisions.

5/1: Grilled cumin-marinated pork shoulder and green salad – More time out back grilling. This was a last minute decision but the roasted cumin made a pretty good quick marinade. The cut of pork from Costco was a little fatty, but finally the flavors came together at the end. I’d marinate it longer if I had to do it again.

5/2: Mixed vegetable soup and steamed veggie salad – This was the answer to the heavy dishes we’d been eating. Kuniko made everything here, as kind of a detox meal and more like what we regularly eat during the work week. All the veggies were fresh from the market so the final soup tasted naturally sweet. It was a refreshing break, and I think our bodies appreciated it!

5/3: Korean kimpa, gangjeong chicken, homemade kimchi served with makkori – Although April was Korean cooking month for us, in early May we still had some ingredients and motivation to take another swing at these dishes. Kuniko has really masted the kimpa, and her version of gangjeong chicken is getting better and better. We also killed off the last batch of kimchi so we’ll need to make another!

5/4: Homemade bacon, waffles and eggs with tangelo mimosas – Yoshi and Mamiko had dropped off some homemade bacon on our doorstep the day before, and Yuki had given us a waffle maker for Christmas, so we decided to have a big breakfast for a change. Kuniko made up the waffles, I fried up the bacon and eggs and we enjoyed everything with mimosas made from the juice of the American tangelo oranges we’ve been able to get recently. Dinner was very light – just a broccoli salad – we were operating on the “one big meal a day” policy.

5/5: Grilled chicken tacos with Patron margaritas – We celebrate cinco de mayo every year with Mexican food, and the tacos (burritos?) that we made this time were excellent. I haven’t found better Mexican food in Japan than what we make in our own kitchen (but from the state of Mexican food in Japan this isn’t saying very much).

5/6: Cubano sandwiches (a la Chef) – The last day of the long holiday and so we made these sandwiches. The pork shoulder is brined for 24 hours, marinated afterwards for several hours, and then roasted for nearly three. We went to Akashi to buy raclette cheese, and Kuniko baked fresh bread to stand in for “pan cubano”. It is a lot of work but these were delicious and made for a nice capstone to the long holiday.

So that wraps up another great Golden Week menu. For the month of May we are planning to try to cook some different dishes from Spain. We’ve got a big Costco-sized bottle of olive oil ready to go. I know we’ll have more delicious meals coming up – hopefully they’ll be a bit more spread out!

We were lucky enough to have a three day weekend, thanks to the new Emperor’s birthday. I’m not sure what he did on his birthday, but we ate a lot of great food.

Starting with Friday night, we went out to eat to celebrate Kuniko’s birthday at Tajima-ya, a yakiniku place that we hadn’t visited in a long time. It is a very busy place and it is always tough the get reservations. They give you a short time limit too, so we had to eat the meat and hit the street.

There are a lot of yakiniku places in Japan that focus on quantity, but at Tajima-ya they serve some great cuts of beef. The Korean noodles and kimchi also help to set the mood, and we really enjoyed cooking up the beautifully marbled Japanese beef grilled over white coals.

On Saturday I put together a wine tasting of Umbrian wines, two whites (Orvieto Classico and a Grechetto), a monster red (Sagratino di Montefalco), an odd duck – a passito red also from Montefalco. Truffles are a big deal in Umbria, so I kneaded out and made my own noodles and then cooked them in a black truffle sauce. Kuniko’s contribution was a broccoli, bacon and mushroom salad, and that was how we got a little taste of Italy on Saturday.

We got an early start on Sunday by walking along the beach towards Akashi. This route we’ve been walking for years, and if the weather is nice it is very refreshing to take in the ocean views while walking briskly for a couple of hours. The last time we did the walk we were surprised to find that one of the old warehouses had been converted into a very modern beach-facing burger restaurant, and so we decided that today was the day to try it out.

The place is called “The Fantastic Burger” and while I’m not sure I’d call them fantastic, they certainly were delicious. We sat facing big glass windows looking out over the inland sea, and sipped on Yona Yona Ale while we waited. Burgers and beer at 10 am? It must be a holiday weekend! They had several kinds of burgers, and the ones we chose were well-made. The owner/cook was a young guy and he said that the location was a bit risky – while it is easy to get attention from people walking it is much more difficult to find by car. But it seems business is doing OK, and I hope that we can drop by again sometime soon. It does threaten to cancel out the calories that we should be burning by walking on the weekends… temptation at the halfway point.

Once we reached Akashi we walked down the fish market street and picked out some big hunks of freshly caught snapper, and that turned out to be our dinner. We are continuing to work on building seafood skillets similar to what we enjoyed in Reykjavik Iceland, and this time was one step closer. I worked on the sauce in two stages, which seemed to make for a more cohesive taste later on. Delicious with the leftover Italian white wines, too!

Then on Monday, we drove out to our new favorite local vegetable shop and stocked up on things for the week. Kuniko spent the day in the kitchen, making up ginger chicken soup, baking two kinds of bread for sandwiches, making cornbread, and also baking banana bread. Since the weather was beautiful I grilled up some big cuts of pork with plenty of BBQ sauce, and also some skewered fat erengi mushrooms. Kuniko threw together an Asian salad with cilantro, lettuce, avocado, tomato and sweet chili sauce, and it felt like summer again.

These holiday weekends are great chances to eat plenty of good food. Happy Birthday Mr. Emperor!