As I write this I’ve just finished polishing off a green tea and white chocolate muffin that Kuniko made for us over the weekend. Anytime we’ve got some downtime Kuniko is drawn to the kitchen, and so far she hasn’t failed to disappoint. The green tea we used is some leftover premium powder from her school’s tea ceremony club, and the quality macha really made the difference.<\/p>\n
Not to be outdone I’ve been working the grill quite a bit lately. The weather has been crappy lately, but I’ve been sneaking out between rain storms to make dinner and experiment with new foods on the grill. The other night I made homemade shisomaki (my favorite kind of yakitori) on the grill, and it turned out really well. Extraordinary, in fact. You cut up a breast of chicken into bite sized pieces, skewer them on a wood skewer and slightly salt them. Finally I wrapped them in a shiso leaf, grilled them for a minute or two on each side and then dipped them in a sour plum sauce that we’ve been using a lot lately. They were as good or better than what I can get at a yakitori. Dangerously good.<\/p>\n
I’ve been experimenting with grilling cheaper cuts of meats, because I’ve noticed that in Japan there is a huge gap between daily meats and premium. Take steaks, for example. For $10 you can get two or three thinly-cut steaks that are usually pan-fried in people’s homes. The meat isn’t really marbled, but there is some fat on the outside. The next step up is wagyu steaks that are completely marbled but also thinly cut – these will cost more like $40 for a single steak. Finally for a normal “American-sized” cut of wagyu steak you are talking $100, and you still have to cook it yourself.<\/p>\n
Still, there are a lot of lower priced meats that you can marinade and grill to make even more delicious. I’ve had a lot of luck with pork – the cuts that are supposed to be used for tonkatsu are easy to grill, and if you add some flavor rub they are easy to grill. You can get three pork steaks for about $3. Chicken is really cheap here – two fresh large breasts of chicken are about $2, and you can do all kinds of interesting things with spices to make something interesting. <\/p>\n
All this talk of grilling would give the impression that we’re doing this all the time, but we’re only grilling twice a week or so lately. The heat of summer has us making salads and cold noodle dishes quite often, and our diet is still rather vegetable-heavy. Eating veggies and rice makes it that much nicer when we opt for the carnivore route now and then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I write this I’ve just finished polishing off a green tea and white chocolate muffin that Kuniko made for us over the weekend. Anytime we’ve got some downtime Kuniko is drawn to the kitchen, and so far she hasn’t failed to disappoint. The green tea we used is some leftover premium powder from her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-pS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}