Cold Natto Soba is a delightful summer dish perfect for days when hot weather suppresses your appetite. Cold soba noodles are easy to swallow, and the dish is rich in nutrients from Natto (fermented soybeans) and other vegetables. This recipe involves minimal cooking on the stove, helping you avoid unnecessary heat.
Corn Tempura is made from fresh sweet corn kernels mixed with tempura batter and deep-fried. It’s sweet, salty, and makes for a great summer appetizer. This kakiage-style Tempura (small pieces of vegetables in Tempura batter) is easy to make and best eaten hot and fresh. On a hot summer night, you might enjoy Corn Tempura with cold beer or other cold drinks. It’s so delicious that you may find yourself eating it straight from the kitchen, never making it to the dining table. The only thing to remember when making this dish is that corn kernels may pop in the hot oil. To avoid this, prepare the corn accordingly: slash the surface of the kernels with a knife and remove excess moisture before adding flour. Other than that, it’s quite easy and quick to make. Hope you give it a try!”
Spring rolls with rice paper, also known as summer rolls, are a popular appetizer or light meal in Vietnamese cuisine. They use a translucent rice paper wrapper, softened by briefly dipping in water. Our version of spring rolls has a Japanese twist. We take the filling of California rolls, minus the rice and nori seaweed, and use it in the spring rolls. The result is interesting and delightful! Instead of Vietnamese vermicelli noodles, we use cooked somen noodles. Our dipping sauce is a simple but tasty combination of soy sauce and wasabi, rather than a complicated peanut sauce. California Spring Rolls are light, refreshing, and healthy affairs, and appeal to many just like California rolls.
Pork and Cabbage Curry is a simple variation of Curry and Rice using Japanese curry sauce mix. Typical Japanese curry requires some time to stew beef, potatoes, and carrots. This curry features thinly sliced pork and cabbage, which takes significantly less time to cook. The flavor combination of pork, ginger, and cabbage resembles Pork Shogayaki, another popular Japanese dish for lunch and dinner. If you feel like having curry, but you don’t want to spend too much time in the kitchen, try Pork and Cabbage Curry. You can also substitute thinly sliced pork with any other protein of choice such as thinly sliced chicken, beef, or tofu. This is a great dish to make on a busy weekday.
Azuki Bar is a popular frozen popsicle in Japan made from sweet Azuki red bean paste. This cool treat has been enjoyed for its nutty flavor and grainy bean texture for decades. Azuki Bar contains nothing complicated or artificial, but it’s pleasantly sweet and full of flavor. It looks just like any popsicle with a stick. It’s a wonderful cold dessert during Japan’s brutally hot and humid summers, but it also can be eaten all year round.
Today’s miso soup features Shabu Shabu pork and leafy green lettuce. Shabu Shabu pork is paper-thin pork loin (or even pork belly), cooked by swishing it in the miso soup. Because the pork is very thin, it cooks through quickly. Rich umami flavor from the pork enriches the soup, giving it a wonderful taste. Lettuce adds a nice crunchy texture to the dish, so try not to cook it too long. Although this is another super easy miso soup, you still get a hearty and delicious result that pairs well with any meal or stands strong on its own with steamed rice. Hope you give it a try!
Chopped salad is a salad where ingredients like vegetables, fruits, meats, and nuts are chopped into cube shapes and tossed with dressing. It became hugely popular in the US, particularly major cities like New York and LA first, before its popularity spread to Japan, where chopped salad specialty stores have started opening as well today.
This simple Yakisoba noodle dish features a whole head of iceberg lettuce and chicken. Iceberg lettuce is most commonly eaten as salads, but its crisp texture also works well in stir-frying. One whole head of lettuce seems like a lot, but it shrinks to about half of the volume when it’s stir-fried. Crisp texture somehow remains, and the lettuce leaves also soaks up the flavors from the chicken and sauce quite well.
Yakisoba is a popular Japanese stir-fried noodle dish, usually cooked with sliced pork, cabbage, and bean sprouts. While Worcestershire-based Yakisoba sauce seasoned version is most well known, Yakisoba noodles that are simply seasoned with salt and soy sauce such as Shio Yakisoba are also popular. While ingredients are super simple, we added sweet and salty oyster sauce for adding richness and umami to the dish.
Black Tea Pork is pork tenderloin cooked in black tea and then marinated in Japanese seasonings. One of the polyphenols in black tea, tannin, tenderizes the meat, eliminates its odor and greasiness, and results in a light and delicious dish. Cooking pork in black tea is a practical method and a great choice to make pork tasty.
Today’s miso soup features imitation crab. While imitation crab may not sound like a high-quality ingredient, it has a lot of umami flavor that enhances the base of the miso soup. Imitation crab, or Kanikama in Japanese, is made from fish paste (primarily pollock) that resembles crab meat. It contains no fat and is high in protein, making it an ideal ingredient for those on a diet. Additionally, it’s rich in calcium, which is an added bonus. Combined with cabbage and eggs, this makes for a delicious and filling miso soup suitable for any meal of the day. Hope you give it a try!