Flavor Boulevard

Summer Green Roll – avocado, cucumber, kaiware sprout, wakame and hijiki. Alissa scooped wasabi like it was green tea ice cream, but I like this one just as it is: plain, fresh and light.

It’s been a long time since I last either wrote about food or ate anything that I could write about. The occasional rainfalls during the drought of takeout Chinese are so-so hu tieu and com suon somewhere in the Ranch 99 complex, and homemade soups, lovely but no hot news. Vegetable intake has been limited to shibazuke from Berkeley Bowl, homemade kimchi, and toasted seaweed (seaweed counts, doesn’t it?). Before leaving for her trip, Cheryl fed me her black chicken soup, brown rice, tau yew bak (similar to thit kho but with soy sauce instead of fish sauce) and, like a loving sister, concerned looks and advice on how I should feed myself healthy meals. I agree with her one hundred percent, but all planned menus for the next day fluttered their wings away as I run from class to class and get home only wishing to relax. Cheryl is married. I entertain the idea that I live like a single guy. A single guy that could not have looked more forward to a vegan dinner with some old friends.

After much debate we decided on a simple kampyo roll, a big fluffy summer green roll (that we each stuffed into our mouth in one bite to prove our manliness(*)), a Cha-Ya roll, a tempura stuffed eggplant, a gyoza and vegetable soup, and three desserts.

Cha-Ya Roll – avocado, yam and carrots, tempura roll with sweet soy sauce.

Tonchi Nasu – tempura stuffed eggplant with setsuma potato, corn, tofu, hijiki, soybean and carrot

Taku Sui – gyoza soup with tofu, broccoli, zucchini, napa cabbage, snap peas, asparagus, cauliflower, silver noodles and mushrooms in a light broth – I like this a lot!

Yellow Moon – tempura banana with a scoop of soy ice cream, drizzled with green tea sauce and red bean sauce

The Yellow Moon is just the tempura banana, the soy ice cream is listed as a separate dessert, but we shameless girls requested a scoop of ice cream with the banana. The Cha-Ya staff is so nice. 😉 This tempura banana is not oily like the deep fried banana desserts at Thai restaurants, the batter is light and plain. It gives you the impression of healthy foods.

Vegan chocolate cake (left) and Oshikuro (right) – plain white mochi in gooey red bean sauce. The red bean is a bit too sweet, but I like it still. The cake is like a soft brownie, not at all dry and lifeless like normal vegan cakes.

(*) In case you wonder, a picture of us is to the right.

Address: Cha-Ya Vegetarian Japanese Cuisine
(North Berkeley)
1686 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley CA 94709
(510) 981-1213
Dinner for four: roughly $90 – Kinda expensive now that I think about it…

One very cold Saturday afternoon in Oakland.

Darren: Normally I don’t like fruit flavored stuff, like watermelon candies you know?
Mai: Yeah, like cherry candies…
Darren: But this mango ice cream is really good!
Mai: It is! I like the green tea the most though, it’s so refreshing. What about you, Kristen?
Kristen: I usually don’t like strawberry flavors, but this strawberry one is so good…

Good thing we each had a different favorite.

When the girl took up our empty sushi plates and asked if we wanted dessert, we were already stuffed, which is a given every time Kristen and I go out together. But we asked the girl what’s on anyway, and she listed, if I remember correctly in my post-food stupor, “tempura ice cream, green tea ice cream, red bean ice cream, green tea cheesecake, seven flavors of mochi ice cream, which includes mango, vanilla, strawberry, green tea, red bean, coffee and chocolate”. We looked at each other for two seconds then at her.

– Can we have the seven flavors, please?
– You want all seven?!
*Looks exchanged*
– Uh… it’s not a thing of seven mochis?
– Well we can make a platter of that too. You want that?
– Yes please. *sheepish grin*

Never turn down ice cream.

Zero complaints on the tempura and the rolls too, they’re Americanized of course and we didn’t do any nigiri nor any of us Japanese. But if you’re American, happen to be near the intersection of Piedmont and Echo in Oakland while hungry for sushi, Shimizu is a sure bet.

Address: Shimizu Japanese Cuisine
4290 Piedmont Avenue
Oakland, CA 94611
(510) 653-7672
shimizucuisine.com

Volcano Scallop ($7.95) – Battered and deep fried scallops with sweet soy sauce

She’s the person behind the mochi at Teance. She pounds the cooked sticky rice instead of using mochiko, chops up whole yomogi for the actual grassy freshness, grow her own wild blueberries because they’re denser in flavor than the bigger highbush cultivars at the stores, and makes fancy mochi fillings with seldom fewer than 4 ingredients. Every time I nibble one of her soft little piece of art, each costs a whopping 4 dollars, I wonder what she doesn’t make at home from scratch and how much more work it takes.

Turns out, Yuri doesn’t make katsuobushi from scratch, that is, she doesn’t behead, gut, fillet, smoke and sun-dry the bonito fish herself, instead she buys the wood-block-looking karebushi and shaves it to top her okomiyaki, which goes without saying is made with grated nagaimo and dashi instead of premixed flour like when I did it.

We made Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, which doesn’t have egg in the batter, but we later added egg to brown the pancake more. Yuri told me to choose the fluffier cabbage instead of those with the leaves tightly packed together, and she added a squeeze of lemon juice on the finished pancake to brighten it up, exactly the little things that I can learn only from a home kitchen.

After two okonomiyaki, we had genmaicha with pickle cucumber and shiromiso, both homemade of course. Then a plain koshihikari senbei (rice cracker), as the sun set generous rays from the window.

Clockwise from top left: Master Hideko Metaxas (in blue) and two assistants arranging an example of Rikka Shofutai; a free-style arrangement in honor of the victims and the philanthropists in the Tohoku Tsunami 2011; an Ikenobo sensei arranging a free-style display; Shoka (left) versus Rikka (right)

Learn something new everyday. At the Japanese American Summer Festival in Concord this year, I absorbed an hour of Ikenobo ikebana art, which is really, really, really rudimentary, but at least now I know that the Rikka style involves nine elements, and the Shoka style three elements (heaven, earth and man).

That day was also the first I’ve heard of the “Three Friends of Winter” sho chiku bai (pine, bamboo and plum), and this astonished me because 1. I’d never encountered any old Chinese things that my mom hasn’t told me about, and 2. it involves plum blossom, which is my name. There’s no way I wouldn’t know that my name is part of a trio that appears in Asian arts and folklores at lunar new year time. My memories must have been failing. 🙁 Anyhow, Nancy made a beautiful onigiri box that follows the sho chiku bai theme:

Homemade sho chiku bai onigiri by Nancy Togami: white onigiri with aonori and sesame (sho), yellow onigiri with fukujinzuke (chiku), and pink umeboshi onigiri (bai)

The rice balls, particularly the fukujinzuke ones (soy sauce pickles), go oh so well with the teriyaki chicken sold at the festival. For $5 you get a quarter of a chicken, either white or dark meat. I chose dark meat of course, a big juicy leg and thigh, but the white meat that Nancy picked also looked gleaming. Kenji-san went with 8 skewers of beef teriyaki for $8. We noshed while listening to the taiko drum performance. In the 110-degree heat, I tried not to stare at the kids swooshing their shaved ice, diverted my thoughts instead to the juniper and Japanese maple bonsai.

Mom is an avid believer against potted plants and caged birds, and I don’t even support cutting grass. But these miniature trees are undeniably works of art.

That said, if Mom and I were given one of these, first thing we do is removing the tree from the pot and digging it a nice warm hole in our front yard. 😉

Is it miso season? (Miso has a season?) Berkeley Bowl puts out about 10 different kinds of miso in their “international” aisle, and Nojo advertises a seasonal 5-course miso omakase menu on Black Board Eats. Usually the Black Board Eats emails go straight into the trash, which I kinda feel bad about because I signed up for their newsletter after all, but thank goodness I did read it that morning. That night I got the code, called my friend, and we went to Nojo.

We were seated at the counter, but not the one facing the chefs, that would have been nice, this was a small counter facing the wall near the door. The wall looks pretty cool but we felt kinda weird at first, what with the other customers crowding the tables and here the three of us facing a wall next to a middle-aged man. We felt outcast. But Nojo doesn’t take reservation for party under 6, only a phone call an hour before you arrive to put your name on the waiting list, guess I should have called more than an hour earlier, what was I thinking following the rules? But the servers, inked and all, are really nice, the water was clear and sweet, the sunflowers smelled good, and the middle-aged man left minutes after we sat down.

And the food.

Cucumber salad with shichimi and nori. Shichimi is a chili pepper mix with (supposedly) 6 other spices, but they sprinkled just enough to give the cold thing a kick, not spicy. There’s more shichimi on the counter for the duller tongues people who like spicy food.

Miso Omakase Course 1: a simple salad of Little Gem lettuce and cauliflower with shiromiso (white miso) dressing. The pickled red onion was the real little gem.

Miso Omakase Course 2: miso soup with oyster mushroom and butternut squash. Hearty. San Francisco gets cold at night, so this helps.

Fried eggplant with akamiso (red miso) and peanut sauce, topped with julienned leek. Eggplants have never been my favorite fruit and will never be even if I go vegan, but this miso eggplant was better than the grilled pork jowl and the garlic-barley miso butter chicken (Miso Omakase Course 3), both of which tip-toed on the salty side.

Tempura tree oyster mushroom, squash blossom and lemon, to be dipped in a zesty ponzu mayonnaise.

We didn’t expect a fried thing when we ordered the rice balls with tare and nori, but the surprise was welcome.

If I was skeptical about anything in the Miso Omakase menu, it was the shiromiso-glazed trout. But its sweet creamy sauce blew my doubt away, the rice ball was great for sweeping up every last drop.

Miso Omakase Course 5: buckwheat & beer crepe, a drizzle of ginger-muscovado syrup, blueberry compote on top and shiromiso ice cream. We thought muscovado was a cross between muscat the grape and avocado (weird, I know, but possible, right?), but we asked, it’s a brown sugar.

And of course, kurogoma (black sesame) ice cream with roasted strawberries on a bed of “peanut thunder crackers”, which is like peanut brittle and caramel popcorn intertwined, multiplied the goodness by 85.

You know how people can just tell that something’s good when they see it, for no reason at all? That’s how it was with Nojo for me. Every izakaya in the Bay has the same kind of yakitori on the stick, the same expensive price, the same raves on Yelp, and I don’t know why I wanted to go to Nojo, but now I’m recommending it to everyone I talk to. Was it the kikubari exuding from the friendly staff, inked and all and warmly smiling as they strode between tables? Was it the simple but flawless food? But I didn’t know any of that before I came.

Somewhere in me, I just knew. Miso is in.

Address: Nojo (which means “farm” in Japanese)
231 Franklin St.
San Francisco, CA
(415) 896-4587

Dinner for three: $99.82

When I walked down that aisle, I beamed with pride. In my hand, a bag of okonomiyaki flour, a bag of katsuobushi, bottles of sauces and aonori. Kristen took care of the cabbage and meats. Pancake day. Osaka style. At least that was the plan.

We didn’t plan on being authentic. We couldn’t. An American-born Taiwanese and a Vietnamese who haven’t lived in Japan at all are not gonna make an “authentic okonomiyaki” on first try. That’s why we chose premixed okonomiyaki flour instead of grating a nagaimo, bottled mayonnaise instead of whipping up eggs and oil ourselves. But just the thought of making our own okonomiyaki in whatever shape we want and however we want it, not having to go anywhere and regretting over soggy, over-salted mashes called okonomiyaki, generated the we-can-own-this attitude that guaranteed pride no matter what the outcome. It’s a sort of defiance after too many letdowns. Instead of mixing flour with water, we boiled roasted corn and mixed flour with corn tea.

Apart from that and the avoidance of green onion (I’d add green onion if I’m making pajeon – green onion pancake, but not okonomiyaki), and impatience – pouring more corn tea than I should, then the batter was too thin and I added some more flour and the batter went too thick, eventually I got double what I intended for, which also helped because we had a lot of cabbage – we followed the Best Okonomiyaki recipe pretty closely until the next-to-last step. Once I made too big a pancake, so when I flipped it, only half got flipped. I got omelet instead of okonomiyaki, but shape doesn’t matter, right? Ah, there was also a time when I forgot to layer the bacon on top of the pancake before flipping it, so the bacon was added to the bottom instead of the top, but that’s just a matter of perspective. 😉

Quasi-Osaka Okonomiyaki (serving 2)
[adapted from Best Okonomiyaki recipe]

1 cup okonomiyaki flour (100 g)
2/3 cup corn tea
2 eggs
1/5 head of cabbage, sliced into 2-mm-thick strips
9 strips of fresh bacon, cut into 3-inch-long (8 cm) pieces or however you like
100g raw shrimp, peeled and diced
Kewpie mayonnaise
Okonomiyaki sauce
Aonori (seaweed flake)
Katsuobushi (bonito flakes)

Boil the roasted corn kernels to make corn tea (옥수수 차 oksusu cha). I just take a handful and throw in a pot of water, you should rather go heavy than light on the kernel, it makes the tea sweeter. Let the tea cool.

Chop the cabbage. Time to show your prowess of chopping without looking, which I can’t do. You’d end up with a LOT of cabbage. Make cabbage salad with kimchi.

Mix flour with corn tea.

Add cabbage, diced shrimp and eggs into the flour. Mix like you never mix before.

Plop some of the mix onto a hot, lightly oiled skillet and spread it into whatever shape, canonically a disk. Four inches across will make it easiest to flip and big enough to be a meal.

Layer bacon strips on top. Let it sit for 3-4 minutes on medium-high heat.

Flip. And DO NOT PRESS it down. You want the air in there for crunch. Let it cook for another 2-3 minutes.

Spatula it out onto a plate. Sprinkle copious amount of aonori and katsuobushi (which we forgot to do! But we used tempura shrimp to make up for that later). Squeeze mayonnaise and okonomi-sauce into your desired pattern. Or make a heart-shaped pancake, like Kristen.

Here, a lesser writer would put something cliche like “this is the best okonomiyaki I’ve ever gulfed down”.

This is the best okonomiyaki I’ve ever gulfed down.

If you bought extra shrimp, make shrimp tempura. We decided this on a wimp and protected ourselves from flying oil with plastic bags. Recommended for entertainment. 😉

With leftover batter after deep frying the shrimps, make fried dough. Drizzle syrup and eat them as dessert. Can you see the shrimp imposter? 😉

Future prospects: grating nagaimo, making our own sauce, other styles of okonomiyaki.

Movies are food for the eye (and ears, and brain, or whatever else you like). I watched Bread of Happiness on the plane ride from Houston back to SFO, and it made me happy that whole day. It also strengthened my resolve to study Japanese. The breads shown in this movie don’t seem particularly complicated, their presentation doesn’t sparkle, but they perfectly suit the gentle atmosphere that flows through the plot: looking at the steam rising as you break a fresh loaf in half, you can smell a sincere love.

Something that I learned from the main guy, a baker, in Bread of Happiness: do you know the literal meaning of “compagnon”?

Also designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, the Korean drama Kimchi Family hits the spot on days when I feel down (and also when I’m eating my cup noodles). It’s another string of small stories of how food made with heart can touch people’s lives in positive ways. If you don’t watch it for the plot, watch it for the kimchi! So many kinds of kimchi that I haven’t thought of being possible before. You can watch it on Hulu.com.

Kimchi Family has a lovely song that I can’t find the lyrics anywhere: “Take a drink. This drink is not alcohol, this drink is our mother’s tears, this drink is our father’s sweat…” UPDATE: Thanks to the author of Following KPop, I now have the lyrics of the drinking song, printed below.

Tonight I actually cried watching its 8th episode. But at least I was at home. For Bread of Happiness, aish, I had to sink into my seat so that the guy sitting next to me didn’t see my eyes turning all red…

발효가족 권주가 가사 (Fermentation Family – Drink Offering song lyrics from Daum Music)
Listen to the song on YouTube and sing along 🙂

Aside from opening a little bit late on Sunday (11:30 am), the Tokyo One at Westchase is a lovely place. Three things that I have now associated with Tokyo One, although I probably shouldn’t, since they kinda belong to the ukiyo (floating world) more than to the permanents:
1. A beautiful peach-colored water lily in the mini pond creek artificial water thing surrounding the building
2. Perfect silky chawanmushi (pictured)
3. The gentle (the gentlest I’ve ever heard) but persistent recommendation of Sean, our server, for ice cream. We were full to the brim, but I gave in after he asked us for the second time if we would like some ice cream (as if I could ever turn down icecream 8)). I’m happy that he insisted, the plum ice cream with plum bits was great, and green tea ice cream is always good. We finished two scoops, Sean came back and asked if we’d like some more. Honest to goodness, I wanted to say yes.

Address: Tokyo One at Westchase
2938 W Sam Houston Pkwy South
Houston, TX 77042
(713) 785-8899
Buffet lunch for three: $51.93
Ah, food-wise? Good tempura, good gyoza, good fish, good rice, etc.

After a 5-course afternoon tea, the three of us felt our stomachs’ calling. The wind blew chilly moisture from the sea. A hearty dinner of noodle in hot broth would hit the spot, one that was saturated with oolong. Quite appropriately, we walked into O Chamé, meaning “eye of tea”(*) literally and “playful little one” colloquially. It’s Mother’s Day, no reservation, we couldn’t be any luckier that the guy found us three seats at the end of the bar.

Of course, who would skip the appetizers. And of course, we couldn’t decide on just one appetizer, so we ordered three. The potato and snow crab croquette ($8.50), buttery but mild, tastes ten times better after a dip in the plumier-than-usual-and-not-too-sour tonkatsu sauce. Usually I don’t dip my stuff, but the sauce is a must here.

The grilled, caramelized eel ($10.50), Kristen’s choice, is great. Little Mom loves eel, and she would love this. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! 🙂 A bite into the crisp endive releases a burst of sharp, almost minty air to balance the eel’s fatty sweetness.

Another fatty, sweet thing is the braised pork ribs with ginger and lemon ($8.50), so sweet I could detect neither ginger nor lemon. The leaner pieces looked soft but not too thrilling. One must go for the pieces with lotsa fat and semi-charred ends, those are gold.

Then came the reason we decided on O Chamé: the noodle soups. The broth is light yet hearty. Actually, I’m still in tea mode so I can only think of the word “full-bodied” to describe it. Tender pork as the base, smooth spinach for texture, and thin strips of takuan (pickled daikon) to freshen it up. Both Tiana and Kristen settled on this pork shoulder udon ($14.50). My normal self would, too.

But I chose the tofu udon instead. Lately I’ve decided that I should gauge a restaurant based on their vegetarian/vegan numbers because it’s hard to make vegan stuff taste good (unless it’s a dessert). This shiitake-spinach-aburage (fried tofu skin) udon (13.50) passes the bar, but it would be nice had it been entirely vegan. The broth is a fish stock flavored by the earthy sweetness of mushroom. I prefer the vegan udon at Anzu, whose broth has the more refreshing note of chrysanthemum greens.

Our face bathed in the steam, our stomach getting packed. It was hot. We were dead full half way through the bowl. I did my best picking up all of my spinach and mushroom, but shamefully left half the broth and a third of the noodle. We thought we couldn’t eat anymore, but then we flipped the page and stared at the desserts, then looked among ourselves and grinned: “I don’t think we’re ever too full for ice cream”. 😀 Just one dessert is not gonna hurt. The agony was when we narrowed our choices to four (from nine): sherry custard, poached pear with berries, truffle torte, and what we ended up getting following the waitress’s suggestion: two scoops of caramel balsamic gelato ($5).

The first spoon was, well, interesting. But it grows on you. It has a bite to it. Kinda feisty, or in Kristen’s words, “like yogurt”, which makes sense because both balsamic vinegar and yogurt are products of fermentation, works of microbes, and sour. Definitely worth squeezing in at the last minute.

Address: O Chamé
1830 4th Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
(510) 841-8783

Dinner for three + tax: $81.56

(*) At first I pronounced it |oh-shah-mei|, like a French thing, you know. But seeing its meaning, I guess it must be |oh-jah-mei|, like “cha” (tea) in sencha.

Technically, ごま蒸し饅頭 (goma mushi manjuu) means Steamed Sesame Bun (as a friend told me), but I’m a firm believer that proper nouns, i.e., names, cannot be translated without losing some of their meaning. Since there is no sufficient translation already, I might as well make the English name suitable to describe the object instead of sticking to the literal translation. Hence, to distinguish these little buns from the gazillion of buns in the Far East, I shall call them “buttons”.

Flaky, multi-super-thin-layered dough. Semi-sweet black sesame paste. Adorable, in every sense of the word.

Here’s the label, for those who can read Japanese:

From Super H Mart, Houston, 12 buttons for $3.