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…

What can you do with 24 squash blossoms?

Twenty-four is too few for squash blossom canh, a clear soup that Mom used to make when I was little. The flower is the only thing of a pumpkin plant (squash blossom in Vietnam is pumpkin blossom) that I didn’t mind eating (I hate pumpkin). The flowers perish too quickly that American grocery stores almost never carry them(*). That scarcity, I can only guess, also raises them to the exotic level that makes the modern American restaurants include the word in their menu around this time of the year (summer squash blossom season) and feature a mere 3-5 flowers on a plate amidst the more common vegetables like zucchini and cauliflower. The craze has been around for at least a decade, Carolyn Jung said, and I don’t see it wilt away anytime soon.

Although I dislike the place at first because it’s always too crowded, Berkeley Bowl gradually grew on me. It started when I realized, after many years away from Vietnam and living just a bit inconveniently far from the Asian markets, that I haven’t seen certain grocery items for ever, for example, woodear mushroom (nấm mộc nhĩ) and straw mushroom (nấm rơm). Then one day I ran into them at Berkeley Bowl. I was like, oh? they have that here?! It’s a great moment. One where you reunite with old friends, and if we should speak in grand terms, it reminds me to appreciate growing up in Vietnam and in my family, the lack of either component would have resulted in a much, much poorer experience with food.

Sometimes that great feeling clouds my better judgment. You know, when people dig out a picture of their middle school gang from a notebook, buck teeth and silly hair or whatever, they feel compelled to put it on Facebook. When I saw the squash blossoms at Berkeley Bowl, I felt compelled to get them home. Not that I knew what to do with them or had time to cook them.

Mom suggested stuffing them with ground pork. I’ve had them stuffed with cheese and batter-fried. But it’s summer. Peaches are in season. This something I make with squash blossoms should taste light and fresh like the flowers it bears.

Bouquet Nectarine Gyoza
– Squash blossoms (the male blossoms, because they’re big enough to stuff)
– medium firm white tofu
– gyoza skin (wrappers)
– 1 yellow nectarine, diced (If you use peach, peel off the skin because peach has fuzz)
– sugar, salt, pepper to taste
– a steamer

Rinse the squash blossoms under cold water, peel off the dark green spikes at the base. Also break off the stem, if there’s any.
Mash the tofu by hand while mixing it with the diced nectarine. Add salt, sugar and pepper to taste.
Gently stuff the nectarine-tofu mix into the squash blossom.
Wrap a gyoza skin outside the blossom, leaving at least the top half of the petals exposed.
Steam until the gyoza skin turns translucent (5-10 minutes). The flower petals will wilt but still retain their color and the bottom half should still be a tad crunchy.
Take out and let cool.

UPDATE: pan-fried these to make them taste better (albeit less healthy  :-D)

(*) Every website I’ve looked claims that squash blossoms can only stay fresh in the fridge up to 2 days under precise condition. Well, what you see in the picture “pre-steamed gyoza” are squash blossoms after 8 days in the fridge.