Turkeys! Bird Flu!

This must be the culprit of my recent bout of the bird flu...



Yes, this is my drive way.



These guys apparently found something they didn't like and boy, did they crackle! I thought someone was having car trouble when I kept hearing this "Krkrkrkrkrkrkrrrrr" sound. It really sounded like a bad starter on a car. Imagine my surprise when I opened the garage door to find a whole herd of these guys all facing the same directions, crying at who-knows-what. There was nothing there that I saw.



They eventually slowly walked away, fluttering their wings along the way.

What a morning. I mean, I live in the 'burbs, but I didn't think I would be greeted by turkeys in my drive way!

Chicken Noodle Ramen for the Sick

I swear, I have the immune system of a SCID mouse. Yup, that's SCID as in severe combined immunodeficinecy. I can't believe it myself, but I am sick AGAIN!

This time, I have a sore throat, a mild headache, a runny nose, and a cough that would scare even the heaviest smokers. The thing about my cold this time around is that it really came suddenly out of nowhere... One evening, I was fine, and the next morning, I was on my dying leg! But down deep, I know there must've been an inkling of sickness earlier last week when a craving so strong I couldn't fight drove me to Himawari Ramen in San Mateo twice in one week.

You see, San Mateo is quite far from my house, especially considering the fact that the object of my travels is a mere bowl of ramen. But the bowl of ramen at Himawari is not a 'mere bowl of ramen'.


The broth is savory with enough salt and oil to be addictive as the juices of ambrosia for a soon-to-be-sick girl. The faint sweetness of the broth is highlighted by the complex blend of animal broths and marine umami. The noodles are firm with enough resistance to make me salivate but gently and seductively give to my bite. The pork cha-shu (char siu) is so tender, it flakes and melts in my mouth. And oh! That egg of theirs! Soft, moist, and warm with deliciously oozy yolk squirting out when bitten, the egg is a precious and indispensable component of the Himawari ramen experience.

The thing I love about Himawari's ramen is that it is light without being wimpy. The soup is almost clear without much fat or overbearing presence of the pork. The soup is maternal in nature - kind, nourishing, and gentle. Compared to some of the other prominent Bay Area ramen shops where pork essence carries the broth and consequently the ramen, the broth at Himawari is the guilt-free version with umami itself promoting the flavors with little help directly from the sweetness of fat and lard.

The noodles keep getting better too. I was always a fan of the Himawari broths (both shoyu and salt flavors) and less so of the noodles. This time around, I noticed how satisfyingly full of texture the noodles had become. Twice in a row, the noodles came out perfectly cooked, soaking up the broth while staying chewy and full of life during the entire meal. Himawari has outdone itself this time around - noodles and broth, they are now my favorite ramen spot in the Bay Area.

Although I absolutely adore their shoyu (soy sauce) ramen, I find it difficult to drive 45 min, crossing a bridge in the process, to get my butt over to Himawari on a regular basis. However, this last week, I made every excuse I could find to sneak a bowl of their shoyu ramen into my system. I craved it so much, I took a nap infront of the store, waiting for them to open on my second visit.

Perhaps my sickness explains why I had such a dire craving. The ramen chef at Himawari told me that they really aim to play up the chicken in their shoyu ramen. Maybe it was the chicken noodle effect that my body was gravitating to, and the chicken in the shoyu ramen soup beckoned me back, knowing that I was coming down with something soon. Or maybe I just like ramen a lot and having a three-day weekend was the perfect excuse to fit yet another trip to San Mateo just to have a yummy bowl of soupy noodles!

Food Blog S'cool

Today's post is over at the Food Blog S'cool...

ISO: Upscale Vietnamese with Herbs

I've been lamenting the fact that I can't take my family out for really good Vietnamese food as their welcome dinner when they come visit me in the US. The emphasis on fresh herbs, copious vegetables, and light vinegared sauces makes Vietnamese food the ideal candidate for a familiar yet exotic meal for my Japanese family. The problems is...　all of my favorite Vietnamese restaurants are...hole-in-the-walls.

I love my pho+? shops, Golden Lotus (Oakland), Vung Tau (San Jose), and the now defunct Nha Trang (Oakland). But as much as I love these places, I want a place where we can have white table cloths and champagne to welcome my family for visiting me all the way out in California. I want a restaurant that doesn't look like a chain or a 'family restaurant' as they call the Denny's-type establishments in Japan. I want a menu that is not laminated in cheap plastic and silverware that actually weighs something.

I've tried a number of the so-called Upscale Vietnamese places now - Slanted Door, Bodega Bistro, Saigon City, and most recently, Crustacean. They all have one thing in common - not enough herbs. None of them served food that was memorably bad, although service has been shaky at all four restaurants. Compared to the warm, welcoming service I get at places of comparable prices, these restaurants seem snooty and all together uninterested at how my dining experience is. Most memorably because this happened a few days ago at Crustacean, a Vietnamese host called the Papa Bear simply by his last name when addressing him to his face! No 'Mr', no 'Sir', no nothing. He had the choice of sticking to the American tradition and using the Papa Bear's first name, which would have been more acceptable. Instead, he decided to use the Papa Bear's last name and rather purposefully left out any respectful preface, which was quite rude in my (and the Papa Bear's) book. Even worse, he did not look up from his podium once to look at the Papa Bear! Not even a smile or a 'please have a seat while we set up your table'...

Anyway, I am getting side-tracked. Aside from the hospitality issue, the one major problem I have with all these so-called Upscale Vietnamese restaurants are that they only serve basil and mint in their salads and their 'herb' repertoire. Where are my tiato (shiso-like leaves), those heart-shaped fishy herbs that I have grown to love, and all the other exciting bursts of flavor that are so unique to Vietnamese cuisine?

And why oh why have the menus become 100% English? If I want a banh hoi or a can chua, how can I navigate the menu to find these items when everything is given English names with non-Vietnamese waitstaff who have never had the Vietnamese dish I am trying to order? No, I am not Vietnamese, but I have learned to read my favorite foods in Vietnamese and I want my food to be Vietnamese. And I want champagne and white-table-cloth-service along with my herbs, my nuoc mam, and my many kinds of banh. They really go well together - the Vietnamese food and the champagne. I have it at home all the time. But is there somewhere I can enjoy the combination without producing loads and loads of dishes? Or am I asking for too much?

PS: My appetite is rather dim right now and my culinary interest at an all time low. Maybe that's why my blog has been kind of whiny these days. I promise to get out of my funk tomorrow when I start back on my running routine!

And I thought I was fusion...

Everytime I am in Japan, I am amazed at how prevalent 'fusion' food is there as a part of any old restaurant. My sister and I have talked about this over and over how the newest, hottest thing in the restaurant scene right now is often something we have grown up with and how we routinely dab with at home - East has been fornicating with West on our palates for as long as I can remember!! Why is it so exciting to see konbu in the hipster restaurants? What's the big deal with using bonito broth to strengthen the risotto?! We've been doing that in Japan since the 80's!!!!!

Here's an example of how prevalent this fusion business is in Japan - a local spaghetti shop served these...


This spaghetti had pickled plums (ume) kneaded into it, served with toasted nori and a crushed pickled plum dressing. Warm, al dente, and gentle, it was everything best from both the Japanese world and the Italian world. Would it knock off the socks of anyone expecting authentic spaghetti? I'm sure!! Did it taste good? Absolutely!!! The fresh flavors of the plum blended perfectly with the somewhat plain firmness of the noodles themselves to provide a refreshing and nourishing bite. It was so smooth and easy to eat, I slurp up my entire plate in a matter of seconds, I think.


My mother had the creamier fish-roe spaghetti. Tarako (cod-roe) spaghetti is so common in Japan that we can buy pre-made tarako spaghetti sauces at most Japanese grocery stores. The saltiness, along with the briny smell of the ocean, of the fish roe is almost like anchovy sauce on authentic Italian pizza and provides a complexity to counter act any dull richness of the cream sauce. In addition, the pops of the fish roe acts as another source of epicurean pleasure - rich, creamy smoothness of the sauce complimented by periodic pockets of popping brine and oceany scent. Who wouldn't love that?!

And this is why I find myself eating at home more and more. If the restaurants want to charge me and arm and a leg for mediocre pseudo-fusion food, blah! I'll eat at home! ...Am I too harsh because of my rediscovered joy for blogging?

Burning off the funk, yakiniku-style

I'm trying to get out of my funk and do more of the things that make me happy. This blog has been so neglected for an entire week already, it's about time I give it some attention. And I have such great dining stories to share from my January trip to Japan, I really want to get it going again...

But today, I think I need to ease into it with a short post, because I am SOOOO tired. I did manage to get my pictures from my in my hometown, Nagoya, cropped and resized, so here we have it. The Rebirth of the Food-loving Alice...

My first meal in Nagoya was going to be a fugu-feast, but since I got in later than scheduled (the trip was cursed with bad air travel luck from the get-go), we ended up at a yakiniku (grilled-beef) meal. Yakiniku is one of my favorites since childhood and oddly something that isn't prevalent in the Bay Area, so I wasn't complaining much. While the Bay Area has a billion different Korean BBQ restaurants that are quite good and I frequent one in particular, yakiniku is very different from the authentic Korean BBQ because of its Japanification. Although the Japanese consider yakiniku to be Korean cuisine, I would say that Japanese-Korean BBQ has evolved into a totally different cuisine with smaller portions of different types of beef, pork, and chicken to be enjoyed with a variety of sauces.


Toraji is a well-established yakiniku chain, and despite it being a chain, the quality is nothing like that of a typical, large franchise. The Nagoya branch has a very nice view of the entire city from its huge windows. Since Nagoya is just beginning to build high-rises and sky scrapers, the 12th floor location is sufficient for a good view...

In addition to pages and pages of non-grilled items, the menu offered 26 different varieties of items to be grilled at the table on their built-in smoke-free charcoal grills. I have no idea how it all works, but I left the place smelling as fresh as I went in (which, incidentally wasn't that fresh, since I had been traveling all day long), although the meats were all grilled at the table on red-hot charcoal they brought out after our orders were taken.


Each cut was absolutely melt-in-your mouth delicious with sauces that really highlighted the tender sweetness of the beef. The signature sauce is a miso-based rich brown sauce with a hint of sweetness, served with eggs for dipping. The sauce was very strong with both saltiness and sweetness that seemed almost overpowering, but when dipped in the egg, all the components worked perfectly to provide an experience of decadence and pure debauchery. The juices and the oils from the meat blended perfectly with its accompaniment. With each bite, the flavors exploded, leaving me nothing but the pleasurable satisfaction of fulfilling the primordial urge to devour meat.


At a striking contrast was the simply prepared shamo or Japanese bantams. You might recall I had shamo last time I was in Japan as well, but these birds are full of texture without being chewy, flavorful without being gamey. It is indeed still chicken, yet so far from any chicken in terms of complex umami tones. Dressed with just a few sprinkles of coarse salt grains, these bantams were at the total opposite end of richness, color, and flavor. Having such widely different types of meats at once is one of the best parts of the yakiniku experience.

The meal was a great way to energize after a full day of traveling. After recalling the meal now, I feel like this is exactly what I need to nourish myself out of my funk. I wonder if I can fit another epicurean getaway to Japan any time soon...

So much to do, so much to do...

Urgh, life is just too hectic for my taste these days.

I have a whole bunch of little things to take care of - like closing my Citibank account of 13 years (they gave the SAME bank account number as mine to someone else and proceeded to let that person's checks cash from MY account!!!!!), opening a new bank account and transferring all my direct what-nots to the new bank, organizing my aunt and uncle's trip to Lake Tahoe, canceling my February "return" flight to Japan on United (I had to buy round-trip to get a reasonable rate during my Narita crisis), and finishing some experiments for a grant proposal deadline.

Leaves no time for blogging and a very sad ex-food lover. I have had no appetite and little desire to eat lately. Maybe it's a combination of exhaustion and general stress. I have all these great pictures of food from Japan, but I have neither the time nor the energy to even think about food... I've been living on two-second meals created from the scraps in my fridge for about two, three weeks now.

Oh well, maybe when I have a little more time in a few days, I can slowly go through my pictures and find inspiration in the tender, slightly smoky grilled meats at the Japanese-Korean BBQ joint, the big tub of tofu simmered in scrumptious konbu broth with enough umami to soak every pore in the tofu, the kaiseki meal I had alongside (well, sort of... they were in the room next to us!) Japanese royalties of the Miya-ke, and much, much more...

Sure ain't no average cup-a-noodle!

Look at these noodles! They look so chewy, firm, and full of noodlicious goodness. This is not a slam on the Bay Area ramen joints, but I gotta say it - these noodles were vastly better than most of the noodles served around the Bay.


The crazy thing is that this is a regular cup-a-noodle-style instant ramen from a road-side convenience store in Japan! No wonder I used to love these instant ramen thingies back in Japan as a child - it really is good!



The bowl (yes, it really does come in a bowl and not in a cup) of ramen contains powdered soup, flavoring/sauce, freeze-dried green onions, and vacuum-packed char siu pork and bamboo shoot pickles. This one, in particular, was styled after the famed Sano-city ramen, known for its quality noodles since the water there is supposed to be crystal clear and deliciously smooth.

I would much rather eat this bowl of ramen again than eat at most of the ramen shops in the Bay Area. But really, this is not a slam on the Bay Area ramen shops. It is just a proclamation of how serious the noodle-worship culture in Japan is - even instant noodles have been reborn into a culinary achievement!

Fugu - who knew?

Is this title corny? It's just my attempt at trying to understand some of the 'mysticism' associated with my favorite fish - fugu. There is so much misunderstanding associated with fugu, it's amazing.


For example, here's an excerpt from an email my sister sent me after watching a TV show about fugu...

"OK. So this guy says how there is poison in it's flesh on top of the poison in the poison sack.
I'm like - POISON SACK??? It's not poison sack. It's just that it's liver consists of poison. There's no SACK.

And he proceeds to say that there's just enough poison in it's flesh to numb your mouth, to give you a tingling feeling.

I'm like HUH?!?!?!

Then I saw.

He's put in like a whole mound of Momiji Oroshi. Then he put more on the piece of Fugu before putting it in his mouth.

DUDE THAT TINGLING FEELING AINT THE FUGU. IT'S THE STUPID MOMIJI OROSHI YOU'VE BEEN DOWNING!!"

...

......

.........

Momiji oroshi is the hot-pepper-spiked radish gratings you see inside the kabosu-lime shell in the picture... It can be very spicy...


Fugu meat is actually very sweet with a very subtle complexity of umami. Dipped in ponzu (citrus-soy sauce) with a dab of momiji oroshi, the sweetness is really highlighted along with the most pleasurable texture that borders on chewy - just enough firmness to make each bite a little more work than most fish. As it gives with each bite, the sweetness and the clean flavors of umami are released. If there is one word to describe fugu, it is 'sublime'. I consider fugu to be one of the greatest epicurean pleasures available to us mankind. It is truly a complex, sweet, tender, and subtle pocket of deliciousness. If I were to ever get myself into Molecular Gastronomy, I would devote my life to the study of fugu.

There are a number of fake, farmed fugu in restaurants these days, and these just don't have the same complexity, texture, or tender sweetness. I had one of these at a izakaya in Japan a few years back - I found it rather strange to find fugu on the menu at an izakaya, a traditionally low-key culinary destination. It wasn't the same. It wasn't even good. In addition, many farmed fugu is forced to swim in formaldehyde, a toxin, before being harvested to kill some parasites that are unique to farmed fugu. This is more than about flavors - it's about protecting yourself and environment. Just say no to farmed fugu...


Fugu is one of the most seasonal fish that the Japanese consume. The best fugu is only available during the winter months, and being the spoiled brat that I am, I have traveled back to Japan almost every year since I was thirteen to gorge myself on fugu in the winter. My mother always calls me with the latest fugu status to lure me back on to the airplane...

And boy, this fugu sushi was so worth the trip this year. I usually have a full course of fugu, but this time, I had a concentrated fugu dose of sashimi, sushi, and deep-fried meat. It was pure epicurean debauchery. The sushi was a unique experience for me - the vinegar of the sushi rice was a perfect accompaniment to the fugu flesh. Sliced so thin I could see through the flesh, the fugu texture was highlighted by the softness of the rice underneath. Two pieces of sushi were enough to satisfy me and leave me breathless.

Fugu. Who knew such great pleasures could be gotten from a bite?