肉じゃが

[dorchadas]

Been a while since I posted about food! But I took special time to make a meal for guests yesterday and thought it might be nice to write about it. I had lisekatevans, colinkyle57, kryptowright, and my sister wanderluster_kp over for Shabbat dinner. And, as you do for Shabbat dinner, I made Japanese food. That's how it works, right?

I complain a lot about the state of Japanese restaurants in Chicago, but one of the worst losses was the closure of Sunshine Cafe, an oasis in a desert of generic sushi restaurants, steakhouses, ramen joints, and izakaya that are barely worthy of the name. Sunshine Cafe had the kind of food you'd find in a small-town Japanese restaurant that serves mostly locals, with a simple menu that tastes amazing. They actually served riceballs with pickled plums on them, and their nanbanyaki tasted just enough like Funky Tonky's yakiniku pilaf that I got it every time I went. In 2015, with the owner over 90 and no one else available to take it over, it closed and now there's a Greek restaurant in its place. We shall not see its like again.

But, I had Funky Tonky, my favorite restaurant in Chiyoda, and Sunshine Cafe in mind when I picked what to make. Nikujaga (literally, "meat and potatoes") is a very simple Japanese dish that's almost always home-cooked, meat, onions, and potatoes in dashi with a few other ingredients. I came home from work, looked up a recipe, and got to work.

The first time I've ever peeled potatoes!

After moving the beef from the fridge to the freezer, about which more later, I got out all the ingredients and set them up. I pretty quickly realized that maybe I should have gotten larger potatoes because peeling a dozen red potatoes is much more taxing than I was expecting. It took ten minutes and two cuts on my fingers from accidentally jabbing myself with the peeler teeth before I got them all peeled, chopped, and put in running water to wash away the starch so it wouldn't leech into the dashi later.

I don't know why peeling was important, but that's a standard in Japanese cuisine. I remember that our friends were astonished that we would eat apples with the peel still on, so when I was told to peel the potatoes and the carrots, I did it despite wondering what the point of it was.

This picture also doesn't have the onion visible, because I had already chopped it up and thrown it in the pot to cook.

Bubbly

This is the nikujaga after I've finished preparation and put all the ingredients in the pot. Chopping up the vegetables, the onions, potatoes, carrots, and green onions, was easy. The hard part was that most Japanese recipes that call for meat call for it to be thinly sliced. In Japan this is easy, since you can buy pre-sliced sukiyaki packages at any grocery store, but it's harder in America where we like our giant steaks. Back when the butcher was still open I could ask them to slice it for me. Unfortunately, it closed last year, and when I went to Jewel to get some beef, it was at 9 p.m. and they were cleaning up the meat department and probably wouldn't have been receptive to my request. I had to find a way to do it myself, so I turned to Google and found a page that told me exactly what to do--freeze it briefly to give it some structure, but not so much that it becomes completely solid.

After half an hour in the freezer, I took the meat out and tried cutting it and it was easy. It cut beautifully into thin strips and I threw them in after sauteing the onions, arranged the rest of the vegetables on top, and then poured on the dashi. After that I put an improvised 落としぶた (otoshibuta, "drop lid") on top, made up of a silicone seal for glass bowls that I had wrapped in aluminum foil, and let it simmer for a while.

They're both pretty unappetizing looking in this picture...

I couldn't just have nikujaga, though, and since I almost always get a seaweed salad at any restaurant that has them available, I figured I'd try making it. I already have a bunch of wakame, hijiki, and konbu around, so I'd just need to find a good recipe. I found this one.

Now that I know how to make it, I'm sure I'll do it again. It was incredibly easy, taking only a couple minutes of work and all of that went into mixing the dressing when I put the sesame oil, miso, mirin, soy sauce, and rice vinegar into a bowl. The seaweed only required rehydration and then transferring to serving bowls, and the dressing was neither too chunky nor too runny. I actually used a bit of it on my dinner tonight, when I ate a leftover salad that I didn't have at work yesterday because my uncle and cousin were in town and met me for lunch. It wasn't quite as suitable for a garden salad with chicken, eggs, and feta, but it still tasted pretty good.

Delicious.

Here's the finished meal! The thinly-sliced beef came out really well, to the point where I might use that technique more often when I have the time to let the meat freeze. When it's thin like that, it's easier for it to absorb the flavors, and I've always had a problem with slicing meat into big chunks and not having it mix well with the rest of what I'm cooking. It's part of why I don't tend to use a lot of sauces or spices in what I'm cooking unless I'm making curry, though I admit that the other part is usually laziness.

Everyone seemed to like it--no one said they did, but they ate all of the seaweed salad and of the whole stewpot of nikujaga, there was maybe a coffee mug's worth of leftovers. I even saw people taking seconds, and that's the biggest compliment I could have asked for. The dashi turned out well too, which was probably the part of the meal I was worried about most because sauces are a weak spot of mine. I tend to just buy pesto or masala sauce, if I even use them at all, but now I'm thinking of just simmering meat in this dashi mixture and serving it, or using it for vegetables. My only regret was that I didn't have the time or ingredients to make annindōfu for dessert.

Also, everyone ate with chopsticks!

I'm lucky in that I like cooking and I'm not bad at it, and I should take advantage of that. As long as I like it and there are leftovers, no recipe is bad.

Comments

[tilmon]

How delicious looking!

Potatoes taste less earthy without the peel, but for little red potatoes, it hardly matters since the peels are so thin.

I'm going to try your trick of partially freezing the meat. I can get thinly sliced meats sometimes at Hispanic markets, and any time if I make the long trip to the Korean market. But it would be a lot more convenient to do it myself.

[dorchadas]

The nikujaga recipe had a note about how important clear flavors are, and that's why I was straining the broth for about ten minutes before I put the otoshibuta on it. I hadn't thought about that as a reason for peeling potatoes, though--it makes sense!

I'm really tempted to use the freezing method on almost all the meat I eat, now that I know about it. Thinly sliced meat is my favorite way to eat it.

[firewhispers]

That looks delicious!

[helvetica]

Your meal looks so great! Good job :) It's nice to cook for others!

[dorchadas]

Thank you! It's way more fun than cooking for just myself.