cooking japanese style

Cooking Japanese Style is another little booklet from The International Recipe Series published in 1979 (Cooking French Style already had a recipe featured on here), with this excerpt from the intro:

Amid the misty mountains of Japan the plexiglass and steel of futuristic architecture complete with bamboo and paper of a more gentle and mysterious past...[r]ice is the basis for almost every meal.  Vegetables are cooked very little.  This way they retain their food value and flavor.  Seasonings play an important part in all dishes.  Soy sauce is used constantly.  Food is served in small delicate portions arranged to please the eye as much as the taste.

I love that first sentence but I'm wondering if they meant compete with instead of complete.  This is the booklet's sweetly tangy Mustard Pickled Eggplant -- the original recipe calls for half a teaspoon of MSG, but I just use half to a full teaspoon of ginger instead.  

Mustard Pickled Eggplant (from Cooking Japanese Style, The International Recipe Series)

1 medium eggplant

3 tablespoons soy sauce

3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon dry mustard (you can also use 1 generous tablespoon of actual wet mustard if you prefer)

3 tablespoons sweet sake

1/2 teaspoon powdered ginger or 1 teaspoon finely minced ginger 

Wash unpeeled eggplant and slice in 1/8 inch slices.  Soak in salted water for 1 hour.  Drain and arrange in a glass or china bowl.  Combine mustard with enough water to make a paste (if using dry powder).  Add to remaining ingredients and blend thoroughly.  Pour over eggplant.  Chill for 2 hours and serve.

fast, fresh & green

Susie Middleton's Fast, Fresh & Green (Chronicle Books, 2010) features 90-plus fairly easy to prepare recipes for those who love vegetables, and for those who'd probably love vegetables more if they knew how versatile and delicious they can be.  But Fast, Fresh & Green is not, as Middleton explains, a wholly vegetarian cookbook, so there will be occasional ingredients that involve meat or poultry or fish. She notes that her palate tends toward the Mediterranean from her years working at Al Forno Restaurant in Providence, and while a number of the dishes do have a Mediterranean flair, there are also other flavors to balance things out.

Fast, Fresh & Green has an enjoyably holistic yet relaxed approach towards preparing food, with advice as to how to get into the cooking "zone" and a general sense of openness where recipes are concerned, working with what vegetables (preferably local and fresh) happen to be available or in season, and personal preferences for spices and combinations.  And what kind of mood you're in when you start to put together a meal, such as being more inclined toward no-cook recipes, regular or "walk-away" sautéing, grilling, braising, or the more in-depth "Slower But Worth It" gratins category.

Explanations of basic techniques and how to stock a good-and-ready pantry make Fast, Fresh & Green a nice option for novice cooks, but the recipes themselves are creative enough to intrigue those who already know their way around the kitchen.  Such as Caramelized Plum Tomatoes in an Olive Oil Bath (so simple but so good), Smoky Spanish Carrots and Fennel with Toasted Hazelnuts, Double Lemon Ginger Carrot Salad, Heirloom Tomato, Summer Peach and Fresh Herb Gazpacho Salad, Colorful Chinese Kick-Slaw, Southwestern Butternut Squash Sauté, and Golden Mushroom and Potato Gratin. And plenty more, including an awesome citrusy Japanese Dipping Sauce for broccoli and/or shrimp, and the savory Thyme-Dijon Butter (for grilled green beans).  All in all making vegetables definite standouts at the table -- and maybe even  able to totally steal the show.

cooking with myrtle

Chicago writer Myrtle Reed (1874-1911) crafted more than a dozen novels in her day, along with several cookbooks under the tasty-sounding pseudonym of Olive Green.  Though she seemed to have a happy marriage and successful career, her suicide note and overdose on sleeping powders claimed otherwise.

Before her unfortunate death, Myrtle/Olive and husband Jack McCullough hosted many a memorable dinner party at their home, and surely quite a few of Myrtle's time-tested recipes were served.   The Myrtle Reed Cookbook was published posthumously in 1916 and seems to combine all the Olive Green books into one volume.  It's an old school cookbook, so many of the recipes may look familiar, but there is a passion for food and humor to the narrative that makes the thought of Myrtle's suicide even sadder. The cookbook is available for free on Kindle and Project Gutenberg, or you can buy a print copy for about $10, depending on the edition.  Here's Myrtle's excellent and classic Fruit Cobbler, as we start getting into summer peaches, plums, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, rhubarb, etc., season:

Fill a deep buttered baking-dish with fresh or stewed fruit— apples, peaches, apricots, rhubarb, plums, or gooseberries being commonly used— and cover with a crust made as follows: Sift together two cupfuls of flour and two teaspoonfuls of baking-powder. Rub into it half a cupful of butter and add one egg beaten with a cupful of milk. Spread over the fruit which has been previously sweetened to taste and bake until the crust is done. Serve either hot or cold with cream or any preferred sauce.

Cheap tea contains sawdust, dried and powdered hay, grass-seed, and departed but unlamented insects. 

Moral—buy good tea, or go without.

*******

The breakfast selected as a type consists of fruit, a cereal, salt fish, or salt meat, or eggs, or omelets, hot bread of some kind, and pancakes or waffles, or coffee cake, one dish from each group, and coffee. Six dishes in all, which may be less if desired, but never more. All six form a breakfast sufficiently hearty for a stone mason or a piano mover; one or two give a breakfast light enough to tempt those who eat no breakfast at all.

Myrtle Reed