沢庵 / 단무지

Two fabulous takuan-related blog posts: Shizuoka Gourmet and Washoku Food.


Don't believe those rude things that get said about sodium.

From the Ancient Garden

Deprivation fires the culinary imagination:

How about rice with mixed vegetables in a hot pot? Thinly slice carrots and sauté them with sesame oil and salt; blanch bean sprouts and season them with sesame oil, sesame seeds, and salt. Also thinly slice meat and season it with spices and soy sauce and sauté; halved and thinly sliced zucchinis are also sautéed with salt and sesame oil. Put oil in a pan and sauté the minced meat, then add hot pepper paste and water and sugar, and let it bubble away before adding pine nuts. This is the sauce. In a stone pot, put a layer of cooked rice and top it with the cooked vegetables and meat and cracked egg. Heat the stone pot until everything is hot, mix everything together with hot pepper sauce, and dig in. (345-6)

(One of many lovingly rendered food fantasies from Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Ancient Garden, Picador 2010, trans Jay Oh).

A Piece of Cake

It's only mid-way through the afternoon, I've got a pile of essays sitting in front of me crying out to be marked and signifying, in all their dreary fatness, that they'll be my weekend companions.

If granted a wish round about now, then, it'd be that I get to teleport to that depachika between Shinjuku and Yoyogi (I can never work out where Takashimaya ends and Kinokuniya begins, but no matter). The cake store and coffee counter half way through is where I took these photos a few months back.



I've been only twice (at Y600 a piece the wee things aren't cheap), and both times when showing guests around Tokyo. But the memories!

Accentuate the Negi-tive

If a separate series of ramen files started things would be bound to get out of hand, so let’s keep this brief.

This is a shot from the first ramen store you pass when leaving Ichigaya Station walking away from the station and down the main street towards Yasukuni Jinja (a destination, I hasten to assure you all, I never reach). The shop’s up a flight of stairs and has a nice Showa-era theme.

And, yes, if you must ask, maybe we were there re-creating scenes from Hikaru no Go. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, OK? And maybe we went to the National Go centre. Give it a break, will you?

All Things Must Pass

This is a picture from the end of 2008, taken in what was for a long time my favourite restaurant in Okubo. But then the owner got homesick and moved back to Korea. Who can blame him? The new owner jazzed the place up a bit, raised the prices and somehow lost the magic touch. Some great pork memories though.

반찬 Ban-Chan!

Side dishes from a cheap vegetarian restraunt just off Insadong-gil in Seoul. It was August and almost unbearably hot and humid. To start the end of the day like this, then, with a plate of unbelievably cheap, achingly beautiful and delicious "Seoul food", was superb.

The gate to food heaven is somewhere on the Korean peninsula.