Category Archives: Japanese

My favourite recipe ever? Perhaps! Miso, spinach and green olive pesto

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I discovered this recipe a while back via justb, an Australian lifestylish website. I had found justb via Meet Me at Mikes, the blog of a former fantastic shop in Melbourne’s Fitzroy written by Pip, who now writes for justb. I have been reading MMAM for years and even learnt how to crochet via her video tutorials!

I digress. This recipe is amazing! It was originally posted as a pesto for a soba salad – I’ve never actually made the whole recipe, just the pesto. It tastes great with mushrooms and goats cheese (baked), on pasta, as a dip, on lovely crusty bread as a bruschetta base, a pizza base … and I’m sure there are many ways I am yet to discover.

It is a really strong, intense flavour from the olive and miso – very umami, which I love. Anyway, I will stop talking about it and post a link as you really, really should make it and see why I love it so much.

Pip’s Miso, Spinach & Green Olive Pesto
makes about 1 cup full : store in the fridge and use often!

In a food processor, blitz…

2 tbsp white miso
1 cup of baby spinach, washed VERY well
1 bunch of coriander, washed VERY well
1/2 cup pitted green olives
50g almonds
2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds
1 tsp sesame oil
1/4 cup olive oil
juice of one lemon
freshly ground black pepper
optional : 1/2 tsp dried chilli flakes

Visit justb for the original, full recipe with soba salad.

Opium, Glasgow City Centre

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We decided to visit Opium in Glasgow the other week to have a quick dinner before we visited the List‘s launch party for the 2012/13 Eating and Drinking Guide.  It had been on our “to visit” list for sometime, and it was a tweet from a visiting Edinburgh personal trainer (@tracygriffen) who described it as delicious and fresh that really got me moving to finally visit!

We were welcomed and seated at a great table right at the window. I’d already decided to go for dim sum (or yum cha as it’s called in Australia, I’m not sure why) because eating lots of plates of small things is my preferred way to eat! Most other tables in the restaurant seemed to be going for the pre-theatre menu – 2 courses for £14.80.

Prawn crackers with sweet chilli sauce

 While we were deciding we nibbled on some prawn crackers. With help from the waiter, we decided to go for 5 dishes – he was honest and said that 6 dishes between 2 people might be too much. I think that’s the first time any one has told me to order less rather than more! His honesty was greatly appreciated.

Crispy Duck Roll: aromatic duck, celery, carrot, chilli & hoi sin sauce £5.60

Hopefully this pictures give you an idea of the food – it’s SO fresh and colourful and I was really impressed by the presentation. Mostly though, I was impressed by the taste. Everything we ate was really lovely and there was nothing I wouldn’t order again.

Chilli Salt & Pepper Squid: seasoned squid in a crispy coating of sichuan salt, chilli, shallot & pepper £5.85

This dish was so spicy, but really light and fresh at the same time. A perfect amount of squid to share between two people.

Crab Meat & Chive Dumplings: crab meat, king prawns & chinese chives £4.50

I cannot resist a dumpling – another one of my all time favourite foods. These dumplings are a world apart from the ones we make at home (something to aspire to!) and were steamed to perfection.

Sticky Rice with Chicken in Lotus Leaf: sticky rice parcel with chicken, pork, mixed mushrooms & bamboo shoots steamed in a fragrant lotus leaf £4.25

I ordered this thinking it would be like San Choy Bow (from Googling, it seems that San Choy Bow is the Australianised version of a Chinese dish) but it wasn’t. I really enjoyed this though – the filling was underneath the sticky rice and was really delicious.

Shanghai Siew Lung Bun: mini pork bun with garlic & red vinegar dipping sauce £4.25

These were the highlight. I’ve never had a better pork bun in my life! I’ve never actually even really liked pork buns, I’ve always found them too sweet. The filling in these, combined with the sweet bun and vinegar was all perfectly balanced. I would happily return to Opium just to eat pork buns.

When it came time to leave, the waiter came over to check we’d eaten enough and whether we though 5 dim sum were a good amount. Our bill ended up being around £30 for the 5 plates, plus a couple of drinks each which I thought was reasonable. They have the loveliest staff here, I was really delighted to meet such welcoming and warm people.

I love that feeling of leaving a restaurant and thinking about the meal for days afterwards – that’s how you know you’ve found a winner. I’m still thinking about the pork buns.

Opium on Urbanspoon

Mocha steak with miso sauce with grilled miso eggplant

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I felt like cooking something a bit adventurous and different last night, something Japanese but not just our standard dumplings. After a bit of googling, I stumbled upon the page for Tim Anderson’s MasterChef recipes and I knew I was onto a winner. For those of you reading from overseas, or not addicted to the MasterChef franchise, Tim is into the final 3 of UK MasterChef and I am praying like the heathen I am that he wins – I think the dishes he comes up with are totally bizarre and amazing, and the fact that they work and impress the judges and critics show that he really is a cut above the rest. 


Anyway, enough gushing and onto our dinner. Thankfully we had most of the ingredients, but still needed to adapt it slightly (partly because I didn’t write down quantities on the shopping list as per usual). The original recipe can be found here, and below is our slightly modified version.

Mocha steak with miso sauce

Ingredients
For the steak
5 tbsp finely ground coffee
5 tbsp cocoa powder
pinch cayenne pepper
30g light brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 x 200g rump steaks
sunflower oil for frying

For the sauce2 tbsp sunflower oil
125 grams oyster mushrooms, cleaned and roughly ripped
1 tbsp brandy
100ml chicken stock
75ml miso stock, made up from paste (75mls water with about a teaspoon or a touch more of miso paste)
50ml double cream
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation method

1.      For the steak, preheat oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6.

2.      Mix together the coffee, cocoa powder, cayenne pepper, sugar, salt and pepper on a large plate and press on the steaks so they are coated on both sides. Hint directly from Tim – make sure the coffee really is completely ground, or it will be gritty. I recommend grinding it in a mortar & pestle so you can really be sure you’ve got a lovely fine powder.
3.      Heat the oil in a frying pan until it is smoking then add the steaks, in batches if necessary, and brown them on both sides, taking care not to burn the coating. Because we were using cheap rump steak, we probably only cooked it on each side for 30 seconds.
4.      Place the steaks on a baking tray and cook in the oven for about three minutes (for medium), turning once. Remove from the oven and leave in a warm place to rest till needed.
5.      Meanwhile, for the sauce, heat the sunflower oil in a frying pan. Add the mushrooms and fry for 2-3 minutes, gently turning a couple of times. Reduce the heat then add the brandy and tip the pan to ignite the alcohol. Sadly, I fail at igniting alcohol on the stove, so this part didn’t quite work out for us.
6.      When the flames have died down, add the chicken stock and the miso stock. Bring to a simmer then add the cream. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper then reduce until the sauce coats the back of a wooden spoon.
  

Grilled miso eggplant (aubergine)


Taken from another go-to site of ours, BBC Good Food.

Ingredients
2 small eggplants (aubergines), halved lengthways
olive oil
2 tbsp miso paste
2 tbsp mirin
large pinch golden caster sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp white or black sesame seeds

Preparation method

  1. Heat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. Score a criss-cross pattern into the flesh of the aubergines. Brush with 1 tsp oil and season. Put on a non-stick baking tray and roast for 20 minutes. 
  2. In a small bowl, mix the miso and mirin with the sugar and the lemon juice. Spread this paste over the roasted aubergines and sprinkle with the sesame seeds.
  3. Put under a hot grill for 2-3 minutes until golden. Serve scattered with the spring onions and a handful of rocket.

    While it might seem like the two dishes would have too much miso, they really didn’t, and they went together amazingly. I was so surprised at how the steak turned out but it was complete and utter perfection – the coffee gave it such a great hit of taste and the cocoa powder toned the flavour down giving you a really rich, smooth and punchy flavour. The miso sauce was also beautiful, a really unusual way of making a standard mushroom steak sauce more interesting.

    We also found that beer is the absolute perfect accompaniment to this steak – Graeme was drinking Hoegaarden and something about the flavours all worked so well together. We were talking about just how great this dinner was all night and thought it would be a great meal to serve for when you were having guests over (provided they’re adventurous!). I’m really looking forward to trying some of Tim’s other dishes now (and hoping he wins, and brings out a cookbook!) – the smushi set is next on my list.

    Ichiban, Glasgow

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    The night we ventured out to try Jamie’s Italian, only to discover it not open yet, meant we ended up at Ichiban. This was the second time we’ve eaten there (first time being before the birth of The Glasgow Food Blog!) – I was so underwhelmed the first time that I was interested to try it again.

    Since starting this blog, we have eaten at places that get rave reviews and have left completely mystified as to why people are giving it so much priase. Loads of people on Urbanspoon rave about Ichiban, and it’s rated number 3 on Glasgow’s best cheap eats. But I’m really not sure why.

    Chicken yakiudon – £7.30 

    Kaisen Bento – £12.90 

    Gyoza 

    Sushi 

    Grilled king prawn, scallop and salmon steak, marinated in teriyaki sauce
    To me, the chicken in the yakiudon tasted strange. More like pork than chicken. I’m not sure how it’s cooked, but that doesn’t leave me with a pleasant taste in my mouth (in more than one way). It was almost too tough to be chicken, and I assume that means it was overcooked or reheated. 
    I had the bento box which I normally love (as I prefer eating a whole range of different things at dinner, not just one dish). The scallops were cooked well but the prawns were overcooked and rubbery, not pleasant to eat. Again, the salmon tasted strange – almost more like trout as it was quite fishy tasting. We eat a lot of salmon at home, and almost always marinade it in teriyaki sauce so I found this odd, perhaps it was just that the salmon was also overcooked. 
    I found it odd that the onigiri is served without a filling (and therefore is just a ball of rice) but since reading the wikipedia about it, I accept that sometimes onigiri is just rice. As a side note, onigiri was one of my favourite snacks in Japan, and I was so excited to see it on Ichiban’s menu that I ordered the bento box because of it. When I discovered it was just rice, with no filling, part of me died inside. An overreaction? Probably. But I love my food.

    The rest of the dish was just ok. I definitely don’t compare the food here to any of the food we eat while in Japan, or even at Nanakusa in Glasgow. 

    I have previous debated the dilemma of writing negative reviews of restaurants, as I am not a professional food writer, and I think sometimes its better to say nothing than to say something negative. However, I am probably providing a skewed idea of what eating in Glasgow is like if I only write about the places that I thought were really good. In this case, I rate Ichiban as just ok. I would go there but I would not go out of my way to eat there again. 

    Ichiban Sushi & Noodle Café on Urbanspoon

    Nanakusa, Glasgow City Centre

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    We ate at Nanakusa on Saturday, 27 March 2010. We were celebrating our anniversary, so it was a bit of a special occasion!

    Thankfully we had booked as it was absolutely mobbed at Nanakusa. And so it should be – we have eaten at this restaurant 5 times since discovering it in May 2009 and have never been disappointed. This was the first time it was really busy in the restaurant which was a pleasing sight as it’s good to see that others have cottoned on to how amazing this restaurant is.

    The restaurant is beautifully decorated with light timber panelled walls and ever-changing wall lights which give the restaurant a moody vibe. What I like about this restaurant is that it has a casual atmosphere but has exquisite food of the highest standard. The staff are so friendly that you feel like you’ve been inducted into their family as soon as you arrive. As the restaurant was so busy, it was quite noisy – but not in a distracting or annoying way, more a pleasant rubble in the background.

    The menu is massive! The biggest difficulty we have eating here is to narrow down the possibilities and to try new things – there are dishes I would happily order every visit, but I try to be adventurous. The menu ranges from small starters (better for sharing than a strict starter), noodles in soup, stir fried noodles, teppan noodles, rice dishes, house specialities and a la carte dishes. Furthermore, there is an amazing selection of sushi and sashimi, as well as special yakitori BBQ dishes. You will definately be able to find something very exciting on the menu and I love spending time reading all the dish descriptions and salivating before finally choosing my meal!

    We normally get about 3 starter size dishes and then two mains which is a great sized meal for two people. As Saturday night was a special occasion we also lashed out for wine and dessert which made for an amazingly decadent meal at a very reasonable price.

    We ate:

     Sake maguro sashimi – tuna and salmon. I love sashimi and this is some of the most delicious I’ve ever eaten – including the sashimi I ate in Japan. Perfectly cut and presented, and delicate and tender in flavour and texture. A real delight and a lovely start to the meal. 
     We ate octopus balls (takoyaki) when we were first in Japan and they are a favourite of ours. These seemed to be hand-rolled as opposed to being cooked in a traditional takoyaki grill, but they were just as delicious and had generous chunks of octopus. 
    Ebi yakitori – grilled prawns with yakitori sauce. I didn’t get a try of these as my boyfriend wolfed them down pretty quickly, but he did tell me they were very soft and delicate, perfectly cooked and nicely marinated. I love prawns – so no comment! Ha. 
    Yaki sake gohan – teriyaki salmon with rice. Wow, what an amazing dish. The salmon was light and fresh and the sauce was generous and packed with flavour. 
    Kamo chilli noodle – deep friend duck stir fry. I avoid anything deep fried as I don’t normally like the greasyness, but the duck was delicious and I immediately regretted not ordering this! The deep frying made the duck lovely and crispy and it worked really well in the stir fry. Yum.
    Chocolate cheesecake. Wow, delicious and amazing. So amazing in fact, we broke protocol and both ordered the same dessert. I loved it, but don’t have as much of a sweet tooth as my boyfriend and had to let him finish it. He didn’t seem to mind!
    As you can tell, I am a huge fan of this restaurant and cannot find any fault with it. The meals are reasonably priced and of an very high standard, all serving sizes are very generous and the staff are fantastically welcoming and friendly. Highly recommended! 

    Nanakusa on Urbanspoon