Dinnertime

Another week of vegetables were delivered to me. 

It is somewhat of a challenge to figure out how to cook them all.  Some of them I have no idea about at all, nothing listed in my Betty Crocker cookbook, some of the challenge is just getting through all these vegetables in a week's time.  Which lets you know that my household has not been vegetable based all these years.  It's not like a truck of vegetables is being delivered to my door, just a portable Styrofoam box with 6 or 7 in season vegetables in it.  But still, at the end of the week I find a couple left in the box.  (Hmm.  This week I still have two turnips...  Maybe turnip miso soup tonight?)

In this week's box were rucola, leaf lettuce, broccoli, shimeji mushrooms, turnips and fuki.  FUKI?  What do I do with fuki?  The scientific name is petasites japonicus and I guess that's why it is not in Betty Crocker...  It grows practically wild in my part of Japan during this season

Okay...  Forget the fuki for awhile. What is the recipe for this week?..  Mushroom and Rucola salad.

• Fry minced garlic in olive oil and add shimeji mushrooms and flavor with salt and pepper and a bit of chili powder.
• Add chopped rucola and sprinkle with lemon juice.  Serve.

Well, I made a variation and didn't call it Rucuola salad...  The greens seemed awfully bitter and Tetsu isn't one for bitterness, so I just added the rucola to the fry pan and cooked it down a bit.  It was pretty good if I called it a side dish.

And then to do something about the fuki.  While I was teaching English to two sisters, the mother who was waiting in my living room got on her iPhone and found a fuki recipe for me to follow and she wrote it down for me (in English!)

Preparing Fuki

• Sprinkle salt over fuki stalks and rub them against the cutting board.  (It is considered a type of rinsing away of the acrid peeling.)
• Boil in water for 2 minutes.
• Plunge fuki in cold water and let cool.
• Peel off the skins.

Cooking Fuki

• Cut fuki into short lengths.
• Put into a pan and cover fuki with water.
• Add 1 tablespoon mirin (a sweet rice wine), 2 tablespoons sugar, and 1.5 to 2 tablespoons soy sauce.  Simmer until liquid is gone.
• Add katsuobushi (dried bonita flakes).

My fuki was wonderful!  Tetsu was amazed that I'd made it myself.  Hmmm, yum!

And this was the dinner I served that night...  I took the picture after we'd started eating.

"Wait!  Put down those chopsticks!  I need to take a picture!"

There is takuwan (pickled radish) on the left, and a shabu-shabu sesame pork salad (quickly simmer thin slices of pork in broth and cool immediately.  Cover all with creamy sesame dressing.)  The brown stalks there are the fuki and the rucola side dish is on the right.  And we had kimchee too for dinner.

By the way, someone asked me about the Whole 30 and if I had found it difficult.  I put that in past tense because I don't consider myself on the Whole 30 anymore.  In October I went STRICT Whole 30 diet meaning I didn't even use soy products (hard to do in Japan) and read labels for added sugar and wheat products which just about cuts out EVERYTHING but fruits, vegetables, meat, fish and eggs.  Seasonings were curry and salt and pepper.  No dairy products.  Snacking was nuts and sweet potatoes.  That month was hard.  But the results showed in lower cholesterol and weight loss.

Since then I've slowly added back soy in abundance (tofu, natto, miso, soysauce, soymilk).  And occasionally will have rice.  I no longer read labels so the added sugar is coming in through store bought seasonings, obento-boxes, eating out.  I still avoid sugar so no desserts nor snacking except for those nuts (I'm going to become a squirrel when I grow up.)  I will occasionally splurge for a yogurt these days but I'm making my own soy yogurt now.  I stay far away from wheat products still though...  And my cholesterol continues to decrease, and my weight which probably isn't real great.  The other day someone commented on how much weight I'd lost and how it was especially noticeable now that winter sweaters and long underwear have been shed.

"Yeah...  Sort of like those Pomeranian dogs after a bath...  You realize there's nothing there under all that fur!"

Does that sound like a compliment?  Maybe I'd better eat a bit more...