Winter Break

This is how I spent the remaining winter break...

Fed up with the amount of ingredients that were being wasted at the Naked Fish restaurant, I've been asking the line cooks and sushi chefs to please save some the clippings and "scraps". It's a Japanese thing to utilize every part of an ingredient, so absolutely nothing gets wasted. One of the "scraps" being tossed out was the daikon leaves. The cooks/sushi chefs would snap off a pile of them and down the garbage can they'll go. Oh, the horror.... in Japan, the leaves are pickled, so processed into furikake, the rice toppings. So that's what I did.

The leaves are stripped from the stems--they need to be blanched first to remove the bitterness.

After seasoning the blanched leaves with salt, sugar, and dashi powder, they are dried thoroughly in a pan until dry and crumbly.

I mixed in sesame seeds. Chock full of vitamins and completely natural.

The stems are also blanched and turned into goma-ae, kind of like a black sesame tahini dressing/marinade.

There are plenty of other "scrap" ingredients that get thrown out, that I will maybe mention later...

It's been a while since we went out to eat, so my parents and I went on a culinary exploration to the Cafe Bistro at the Nordstroms. I've seen their menu before, and it seemed interesting. We went for the dessert, of course, for educational purpose.

We ordered the Triple Berry Shortcake and the Vanilla Bean Creme Brulee.

Both desserts tasted good...well, I would say mediocre. Definitely nothing special about them...other then their size. Oh my gracious. The creme brulee was big enough for two people, and the shortcake was about the size of a Big Mac. We finished the creme brulee, but we had to take the shortcake home. We never finished it. Sorry, our taste buds are too honest sometimes.

There was another bakery that we wanted to try, called Creme de Bakery. They had pan dulce-type of bread, pork buns, and a surprising varieties of cakes--mocha, tiramisu, strawberry, etc. I picked green tea flavor and the chestnut flavor. The cashier lady said that they're mousse cakes, basically layer cakes with mousse-type filling.

The green tea one had adzuki beans in it. The chestnut had bits of chesnuts. Their taste? ...Ick. The mousse part was very light, not heavy at all--and the amount of gelatin was almost too much. It was on the borderline of being a bavarian cream instead. The green tea flavor was very subtle, but the chestnut flavor was pretty much absent. The sponge cake was also very light and airy, but tasteless. As a matter of fact, it was so light it almost tasted artificial--as if no human hands have been involved in the making of this cake. The only positive thing about these was that they were both light enough that we didn't feel weighed down. We won't be going back there.

At work, here's the latest dessert I've come up with: The "Naked" Asian Pear Tart.

Flaky puff pastry, wine-poached asian pears, caramel sauce, raspberry sauce, and vanilla gelato. Served warm. After the asian pear season, we'll start using available seasonal fruits.

And with the upcoming Valentine's Day, a chocolate dessert I came up with: Molten Chocolate Fish/Taiyaki.

Served with vanilla or green tea gelato, fruits, and raspberry sauce. I love that melted chocolate just oozing out from the fish/taiyaki belly...