Posted By hiromi on November 24, 2010 in Food, Thoughts on life |
Some people are planners and some people go with the flow. I guess I am more the latter although I do try and plan. But when something happens, you just have to go for it, right?
I am participating in another Underground market, this time a Christmas theme. I wasn’t going to do it figuring that I don’t do anything remotely Christmasy but one thing led to another and here I am, gearing up to do it again. Some of you may have read my post after the last one so you know that I learned many things. Might as well put them to good use and see if I can do a little better this time.
I will be selling my roasted nuts. I have been doing them ever since I started teaching as something for my students to nibble on while I cook. Since the classes are at night, I didn’t want people to perish waiting for dinner. So I put together a soy sauce, kombu (sea weed) and sake combo and toasted mixed nuts. Very simple and very good according to the feedback I have gotten. Actually, the feedback has been so good that friends have started asking me to make them for them. Very flattering and also got me thinking, is there business potential here? So for this market, I have added a sweet version, made with miso, agave, mirin and sake. Pretty good if I say so myself.
The wonderful Ms Marmite Lover, the hostess of the market has come up with a new twist for this one. A Dragons Den type event for food producers. Hopefully not as scary as the real dragons but a chance to find out if there is any potential for my nuts. I started off hoping for just a chat since I didn’t think I was ready to participate in something like that, but again, the opportunity was presented, so I thought, why not?
What all this does for me is it gives me structure to get things done. Because of the market, I now have my classes set until the end of March next year. I have to give some serious thought to the costing of my nuts so that I don’t sound like a blithering idiot in front of the nice dragons. What a tremendous opportunity, to pick the brains of people who are actually successful in the business.
So I guess my pattern will continue to be, fall into things, roller coaster ride then see how it turns out. It’s never boring.
Posted By hiromi on November 20, 2010 in Food |
I’ve posted here before about some questionable food claiming to be Japanese. I went to a cooking demonstration recently and saw Rick Stein make 5 dishes in an hour. Most of it looked good and simple to recreate at home. But I took exception to the second dish he produced, a plate of sashimi.
Now, I am not an expert in preparing sashimi as it takes special training. I don’t teach it in my classes because you need sashimi grade fish for which you have to go to a specialty shop. And while I am happy to slice some up to serve to family, I wouldn’t presume to teach it. But I do know the basics of what you can and cannot do. And you cannot, as he claims, just buy farmed salmon and eat it raw. As it says on the Food Standards website, “If a shop or restaurant buys fish to be eaten raw or almost raw, for example, sushi or raw herring, it must have been frozen at minus 20°C for at least 24 hours.” This is to kill off the worms that can be present. They are killed in the cooking process but obviously you don’t cook the fish for sashimi. So please, don’t buy fish at your local supermarket and think you can eat it raw.
Then he made a dipping sauce. I know that some very high end sushi places serve a special sauce which starts with dashi, the seaweed and bonito stock that is the soul of Japanese food. He used an instant one, which I understand since explaining dashi would have been an hour onto itself. But he used one which has as the first ingredient, MSG. But as it is the most popular brand, I am willing to cut him some slack. It is how he prepared it that was a problem. You cannot just put some into water and stir it up. It is granules and requires heating for it to dissolve and actually turn into stock.
Aesthetically he didn’t do a great job plating which was surprising given his credentials. All in all, I got the impression that he didn’t think anyone in the audience would try and reproduce it so he just whipped it off to have another dish in the programme.
I hope next time he attempts this, he watches the programme he did in Japan beforehand so he can remember what it’s meant to look like in the end. And note where the fish came from.
how I hoped it would look when he said "sashimi"
