Seasonal spotlight: Setsubun

February 3 is Setsubun, which marks the division between winter and spring according to the lunar calendar. These days Japanese people celebrate Setsubun by tossing roasted soybeans around their home to purify the interior, which may or may not involve dressing someone up in a demon mask and pelting them with beans. This year I decided that I wanted to avoid finding dried soybeans hanging out in corners of my apartment for the next month, so we bought a bag of individual packages to toss around instead. We also received a free paper demon mask helpfully reminding us that we only have until July to prepare for the switch to digital broadcast, which in our case is unfortunately going to involve buying a new TV in the next few months. (I really hate being forced to spend money by outside forces, but it also seems stupid to buy an adapter for our ancient television…so conflicted!)

Setsubun is also the one day of the year that people eat something called ehōmaki, a type of rolled sushi. “Ehō” refers to the direction that is considered most auspicious for the current year according to Onmyōdō, which is a Japanese divination practice influenced by Chinese ying-yang divination and the Chinese zodiac (the ehō for 2011 is south-southeast). It’s really complicated and I don’t understand it very well, but suffice it to say that this system of beliefs is based on the concept that certain directions are lucky at certain times.  In literature from the Heian period the nobles were always using this as an excuse to visit the home of some lady they were trying to get close to by showing up and saying “Excuse me, I’m headed in an unlucky direction. Can you put us up for the night?”

(And speaking of Onmyōdō and the Heian period, if you haven’t seen Onmyoji you really should!)

Unlike other types of sushi rolls, ehōmaki are not cut into bite-sized pieces before they are eaten. Instead, you are supposed to stand facing this year’s lucky direction and eat the entire roll without speaking. This supposedly brings good luck of all sorts. My former boss was really into this sort of custom so each year he bought ehōmaki and we all lined up in the conference room, facing the same direction and silently eating our sushi rolls. This was always vaguely awkward for me because I eat so slowly, but it was an interesting way to take a break from work.

Like so many other foods in modern Japan, people rarely make ehōmaki at home anymore and most people buy theirs either from a specialty shop or convenience store. Since eating convenience store sushi always makes me feel somewhat ill due to the massive amounts of MSG and since it’s been a while since I rolled sushi, I decided this year to try making my own ehōmaki for the first time.

It seems that there are some ingredients which are considered particularly lucky for ehōmaki, but my husband and I decided on a simple combination of cucumber, egg, and braised shiitake mushrooms with kanpyō (dried gourd strips). We had some extra rice left so we also made a roll with some leftover nattō (fermented soybeans) and kimchi. Most ehōmaki also contain sakura denbu, which is made of shredded fish flakes that have been dyed a lurid shade of pink. It’s not my favorite so I left them out.

Here are some links that might be of use if you’re considering making ehōmaki this year. Even if you eat yours sitting at a table, I think that a delicious sushi roll is always a good way to bring a little luck into a gray February day!

• How to make sushi maki from Make My Sushi
• Setsubun: The Day Before Spring from Kyoto Foodie
• Setsubun Ehomaki from WASHOKU
• Homemade sakura denbu from Just Bento
• How to roll maki sushi from Sushi Day
• Tutorial: making tamagoyaki from Lunch in a Box

Ozōni

Ozōni is a soup that is served on New Year’s morning in Japan. In Japanese “ozōni” is written with the characters for “complex” (雑) and “simmer” (煮), which is a roundabout way of saying that this soup can contain a wide variety of ingredients. Grilled mochi (rice cakes) are almost always included, along with vegetables such as carrots, mitsuba (trefoil), or spinach. For a little extra holiday cheer, some people also include pieces of colored wheat gluten in auspicious shapes like ginkgo leaves. Tiny pieces of yuzu skin can also add an aromatic garnish.

But like most Japanese foods, ozōni is subject to a tremendous and perplexing range of regional differences. Depending on where a family is from, the broth of ozōni might be based on soy sauce, miso, or something else. Chicken or other meats might be incorporated either as slices or small meatballs. I’m sure there are probably whole books out there about different types of ozōni, but really the only constant is that it is served as breakfast on the first morning of the New Year. In that way ozōni is sort of like Japan’s equivalent of Thanksgiving stuffing – everyone has their own way to make it and everyone is convinced their way is best.

This recipe is mostly based on the ozōni that my husband’s mother makes, which is flavored only with soy sauce and sake and depends on the addition of chicken breast and burdock root to add depth to the broth. I’m not usually the type of person who bothers cutting vegetables into decorative shapes, but I did drag out the special tool to cut the carrot into the shape of plum blossoms in honor of the New Year (except I realized halfway that my tool is shaped like a cherry blossom, not a plum blossom – oops). Here’s a video if you want to try making the carrots fancy. This recipe is even prettier if made with a combination of regular carrots and kyōninjin carrots from Kyoto, which are a deep red color and are available in Japan towards the end of the year.

Ozōni

Ingredients (serves 2)
3 cups dashi
Small handful spinach
100 grams chicken breast
2 shiitake mushrooms
1/4 package (25 grams) shimeji mushrooms
5 centimeters gobō (burdock root)
Carrot
2 pieces mochi
2 tablespoons usukuchi soy sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon sake
Mitsuba
Yuzu skin, cut into small “needles” or slivers.

1. Heat the dashi.
2. Cut the mushrooms into bite sized pieces. Use the back of a knife to scrape the skin from the burdock root, then cut by “shaving” off small pieces (sort of like sharpening a pencil by hand). Cut the carrots into decorative shapes or simply chop into circles, about three pieces per person.
3. Cut the chicken breast into bite sized pieces and add to the dashi. Simmer until cooked all the way through, removing any aku (scum) or fat that floats to the top.
4. Add the mushrooms, carrots, and burdock root to the dashi and chicken. Continue simmering.
5. Season with soy sauce and sake. Taste, and adjust seasonings as necessary.
6. Blanch the spinach in a separate pot, then rinse. Chop and form into neat little bundles.
7. Grill the mochi according to the directions under the broiler or atop the stove.
8. Place a bundle of spinach and piece of grilled mochi in each bowl. Use chopsticks to arrange carrots and other ingredients in bowls, then pour broth on top. Garnish with chopped mitsuba and yuzu skin.

Grilled mochi and spinach

Toshikoshi soba for vegetable fans

I don’t get sick very often and I almost never have a fever over 99, but at the end of December 2009 my husband picked up some sort of virulent influenza and passed it to me. With both of us too sick to travel to his family’s home, we spent the last few hours of 2009 listlessly partaking in the Japanese tradition of watching Kōhaku Utagassen, the lackluster singing competition that is held every year. At that point my fever was somewhere around 104, so I barely remember what bands appeared or what ridiculous costumes were featured. But I do remember the soba noodles that Tsuyoshi made, which were the only food other than English muffins and tea that I had consumed for several days at that point. I clearly recall carrots and enoki mushrooms atop a steaming bowl of chewy buckwheat noodles in a soy-tinged broth made from homemade dashi, accented by just a few pieces of yuzu skin to add a citrusy flavor and aroma. Despite the fact that this bowl of noodles was thrown together from things we had in the refrigerator even after days of no grocery shopping, somehow it made me feel like I might just survive to see 2010 after all.

Toshikoshi soba, which literally means “ending the old year and beginning the New Year soba,” is eaten after the clock strikes midnight on the first day of the year. Theoretically the reason people eat soba has something to do with the long noodles symbolizing long life and luck in the New Year (and according to this website it is also associated with severing the bad luck of the previous year), but it really takes very little to convince people to eat soba.

Most toshikoshi soba I’ve been served at the homes of friends has been fairly plain, with perhaps some green onions or kamaboko (cakes made from fish paste) on top. I had toshikoshi soba once at a Buddhist temple in the middle of the night, and their soba was served cold with wasabi and a soy-based dipping sauce. But soba is a pretty carbohydrate-heavy snack and I personally prefer my soba topped with plenty of vegetables to make it a more complete meal. (Unfortunately when I took the photograph up top, I had randomly bought some brown enoki mushrooms without considering that they wouldn’t look as pretty against the noodles. It would look nicer with the regular white ones.) This recipe for toshikoshi soba is not a traditional one by any means, but it’s a combination I like. I’m planning to eat it again this year, hopefully in much better health.

Toshikoshi soba with carrots and enoki

Ingredients (serves 2)

2 servings soba noodles (dry or fresh)
1/4 – 1/2 carrot (depending on size; add as much as you want)
1/2 package (90 grams) enoki mushrooms
Yuzu skin
Chopped scallions
1 liter dashi
2 tablespoons sake
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 tablespoons usukuchi soy sauce
Pinch sugar
Pinch salt

1. Use a knife to thinly remove the upper layer of the yuzu skin (about 1 inch square). Chop into thin slivers.
2. Heat the dashi. Chop the carrot into half moons and cook in dashi until soft.
3. Add seasonings to dashi, and taste. Add more soy sauce or sugar if necessary.
4. Add enoki mushrooms.
5. Cook soba in separate pot according to directions.
6. Warm two serving bowls by pouring a little hot water into them and swirling it around. Pour out, then place half of the cooked noodles in each bowl. Add dashi mixture. Garnish with chopped scallions and yuzu slivers.

Kinoko nabe (mushroom hot pot)

Nabe is one of those things that it’s almost ridiculous to use a recipe for. It makes much more sense to follow a simple formula: flavorful broth + vegetables + protein + starch = delicious. The broth is almost always based on dashi (although you could use chicken or vegetable stock if you liked) and can be flavored with soy sauce, miso, spices, or kept plain; the vegetables can be absolutely anything; the protein can be meat or soy; and the starch can be noodles, rice, or mochi (glutinous rice cakes).

Despite this, I found myself following my husband around the kitchen with a notepad in late November as he threw this nabe together. Part of the reason was that I wanted to post it here, but I also just wanted to have some kind of record. Tsuyoshi is the kind of cook who doesn’t like using recipes and therefore his nabe turn out slightly different each time, and I was curious to see exactly what he was doing differently.

Please consider this recipe a rough guideline to be tweaked as necessary depending on your preferences and what ingredients you can find. It can be easily modified to feed a large number of people if you simply increase the amount of broth, vegetables, and protein (which can be added in several batches at the table) and keep plenty of dashi on hand to add to the pot when the liquid is getting low. This meal is also very vegetarian friendly – I like to add a small amount of meat to make the broth more flavorful, but you can leave it out if you want.

A note about the nabe itself: we use a ceramic nabe that is a Japanese size 9 (approximately 23.5 centimeters in diameter). This is technically the size to feed four or five people, and provides two meals for us. If you don’t have  a Japanese-style nabe, you can make nabe in a wide pot– just make sure it’s shallow enough that you can arrange the ingredients inside without having them float around in the broth like soup. It’s also traditional to serve the nabe at the table atop a small tabletop burner sold for just this purpose. I’ve never seen an equivalent outside of Japan (although maybe something similar is sold for camping), but you can certainly keep the nabe cooking atop the stove and get up from the table when you want another serving.

Kinoko nabe (mushroom hot pot)

Serves: 4

Ingredients
1.5 liters dashi (more if necessary, depending on the size of your nabe)
2 tablespoons sesame oil
3 cloves garlic, sliced
Ginger, sliced (roughly the same amount as the garlic)
3-5 dried chili peppers, cut and seeds removed (depending on how spicy you want it to be)
1/4 onion, diced
White miso, to taste
1 package (180 grams) enoki mushrooms
1 package (100 grams) shimeji mushrooms
1 package (100 grams) maitake mushrooms
1 package (100 grams) Moyashi (bean sprouts)
1/4 Chinese cabbage
1 block tofu, any type, cut into large squares  (more if not using meat)
200 grams sliced pork
A few big handfuls of greens (seri, etc.)
Mochi, cubes or sheets (optional)
Ponzu, yuzu koshō pepper, sesame sauce, etc. for serving (optional)

1. Drizzle sesame oil into your nabe. Cook the garlic, ginger, and onion over low heat to flavor the oil.
2. Add the hot peppers and continue cooking while stirring constantly.
3. Add the meat. Cook until no longer raw.
4. Add ½ of the total amount of mushrooms. Cook while stirring until slightly softened.
5. Add enough dashi to cover your ingredients. Simmer gently, using a wire whisk or other implement to remove the aku (scum) that floats to the top.
6. After all aku is gone, use a miso koshi strainer to add the white miso (or remove some of the soup into a small bowl, mix the miso in there, then return it to the nabe).  Start by adding a few teaspoons, then taste. Continue adding miso until the soup tastes flavorful but not overly salty – the goal isn’t to make miso soup but to add another dimension of subtle flavor.
7. Add the rest of the mushrooms, Chinese cabbage, tofu, and mochi (optional) arranging them nicely inside the pot. Add more dashi to cover if necessary, but you don’t want to submerge all the ingredients – they should peek out from the broth.
8. Add a final drizzle of sesame oil for fragrance. Mound the greens in the center of the pot.
9. Bring the nabe to the table and set it on the portable stove. Turn the stove heat as low as necessary to maintain a very gentle simmer.
10. To serve, provide each person with a small dish and have them use chopsticks or a ladle to select their own vegetables, meat, tofu, etc. You can put ponzu or sesame sauce inside the dish to dip the ingredients in, or smear them with a bit of yuzu koshō pepper paste.

After eating, save all of the savory broth that remains as well as any leftover scraps of vegetables. If you are still hungry you can finish the meal with rice porridge. If not, save the broth and make porridge for breakfast the next morning. Just be careful not to add too much rice, since it tends to plump up and expand. You can either rinse the rice to remove extra starch, or add it to the broth as is to create a heartier porridge.

Left: Adding the meat to the mushrooms, onions, garlic, and ginger

Right: After adding blocks of mochi

Kinoko zōsui (mushroom rice porridge)

Ingredients

Leftover nabe broth
Cooked rice, any kind (about 1/2 cup-3/4 cup per person)
1 egg per person

1. If rinsing the rice, place in a strainer and gently rinse under running water.
2. Add the rice to the leftover broth in the nabe, and cook over medium-low heat until rice begins to plump and expand, stirring to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
3. Beat eggs in a bowl. Gently pour into the pot, stirring to cook.
4. Ladle into individual bowls and serve.

Seasonal spotlight: Yuzu

There’s something I wait for every year, one thing that keeps me anxiously counting the days once that first autumn breeze makes itself felt. No, I’m not talking about New Year’s celebrations or Tokyo’s one yearly snowfall. Instead, the part of winter in Japan that gets me the most excited is the appearance of the fruit known as “yuzu,” which is sometimes called “citron” in English.

Yuzu is a round yellow citrus fruit that is smaller than an orange, with a unique smell that simply cannot be described in words. Unlike other citrus fruits, the flavor and aroma of yuzu are concentrated in its skin that is either zested or cooked and eaten. Yuzu skin is used to add a bright accent to many winter foods such as simmered root vegetables. It is also incorporated into many dishes that are part of traditional New Year celebrations, like the ozōni soup that is served on the first morning of the year.

If you were to taste yuzu juice by itself you probably wouldn’t think it was that worthy of notice since the juice actually resembles lemon juice a great deal. This is where some recipes go wrong – if your recipe calls only for yuzu juice and not yuzu zest, it’s always a good idea to put some zest in as well to ensure that you retain the real smell and flavor of yuzu.

Yuzu is also widely used in both beverages (many alcoholic) and desserts. I’ve had yuzu sours, yuzu soda with lemon, green tea with yuzu, yuzu cheesecake, yuzu candy, manjū buns filled with yuzu and white miso, candied yuzu skin, yuzu jam, yuzu white chocolate, yuzu shortcake, and many more delicious yuzu offerings. Yuzu is often made into ponzu, a citrus-flavored soy sauce that is used for dipping vegetables from hot pot dishes or made into salad dressing. The only way that yuzu is definitely not eaten is by itself like an orange. I’ve even bought yuzu shampoo and body soap. And speaking of bathing, yuzu are sometimes floated in hot bath water to perfume it (and the bather) with their fragrance.

This is the signal that yuzu season has arrived

I wasn’t always so crazy about yuzu, though. For me this particular fruit was an acquired taste. It took a few years for my nose to learn to appreciate the aroma of yuzu, which is somehow both flowery and a bit pungent at the same time. Now I like to keep a couple of yuzu in my refrigerator constantly from the time they come into season, so they are always at hand for garnishing vegetables or noodles, making pickles, or whisking into salad dressing.

Generally on this blog I will try to give suggestions for ingredient substitutions or encourage people to try making a Japanese-style recipe with familiar vegetables if something happens to not be available locally. Yuzu is an exception because I don’t think there is another citrus fruit that is even remotely similar. If you’ve never tasted or used yuzu, do yourself a favor and try one even if it means convincing your local produce guy to put in a special order. Yuzu is becoming gradually more popular out of Japan, so I bet that it isn’t that hard to find in most places with a decent selection of Asian food. And if you do get a hold of some yuzu, here are some recipes to start with.

• Seared Hamachi with Carrot Salad and Yuzu Dressing from Food & Wine
• Yuzu Lemon Cocktail from White on Rice Couple
• Namasu Daikon, Carrots and Yuzu Pickles from Foodista
• Yuzu Cremes Brulees from Tartelette
• Yuzu Liqueur from Kyoto Foodie
• Yuzu macaron with candied grapefruit and wasabi from Zen Can Cook
• Pan Fried Sole with Yuzu Wasabi Butter from New Food
• Candied Yuzu Peel from Suite101
• Japanese Yuzu Dressing from Nifty Noshing
• Yuzu Tonic from Tokyo Terrace