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Post by mitsuhide on Nov 14, 2011 1:15:24 GMT -5
One problem I am running into is the fact that it is a dry site. Jesus drank wine but I can't?? So the appetizer course is still open- a soup (clear base super simple)- Grilled course beef/chicken- some other food here - finally Tea with tea sweets? what about the younger audience some don't like tea? PS all served with rice of course. Is this a good start then?
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Saionji Shonagon
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One dreamed of becoming somebody. Another remained awake and became. (Found in a fortune cookie.)
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Post by Saionji Shonagon on Nov 14, 2011 11:17:43 GMT -5
Fresh raw vegetables (cucumbers sliced very thin are excellent this way) with a rice vinegar dressing can fill the "salad" role for you. You can also dress shrimp or crab meat (not sure how available this is in your area or whether it'll blow your feast budget) with the same sort of dressing and serve chilled. 6 tablespoons vinegar, a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon of soy sauce and a little salt to taste. You can also make your own pickles. www.theblackmoon.com/Jfood/ftsuke.html#salt has some recipes that use only salt. If you don't have a pickle press, put them in a plastic container and put a lid on top that is too small for the container and weight it so it presses down on the contents - the vegetables will sweat their own juices and mix with the salt to form the brine. (This is also something you can do ahead of time, which means you don't have to mess with it on the day of the feast!) Have water for the non-tea drinkers. If you like, float a couple slices of lemon or orange in the pitcher. It's not particularly Japanese, but it's something they can drink. Ah, found it - here's a non-miso soup that was posted to the boards awhile back: tousando.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=food&action=display&thread=2456And niku dango (meatballs). They're yummy! tousando.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=food&action=display&thread=2467
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Lady Kimiko
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I'm busy making tea bowls these days.
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Post by Lady Kimiko on Nov 14, 2011 11:34:56 GMT -5
I have hosted tea tasting for Girl Scout troops...and shockingly the kids ALL loved the tea. I presented the girls with 3 separate teas, and let them pick and choose their own teas to drink. Sugar was on the table as an extra however NONE of the girls added any sugar to their tea.
There are a variety of teas out there: I suggest finding some with bits of fruit in them such as a loose leaf with a strawberry base. black teas -tend- to be pretty strong and bitter to young tastebuds.
When I host parties here..the kids all ask for our teas.
Moral of the story - go with a green or white fruity tea, and have sugar optional...kids do like tea.
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Post by Noriko on Nov 14, 2011 18:16:53 GMT -5
Fresh raw vegetables (cucumbers sliced very thin are excellent this way) with a rice vinegar dressing can fill the "salad" role for you. You can also dress shrimp or crab meat (not sure how available this is in your area or whether it'll blow your feast budget) Surimi perhaps? I don't know how easier to find or cheaper it is but it is a popular contemporary substitute. There's also the shellfish allergy problem but chances are if people have such an allergy, they will probably not sign up for the feast. As for being a dry site, you may want to prepare and freeze that dish offsite or ask the site director if dry only applies to the serving of drinks- if using cooking wine is an exception (it might be).
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Post by solveig on Nov 14, 2011 21:42:09 GMT -5
Noble Cousin! Greetings from Solveig! finally Tea with tea sweets? what about the younger audience some don't like tea? Consider not serving rice with the "desert" course. They really do not belong together. What you can substitute for rice is mochi sweets. Mochi is made from rice after all. As for tea. I urge you to use green tea. Black tea really isn't all that Japanese. I have also gotten positive reactions to matcha from the younger set. As for surimi, it's ground fish goo. I'm not sure that it would go over all that well. How about kamaboko instead? It is made out of surimi.
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Post by Noriko on Nov 14, 2011 22:21:50 GMT -5
*googles* Ah, I meant imitation crab. I guess I picked it up from my university which, whenever a dish contained imitation crab chunks, said it contained "surimi". A typical university dish could be, say, penne pasta, "surimi", spinach, tomatoes and cream sauce. Recommended with reservations ;D
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bovil
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Post by bovil on Nov 15, 2011 2:11:59 GMT -5
*googles* Ah, I meant imitation crab. I guess I picked it up from my university which, whenever a dish contained imitation crab chunks, said it contained "surimi". A typical university dish could be, say, penne pasta, "surimi", spinach, tomatoes and cream sauce. Recommended with reservations ;D Well, imitation crab is textured fish cake with something to make it taste like crab. I remember the term "surimi" gaining currency in American markets a decade or so back, I think to avoid "imitation" suggesting "fake" or "artificial" and to create a foreign mystique about it. As a loanword in English it generally refers to the end-product rather than the source ingredient.
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Post by morejello on Nov 28, 2011 21:25:34 GMT -5
Thanks to everyone who has given suggestions here. I am the sucker cook who agreed to do a japanese feast for Mitzi.
Our limitations are essentially that we're cooking for people who don't know squat about japanese anything, and we have limited access to a lot of products that would normally be used. We live in Idaho, so access to fresh fish is pretty negligible. Plus, we will have no access to specialized cookware or serving ware. Additionally, I am unfamiliar with much of the terminology so it takes more work for me to find suitable substitutions. However, I'll eat just about anything and I'm not above getting someone else to eat a dish without knowing what is in it.
Currently we're looking at: Genami Zoushi (brown rice and mushroom soup) Nasu-Miso (fried eggplant in miso sauce) Nikkorogashi (New Potatoes in Daishi stock) Chicken grilled with Yakitori sauce and I'm seriously considering the Niku Dango recipe linked to earlier in this thread. Those meatballs sound AWESOME. Yes, I know there's no fish and that is sacrilege. And of course, lots of short-grain rice. And because I'm me, I'll probably make up a bunch of desert items to go around. Or if I can get some good Nori I may try my hand at making sushi for an appetizer before hand. I will probably make some assorted pickled vegetables to go out on the tables as well, that's not a difficult process.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 29, 2011 12:19:17 GMT -5
That feast menu sounds yummy to me, and it looks like even the timid will be able to find enough things to eat. I am such a sucker for mushrooms and eggplant I possibly wouldn't even make it to the chicken.
If you see a good price on fish while you're shopping, and want to remedy its absence from the plan, you can probably cook it the same way you are cooking the chicken.
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erink
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Post by erink on Dec 8, 2011 23:53:26 GMT -5
Sounds yummy.
I wouldn't bother with the sushi, it's a lot of effort for a dubious outcome. And it's not really that authentic.
I've used two super easy pickle recipes that can be made way ahead (they're better a week old). One is a cabbage pickle with citron (substitute lemon and a few limes for yuzu) and one is a radish pickle that ... I don't remember what's in it at the moment, but you can find a recipe for that pretty easily. I think it's a vinegar pickle. Red radishes aren't period but radishes or turnips substitute well for daikon. Serve small quantities with rice. And the cucumber vinegar sunomono (it has a tiny bit of mirin in it but that can't possibly count). They're all "refrigerator pickles" so they don't keep on their own.
Ah, soy powder is so delicious! I brought some home last trip but I never used it. Kind of peanut butter flavored. I had kinako mochi and fell in love.
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Post by Nezumi on Dec 20, 2011 9:30:36 GMT -5
It sounds lovely!
I'd definitely support mochi, I made mochi for the first time recently. It was very easy and came out just like what I've had at restaurants. I'm planning to contribute some for the next exotic-food-friendly potluck.
It's surprising what kids will eat and enjoy. I have a five year old relative who's been developing a fondness for modern Japanese food due to what I have in my picnic lunches. Her grandad's got into green tea for health purposes, and she's been known to have a sip from time to time.
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Post by morejello on Mar 29, 2012 23:43:40 GMT -5
Ok, so I figured I would give you guys a report on how the feast went.
The first course was a shiitake and brown rice soup. Because we were making such a large amount, I used dried shiitake. Lots of the stuff I read about using dried mushrooms said to use the water from rehydrating as part of the soup stock, so that's what I did. The rest of the stock was dashi made from dashi-no-moto. I had a lot of concern when cooking the soup because the rehydrated mushrooms smelled funky and the dashi-no-moto smelled like fish (duh). Plus the soup wasn't as thick as I wanted. BUT. When we added the egg to the soup right before it was done, the texture became exactly right. Everyone loved the soup and I have been asked to publish the recipe in our newsletter. I will also post it below.
Second course was vegetables. Veggie dish 1 was new potatoes cooked in dashi. That's pretty much it, and it was pretty good. Veggie dish 2 was cubed eggplant in miso sauce. This dish was probably the most difficult, as it required frying the vegetables, then adding sauce, then adding the miso, all while stir frying. Not a big deal if you're cooking for 4, but our portions on this dish were for 40. We subbed sweet bell peppers for about 1/3 of the eggplant just to give the dish some contrasting color. These were good, but lots of people didn't eat much of it.
Course 3 was meat. We had chicken yakitori, basically just skewers with chicken and green onion, slathered in the sauce as they cooked on a grill. This is the dish I think I screwed up on the most, I think I should have marinated the chicken in the sauce overnight to give it more flavor. Other meat was the niku dango meatballs from above. They were very good, but I actually found the sauce that goes on them to be a bit plain. It definitely could have had more zing. Meatballs and chicken were both also big hits.
We ended with Mochi. I made the mochi cakes with filling instead of the steamed pan of mochi goo (apparently there's a lot of different ways to cook it). We did 2 varieties - a more traditional mochi with sweetened bean paste inside and rolled in dried coconut, and a 'modern twist' with a hershey's kiss inside and rolled in cocoa powder. The traditional one was way better and way more popular. The chocolate ones were simply too sweet. I'm still eating leftover an mochi, and they're yummy.
We never did get the green tea made, and I scorched the sticky white rice, so those were both FAIL. We were going to also serve edamame to all the tables but we forgot and left it at home.
Overall very successful. Cost of the feast was $300, which was enough to serve 50+.
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Post by morejello on Mar 29, 2012 23:57:22 GMT -5
Soup recipe as per the book.
-Ingredients- 1 litre/ 4 cups dashi stock, or 4 cups water and 4 tsp dashi-no-moto 60ml/4tbsp sake 5ml/1tsp salt 60ml/ 4tbsp shoyu 115g/4oz. fresh shiitake mushroom, thinly sliced 600g/1lb 5oz cooked brown rice. 2 large eggs, beaten 30ml/2tbsp chopped fresh chives
-Instructions- Mix the dashi stock, sake, salt, and shoyu in a large pan. Bring to boil then add sliced shiitake. Cook for 5 minutes over medium heat. Add cooked brown rice to the pan and stir gently over medium heat. Break up any large chunks of rice. Stir until rice is thoroughly warmed. Pour the beaten eggs into the pan as if drawing a whirlpool. Lower the heat and cover. Do not stir. Remove the pan from the heat after about 3 minutes, and allow to stand for an additional 3 minutes, until the egg is just cooked. Sprinkle chives into the pan. Serve the dish in individual bowls. Garnish with sesame seeds and shichimi togarashi if you like.
*cooks note - if you use dehydrated mushrooms, save the water you use to rehydrate them with to use as part of the stock. Measuring cooked vs. dry rice. 1 cup dry brown rice = 7oz. 1 cup dry brown rice = 2.5 cups cooked. 1 cup cooked brown rice = 8 oz. To get 1lb 5 oz cooked rice, you need about 1 cup of dry brown rice to start with, and follow the directions on the package.
This recipe from "Japanese Cooking" by Emi Kazuko. It's a very good book, with at least half of the book explaining what the ingredients are and how they're used before it actually gets to recipes.
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Post by morejello on Mar 30, 2012 0:05:11 GMT -5
The only ingredients for the feast that I couldn't get locally were the dashi-no-moto, the miso paste, the can of sweetened bean paste, and the mochigome flour. All of those I ordered online from Amazon.com.
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Post by mitsuhide on Apr 1, 2012 18:40:11 GMT -5
Hey I was there for that feast and it was really good I enjoyed the meat skewers the most.
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