Hot Mother-Daughter Action

After an overdose of my Iranian half of culinary heritage for Norooz, it was time to balance it all out by engaging in some Japanese debauchery. No, not anime featuring demon tentacles, uniformed school girls, and odd forms of penetration. We're simply not into that hentai stuff. But my other ethnic half's perversion doesn't end with used panty vending machines.

In fact, everyday Japanese weirdness isn't so much perversion, but an almost innocent frankness that turns out to be – like all things Japanese – very cute. Naming foods, for example, is subject to this cute-ification. Take the dish known as shirako for example. That would be fish milt. Milt is sperm. Shira is a prefix meaning white. Ko is a suffix meaning child. Sperm is white, and makes children. Hence...

Alas, there will be no eating of sperm this episode. Instead, we're talking about oyako donburi. So donburi is the common term for rice bowl (as in a bowl of rice with food on it, not unlike a teriyaki bowl). You just learned that ko means child. Oya? That means parent. Parent-child rice bowl.

Obviously, this is more of a metaphorical description of the dish. But it's not far from literal. The primary components of oyako donburi are the chicken and the egg.  We're not going to argue over who comes first. (Who cares as long as both do?)  We're going to tell you how this deliciously morbid-sounding familial dish is done.

To top each bowl of steamed Japanese rice (please don't use jasmine rice or Uncle Ben's - that only hurts me), you will need a chicken breast, 2 eggs, half a sweet onion (or three green onions), and a cup of sauce. The cup of sauce is comprised of 180 ml (1 cup) dashi (bonito stock, look it up), 2 tablespoons each of soy sauce and sugar.  Those are your ratios, and the only ingredients you actually need.

Heat up a skillet and pour in your cup of sauce.  Toss in the chicken breast, cut into thin strips manageable enough for chopsticks, not unlike a stir-fry.  Let the chicken simmer in the sauce 5-7 minutes over medium heat, then add your onions. After a few more minutes, when your onions have started to soften, pour in your slightly beaten eggs over the top of the chicken-onion-sauce concoction. Do not mix.

Scoop your hot, steaming rice into your bowls, and while the eggs are still runny (but not totally raw, eww!) use a large serving spoon to ladle it out on top of your rice. Optionally, before scooping it out, you can sprinkle it with strips of yakinori (roasted seaweed in sheet form, like what's wrapped around sushi rolls).

Serve while piping hot. The egg will continue to cook and will be ready by the time you get it to the table. For a touch of color, I added a garnish of aonori (green seaweed flakes), but some argue that over-garnishing a donburi will detract from its purity of flavor.

A Whole Lotta Wiener

Sometimes you just need some wiener.

And it's really hard to say no when it's only 1€80 a 10-pack at the local convenience store.

The humble hot dog sees a lot of abuse. It gets slathered in ketchup. It gets served with cheap canned chili. In Paris, it gets baked into the bun forming some sort of disgusting 4-day old bagel dog sold alongside pre-made crêpes near tourist traps.

We have nothing against cheap convenience foods. And this week, with both of us having had a lot of work, going to the butcher or fishmonger or green market wasn't an option.

Cheap and Trashy
One thing you really appreciate after leaving the US is good ol' WT food. Especially on a hot day (by local standards, to which we've become acclimated, anyway) where you just want to grill some hot dogs or factory-produced burger patties and have a tub of potato salad from Safeway or Costco or some other place a foodie would look down his nose.

Of course, living in a 300+ year-old building with no back yard means no barbecue. (The French don't take kindly to having their historical neighborhoods burnt down by Americans longing for a good ol' cookout.) So Alannah improvised with our ridiculously effective broiler, roasting some wieners that I could swear tasted like they came off a Weber kettle. Look, she even made grill marks!


Alongside it, a gigantic mound of potato salad. Here's where we went back to our usual selves... I've never really cared much for mayonnaise. Unless it's homemade or Kewpie brand mayo from Japan. In this case, we went for making our own Japanese-style mayo. It's a bit lighter and sweeter than regular mayo, and unlike French mayo, isn't infused with mustard. It's pretty simple - egg yolks + rice vinegar + cider vinegar + salad oil + a pinch of sugar. Then work it like crazy with a whisk, 'til you've got a gooey, creamy sauce ready to be slathered over potatoes.

Japanese Wieners
Not letting anything go to waste, we once again leaned on the hot dog crutch the next night, this time to make Japanese food. This isn't out of the ordinary - when we had relatives visiting from Japan last fall, they taught us a bunch of their favorite dishes. My aunt kept adding at the end of each dish, "Oh, and it's really good with hot dogs!" Being an old divorcée with adult kids who've long left home, I suppose she was all about finding new ways to enjoy wieners.


In that spirit, we put together a hot dog donburi. A donburi is a big bowl of rice topped with meat, often with a softly scrambled egg surrounding it. For instance, you often see it with tonkatsu, which is a fried and breaded pork loin. We substituted a hot dog.

Unfortunately, beaten egg and panko bread crumbs don't really stick to the slick, smooth surface of hot dogs too well, so there was a gloppy mess of wiener to be dealt with. But in the end, it worked out... and was surprisingly tasty.

And Some Balls, Too...
When our Japanese contingent was visiting, they'd brought us a takoyaki pan - a cast iron pan with golf ball-sized wells to make the eponymous Osaka snack. The batter is similar to okonomiyaki, based on the slimy, white, viscous nagaimo (or yamaimo if you can dig some up), only without the cabbage. This time around, I'd made some tenkasu (little fritters of tempura batter) to bolster the dough, lest you want the takoyaki balls to come out flaccid and not hold their shape.

Naturally, instead of cubes of boiled octopus, I loaded up each ball with a piece of hot dog.


Sadly, cast iron takoyaki pans and typical French vitroceramic electric ranges are not a marriage made in heaven, so a half dozen of our balls were essentially culinary abortions. The other ten, however, came out perfectly spherical, brown, and delectable.


I put them into pyramids topped with the customary aonori, katsuoboshi, mayo, and a sweet soy/vinegar sauce. A little yakisoba on the side (with sliced hot dog, of course), and some potato salad, and this was almost an authentic Japanese meal.

Next time, we'll preheat the takoyaki pan in the oven and perhaps put it over the ninja stove (sadly our only way to cook over gas) and see if we can get a full set of balls to bite down on.