Soy Sauce Quotes

Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good.

See? Injustice. Here we are, risking our lives to rescue Kai and this whole planet, and Adri and Pearl get to go to the royal wedding. I’m disgusted. I hope they spill soy sauce on their fancy dresses.” Jacin’s concern turned fast to annoyance. “Your ship has some messed-up priorities, you know that?” “Iko. My name is Iko. If you don’t stop calling me the ‘ship,’ I am going to make sure you never have hot water during your showers again, do you understand me?” “Yeah, hold that thought while I go disable the speaker system.” “What? You can’t mute me. Cinder!

She heard footsteps thumping from the crew quarters and Jacin appeared in the cargo bay, eyes wide. “What happened? Why is the ship screaming?” “Nothing. Everything’s fine,” Cinder stammered. “No, everything is not fine,” said Iko. “How can they be invited? I’ve never seen a bigger injustice in all my programmed life, and believe me, I have seen some big injustices.” Jacin raised an eyebrow at Cinder. “We just learned that my former guardian received an invitation to the wedding.” She opened the tab beside her stepmother’s name, thinking maybe it was a mistake. But of course not. Linh Adri had been awarded 80,000 univs and an official invitation to the royal wedding as an act of gratitude for her assistance in the ongoing manhunt for her adopted and estranged daughter, Linh Cinder. “Because she sold me out,” she said, sneering. “Figures.” “See? Injustice. Here we are, risking our lives to rescue Kai and this whole planet, and Adri and Pearl get to go to the royal wedding. I’m disgusted. I hope they spill soy sauce on their fancy dresses.” Jacin’s concern turned fast to annoyance. “Your ship has some messed-up priorities, you know that?” “Iko. My name is Iko. If you don’t stop calling me the ‘ship,’ I am going to make sure you never have hot water during your showers again, do you understand me?” “Yeah, hold that thought while I go disable the speaker system.” “What? You can’t mute me. Cinder!

See? Injustice. Here we are, risking our lives to rescue Kai and this whole planet, and Adri and Pearl get to go to the royal wedding. I’m disgusted. I hope they spill soy sauce on their fancy dresses.

We prepared three Man dishes: Miso Soup with Man, Daikon Leaf and Man Stir-Fry, and Man Simmered in Sweetened Soy Sauce.

I am three forks away from eating all your food with two homeless guys. It’s too bad I only have a suitcase full of spoons and a bucket of soy sauce.

I said to John, “You know that if you walked around the world, your hat would travel thirty-one feet farther than your shoes?” John said, “I dunno, Dave, but before we make a bomb I have to shave half the dog.” I nodded. He got up, called to Molly and herded her into my bathroom. I wondered when the soy sauce would take effect.

Govern a family as you would cook a small fish—very gently.

They’re ice cream cufflinks,” I said brightly. “I know a jeweler on Rue de la Paix who makes customized pieces. The onyx is the soy sauce. The ruby is the cherry, even though you don’t eat it with cherry, but I think the red ties the design together.” It was a half-joke gift, half-sincere. Dante owned dozens of luxury cufflinks, but I wanted to give him something more personal. “Do you like them?” I asked. “I love them.” He removed his current cufflinks and replaced them with the new ones. “Thank you, mia cara.

One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked.

YO SOY SAUCE! CÓMPRAME!

Honey, have you seen my measuring tape?” “I think it’s in that drawer in the kitchen with the scissors, matches, bobby pins, Scotch tape, nail clippers, barbecue tongs, garlic press, extra buttons, old birthday cards, soy sauce packets thick rubber bands, stack of Christmas napkins, stained take-out menus, old cell-phone chargers, instruction booklet for the VCR, some assorted nickels, an incomplete deck of cards, extra chain links for a watch, a half-finished pack of cough drops, a Scrabble piece I found while vacuuming, dead batteries we aren’t fully sure are dead yet, a couple screws in a tiny plastic bag left over from the bookshelf, that lock with the forgotten combination, a square of carefully folded aluminum foil, and expired pack of gum, a key to our old house, a toaster warranty card, phone numbers for unknown people, used birthday candles, novelty bottle openers, a barbecue lighter, and that one tiny little spoon.” “Thanks, honey.” AWESOME!

White chocolate peppermint latte, half skim, half soy, no whip, extra white chocolate sauce on the bottom and a drizzle on top.

They said someday you’ll find / all who love are blind / Oh, when your heart’s on fire / You must realize / Smoke gets in your eyes.

On barstools they ogled the bachelorettes in the club and discussed their chances, recalling near-conquests from previous visits. In the buffet lines they foraged from the heat lamps and steam trays, and impaled and then swirled wasabi around tiny ceramic saucers, tinting soy sauce.

Real soy sauce is as complex as a fine wine- fruity, earthy, floral also can, lah." Uncle Robert pointed out the lively acidity of the light soy sauce in comparison to the rich, mellow sweetness of the dark one. Light soy, he explained, was used for seasoning and dipping; dark soy was used for cooking because its flavors developed under heat.

These are some of my favorite smells: toasting bagel, freshly cut figs, the bergamot in good Earl Grey tea, a jar of whole soybeans slowly turning beneath a tropical sun.

Mr. Carter cleared his throat. “Soy sauce.” He deadpanned. “Really, Sera?

She’d always been the Watson to his Sherlock, Bonnie to his Clyde, the soy sauce to his ginger.

we’re all just feeding off the stored fat of a dream gone bad. You want soy sauce on that?

Sweet braised black soybeans, crisp yellow sprouts with scallion and sesame oil, and tart, juicy cucumber kimchi were shoveled into our mouths behind spoonfuls of warm, lavender kong bap straight from the open rice cooker. We'd giggle and shush each other as we ate ganjang gejang with our fingers, sucking salty, rich, custardy raw crab from its shell, prodding the meat from its crevices with our tongues, licking our soy sauce-stained fingers. Between chews of a wilted perilla leaf, my mother would say, "This is how I know you're a true Korean.

I described Ba's dream of making soy sauce a staple for Western cooks. "He makes a stellar boeuf bourguignon with light soy sauce in place of salt," I told the girl. The delicate flavors of our sauce enhanced the rich umami taste of the meat. Our sauce rounded out the stock, highlighting the bright, acidic tomatoes, preventing the red wine from overwhelming the dish.

Tangy Barbecued Meatballs 2 lbs. ground beef 1 c. corn flake cereal, crushed 1/3 c. fresh parsley, chopped 2 eggs 2 T. soy sauce 1/4 t. pepper 1/2 t. garlic powder 1/3 c. catsup 2 T. dried, minced onion Combine all ingredients, mixing well. Form mixture into one-inch meatballs; place in an ungreased 13"x9" baking pan. Pour sauce over meatballs; bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Makes 15 servings. Sauce:

She showed you how to make her special adobo recipe- proper adobo, with soy sauce and vinegar and spices- and it tasted exquisite, better than any other grandmother would have made. She offered both meals for free to the carinderia's clientele that day, much to their delight. Sampling your casserole brought them no perceptible changes; eating Lola's adobo left them fresh, eager, and thrumming with energy, exhaustion falling away like a cloak.

When he made my favorite bak kut teh, a fragrant, spicy soup with tender pork spare ribs and fat shitake mushrooms, he always had me sample the stock. He taught me to make a big slurping sound as I sipped to avoid burning my tongue. He taught me to discern the warmth of cinnamon, the tang of orange peel, and the mellow licorice of star anise. Most importantly, Ba taught me to appreciate the way a dash of Lin's light soy sauce brightened each of these flavors while pulling them together into a single, harmonious whole.

Lots of kitchens have a “catch-all” drawer. What’s in here? It’s always a surprise. Soy sauce packets from carryout, rubber bands, pennies, matches, pushpins, a stray refrigerator magnet. I’m only going to say this once: No. Junk. Drawer. Do I make myself clear?

Unlike Japan, Italy's cuisine has long centered on meat dishes. In their home province of Tuscany, duck, rabbit, and even boar would be served in the right season. I suspect that is how they learned how to butcher and dress a duck. The breast meat was glazed with a mixture of soy sauce, Japanese mustard, black pepper and honey to give it a strong, spicy fragrance... the perfect complement to the sauce. Duck and salsa verde. They found and enhanced the Japanese essence of both... ... to create an impressive and thoroughly Japanese dish!

Koji is at the core of Japanese cuisine—it’s the key to sake, soy sauce, miso (the fermented soy paste used as a basis for soup), vinegar, and tofu. Technically, it’s the fungus Aspergillus oryzae, and if you were an infectious disease specialist, that would freak you out a little bit because most of the Aspergillus genus is poisonous.

The oyakodan is delicious. It's perfectly representative of the subtler side of Japanese food, not the guts side. I dipped my spoon through the omelet and pulled up a scrag of egg, a cube of chicken, and a clump of rice. It was one of those predestined combinations, like shrimp and grits, rounded out perfectly by the hint of soy sauce.

WITH THIS BOOK I respectfully invoke the heroic, aggrieved souls wandering in the boundless bright-red sorghum fields of my hometown. As your unfilial son, I am prepared to carve out my heart, marinate it in soy sauce, have it minced and placed in three bowls, and lay it out as an offering in a field of sorghum. Partake of it in good health!

women who sat clutching their purses in their laps as they eyed the men with equal parts intrigue and revulsion.

Suddenly I questioned why I so indiscriminately craved the approval of others.

Govern a family as you would cook a small fish—very gently.” I said, repeating the Chinese proverb Mr. Liu had told me.

Salmon Meunière, piping hot and steaming with the rich aroma of butter! Sautéed squid liver, boldly fragrant with the scents of garlic and soy sauce! And a gleaming mound of glittery salmon roe marinated in soy sauce! "It's a parade of the ultimate in gourmet ingredients! Somei Saito senpai has created a brand-new culinary gem with his Buttered Seafood Rice Bowl!

In polite conversation, we’ll tell you we have two seasons: hot-and-wet and hot-and-dry. In less polite conversation, we’ll reveal there are three: hot, very hot, and very fucking hot.

FOOD Adobo (uh-doh-boh)---Considered the Philippines's national dish, it's any food cooked with soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, and black peppercorns (though there are many regional and personal variations) Almondigas (ahl-mohn-dee-gahs)---Filipino soup with meatballs and thin rice noodles Baon (bah-ohn)---Food, snacks and other provisions brought on to work, school, or on a trip; food brought from home; money or allowance brought to school or work; lunch money (definition from Tagalog.com) Embutido (ehm-puh-tee-doh)---Filipino meatloaf Ginataang (gih-nih-tahng)---Any dish cooked with coconut milk, sweet or savory Kakanin (kah-kah-nin)---Sweet sticky cakes made from glutinous rice or root crops like cassava (There's a huge variety, many of them regional) Kesong puti (keh-sohng poo-tih)---A kind of salty cheese Lengua de gato (lehng-gwah deh gah-toh)---Filipino butter cookies Lumpia (loom-pyah)---Filipino spring rolls (many variations) Lumpiang sariwa (loom-pyahng sah-ree-wah)---Fresh Filipino spring rolls (not fried) Mamón (mah-MOHN)---Filipino sponge/chiffon cake Matamis na bao (mah-tah-mees nah bah-oh)---Coconut jam Meryenda (mehr-yehn-dah)---Snack/snack time Pandesal (pahn deh sahl)---Lightly sweetened Filipino rolls topped with breadcrumbs (also written pan de sal) Patis (pah-tees)---Fish sauce Salabat (sah-lah-baht)---Filipino ginger tea Suman (soo-mahn)---Glutinous rice cooked in coconut milk, wrapped in banana leaves, and steamed (though there are regional variations) Ube (oo-beh)---Purple yam

The light sesame ginger dressing goes perfectly with this Asian-inspired salad. 2 cups shredded romaine lettuce 1 cup shredded cabbage 2 scallions, finely chopped 1 large carrot, shredded or finely chopped 1 handful cilantro, chopped 1/2 avocado, pitted and chopped 2 cups shredded chicken 1/4 cup peanuts, roughly chopped, for serving LIGHT SESAME GINGER DRESSING 3 tablespoons sesame oil 1 teaspoon soy sauce 3 tablespoons rice vinegar 1 tablespoon honey 1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds 11/2-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and minced 1. In a large bowl, combine all the salad ingredients. 2. In a small bowl, combine all dressing ingredients and whisk thoroughly. 3. Toss the salad with the dressing or leave the dressing on the side. 4. Sprinkle with peanuts.

The mixture, Ahkong's creation, was sweet and tangy and savory- a comforting, full-bodied flavor like burnt sugar, or brown butter that contrasted sharply with the dancing bubbles on my tongue.

The typical smell from skin-on pork belly is completely erased by the spices used. All that reaches the tongue... are the mild sweetness of the fats and the zesty richness of the curry!" "It's amazingly delicious!" "After I parboiled, seasoned and pan seared the pork belly... I braised it in a mixture of oyster sauce, soy sauce, Shaoxing wine and other seasonings. I gave it its fragrance with star anise, ginger and Sichuan pepper." Strange. The meat is incredibly heavy and filling... yet this dish is so easy to eat! Why? "IT'S THE RICE! Now I see! She mixed a dash of rock salt and Sichuan-peppercorn oil into the rice! The refreshing scent and tongue-tingling flavor of the peppercorn oil ameliorates the oiliness of the fats... ... but its spiciness makes you want another bite of the sweet meat... it's a chain reaction!

At the Chinese restaurant, Nami Emo would reserve a room with a big table and a gigantic glass lazy Susan on which turned small porcelain pitchers of vinegar and soy sauce with a marble button to ring for service. We'd order decadent jjajangmyeon noodles, dumpling after dumpling served in rich broth, tangsuyuk pork with mushrooms and peppers, and yusanseul, gelatinous sea cucumber with squid, shrimp, and zucchini.

He put the sliced celery and mushrooms into the frying pan. Turning the gas flame up to high and lightly jogging the pan, he carefully stirred the contents with a bamboo spatula, adding a sprinkle of salt and pepper. When the vegetables were just beginning to cook, he tossed the drained shrimp into the pan. After adding another dose of salt and pepper to the whole thing, he poured in a small glass of sake. Then a dash of soy sauce and finally a scattering of Chinese parsley.

That was the urge to drink. In the moment the wave peaked, you were sure it would sweep you off your feet, engulf you, drown you. But if you braced yourself and faced it straight on, the wave would pass. You would emerge on the other side. “Try

Oregano, garlic powder, cayenne. The words ring in my head and, although I hadn't been planning on it, I grab some fresh ginger that 'Buela uses for tea. I pull some soy sauce packets out of a drawer we throw fast-food items in. "Put those onions in the pan with the olive oil, 'Buela." "Sofrito?" she asks. But I'm not making the usual base. "Something a little different this time." She tosses the onion into the oil, peels and crushes the garlic in el pilón, and then spoons that into the skillet, too.

Memories fill my mind, as though they are my own, of not just events from Gideon's life, but of various flavors and textures: breast milk running easily down into my stomach, chicken cooked with butter and parsley, split peas and runner beans and butter beans, and oranges and peaches, strawberries freshly picked from the plant; hot, strong coffees each morning; pasta and walnuts and bread and brie; then something sweet: a pan cotta, with rose and saffron, and a white wine: tannin, soil, stone fruits, white blossom; and---oh my god---ramen, soba, udon, topped with nori and sesame seeds; miso with tofu and spring onions, fugu and tuna sashimi dipped in soy sauce, onigiri with a soured plum stuffed in the middle; and then something I don't know, something unfamiliar but at the same time deeply familiar, something I didn't realize I craved: crispy ground lamb, thick, broken noodles, chili oil, fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk, tamarind... and then a bright green dessert---the sweet, floral flavor of pandan fills my mouth.

Once people saw how a single teaspoon can bring out the fragrance of scallion and ginger and garlic, or how a light coating can amplify the smokiness of tender roast meat,"- here, he bunched up his fingertips and brought them to his lips-"how could they turn away?

I can see Mr. Yukihira is sautéing cubed chicken, diced onion, prawns and uncooked rice in his. He filled the frying pan with the gentle flavor of butter, and he's now softly wrapping it around each and every one of his ingredients! On the other hand, Mr. Saito heated some garlic slices in oil until fragrant... ... and then added his butter together with soy sauce, cuttlefish and cuttlefish liver. The unique and luxuriantly salty smell of the bounty of the sea is being taken to even greater heights with the rich scent of butter!

But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that's not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that's exactly right every time.

This dish... it's sweet-and-sour pork but with black vinegar. In fact, you could call it "Black Vinegar Pork." The glossy black of the vinegar was used to great effect in the plating, giving the dish a classy and luxuriant appearance. But the moment you put a bite in your mouth... fresh, vibrant green tea explodes in a sea of invigorating green. It is extravagantly delicious. Chef Kuga's Sweet-and-Sour sauce includes not just black vinegar but also balsamic vinegar as well as Chef Mimasaka's smoked soy sauce! It destroys the traditional boundaries of sweet-and-sour pork, creating a dish that's rich, tangy and savory while erasing the pork's thick greasiness to push the taste of the green tea to the forefront! He has completely succeeded in taking the green tea leaves and making them the centerpiece of his dish! But the point most worthy of attention... ... is that this sublime taste experience wasn't created using solely Chinese-cooking techniques. It shows an equally deft use of traditional French techniques!" "What the... French?! But isn't he supposed to be a purely Sichuan-Chinese chef?!" "Yes, yes. I'm gonna explain, so quiet down and listen up, 'kay? See, there's another secret y'all don't know. That sweet-and-sour sauce? I based it on Sauce au Vinaigre Balsamique. That's a balsamic vinegar sauce used in a whole lot of French recipes." "Aha! Now I see. So that's where it came from! French Vinaigre Balsamique sauce is a reduction of balsamic vinegar and Glacé de Viande! It has a light tanginess and thick richness, which must have boosted the deliciousness of the sweet-and-sour pork into the stratosphere!

She inhaled the steam rising from the coffee without touching it. “I’m very picky about my coffee.” “White chocolate peppermint latte, half skim, half soy, no whip, extra white chocolate sauce on the bottom and a drizzle on top.” Her gaze shot up, watching me over the rim of the cup with a hint of incredulity. “How’d you know?” I shrugged. “Maybe we like the same drinks.” Or maybe Wendy had told me the other day when she balanced three cups of coffee in the elevator. Liya clamped her mouth shut but covered the warm cup with her petite hands. Her glossy red nails clicked against the sturdy paper cup, drowning out the muted sounds of others in the hallway beyond the open door. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “I don’t think you did anything to the coffee.” “I mean it’s okay to smile because someone brought you your picky-ass latte.” She took a sip. “We’re not friends, you know?” “No one forgets being told they’re not friends,” I said teasingly, knowing full well she didn’t want to be friends but yet, here we were. A smile crept across her lips, even though she tried hard to stop it.

2½ cups thinly sliced scallions (greens and whites; from 1 to 2 large bunches) ¼ cup finely minced peeled fresh ginger ¼ cup grapeseed or other neutral oil 1½ teaspoons usukuchi (light soy sauce) ¾ teaspoon sherry vinegar ¾ teaspoon kosher salt, or more to taste Mix together the scallions, ginger, oil, soy, vinegar, and salt in a bowl. Taste and check for salt, adding more if needed. Though it’s best after 15 or 20 minutes of sitting, ginger scallion sauce is good from the minute it’s stirred together up to a day or two in the fridge. Use as directed, or apply as needed.

What a deeply rich and full-bodied piece of chutoro tuna! The sweet nikiri sauce brushed ever so lightly over it makes the fish's natural umami flavor stand out in stark contrast! *Nikiri sauce is a sweet glaze made from soy sauce, mirin, and other seasonings that are heated just enough to dissipate the alcohol content.* "The akami piece was cured with kombu seaweed. Their savory flavors meld harmoniously in my mouth! And finally there's the rare gill-meat delicacy- the kamatoro! Its almost savage richness is gently wrapped in the sweetly tart freshness of the sushi rice!

Shigureni is a variety of stewed meat where ginger has been added to the traditional soy sauce-and-sugar simmering sauce. Thick, sweet and accented with ginger's uniquely spicy tang, there are layers of flavor to please the tongue! Light yet thick, tangy yet sweet... all the various flavors patter across the tongue like a short afternoon drizzle- thus its name, shigure, which means "fall shower." "It's a dish renowned for its exceptionally deep and compelling flavors." "Ooh, you just know it's gonna be good. That's Takumi-chi for ya! He's a master of both Italian and Japanese cooking!"

Life is a tiring business indeed. Soy sauce runs out. Milk runs out. Dishwashing detergent runs out. Lancôme lipsticks—I thought I had stockpiled several years' worth—run out. Dust underneath the dining table becomes dust balls. Newspapers and magazines pile up, and so does laundry. E-mail and junk mail keep coming. When occasion demands, I make myself presentable and I present myself. I listen to my sister's same old complaints on the phone. I withdraw money for my elderly mother, whose tongue works fine but whose body is a mess. I contact her caseworker. And now I have reached a stage in life when my own health is prone to betray me.

The hawker center was a large, open-air hall that housed four dozen independently owned food stalls, each specializing in a single signature dish, from barbecued stingray coated in fiery, pungent shrimp paste to Hokkien mee, a mixture of yellow and rice noodles, fried with eggs and then braised in rich, savory prawn stock.

It starts with chicken thigh meat cut into big, thick chunks. They're then set to marinate for the morning in a Nikumi- Original Marinade featuring soy sauce and cayenne pepper. "Breading done." "Thanks!" "Man, the smell of this chicken deep-frying is so good, it's making me hungry!" "Is it done yet? I wanna eat!" After the chicken breast has been fried not once but twice... ... it, along with lettuce leaves and other leafy herbs... ... is all wrapped up in our special, freshly cooked wrap! Some of our "Secret Chili Sauce" (which has a dash of Thai Nam Pla in it for flavor)... ... and a sprinkling of fresh cracked black pepper top it all off!

Who knew that specialty food producers from bastions of Americana as Gainesville, Florida, and Louisville, Kentucky, had begun to experiment with artisanal soy sauce? According to a prominent food magazine, the Kentucky producer even aged its sauce in old bourbon barrels for an added whiff of smoke and local color. Top chefs all over America were raving about the depth of flavor the smoky sauce brought to dry-aged filet mignon and buttery black cod. An avant-garde chef in Chicago had infused the soy sauce into butter. The resulting concoction was spread on bite-sized brioche, topped with tobiko caviar, and served as the amuse bouche to his seventeen-course tasting menu.

As we followed, she listed all the dishes Auntie Tina had ordered: crispy eel in sweet sauce, smoked duck two ways, hand-pulled noodles with crab roe- "luckily we had enough pregnant crabs on hand!"- and others I could not decipher from their poetic yet opaque Chinese names: squirrel-shaped Mandarin fish, eight treasure rice, four happiness pork.

Eggs appear at breakfast in a variety of forms, often as tamagoyaki. You've met this sweetened omelet at your local sushi place, where it's considered beginner sushi. In Tokyo, good tamagoyaki is an object of lust. Cut into thick blocks and served at room temperature, a creamy monolith of tamagoyaki is somehow the antithesis of American breakfast eggs. It can be made at home in a special square or rectangular frying pan, but it's also for sale in supermarkets, at depachika, and at Tsukiji fish market. Most people who aren't sushi chefs buy it. My tamagoyaki-making skills are nonexistent, but I sometimes flavor beaten eggs with soy sauce, dashi, and mirin and make an omelet to eat with rice and nori.

[…] this headmaster asked parents to include in their children’s lunch boxes “something from the ocean and something from the hills.” “Something from the ocean meant sea food - things such as fish and tsukuda-ni (tiny crustaceans and the like boiled in soy sauce and sweet sake), while "something from the hills” meant food from the land - like vegetables, beef, pork and chicken. Mother was very impressed by this and thought that few headmasters were capable of expressing such an important rule so simply. Oddly enough, just having to choose from two categories made preparing lunch seem simpler. And besides, the headmaster pointed out that one did not have to think hard or be extravagant to fulfil the two requirements.

How specialized do restaurants get in Japan? Every weekday at lunchtime, people queue up on a side street just south of Ningyōchō Station, in an old Tokyo neighborhood. They're waiting to get into Tamahide, a restaurant that (at lunchtime) serves one dish, oyakodon. Written with the characters for "parent" and "child," oyakodon is a runny chicken omelet (get it?) served over rice. There are very few ingredients to this dish: chicken, egg, and rice, soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. There is no vegetarian version, no low-carb salad version, no side dishes other than a tiny dish of pickles perched atop the lid of your bowl. If you're not in the mood for diced chicken meat, however, you can order the dish with chicken liver or ground chicken.

Before long our entire table was covered in food: an earthenware ramekin of pearly-pink prawns bathed in garlic butter; translucent, paper-thin slices of cured ham fanned out on the plate; tortilla espanola with nuggets of potato and sweet onion; candy-stripe beets studded with goat cheese and almond slivers; slow-cooked short ribs almost silky in their tenderness; thick chorizo stew.

Another night I bought lobsters, taking time to observe them in the supermarket tank, sussing out the liveliest of the bunch. I instructed the fishmonger to lift them with his plastic rake and tickle their tails like my father taught me, picking the ones that flipped violently and with gusto. I boiled them in a large pot and set out the same small bowls my mother would for the melted butter. When they were cooked through, my father made two hacks in the center of their claws and large incisions down their backs. When we ate lobster, my mother used to boil one for each of us and content herself with a side of corn or a baked potato or a small bowl of rice with banchan and a can of saury, an oily fish she braised in soy sauce. But if we were lucky enough to find some, she'd eat the roe, giddily scooping the plump orange eggs onto her plate.

Fresh seafood stock made from shrimp and crab... It's hot and spicy- and at the same time, mellow and savory! Visions of lush mountains, cool springs and the vast ocean instantly come to mind! She brought out the very best flavors of each and every ingredient she used! "I started with the fresh fish and veggies you had on hand... ... and then simmered them in a stock I made from seafood trimmings until they were tender. Then I added fresh shrimp and let it simmer... seasoning it with a special blend I made from spices, herbs like thyme and bay leaves, and a base of Worcestershire sauce. I snuck in a dash of soy sauce, too, to tie the Japanese ingredients together with the European spices I used. Overall, I think I managed to make a curry sauce that is mellow enough for children to enjoy and yet flavorful enough for adults to love!" "Yum! Good stuff!" "What a surprise! To take the ingredients we use here every day and to create something out of left field like this!" "You got that right! This is a really delicious dish, no two ways about it. But what's got me confused... ... is why it seems to have hit him way harder than any of us! What on earth is going on?!" This... this dish. It... it tastes just like home! It looks like curry, but it ain't! It's gumbo!" Gumbo is a family dish famously served in the American South along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. A thick and spicy stew, it's generally served over steamed rice. At first glance, it closely resembles Japan's take on curry... but the gumbo recipe doesn't call for curry powder. Its defining characteristic is that it uses okra as its thickener. *A possible origin for the word "gumbo" is the Bantu word for okra-Ngombu.*

In summer, most ramen restaurants in Tokyo serve hiyashi chūka, a cold ramen noodle salad topped with strips of ham, cucumber, and omelet; a tart sesame- or soy-based sauce; and sometimes other vegetables, like a tomato wedge or sheets of wakame seaweed. The vegetables are arranged in piles of parallel shreds radiating from the center to the edge of the plate like bicycle spokes, and you toss everything together before eating. It's bracing, ice-cold, addictive- summer food from the days before air conditioning. In Oishinbo: Ramen and Gyōza, a young lifestyle reporter wants to write an article about hiyashi chūka. "I'm not interested in something like hiyashi chūka," says my alter ego Yamaoka. It's a fake Chinese dish made with cheap industrial ingredients, he explains. Later, however, Yamaoka relents. "Cold noodles, cold soup, and cold toppings," he muses. "The idea of trying to make a good dish out of them is a valid one." Good point, jerk. He mills organic wheat into flour and hires a Chinese chef to make the noodles. He buys a farmyard chicken from an old woman to make the stock and seasons it with the finest Japanese vinegar, soy sauce, and sake. Yamaoka's mean old dad Kaibara Yūzan inevitably gets involved and makes an even better hiyashi chūka by substituting the finest Chinese vinegar, soy sauce, and rice wine. When I first read this, I enjoyed trying to follow the heated argument over this dish I'd never even heard of. Yamaoka and Kaibara are in total agreement that hiyashi chūka needs to be made with quality ingredients, but they disagree about what kind of dish it is: Chinese, Japanese, or somewhere in between? Unlike American food, Japanese cuisine has boundary issues.

This texture... you used an aspic." "Bingo! Those golden cubes under the egg... are a chicken aspic! So what's an "aspic"? Easy! It's a jelly made from the chilled broth of gelatin-rich meats and fishes. I simmered chicken wings in bonito broth seasoned with saké and light soy sauce. This drew the chicken's natural savory flavor and gelatin into the broth. I quickly chilled the resulting broth until it gelled, and then cut it into small cubes." "It was the aspic he was making in that enormous pot." "Sprinkle the cubes over piping-hot rice... and the rich chicken aspic will melt and coat the egg curds with a "ploop"!" I see. In other words... the aspic is really a thick, rich and savory chicken soup! The full-bodied and salty flavor of the aspic broth... brings out the soft, mild sweetness of the egg curds perfectly. Not only that, each bite is a heaven of fluffy smoothness. In every way, the aspic is emphasizing and magnifying the deliciousness of the eggs!

I see bacon, green peppers, mushrooms... those are all found in Napolitan Spaghetti. I guess instead of the standard ketchup, he's used curry roux for the sauce? The noodles look similar to fettuccini." "Hm. I'm not seeing anything else that stands out about it. Given how fun and amusing the calzone a minute ago was... ... the impact of this one's a lot more bland and boring..." W-what the heck? Where did this heavy richness come from? It hits like a shockwave straight to the brain! "Chicken and beef stocks for the base... with fennel and green cardamom for fragrance! What an excellent, tongue-tingling curry sauce! It clings well to the broad fettuccini noodles too!" "For extra flavor is that... soy sauce?" "No, it's tamari soy sauce! Tamari soy sauce is richer and less salty than standard soy sauce, with a more full-bodied sweetness to it. Most tamari is made on Japan's eastern seaboard. " "That's not all either! I'm picking up the mellow hints of cheese! But I'm not seeing a single shred of any kind of cheese in here. Where's it hiding?" "Allow me to tell you, sir. First, look at the short edge of a noodle, please." ?! What on earth?! This noodle's got three layers!" "For the outer layers, I kneaded turmeric into the pasta dough. But for the inner layer, I added Parmesan cheese!" "I see! It's the combination of the tamari soy sauce and the parmesan cheese that gives this dish its incredible richness!" "Yeah, but wait a minute! If you go kneading cheese right into the noodles, wouldn't it just melt back out when you boiled them?" No... that's why they're in three layers! With the cheese in the middle, the outer layers prevented it from melting out! The deep, rich curry sauce, underscored with the flavor of tamari soy sauce... ... and the chewy noodles, which hit you with the mellow, robust taste of parmesan cheese with every bite! Many people are familiar with the idea of coating cream cheese in soy sauce... ... but who would have thought parmesan cheese would match this well with tamari soy sauce!

Our neighborhood ramen place was called Aoba. That's a joke. There were actually more than fifty ramen places with in walking distance of our apartment. But this one was our favorite. Aoba makes a wonderful and unusual ramen with a mixture of pork and fish broth. The noodles are firm and chewy, and the pork tender and almost smoky, like ham. I also liked how they gave us a small bowl for sharing with Iris without our even asking. What I really appreciated about this place, however, were two aspects of ramen that I haven't mentioned yet: the eggs and the dipping noodles. After these two, I will stop, but there's so much more to ramen. Would someone please write an English-language book about ramen? Real ramen, not how to cook with Top Ramen noodles? Thanks. (I did find a Japanese-language book called State-of-the-Art Technology of Pork Bone Ramen on Amazon. Wish-listed!) One of the most popular ramen toppings is a soft-boiled egg. Long before sous vide cookery, ramen cooks were slow-cooking eggs to a precise doneness. Eggs for ramen (ajitsuke tamago) are generally marinated in a soy sauce mixture after cooking so the whites turn a little brown and the eggs turn a little sweet and salty. I like it best when an egg is plunked whole into the broth so I can bisect it with my chopsticks and reveal the intensely orange, barely runny yolk. A cool egg moistened with rich broth is alchemy. Forget the noodles; I want a ramen egg with a little broth for breakfast. Finding hot and cold in the same mouthful is another hallmark of Japanese summer food, and many ramen restaurants, including Aoba, feature it in the form of tsukemen, dipping noodles. Tsukemen is deconstructed ramen, a bowl of cold cooked noodles and a smaller bowl of hot, ultra-rich broth and toppings. The goal is to lift a tangle of noodles with your chopsticks and dip them in the bowl of broth on the way to your mouth. This is a crazy way to eat noodles and, unless you've been inculcated with the principles of noodle-slurping physics from birth, a great way to ruin your clothes.

Take one of the dishes you will be eating tonight, fritto misto. The old butcher who sold me the meat was most insistent that it should be cooked the old way---so brains, for example, are always poached in vegetables, then left to cool before being sliced and deep-fried in batter. But then you think, this batter is not so different from Japanese tempura, and tempura can be served with a sweet chile and soy dipping sauce, so why not make an Italian version of that, perhaps with balsamic vinegar from Modena instead of soy, and see what happens

She took a knifeful of the butter clinging to the silver paper, so soft it offered virtually no resistance, and dropped it into the holes in the potatoes' skins. It was absorbed mercilessly fast by the granules inside, which soon took on a yellow hue. Rika sprinkled on a few drops of soy sauce, then pressed her hands together. 'Itadakimasu,' she said, and tucked in to the potatoes with a fork. The hot potatoes engorged with butter crumbled apart in her mouth and the steam rose up to the back of her throat. Inside her mouth, the mixture transformed into a smooth-textured cream, heavy and rich, which spread out hotly across her tongue. The Sado was relatively light in its taste, but had the same warmth and body as the other dairy products she'd sampled in Niigata. The soy sauce drew out the sweetness and texture of the potatoes, and the hand with which Rika held her fork moved incessantly. The next thing she knew, the two potatoes had disappeared, along with almost all of the butter. She lay down, a delicious sated feeling in her stomach. She had managed to soothe herself, and of that she felt proud.

For my first home-cooked meal in Tokyo, I took an assortment of beautiful Japanese ingredients and did what came naturally: I made Chinese food. I stir-fried some beautifully marbled kurobuta (Berkshire breed) pork with bok choy, ginger, and leeks, sauced it with soy sauce, mirin, and vinegar, and served it over rice, sprinkled with shichimi tōgarashi seven-spice mixture. This seemed like a reasonable act of Japanese-Chinese fusion. I made some quick-pickled cucumbers on the side. This was before we discovered that anything you do to a Japanese cucumber diminishes it. I should have known this; once I interviewed a Japanese-American farmer who grows more than a hundred Asian vegetables in Washington state. Naturally, I asked him about his personal favorite. Cucumber, he said. "How do you prepare it?" I asked. "Slice and eat." The whole meal was about the same as something I'd make at home, but I cooked it in Japan. It was like the SpongeBob SquarePants episode where SpongeBob has to work the night shift at the Krusty Krab, and he keeps saying things like, "I'm chopping lettuce... at night!" I was slicing cucumbers... in Tokyo!

I can smell the pungent scent of garlic and soy sauce coming from the eggs... ... almost as if they had been grilled! But... the eggs are still raw! How could he...? It was then! When he slid the eggs across the heated oil in the skillet in that quick flip. Was that enough to infuse the raw egg with all the flavor of the seasonings?!" "?! Wait, you can do that?" "Heck no! If you're even the slightest bit too slow, you end up with a skillet full of half-cooked scrambled eggs." "I've got about one second to cram all that flavor into the raw egg. And to do that, cheapo bland eggs are a better choice than high-end eggs with a strong flavor. Can you even imagine it? All that thick, raw egg... ... practically bursting with the flavor of sesame oil, garlic, and roasted soy sauce. Go on, try a bite. Then you'll understand. Don't let it get cold. DIG IN." The scent of garlic and roasted spring onion... So heavy, it's just this side of being so much you could choke. The thickness of it all strokes the tongue. With each bite... ... the roasted soy sauce mixes with the rice... ... while the raw egg... ...slides slickly down the throat.

By the way, there's one more benefit to freezing eggs... that I neglected to tell you earlier. Y'see... by freezing them, the robust flavor of the yolks gets even richer!" "The flavor of the yolk... changes?!" "When you freeze a chicken egg, its proteins condense into a jelly... which gives it a tender and creamy consistency when you cook it. The flavor of the yolk in particular becomes deep and rich! Basically, freezing the egg is the biggest reason this tempura rice bowl is as delicious as it is! Plus, I made sure to pour on plenty of Yukihira Family Restaurant's special savory and salty house sauce! It's soy sauce and mirin added to bonito stock. I made sure this batch was extra rich! There's no way it wouldn't par perfectly with the rice and egg! The thing is, luxury-brand eggs all tend to have strong flavors from the get-go. Using them would make the entire rice bowl taste heavy and cloying." "Wait. Is that why...?!" "Yep! Since the sauce I use is thick and heavy, and freezing eggs makes their flavor richer... ... a blander egg is the best choice!" "Oh! He had a legitimate reason for using those cheap eggs!" "That's Soma for you!

The mochi gradually began to take on color and swell out. When their skin seared with brown grill marks started to split open, revealing glimpses of their sparkling white insides, Rika took them out of the toaster. She perched a generous wedge of butter on top of each, and prepared the sugared soy sauce in a small dish. Watching as the molten butter flowed gently over both the burnished surface and the soft white interior, her stomach rumbled. Though she knew it was bad manners to eat standing up, she stuffed one of the mochi in her mouth right there at the counter. The heady aroma that rose up through her nose, the crispiness of the skin as it broke open beneath her teeth, the silkiness of the gooey insides that spread themselves flat across every bit of flesh in her mouth and refused to let go... The hot butter fused the sugar and soy sauce together, clinging to the sweet, soft, shapeless mass in her mouth, swimming around its outside as though to ascertain its contours. The grease of the butter melded with the grit of the sugar and the pungent soy sauce. By the time she'd finished chewing, the roots of her teeth were trembling pleasurably.

This hollandaise sauce that's been generously drizzled over the whole dish... I can taste yuzu kosho and soy sauce in it. That's a decidedly Japanese twist on a typically very European sauce! The heavy savoriness of thick sliced pork grilled to a crusty golden brown... ... balances perfectly with the briskly tart Shio Konbu seaweed and shiso leaves mixed into the rice! Then there's the centerpiece of his dish, the tempura egg! It's crispy on the outside and delectably soft and gooey on the inside! Instead of freezing it, he must have poached the egg before deep-frying it this time! The whites are unbelievably tender, and the soft-boiled yolk is so creamy you might not believed it's cooked! To batter and deep-fry a poached egg that delicate without crushing it... ... you'd need skill and a touch bordering on the superhuman! Just how much has he trained?! How hard has he practiced... ... to make this single dish?! "Sure does take you back, doesn't it? This Eggs Benedict. I switched the muffin out for some seasoned rice, a family-restaurant staple. Then there's the poached egg that I deep-fried. Pork chops for the bacon. Japanese-style hollandaise sauce.

These are some of my favorite smells: toasting bagel, freshly cut figs, the bergamot in good Earl Grey tea, a jar of whole soybeans slowly turning beneath a tropical sun. You'd expect the latter to smell salty, meaty, flaccid- like what you'd smell if you unscrewed the red cap of the bottle on a table in your neighborhood Chinese restaurant and stuck your nose in as far as it would go. But real, fermenting soybeans smell nothing like sauce in a plastic bottle. Tangy and pungent, like rising bread or wet earth, these soybeans smell of history, of life, of tiny, patient movements, unseen by the naked eye.

The salmon is perfectly cooked. The trace amounts of sugar contained in the wheat flour have combined with the butter in a chemical reaction that's creating a wonderful fragrance. It was all fried together for precisely the right amount of time to create a superb Meunière." "The squid liver was quickly sautéed in a dollop of butter as well, taking a bite of that with the Meunière is sublime! The butter's flavor gently wraps around the salty and pleasantly bitter taste of the liver, giving it a beautifully mellow body." "He added pomegranate seeds and tonburi to the soy sauce marinated roe! Those three completely disparate flavors meld into a seamless whole thanks to butter! Not only does it have an amusing texture, the roe doesn't have its typical greasiness either!" *Tonburi, also called land caviar, is the seeds of the summer cypress plant. It's texture is similar to caviar.* He's used mounds of butter in so many different facets of the dish, but it somehow hasn't made the flavor heavy at all. The secret to that lies in the bed of special sushi rice hidden underneath the seafood! "This sushi rice was made not with vinegar but with orange juice and lemon juice!" "So that's why he was squeezing that mountain of oranges!"

It goes without saying that the meat is tender... ... but the generous helping of minced onions on top just whets the appetite further! And this full-bodied flavor... red wine? After searing the steak, he must have added red wine to the remaining meat juices and caramelized the onions in the resulting sauce!" "Not only that, the sauce was beautifully thickened with potato starch! It wraps around both the meat and the rice so perfectly, it's amazing!" "And tying it all together is the flavor of scorched soy sauce! Even char was used as a seasoning to deepen the flavor! He made this special, unforgettable sauce building upon the onions that are so critical to a true Chaliapin Steak!" "Both the meat and the sauce have strong, solid flavors... yet the more I eat, the hungrier I get. In fact, it almost feels like I could eat this bowl endlessly! Why? Is there some other secret hidden in this dish?" "Yep! That trick is in the rice. I added in some handmade pickled-plum mix to it. It's crisp plum-seasoned rice!" "Aha! So that's it! That brisk aftertaste that encourages another bite is pickled plum!" The tender, fragrant steak... the beautifully thickened, perfect sauce... and the fresh, tartly flavored plum-seasoned rice.

It's a parade of flawless tuna deliciousness! But by far, the most dangerous piece... is the one that looks like a bomb of pure tuna goodness, the straw-grilled, seared noten sushi! The noten- a cut of meat from the top of the tuna's head- is one of the priciest cuts. Extravagantly fatty, its richness melds with the fragrant searing into a powerful duo! Yet there isn't the first hint of fishiness! Searing it using aromatic straw burned it away, leaving only pure savory flavor behind to please both nose and palate!" "His Trace was dead-on. Looks like it really will be his arrangements on that Gunkan Maki that decide this card." "I can't even begin to guess what it tastes like." What's this on top of the minced tuna and leeks?! Is it... meringue?! "Aah! Now I see! I know what Subaru Mimasaka took out at that moment! It was the same smoked soy sauce he passed to Kuga!" The mellow, full-bodied aroma of smoked soy sauce has seeped into every crevice of the minced tuna... ... while the differing textures of the meringue and the negitoro create deeper, more complex layers to the flavor! If I were to name it, I would call it the "Ultimate Negitoro Eggs-over-Rice Gunkan Sushi"! Minced tuna rib meat mixed with leeks and smoked soy sauce, topped with quail-egg yolk

FOOD Adobo (uh-doh-boh)--- Considered the Philippines' national dish, it's any food cooked with soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, and black peppercorns (though there are many regional and personal variations) Bibingka (bih-bing-kah)--- Lightly sweetened rice cake, commonly consumed around Christmas. There are many varieties, but the most common is baked or grilled in a banana leaf-lined mold and topped with sliced duck eggs, butter, sugar, and/or coconut. Buko (boo-koh)--- Young coconut Champorado (chahm-puh-rah-doh)--- Sweet chocolate rice porridge Lambanog (lahm-bah-nohg)--- Filipino coconut liquor Lumpia (loom-pyah)--- Filipino spring rolls (many variations) Matamis na bao (mah-tah-mees nah bah-oh)--- Coconut jam (also known as minatamis na bao) Pandan (pahn-dahn)--- Tropical plant whose fragrant leaves are commonly used as a flavoring in Southeast Asia. Often described as a grassy vanilla flavor with a hint of coconut. Pandesal (pahn deh sahl)--- Lightly sweetened Filipino rolls topped with breadcrumbs (also written pan de sal) Patis (pah-tees)--- Fish sauce Pinipig (pih-nee-pig)--- Young glutinous rice that's been pounded flat, then toasted. Looks similar to Rice Krispies. Salabat (sah-lah-baht)--- Filipino ginger tea Tuyo (too-yoh)--- Dried, salted fish (usually herring) Ube (oo-beh)--- Purple yam

Inside, the house was filled with people dressed in varying interpretations of the party's "Roaring Twenties" theme- chosen to commemorate the end of Kat's own roaring twenties. There were a couple of flapper dresses and Louise Brooks wigs, but the majority of the crowd was simply dressed up: girls in sequins, guys in blazers and jeans. They spilled out of the living room and onto the patio and garden surrounding the swimming pool; they clustered around the outdoor bar and the long table laden with finger foods: dumplings in bamboo steamer baskets, assorted sushi rolls, chicken satay made onsite by a hired cook- a wizened Malay man who'd brought his own mini grill and pandan-leaf fan.

crispy baked wontons Brianna Shade | BEAVERTON, OREGON These quick, versatile wontons are great for a crunchy afternoon snack or paired with a bowl of soothing soup on a cold day. I usually make a large batch, freeze half on a floured cookie sheet, then store them in an air-tight container for a fast bite. 1/2 pound ground pork 1/2 pound extra-lean ground turkey 1 small onion, chopped 1 can (8 ounces) sliced water chestnuts, drained and chopped 1/3 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce 1/4 cup egg substitute 1-1/2 teaspoons ground ginger 1 package (12 ounces) wonton wrappers Cooking spray Sweet-and-sour sauce, optional In a large skillet, cook the pork, turkey and onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink; drain. Transfer to a large bowl. Stir in the water chestnuts, soy sauce, egg substitute and ginger. Position a wonton wrapper with one point toward you. (Keep remaining wrappers covered with a damp paper towel until ready to use.) Place 2 heaping teaspoons of filling in the center of wrapper. Fold bottom corner over filling; fold sides toward center over filling. Roll toward the remaining point. Moisten top corner with water; press to seal. Repeat with remaining wrappers and filling. Place on baking sheets coated with cooking spray; lightly coat wontons with additional cooking spray. Bake at 400° for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown, turning once. Serve warm with sweet-and-sour sauce if desired.

What a wallop of rich, full-bodied flavor! Tangy spiciness is flooding in my mouth! This ain't no sweet tea cake! Ankimo?! It's filled with ankimo monkfish liver!" "Yep! You've got it in one. This here is a special little dish I made... I dub it THE ANKIMONAKA GUTS SANDWICH!" "Wait a minute. There were no rice wafer shells or batter in the ingredient trucks! How could you make a monaka sandwich?!" "Easy enough to make your own with a little cornstarch and shiratama rice flour. Squeeze some batter between two muffin molds- like these- bake them, and voilà! You have your own instant rice wafers. It's a pretty delicate operation, though, so you've gotta be patient and careful. As for the filling, I started out by trimming and deveining some monkfish liver, then I salted it to remove its fishiness. Next, I whipped up a broth of bonito stock seasoned with soy sauce, sake and sugar and then simmered the liver. I pressed it through a strainer until it was a nice, smooth paste and mixed in my handmade Shichimi red pepper blend. After that, all that was left was to stuff the rice wafer shells with it and serve!" Light, crispy wafers and thick, sticky monkfish-liver paste! Those two and the mountain yam he mixed in with them make for marvelously contrasting textures! And their flavors! The sharp spiciness spreads its addicting tingle through my entire mouth! He struck the perfect balance between the savory umami of the bonito stock and the salty soy sauce too... Which makes the tangy spiciness of his red pepper blend stand out all the more!

But most of all, where did this deeply complex sweetness come from?! It's far too nuanced to be solely brown sugar!" "Oh, the answer to that is in the flavoring I used." "Soy sauce?!" "Oh my gosh, she added soy sauce to a dessert?!" "I used it at the very end of the recipe. To make the whipped-cream filling, I used heavy cream, vanilla extract, light brown sugar and a dash of soy sauce. Once the cakes were baked, I spread the whipped cream on top, rolled them up and chilled them in the fridge for a few minutes. All of that made the brown sugar in the cake both taste and look even cuter than it did before." "Aah, I see. The concept is similar to that of salted caramels. Add salt to something sweet.. ... and by comparison the sweetness will stand out on the tongue even more strongly. She's created a new and unique dessert topping- Soy Sauce Whipped Cream!" "Soy sauce whipped cream, eh? I see! So that's how it works!" Since it isn't as refined as white sugar, brown sugar retains trace amounts of minerals, like iron and sodium. The unique layered flavor these minerals give to it matches beautifully with the salty body of soy sauce! "Without brown sugar as the main component, this exquisite deliciousness would not be possible!" "It tastes even yummier if you try some of the various fruits in between each bite of cake. The candy sculptures are totally edible too. If you break one up into crumbs and crunch on it while taking a bite of the cake, it's super yummy." How wonderfully surprising! Each and every bite... ... is an invitation to a land of dreams!

Because this tea kaiseki would be served so soon after breakfast, it would be considerably smaller than a traditional one. As a result, Stephen had decided to serve each mini tea kaiseki in a round stacking bento box, which looked like two miso soup bowls whose rims had been glued together. After lifting off the top dome-shaped cover the women would behold a little round tray sporting a tangle of raw squid strips and blanched scallions bound in a tahini-miso sauce pepped up with mustard. Underneath this seafood "salad" they would find a slightly deeper "tray" packed with pearly white rice garnished with a pink salted cherry blossom. Finally, under the rice would be their soup bowl containing the wanmori, the apex of the tea kaiseki. Inside the dashi base we had placed a large ball of fu (wheat gluten) shaped and colored to resemble a peach. Spongy and soft, it had a savory center of ground duck and sweet lily bulb. A cluster of fresh spinach leaves, to symbolize the budding of spring, accented the "peach," along with a shiitake mushroom cap simmered in mirin, sake, and soy. When the women had finished their meals, we served them tiny pink azuki bean paste sweets. David whipped them a bowl of thick green tea. For the dry sweets eaten before his thin tea, we served them flower-shaped refined sugar candies tinted pink. After all the women had left, Stephen, his helper, Mark, and I sat down to enjoy our own "Girl's Day" meal. And even though I was sitting in the corner of Stephen's dish-strewn kitchen in my T-shirt and rumpled khakis, that soft peach dumpling really did taste feminine and delicate.

The broth... it's made with a mix of soy milk and charred miso. But how could you get a flavor this robust with just those?" "I mixed in grated ebi taro root. It's a strongly flavored tuber that mashes easily into a smooth, thick paste. Adding that to the broth gave it a creamy texture and a richer flavor." "Weird. All of a sudden I'm starting to feel warm." "That's the chili oil and grated raw garlic and ginger taking effect. The soy milk took the edge off of the spicy bite... so now it just gently warms the body without burning the tongue." "The rest of the ingredients are also a parade of detailed work. Thin slices of lotus root and burdock deep-fried to a crispy golden brown. Chunky strips of carrot and turnip grilled over an open flame until lightly charred and then seasoned with just a little rock salt to bring out their natural sweetness. Like a French buffet, each side ingredient is cooked in exactly the best way to bring out its full flavor! But the keystone to it all... ... is the TEMPEH!" TEMPEH Originating in Indonesia, tempeh is made of soybeans fermented into a cake form. Soybeans are lightly cooked and then wrapped in either banana or hibiscus leaves. When stored, the naturally occurring bacteria in the leaves causes the soybeans to ferment into tempeh. Traditional food with a history over four hundred years long, tempeh is well-known and often used in Indonesian cuisine. "Mm! Wow! It's really light, yet really filling too! Like fried rice." "It has a texture a lot like that of a burger patty, so vegetarians and people on macrobiotic diets use it a lot as a meat substitute. I broiled these teriyaki style in a mix of soy sauce and sake.

Cool green foods became the natural choice in restaurants and teahouses. Matcha, the powdered green tea used for the tea ceremony, flavored ice cream, jewel-like gelatin cubes, and sweet whipped cream eaten in parfaits and layered with grapes, pineapple chunks, and chewy white mochi balls. There were Japanese-style snow cones, huge hills of shaved ice drizzled with green tea syrup, along with green tea-flavored mousse and tea-tainted sponge cake. Matcha flavored savory items too, including green tea noodles served hot in dashi soup, as well as chilled and heaped on a bamboo draining mat with a cold dipping sauce of dashi, mirin, and soy. There was green tea-flavored wheat gluten and the traditional Kyoto-style dish of white rice topped with thin petals of sashimi that you "cooked" at the table by drenching it with brewed green tea from a tiny teapot.

A soup dumpling is a little marvel of engineering. Called xiao long bao in Chinese, shōronpō in Japanese, and "soupies" by Iris, soup dumplings consist of silky dough wrapped around a minced pork or crab filling. The filling is mixed with chilled gelatinous broth which turns back into soup when the dumplings are steamed. Eating a soup dumpling requires practice. Pop the whole thing in your mouth and fry your tongue; bite it in the wrong place and watch the soup dribble onto your lap. The reason I thought about chocolate baklava is because Mago-chan pan-fries its soup dumplings. A steamed soup dumpling is perfect just the way it is. Must we pan-fry everything? Based on the available evidence, the answer is yes. Pan-fried soup dumplings are bigger and heartier than the steamed variety and more plump with hot soup. No, that's too understated. I'm exploding with love and soup and I have to tell the world: pan-fried soupies are amazing. The dumplings are served in groups of four, just enough for lunch for one adult or a growing eight-year-old. They're topped with a sprinkle of sesame and scallion. You can mix up a dipping sauce from the dispensers of soy sauce, black vinegar, and chile oil at the table, but I found it unnecessary. Like a slice of pizza, a pan-fried soup dumpling is a complete experience wrapped in dough. Lift a dumpling with your spoon, poke it with a chopstick, press your lips to the puncture wound, and slurp out the soup. (This will come in handy if I'm ever bitten by a soup snake.) No matter how much you extract, there always seems to be a little more broth pooling within as you eat your way through the meaty filling and crispy underside. Then you get to start again, until, too soon, your dumplings are gone.

We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface. The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin- a surf-and-turf to end all others. The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. "From the sixteenth century," he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a ripple wave of crunch. The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below. A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before. The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the white fashioned from grated daikon.

The moment I put it in my mouth and bit down... ... an exquisite and entirely unexpected flavor exploded in my mouth! It burst across my tongue, rushed up through my nose... ... and rose all the way up to my brain!" "No! It can't be!" "How is that possible?! Anyone with eyes can see there's nothing special to that dish! Its fragrance was entirely inferior to Asahi's dish from the get-go!" "That there. That's what it is. I knew something wasn't right." "Asahi?" "Something felt off the instant the cloche was removed. His dish is fried rice. It uses tons of butter, soy sauce and spices. Yet it hardly had any aroma!" "Good catch. The secret is in one of the five grand cuisine dishes I melded together... A slightly atypical take on the French Oeuf Mayonnaise. ." "Ouef Mayonnaise, or eggs and mayonnaise, is an appetizer you can find in any French bistro. Hard-boiled eggs are sliced, coated with a house-blend mayo and garnished with vegetables. Though, in your dish, I can tell you chose very soft-boiled eggs instead. Hm. Very interesting, Soma Yukihira. He took those soft-boiled eggs and some homemade mayo and blended them into a sauce...... which he then poured over his steamed rice and tossed until each and every grain was coated, its flavor sealed inside! To cook them so that each individual grain is completely covered... ... takes incredibly fast and precise wok handling over extremely high heat! No average chef could manage that feat!" " Whaaa?! Ah! It's so thin I didn't notice it at first glance, but there it is, a very slight glaze! That makes each of these grains of rice a miniature, self-contained Omurice! The moment you bite into them, that eggy coating is broken... ... releasing all the flavors and aromas of the dish onto your palate in one explosive rush!" No wonder! That's what entranced the judges. That sudden, powerful explosion of flavor! "Yep! Even when it's served, my dish still hides its fangs. Only when you bite into it does it bite back with all it's got. I call it my Odorless Fried Rice.

Thick and creamy egg, fragrant roast quail... and the rice! It all makes such a hearty, satisfying combination! Wait, something just crunched? "See, there are five parts to a good chicken-and-egg rice bowl. Chicken... eggs... rice... onions... and warishita. *Warishita is a sauce made from a combination of broth, soy sauce and sugar.* "I seared the quail in oil before putting it in the oven to roast. That made the skin nice and crispy... while leaving the meat inside tender and juicy. For the eggs, I seasoned them with salt and a generous pinch of black pepper to give them some bite and then added cream to make them thick and creamy! It's the creaminess of the soft-boiled egg that makes or breaks a good chicken-and-egg bowl, y'know. Some milk made the risotto extra creamy. I then mixed in onions as well as ground chicken that was browned in butter. I used the Suer technique on the onions. That should have given some body to their natural sweetness. For the sauce, I sweetened some Madeira wine with sugar and honey and then added a dash of soy sauce. Like warishita in a regular chicken-and-egg rice bowl, this sauce ties all the parts of the dish together. Try it with the poached egg. It's seriously delicious! Basically I took the idea of a Japanese chicken-and-egg rice bowl... ... and rebuilt it using only French techniques!" "Yukihira! I wanna try it too!" "Oh, uh, sorry. I only made that one." "Awww! You've gotta make one for me someday!" "There is one thing I still don't understand. When you stuff a bird, out of necessity the filling has to remain firm to stay in place. Something soft and creamy like risotto should have fallen right back out! "How did you make this filling work?!" "I know! The crunch!" "Yep! It's cabbage! I quickly blanched a cabbage leaf, wrapped the risotto in it... ... and then stuffed it inside the quail!" "Aha! Just like during the Camp Shokugeph!" It's the same idea behind the Chou Farci Shinomiya made! The cabbage leaf is blanched perfectly too. He brought out just enough sweetness while still retaining its crispy texture. And it's that very sweetness that softly ties the fragrant quail meat together with the creamy richness of the risotto filling!

In theory, toppings can include almost anything, but 95 percent of the ramen you consume in Japan will be topped with chashu, Chinese-style roasted pork. In a perfect world, that means luscious slices of marinated belly or shoulder, carefully basted over a low temperature until the fat has rendered and the meat collapses with a hard stare. Beyond the pork, the only other sure bet in a bowl of ramen is negi, thinly sliced green onion, little islands of allium sting in a sea of richness. Pickled bamboo shoots (menma), sheets of nori, bean sprouts, fish cake, raw garlic, and soy-soaked eggs are common constituents, but of course there is a whole world of outlier ingredients that make it into more esoteric bowls, which we'll get into later. While shape and size will vary depending on region and style, ramen noodles all share one thing in common: alkaline salts. Called kansui in Japanese, alkaline salts are what give the noodles a yellow tint and allow them to stand up to the blistering heat of the soup without degrading into a gummy mass. In fact, in the sprawling ecosystem of noodle soups, it may be the alkaline noodle alone that unites the ramen universe: "If it doesn't have kansui, it's not ramen," Kamimura says. Noodles and toppings are paramount in the ramen formula, but the broth is undoubtedly the soul of the bowl, there to unite the disparate tastes and textures at work in the dish. This is where a ramen chef makes his name. Broth can be made from an encyclopedia of flora and fauna: chicken, pork, fish, mushrooms, root vegetables, herbs, spices. Ramen broth isn't about nuance; it's about impact, which is why making most soup involves high heat, long cooking times, and giant heaps of chicken bones, pork bones, or both. Tare is the flavor base that anchors each bowl, that special potion- usually just an ounce or two of concentrated liquid- that bends ramen into one camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you'll find tare made with up to two dozen ingredients, an apothecary's stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite.

Just as the two of them finished their plump white asparagus spears in white sauce, they were served a selection of grilled vegetables. To think that onions could become so sweet and rich simply by grilling them! Rika had never been a fan of shishito peppers, but the ones on the plate in front of her were fragrant, with a gentle taste. Before she knew it, she'd devoured many more vegetables than she had the other night in that Japanese bistro, just a few dozen meters from here. She was fairly sure that the red meat being cooked on a section of the hotplate not far from where they were sitting was for them. Eventually, clear juice began oozing from its surface. Even the smell of the melting fat was appealing and mild--- not aggressive or meaty. She watched transfixed as the red turned to pale pink, as the white fat grew translucent. The meat was cut up and served to them in pieces. Rika imagined it would be steaming hot, but when she brought one of the chunks to her lips, she found it to be just the right temperature. The comfort it brought was that of a warm, affectionate tongue entering her mouth. When she bit into the aromatic seared surface of the meat, the juice from the moist, rare sections came seeping out, making the lining of her cheeks tremble. A blood-colored filament flickered across her vision. 'Apparently the garlic-butter rice here is truly out of this world. They use plenty of butter, as well as the leftover meat juices.' Rika was looking at the rice cooking on the hotplate as she spoke. Cloaked in their mantle of amber butter, the grains shimmied and danced before her eyes. There was a sizzle as the chef poured on some soy sauce, and then the short, spirited tango was over. Bowls of the glistening bronze rice appeared before them. Swathed in meat juice and butter, each and every grain shone potently. The rich, heady aroma of the soy sauce stoked Rika's appetite. The garlic singed to a deep brown unleashed a perilous bitterness and astringency across her palate. Slippery with fat, the rice slid across the plane of her tongue and down her throat. The meat she'd eaten before had been fantastically flavorsome, but this rice that had absorbed its juices was truly formidable in its taste. With each movement of her jaw, she felt a new lease of power surging up her body. The sense of fullness brought on a comfortable lethargy, and Rika felt she could happily drop off right at that moment.

This rich pork flavor, which lands on the tongue with a thump... It's Chinese Dongpo Pork! He seasoned pork belly with a blend of spices and let it marinate thoroughly... ... before finely dicing it and mixing it into the fried rice!" "What? Dongpo Pork prepared this fast?! No way! He didn't have nearly enough time to simmer the pork belly!" "Heh heh. Actually, there's a little trick to that. I simmered it in sparkling water instead of tap water. The carbon dioxide that gives sparkling water its carbonation helps break down the fibers in meat. Using this, you can tenderize a piece of meat in less than half the normal time!" "That isn't the only protein in this dish. I can taste the seafood from an Acqua Pazza too!" "And these green beans... it's the Indian dish Poriyal! Diced green beans and shredded coconut fried in oil with chilies and mustard seeds... it has a wonderfully spicy kick!" "He also used the distinctly French Mirepoix to gently accentuate the sweetness of the vegetables. So many different delicious flavors... ... all clashing and sparking in my mouth! But the biggest key to this dish, and the core of its amazing deliciousness... ... is the rice!" "Hmph. Well, of course it is. The dish is fried rice. If the rice isn't the centerpiece, it isn't a..." "I see. His dish is fried rice while simultaneously being something other than fried rice. A rice lightly fried in butter before being steamed in some variety of soup stock... In other words, it's actually closer to that famous staple from Turkish cuisine- a Pilaf! In fact, it's believed the word "pilaf" actually comes from the Turkish word pilav. To think he built the foundation of his dish on pilaf of all things!" "Heh heh heh! Yep, that's right! Man, I've learned so much since I started going to Totsuki." "Mm, I see! When you finished the dish, you didn't fry it in oil! That's why it still tastes so light, despite the large volume and variety of additional ingredients. I could easily tuck away this entire plate! Still... I'm surprised at how distinct each grain of rice is. If it was in fact steamed in stock, you'd think it'd be mushier." "Ooh, you've got a discerning tongue, sir! See, when I steamed the rice... ... I did it in a Donabe ceramic pot instead of a rice cooker!" Ah! No wonder! A Donabe warms slowly, but once it's hot, it can hold high temperatures for a long time! It heats the rice evenly, holding a steady temperature throughout the steaming process to steam off all excess water. To think he'd apply a technique for sticky rice to a pilaf instead! With Turkish pilaf as his cornerstone... ... he added super-savory Dongpo pork, a Chinese dish... ... whitefish and clams from an Italian Acqua Pazza... ... spicy Indian green bean and red chili Poriyal... ... and for the French component, Mirepoix and Oeuf Mayonnaise as a topping! *Ouef is the French word for "egg."* By combining those five dishes into one, he has created an extremely unique take on fried rice! " "Hold it! Wait one dang minute! After listening to your entire spiel... ... it sounds to me like all he did was mix a bunch of dishes together and call it a day! There's no way that mishmash of a dish could meet the lofty standards of the BLUE! It can't nearly be gourmet enough!" "Oh, but it is. For one, he steamed the pilaf in the broth from the Acqua Pazza... ... creating a solid foundation that ties together the savory elements of all the disparate ingredients! The spiciness of the Poriyal could have destabilized the entire flavor structure... ... but by balancing it out with the mellow body of butter and soy sauce, he turned the Poriyal's sharp bite into a pleasing tingle!

The tofu pocket is soaked with butter, every bite of it drenching the lips... ... sending rich waves gushing through the mouth. Just one taste is enough to seep both tongue and mind in a thick flood of butter! "The tofu pocket is so juicy it's nearly dripping, yet it hasn't drowned the filling at all. The rice is delectably fluffy and delicate, done in true pilaf style, with the grains separate, tender and not remotely sticky. Simmered in fragrant chicken broth, the prawns give it a delightful crunch, while ample salt and pepper boost both its flavor and aroma!" "The whole dish is strongly flavored, but it isn't the least bit heavy or sticky. The deliciousness of every ingredient, wrapped in a cloak of rich butter, wells up with each bite like a gushing, savory spring! How on earth did you manage to create this powerful a flavor?!" "Well, first I sautéed the rice for the pilaf without washing it- one of the major rules of pilafs! If you wash all the starch off the rice, the grains get crumbly and the whole thing can wind up tasting tacky instead of tender. Then I thoroughly rinsed the tofu pockets with hot water to wash off the extra oil so they'd soak up the seasonings better. But the biggest secret to the whole thing... ... was my specially made Mochi White Sauce! Normal white sauce is made with lots of milk, butter and flour, making it really thick and heavy. But I made mine using only soy milk and mochi, so it's still rich and creamy without the slightest hint of greasiness. In addition, I sprinkled a blend of several cheeses on top of everything when I put it in the oven to toast. They added some nice hints of mellow saltiness to the dish without making it too heavy! Basically, I shoved all the tasty things I could think of into my dish... ... pushing the rich, savory flavor as hard as I could until it was just shy of too much... and this is the result!" Some ingredients meld with the butter's richness into mellow deliciousness... ... while others, sautéed in butter, have become beautifully savory and aromatic. Into each of these little inari sushi pockets has gone an immense amount of work across uncountable steps and stages. Undaunted by Mr. Saito's brilliant dish, gleaming with the fierce goodness of seafood... each individual ingredient is loudly and proudly declaring its own unique deliciousness!

Then eliminate hidden sources by reading labels Eliminate hidden sources of grains by avoiding the processed foods that fill the inner aisles of the grocery store. Almost all of these are thickened, flavored, or textured with grain products, or grains are added as cheap filler and/or appetite stimulants. Living without grains means avoiding foods that you never thought contained grains, such as seasoning mixes bulked up with cornstarch, canned and dry soup mixes with wheat flour, Twizzlers, soy sauce, frozen dinners with wheat-containing gravy and muffins, and all breakfast cereals, hot and cold. (You will find lists of the hidden aliases for wheat and corn, in particular, that can be found in so many processed foods in Appendix B.)

Home Cooking: The Comforts of Old Family Favorites." Easy. Baked macaroni and cheese with crunchy bread crumbs on top; simple mashed potatoes with no garlic and lots of cream and butter; meatloaf with sage and a sweet tomato sauce topping. Not that I experienced these things in my house growing up, but these are the foods everyone thinks of as old family favorites, only improved. If nothing else, my job is to create a dreamlike state for readers in which they feel that everything will be all right if only they find just the right recipe to bring their kids back to the table, seduce their husbands into loving them again, making their friends and neighbors envious. I'm tapping my keyboard, thinking, what else?, when it hits me like a soft thud in the chest. I want to write about my family's favorites, the strange foods that comforted us in tense moments around the dinner table. Mom's Midwestern "hot dish": layers of browned hamburger, canned vegetable soup, canned sliced potatoes, topped with canned cream of mushroom soup. I haven't tasted it in years. Her lime Jell-O salad with cottage cheese, walnuts, and canned pineapple, her potato salad with French dressing instead of mayo. I have a craving, too, for Dad's grilling marinade. "Shecret Shauce" he called it in those rare moments of levity when he'd perform the one culinary task he was willing to do. I'd lean shyly against the counter and watch as he poured ingredients into a rectangular cake pan. Vegetable oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, salt and pepper, and then he'd finish it off with the secret ingredient: a can of fruit cocktail. Somehow the sweetness of the syrup was perfect against the salty soy and the biting garlic. Everything he cooked on the grill, save hamburgers and hot dogs, first bathed in this marinade overnight in the refrigerator. Rump roasts, pork chops, chicken legs all seemed more exotic this way, and dinner guests raved at Dad's genius on the grill. They were never the wiser to the secret of his sauce because the fruit bits had been safely washed into the garbage disposal.

I've got it! Shecret Shauce! We can bottle it and sell it at farmers' markets or on the Internet!" We both laugh at her, but then Anne's face grows thoughtful. "It was pretty good stuff," she says. "Hey, Eleanor, what would happen if we blended it, so no one knew it was fruit cocktail? Then we wouldn't even have to give away the shecret." I get up and walk to Benny's cupboard, pull out ingredients: vegetable oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and one can of fruit cocktail. The only thing I can blend it in is Benny's old Osterizer, which actually works better than any appliance I've got. The finished product is a beautiful peach color, silky in texture, and tastes almost perfect. "All it needs is a bit of sweet chili sauce to perk it up," I say. "Here, taste." Who knows? A family dynasty might have been born from the ashes of our fathers.

We did go to a skeezy yakitori place, however, which is where Iris discovered bonjiri, chicken tail, the fattest, juiciest bit of the chicken, and the best to grill on a stick and brush with sweetened soy sauce.

True, there's an aisle devoted to foreign foods, and then there are familiar foods that have been through the Japanese filter and emerged a little bit mutated. Take breakfast cereal. You'll find familiar American brands such as Kellogg's, but often without English words anywhere on the box. One of the most popular Kellogg's cereals in Japan is Brown Rice Flakes. They're quite good, and the back-of-the-box recipes include cold tofu salad and the savory pancake okonomiyaki, each topped with a flurry of crispy rice flakes. Iris and I got mildly addicted to a Japanese brand of dark chocolate cornflakes, the only chocolate cereal I've ever eaten that actually tastes like chocolate. (Believe me, I've tried them all.) Stocking my pantry at Life Supermarket was fantastically simple and inexpensive. I bought soy sauce, mirin, rice vinegar, rice, salt, and sugar. (I was standing right in front of the salt when I asked where to find it This happens to me every time I ask for help finding any item in any store.) Total outlay: about $15, and most of that was for the rice. Japan is an unabashed rice protectionist, levying prohibitive tariffs on imported rice. As a result, supermarket rice is domestic, high quality, and very expensive. There were many brands of white rice to choose from, the sacks advertising different growing regions and rice varieties. (I did the restaurant wine list thing and chose the second least expensive.) Japanese consumers love to hear about the regional origins of their foods. I almost never saw ingredients advertised as coming from a particular farm, like you'd see in a farm-to-table restaurant in the U.S., but if the milk is from Hokkaido, the rice from Niigata, and the tea from Uji, all is well. I suppose this is not so different from Idaho potatoes and Florida orange juice. When I got home, I opened the salt and sugar and spooned some into small bowls near the stove. The next day I learned that Japanese salt and sugar are hygroscopic: their crystalline structure draws in water from the air (and Tokyo, in summer, has enough water in the air to supply the world's car washes). I figured this was harmless and went on licking slightly moist salt and sugar off my fingers every time I cooked.

We ate three tiny, geometrically engineered appetizers, including a perfect cube of kabocha squash-flavored fish cake and an octopus "salad" consisting of one tiny piece of octopus brushed with a plum dressing. Then the waitress uncovered and lit the burner in the center of the table and set a shallow cast-iron pan on top. She poured a thin layer of sauce from a pitcher. Sukiyaki is all about the sauce, a mixture of soy sauce, mirin, sake, and sugar. It's frankly sweet. Usually I'm a tiresome person who complains about overly sweet food, but where soy sauce is involved, I make an exception, because soy sauce and sugar were born to hang. The waitress set down a platter of thin-sliced Wagyu beef, so marbled that it was nearly white. She asked if we wanted egg. This time I was prepared: only for me, thanks. Then she cooked us each a slice of beef. It was tender enough to cut with your tongue against the roof of your mouth. While we sighed over the meat, she began adding other ingredients to the pan: napa cabbage, tofu, wheat gluten (fu), fresh shiitake mushrooms, shirataki noodles, chrysanthemum leaves (shungiku), and, of course, negi. Suggested tourist slogan: Tokyo: We put negi in it. Then we were left to cook the rest of the meat and vegetables ourselves. I think we nailed it. (Actually, it's impossible to do it wrong.) Like chanko nabe and all Japanese hot pots, sukiyaki gets better as the meal goes on, because the sauce becomes more concentrated and soaks up more flavor from the ingredients cooking in it.