A Japanese inspired weekend

We are lucky to live in a city where there are many diverse cultures from practically every continent of the world – ask someone where they are from and they are very rarely “Australian”, more likely Italian, Lebanese, Irish, Japanese, to name but a few. The most obvious way this has impacted Sydney is in its food culture – it is a foodie’s heaven and every conceivable kind of cuisine is available here; it’s something about Sydney that I am going to sorely miss once I’m back in England.

Much like London, Sydney has its own China Town, where there are numerous Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malayasian, and Vietnamese restaurants. For me this is usually a place I avoid – it’s not my favourite place in the world for a few reasons, mostly because Asian people seem to walk really slowly.

My interest however has recently been piqued by a book I have read called Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat. Now, I’ve always loved sushi but to presume that Japanese cookery is just sushi is very narrow-minded. This book really inspired me to delve further into the world of Japanese cookery, which seems to be simple, with clean flavours, and above all, very, very nutritious.

A trip to China Town it was then, accompanied by Dave, to stock up on all the essential ingredients I would need to start my Japanese cooking adventure.

Easing ourselves into this we had lunch at a Japanese restaurant called Mizuya – a delicious meal of grilled teriyaki vegetables and steak, with various side dishes, rice, miso soup and the essential green tea. 

 This was followed by a dessert of almond milk tea with tapioca pearls, a favourite of the Japanese in Sydney.

Next stop was an Asian supermarket in the heart of China Town. This has to be one of the most daunting supermarket experiences of my life – I must have spent about an hour trying to find the ingredients I needed, during which I mostly stood in one aisle staring at the hundreds of varieties of soy sauce there were, wondering what the difference was and which was best to get.

Everything (unsurprisingly) was in Japanese, Chinese or Thai, and although with a short translation on the back, I was still pretty clueless as to what kombu, bonito flakes and dashi were, what they looked like, or how I was meant to use them for cooking.

 Anyway, helped greatly by Dave’s patience (I almost left my basket and walked out), I managed to get everything I needed, including some little treats called mochi ­– glutinous rice cakes filled with red bean paste. Treat, in retrospect, is definitely not the right word for them; they were absolutely vile. I think the clue was in the fact that they were filled with red bean paste…errrr, yuck????

To cut a long story short, my Japanese cooking experience was quite disastrous. I attempted a beef and rice dish, which was basically beef with onion and leeks broiled in dashi, a Japanese broth made from water, kombu and bonito flakes, over brown rice.

Apparently you can buy dashi ready made, but I couldn’t for the life of me find it in the Asian supermarket so I made it myself – I think this is akin to making your own chicken stock as when Dave relayed this story to his Japanese colleague, she was rather impressed.

The beef turned out as tough as old boots, although the taste of the broth was quite nice. I attempted to save the dish by instead making it vegetarian - stir frying some vegetables and then pouring the broth over this. It was average. Understandably, my enthusiasm for
Japanese cookery has somewhat waned since – I think I might stick to letting the experts do it and just get my Japanese fix from the local takeaway.