No Recipes – Techniques, inspiration and cooking tips from my Japanese kitchen

White chocolate matcha mint buttercream on coconut cupcakes

Let’s face it, cupcakes, aren’t about the cake so much as the frosting. The cake is really just there as a foil for the tasty frosting (how else can you justify putting several tablespoons of butter and sugar in your stomach?). I’m guessing this is why frosting haters typically don’t like cupcakes. The other day [...]

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Kasha corn fritters

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Being a meat eater these days seems a bit like being a smoker 20 years ago (still socially accepted, but something that meat eaters are starting to feel guilty about). I know I’ve been posting a lot of meat dishes lately, so consider this recipe this week’s mia culpa (something I’m sure I’ll be doing [...]

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Wiener Schnitzel (Veal Schnitzel)

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Some of you may know this as a crisp light dish that’s moist and flavorful. Others may have less pleasant memories of greasy, soggy cardboard that’s only made edible by drowning it with condiments. If the later sounds familiar, then I urge you to read on and give this simple dish a try in your [...]

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Lemon tuna steaks on roasted veggies

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Okay, so this one was hard to name. Every title I came up with made it sound… well… simplistic. The ingredients and preparation are both simple, but this belies its tastiness. If you think I’m crazy for calling cooked tuna tasty, I feel your pain. At most restaurants it’s either lightly seared (at which point [...]

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Roast pork with walnut pesto on pasta

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One of my favorite things about leftovers are the things you can turn them into. While most home cooks wouldn’t slow roast a hunk of pork to make a pasta dish, if you happen to have some sitting around, there are lots of awesome possibilities that open up. This is something I was contemplating while [...]

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Chinese roast pork (siew yuk)

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Whenever I go to Chinatown to pick something up, I almost always have to stop at a place to pick up some crisp skinned roast pork. This is often confused with the more well known bbq pork (char siew), which has the telltale red exterior from the sweet bbq glaze. Both are good, but when [...]

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Beef noodle soup

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One of the things I miss most about the Bay Area, is the abundance of south-east Asian restaurants. Yes we have our share of Thai and Vietnamese places here with a small sprinkling of Malaysian, but they are passable at best, often laden with MSG and salt. The worst part is that they miss the [...]

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Homemade Asian beef balls

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Most people who have tried these at a restaurant will tell you that beef balls are an acquired taste. It’s not not even the taste so much as the texture. Rubbery, and almost crunchy is the first thing to come to mind… making one wonder what exactly these “balls” are made of. They’re widely used [...]

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