Umami Mart

One thing California and Japan have in common is the abundance of bright orange Fuyu persimmons when November hits. Persimmon or kaki, in Japanese, are best eaten uncooked and must be peeled. The most common way to eat them in Japan is for dessert, perhaps alongside a branch of a few very plump kyoho grapes. […]

Since my last post on an early Thanksgiving dinner, I went down to Fort Lauderdale, soaked in a lot of sun, darkened up the way a real Asian guy should look, then came back to a freezing NYC. I am depressed. I want more sun. I was going to write about my food experiences in […]

I love mushrooms. They’re strange, beautiful, alien creatures and usually a common motif in my own work. They are such a contrast– cute, but deadly; delicate, but powerful. I also love eating them although that happens not so commonly. In contrast to the Tokyo supermarkets being full of many different freshly wrapped shrooms ready for […]

photo by erin gleeson.

Aubergines are one of my favourite vegetables and I will always choose an aubergine dish if I can at restaurants (except if there’s beef, and I have to admit baba ganoush still defeats me). And nothing goes better with aubergine than oil. Life is tough. I grew up with a mother who cooked something different […]

While I was still thinking about sloth and summerly posts, suddenly the editor changes the direction to R. What the hell does R mean? Me? This is such an Anna Wintour move, and I feel like Grace: love her, but hate her. However being a working bee, we have to comply with orders from the […]

So I’m having an old friend over for dinner, and he’s a vegetarian. Don’t we all hate cooking for vegetarians? None of my tried-and-true-recipes-for-normal-carnivore guests, like Beetroot Chicken or Bloody Pot Roast Beef, would fit the food customs of my friend. Luckily I recently had a fab side dish at another (non-vegetarian) dinner party some […]

Is it really the last day of Sloth Season? Say it ain’t so! Sigh. Totally not fair considering the Bay Area has been a shroud of fog, gloom and sweater-weather all “summer”. In Dante’s Inferno, San Francisco is not unlike the third circle of hell, where the gluttonous are punished in eternal rain and relentless […]

Lazy here. Very very lazy. Yet, I have a knack for going into my fridge and whipping up random dishes that are at times bizarre, but always edible. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Goya Champloo Breakfast Burrito. It’s kinda genius, if I do say so myself, plus it seriously only took me like […]

Thursday, another start of a four-day weekend, was spent in the kitchen. It was gorgeous outside, and it would have been a perfect day to lay on the beach, but all the travel, sand, and that return trip with sand stuck in your butt crack didn’t sound too attractive, so I decided to devote it […]