Ippuku

I took an old friend from Hong Kong to Berkeley's Ippuku which goes beyond a yakitori joint. One of their more novel dishes is a chicken tartare served with a raw quail egg on top.  Who's afraid of raw chicken sushi?  Even as a Korean- raw chicken flesh is something I've never properly had.  I've only enjoyed raw chicken skin and heart with sesame oil as a child.   I've been putting off this particular delicacy for quite a while now only because I couldn't get anyone to share it and I didn't want to have to eat an entire bowlful by myself.

The flesh is quite sweet and tastes like sushi.  It turns out my friend somehow managed to evade this special experience without me noticing.  I think once is enough for me as I find their raw scallops or uni to be a tastier treat.  We also enjoyed grilled beef tongue, chicken heart, chicken liver and pig intestines with numerous cups of soba/buckwheat tea.  I might toast my own buckwheat groats at home and start drinking more soba tea as it's nutty and healthful.

  

Chestnut creme noodles was their seasonal dessert.  A visual pun on soba, this piece of deliciousness also hid  a dollop of creme and spongecake inside.  Ippuku means to take a break and so this meal gave us a definite respite from the endless taco and ceviche parade in Mexico but I'm ready to go back to topopos and salsa.

Double Deliciousness

Purpose of my short life on earth is to share something delicious every day. Today I was lucky to have two absolutely delicious meals.  Tempura uni - what a brilliant idea! The uni is very fresh and not just a clever way to get rid of oozing old uni. I didn't have to share this deep fried treasure as my dear husband leaves all uni to me.

This excellent sushi dinner was at Kiku- my neighborhood sushi joint. My favorite is hotate or scallop. If there is any better, I don't want to know. So sweet and moist, there's no point in cooked scallops for me, not even deep fry in duck fat.

For lunch I had my usual blood 'n pork soup. I've been eating this soup at the same Vietnamese noodle shop in Oakland Chinatown for 10 years. But today I got it without noodles, just bean sprouts.  I've been trying all year and finally, it's not psychologically hard to forgo rice and noodles. Even five years ago- the idea of giving up rice would have been crazy talk. But now I can enjoy deliciousness undiluted with starches.

Ankimo Rabbit Hole

On a rare day, I'll eat something so good that if there's anything better, I don't want to know. Last week I was fortunate enough to bring down my gullet the nuttiest creamiest most delicate ankimo ever.  Ankimo is the liver of the monkfish- a critter unfortunate enough to be endowed with an unusually large and delicious tube of liver. Ankimo is oft said to be the fois gras of the sea and is equally fraught with moral dilemma.

From the lovely presentation above, you would never suspect anything to be amiss. Monkfish is caught predominantly by indiscriminate trawling which is a terribly destructive way to go about pleasing liver loving saps like me. There are many things in life that are so wrong yet so good.  The gustatory pleasure really overrides any sense of shame I should feel.  If you've made up your mind to do something against your principles, you might as well enjoy it and not feel guilt. You can see I was not raised Catholic.

This particularly stellar example of ankimo was served at Sushi Sho. The chef Aki-san, who my husband dubbed Sake-san since he kept slugging surprising amounts of sake between sashimi sets, worked skillfully in putting our dinner together.  You can see he did not skimp on the momiji oroshi - grated daikon with red chili pepper. "Momiji" is Japanese for maple or autumn foliage;  Japanese are fond of poetic references.

There is a cult of sushi eaters who swear by specific chefs who manage to procure the "freshest" fish possible and present it skillfully.  Much of the raw tuna and other sushi served at sushi restaurants has been super frozen and jetted around multiple times.  The process of super freezing to -60F allows the sushi to store perfectly for years. Our ideals of freshness and the realities of industry practice can easily be hidden away as few diners really know what belies a plate of nigri sushi.

I probably wouldn't be able to stomach sushi if I knew everything.  Not just the environmental exploitation- there's exploitation of poor island nations like Kiribati and Tuvalu who have sold off fishing rights for a pittance. I better stick to California Point Reyes oysters and Dungeness crabs until I research a bit more.

2013 Tea Experiments

While I was cleaning out the kitchen in preparation to welcome 2013,  I found a lot of random canisters holding hong cha, stale sencha, oolongs and such.  These teas don't get a lot of play. The husband just said flat out- "You have sooo much tea.  Maybe you shouldn't buy any in 2013." Nice try mister.

If I were to take his challenge seriously, I have exactly one week to order any tea for the rest of next year but I need not panic.  I have several hundred samples sent by generous tea friends along with more than my body weight in tea.    What I need is not consumption limits but a more disciplined approach to tea drinking.  When you have multiple hundreds of teas to select from- you can end up just flitting from tea to tea. When I can drink any number of teas at any time, I tend not to try as hard to find the good points of a tea which doesn't particularly stand out.

I've always been fascinated by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman's ice cream experiments.  He paid volunteers to eat their favorite ice cream for eight days straight and to predict whether or not they would enjoy the experience the next day and on the last day.  He proved that humans are notoriously bad at predicting even their own future preferences.  Combined with the fact that humans presented with excessive choices tend to be less satisfied than those with limited choices, I'm betting a few constraints would help my situation.  I thought of the following experiments for 2013:

• Drink the same tea for an entire week.
• Drink the same tea for a specific weekday for an entire year. 
• Drink the same region for an entire month - maybe February will be Yiwu month.
• Drink the same factory for an entire month- Menghai March...
• Drink through an entire beeng.

I might hate such constraints or I might love it. I won't know till I try.

(My husband and I tried a new neighborhood sushi joint tonight to be outright surprised by something exceedingly fresh and delicious. I had the scallop, aji, hirame, and uni tempura which were most excellent.  Tear almost come to my eye.  I didn't feel this way when I saw Jiro Dreams of Sushi but when I encounter such efforts first hand,  I'm inspired to do better in my own life.  )