Flour days

Simmer the beans  gently

ZENSAI 

Makes 8 servings

Ingredients:

300 grams azuki beans  

300 grams white granulated sugar  or more

1 Tbs soy sauce  

4 pieces of Mochi, cut in half

Rinse the beans in cold water several times. Soak overnight in plenty of cold water to soften.  If the beans are very fresh, no soaking is necessary.

Discard soaking water, rinse and cover beans with fresh cold water.  In a heavy saucepan, bring the beans and water to a boil.  Drain.  Start again with fresh water and bring to a boil and then turn heat to a gentle simmer until the beans are cooked throughly, being careful not to overcook or burn them. The beans should be submerged in the cooking liquid and never exposed. It will take about 90 minutes to two hours to cook the beans. Test one bean and squash it with your finger.  If it squashes easily, it is ready.

When the beans are cooked, pour off the excess cooking water leaving just enough to cover the beans. Add 1/2 the white sugar and the soy sauce. Bring to the boil and then turn down the heat to a simmer for about 15 minutes.  Add the remaining sugar and cook for another 15 minutes. Taste and make adjustments.  If more sugar is needed it can be added at this point.  Simmer for a few more minutes and turn heat off.  The azuki beans are ready to be served but it's best if you let them rest in the saucepan overnight. 

When ready to serve, cut the mochi pieces in half and grill under a broiler or a toaster oven until they pop. Heat the zenzai until very hot. Place a piece of grilled mochi in individual serving bowls. Ladle the hot zenzai on top. Serve immediately.

This recipe makes about 8-12  servings.   

Note: If the soup is too thick, you can dilute it with a  little water.  If it is too thin, you can

cook it and thicken the soup. This is a matter of preference.  It should have the consistency of a thick soup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Chef

A calm moment

One thing I can say about baking pies is that I have taken it for granted all my life.  My mother was an excellent baker.  Her pie crusts were consistently flakey and her apples perfectly sweet.  She didn't follow a recipe but measured with her eyes. When she made plans to bake pies, she did most of the work in the middle of the night. A half a dozen pies would be cooling on the pie racks at dawn, filling the house with their sweet aroma.  Then there is my sister Fuyuko Kondo who is a French trained pastry chef. Quite an accomplished one if you don't mind my bragging. She was one of the first female chefs to be invited on the Iron Chef show in Japan to challenge the French Master Chef Sakai (no relation to me). Even though I spend an awful lot of time in Tokyo, I have never taken a pie baking lesson from her. I just eat her pies, tarts, cakes, cookies... everything she bakes.  Her pastries are all so good. I always put on a couple pounds when I go back to Tokyo. I do have some specialities of my own though- tart tatin, butter cookies and creme caramel.  I usually bake a tart tartin for Thanksgiving but this year we were invited to our friends for the festive dinner so I didn't think tart tatin would work as a Thanksgiving dessert.  

I used Golden Delicious, Granny Smith and Pink Gala apples.

I found a Rum Raisan Apple Pie recipe on line from Gourmet, so I made it as part of a refreshment course in baking apple pies. The recipe uses three varieties of baking apples of your choice and rum soaked raisans.  I was multi-tasking on the day I was making the pie crust, which is a no-no. I forgot to put salt in the dough.  Fuyuko tried to help me fix it but it was too late.  I had to start all over again. Of the two pies I finally baked, the one I sprinkled granulated sugar on the crust surface, as the recipe instructed, turned out like the surface of the moon. That pie didn't make it to Russ and Kathy's house.  The other pie was based with egg yolk and milk.  It was baking beautifully but after I stuck it in the oven, I realized that I had forgotten to top the apples with butter.  So half way into the baking, I put the butter through the ventilation slits, which made the slits grow larger. The pie in the picture below is the very pie but seen from a good angle.  From the other angle, it looks like a howling face.  But I didn't let it bother me. I took the little flower cookies from the reject pie and covered the big slits.  People said my pie was yummy, and even enjoyed it for breakfast the next day. I have friends with high tolerance levels. The reject by the way, is being consumed by me.  I am halfway through it.  As for the apple pie recipe, I would cut back a little on the sugar and flour in the apples, and perhaps pre- cook the apples before putting them into the pie crust, as my mother did. The pie crust, I need a lot more practice. I will try again at Christmas time. 

Recipe:   Gourmet - Rum Raisan Apple Pie (here is the link for the recipe).

Fresh out of the oven.

 The beautiful box of Higashi from Ikkoan.

My pastry chef sister Fuyuko e mailed me just before leaving Paris that I should check out Jacques Genin's new salon de the if I could get myself over to the Marais district.  Jacques Genin's  salon is breathtakingly beautiful. It is a bit daunting at first but the lovely marshmallows and caramels in the display case will lure you in.   What's was most impressive were Genin's chocolates. Creamy and dense in flavors of caramel, vanilla, chinammon, mint, etc.  The chocolates are packaged in a silver metal box.  I am telling you, he treats these little chocolates as if they were jewels.  I learned that in the old days, chocolates used to be sold in metal boxes because they stayed freshers.  Genin is bringing back the good old ways. I bought the smaller box of nine chocolates.  It was 10 euros for 9 tiny pieces but well worth it.  I was instructed not to put the chocolate in my suitcase while travelling because the temperature of the plane's cargo section was too cold.  So the silver box travelled with me in my backpack and stayed close to me during the 12 hour flight back to Tokyo.  

While you are at the shop, do have a cup of tea, sit here and enjoy the tranquil space. I loved it.  The teas are all Chinese green tea blended with herbs and flowers.  It was very relaxing.  You get two pieces of chocolate with the tea.  Also, when you buy the chocolate, they will let you try a free sample.  I ate so many chocolates that day, I felt full and happy.  I skipped dinner.

I was surrounded by delicious temptations growing up in Tokyo. Nishimura Fruit Parlor  in Dogenzaka, Shibuya was one of them. We could get suspended from school if you got caught eating at these parlors and cafes in school uniform.  But we did it anyway, a gang of girl deliquents that we were.  Dongenzaka is still where the young and restless rendevous, looking for the same kind of thrill.   Most of the other older style Japanese cafes where you could get agar agar fruit (Mitsumame), sweet azuki bean soup (oshiruko)  and grilled mochi wrapped in nori seaweeed have sadly disappeared and replaced or being replaced by ramen noodle places, 99 Yen stores, massage parlors, H&M, Starbucks, etc. But this old fruit parlor still stands.  Maybe so because the parfaits (that's what they call the ice cream sundaes in Japan)  have kept their fantastic overkill look.  Except in my days,  we didn't get exotic toppings like star fruit, papayas and kiwi on our parfaits.  We didn't even know such fruit existed on the planet.   Strawberries, bananas and pineapple were about as exotic as you could get in Japan back then.  I remember saving the slice of banana in my parfait  till the very end because it was so precious.  Here I was with my gang of girlfriends spending our entire month's allowance at the fruit parlor after school.  What a thrill we had deconstructing this towering work of art. I still talk about the parfaits with my old girlfriends.  The parfaits came with a long skinny spoon so you can use it to scoop out the ice cream in the middle and poke at the fruit on the bottom. My petite Taiwanese girlfriend Peichun was always the one who went for the biggest parfait and tackled it with no sweat.  Somehow, when I got home, I had plenty of appetite left for dinner. My mother had no way of tracing my crime.  These days if you go to Nishimura Fruit Parlor, you will often find blonde Japanese youngsters in weird customes, wearing horrible eye make up and hair dos. They usually change into these customes and dab the stuff on their face at the train stations.  They don't look anything like the teenager I was but  I know we share the same feeling about the parfaits.