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In Anglo-Saxon culture, chestnuts are strongly associated with winter, especially Christmas, but in Japanese cuisine, they’re harbingers of fall. Many Japanese ingredients that are considered to be evocative of a specific season are featured in a simple rice dish, and chestnuts – kuri, in Japanese – are no exception. (Ayu, sweetfish, is a similar ingredient [...]

We’re just about to wind up our whirlwind tour of Japan, so I wanted to share some photos of the things we’ve been eating over here. The food has been almost uniformly awesome. Of course, we’ve eaten a lot more than what’s in this slideshow, but these are a good cross-section. Be sure to click [...]

A few days ago, we had a chance to visit Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo. Tsukiji is one of the largest fish markets in the world, if not the largest. One of its most famous features is the bluefin tuna auction that takes place nearly every day. Although I am opposed to eating bluefin tuna [...]

I’ve been cooking a lot of Japanese food this year, in preparation for an upcoming trip to Japan, and time and again I’ve come back to one observation: dashi is the heart and soul of Japanese cooking. Dashi is to Japanese cuisine what veal stock is to classic French cuisine, only more so. The most [...]