Lunch for Two

I've been wanting to write this entry all week but work kept making me come home so late that it just wasn't possible. Monday was Yuki's birthday, so I took her out for lunch on Sunday at Cicada in Hiro. I'd actually wanted to take her to La Table du Joel Robuchon in Ebisu, but it was completely booked, so I went with Plan B. I'd read several good reviews of Cicada and their menu looked good, so I decided to give it a shot.

Best. Decision. Ever.

I'm absolutely comfortable saying it's the best meal I've had in Tokyo to date. I cannot say enough about how good this place was. The bill was a bit higher than I'd expected (more on that later) but it was so good I wasn't going to complain.

As a brief aside, one of my shortcomings as a food blogger is that I'm just not comfortable whipping out my camera in a restaurant and snapping away. To me, it just destroys the atmosphere, which is pretty important in my books. It's a different story when you're traveling because you've got that tourist mentality and anything is fair game for photography for the sake of preserving those memories after you go back home. But when you're in your own backyard, it's a different story. As such, I apologize for not having any pictures of the food. You'll just have to trust me that it was all absolutely amazing.

The food follows a general Mediterranean theme, with influences from Morroco, Tunisia, Greece, and Spain. Our waitress was very informative, explaining the origins of almost everything we ate, though she was a bit sales person-ish in making recommendations. Nevermind, the whole experience was good enough to overlook that. Since we were celebrating, we got drinks, Yuki getting the sangria (dangerously easy to drink) while I had a strawberry bellini (pureed strawberries + sparkling wine? yes please!).

They start you off with a cumin and fennel flat bread which, besides being delicious, had a really pleasant chewy texture. You could actually taste the cumin and fennel, which I found nice as many places are so light on the spices that the flavor doesn't stand out. There was also a small bowl of sea salt to sprinkle on it, which boosted the flavors even more. They also have several kinds of olive oils to go with the bread and we went with a Spanish one (we don't know enough about olive oils to make any kind of proper decision and Yuki has a soft spot for Spain, having spent some time there during college). Our waitress informed us that it was a special early harvest one (I honestly have no idea what that changes about the oil itself, but whatever) and that there was a very limited number of bottles produced every year. Lots of fancy schmancy explanations and such, but the bottom line is that it was some of the best damn olive oil I've ever had. It's hard to put into words what was different about it, but it really was top drawer stuff.

Weekend lunch is a course meal at Cicada, which includes an appetizer, a main course, dessert, and coffee/espresso. The waitress told us that the appetizers are quite large (they were) and the best way to go was to order different things and share, so that's what we did. We started off with a feta and olive Greek salad (yes, I eat salad now. I know...) I left the olives to Yuki since she loves them and I'm not a huge fan (I did try them though, just to give them a chance). The salad was quite good and enjoyable, with generous slabs of feta being the key part for me. It was large, even for two, and probably could have been enough to just move on to the main courses. Fortunately for us though, there was one more appetizer to come.

The second appetizer was roasted baby squid stuffed with prosciutto, bread crumbs, and spices. Wow. Probably the single most inspirational dish I can remember eating. There really aren't words to describe the awesomeness. The squid was tender, the stuffing juicy and flavorful, with just a little kick to it. Eyes-roll-back-in-your-head kind of delicious. It was a fairly simple dish, but made with quality ingredients and so freakin good to eat. When I try to imagine what people in those picturesque, warm, sunny parts of Europe eat, dishes like this come to mind. Honestly, if lunch had ended there and we'd just walked out, I would have been perfectly content.

The first main course was grilled snapper with potatoes, olives, and rosemary. It was good, made with nice fresh ingredients, but it takes a lot for white fish to really wow me and this wasn't going to be it. Yuki said the olives pretty good, but the ones in the salad were better. The rosemary potatoes were good, but you places serving up potatoes like that are all over the place. All in all, tasty but completely forgettable, especially following the squid.

The second main dish was a tangine that came in a super cool dish with a crazy cone-shaped lid (I don't know what the deal with it was, but I'm sure it had some sort of cool purpose). There were 3 choices for the tangine: seafood, lamb, or chicken. Considering we're already had 2 seafood dishes and chicken is relatively boring and plain, we went with the lamb. The tangine was basically a spiced stew with lamb, tomatoes, eggplant, onions, and bell peppers. We also got a bowl of couscous to go with it, though I tend to think that couscous doesn't really offer much to a dish besides a kind of weird texture. The tangine was good, particularly the lamb, which was unbelievably tender to the point where you wonder how many hours they must have let it cook. It pretty much just fell apart in your mouth. I thought the tangine itself was pretty good, but it jumped up to an entire new level with the addition of a little chili paste that was provided on the side. It added both gentle spiciness and an irresistible sweetness that made me wish I'd added it from the start. Really, they should just mix the two of them for you, cuz it was average without it and amaaaazing with it.

Next up was dessert. Yuki is a huge creme brulee fan, so she couldn't help but go with the pistachio creme brulee. Normally creme brulee comes in a little ramekin and is a little bit less than you'd really want, but not this one. This came in a rectangular dish about the size of a salad plate and was a solid size for the both of us. The pistachio flavor was very subtle, kicking in more as an aftertaste than anything, which is probably for the best, since a dessert that tasted too strongly of pistachios probably wouldn't be all that appealing anyway. There were several desserts on the menu that sounded good, including a marsala tirimisu and a chocolate cake made with Valhrona chocolate, but I'm of the opinion that when you go to a quality restaurant it's a bit of a waste to not order the more creative stuff on the menu. It was that thought process that lead me to the fennel and apple cake with mascarpone. Normally, I am not a huge fan of warm fruits, but I'd never seen apple and fennel combined together, much less in a dessert, so I thought it'd be worth a shot. The cake was warm, moist, and soft, with the juicy chunks of apple adding both flavor and texture and combining quite well with the fennel flavor. I have to say, outside of Indian curries, I have almost no experience with food that includes fennel, but it was a very interesting flavor. I really liked the cake and think it was probably one of the best desserts I've had in Tokyo.

The bottom line is that the food was fantastic. Having personally picked the squid, tangine, and apple fennel cake, I believe I win the award for good choices (not to brag, of course). Though the lunch we had at Calm Terrace a few weeks back was probably more creative, I think this one wins out slightly in the taste department. The lunch course by itself is only 2900 yen (~$29), which I would say is a bargain for the quality and quantity of the food, especially considering how little that will get you at dinner in Tokyo.

Unfortunately, it can't all be sunshine and puppy dogs. The one knock I have against Cicada is that they kill you with the extras. I'm not sure if I was just distracted and not listening carefully enough, if my Japanese wasn't quite good enough to catch it, or if the waitress just straight up didn't mention it, but most of her recommendations throughout the meal came with their own separate little price tag. The olive oil was about $4, though I would still call that money well spent considering how delicious it was. But the water. Oh the water... At the beginning of the meal, we were told they had sparkling and mineral water, so we went with mineral water. The waitress opened a bottle and filled our glasses. I always drink a lot of of water when I eat out (I would say I usually go through at least 6 or 7 glasses in meal), so I was just drinking away as I always do. A few glasses in, the waitress asks me if I'd like to drink some more, so I said sure. She opened up another bottle and loaded me back up from there. It wasn't until I saw the bill that I realized that those bottles of water ran me 800 yen (~$8) a piece. Say what you will about restaurant mark ups, but $8 a bottle for water is a bit ridiculous if you ask me. For that kind of money, there had better be some virgin in Greece who lives out in the middle of nowhere and whose sole task in life is to collect rain (only in the spring) for the sole purpose of bottling in glass bottles blown by hand by her elderly craftsman father whose family has been making glass bottles for water for generations. Something like that. Ok, maybe that's a bit much, but you get the point. $16 for water is stupid. Fortunately for them it was a birthday celebration and the food had been damn good, so I just took it as being like a service charge and didn't say anything. So, while I highly highly highly recommend Cicada for a weekend lunch, say no to the water. You're probably better off washing your food down with cocktails and it will certainly be more enjoyable.


After all that, it pretty much felt like fate when my local fishmonger had baby squid for sale Saturday morning. Getting the big full size squid is super easy, but I had never seen (or at least noticed) the smaller ones before, so I took it as a sign. 498 yen (~5) for a tray of them seemed reasonable enough, so I snatched them up in preparation for my attempt to recreate that oh-so-amazing appetizer at Cicada.

Unfortunately, I had almost finished making them when I realized that my camera's ISO was set at 1600 (I'd been taking night shots when I last used it), so a lot of my pictures are completely usesless, to the point where even digitally processing the RAW files can't save them. For some reason they look pretty good when I look at them in Picasa, but when I open them in Adobe Lightroom to convert to JPEGs, they are no good. In any case, apologies upfront for a lack of good pictures for this one.

I had expecting the package to have 5, maybe 6, of the little suckers in it, so it was a bit of a surprise to a full dozen 3-4 inch squid. I guess I'll be looking for other ways to use a couple of them for dinner tonight. Squid are not particularly hard to clean, especially these little ones, but it is a little time consuming at first. Once you get into the swing of it, you can fly through them pretty quickly.


I looked up several recipes for stuffed squid to get an idea for what was commonly used and came up with the following list: onions, chorizo, bread crumbs, basil, garlic, and chilis. Several recipes also called for you to dice up the squids tentacles and use them so, not wanting to be wasteful I decided to give that a shot as well. I've recently discovered a surprisingly well stocked (and affordable!) grocery store in the basement of the Marui department store in Kita Senju, which falls on my commuter rail pass for work, letting me go to and from for free. I already had onions, garlic, and panko, so headed over there to pick up some red chilis, basil, and chorizo to use for the stuffing.


I gave the onions a good run in the frying pan to get them soft and sweet and tossed the squid tentacles with them for a split second to make sure they got cooked properly as well. After letting that cool down a bit, I mixed all the stuffing together and started loading up the squid. I had forgotten the garlic when I took the pictures, so I chopped up a couple cloves and tossed them in as well. I completely forgot to season with salt and pepper (the whole process up to this point had taken longer than I'd expected and I was rushing things a bit). In hopes of avoiding having it turn out too boring, I was pretty conservative with the panko, but half way through the first squid I realized that there wasn't going to be nearly enough filling for the 8 squid I'd planned on cooking, so I doubled the amount of panko.

One thing about the dish at Cicada's version that I wasn't able to try to copy was that they roasted their squid, which put a nice browning on the outside. Not having an oven, that wasn't really an option for me. Most recipes I read called for simmering the squid in a tomato sauce and, since I just so happened to have some chunky tomato sauce in my fridge, I went that route. I also happened to have a bottle of red wine that I was drinking that night, so I alternated between adding slugs of that between the pan and my mouth. One for the food, one for the cook and all that. Since the stuffing will expand and the squid will shrink when you cook them, you need to seal the opening or else your stuffing will just gush out. I gave the squid about 15 minutes to each side and ate them with some of the tomato sauce. Since there was still a good bit of sauce left over, I cooked up some pasta and ate that as well. I will be the first to admit that they're not the most delicious looking dish ever. In fact, they kind of look like slugs. But if you can get past that they're good eats. My squid turned out quite well, though still just a shadow of the dish I ate at Cicada, but nothing to be ashamed of, that's for sure. I think next time I will try searing the outside first before adding in the sauce, to get that browning goodness.

Mediterranean Stuffed Squid
8 baby squid, cleaned and tentacles diced

1 3-inch chorizo sausage, diced
1/8 onion, diced
1 tbs basil, minced
2 red chilis, seeded and diced
~1/2 cup panko

Enough tomato sauce tomato sauce and red wine to cover squid half way
Salt and pepper to taste

Dinner For One

Summer means fireworks in Japan and for the last month or so there have been fireworks shows somewhere in the Tokyo area almost every weekend. I tried to organize all the Michigan kids to go see this week's big one, but pretty much everyone either already had plans or wasn't interested. As that group pretty much constitutes my entire social life in Japan, I was left with a completely open calender for Saturday night.

There had been some construction going on near my place all day, so I didn't think too much of it when I first started hearing loud banging noises around 7pm. I finally figured out what was really going on and, having nothing better to do, thought I'd check it out a little. I had been able to see the fireworks from the train on my way home last weekend and since this week's were also supposed to be going on a little South of here, I thought I might be able to see something if I headed to the river near my place since it runs North-South. When I got there, I discovered that not only were they being launched to the South (which I could only just barely see off in the distance), they were also going on much closer to the east. I watched for a little while, taking some pictures, then headed back to my place. Unfortunately, it took me a while to realize that not only could I see the fireworks from my balcony (my room faces east) but that the view was far better from up there. Still, I managed to catch the last hurrah, so that was nice.

I have to say, fireworks really are not meant to be watched by oneself. It was a nice cool summer evening that would have been perfect for having a picnic and watching the show, which only made the loneliness all the more poignant.

To make matters worse, when grocery shopping that morning, I had bought ingredients to cook the kind of dish for dinner that would be far better for a dinner date than dinner for one. For some reason, scallops scream date food to me. They certainly aren't something often served for dinner for a large number of people and something just seems strange about the idea of eating them by oneself. But, most weekends, my local grocery store has a local fishmonger set up shop in a part of the store and the scallops had been catching my eye for quite some time. I honestly haven't had scallops that many times in my life, so I'd hardly call myself a big fan, but something about the idea of the fishmonger picking out the shell, cutting the scallop out, tossing it into a bag, and handing it over to me suggested a kinda of freshness that I wanted to try. I picked up 3 of the little suckers at ~$1 a pop, which seemed pretty reasonable to me.


I'd looked at a few recipes to try to find inspiration and though I didn't find anything that sounded quite like what I was in the mood for, I did find some good tips on how to sear the scallops. I think particularly important is making sure to dry them off really well and having a really hot non-stick pan. Having the heat up high is also key, as the inside will continue cooking even after you remove the scallops from the pan, so you want to sear the outside as quickly as possible to avoid overcooking the whole thing. Though I'm not a fan at all of my IH stovetop, I will at least acknowledge that it will get crazy hot if you jack the temperature up and it did the trick well enough for the scallops.

I'm a big fan of light and sweet sake-soy sauce based sauces with seafood, so I threw together a mix of roughly 2 tbs sake, 1/2 tbs soy sauce, 1/2 tbs mirin, 1/2 tsp sesame oil. It's a pretty basic set of flavors that seem to match well without overpowering the fish. I sauted some sliced up bell peppers as well to keep things from being too boring and to add a little nutritional balance to the meal.

In the end, the whole process went like this:
(1) Clean scallops, drying thoroughly. Lightly season with salt and pepper
(2) Quickly saute bell peppers until about half done. Remove from pan.
(3) Add a glug of olive oil to the pan and turn the heat up high.
(4) Place scallops in pan and leave undisturbed for 1.5~2 min
(5) Flip scallops and cook for another minute
(6) Remove scallops and deglaze pan with sake. Scrape up any bits of scallop stuck to pan
(7) Add remaining sauce ingredients and reduce for 3~4min (the time is a total guess on this one, but that's about what it felt like). About 2/3 of way through add the bell peppers back to the pan and finish cooking
(8) Plate bell peppers. Place scallops on top, then drizzle with sauce

The scallops seared up beautifully, with that sexy brown crust on the outside but the tender, just barely cooked middle. But, to be totally honest, I just don't think I'm a big scallop fan. Before you go telling me that I just didn't cook them right, I'll point out that I've had them in restaurants before as well and they just don't really do it for me. I had been hoping it would be different this time because I was using good fresh ones, but it really wasn't. That's not to say they were bad, it's just that there are a lot of other kinds of seafood or meat that I think I would have liked more. In any case, it's one more thing I can say I've tried cooking and I think the things I found out about searing them will hold true for other types of seafood as well. Oh well, live and learn.

Tekito Shrimp Stir-fry

As both an island and the home of sushi, seafood is kind of a big deal here in Japan. Though the popularity of red meat has risen in recent years, seafood is still a major part of the Japanese diet. Back in Michigan, most types of seafood cost 2-3x what I spent on chicken, pork, and beef, pretty much a deal-breaker for a poor college student, so it rarely figured into my dinner plans. Here in Tokyo, however, there is an amazing variety of fresh fish available year-round and it is generally less expensive than in the US (though the price of the really high quality stuff is through the roof), so I’ve been trying to incorporate more of it into my diet.

The biggest problem I run into is not knowing what the hell anything is. Besides the fact that I have to learn the Japanese name for everything I know in English (though, admittedly, that’s not a lot), there are dozens of kinds of fish here that aren’t available in the US to begin with. I don’t know a terribly large amount about the characteristics of different fish to begin with so figuring out what to buy or how to cook it is a bit of a hurdle. I’ve only just scratched the surface of what’s available, but I’m hoping to be able to convince myself to be more adventurous with my future purchases. In the meantime, my local fishmonger almost always has shrimp available at a reasonable price so I can fall back on that even when the fresh fish is not looking so great or has sold out. It's also nice because peeling and deveining shrimp is a good bit easier than dealing with all the little bones in a piece of fish. In the US, fish is usually sold in steaks or filets with the bones removed, but here they tend to be sold whole or fileted, with all those pointy little bones lurking in them...

I bought 3/4 lb of shrimp earlier this week and split it between a lunch and two dinners. One of the toughest parts of cooking seafood is not overcooking it. Of my two dinners, I managed to get it right for the first one, with tender juicy shrimp that sort of burst with seafood goodness in your mouth. The second dinner was not nearly as successful, the shrimp turning out pretty firm (fortunately not to the point of rubbery though). It wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. Clearly some practice is needed.

This is a good example of one of my tekito stir-fries: I took a the protein and veggies I had available, gave them a quick whirl in the wok, and threw together a sauce from what was on hand and sounded good. I make a lot of meals like this. Marinading the shrimp didn't help much, but that's probably due more to the fact that I cooked them too long. I'd been hoping that the corn starch from the marinade would help make them fry up golden brown, but that didn't work out so well. However, I did give the tofu lots of time to drain, then powdered it with corn starch, which resulted in a nice crust on the tofu and helped keep it fall apart under the constant stirring. The sauce was really good and the veggies all turned out well; the only problem was the shrimp being cooked to long. I suppose you can't get it all right every time, so all I can do is take away the little lessons learned and hope to do better next time.

Marinade:
2 parts Shiao Xing rice wine
1 part Soy sauce
1 part Corn starch
1/2 part Chili oil

Sauce:
2 parts Soy sauce
1 part Shiao Xing rice wine
1 part Hoisin sauce
1 part ginger (finely minced)
1/2 part sugar
5 thai chilis (thinly sliced)