Living & Working in Ishikawa, Japan
First of all, congratulations to the Ishikawa JET Kitchen crew on the completion of an excellent resource. Whether you’re a culinary nerd or just setting out to cook on your own for the first time, I highly recommend having this recipe collection on hand.
Last Saturday's special (one of four) at Mokuyuurin: Pesto pizza with eggplant and okra.
Looking to get out of your kitchen for a delicious meal made with fresh ingredients? Hoping for a jaunt out of the city? Consider visiting Tsurugi in Hakusan City, home of Mokuyuurin. Here you can find pasta, risotto and pizza, prepared with fresh local vegetables. Sit at the counter on the second story to watch seasoned pizza chefs at work at a pair of handsome brick ovens below. Or sit at one of the large wooden tables located along the expansive staircase, where giant windows open onto the green of the forests outside. Expect to pay somewhere between 800 and 1400 yen for a meal. I recommend the sets – for 1380 yen you can enjoy salad, dessert and a drink in addition to the seasonal special of your choice.
Wooden architecture, huge windows, natural light and a wide open atmosphere make Mokuyuurin the perfect place to spend a quiet, rainy afternoon.
If you have time, be sure to stroll through the store up the walkway to the left. While craftsman wooden tables and chairs may be out of your price range, the young and young at heart will enjoy the extensive collection of wooden toys from around the world. And don’t forget to pick up some cedar wood chips. Kept in your drawers or closets, the fragrant scraps will help keep your clothes smelling fresh throughout the long, damp Hokuriku winter. Outside of the Mokuyuurin complex, you can stroll through Shishiku Park to the World Shishi Museum (an impression collection of shishi masks used in festivals all over Asia – admission is free!) or down the street to Shirahime Jinja, one of Ishikawa’s most renound Shinto shrines.
For more information, check out the full review, or look below.
More Information
もく遊りん食工房（Mokuyuurin Shoku Koubou）
Hours (April through December) 11:00~22:00 [last order 21:00]
Winter Hours (January through March) 11:00~21:00 [last order 20:00]
(Closed Tuesdays, and weekdays from 15:00 through 17:00)
Phone number 076-273-9501
Address 石川県白山市八幡町リ−１−６
Homepage http://www.moku-you-rin.co.jp/food/food.html
Getting there (by train): Take the Hokutetsu Line (located across the parking lot from Nishi Kanazawa Station) to Tsurugi Station. Mokuyuurin is approximately a 30 minute walk from the station – take your time, and a map.
(by car, from Kanazawa): Head South on Highway 8, through Nonoichi. Take a left onto Highway 157. After about 10 kilometers, turn left at the 水戸町 intersection. Continue across the river to the next light, then turn right at the 新町 intersection onto 179. After approximately one kilometer, turn left across from Kaga Ichinomiya (加賀一の宮) Station (no longer in operation - but this should be the only large, T-shaped intersection in the area. Anyone with better directions is encouraged to contribute). Follow this road straight through the next light (the 八幡町 intersection), through residential areas until you run straight into the Shishi World Museum (a large building with a tiled roof and a long staircase running straight down to the road). Turn left here, and continue for about 130 meters. Mokuyuurin will be on your right – the next wooden building with a large parking lot. The restaurant is located up the front stairway, through the door to the left.
The end of summer vacation is in sight, and the weather seems to be conspiring. With average temperatures since the weekend hovering around 27 degrees (down from the mid 30s a week ago), it’s hard to believe its still August. At this rate, we can expect the disappearance of these quaint little blue-and-red banners from storefronts any day:
The "ice" flag (read: Shaved Ice Sold Within)
Summer is the season of kakigori (かき氷 – shaved ice). First recorded in writings from the Heian Period (784-1185), this popular icy treat continues to make an annual appearance in cafes, convenience stores and festival stalls across Japan from June through August. It comes in fruity flavors like melon and peach (my favorite is strawberry with condensed milk), as well as Japanese classics like macha (green tea) and azuki (sweet bean).
If, like me, you find yourself experiencing the childish desire for shaved ice season to last forever, you might consider making your own. Kakigori ki (かき氷機 – shaved ice machines) are available in a number of colors and models at house ware purveyors (think AEON, Komeri, Don Qihote and PLANT 3). Until this year, I had always dismissed this kind of thing as a silly extravagance, but I was surprised to see how cheap they were. Even without end of summer discounts, you can expect to spend between 900 and 3000 yen (those that are electric or are covered with images of Pikachu, Anpanman, or Micky Mouse tend to run a little higher than the plain, hand-crank varieties).
My electric shaved ice machine was 1900 yen at PLANT 3 in Tsubata.
Ingredients are surprisingly simple – just ice (most machines are fine with regular old ice cubes) and syrup. For that brightly colored carnival effect, flavored syrups are available at most grocery stores. Alternatively, if you’re feeling ambitious, you can make your own! For a homemade plum syrup recipe, check out Hokuriku Expat Kitchen. Go enjoy the stuffing out of summer – and, as always, happy cooking.
Kakigori with homemade plum sauce and condensed milk. I wish I had done this much earlier.
Chelsea is a second year CIR in Tsubata. She writes a blog, and will probably be posting shaved ice recipes through December.
With this being the summer of energy saving, even those havens of heavy AC use like Kahoku AEON are a few degrees warmer inside this year than last. On the flip side, this summer has seen a surge in countermeasures against summer discomfort which don’t use electricity, but employ instead the powers of nature and the human psyche. For example, the sound of a fuurin (風鈴), a glass windchime, draws one’s attention to the breeze and is said to create a cooling effect. (I had one last year, and I have to say, I found it very pleasant.) Another example that you may have noticed around your town is the Green Curtain (グリーン・カーテン) , leafy vines trained to grow on a net in front of a window. Of course, this blocks hot sunlight from the interior of a home or office, but the real selling point is psychological – green leaves waving gently in the wind are meant to make the veiwer feel cool and energized.
Now, one issue is that there aren’t many attractive vines that live long and prosper when forced to grow along a scorching exterior wall in the middle of summer. With a lot of TLC, morning glories and cucumbers do okay, but the champion of the green curtain is goya. A relative of the cucumber, goya (or bitter melon) is native to tropical and sub-tropical locations around the world. It produces a fruiting body that resembles a cucumber with the measles. While theoretically edible, the bumpy goya is one of the bitterest foods out there. Recipes that use goya, such as Okinawan chanpuru, usually include steps to remove some of the astringent taste, and mask the rest with the mild flavors of eggs, meat or tofu.
If they’re so bitter, why bother? Here are five reasons why you might consider giving goya a try:
Whether that last one actually has any scientific backing, I’m not sure. But like I said, power-saving summer comfort is as much psychological as it is material.
Ready to give goya a go? Check out the end of this blog post for a chanpuru recipe – it’s easy, filling, and (most importantly of all) completely edible.
Chelsea is a second year CIR in Tsubata. She enjoys meeting other food people through her blog, and is always up for trying new veggies.
Bento: healthy, convenient, and (with a little planning) yours for only 10 minutes of your morning.
I know a lot of JETs partake of school lunch on a pretty regular basis, but do you ever have days when you need to provide your own lunch? And how about those of you who work at schools without kyushoku, or who don’t work at schools at all? Do you ever feel envious of the neatly packed bento that your students or coworkers bring from home? Do you want to make your own lunch, but feel daunted by the prospect of waking up even earlier than you already do?
There are two ways that I bribe myself into making bento for myself (almost) every morning. The first: giving in to my ego and posting photos of my lunches online for people to write nice comments on. The second: making stuff in advance.
While psychological motivators are all well and good, preparing dishes in advance is actually a very effective time saver, and could ultimately be the difference between a one-time early morning stint and a sustainable bento-making schedule. Sometimes you might just put aside a little bit of whatever you had for dinner the night before, but it’s also helpful to have something with a long life span on hand in the fridge or freezer. Meat products lend themselves to this particularly well, but there are a number of vegetable dishes that can be set aside for later.
My personal favorite is kinpira gobo (金平ごぼう). Kinpira describes a method of cooking which is a combination of simmering and sauteeing in a mixture of soy sauce, sake and sugar. The final result is salty, sweet and spicy, all at the same time. A variety of vegetables and other ingredients can be prepared this way, but my favorite is gobo (burdock root), a root vegetable available in the produce section of Japanese grocery stores year round. Gobo is a long, skinny root, usually still covered in dirt, sold in a large plastic in quantities of 2-10, depending on the size of the roots. It is somewhat tough, and needs to be soaked to remove bitterness before being prepared. It’s unique, earthy flavor is worth the work, though. It makes a good addition to miso soup or stir fry, but I think its flavor is best exhibited in kinpira.
Kinpira is a great addition to bento for a number of reasons. For one, it tastes just as good (if not better) cold as it does hot. Equally important is the fact that it keeps well in the refridgerator, and can be set aside in the freezer for a long time if sealed properly. I usually make a big batch of it all at once, then wrap it in small portions in plastic wrap and keep it frozen until I need it.
Want to try making kinpira? Check out the recipe on my blog!
I got up at 7:00this morning, washed my face, got dressed, did my hair (okay, actually, I just sort of ran a comb through it - it looks pretty weird), made lunch, ate breakfast, read a front page story from the New York Times, and was out the door by 8:00. With a little planning, making a bento every day is not an unattainable goal.
Chelsea Robinson is a first year CIR in Tsubata with a thing for food. Check out Hokuriku Expat Ktichen for more bento ideas and culinary musings.
For a small country, it seems to me that Japan has an amazing variety of regional cuisine. Here in Ishikawa, we’re blessed with ample seafood, and the cold winters and hot, humid summers lend themselves particularly well to fermentation; as a result, many of our regional specialties involve fermented seafood which, I think, is something of an aquired taste that I have yet to aquire. If you, like me, are looking to try something else that’s popular with the locals, why not give fu (麩) a try?
Fu is the name used to describe a number of preparations of wheat gluten (essentially, what’s left over if you wash all the startch out of wheat flour.) Some kinds, including sudare-bu （すだれ麩 – a type of fu eaten almost excuslively in Ishikawa), are very dense and hard, and require soaking before they are edible. Other kinds, such as kuruma-fu （車麩 – a popular ingredient in home cooking in Hokuriku） are leavened with baking powder. These are light, brittle, and extremely absorbent. The soak up sauce like nobody’s business, and make a satisfying (and protein-rich) meat subsitute in stir fry and curry.
I bought a package of kuruma fu earier this week, and have been having a lot of fun cooking with it. Would you like to give it a try? Check out Hokuriku Expat Kitchen this week for recipes for Fu Donburi and Cold Miso Soup (the latter is even seasonal!) Happy cooking!
Forgive me for the following lines of shameless self-promotion. I’m a CIR in Tsubata who happens to adore food – its cultural relevance as well as its production and consumption. A few months ago it was getting to the point where it seemed like my Facebook wall was almost nothing but photos of things I had eaten. So I decided to consolidate. I started a blog.
I try to keep my content local when I can, and particularly enjoy trying out mysterious seasonal produce – but I post everything from bento ideas to restaurant reviews, as well as recipes and stories. If you’re a fellow food enthusiast, would like guidance on cooking in Japan, or are just looking for a fun way to experience more of Ishikawa, Hokuriku Expat Kitchen is meant for you.
Look for a weekly update on my culinary adventures every Thursday, here on the Ishikawa JET Blog!
Without further ado, today’s post is a restaurant review.
Unkai (雲海) is an awesome gyoza restaurant in the hills just inland of central Tsubata. It’s a bit of a trek, even with a car, but I promise it’s worth your while. You can sample twelve unusual dumpling varieites (including curry and black sesame) as well as Chinese teas and homemade desserts, served against the backdrop of an elegantly restored 100 year old house. The owner/chef is generous and accomodating, and will gladly design a menu that fits the needs of your party. Vegetarian versions of all of the gyoza are available upon request.
Hours: 10:00 a.m.~7:00 p.m. (Closed Wednesdays) Open by reservation only
Phone Number: (076) 288-0308
Address: 石川県河北郡津幡町字上藤又ト９ (Ishikawa ken, Kahoku gun, Tsubata machi, Kamifujimata To 9)
For more information, see the full review, or visit Unkai’s webpage (Japanese only)
… Or is it?
The shop windows glow invitingly in the evening.
I’d like you introduce you to Patisserie Ar. I found this place when I got lost on the way to a preschool visit. Hidden away in a residential neighborhood just a minute by car from the highway, this take-home cake shop is definitely worth the short detour when you’re passing through. They have no seating, but they’ll package their delicious cakes with plenty of ice packs to keep them safe and cool until you make it home.
The shop itself is cute, with ornate wallpaper and an eclectic collection of decorative mirrors covering the walls. But of course, our eyes are immediately drawn to the glass case, and the enticing display of cakes and sweets of all colors and shapes. There are flavors for sweet lovers of all kinds, from that staple of Japanese cake shops, strawberry shortcake, to a simple, rich gateau chocolat (ガトーショコラ), to creamy green tea mousse (te ver – テ・ヴェール 抹茶ムース). Their blueberry tart is piled high with cream and fresh blueberries, and their chocolate raspberry cake is just the right combination of sweet and tart.
The blueberry tart has a center of blueberry preserves and sweet vanilla custard, and is topped with fresh blueberries and whipped cream (370 yen).
I think I was most impressed by their chiffon cake. I always considered chiffon cake to be a pretty boring, no-comment kind of dessert, but Patisserie Ar has made me realize its potential. Theirs is extremely moist and complimented well by not-too-sweet whipped cream. The flavor varies seasonally – last time I went, each slice was flavored with yuzu zest, and the time before that with the subtle aroma of earl gray tea.
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