Ethical crisis averted, no bear soup this time for dinner

No bear soup this time but still a feast. After a quick explanation of how and when to cook what where from our hostess it was down to business. Georgia, again, got the kids meal that would feed a small army of toddlers let alone one.



Shabu shabu was on the menu tonight. Thinly slice pieces of steaks and veggies. There was a foil "pot" simmering over a candle of some sort of milky white soup. All we had to do was dump the veggies in, wait till it boiled and then "shabu shabu" the meat. That is, dip the meat in the soup for about the same time it takes to say say "shabu shabu" then dip it in one of the 3 or 4 sauces and eat. So tender. So delish.


Georgia didn't know where to start. Rice, soup, fried things and fruit and chocolate eclair to finish.


You really could just fill up on all the appetizer thingys. Raw fish things...


Deep fried things...


Cold things in sauces...


And a seafood fish soup thing just to push you to bursting...


But there is always room for sake. Always.

Bear soup?

After a dip in the Onsen, more on that later, we got back to our room just in time for dinner. A woman brought a trolley loaded with trays of food and started laying the trays on our low table. We have to sit on the floor, but we have seats of a sort. Basically a chair with the legs cut off and a cushion. Not the most comfortable seating arrangement in the world depending on your flexibility. I have the flexibility of a chair. The word dinner does not give justice to this meal. It is a feast. I felt full just looking at it. It was intimidating. As each dish materialised I regretted having that Kit-Kat earlier, then lunch, and then breakfast seemed an overindulgence. As a matter of fact I was starting to wish I'd left some room after dinner the night before.
 

There was the usual vast variety of food you get in Ryokans. Cold foods, soups, veggies, meats, fish (sashimi and dried), sauces, dips, tofu and rice. There was a cooker to cook something, probably the meat and veggies. It is all exquisitely prepared and the attention to detail is amazing.

I started with a broth containing some kind of tasty but unrecognisable meat. It was quite delicious. Later we were chatting with someone in the onsen and they asked us if we enjoyed the bear soup. Bear soup? When I'd read about Osenkaku I'd thought that bear soup, a local speciality, was some kind of euphemistically named dish. Like buffalo wings. Oh dear god. That delicious soup with unrecognisable but tasty meat was bear. Local bear hunted in the mountains. If I was at a restaurant and they served bear I would be horrified. I certainly wouldn't order it. But what is done is done. And it was tasty. Poor bear.

There was nothing in the way of ethical dilemmas for the rest of the meal. Unless you're vegan of course. Georgia was served a kids meal. The kids meal was as overloaded with tasty goodness as the adult meals. In fact an adult could have been well and truly satisfied with the kids meal. The kids meal also came with a gift pack. A bag full of goodies. Toys, lollies, puzzles. Georgy was extremely happy with her gifts.

Steak Tartare

Michelle's steak tartare. It's just raw steak and an egg right? Heh. This is a finely chopped fillet steak with herbs, onions, oil, toast and a quail egg. The meat is ever so buttery and delicate. This was as good as any from a classy French restaurant. I live with a Three Star Chef.

Steak Tartare

More food porn by Michelle - warning: contains fresh truffles

To die for cheese stuffed ravioli dripping with a burnt butter and sage sauce liberally sprinkled with fresh truffle shavings. Love truffle season.

Pancakes

Home made wholemeal pancakes with bacon, poached eggs, whipped butter and Canadian maple syrup. Thank you North America for inventing this yummy breakfast (although, we had this for a late lunch).

Pancakes!!!!!11111!11!!

Holy crap! I can make mousse...

Chocolaty smooth rich mousse. And I did it all by myself. However I did ruin half a kilo of chocolate in the first attempt. No ponies ruined though (obscure Skullcrusher Mountain reference).

Home damned made chocolate mousse.

Lovin' Ad Hoc At Home & Cuisine du Temps

We're slowly working our way through Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home. Almost every recipe is easy enough to make at home... Oh.
The buttermilk fried chicken is pretty damn spot on. Best fried chicken I've made. Throw in a home-made coleslaw, a beetroot and orange salad and fried cavalo nero and we don't need to eat out again.

Fried chicken and salad

Jacques Reymond's Cuisine du Temps is also proving doable at home. Modern French Asian Australian fusion it is. Who'd have thought of glazing a lamb rack with oyster sauce and soy sauce? Throw in mint oil and celeriac puree and embeurree of cabbage we have haute cuisine at home. Yet, it was easy... ish. The mint oil was surprisingly easy and delicious.

Lamb rack with mint oil

Ad Hoc and Movida

I got a little adventurous recently and actually opened a couple of cook books. Since Georgia came along I've been doing a fair bit of the cooking and I have got really good at cooking stews. But even I can get tired of stew so I cracked open Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home and Frank Camorra's Movida Cookbook.

Thomas Keller owns the legendary French Laundry restaurant in California. There's little chance I'd attempt one of his recipes from the French Laundry but Ad Hoc At Home is as it says. A cookbook for the home. Lots of basic but tasty recipes. I've tried his fried chicken recipe and it is sensational. This time though I made his Pan Roasted Duck Breast with Butter Braised Brussel Sprouts, Radishes and Kohlrabi. Before I attempted this I'd never even heard of Kohlrabi. Click here to read up on it. Thankfully are local green grocer, Fratelli Fresh, had it.

The duck breast was fairly easy to prepare. Simply marinated in various herbs then fried and finished off in the oven. The vegies took a little more preparation including cooking the radishes in emulsified butter. Butter emulsification? Hadn't done that before either. Anyway, it all came together reasonably successfully I think. The reason I chose duck is because Michelle loves the duck. Really. Loves the duck. She was even impressed with mine.

Pan Roasted Duck Breast with Butter Braised Brussel Sprouts, Radishes and Kohlrabi

Frank Camorra runs Movida in Melbourne. Movida is a Spanish restaurant cum tapas bar and serves extraordinary tapas and raciones. Best we've had outside of Spain so I was keen to try his pork recipe from the Movida Cookbook.

The pork had to be marinated is all sorts of herbs and liquids including sherry vinegar, white wine and sherry and then cooked in the oven. For something that isn't cooked for very long it comes out soft and succulent. I also felt like patatas bravas - potatoes in a mayonnaise base sauce. And yes, I hand made the mayonnaise. I over did it on the sauce when I mixed it in with the fried potatoes though. Still, it was pretty good. Patatas Bravas recipe here.

Marinated and braised pork with patatas bravas and broccoli

Two fairly involved and complicated, for me, meals in two days. I don't know what I'll try next.

Meat Butterfly

Sashimi time

No Michelle is not feeding raw fish to Georgia... yet.

A French truffle

Sadly decadence is a much underrated vice. When I saw this little baby (pictured below) on display at Victor Churchill the other day I knew she had to be mine. This is our first French truffle - usually we get the domestic almost as expensive variety. Decadence? Well truffles are an extravagance. It isn't very often you buy something that is in the two to three thousand dollars per kilo range. Luckily they are small and light. This little ball of black beauty was only 18 grams. But oh the flavour and odour. To store it you have to double seal it in a zip lock bag and then in a plastic container because otherwise your milk will have zee stink of zee angels.

The very simplest thing you can do with a truffle is shave some into a basic omelette and then once the omelette is done take the pan and fry up more shavings in some lovely brown burnt butter. We then get a double hit of truffley goodness.

There's still plenty of truffle left for Michelle's Truffle Egg Pasta. Last time it was divine so I have... expectations.

What did Michelle miss most while she was pregnant?

There are a number of foods not recommended for pregnant women one of which is sushi. Raw fish. Michelle loves sushi so it has been a struggle for Michelle to get through an entire 9 months without sushi. Michelle's favourite sushi in Australia is from Yoshii. Yoshii doesn't usually do take-away but yesterday he graciously made up a selection of sushi for us to take-away. I wanted to organise this for Michelle's birthday today but Yoshii is closed today (Australia Day) so we got it yesterday instead. Yoshii's sushi is the best sushi we've had outside of Japan and he would give some of their top Michelin starred sushi chefs a run for their money.
Happy birthday Michelle.

Fish

Before

After

A couple of random Michelle and Copernicus shots

Thomas Keller's Buttermilk Fried Chicken

Thomas Keller, legendary chef from The French Laundry in California, has a cook book for those of us whose cooking aspirations are not so lofty as to attempt to emulate his French Laundry recipes. The book is Ad Hoc At Home and it is where I got this recipe for Buttermilk Fried Chicken and garlic potato puree. The coleslaw is all mine.
Recipe to come....

The last dinner in Sounkyo

Back to the fisherman's hut for dinner again. We walked passed the group buffet where the tour groups were being treated to a drumming display. Meh, we had another sumptuous feast.
We got to grind our own wasabi paste again. This time it was white wasabi. There is nothing quite like fresh wasabi. Forget that stuff in a tube we get in Oz. We've since found out that most of the wasabi in a tube is made from ordinary horse radish, food colouring and flavouring. Apparently some wasabi is being grown in Tasmania now and each root goes for between $7 and $15 and can be found at Harris Farm stores. You beauty. We will be checking that out when we get home.
We left a cutesy note in the visitor's book.

An honest to goodness fisherman's hut in the basement of the hotel. Sorta.

"Restaurant Kita Banya - Enjoy fresh delicacies from land and sea as you sit around the fire in a private fisherman's style hut." That's what the blurb from the hotel handbook in our room says. Our dinner ticket was written in Japanese but by comparing characters we were able ascertain that Kita Banya is where we were to be eating tonight. I didn't fudge up the hotel reservation after all. When you book one of these hotels you have to choose a stay plan that includes meals. When it is all in Japanese it can be... difficult. Thank you translate.google.com. What we didn't want was the buffet. When we saw the number of people piling into the buffet hall we were very relieved we had reserved the intimate private dining room for two. Speaking of the number of hotel guests I can almost state categorically that Michelle and I were probably the only westerners in Sounkyo this weekend. I flipped through half a dozen guest books in the private dining rooms and there were only 4 other entries by westerners - 1 Aussie, a Frog and a Yank. Actually in the almost 30 days we've been in Japan we've been lucky enough not to see many westerners at all. In Hokkaido so far they have been very scarce on the ground. Anyway, these big hotels are amazing in how they accommodate different people for meals. Huge banquet rooms and fine dining for two. Our waitress for the evening was the lovely Mutsuko. She had almost no English and of course we had no Japanese but we were still able to communicate and she was a delight. The first thing we had to do was choose a main course. One of two fish or Australian(!) steak. One thing about Aussie beef, it made miss the Hida beef even more.