Japanese Recipes for the Home Cook

For my first Foodbuzz Project Food Blog challenge (please head over here—voting starts September 20!), I decided to take on a favorite of mine, inari zushi. We make it every year when we visit my husband’s family for Oshogatsu (Japanese New Year) in San Juan Bautista. I’m there with the aunties, cousins, and neighbors, year after year, stuffing hundreds of aburaage (fried tofu) with rice, but I’ve never made it on my own from start to finish.

This is a typical Japanese dish and one that exhibits qualities that define me as a cook. At first glance, it seems rather simple—a small fist full of rice tucked into a pocket of sweet fried tofu. But what you don’t know are the many little things that make a dish really sing: the time it takes to let the bonito flakes sink in a batch of dashi, the small amount of sake added to cook the rice, the timing of adding the shoyu to the aburaage so as not to overcook, the slow simmer of the shiitake and kanpyo. It’s the details (i.e. love) that matter. I enjoy eating a nice fancy meal once in a while, but that’s not who I am as a cook. I’m a home cook that likes to feed my family with dishes that are humble, but soothe the soul. I like to cook food that’s approachable, even if that means it lacks the wow-factor or it isn’t pushing any boundaries. In particular, my goal for this blog is to show the joy and pleasure I get from Japanese food—the stuff I grew up on.

So here we have inari zushi—a seemingly easy, but in fact labor-intensive recipe. I admit I was a little intimidated at first, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me because I had an eye on my friend Hama’s Inari Army. She topped her inari with nori, egg, and shiso and it looked so appetizing—more so than presenting it the traditional way with the seam side down—that I had to make some of my own.

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