Moved!

New home @ Sina microblog

Due to restricted Blogger access in Asia and popular request from family members (re: hi dad), Feastive will be merged with my Sina microblog from this point forward. Although I mainly post in Chinese and Japanese there, all photo tags are in English so feel free to drop by!

Meanwhile, entries found at this location will remain online as an archive of sorts. Who knows, perhaps it'll be revived one day for some grand purpose... Either way, thanks for reading until now and hope to see you again somewhere in cyberspace!

Soup or Dessert?

Typically this would be categorized as dessert, though I have always seen it as a diet soup of sorts, full of good items for women with a serious lack of iron. Many thanks to mom for the awesome recipe!

Ingredients: red bean, peanut, red date, coix seed with brown sugar

Mix Your Miso

As miso soup served at a restaurant tends to contain only orthodox items such as tofu and seaweed, making it at home guarantees more variety in its content and thereby a noticeable increase in nutritious value. A typical bowl of miso soup at my place would include at least four types of vegetables as well as lean pork slices, combined with a soup base made of multiple miso blends. Having a busy week at work? Keep a pot of mouthwatering miso soup in your fridge and dinner will be set for a good few days.

It's Sweets Time!

Blancmange is one of my favorite summer desserts/snack choices. It's easy to make and quite satisfying to the tummy despite having a low calorie count per serving, accompanied by a rich collection of topping/mixing that helps me a great deal when cleaning certain stock items from the fridge e.g. jam, dry fruits, etc. Give it a shot if you're a health-conscious sweets lover! (Does the last part sound like an oxymoron...?)

The First Bento

While sorting my photo folder today for a design project, I came across the above shot from several years ago: my very first attempt at bento making. How nostalgic!

To anyone who is learning how to cook like myself, I would highly recommend taking photos of what you make as frequently as possible. Not only is it an effective way for one to stay motivated on his or her cooking/diet schedule (think about lazy weekends after a rough week of work), visual records are always helpful when it comes to providing a better understanding of how much one is learning day by day.

What would your food photo look like a year from now?

Color and Cooking

Presentation is very important to Japanese cooking as a whole, a good example being color combination, which happens to be the one aspect I tend to pay special attention to when preparing a meal. Aside from brown, the color of health in Japanese cooking, I like to include a balanced portion of green, red and yellow--two primary plus one secondary color as noted on a typical color wheel. Such endeavor not only delivers extra aesthetic quality for a dish, but also a better nutritious balance as a 2:1 vegetable to protein ratio is best for digestion, which results in a healthier diet.

Use Your Milk

Milk is a popular ingredient for dishes I make/would like to try out in the future. However, the amount of milk required in a single-person recipe tends to be quite small, and I don't drink milk as is anymore due to calcium overdose as a child. (Think about having 2-3 liters of milk a day due to orders by grandparents...)

With that said, since milk is typically sold in 1 liter size containers and relatively easy to expire, a milk carton could move straight into garbage category after being used only once or twice in my kitchen, which is a lot of waste. Then I came across a simple recipe on the website of a Japanese farm that teaches how to make tofu using just milk and white vinegar, which I tried right away and voila, problem solved! Milk tofu is now one of my favorite side dishes at dinner, served with home-made sauces of all kinds that makes both my fridge and my tummy very happy.

Dragon Boat Festival

Eating chimaki (zhongzi in Chinese) in celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival! The filling tends to differ per region, and my family usually makes the following versions each year: red bean and peanut. Yum!

Rediscover Your Salad

I used to hate salads with a passion, which is probably not a surprise considering how much of a junk eater I was before discovering the joy of home cooking. It took some time before I came to the realization that salads require as much personalization as any other complicated dish to become truly likable, i.e. how a recipe learned from books/TV shows is always tweaked according to one's unique daily intake preference before it is made into a staple at respective households.

Whether it be the choice of vegetables or seasoning used, keep trying until you arrive at the absolute best combination for you and you only--that would be when you truly appreciate having a salad at your dining table time after time.

Purple Yam Love

 
Lately I have become quite fond of purple yam as an ingredient for side dishes, served with yuzukoshō (a Japanese paste made from chili peppers, citrus fruit and salt) and black pepper. It is also a great substitute for rice and noodles as part of your daily carbohydrate intake. Give it a shot if you find it at a supermarket near you!

Manage Your Time

Effective time management is essential to those who are determined to keep up a healthy diet i.e. cook more and eat out less. Example scenario: don't you think that spending 10 minutes on preparing a well-balanced sandwich for lunch is much more valuable than say, hitting a high score on Facebook games?

Steam Your Hamburg

No, I'm not joking: we actually steam our hamburg (a.k.a. a Salisbury steak dish in Japan, often a family staple) in a fry pan while cooking. This method ensures that no meat juice can escape before serving and is especially effective when making soy sauce based hamburg.

Today's lunch: hamburg with mushrooms and green onions, cucumber topped by self-made meat sauce, tomato egg drop soup

The Power of Brown

 

One advice from Japanese grandmothers: brown is the color of health and should be present in at least one meal per day.

Today's lunch: radish in self-made teriyaki sauce, honey and black pepper chicken, chikuzenni (a traditional dish originated from the Kyushu region in Japan) with brown rice

Make Your Own Sauce

I like to make my own sauce and dressing whenever there is time. Doing so not only enables me to control the amount of salt, sugar, etc. I intake more precisely, the process of learning and making something that tastes good and lasts long at the same time is quite satisfying. Additionally, having a few jars of cooked meat/vegetarian sauces at hand can really save your day when trying to add variety to a meal during busy periods of life.

Today's lunch menu: steamed bean sprout topped by meat sauce (self-made with pork, garlic and red onion), scrambled egg with asparagus, chicken ham and potatoes, veggie red bean bread and mango tea

Veggie Red Bean Bread

I have recently come across an interesting type of bread (see photo), where vegetables and red beans are mixed into its base flour, thus the green and brown-red look. Give it a shot if you find it near you! (Bought at T&T: Coquitlam Centre)

The World of Bento

Bento is a Japanese term for "packed meal in a box". As part of the ongoing tradition, many children in Japan grow up with the taste of their family through bento (i.e. in many schools it is expected that students would bring their own lunch), and a good number of them would become bento makers for their own family in the future. Oh, did I mention that making bento is also a great way to diet?

Above are photos of the kind of bento I bring to school these days. Watch out for future bento collection tags at this blog for more showcases and related recipes!

10-minute Vegetable Soup

Once upon a time, I spent every other day of my life living solely on dark chocolate and fried shrimp. Oh the horrifying memories.

As is the case with all youngsters who are overly confident with their metabolism, the idea of eating more balanced meals did not occur to me until late 20s, when the consumption of vegetables no longer posed a big challenge. That being said, I still could not find myself liking the taste of certain items such as carrots and onions at first, even if I am fully aware of all the good they bring to one's body.

Solution to my problem? The 10-minute vegetable soup! A bit of sesame oil combined with specialty sauces can do all kinds of wonders to satisfy your tongue, not to mention you are able to consume a larger variety of vegetables this way.

Today's ingredients: fresh leek, chopped carrots, 2 kinds of mushrooms and green onions

Cooking on YouTube

Price tags aside, authentic Japanese cooking classes are rather difficult to come by in North America. As a result, I take most of my cooking "lessons" through parents, imported recipe books and YouTube. The latter is especially effective when it comes to treating different types of ingredients with proper tools.

Below is my personal playlist on YouTube where I save short clips related to Japanese home cooking. There will be more to come as I find them. Note: if you are interested in learning more about a specific clip from the list, I would be happy to provide quick translations.

Tamagoyaki (Japanese Omelet)

Tamagoyaki, or Japanese Omelet, is a staple dish every Japanese family makes to go with their breakfast, packed lunches or dinner sides.

I typically like to rearrange the traditional recipe a little to make the omelet more flavorful. Tuna, fish soup and green onions are some of my favorite items to mix with the egg before cooking with a fry pan or steam in a special silicone case.

About

Welcome to Feastive, a visual journal dedicated to Japanese home cooking with occasional twists e.g. restaurant reviews, recipe book recommendations, etc.

Feastive: a self-created word displaying Feast as an adjective

I have long wanted an opportunity to start monitoring my eating habits, an act I believe to be key to better health, which in turn links to a more productive school and work life. When one of my classes at VFS assigned the creation of a blog as part of its curriculum, I jumped at the chance to create Feastive, not only because I am a big fan of Japanese cuisine, but also due to my recent effort to eat out less. (Vancouver is quite the expensive city!)

While visuals (e.g. photos, video clips, etc.) are meant to be the primary focus of this journal, I will likely be jogging down favorite recipes and cooking tips from time to time for personal reference. If you have stumbled across any of my posts and would like to share relevant experience and/or advice, feel free to leave a comment :)

Without further ado, let's be feastive!