Bringing Culture to the Countryside

As much as I would like to, I cannot take full credit for bringing culture to the countryside on Wednesday night. Instead, the initial responsibility for this feat lies with an enterprising fishmonger who has a stall at the weekly market in Wantage.

In a town that's centre is starting to look very bleak, with every other shop closing down (thanks primarily to some interesting local planning decisions), this fishmonger and his sign for 'sushi £4.50, 2 for £8' stood out like a beacon of decency. 4 trays promptly purchased, my mother and I took up the proverbial gauntlet and ran with it. Not literally, of course, or we might have dropped the sushi!

Showing Off Some Skills On My Birthday

Our family is one of confirmed Japanese food lovers. Our favourite restaurant in Edinburgh was Izzi (before it shut down), our first dinner out when we're in the states is sushi, my last birthday was at a tepenyaki restaurant in Lytham... Need I go on?

So, with our newly purchased sushi as a base, we set about preparing a Japanese feast for dinner.  We had some edamame (soya beans in their pods) in the freezer, which we usually have served with a good sprinkling of rock salt, so that as you suck the beans out of the pods you get a lovely salty, steamy taste.  When I was in Taiwan in 2010, though, I had tried edamame with raw garlic crushed through it.  Garlic being the one thing that is always on my shopping list, I was pleasantly surprised by this development and tried a variation out for our Japanese feast.  I warmed up a good amount of olive oil in a tiny pan and added finely chopped garlic, cooking it very gently, not allowing it to colour.  I poured the garlic and some of the olive oil over the cooked edamame and then tossed in a couple of pinches of rock salt.  First course done.

When you order set menus in restaurants, you tend to get a miso soup course accompanied with a sweetly dressed salad.  Using Clearspring Organic Miso paste, we made up the soup served sprinkled with finely sliced spring onions.  We made a quick salad of shredded lettuce, grated carrot and grated radish.  For the salad dressing we combined finely-grated ginger, a splash of soy sauce, a glug of sesame oil, a pinch of sugar, a slosh of white wine vinegar and a big tablespoon of mayonnaise.  I don't know whether this ingredient list is even close to that of the traditional dressing, but it certainly tasted like a good approximation.

The feast was completed by our market-bought sushi for third course and a small bottle of sake, poured into a jug and heated in the microwave.

We may not have slaved hours in the kitchen cooking sushi rice, we may not have trawled the south west sourcing ingredients, but we did have a very nice evening, with very tasty food courtesy of a fishmonger with a vision in the deepest, darkest countryside!