The Dinner Files

My Uncle Denny may be best known both here and in my mind for his superlative smoked salmon, a fish he catches, cleans, and smokes himself. It is actually smoked, not cold-cured or salt-cured, but set in a smoke house filled with smoke from a hot fire, a process known as hot smoked to some, kippered to others, or, simply, smoked. Instead of transforming the salmon  into the silken slabs of gravlax, the smokes dried the fish a bit, highlighting the oils which remain free-flowing in even the coldest of waters and that make salmon so delicious, and makes it easy to flake into salty bites.

Yet it is from him that I first learned a) pumpkin pie need not come from a can, and b) you need not confine yourself to pumpkin when making what he calls “gourd pie.” It takes no discernible effort for me to picture him in the kitchen of their old house – the one with a giant hand-cranked coffee grinder built into the kitchen wall, with baskets and pan hanging over the counters, and a wood-burning stove in the living room – manning the blender on a Thanksgiving morning, whipping up a half dozen of his gourd pies to bring to the Thanksgiving potluck and soccer game while my cousin, who is now finishing up law school, pulled at my hand hoping I’d read the stack of picture books he’d assembled to him.

So when Denny and my Aunt Nancy as well as my parents were in town the weekend before my dad’s birthday, we had a little dinner to celebrate. I took extreme advantage of my guests and made a range of pies to fill in my Thanksgiving offerings over at Local Foods. Pumpkin pie, chile pumpkin pie (seriously, that bit of ground dried chile is awesome in pumpkin pie!), and a bourbon pecan pie (made with maple syrup) were all on offer. Following my fine uncle’s example, the pumpkin pies were made with freshly roasted winter squash, with something labelled a “red kabocha” at the market. It looked suspiciously like a red kuri pumpkin to me. Check out that gorgeous color.

Whether you roast your own squash to make your own pie or not, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving and hope you spend it with people who make you laugh and who slowly but surely, without too much fuss and without distracting from the animated conversation already in the works, pay you the ultimate compliment and finish all the pie.

(Still menu planning? Find a gaggle of my Thanksgiving desserts recipes over at Local Foods.)

I had a birthday dinner for my dad this weekend. It was small, it was loud, it was delicious. It was an alliterative meal of padron peppers, posole, and pies. I’ll tell you all about the pies later, but for the moment I need to spread the posole word.

You can find lots of recipes for posole out there, and I’m sure they are all fabulous. I will say, however, that many of them seem unnecessarily complicated. Posole is a simple dish of pork and hominy seasoned with chile. Not much more is really required. Some salt is going to help things along, and some garlic and a bit of oregano help deepen and round out the flavor.

I kept it frighteningly simple. Rustic, was my dashing husband’s comment, and I took it as a compliment. The bowls were emptied, re-filled, and re-emptied, which I take as the most sincere of compliments people can pay a cook.

Get the recipe for posole. I like to pile a bit of lime cumin cole slaw on top, letting the shreds of cabbage sink down into the posole, adding crunch and freshness to every spicy rich bite.

My dashing and I have some classic marital opposites-attract divisions. I would like the house to stay in a state of perpetual spotless delight; he is a big slob. I think 3 o’clock means 3 o’clock; even our son knows his father’s “half an hour” has nothing to do with 30 measurable minutes. One thing we can really agree on though is this simple truth: spaghetti squash sucks.

We had both, at separate points in our lives, been served spaghetti squash topped with marinara sauce and told it was a delightful substitute for pasta. Maybe you like that kind of nonsense, but we sure don’t.

I once had to come up with a spaghetti squash recipe for work so I tossed with with a jalapeño-infused cream, smothered it in cheese, and baked the living daylights out of it. Of course that was good (check it out). My local foods site for About.com had a noticeable dearth of spaghetti squash recipes, and the people, they seem to really want to eat spaghetti squash. So I got to thinking, and thinking. And then it occurred to me: Spaghetti squash isn’t much like pasta, but it is somewhat like rice vermicelli. So I made a family favorite — pork and rice noodles — using spaghetti squash as the noodles. Everyone agreed: very tasty. It’s so good for you it’s almost wrong, but the mild sweetness of spaghetti squash works with the spice in this dish remarkably well.

Get the recipe for Spicy Spaghetti Squash “Noodles”. Note: You will need some cooked spaghetti squash to make it.

Sure, I’ve made doughnuts before, but I’d never made my very favorite type of doughnut: a lightly glazed sour cream old fashioned.

Or, to be more specific, a lightly glazed sour cream old fashioned doughnut from Top Pot in Seattle.

Then my food writing world pal Jess Thomson worked on Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts: Secrets and Recipes for the Home Baker and there is was, on page 96, the recipe.

So after dinner I mixed up the dough (no big deal) and set it in the fridge to chill while I slept. I set my alarm to wake up a bit early (time to make the doughnuts!), and sipped coffee while I rolled and cut the dough.

I overestimated how long that would take (the rolling and cutting took less than 15 minutes), so I sipped more coffee while I read in the quite of the morning. About fifteen minutes before my friend and neighbor dropped off her kids that I oh-so-nicely agreed to take to school that morning, I heated up the oil and started frying.

I learned, from Jess, that old fashioned doughnuts are made from a cake-like dough, fried at a lower temperature than other doughnuts, and turned twice while frying—a combination that gives them those crunchable grooves and petals that hold a simple glaze oh so beautifully, especially when you do as Jess says and dip still-warm doughnuts in a still-warm glaze and let them set up for at least ten minutes before crunching into them.

Was I motivated to write an informed review of my friend’s book? A selfish desire to enjoy a homemade old fashioned doughnut with my coffee on a dreary run-of-the-mill Tuesday morning? A maternal need to make my son’s favorite breakfast (sadly, he knows just how awesome homemade doughnuts are)? A narcissistic desire to have two delightful little girls think I’m the bee’s knees? No one much cared, we just happily ate the results, leaving a thin layer of sugar and joy all over the house.

At our family cabin in northern Minnesota there are, as is the custom, many family photos, including a fine selection of oldey timey black-and-whites of my great-grandparents engaged in various antics. This lady here? She’s my great-grandmother, Georgie McGregor Bronson. She died when I was seventeen. Seventeen! I used to drive over and visit her. She would say I was an angel sent from heaven for coming to cheer her up with what, I now understand, was my sheer youth and existence. Let’s just say this: that wasn’t the usual reaction to me at the time.

So here she is, bathing, in the lake in which I bath every summer. Her daughter was the grandmother I adored. As a kid I swam at that very dock with both of them and pretty much every other member of that side of the family.

But all that is besides the point. I love the picture for those reasons, but I post it here because of words she said to my mother when she was fairly close to dying and was pretty much a fairly cheery pile of skin and bones: all my life, I wanted to be thin, what good does it do me now?

She wasn’t a heavy woman by any stretch, but she wasn’t tall and she had a “nice bosom,” so I suppose she never felt particularly svelte either. Of course, we have photographic evidence above that she was a normal sized, even thin by many many standards, person above.

I bring this up because, if you’re anything like me, you want to feel healthy and look good but not obsess about your weight or be weird and develop what I like to call an “under-control adult eating disorder.” The thing is, maintaining that balance becomes increasingly difficult as middle-age spread sets in and what you need to do just to keep wearing your own clothes is less and less fun.

For example, I would like to be able to eat cheese. Lots of cheese. I love cheese. Every single kind. I don’t want to binge or anything, but I would very much like to eat, say, a couple ounces of cheese everyday. And I used to do so. Happily. Every afternoon around 4 or when I got home and started fixing dinner, I would joyfully eat two or three ounces of cheese. Sometimes more. You know what? That’s no longer such a good idea for me. I’m afraid copious amounts of cheese may have to go in the same pile as smoking: something I’m going to put off for now, but when I hit 80, watch out!

In short, I’ve been working through what it means to work in food and have food be such a big part of my life and such a source of pleasure and camaraderie, while also taking quite seriously that I’d like to pretty much stay this size. Well, I’d actually like to be the size I was before I hurt me knee, which is just very slightly smaller than I am at this exact moment. Seeing how quickly I put on a few while laid up and then what it takes to take off a few at this point in the game is fairly depressing.

So, when I opened New York Magazine and saw this, my inner Joan Rivers shouted “can we talk?”

There are so many ways to read this page it boggles the mind. The skinny-women-are-the-ideal/skinny-women-are-freaks dichotomy is super fun to process, for starters. But as someone who loves food, let me say this: The model may very well believe that she eats “like a normal person,” and maybe she does, but to me it looks like she spends all day barely staving off hunger and then orders the least appetizing dinner I can imagine. Barley soup, a tuna wrap, and cole slaw? Each element sounds okay, but as a meal? Together? That shit ain’t right. There is not a single food episode (I can hardly call most of them “meals”) that she eats that a human could possibly look forward to. It’s all just so Spartan and sad. The ballerina, on the other hand, with her holier-than-thou attitude and bizarre eating schedule (which, to be fair, seems designed around maximizing her energy for performances while keeping her bird-like and lift-able), at least has a few things in there that sound tasty. A crab cake with chopped salad and Pinot Noir? Sign me up!

As someone facing the dreariness of a slowing metabolism, I can’t help but think that the model, who is young and naturally slim, is seriously wasting her time. She could be downing cereal swimming in half-and-half, snacks of steaming macaroni and cheese, troughs of trifle. She could, I bet, ditch the “light butter” and spread her “whole wheat flatbread” with avocado butter, a concoction as decadent as it sounds which a friend and I made way too much of in college, to no ill effect. Instead she lists “ice water” as part of a meal.

It’s enough to make an old lady cry. Instead, though, I hope that when my son and perhaps future grandchildren and even great-grandchildren look at what will be old photos of me someday in the future they will remember that I was active and fun, just like Georgie. And that I never served them barley soup, tuna wraps, and cole slaw. Ever.

A giant pet peeve of mine is how everyone talks about how busy they are. It annoys me on two fronts. The more obvious one being that since we’re all so busy it’s not actually unusual enough to warrant quite so much conversation space, can we agree on that? The second part is more troubling. How can one possibly explain what’s going  on when one’s life really is exceptionally booked? Not the normal busy of modern life with its commuting and dual-working couples and the bright and shiny objects that distract us on the internet (you’re welcome!), which is enhanced by the nonsense of parenthood for some of us (not all of parenthood is nonsense, of course, but shuttling people to birthday parties and bringing snacks and all that – you know what I mean, the nonsense part, the part that isn’t what you were thinking about when you thought to yourself “I should have some kids”), but the kind of busy that sort of smacks the wind out of your gut and can leave you paralyzed at your desk wondering how, how on god’s green earth, you can possibly get everything done. Sometimes that sense hits for a few hours, other times it comes in horrifying weeks-long recurring waves. What do we call that when we’re always “busy”?

So I don’t know what to say except I’ve been quite occupied. Of course, much of that occupation has been of my own creation (I am such a hard-ass boss!) and I even enjoy the bulk of the actual work, but if anyone else wants to drive my son to a “Pump It Up” birthday party on Friday night, I wouldn’t complain one bit.

Some of the flurry has been recipe work for others, so I can’t post about that. And the bustle and focus on writing work (which I love!) has meant meals haven’t been all that fascinating around here lately. A new-to-me version of tuna pasta has made several appearances, but an accurate picture of that looks like a dog threw up on your plate. I could style it all pretty, carefully placing tuna and herbs on the tangle of noodles so as not to overwhelm them, but that isn’t going to taste very good and it also won’t be what you end up with if you follow my suggestions below. What you will end up with, however, are empty plates, so I feel my journalistic integrity, or at least my claim to be writing non-fiction, is intact when I try and tempt you with the picture above.

Spaghetti with tuna pepper and lemon

This dish was made at the suggestion of a friend when we needed to eat lunch. These things were all hanging around the kitchen. I’ve since made it three times in the last ten days because it is easy, delicious, fast, and I usually have the ingredients hanging around my house. I try to eat more sardines and less tuna, but the intensity of my work schedule lately has brought out cravings for the deeply familiar. Things from childhood: tuna, peanut butter, apples, carrots, cottage cheese. Sardines would work beautifully in this dish, and are a much better choice in terms of keeping the ocean functioning for a few extra years. If you use tuna, you might want to do as I do and shell out the extra money for hook-and-line caught pacific albacore tuna (here are a few brands I like). I also have been known to make a delicious tuna tomato pasta or a tuna olive and caper pasta. This sardine pasta can really fit the similar bill, too.

Put a pot of water on to boil. While that’s heating up mince a few cloves of garlic, finely chop 4-8 green onions, and mince about a cup (less is fine) of whatever fresh herbs you can scrounge up — I particularly like a mix of flat-leaf parsley, mint, and basil in this dish.

At this point there are two ways to proceed: the faster way or the fewer dishes way.

Faster way: Put a large frying pan over high heat. Add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil, swirl to coat the pan, and add the garlic and a few red pepper flakes or a dried chile or two if you want some heat. Let that sizzle for a few seconds and add the green onion. Cook, stirring, until the onion is softened. Add about 1/2 cup white wine, if you like, and a can of tuna, including the juices in the can. Break up the tuna and cook, stirring a bit and perhaps reducing the heat to keep things cooking but not flailing around wildly in there, until the wine is reduced by at least a half, about three minutes.

During all this, when the water starts boiling, add enough salt to make it taste as salty as ocean water and  1/2 pound of spaghetti (this sauce, with a bit more olive oil, could stretch to cover a full pound, but I might consider adding more tuna at that point). Note that this sauce works very well with whole wheat pasta. Cook until almost tender to the bite, when it needs just another minute to cook, remove a cup of the cooking water, and drain the noodles.

Grate some lemon zest over the sauce mixture – about half a lemon’s worth. Add the herbs and at least 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (I’ve been known to add more, but I have a thing for black pepper) and stir everything together. Add the reserved cooking liquid, stir to combine, and dump in the pasta. Use tongs or two forks to help combine everything. Cook until the liquid is mostly absorbed and the pasta is al dente. Squeeze a tablespoon or so of fresh lemon juice over the whole mess, toss again, taste, and add more salt, pepper, or lemon juice as you see fit. This makes three or four reasonable servings or two “I cranked out the pages this morning and my brain needs carbs” starving-writer servings.

The fewer dishes way: Prep everything while the pasta cooks, but wait to cook the sauce in the pasta-boiling pot after you’ve drained the noodles.

We took a little trip during our vacation last June. I mean, sometimes you need a break from all the sun and white sand and clear water. Sometimes you need a little fog and drizzle. Sometimes you need to go to a volcano.

We did not see the lava flow – it wasn’t flowing anywhere where people can see it while we were there – but we did walk through a crater that had a volcano erupt in it in the 50s and is now a creepy black moonscape surrounded by forest, so we had that going for us.

Since the volcano and Volcanoes National Park are on the full opposite side of the large island from us, we stayed overnight up in Volcano, Hawaii. And we did as we were told by many many people and ate at the Thai restaurant there. We were, in fact, ordered by two separate people to be sure to eat there. It is no exaggeration to say that people had raved about the place. Raved.

In fairness, the Thai food was perfectly tasty. We were all quite happy with our dinners. What we were not was blown away. What we would not do is rave about it. If you live in a city with any decent Thai food at all, the Thai place in Volcano, despite what you hear, will not thrill you. What it will do is fill you up and taste good doing it. Just don’t get too excited.

What you can get exited about, however, is the Hana Hou Restaurant in Naalehu, the southern most restaurant in the U.S. For us it was on the way home up the west side of the island.

Homey, fresh, tasty food and a cheery aloha atmosphere. We ordered from the daily specials board as they were being written.

The mac nut chicken salad was tasty, the chowder fresh and hearty, the fish and chips crisp and light.

That crazy delicious macadamia nut cream pie up top (nuts in the crust, too) thrilled the lot of us. They pour delicious coffee at Hana Hou and the guy who grows it was there eating his plate lunch at the table next to us, so that, of course, thrilled me.

Dear old friends were excited to tell me about their latest discovery. During a kitchen remodel they became deeply dependent on their grill. And one of them thought to put dough on the grill and grill the bread. The other of them thought that her husband was a genius for coming up with this. She thought I would be excited and amazed. She thought I’d want to write about it.

“I know!” I said, “I love making grill bread.”

“You know about it?” she asked, disappointed. “It’s a thing?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s a thing.”

Her husband nodded. He had been less impressed with his innovation from the beginning. He knew it was a thing.

This summer I branched out from my classic it’s-like-a-crack-pretzel version and took inspiration from a cilantro-scallion bread in the July issue of Bon Appetit. But I didn’t have cilantro or sesame seeds at the cabin and… well, there were several changes. The most important one, however, was popping the scallion-laden spirals on the grill. Some fell apart, some got a bit, um, charred, but that was a grillmaster/cook’s error rather than a recipe problem. Overall they were scrumptious.

Scallion grilled bread

This dough is much softer than others that I’ve grilled. Keep the grill at a steady, medium heat so they can cook through without burning and without you having to try and move them before the dough is nicely “set” so they don’t fall apart as some of mine did when I had to move them away from the intense heat on my overly-hot grill (in my defense, I had to move the lit grill up a stair to get in beneath an overhang when it started to rain and the coals shifted around most annoyingly).

Dissolve 2 teaspoons dry active yeast in 1/2 cup of warm water. Make sure it gets a bit foamy to make sure the yeast is alive and activated. Stir in 2 teaspoons sugar and 2 teaspoons fine sea salt to dissolve. Then stir in 4 tablespoons melted and cooled butter and 1 egg. Stir about 2 cups flour into this wet mixture. You will have quite a sticky dough. Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk, about an hour or so or overnight in the fridge.

When the mixture has about doubled, chop up 4 scallions/green onions and combine them with 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds if you’re so inclined.

Punch down the dough and knead on a well floured surface so it’s a nice smooth mass. Roll or pat and stretch the whole mass into a 12-inch long rectangle about 1/2 inch thick. Spread the dough all over with the scallion-cumin seed mixture, loosely roll the rectangle the long way into a log (the dough will expand and you want the spirals you’ll end up with to stay flat spirals and not puff up into cones), set the seam-side down and cut into 12 even disks about 1-inch thick each. Lay the disks out on a floured surface, pressing them a bit more flat or shaping them back into round disks if they got squished as you do so, cover with a clean towel, and let sit until a bit puffy.

Heat a grill to as even a medium heat (you can hold your hand about an inch above the cooking grate for 3 to 4 seconds) as you can. Brush the clean cooking grate with oil and brush the top of the disks with oil. Set the disks, oil-side-down on the grill and cook until the dough is a bit “set” and breads are well browned on one side, 3 to 4 minutes. Oil the raw tops of the breads and turn them over to cook on the other side until cooked through and well browned on both sides, another 3 to 4 minutes. Serve somewhat immediately because fresh, hot bread is such a treat.

I have three sisters-in-law. They are each massively impressive in their own way. Their most important trait, of course, is the immense love they have all shown me and mine. A most treasured additional characteristic they share is the ability to make me laugh out loud. And really, that is all I ask of anyone.

What they may not realize, however, is how much they have helped me professionally.

They would not have realized this because none of them are writers. Or cooks.

What they are is this: smart, on-the-ball, professional women with children. Two of them work really amazingly full-time at rather beyond-demanding jobs, the third is career-shifting while raising three kids which hurts my head to even think about. Ow. They have all, over the years, sat and watched me cook. They have all, on various occasions, complimented the results. They want to feed themselves and their families in pleasurable and healthful ways.

And so when I write up a recipe I always image Heidi and Michelle and Mary cooking it. They are, collectively, my recipe barometer. On good days they are merry companions and we swing along through soups and salads with great fun. On bad days they are the witches from MacBeth, thwarting me at every turn with bad news and extra work because they do not already know how to grill a turkey or can’t agree on what, exactly, “blanching” is. How quickly will they, in all honesty, be able to mince those shallots? Do they keep (or want to keep) whole wheat pastry flour in the house? Will Heidi be able to find Asian eggplant easily in Minneapolis, or will it require an extra errand? Am I sure Michelle’s market in Los Angeles carries harissa, or must a substitution be stated? Will Mary, in her Greenwich Village apartment, need an alternative to grilling proper? I must admit that I do not answer their (imaginary) concerns as often as I might, but at least I do think of them, and that is thanks to my sisters-in-law.

One of them (Heidi) made a grilled corn salad this summer that got me thinking. It got me thinking about how to make an even more delicious grilled corn salad. I then made that even more delicious salad last weekend and another of them (Michelle) was quite taken by the results. Dare I hope that the third (Mary) finds a grill and cooks this up? (Hint: char the corn under a broiler instead of on a grill!)

Spicy grilled corn salad

This is yummers, plain and simple. Good all on its own, I’ve enjoyed it served with a lovely grilled tri-tip, a grilled chicken, and some grilled bratwurst (less of a perfect marriage, but tasty nonetheless). The green chile dressing could, of course, be used in plenty of other ways if one were so inclined.

Shuck 6 or 8 ears of fresh sweet corn. Brush them lightly with oil and set, along with 2 jalapeño or serrano chiles, on a hot grill. Cook, turning as you think of it, until the corn is lightly charred all over and the chiles are nicely blackened. Take everything off the grill as it’s done and let sit until it’s cool enough to handle.

Remove the blackened skin, stem, and seeds from the chiles. Chop them up – if they sort of fall apart as you do this, all the better. Put them in a large salad-type bowl and add 1 tablespoon of lime juice, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, some generous grindings of black pepper, and enough salt to make the taste pop. Finely chop a small red onion or a few shallots. (You can put the chopped results in a sieve or strainer, rinse with cold water, and turn out onto paper towels to pat dry if you want to tame the pungency of the raw onion.) Add the onion to the bowl and toss with the dressing. Cut the grilled corn kernels from the cobs and toss them with dressing and onion. Chop up as much cilantro as you have (about 1 cup of leaves works nicely, but more or less is fine) and add that to the mix. Serve it up. Note that a handful or two of crumbled cotija cheese (feta is a fine enough substitute) would not be out of order.

Sometimes a favor flips itself over. You start off thinking you are doing someone else a favor and end up so grateful for what they have done for you.

About a week ago the lovely Tara Austen Weaver, author of The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman’s Romp through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis, sent out a request. She asked that people check out her new e-book, Tales from High Mountain, part 1, about the months she lived in a very traditional house in a very traditional town high the mountains of Japan. It costs only $3.99, as a PDF or a Kindle download, with all proceeds going to on-going relief efforts in Japan. She set the price low to encourage buyers, but you can enter any amount you want in the final purchase price to give more, if you’re so inclined.

So I bought it and stayed up late reading it – remembering so well the unbelievable fatigue that can come when living in a foreign country, in a foreign language, in other people’s houses – and tweeted about it, trying to get the word out about her great writing and inspiring goal of raising money to help a country she deeply loves.

But I kept thinking. Her descriptions of the food were, of course, so tempting. I do not cook a lot of Japanese food. Hardly any, really. But that night of reading about Japanese food made me turn the next morning to Everyday Harumi: Simple Japanese Food for Family & Friends by Harumi Kurihara who, according to the press release sent with the book from the publisher, is the Martha Stewart of Japan. I have absolutely no idea how accurate that comparison is, but I do know that the recipes in this book are super simple and beautiful and there are at leasta  dozen post-its sticking out from its pages marking the recipes I meant to cook when I first looked through it. Then recipes for work needed to be cooked and other books showed up and piled on top and I simply lost track of those intentions.

Until, of course, I read Tales from High Mountain. So I cooked up the onigiri, rice balls with chopped chicken (although the book has you use ground, which I didn’t note until I’d chopped the chicken – I’m a good recipe writer and not really the best recipe follower). We loved them. Origiri are, according to this book, what Japanese people might eat when we would turn to a sandwich. Lightbulb. My son, age 8, does not like sandwiches. This makes packing his punch everyday sort of a pain. Not so this week. We made another batch of origiri together and have popped them in his lunch bag two days in a row now.

I thought I was doing Tara a favor and in the process giving some more money to natural disaster survivors (something no San Franciscan every sneezes at). In the process I had a stupid, quotidian, boring, and unremarkable problem that has vexed me regularly for years – what to put in that lunch bag – solved.

How is that for a lead-in to asking you for a favor or two? First, check out Tara’s post and consider ordering her book. Second, cook something totally new this week. Who knows what other problems – big or small – we might solve?

Origiri – chicken rice balls

This is my version – a bit less sweet and with a bit more chicken in the chicken-to-rice ratio.

Rinse 1 cup sushi rice (long grain really won’t work) in cool water until the water runs clear. Put in a rice cooker or pot with 1 1/2 cups water and 1/2 teaspoon salt, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer 15 minutes. Take off the heat and let sit 5 minutes. Uncover and let cool.

Meanwhile, put 1/2 pound finely chopped chicken thigh meat (or ground chicken if it doesn’t freak you out the way it freaks me out), 3 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce, 2 tablespoons sake, and 2 tablespoons mirin in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cook, stirring, until the chicken is cooked through and the liquid is pretty much absorbed, about 5 minutes. Let cool.

Combine the rice and chicken mixture thoroughly. With damp hands grad a small handful of the mixture and press – press really hard – into a ball or patty. Set on a plate and repeat – being sure to rinse and re-wet your hands between each one (you’ll be tempted to try to do a second without rinsing your hands first, don’t give in to this temptation, it will only lead to super-sticky rice-covered hands). Cover let sit a bit before eating or chill and eat later.

If the mixture is still a bit warm, the balls will not hold together as well, so don’t fret if they start plopping apart a bit if you’ve jumped the gun and made them before things are cooled off.