Ugenta in review


27th April 2010


A high-end ryokan is theatre. Not the kind with heavy curtains and painted backdrops but tiny stages of tatami, paper lamps and pocket gardens. The woman in kimono who greets you is an actress; you will meet the rest of the cast when they serve you dinner in your room or drive you to the station when you leave.

You will have a better view than even someone sitting in the most expensive seats in the theatre. And you can touch the props - lacquerware, pottery painted or rough, the sprig of flowers on your dinner tray.

Total theatre. When it all comes together, you wonder why anyone visiting Japan would want to stay in a hotel.

Then you look at the prices and - oh, well.

So it's a hobby I can indulge in only about once a year.

This year, it's Ugenta, an inn that accepts no more than two parties a night. The ryokan can be reached by taking a train from Demachiyanagi station to the mountain village of Kibune (left) - about 30 minutes - and then a bus. If you give the Ugenta staff enough notice, they'll pick you up at the station.

But enough talking. On with the pictures!

Dinner theatre:




Zensai (appetiser). Can you see the sakura design on the paper?




Suimono course: soft-shelled turtle soup. You pour it out into the lid, adding a little ginger seasoning from the white pot, and drink. Chicken-soup comforting if you don't add the ginger, and a fire edge if you do. My favourite of the whole meal - and so good I almost got over the guilt of eating turtle.


(Forgot to take photos of the sashimi course. The sake must have been kicking in around about here.)




Yakimono: grilled Kyoto beef. The beans are issunmame.







Conger eel sushi. Not otah.




Young bamboo and shirauo (白魚) - the white, fish-like shadow.




Eat your tentacles; they're good for you. Hotaru ika, if you're interested. Also akagai, nanohana and a kind of daikon called moriguchi. This is the sunomono course, which sounds more appetising than "vinegared things".



Rice with young bamboo and a sprig of kinome.

When you hit the carbs course in kaiseki, the curtain's about to come down. I'm usually down for the count by this part of the meal because little dishes over a long stretch of time take up a surprising amount of space inside.

But the woman serving us offered to get the kitchen staff to turn the rice we didn't eat into onigiri so we could have it later if we got hungry. She returned with the riceballs wrapped and accompanied by pickles and a dish of chirimen (fish even tinier than ikan bilis) flavoured with sansho peppercorn.

This...this is service.





Dessert. It looks simple - strawberries, oranges and jelly - but, for some reason, it worked so well I ate the mint in shock.


But what about the rest of the ryokan i.e. the bits you can't eat? You can get a good idea of the room layouts from the inn's website though they aren't rooms so much as small maisonettes (maisonettette?). (If you're viewing this at work, be advised that the top page of the Ugenta site comes with a soundtrack.)


You can breathe out here. Space inside and the mountains at your window. Leave the balcony door ajar and you'll hear the stream beside the inn.




And the wood!



Furniture by George Nakashima. Beer glasses live inside this cabinet. We should all be so lucky.



Look at the right knob!




And the left!

The pictures of the other cabinet knobs are too blurry to be posted. It's never a good idea to take pictures when your hands are shaking.


If you like space, wood and mountain valleys, Ugenta may be the ryokan for you. The food may not have been the most exciting kaiseki I've encountered but it was solidly executed with a few excellent touches. Like the guilt-removing turtle soup.

And when I woke up in the middle of the night - I had the upstairs room, with the computer and calligraphy set - this was outside my window.





I put the camera on the table in front of the window then took the shot. My hands were shaking again.

I shall immerse! I shall blend! The world is my (blendable) oyster!


4th December 2009


Have bought my first immersion blender. Am very excited.

The Lazy Gaijin: Fairly Edible Meals Made With Ingredients From A Japanese Supermarket And A Minimum Of Fuss


Recipe No.1: Onion and sweet potato soup


8th November 2009


A year and nine months between the first posting and the second: it has to be some kind of record.

There are lots of things I'd like to do this lifetime. Some are one-off events, like seeing the Northern Lights, while others are more in the line of ongoing missions. This is one of the latter: making good soup without messing around with bones or resorting to stock cubes and powders.

I invented a fairly edible soup on Saturday which fulfils these two requirements. Here's the recipe. (The measurements will be approximate because life's an adventure and sometimes cooking is too.)


Makes 3 servings
Ingredients:

Water, 1 litre

Pasta water, around 250 cc (left over from cooking lunch. Probably doesn't make much difference if you leave it out)

Big onions, 3 (because they came in bags of 3)

Small Japanese sweet potatoes, 3 (ditto)

Konbu, 1 piece (Pronounced kombu but spelled konbu. I was aiming to use a 10 cm square piece but the one I pulled out of the bag was bigger and I couldn't be bothered to cut it so... I've been wondering why konbu is used so much in Japanese stocks. I believe it's added for umami. And perhaps for luck)

Tofu (however much you want to eat)

Chicken (As above. I got enough to cover my hand because a packet with that much was going for 30 per cent off at the supermarket)

Soya sauce or salt (I ended up using both)

Sake (Probably optional but I used it to marinade the chicken. You can also drink it if you get thirsty. No one will check if you're old enough to)


Here we go:

1. Wipe the konbu (pronounced kombu but spelled konbu) with a wet cloth. I'm not sure why this is necessary but Harumi Kurihara says to and I don't argue with her. At least, not very loudly).

2. Put the konbu in a pot with the water and pasta water that you may or may not be using. Leave for 10 minutes then light a fire under the lot. Harumi-sensei says to take the konbu out when the water becomes warm, whatever that means. I interpreted this to be that stage before serious bubbles appear in the water.

3. While the konbu was doing its 10 minutes in the pot, you should have cut the chicken up into pieces that will fit into your mouth and marinaded them with soya sauce and optional sake. I used however much came out when I poured in one circular motion over the bowl.

4. Cut up the onions. The smaller the pieces, the less boiling time but on the other hand, you'll suffer onion fumes for longer while dicing with death. If the water is boiling, dump in the onion as quickly as you can.

5. Cut up the sweet potatoes. Again, the smaller the better. And this time, there are no fumes, hurray!

6. Oh, and add the sweet potatoes to the pot.

7. Keep the boil going until the onions and sweet potatoes almost dissolve. If you've finished the washing-up and start to get bored, you can speed up the process by hitting them with a ladle or something.

8. When you add the chicken is up to you. I dumped it in when I couldn't stand the suspense any longer. And anyway, I wanted to wash the bowl it was in.

9. At some point, put in the tofu. You can dice it first or just toss it in and hit it with your ladle. Tofu rarely fights back.

10. The timing of the spinach addition - oh bugger, I forgot to put spinach in the ingredients list - is far more important. Spinach does not seem to be one of those things that take kindly to boiling so throw it in only when you're ready to serve.

11. When are you ready to serve? When the water level in the pot goes down, the onions and sweet potatoes have turned into a kind of sludge and your stomach starts to make socially unacceptable noises, it's time to add the spinach and wrap up this gig. First aid measures involving soya sauce or salt will probably be necessary. And a little prayer never hurts.


Verdict:

It doesn't taste half-bad. The yellowish-grey colour of the soup is regrettable but you can always close your eyes. It also explains why there are no photos in this post. The main thing is, the stuff is edible and the flavour didn't come from roasting bones or stuff that will make your hair fall out. This is an experiment I plan to repeat.

Today's special

...because I've finally decided to write about food.

And I'm going to do it even though I'm probably one of the worst candidates to compile a culinary guide.

The fact is, I don't know much about food. There are blogs that whip up lines such as 'Served in a small Staub cocotte, the livers were buttery soft'. This will not be one of them. (Those livers sound great though.)

I don't know much simply because, for most of my life, I haven't been interested enough to learn.

It's a bit odd, given that I grew up in Singapore, where eating is the national hobby that cuts across all social strata. Over and over, I listened to diners talk about the meal that they were eating, the meals that they'd eaten and the meals that they planned to eat. Eating all the while.

And I was mystified. I'd be happy if the dish in front of me happened to hold something tasty but I couldn't go on and on about it. And I just couldn't seem to find the enthusiasm to seek out new dishes and new restaurants. Or to boldly go where no food critic had gone before.

Or to boldly drive to a neighbouring country for pig innard soup, as a friend suggested we do.

(Anyway, the only kind of pig innard I like is the liver. Whether it's served in a Staub cocotte or not. The other bits, you can keep.)

In other words, the only blogger with worse food writer credentials than mine would be someone whose nutritional needs are all met by air, water and sunlight.

Or, in technical terms, what we experts call a plant.

But I came to Japan in the spring of 2005 and in the space of two weeks, everything I ate worked. If I were to rank the things that passed my lips, the meal with the lowest score would still be considered competent. And at the other end, the food not only went off the scale but broke it and turned it into fertiliser for baby scales.

Though no angels showed up, it was still an epiphany.

Or rather, a series of little epiphanies and after a while, I learned to recognise the process. Step 1: insert food into mouth. A normal, everyday motion; no cause for further comment. Step 2: something starts to happen to the tastebuds. Step 3: the whole body stiffens - what's going on with those tastebuds? Step 4: the whole body is stiff. It can't chew, swallow or spit the food out. Step 5: nothing is going to make me spit it out because...we have a winner!

It's a bit like having a heart attack and being revived with defibrillators all at once. Let's see... If a heart attack is cardiac arrest, what's the tastebud equivalent? Tongue arrest? Tonguegular arrest?

I like tonguegular arrest; let's go with that.

In that 2005 trip, the most spectacular tonguegular arrests happened in Kyoto. Though it's Osaka that has the gourmand reputation and Tokyo, all those Michelin stars, it's Kyoto - refined, restrained, balanced on the edge of a knife - that makes me do what I thought I never would: write about food.

What I'd really like to do is come up with food trail maps, just like those sightseeing guides for walking tours. And in an ideal world, the city's tourism authorities would fund the whole enterprise.

But it doesn't look like it's going to happen and I can't really approach publishers with a book proposal because of, well...what I said in the second line of this post.

Still, with little funds and even less knowledge, I'll do what I can anyway because when you discover magic, it's only human to want to share it.

(It's also human to want to keep it to yourself. If I find a great place with only four tables, it may come under this category.)

So this blog will be about the shops, restaurants, cafes and holes in the wall that make me glad that my nutrional needs aren't met by air, water and sunlight.

There will be recommendations. There will be addresses. There will be, if I remember to take pictures before digging in and making a mess of it, pictures. And if I'm feeling especially diligent, there will be maps. But not the fancy ones you can enlarge and shrink with your mouse. My maps will be blob-and-line sketches on the closest bit of paper at hand because blogging alone is testing the limits of my technological capabilities.

But despite the negatives I'm racking up - little money, less knowledge, computer skills inherited from the Stone Age - I may be the right person to talk about food, after all.

Because if something can wake up a culinary dullard like me, it has to be magic, right?