Origami Mommy

Japanese Sweet Potato Cakes

It's fall harvest season in Japan.

We've been eating persimmons, chestnuts, apples, and of course, sweet potatoes.

We could eat these all day long. Field trips in the fall to harvest sweet potatoes (oimo hori) are a common activity in kindergarten, and I still remember our children getting on a bus, and coming back hours later, covered in dirt and proudly carrying their bags full of sweet potatoes fresh from the earth. I miss apple picking back home in New England terribly - it's something we did every fall with the boys before we moved here - but I am so glad they get to have this sort of experience while living here.

One spring, they even got to plant sweet potatoes at our homestay family in Gifu-ken, and they have also planted them on the garden in their kindergarten, along with many other vegetables.

The other day our homestay family sent us a wonderful package of freshly harvested sweet potatoes and chestnuts and lotus root. Plain, roasted sweet potato, or yaki imo, is the best. It is less sweet than the sweet potatoes, or yams, I grew up with. It's a beautiful golden color (you can also get purple ones these days) and the taste is reminiscent of chestnut. You can roast it at home in an oven at 400 degrees for a wonderful plain after-school snack, or, if you live here, you can purchase it from the "yaki imo" vendor who makes his rounds in the neighborhood in the fall.  I will never forget lying with my newborn daughter the day she was born and hearing the distinctive sound of the potato man in our neighborhood. Such a Japanese fall sound for me, forever linked now with the lovely memory of a peaceful birth.

In addition to plain roasted sweet potato, I like to cook it in a vegetable braise, dice it and roast it with olive oil and herbs, make caramelized sweet potato (daigaku imo), and bake sweet potato cakes. Sweet potato cakes are a wonderful way to enhance the sweetness without going overboard. Here's a photo. A recipe follows, and I'll try to post a recipe for daigaku imo too sometime in the next few days.

Japanese Sweet Potato Cakes

Sweet potatoes, about 2 medium or 400 grams 

40 grams butter (about 2-3 tablespoons), softened

70 grams sugar (about 1/3 of a cup)

One egg yolk

2 T cream

Flour

For flavoring - a splash of rum, or a generous teaspoon of vanilla essence, or cinnamon. We love vanilla.

One more egg yolk for brushing on top of the cakes before baking.

*Note: All measurements are approximate and leave much room for flexibility! I'm not much of a measurer. A few potatoes, a dollop of butter, a splash of cream - this is how I bake these and it turns out fine. These are more forgiving than other baked goods. So don't worry about this part too much and definitely don't feel you need to race out to buy a cooking scale! I happen to own one because Japanese recipes call for them. 

Directions:

Roast your sweet potatoes in the oven until they are soft, then cut in half and scoop out the insides into a bowl. If you mix in the butter right away there is no need to wait for it to soften, as the heat of the potatoes will do it for you. Mix in the egg yolk, cream, sugar, and flavoring of your choice, and mash all together with a wooden spoon until creamy. Kids love doing this part! Now add enough flour to bind it all together so that you can mold it without it losing its shape. Add flour only a little at a time, because you want the dough to remain creamy and soft. Some recipes don't even call for any flour at all but I think it is helpful. I probably added about 1/2 a cup in the end altogether.

Put your cakes on a greased cookie sheet (I usually use parchment paper instead of grease) and then brush the tops with egg yolk. Pop them in the oven at 350 for about 15-20 minutes, and enjoy! 

If you can't get Japanese sweet potato where you live, perhaps this would be good with butternut squash, pumpkin, or yams. 

What are your favorite ways to cook with fall harvest vegetables and fruits? I'd love to hear. 

Gyoza (dumpling) party

Have you ever eaten homemade dumplings? When I was growing up, dumplings (called mandoo in Korean or gyoza in Japanese) were one of our favorite things to make and eat. In college and during my single years friends and relatives would often gather to make and eat fresh hot dumplings. There's nothing quite like the taste of homemade dumplings, especially when you make the wrappers yourself too.

I made dumplings with my two boys a few times when we had no toddlers underfoot, and after seeing a post on Babette Feasts, decided it was time to make them again now that our youngest has grown up a bit. Check out Babette's recipe. If you want more details on making your own homemade skins, here's a great link at La Fuji Mama (although in our house, the wrappers definitely do not turn out this uniform! Part of the fun of making these with children is letting them have fun with the dough and experiment). This makes for a great Saturday night at-home family party. The only tip I'd have is to make sure there's another adult around if you have a young child to help. My husband was out of commission with jet lag, and I got a little flustered between all the supervising and frying up, especially after I noticed that my daughter had stopped filling the wrappers and was just making little mounds of dough and piling the filling on top.  We also ran out of dough halfway through, so I'd make sure to make plenty in advance - any leftovers can just be fried as is or mixed with scallions to make scallion pancakes.

I love making homemade dumplings because you can throw just about any ingredient in the filling that you want to. This time I used nira, which is a Japanese green similar to chives, shiitake mushrooms, (dried deliver more potent flavor than fresh, but I had no dried ones on hand), grated carrots, and of course, plenty of garlic and ginger. I also added in a generous amount of chopped Chinese cabbage - you need to salt it first and squeeze it out or else it will leach water out into your dumplings when you're cooking (ugh, soggy dumplings). For flavoring I just added dashes of soy sauce, sesame oil, rice wine, white pepper, and then mixed it together with the vegetables, ground meat, and corn starch.

Mix up a batch of dough (basically just flour, water and salt - knead and keep adding flour until it feels supple enough to roll out without being too sticky), set out placemats sprinkled with flour and a bunch of rolling pins, and let your children loose!

Fry in a fry pan with some oil till browned, then add a splash of water, cover quickly so they steam-cook, and then take the cover off after a minute or two so the water can evaporate.  Part of the charm of children's gyoza parties is the variety of shapes and sizes you get. Serve with salad or pickles on the side (these are simple cucumber pickles made the same way as my radish salad, with salt, rice vinegar, and sugar).

It's always fun to liven up a family meal by turning it into a party like this where the children participate in making their own creations - other things that we've done are burritos, homemade pizza, fondue, Korean barbecue, sukiyaki, yakisoba (Japanese stir-fried noodles), and ice cream sundaes. Do you and your children have any favorite dishes that you make together at the table?

Birthday season and the very best chocolate cake recipe ever

Birthday season has begun in our family. All six of us (including new little one due in October) have birthdays during the late summer and fall. I splurged on a wonderful birthday banner I spotted on Etsy. I loved it, and knew I wouldn't be able to get a variety of nice fabrics to make one myself in time for the start of birthday season. So I ordered it from Meringue Designs (check out her gorgeous pillows, too!) and it arrived an hour before our first birthday celebration began.

It will get so much use this fall, I'm thinking we should just leave it up until our last birthday in November.

For my husband's birthday in early August, I made a chocolate cake from the very best chocolate cake recipe I've ever tried. I've baked so many homemade cake recipes over the years and they were all too dry for my liking. Mira, an online friend who blogs at This Lovely Moment, generously shared this wonderful recipe with me after seeing my SOS for a moist cake recipe on Facebook. Here's the recipe. I can't recommend it enough.

This photo is all I have, and it wasn't the best frosting job (that's what happens when you have 3 children eagerly clamoring to help out) but it was made with love, and that's what counts, right?

All of our gifts were handmade. Daniel had been making little cards and trinkets and paper presents for weeks and stashing them away in a secret place. He and Benjamin also made games to play with their daddy. They spent a happy day or two planning and creating their games. A handmade banner, homemade birthday cake, and joyful children's creations made for a lovely celebration.

Easiest scones, retro popovers

Because I am constantly distracted by my toddler, I need quick and easy recipes.  Here's a super-fast and easy scone recipe which hardly requires any mixing. The best thing about it is that it is very, very easy and forgiving - I can adjust or substitute mix-ins and it's just fine.  It's perfect to make when you have little ones clamoring to help in the kitchen, need something fresh-baked in a hurry, and don't have time for anything complicated. 

Easiest Scones (adapted from Better Homes and Garden's Pat-A-Cake Scones)

1.5 cups flour (I used 1 cup whole wheat and 1/2 cup white flour, and have made with all whole wheat flour before)

1/4 cup sugar

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 cups whipping cream

Cinnamon to taste, other add-ins as desired (chocolate chips, cranberries, nuts, raisins, etc.)

Preheat the oven to 375. Mix dry ingredients, then pour in the cream, and mix together with a spoon and then your hands. Pat it into a pie pan, brush the top with cream and sugar (I used cinnamon sugar), and bake for about 15-18 minutes until golden brown.

Popovers 

There are times when I am lucky enough to have a 15 minute break here or there to actually try a normal (not speedy) recipe. This morning for Father's Day I made  Maida Heatter's Popovers, which first appeared in the New York Times in 1966 and was recently reduxed, that I'd been meaning to try for awhile. I think they turned out well, although I'm now eager to try my hand at a less heavy popover recipe - send any suggestions my way!

Spring radishes and baby daikon

I'm not fortunate enough to have my own garden yet, but the prohibitive cost of out-of-season produce in Japan and the overall emphasis on eating seasonally in this culture gives us a great opportunity to talk to our children about the food choices we make every day. In late spring, young radishes and baby daikon are plentiful and delicious and we use them as much as we can in our meals. I usually make a Korean-style fresh pickled salad out of radishes; it shows off the bright and beautiful colors and lets the natural flavor shine through. A sprinkling of black sesame seeds makes it pop.

Korean Radish salad

Ingredients:

Young radishes

Salt

Rice vinegar

Sesame oil

Sugar

Black sesame seeds

Directions:

Thinly slice radishes, sprinkle lightly with a bit of salt, and let stand for about twenty minutes until the radishes are wilted. Pick up and squeeze handfuls of radish to get rid of excess moisture. Mix together about 2 tablespoons of rice vinegar with 1-2 tsp of sugar until the sugar has dissolved. (To be honest, I don't usually measure, so feel free to adjust these proportions to your liking). Toss the radishes in this mixture. Arrange in a bowl, sprinkle with a few drops of sesame oil, and garnish with black sesame seeds.

Daikon is another kind of radish which is used liberally in Japanese and Korean cooking. Usually it is quite large, but in the spring - and only in the spring - you can find young radishes, mild and sweet enough to crunch on raw. I like to cook them in a mild braised stew with other root vegetables. Admittedly, some of the vegetables in the photo below are not spring vegetables - Japanese sweet potato, for instance, is a fall food - but I love the contrast of many different vegetables together in one bowl.

Root vegetable stew, Japanese-style

Ingredients:

An assortment of vegetables (some suggestions: carrot, potato, daikon radish, sweet potato, gobo (burdock root), renkon (lotus root), bamboo shoots, broccoli, spring peas, asparagus)

Chicken or tofu

5 T Soy sauce

3 T Mirin (sweet rice wine)

2 tsp Sugar

2 T Sake (regular rice wine)

Directions:

Peel, and then cut vegetables into roughly 1-inch sized chunks. (If you have baby vegetables, leave them whole, but peel/scrub as necessary). Cut chicken and/or tofu in similar-sized chunks as well. If using chicken, saute in a medium sized saucepan till browned. Add vegetables and tofu to the pot and fill about halfway with water. (If you are using green or tender vegetables such as broccoli or spring peas, set aside for now - you'll add them in when the stew is nearly done so that they stay nice and green). 

Boil for about 5 minutes, then add the soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and sake, plus enough water that the vegetables are nearly covered. Continue to boil at a medium heat, partly covered,  until the vegetables are cooked through, then add any green vegetables you will use, cover with a lid, and cook until they are just cooked through. Adjust and increase seasonings as necessary.