Month 5 day 1: Yakitori

This month I have five magazines:

• Cooking Light, May 2011 (because there were too many Mays)
• Cooking Light, June 2010
• Cooking Light, June 2011
• Food Network Magazine, June 2010
• Every Day with Rachael Ray June 2012

These issues are chock-full of grilling recipes. I'm not sure I like grilling that much, because you would have to prepare everything in your room, then go downstairs and fire it up, and there is no sink to wash your hands/utensils/plates between putting the raw meat on the grill and taking it off. I might try some on the grill pan, though, which I love to use, even though the handle makes it impossible to use any adjacent burners.

Like tonight, for example, I used the grill pan and made:

• Yakitori, Cooking Light, June 2011
• Sesame-Miso Cucumber Salad, Cooking Light May 2011
• served with rice and corn, microwaved for a bit and then put on the grillpan for a few minutes with some of the leftover yakitori tare.

Actually, last month I had a recipe for yakitori from Food and Wine and a recipe for a cucumber wakame salad I was going to make with it. I knew that there was a June yakitori recipe coming up, and I kind of thought I would see which was better. But then June ended, and I never tried it. I considered that I could make both tare and see which was better, but decided to stick with just the one since I was running out of everything. I'm not sure how close this is to the real recipe, because as I was cooking I ran out of sake, so I just halved most of everything else. I ran out of rice vinegar, so then I started using some old sushi vinegar, which I also ran out of. And I ran out of sesame seeds after the salad, and the cilantro wasn't good anymore. Some restocking is in order I guess. Also the other day I ran out of whole pepper corns and thought I was buying more, but it was allspice and I just totally didn't read it until I almost put it in the grinder (>_<)

Also, the F&W recipe has the sauce just dredged on at the end, but this one is marinated for a bit, so it seemed better. And it was good! I will keep this recipe. I have been back from Japan so long that I don't remember much what real yakitori tastes like. I'm sure this is not legit, but it tastes good in its own right. The cucumber salad is good too, and is just very simple. If I make it again I will either cut the cucumber as thin as possible or I will peel it first. The funny thing is that the cucumber salad recipe comes with some variations. One of the variations is "don't use the first 7 ingredients" and use others instead. That leaves just the cucumbers.... I wonder how that counts as a variant.

I think it would be fun to try the other recipe still though. Both of them were for the type of skewer known as negima, meaning "onion in the spaces." There are many other types of yakitori, so it's interesting that this is the one that's made its way into Western cookbooks. Others might not be so pretty, featuring cartilage and stuff like that. Speaking of authentic yakitori, I will be going next week with some of the other JET alumni to Yakitori Zai to make some. Yakitori Zai is fairly new, and is a totally legitimate yakitori restaurant, but the prices are crazy. With their pricing system, these three skewers would have cost $15 and the salad $10. So I have never been. But I'm very excited to go. Maybe I should start going to more of the JET alumni meetings to get invited to this sort of thing more often....