Chef Hiro Sone?s Niku-Jaga

Memory is a powerful tool, especially when it comes to food.  I recently got a cookbook called Cooking from the Heart, a book put together by the organization Share Our Strength.  The book features recipes from one hundred of the country's well-known chefs.  The book is wonderful.

Usually I love cookbooks with lots of pictures–I like to be able to see the food before I make it.  This book however doesn't have any pictures, yet it is filled with images–images that are created by the chefs' memories.  Each recipe is accompanied by the story of what the recipe means to that particular chef.  The Introduction of the book, Michael Rosen explains, "recipes are simply a kind of memory: an attempt to re-create the taste of some familiar dish . . . a way of passing along a particular method for preparing pie dough or gravy . . . an experiment in recapturing some experience remembered from travels or childhood.  A recipe is a memory made indelible." As I flipped through the book and read some of the stories, I could see Ming Tsai with his family stuffing potstickers around the ping-pong table in his house at Christmas time and I could see Gale Gand when she was a young girl baking pies with her mother, adding her initials in the bottom of the crust with a rope of dough.  Reading these stories I wanted to crawl into the pages of the book and experience them for myself.  This book perfectly captures why I love being a food blogger: being able to create, capture, and share these types of memories. As Rosen wrote, "Each chef's table–whether oceans, generations, or cultures away–will link with yours as though we were all sitting down to eat at one universal table assembled from each of our individual leaves."

The first recipe I made out of the book was Chef Hiro Sone's  recipe for niku-jaga.  I was immediately drawn to it, because it is finally starting to cool down here in Southern California, and niku-jaga, which is a wonderful comforting and filling stew made of meat, potatoes, and mushrooms, is one of my favorite Japanese comfort foods.

The recipe calls for shiitake mushrooms, which I love.  My local grocery store was out of fresh shiitake, so I used dried shiitake.  This requires a bit of advance preparation, but it's easy!

How to rehydrate shiitake mushrooms

 

With a pair of sharp kitchen shears, snip off the stems of the dried shiitake mushrooms.

 

 

Don't throw them away though!  The stems are great to add to stock for added flavor.  I save mine in an airtight container and pull them out when I need them.

 

 

Put the mushroom caps in a container and cover with warm water.

 

 

Place a small, flat plate (or an otoshi-buta if you have one) on top of the mushrooms to submerge them completely in the water.  I used two plastic containers that fit together.  Soak the caps for at least 30 minutes and up to several hours.  When the caps have softened, strain the liquid to get out any bits of grit, and then rinse the caps in clean water and resoak them in the strained liquid for 5 to 10 minutes.

 

Look how pretty they are after they have softened up!