Washoku, or Japanese cuisine, Part Two.

This is the second part of my initial effort to practice and teach washoku, or traditional Japanese cuisine.

Ichijuusansai in stages: Top row – Salmon row, sansai (three dishes, no soup), nisai (two dishes, no soup, with pickles); second row – eggdrop soup for breakfast, baked potato with fried cod, steamed cauliflower and broccoli, pickles with mixed leftovers; third row – Thai tofu scramble leftovers with two veggie compositions to add color and veggies to the mix.

What is ichijuusansai? It means one soup, three dishes (plus rice and pickles). It’s the food composition principle behind teishoku, that traditional Japanese fare the average family has on a day to day basis. So let’s say it’s five and a half dishes, if you count the soup:

  1. Rice
  2. Soup (default: miso shiru)
  3. Main entree (sashimi or grilled dish)
  4. Side dish (chopped veggies or seafood in vinegar and miso)
  5. Side dish (simmered, boiled, or stewed)
  6. Pickles

Ichijuusansai = Myth of uber domesticity?

Conclusion: Ichijuusansai is too labor intensive for this working mama even during her Spring Break! It took me a few days. Instead of doing 5.5 dishes, I ended up with at most 4 dishes, mostly without soup. Rice is straight forward, especially with a rice cooker and an special Japanese measuring cup that matches the lines for numbers of cups of rice. Soup could be miso soup, but I grew tired of this after having done this for nearly a month—sorry Onigiri and Miso Soup Only cookbook author! This Americanized Japanese mama needs variety! Plus, she has to think about her finicky kids.

Day One: I managed to season and bake salmon and stew some eggplant with bell peppers. These paired with the rice and salad I threw together with some Korean leftover pickled veggies. But no soup. Not all within the 1.5 hours I usually give myself. There is some prep cooking before. But I tend to not spend more than two hours a day cooking, so soup didn’t happen.

Day Two: I did karaage, which requires pre-marinading chicken for a few hours before for the best flavor, then breading, then airfrying. Between that and peeling and grilling asparagus and pickling some cabbage and cucumbers, I was done with food preparation!

Soup for breakfast

Day Three: To finally enact the ichijuu part (one soup), I ended up making egg drop soup to please my most finicky diner, my 16 year old who won’t eat miso soup. He won’t even eat eggs any other way! This egg drop soup recipe really did it for us. So delicious! I used soy sauce (shoyu) instead of msg. And turmeric was key. Beware of overuse of starch! I substituted potato starch for corn starch.

By dinner time, I confess I was fed up with ichijiuusansai or teishoku and ended up doing baked potato to take a break from the rice + combo. The kids are unfamiliar with baked potato as a dish. What seems all-American is a bit exotic to them since rarely do I make it. Partly because baking potato takes so long, it’s an energy commitment. In the back of my mind, I thought of the microwave cheat, which I did.