03 Feb 2015 13 Comments
in Eating Out Tags: humor, Japanese food, Kula sushi, Little Osaka, Sawtelle Ave., sweet shrimp, uni
There’s an outpost of a popular Tokyo revolving sushi chain called Kula located in the Little Osaka neighborhood of Sawtelle Avenue in West L.A. that I like to visit.
Imogen enjoying her salmon at Kula
Every plate is $2.25, the quality is unusually good, and so you get a great sushi lunch for $12-$15. You can really go nuts and spend $20. More
18 Oct 2013 20 Comments
in Food, Recipes Tags: ama ebi, cooking, humor, Japanese food, Otter Pops, sashimi, sushi, toro, unagi
Immy digs in
The other day, I was having some tuna toro sashimi for a snack before dinner. As I sat at the dining room table daintily dipping thin slices of fish into soy sauce and wasabi, my 3-year-old daughter, Imogen, approached.
“I have some?” she said. More
09 Apr 2013 3 Comments
in Cooking Tips, Food, Humor Tags: dashi, Japanese food, Kikunae Ikeda, msg, Nijiya Market, Pacific Mercantile Company, secret ingredients, umami
The Japanese were the first to describe and isolate “umami,” the fifth taste (“savory”). When professor Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University identified umami in 1908, he did so working from the ingredients in Japanese “dashi” soup stock, made from bonito fish and kombu seaweed. The key components, it turned out, were ribonucleotides and glutamates.
From there, the Japanese got industrious and distilled those ingredients into their purest form — monosodium glutamate. MSG. Which, if you’re like most people, you avoid like the plague. But which winds up in nearly anything processed you eat in less conspicuous forms (most often as “natural ingredients”). More
skinny girls & mayonnaise 