Chicken

Simple, so delicious and versatile. I cooked it in ten minutes last night with dark meat chicken, garlic chives (nira) and slivers of carrot. Here's what you do:

Mizutaki hot pot is about as simple as it gets: Pile a bunch of ingredients into a hot pot. Pour in water. Turn on the heat and cook.

So I was digging up research on Japanese-style tartar sauce for the new cookbook I'm working on with Tadashi, when I came across this dish.

Sorry Paula Dean, but nothing beats Japanese-style fried chicken. (To Mary in Austin and all my friends down south who make amazing fried chicken: Don't kill me! :) ). The secret is the marinade.

Here are more videos Tadashi and I shot for last week's Japan Society presentation of our book, The Japanese Grill. Check out how to turn out amazing steaks, scallops, chicken, veggies, using marinades and rubs with garlic-soy sauce, miso, yuzu kosho, sansho and more... So don't delay: Fire up the Weber and get grilling right away!

Last night my coauthor Tadashi and I gave a talk and demo on Japanese grilling at the Japan Society in New York. But how do you demo grilling in auditorium where you can't grill? With videos, of course!

I've talked about simmering before, so you know it's one of my favorite cooking techniques in Japanese cuisine. It's a simple and fast way to infuse amazing flavor into ingredients. The secret is the traditional seasonings:

In my last post I made dashi with Chef Isao Yamada, who I cooked with recently. So now that we had some beautiful dashi, the fundamental stock of Japanese cuisine, what to do with it? Yamada-san didn't waste any time cooking a slew of fantastic dash-based dishes, including this one.

Here's a simple method my pal and coauthor Chef Tadashi Ono of Matsuri mentioned to me last week: Steaming a whole chicken with sake. It couldn't be easier.

My wife and I and a houseguest visiting from Japan cooked this dish on New Year's Eve from a recipe dug up in a Japanese newspaper. God, it was good.

For me, the holy grail of Japanese cooking boils down this: The ability to look in the fridge, see what I've got and cook something fabulous with it. I've witnessed this two-step over and over in Japanese homes, watching slack-jawed with admiration as home cooks knocked out great dishes on the spot.

One of the most useful skills I've been perfecting this fall working in the En Japanese Brasserie kitchen is boning chicken legs and thighs. I've boned dozens of these suckers so far and I can tell you that knowing how to do so is extremely practical and useful at home, too.