Vegetables

Besides honing my technical skills working every week now with Chef Abe and his crew in the kitchen of En Japanese Brasserie, I've been learning a ton about contemporary Japanese cooking.

I found some beautiful (or, "byu-DEE-ful," as they like to say here in my homeland of Brooklyn) Japanese eggplants at the local market, so I started digging through my notes and cookbooks for ideas on how to prepare them.

Now that summer, I mean the real thing - 90 degrees, sticky and humid - has finally arrived in New York, I want to share some simple Japanese dishes perfect for these scorching days.

When my friend, and supremely talented young chef, Atsushi Nakahigashi visited New York last summer, he whipped up some terrific dishes for me. Now that he's visiting Gotham once again, I posed a challenge...

In this preparation, Chef Honma of En Japanese Brasserie demonstrates the Japanese cooking notion of contrasting a main ingredient with a supporting ingredient to highlight the main food's flavor.

Here's another dish Chef Honma taught me at En Japanese Brasserie. Like the mushroom ohitashi, this obanzai-inspired dish relies on dashi.

Chef Honma of En Japanese Brasserie features this dish on his seasonal obanzai menu, which evokes the traditional home cooking of Kyoto.

During his stay in New York, Saveur's editor-in-chief Jim Oseland graciously invited Atsushi to demonstrate his cooking at the magazine's test kitchen, and prepare lunch for the editorial staff. Atsushi planned a wonderful menu, incorporating dishes we had cooked plus new ones. After last minute sprints to the farmers market and Sunrise Mart, the Japanese food store in lower Manhattan, we arrived at the magazine laden with supplies, and Atsushi set to work.

At Saveur, Atsushi demonstrated a fundamental notion of Japanese cooking through this utterly simple dish, composed of Japanese cucumbers, a good konbu-katsuobushi dashi and myoga for garnish.

On Mondays and Fridays at the Union Square farmers market, a farmer of Korean descent named Yuno sells lovingly grown Asian vegetables, the only one there who offers these varieties. Atsushi was thrilled to find at her stand fushimi togarashi, heirloom Kyoto peppers, and snapped up a bunch.

This dish, like the konbu dashi soup with clams, once agan demonstrates the power of konbu, which infuses water with an irresistible savoriness or umami to serve as a flavor foundation for other ingredients. In this case, Atsushi prepared a simple soup with egg and scallion that was fast to prepare and extremely tasty.

A simple soup that evokes the ideas of mottainai and the power of konbu: Atsushi collected turnip peels and scrap pieces of carrot from preparing other dishes and added them to a pot of water with a piece of konbu in it. He turned on the heat and cooked it until the konbu gave off a pleasing aroma, then strained the liquid. In the meantime, Atsushi sliced a handful of snow peas on the diagonal.