MY BEST OZONI EVER!!!

My final four meals at the end of the year vary, but this year:

• Wagyu and onions breakfast.
• Apple at the Ala Wai Golf Course for lunch on New Year's Eve.
• 15 Craigside New Year's Eve Dinner.
• Ozoni for the first meal on January 1, 2019

A standard bento meal in Hawaii is chopped steak.  The quality varies quite a bit.  I yesterday morning had my absolute best combination ever, with half a pound of Japanese wagyu beef and onions, plus two eggs over easy, natto, rice and tsukemono. 

Well fortified, I drove to the Ala Wai Golf Course.  As most readers know, I walk 18 holes  twice a week, and agonize in the process, but do this so that I can eat and drink anything I want.  For lunch, as part of the sacrificial process, I had a whole apple.

15 Craigside has a special dinner every eve of the New Year.  I was invited to joined Sam, Ernie, Carol, Eppie, Ken and Bob:

Roasted striploin was the feature, with Chinese-style steamed fish, char siu chicken, shrimp scampi, spinach and mushroom rice pilaff, and a salad/fruit/tsukemono bar:

My meal:

When going through the line, I commented that the beef had no fat.  How thoughtful of them, but they found a nice chunk of fat from another cut and delivered it to me.  Amazingly enough, even certain animal fats are now sometimes recommended in your diet.  In particular, Japanese Wagyu Beef fat is especially good.  We had champagne, one of my Stanford cabs and sake.  The dessert was strawberry swirl cheesecake:

The camaraderie and general joy transcended the cuisine.  When I returned to my apartment, the sun was setting;

We are all really old at 15 Craigside, but a continuing tradition is our poker group beginning play at 8:30PM and through midnight to greet the new year, and all nine of us made it to 2019.  We certainly also had enough to eat and drink, particularly as we just had our New Year Eve supper.

I awoke to a water lily wishing me Happy New Year:

My special o-zoni, Japanese New Year soup, began before dinner last night when I fried some scallops in butter:

I then added kamaboko (fish cake), hokkigai (a red Japanese clam, Spicula sachalinensis--which normally is bright red, but not so more recently, indicating, probably, a lower quality) and abalone, including the liquid broth from each can:

Then came water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, hasu (lotus root), konnyaku (gelatin from a yam) and shiitake mushrooms.  Throw away the liquid from these cans.

I added some water and sake and low-boiled this pot for several hours.  The taste was mild, so I added some soy sauce.  For soups like this it's best to prepare it the day before so that the taste can develop.

Fresh vegetables particularly enhance the ozoni.  However, unlike just about 99% of cooks, I don't use mizuna (left), a piquant argula-like leafy vegetable only used this day.  Why, don't I like the taste?  Not sure.  Maybe I'll include it next year.

My veggie combination included green onions from my herb garden.  Some of these items, like the salmon eggs and soba, will be used for my second meal later in the day:

Note the whiteness of the right o-toro (fatty blue-fin tuna).  Hawaii residents are happy about the redness of yellow-fin tuna (ahi), but that means there is very little omega-3 fatty acids.  At Tamashiro's, ahi goes for $20-$40/pound during the New Year period.  At Marukai, o-toro sells for $60/pound, while the price is $80/pound at J-Shop.  In Japan, up to $300/pound.  However, in 2013 Japanese sushi chain owner Kiyoshi Kimura paid $1.76 million for a bluefin tuna that weighed in at 489 pounds, or $3600/pound.  To the left is Kimura with that fish.

My o-toro sashimi  over cucumbers and lettuce, with kazunoko (herring roe) and myoga (Japanese ginger).  I kept half the o-toro for my second meal.

About the ozoni itself, I fried some Japanese wagyu beef fat to crispness, then placed about a fourth of the earlier concoction into this smaller pot.  I carefully placed two mochi pieces into this stew, and fried an egg.

My lanai meal:

What am I drinking?  Here is a montage of what I will be tasting today:

Note that the Kirin is First Press / 100% Malt, which sounds ornate, but is just their standard beer.

Of all the things, the kazunoko was the star of this meal.  The ozoni broth was slightly lacking in salt, on purpose.  However, with just a tiny bit of these fish eggs, the combined taste was just perfect.  The crunchiness further made the experience stimulating.

This was the best ozoni I've ever had.  I wonder if there is contest for this soup?  My enhancements this year had to do with the wagyu fat, egg on top and dash of Johnny Walker Black Label into the bowl.  I wonder if one of my lanai herb garden plants will make the final cut for inclusion next year?

My second meal was a Japanese tailgate, with salmon eggs (ikura) over rice and under an egg over easy.  O-toro sashimi and more of my ozoni:

Then sunset from 15 Craigside:

Happy 2019!!!

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OZONI, WAGYU, OTORO, ABALONE, UNAGI, POKE, RAMEN AND HOPE FOR 2018

Yesterday was a dining ultimate, Vintage Cave (scroll to next posting).  Today, I begin with the Ozoni I made to start the day, and go on to what I've been eating the past few days.

Wikipedia calls this Japanese soup zoni, but I add the honorific, o.  This is the way Japan begins the New Year, and the ingredients vary throughout the country.  The origin goes back to 1336, when this dish was offered to the gods on New Year's Eve.  The samurai class carried the tradition, and only over the past century and a half has this become a national beginning for all.

I never made ozoni until Pearl passed away.  Every year the ingredients change, for it all depends on what I can find.  Today, for example, I began with:

The key broth taste-makers are scallops and hokkigai, more commonly known as the surf clam, and important because of the red color.  Red is auspicious this day.  Even the kamaboko (fish cake) is red.

The fish is o-toro (fattest blue-fin tuna) and the meat, wagyu beef from Miyazaki, the best in Japan.  The former costs $55/pound (five years ago a blue-fin tuna sold for more than $3500/pound in Tokyo) and the latter $99.99/pound, but what goes into the soup is minuscule.  The significance of the fish is for the ultimate sashimi, and beef, a bit of butter-yaki, lightly fried in butter with vegetables and an accompanying sauce.  You don't need rice for this first meal because inside the broth is mochi, pounded rice.

The vegetables in the soup are optional.  For most, something called Mizuna (left) is used.  I don't like the taste of this green, so I substituted mustard cabbage, and added water chestnuts,  konnyaku (white, jelly-looking pieces), shiitake mushrooms and lotus root, called hasu in Hawaii.

My drinks this morning were Kirin Beer, Junmai Daiginjo Sake and a Staglin Caberner Sauvignon from my Stanford collection.

I had a simple brunch of just this soup, plus otoro sashimi:

This was my best meal of the year.  Also the first.  That plant stem was papaya:

Then at sunset I had my second meal, more of the ozoni and otoro, plus Miyazaki Wagyu Beef:

Moving in reverse chronological order, last night from 9PM to Midnight, the 15 Craigside Poker Club celebrated our New Year's Eve with Peking Duck, and Abalone with Choi Sum  Our drinks included Heidsieck Piper Champagne, Johnny Walker Platinum, Japanese sake and red wine from Australia.

Earlier in the evening there was our annual 15 Craigside special dinner of Roasted Striploin, Chinese Steamed Fish, Char Siu Chicken, Shrimp Scampi and cheesecake:

The wine was a spectacular 3 Eves Livermore Valley Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.  Why only three...diners?  Two had the flu (it is reported that 36 residents are now down with this ailment) and a couple went out to their daughter's home.  What is that brown thing over the salad?  I can't remember.  15 Craigside also had another New Year's Eve Party, which I just could not fit into my schedule.

A few days ago I had lunch at 15 Craigside of yellow-fin tuna sashimi, provided by Henry Au, here with real abalone and poke (note the extra large bottle of white wine he brought, and this is lunch):

Earlier last week, also for lunch, I had my favorite ramen at Lucky Belly:

This must be popular, for at an adjacent table of young visitors, they were all having the same.

This past Friday I went golfing at Ala Wai with my neighbor, John.  Note the rainbow in the background.  Maybe that was the inspiration, but I decided at that moment to begin my grand gastronomical splurge.  We dropped by J-Shop, where I purchased a dish of o-toro and a few pieces of wagyu beef:

The evening was punctuated with a beautiful sunset.

Then, for Christmas Eve I joined John, Deanna and two of their church friends for the First Presbyterian annual holiday show at the Koolau Golf Course, followed by dinner at Noboru in Kailua:

I had an excellent hamachi kama (yellowtail collar), and John gave me one of his unagi sushi, which I enjoyed with a flight of sake.

I especially look forward to my breakfasts on the lanai, below, portuguese sausage and eggs over rice and natto with poke:

Let's see, ice tea, apple juice and water, but, maybe not.

The o-toro also provided for two other breakfasts on my lanai:

For lunch this weekend I sneaked out of the dining room a tuna and egg sandwich, to which I added a slice of onion and basil from my roof, fried the sandwich in butter and drank an orange crush:

Unfortunately, like the Fanta meal I had a few weeks ago, I read the back of the bottle:

First, it contains no juice.  However, no caffeine...which could well be a future enhancement, for this active molecule in coffee appears to prevent dementia and Alzheimer's disease.  Second, just this bottle provided 24% of the total carbohydrates for the day.  Worst, the ingredients include Yellow Dye #6 and Red Dye #40. YD#6 has a range of health concerns, and is banned in Norway and Sweden, while Red Dye #40 causes chromosomal damage, affects lymphomas and is linked to hyperactivity:

Oh, great.  However, there is hope, for I also took a few photos of what I viewed from my lanai:

I've been here for more than three years and for the first time noticed a fern growing in a pipe protruding from a neighbor roof.  Yes, there is hope.

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