Meal 85: Japan

Japanese cuisine is a real delight of variety of cooking technique, flavor balance, textures and seasonal sensitivity, which is why it’s a shame that most Westerners only know it through the narrow (though tasty!) lens of sushi. Accordingly, for this meal, the last at our Brooklyn apartment, I resolved to get nowhere near the stuff, and instead showcase an admittedly small fraction of the rest of what’s on offer, with an inclination toward traditional summertime foods.

Having come of age during the height of America’s economic intimidation by and cultural fascination with modern Japan, that country had an outsized influence on my childhood. I first went when I was nine years old on a one-week elemetary-school exchange (who knew such a thing existed!) outside of Osaka, then again in middle school, high school, and then a few years ago for work. I went to a Japanese Saturday school for a few years, studied the language in high school and college, and cooked quite a bit of Japanese food with my parents throughout middle and high schools. Alas, I’ve lost most of the language, but I’ve remembered quite a few bits about the cuisine that helped in the research for and preparation of this meal.

I did as much prep in advance as possible, because we had a World Cup match to watch! After the US and Portugal played to an agonizing tie, a bunch of folks came over: Diana, Jeff, Elly, Erika, Carolyn, Matt, Catherine, and more!

Mugicha | Cold barley tea

Having grown up on the West Coast, I didn’t know about humidity, so when I went to Japan in August after graduating eighth grade, I was just about knocked on my ass. The saving grace was this incredibly refreshing, smoky-nutty barley infusion. The standard packaging is enough to make 54 liters of the stuff, which ought to give an indication of its addictiveness. If you’re closer to a Korean market, look for borucha, which is as far as I can tell the same thing.

Hiyayakko | Cold tofu appetizer | Recipe

At the end of a hot day, this simple little appetizer is a lovely way to ease into the meal. The softest tofu is topped with a bit of grated ginger and scallions, and kissed with a bit of a chilled sauce. Easy, gentle, inviting.

Kyuuri to wakame no amasuzuke | Cucumber and seaweed pickles | Recipe

Thanks to the preponderance of sushi restaurants, about the only bit most people experience of the wide world of Japanese pickles is the little bit of ginger — which, sadly, is usually died pink to cover over imperfections. (You know ginger is naturally a very pale yellow, right?) Since I didn’t have time for some of the long, salt-based pickles that can take months or even years, I went for an overnight marinade of thinly sliced cucumbers and the spindly wakame seaweed in a tangy-sweet blend of rice vinegar and the curious sweet rice wine known as mirin. Another refreshing and appetite-stimulating starter.

Goma ai shingiku | Chrysanthemum greens with sesame sauce

Blanched spinach with sesame sauce was a common first course for Japanese meals at home growing up, but I'd never realized until Elly mentioned it that the dish can be made equally well, and in a slightly more exotic fashion, with chrysanthemum greens. They're a bit more bitter and herby than spinach, and more toothsome, but still shrink down to almost nothing just the same. With the thickly textured yet gently flavored sauce, it's another good addition to a lineup of summer nibbles.

Miso shiru | Miso soup | Recipe

As with most simple soups, the key is the broth. At the heart of this and just about every Japanese soup — and, heck, many Japanese foods beyond soup — is what’s known as dashi, made with wide strips of natural-MSG-laden kombu seaweed and impossibly thin flakes of dried shaved bonito called katsuobushi that lends an utterly clean fishy flavor.  While I have cooked dozens of Japanese meals in my life, I’ve never made dashi from scratch, and I’m glad I did: as with so many things, a little extra effort lends a flavor that’s purer and more satisfying. The miso, made from fermented soybeans and adding a bit of body and tang, is but an afterthought, stirred in at the end right before a baptism of tofu, wakame seaweed, and scallion nibbles. Despite the heat, everyone finished their bowl!

Saba shioyaki | Broiled mackerel | Recipe

Some of the best foods are truly the simplest, the ones that combine the good fortune of fresh ingredients with just enough manipulation to bring out its best. They happened to have local mackerel at the neighborhood farmers market (though I think it’s more accurate to call fishermen hunters than farmers!), and all I did was salt the filets long enough to draw out a bit of liquid, and broil them skin-side-up for about ten minutes. I’ll leave it to you to decide if the wedge of lemon on the side was cheating on nature.

Negima yakitori | Chicken and scallion skewers | Recipe

Through this sweet-glazed chicken kabob, Japan has made a world-class contribution to the constellation of grilled meat. In contrast to some other dishes that delicately present subtle flavors in genteel portions, yakitori is bold, brash, and brutish, rich and meaty chunks rippedp with the teeth off a skewer held by increasingly sticky fingers and washed down with a big gulp of beer. And unlike the neatly arranged bento and other precisely apportioned food, yakitori is ordered one after another, the empty skewers totaled up to calculate the bill.

This was certainly the most labor-intensive dish, and one that admittedly most Japanese home cooks wouldn’t do — it’s the equivalent of making your own ketchup. But just as homemade ketchup tastes better than the already-good bottled version, so does this yakitori sauce. Once thickened and cooled, it’s used in abundance, generously slathered time and again on the grilling skewers to lacquer on layers of salty-sweet richness. It turned out great and everyone enjoyed it; my one improvement for next time would be to cook them half-way before the guests arrive, because it took longer than I’d hoped to grill them all up from raw.

Zaru soba | Cold buckwheat noodles with dipping sauce | Recipe

Along with mugicha, the barley tea, my food memories of summertime Japan are full of these cold buckwheat noodles. Slightly chewy and surprisingly easy to grip with chopsticks, they’re run through a  soy sauce-dashi dipping sauce — zaru is an onomatopoeia for the sound the noodles make when sloshed through the sauce — then slurped as a cooling delight. Zarusoba often serves as the end of a meal, a cheap and filling way to top off the tank if the more expensive protein and vegetables didn’t suffice. I love the texture, the flavor, and the temperature, and of course the memories they all evoke. Somehow I always manage to finish my bowl.

Meal 83: Israel

One way to look at cuisine is the interface between what foods are available and the cultures of the people who live there. We get a fascinating case study in the foods of Israel, a young country in an ancient land, with most of its population zero to two generations removed from some other place, whether near or very far. Israeli food is very much not what we think of in the U.S. as "Jewish food," for a few good reasons. I could get into ethnography and census counts, but this is a food blog, so just think to yourself whether matzo ball soup and brisket roasts sound good in a hot environment. Frankly, I don't blame Israelis, including those of Ashkenazi descent, for ditching the food of a poor people in a cold climate with short growing seasons, and instead preferring the abundance of the Mediterranean. There's a reason the Garden of Eden is placed somewhere around there!  (Incongruously, Israel has also developed a far less holy snack-food industry.)

Rather, much of the food in Israel comes from the Mizrahi, which essentially means Jews from places that aren't culturally European, including North Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia — depending on who you ask this includes the Sephardim, those whose lineage goes back to Spain. It's unclear to me whether such staples of the Israeli table like hummus, falafel, and shawarma come from these immigrants or were borrowed (or appropriated, depending on your view) from the Palestinians; if anything, my guess is that both factors reinforced each other. That said, the Mizrahim brought other foods, like kibbe soup from Iraq, and the fish dish you'll see later. (Speaking of Palestine, as it's a permanent observing state of the UN, it'll get its own meal later on.) The last notable group is Ethiopian, though it doesn't seem like they have a huge impact on the standard Israeli table.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sarah, my buddy from high school, who now lives and works in Israel. She's an assiduous follower of the blog, and was a tremendous help in sorting through the menu, steering me in the right direction (turns out Israelis don't really make falafel at home!), and pointing out things I may never have come across because they're almost too obvious to anyone who knows the culture (minty lemonade!).

Our guests for the evening were Martyna, Russell, Jessica, Miriam, and Rob!

Limonana | Minty lemonade | Recipe

It's so goofy as to sound apocryphal: this most refreshing of drinks is not only an invention from within the past 25 years, but it came about as the invented subject of an ad campaign meant to prove the value of out-of-home ads (think sides of buses). Apparently enough people were enticed by the promise of a minty lemonade with a catchy name that they started asking for it at restaurants, who pretty quickly figured out how to make it.

Whenever and however it was invented, it's a shock this beverage isn't found anywhere in the world it gets hot. Tart lemon is refreshing, cooling mint is refreshing, and the addition of sugar and seltzer make them a delight to drink. In this version I made a simple syrup with mint, but you could just as easily muddle mint in the glass.

Sarah made it clear that to be a real Israeli summertime event, we ought to also mix arak, an anise liqueur similar to raki or ouzo, with grapefruit juice. As she had warned, we found it pretty vile.

Hummus | Chickpea dip | Recipe

While time-consuming, it's easy and cheap to make hummus from scratch. It takes an overnight soak and several hours of simmering, but the final step is a mere blitz in the food processor and you've got your own fluffy, creamy dip that's as garlicky, salty, tangy, or oily as you want it. For those of us who are, uh, sensitive to garbanzos, you may find that when you give the a long soak and a slow simmer, they're a lot more digestible than their commercially prepared counterpart.

Pita | Flatbread | Recipe

Respectable bakers say that when it comes to normal loaves of bread, bad bread should be eaten hot to mask the lack of flavor, and good bread should be allowed to sit for a bit. But I really like hot bread, so flatbreads allow me to indulge my taste and maintain my amateur-baker pride. Flatbreads are also generally pretty quick and easy to make, the only annoying part being frequently bending over and pulling things into and out of a hot oven. My trick is, whenever possible, to make flatbreads on a griddle on the barbecue, which makes access so much easier.

Unlike the thin and rather sparse pitas we most often see here, Israeli pitas are thicker and spongier. I found I got the right thickness by putting a ball of dough on a plate with slightly raised sides and using a rolling pin along the edges of the plate, making for about a half-inch-thick piece of dough. (I use a horizontally-grooved hand-carved chapati roller I bought for fifty cents at a Mumbai antique shop. You could also use a wine bottle.) Too much sauce soaks right through a normal pita, while this thicker variety is well-suited for sopping up all manner of dip and sauce, or for making your own little sandwich with. Yum.

Salat yerakot | Chopped salad

It's really nothing more than tomato and cucumber with sumac, lemon juice, and olive oil, the sort of thing that's eaten pretty much anywhere those ingredients grow. But what makes it Israeli is how incredibly finely chopped everything is. Apparently it's a point of honor of Israeli chefs. I found it made things really watery as you can see, as every stroke of the knife squishes more juice from the tomato — was I supposed to drain some of it?

Chraime | White fish in spicy tomato sauce | Recipe

We can thank the Sephardic Jews of North Africa, many of whom emigrated to Israel, for this easy, simple, yet really tasty dish. The flavors play off so well, the tang and spice of the sauce with the oily-sweet, fleshy fish. And it's so easy to throw together: throw together ingredients you probably have on hand (including that humblest of staples, tomato paste), pop in whatever firm fish you happen to find (the recipe calls for sea bass but I had an easier time coming by swordfish thanks to Trader Joe's), and you're done. Tasty dinner in 20 minutes.

Yerakot kluim im daloreet, krooveet, ve'batzal adom | Roasted vegetables with tahini sauce | Recipe  

Sarah made it clear that adding cauliflower to the meal would lend a real sense of authenticity, and that Israelis love their roasted veggies, so that's how I made the cauliflower, along with butternut squash and red onions. Instead of roasting in the oven, I threw everything in a basket on the grill. The veggies got moderately charred, but the crowd didn't seem to mind, it all got gobbled up.

Kebabim | Ground lamb with pine nuts and tahini sauce | Recipe

In Israel, kebab doesn't mean meat chunks on a skewer, or a big ol' spit (that's schwarma in Israel, of course), but rather spiced ground lamb patties. Pine nuts add a bit of crunch and the mint is a refreshing balance to the rich lamb. I grilled them like hamburgers, then we doused them in a tahini sauce. They also worked well as a sandwich inside the pita. I ended up with way too much of the meat, which I then froze raw for future meals.

Yerushalmi kugel | Peppery caramel casserole | Recipe

This is one of the few foods I found that can be called historically Israeli, as in, invented by a Jewish community living there before the creation of the state. It's a curious dish, a noodle casserole that blends an oily sweet caramel with fresh cracked pepper, and bound together with eggs. With a long, slow bake, the top and edges get good and crispy, and the inside stays moist. Is this a dessert, a snack, or a light meal? It could be any of that.

Rugelach | Chocolate-walnut-jam rolled cookies | Recipe

For years I've heard stories of my ancestor, Fannie Danab, who was such a good cook that she never taught anyone her techniques, since she didn't want anyone to be a slave to the kitchen like she was. All the same, my grandmother worked to replicate her recipe for rugelach, the crispy little rolled-up cookies that, along with schniztel, are one of the few Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jewish foods to have become firmly implanted in Israel. The recipe here is, according to my mom, pretty close to what my grandmother would make, so here you have it, third-hand.

The secret to the flaky dough is cream cheese and of course butter; I decided to keep this meal kosher, so it was Tofutti and margarine here. I rolled out rounds (it's thankfully a pretty forgiving dough), spread out a really tasty strawberry-raspberry jam, sprinkled with chocolate and walnuts (not hazlenuts, because I used what I had), sliced into wedges, and merrily rolled them up.

Meal 82: Iraq

Look beyond the horrible news coming out of the country these days, or the past few decades — way, way beyond, because agriculture and civilization in the lands that now comprise Iraq goes back at least ten thousand years. The soils along the Tigris and Euphrates river are fertile and relatively moist, and the surrounding lands held forth wild grasses that became such staple grains as wheat and barley, and soon after domesticated animals, and writing, and even beer.

The cuisine of Iraq has transformed a whole lot over the millennia. While wheat and barley are still to be found, rice is the grain of choice — so beloved that it goes by the word timman, from the now-extinct Akkadian language, rather than the standard Arabic ruz. Beer can be found, but indications are that it's not so great. And other crops have emerged too, with Iraq now the world's largest producer of dates.

While many of the classics of Middle Eastern cuisine are very common on the Iraqi table, such as hummus, baba ghannoush, and kebab, I narrowed the focus to what is, as far as I can tell, most distinctive to the country. In particular, I found abundant reference and a huge variety of recipes for kibbeh, a general term for grain stuffed with meat, and there was no doubt that the "national dish" is a fish split open, rubbed with spices, and slowly grilled, or that I should make a cookie with a nearly savory dough but a very sweet filling for dessert.

Our guests for the evening were Molly, Stephen, Steve, Yali, Sarah and Shana.

Loomi | Dried lime tea | Recipe

Most things when dried are seen as a fairly equivalently flavored, if sometimes inferior, substitute for the fresh version, like spices or mushrooms or stone fruits. But a very few foods transform into something altogether different after spending some time in the sun: sundried tomatoes have a concentrated richness, it's hard to believe a raisin was once a grape. Limes go through perhaps an even greater metamorphosis: they shrink, turn nearly black, the insides crumble into almost nothing, and they take on a haunting aroma that's smoky, tart, bitter, and perfumey, all in one.

While they can also be used whole in a stew, or ground up into a powder and added to a spice blend, you'll enjoy them in their purest form as an exquisitely refreshing tea. The hardest part of making loomi, as it's known, is finding them, but any Middle Eastern store or a good-enough spice shop will carry them. (Kalustyan's in Manhattan has several varieties of different darkness and size, shades of subtlety I have yet to explore.) Once acquired, it's as simple as poking a few holes in them with a fork, steeping them in water with sugar added, straining, and chilling.

Mutabbal | Eggplant salad | Recipe

Pretty straightforward: roast an eggplant, dice it up and put over chopped veggies, drizzle with olive oil and pomegranate molasses. Really quite tasty.

Kubba halab | Lamb-stuffed rice croquette | Recipe

Iraq offers an astonishing variety of meat-stuffed grain. With a few exceptions, such as the Mosul variety which is two thin layers of bulgur with a meat layer in the middle, they are shaped somewhere between a torpedo and an American football, a coating of starch enveloping a meaty core. I chose this one, with a shell of rice and potatoes, in homage to the predominance of rice in the Iraqi cuisine and psyche. (Though, oddly, its name refers to the Syrian city of Aleppo.)

This was a labor-intensive dish. The meat isn't so hard to make but for all the breaking-up of the ground lamb in the frying pan. The outer shell requires cooking both rice and potato, then passing through a meat grinder, before forming into balls that you poke a hole into and smush in just enough lamb but not so much that it bursts. Then you have to freeze the balls to get them firm enough so they don't break apart when being fried in the pan, but even then they sometimes break and a fair amount of the crispy bits stick to the pan rather than the food. It's tasty enough, but maybe I'd recommend the easier Mosul variety!

Masgouf | Grilled butterflied fish | Recipe

Masgouf is a freshly-killed carp from the Euphrates river, butterflied, rubbed with turmeric and tamarind, and splayed out vertically, its insides exposed to the nearby flames of slowly burning apricot wood. The memory of this dish, languid in the cooking, inspires such wistfulness for better days that it's been the topic of dozens of articles and even a widely distributed fictional book. But now the Euphrates is so polluted that it's a serious risk to eat a carp pulled from it, and the hours of leisure the live-fish-to-smoky-flesh preparation require are too far a luxury to Baghdadis of recent times.

My reasons for not making a true masgouf are purely logistical: I don't have the space or equipment to build such a fire, and none of the shops I went to in Chinatown had carp, so I used tilapia instead. Thankfully they took care of the butterflying for me, and I did my best to replicate a slow smoky fire by using hickory chips on the gas grill and very slowly and indirectly cooking the fish. You know what? It turned out super tasty. The smoke definitely came through, and the odd combination of spices paired nicely with the sweet flesh.

Timin shreya | Vermicelli rice | Recipe

Just like their Eastern neighbors, Iraqis love a crispy crust on their rice. Unlike the Persians, though, Iraqis don't go through an elaborate process of soaking and parboiling the rice and then exaggerating the crust with a layer on the bottom — they just use a bit of fat and a very long, slow cook to get a crispy crust the straightforward way. While putting vermicelli, little strands of pasta, in with the rice isn't necessarily the absolutely most typical presentation, it sure looks nice and adds variety to the presentation. If making this dish, it's really important to make sure the heat is well-diffused. I use a cast iron heat diffuser, but in a pinch you could just place your pot on top of a (not-non-stick) frying pan to make sure the heat really spreads, otherwise you'll get a burnt spot where the heat hits.

Kleicha | Date cookies | Recipe

Back when Iraq was a place of diverse religions, Jews and Christians as well as Muslims all would make this dish as a symbol of celebrations both religious and personal. It's not exactly what passes for a cookie in the West — the yeasted dough is decidedly unsweet and it's the filling that makes it dessert, and the whole thing is haunted with spices like generally un-sweet flavors like fennel and nigella — but the crispness and finger-food nature make for a sufficiently apt comparison. While they can be many shapes and filled with many things, the classic filling is dates and the roll-up cookie seems the most common.

These were actually really fun to make. The dates come together nicely, and the dough is so buttery that it's actually a pleasure to work with. And oh, the eating experience! A haunting combo of spices, a delightfully flaky cookie that gives way to a firmly chewy interior, and the perfect size for eating in two nibbles. Goes great with cardamom tea!

Meal 78: Indonesia

Indonesia's all about the islands. It's got over 17,000 of them, including large parts second- (New Guinea) and third-largest (Borneo) islands in the world. It also has the most populous island — at 141 million people, Java's population is about the same as Russia's, in 133 times less area! While it's generally not much on our radar from a geopolitical or cultural standpoint, it's played an important role in world, and culinary, history. For millennia traders from the West have sought its spices, and who knows how long it would have taken a European to make it to the New World had there not been the urge to find an easier route to the pepper, nutmeg, and cloves of Molucca, the Spice Islands? Curiously, spices don't have a particularly bold role in Indonesian cuisine today, which instead leans more on roots like ginger and galangal, and chili peppers, which ironically were first brought out of the New World by Columbus as a next-best-thing for not having found black pepper and found their way to Indonesia via the Portuguese. (They brought peanuts, too.)

Joining us for the meal were Erika, Claire, Iris, Ben, and Michelle.

Arrack punch | Recipe

Indonesia's best-known liquor was actually a lot better known a century ago. In that pre-Prohibition age of punches, this sugarcane-and-rice firewater clocking in at 50% alcohol was a mainstay, a touch of the colonial and exotic. As a predominantly Muslim country, Indonesia has little drinking culture (Bali is a notable exclusion!), but this recipe, with limes and freshly grated nutmeg (which is native to Indonesia), seemed appropriate. Laura made them cold and strong — there's nothing but ice, simple syrup, and lime juice to cut the alcohol!

Tumpeng nasi kuning | Yellow rice mountain | Recipe

The tumpeng is more than a cone of rice representing the country's mountainous terrain. It's the sign of a celebration, as important to many Indonesian families as a cake is to a Western birthday. It's also more than just the rice itself, because it always comes with an assortment of foods that make up a feast, at the whim of the host. It's this intersection of tradition, symbolism and flexibility that's led it to recently be named the primary national dish by a government agency.

This recipe looked great, but turned out not so good. Soaking with fresh turmeric overnight didn't make it as richly yellow as a quick douse of the powdered version would have, and the instructions to boil, covered, on high for 20 minutes led to burnt rice sticking to the sides so hard it took a week of soaking to get off. Fortunately, though, most of the rice turned out well, and as you can see, made for a pretty cone — which I formed with a chinois, a pointy strainer.

Krupuk | Fried crackers

These things start out as these little wafers of sun-dried tapioca starch with flavoring, but as soon as they hit oil, they puff up, with a texture somewhere between a Cheeto and meringue. You can buy them pre-fried in a bag just like chips, but it's so fun and easy to make them. You can even make them completely from scratch, but alas, without much sunshine to speak of, I resorted for store-bought. I made two versions: garlic, and fish, the latter being not a wafer but more like a nest of noodles.  The savory-fatty-crispy contrasted the strong, sweet punch quite nicely.

Satay ayam madura | Chicken skewers with peanut sauce | Recipe

I couldn't have been happier to fire up the grill for the first time this year for this tasty treat, popular throughout Indonesia and Southeast Asia. You start by making a peanut sauce, a complex thing of beauty, with peanuts fresh roasted on the stove, blended with intense flavors like shrimp paste and cayenne peppers. Then skewered chicken goes through two marinades: first a bath in sweet soy sauce and chicken fat rendered with garlic and ginger (YUM), then halfway through cooking a basting with peanut sauce, more sweet soy sauce, and lime — all that fat and sugar make for some flare-ups, and it was dark and cold out so it was hard to test for doneness, so I just cooked it low and slow until crispy. My only regret through the whole thing is that I didn't buy more chicken; the tasty, mildly sweet, caramelized morsels disappeared in seconds.

Urap sayur | Blanched vegetables with coconut dressing | Recipe

For whatever reason (sanitation?), Indonesian cuisine has many cooked salads. Vegetables I'd be happy to eat raw, like bean sprouts, are blanched or steamed before being dressed. While gado-gado, with a peanut dressing, is probably the most famous, we have plenty of peanuts going on in other dishes. An urap, with a sweet-sour-spicy flavored coconut dressing, is more common on a tumpeng platter.While I enjoyed the flavors dressing, the blanched veggies weren't quite my thing, though some others at the table said they liked the whole thing quite a bit.

By the way, this was by far my easiest coconut-extracting experience. I did my usual thing of whacking on the equator a few times with the back of a cleaver, and not only did it crack nicely and easily to open, but the flesh also separated almost effortlessly from the shell. Usually it takes a good ten to twenty minutes to pry it off. Did I do something right? Did I get lucky with this coconut? I'd love to understand what happened so I can repeat the success.

Rendang daging minang | Caramelized beef coconut curry |Recipe

Rendang is a strange and clever technique for making meat last at room temperature for weeks. You start with enough coconut milk that it looks like you're making a soup, but you keep it on a low boil for hours until all the liquid evaporates, and you end up with a sort of fried meat. (This isn't the first time I've seen this technique — the oil down from Grenada, in particular, also cooks a stew down in coconut milk until it's nice and thick.)

 The Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, who have a centuries-long tradition of travel and trade, invented the dish for their journeys, and then spread the love wherever they landed, so now it's a popular dish throughout the region. Today, with decent refrigeration, packaging, and supply chains, there's no need to spend long hours making this complex dish, except that it happens to be extremely tasty — kaffir lime leaves, star anise, lemongrass, and a host of chilies and aromatic roots combine for a really luscious dish. The beef, which starts out as an extremely tough cut like shank, melts into nothing until it's the texture of tuna fish. And all that coconut milk — the fat makes the dish rich, and the residual sugars caramelize! Yum.

Tempe orek | Stir-fried tempeh |Recipe

Tempeh is Indonesia's homegrown soy product, based on fermentation with a particular fungal spore whose white vegetation forms a white mass that holds the beans together. (If that sounds gross to you, I recommend you not research how cheese is made.) While in the West we tend to use it as a vegan substitute for ground beef, Indonesians tend to treat it as the Chinese often do tofu, cut into cubes and stir-fried until crispy. This recipe uses a straightforward sambal of quick-cooked garlic, shallots, chilies and galangal, made into a thick sauce with palm sugar and kecap manis, a sweet soy sauce. (Kecap is pronounced pretty much like "ketchup," and that's no coincidence — it's a long history, but our tangy, thick tomato condiment can trace its history back to Southeast Asia.) The result is quite tasty, with moderate spice, and very healthy for vegetarians and vegans as it's loaded with B vitamins.

Sambal teri kacang | Fried dried anchovies with peanuts | Recipe

This dish is about as intense as it sounds: super-fishy, crunchy, and with that sweet-sour-spicy base we've seen repeated a lot throughout the meal. It was a bit of work to soak and then dry the anchovies, but I'm glad I did because otherwise they'd have been way too salty. Fun to munch on, but you don't need to make much per person unless you need something to snack on with beer.

Setokeng | Warm ginger broth with floating treats |Recipe

Whether warm or icy, most Indonesian desserts are a sort of half-drink, half-soup full of assorted nuggets. This one is a wintertime comfort, a sweet ginger broth playing host to a grab bag of delights both floating (bread, peanuts) and sinking (tapioca pearls, palm fruit), topped off with a drizzle of condensed milk because why not. It's a bizarre texture combo, ranging from fall-apart mushy to chewy to crunchy, but I found it surprisingly nice and comforting on a cold evening.

Meal 65: Germany

What a convergence -- my 30th birthday, the one-third point for United Noshes, a gorgeous day, an apartment with a backyard...and a cuisine and culture renowned for good cheer around food. While German food rarely makes the rounds of haute cuisine, for those who enjoy meat and beer it's a wonderful, homey way to get a lot of calories. New York City used to have a distinct German immigrant population. Much like Chinatown today, Kleindeutschland in the Lower East Side and other enclaves around town featured whole communities where you'd see more German than English on the walls. Yet today the presence is a lot more subdued, and is hanging on best in the portion of the Upper East Side once known as Germantown. There are many reasons explaining the decline of the German identity, from the General Slocum disaster in which over 1,000 people capsized near shore, to xenophobia during the two World Wars.

About thirty friends and members of the Noshing community passed through in the nine (!) hours the temporary backyard biergarten was open, including three visitors from California! Thanks to all who came for bringing so much beer and wine, too -- it was quite festive!

Aufschnitt | Cold cuts

German food is chock-a-block with preserved meats. To get the party started, I set out a few different kinds. Pictured above is liverwurst; sometimes it's more of a spread but this is the Braunschweiger variety, originating from near Hanover, which is firm enough to slice, and goes great with some onion on a bit of pumpernickel bread. We also had two air-dried ones: Landjäger, from the south, which is like a thin square salami, and smoked bratwurst. To round it out, we enjoyed the rich and appropriately named Butterkäse -- käse means cheese and I'll let you figure out the other part.

Brezeln | Pretzels | Recipe

I've always loved the distinctive flavor of pretzels, that oddly salty nuttiness, most enjoyable a crisp crust and a soft inside. The process was really enjoyable: a quick rise, a supple dough to roll and twist, a quick boil in a baking soda bath to lend the distinctive flavor, and a moderate bake. (In fact, the one modification I'd make to the recipe is to cook at more like 400 or 425, rather than 450, to get it to really bake through -- the crust will darken plenty even at a lower temp thanks to the baking soda.) Since I didn't want to spend my birthday party leashed to the stove, I figured out (with help from my buddy PJ at King Arthur Flour) how to prep and freeze them ahead of time while serving them nice and hot, right in time. I made them the whole way through but pulled them just as the crust was starting to brown, froze them on sheets until mostly hard, and put them in plastic bags and back into the freezer. A few days later, I thawed them for about an hour at room temperature, and put them on a 350 oven for maybe 15 minutes until the house smelled great. Done! I think they turned out even better this way than the original recipe, because the second bake really cooks them through and also lends a pretty thick and crispy crust. However you judge it, I made 65 pretzels and they all disappeared!

If you end up making these pretzels -- and you should! -- make sure you get some good mustards to go with it. We had a straightforward, medium-sharpness yellow mustard, a spicier one, and my favorite, a sweet rich Bavarian. Each brings out a different aspect of the pretzel, and taking your time to decide which mustard is your favorite is a great excuse to eat more pretzel.

Rheinlander Sauerbraten | Sweet and sour pot roast | Recipe

Don't worry, even if the photo were in focus, this dish wouldn't look like much. But whatever soaking three days in a spiced vinegar sauce followed by several hours of stovetop stewing and a dusting of raisins does to make a hunk of beef look unattractive, it sure makes it flavorful. This dish has been enjoyed in Germany for a very long time -- both Julius Caesar and Charlemagne have been credited with its invention -- and the meaty sourness, balanced a bit by the sweetness of gingersnaps and raisins, is still a winner.

Würste | Sausages

While I try to make as much as possible from scratch, I draw the line at sausages. It was surprisingly difficult to find a good variety of German sausages around New York -- Fairway, normally a reliable source of European foods, really came up short. So I headed up to Yorkville on the Upper East Side, an area once well-known as Germantown, to Schaller and Weber. It was tough to choose from their wide variety, but I ended up with delicate Weisswurst, richly spiced and smoked Bauernwurst, and then the famous Bratwurst, which I bought raw, and simmered in beer before grilling. As all the sausages were fully cooked ahead of time, grilling was just for temperature and texture, so I did it with the cover up.

Rotkohl | Stewed red cabbage with apples | Recipe

The classic German stewed cabbage is tender, with a good balance of sweet and sour. While this fulfilled all those elements, it was kind of lacking in depth. The dish was pleasant enough, but didn't really beg to be scarfed down like some versions of these dishes I've found. Not sure what the problem is -- maybe shredding with the Cuisinart made the cabbage too fine, or something?

Berliner Kartoffelsalat | Vinaigrette potato salad | Recipe

Most German potato salads don't have mayonnaise, and I like them for that. This recipe, which makes an unsubstantiated claim of being from Berlin and therefore helped me round out the geography, is pretty clever, using juice from the pickles as the sour base for the vinaigrette. I'd say it was all right, but it probably could have used more vinegar to really make the flavors sing. I also probably overcooked the potatoes a bit, which might have made things mushier than ideal.

Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte | Black Forest cake | Recipe

I didn't feel like I should be making my own birthday cake, so Laura agreed to do it. She even knew what she'd make, a German chocolate cake. Imagine Laura's surprise when she discovered that such a cake is actually American in origin, invented by a certain Sam German working at a chocolate company! Thank goodness our friend Lisa came to the rescue with this cake, which is so German that it was one of two national submissions to a Europe-wide cake fest. Four layers of deep chocolate, generously separated with buttercream studded with cherries, and then evenly sprinkled with shaved chocolate...wow. I might have a German-themed birthday party every year just so I have an excuse to get this cake!

We're about to start into a 16-state, 4500+-mile road trip, and our first stop is to the Jersey Shore where we'll do the Greece meal!