栗: Kuri; Chestnuts

Despite the Christmas song, chestnuts were never something I really imagined eating until I came to Japan. They are firmly associated with cooler weather, and are often sold as 甘栗 (amaguri; sweet chestnuts) at small stands. They are also made into 金団 (kinton, sweet chestnut paste), which is used in confections and may be more appealing to those whole don't like the red bean 小豆 paste more commonly used.

Chestnuts are faintly nutty, with a mealy texture, and are usually candied if not made into the paste. They are always served at New Year's. A French treat that has never taken off in the States but that got popular here is marrons glaces, or candied glazed chestnuts that are often sold as expensive gifts. We're using them to garnish the grilled fish right now.

PS- they're also a complete pain in the butt to peel. You have to soak them in water overnight to soften the outer shell, then peel it off, then cut away the bitter inner skin, shaping each chestnut into a 6-sided figure. Try not to get roped into it by yourself.

風干し鰈 (Kaze-Boshi Karei): Wind-Dried Flounder

Drying fish is a basic technique that seals in and strengthens flavor as well as helping to preserve the fish longer. Although I have to admit I was pretty horrified when I saw raw fish just being hung up for hours, even in the summer. I always imagined dried food to be done in stainless, sterilized surroundings, or at least in a special room. Not in Asia. It's really weird seeing fish hung out to dry amidst the skyscrapers and Tokyo bustle. We're on the second floor of a building but we head up the stairs and tie the fish to hangers on the third floor's stairwell.

After scaling, deheading, and cleaning the flounder, you soak it in 立塩 ('standing water', the word for water that has the same salinity as the sea, about 3%) for 30 minutes. This adds flavor and tightens the flesh of the fish. Drain, dry, and make a slit along the spine in both the front and back of the fish. Skewer by the tail and dry outside, preferably on a breezy coolish day, for about 6 hours. The fish keep about a week but are best used as soon as possible. They are usually grilled. I like it when we do big batches of fish like this, because I can get in on the knife action. I did most of the knifework on these guys myself.

Footwear

When I was in the States, it was a sign of machoism to wear anything other than boots in the kitchen. The tough chefs wore hard clogs, but between using a hose on the concrete floors and flying food, hot oil, and dropped knives, it was a risk to have anything other than treated leather covering your toes. Not so in Japan.

First of all, there are no dropped knives in Japan. When you're dealing with lengths of metal that cost as much as a month's rent, you don't drop them. There are no 'house knives' here, and you don't use other chef's knives here, period. The most arrogant way to pull rank in the kitchen is for a senior chef is to use an inferior's knife instead of bothering to break out his own. Secondly, Japanese chefs work clean. Food is rarely if ever dropped, and seen as a direct loss. As a direct result, floors are cleaned less often, more like once a week rather than every night. Usually long boots are provided for said cleaning by the house.

All this leads to most chefs wearing a lot less protection on their feet over here than I am used to. Sushi chefs in particular often opt for 下駄, or Japanese wooden sandals, and socks. I've gone with a pair of rubber clogs with holes for ventilation, and only wipe them down once a week.

Choking it Down

One of few nice thing about working the hours that I do is that I get fed twice a day. The flipside is that the Japanese adhere to what your mom always told you: clear what's on your plate with no comments. Japanese restaurants don't do food waste. If something can't be served anymore, we get it. I'm lucky; the owner of my restaurant eats with us, and he makes sure we eat pretty good (sometimes great) and will pull food that isn't the absolute freshest and give it to us instead of hanging onto it until it goes bad. At another place, I've seen fish that had actually started to stink being broken out and served to the staff.

However...I don't mind choking down the occasional not-tasty, odd, or maybe gross thing at a friend's house, and I consider myself pretty open to most foods. But I've been an adult for a long time, and having the restaurant dictate the majority of what I consume is hard to bear. It's very much like being a small child, and taking whatever Mom dishes up. Fugu Senpai is also under a lot of pressure to spend as little as possible on ingredients and to cook them as fast as possible, so that the instant the last customer leaves the restaurant, we are sitting down to eat. This leads to a lot of stir-fries and fried food. Which is where my real problem comes in. I've been really sensitive to oil since I was a child, finally cutting it from my diet altogether. I just can't stomach it. I tried to just eat less when fried food was served up, but I felt like crap for the rest of the day. Fugu Senpai is a nice guy and he's been trying to accommodate me by using different preparation methods for my food. I really appreciate it, since observing special dietary needs aren't part of his job description. It does make me realize how much I enjoyed cooking for myself, though, and is getting me more motivated to be the one to cook the meals at the restaurant.

秋: Fall

The heat has finally broken a bit and we've officially hit the fall season as far as ingredients are concerned. Fall is when Japanese cuisine really comes into it's own. You've got 秋刀魚 (Pacific saury), 栗 (chestnuts), 銀杏 (ginko nuts), 梨 (Japanese pears, my favorite fruit), and a variety of 茸 (mushrooms), the king of which is 松茸 (matsutake; pine mushroom). Matsutake have an incredible aroma when grilled lightly, and one of the more spectacular meals I saw served was when the owner broke out some charcoal and grilled slices of matsutake right at the counter, then shaped the piping hot 'shrooms into sushi. The smoky aroma of dashi is brought out by the cold too, and soups are especially good at this time. People really interested in Japanese cuisine should get out at least once in the next 6-8 weeks.

Note: The worldwide climate change is real. We've been serving 秋刀魚, a fish which has the character for 'fall' in it's name, since mid-summer. Everything is coming out earlier and earlier and the food seasons are ending more quickly. In a cuisine that is based as firmly on tradition as Japanese, you are supposed to eat certain types of food at certain times of the year or on certain days, but gradually this is becoming obsolete as the Earth warms up.

Hands

Every chef knows the agony of hands. Having them, I mean. They crackle on the ends of your wrists, catching on cloth and smearing blood unexpectedly. Bend your fingers and feel the skin strain to breaking over your knuckles. Try to put them in your pockets and let the grimace of pain break through your tough-guy face. All chefs have half a dozen cuts, burns, cracks and scrapes healing half-heartedly on their hands at all times, but the real enemy is dryness. Your hands are wet most of the day, washed uncounted times, in contact with soap and cleansers and bleach for hours. You may try the girly glove approach for a while, but you nearly always ditch them when you've gotten into that hardcore cleaning drive that barely allows you time for the bathroom, much less tracking down and pulling gloves already your already-devastated paws.

Forget fashion magazines or bath shops. Cooks are the ones that can tell you about skin creams. Having naturally dry skin to begin with, I suffer doubly, and in the winter my hands are twin suns of radiating pain. I've tried the range of lotions from Wal-Mart to department stores where they sell it by the ounce, all the Burt's Bees products, antibiotic cream, Bag Balm, shea butter, cocoa butter, pure petroleum jelly, prescription medical cream, etc. I've done it all, man. This is the bottom line and the only thing that keeps the pain at bay: pure lanolin. Not anything lanolin-based; you need the 100 percent smelly sheep's fat, and you need to smear it thickly on your hands at least every other night and put on cotton gardening gloves to keep it on your skin instead of on your sheets. (Rubber gloves make your hands break out and do weird stuff if you use them every night.) The gloves make hitting the snooze button interesting in the morning, but add a certain Fight Club atmosphere to the bedroom.