Recipes
Bento making is a great way to eat local, healthy food, and can be an outlet for your creativity. In order to keep it safe though, proper preparation is a must in order to avoid food poisoning, especially in a hot summer like the one we’ve had this year.
Our newest team member, holistic nutritionist and mom, Ichiko has shared her recipe for a modern western take on a Japanese quick-pickle recipe.
I make about 200 dumplings at a time and freeze them. It is a bit of a production to make, but it is so worth it. I'm always excited when I get to eat these, it's not like a sad frozen dinner, and they are so convenient. Try these gyoza with steamed rice and some sauteed bean sprouts, and beer!
It is difficult and time-consuming to cook brown rice well. So we are excited to share with you a fantastically simple way to cook fluffy and delicious brown rice, it's called "bikkuri-daki."
The word bikkuri means surprise and daki means to boil, in Japanese. The surprise, which we will explain below, shocks the grains of rice into splitting their shells, and this results in a fluffy texture.
According to Wikipedia, this method has been used in the Tohoku-area of Japan for a long time, and before people started using specialized pressure cookers for hard rices, it was a well-known method.
Usually when cooking brown rice, you need to soak it for several hours to let it absorb enough water, and cooking usually happens in a pressure cooker or electric rice-cooker.
The bikkuri-daki method is a fast and easy alternative that yields great results.