Favorite Fall Comfort Foods

Posted on October 5, 2023 by Bert Tanimoto

Here’s the thing—you wouldn’t expect the words “comfort food” and “high tech” to go together, but when I sit here and think, “What can I make with my Zojirushi products today?” the tech makes it easier to cook everything. And that includes the simple stuff that I grew up with, like sweet potatoes.

My wife loves French onion soup. She dug up this recipe from Better Homes & Gardens® that makes a one-pot pasta with canned soup, so we made it with our electric skillet.

You can tell this is going to taste good just by looking at it—how can you go wrong with canned soup? Of course it isn’t going to compare with how the French did it in the 19th Century, when the modern version of onion soup first originated at open air markets, but modern times has its advantages too.

Once the pasta has cooked through, the real flavor goes in; all those browned onions and cheese.

The crusty French bread takes the place of the croutons you would normally find in French Onion Soup. This is the best kind of comfort food—the kind you make with no trouble in one pot.

OK, I’m not gonna lie. We don’t have a lot of counter space in our kitchen, so when we take out an appliance to use, it’s going to get more than one use before it goes back into the closet. The skillet is handy for this kind of homey dish anyway, so we made Paella. Listen, whenever I eat rice it’s almost always an Asian dish, but I do like other kinds and Spanish Paella is one of them. The other is Cajun rice. I’ll eat anything that tastes good, you know what I mean?

Notice how the skillet seared the bottom of the rice so nicely, a trademark of good Paella.

More comfort food—a simple steak with grilled vegetables.

Maybe steak isn’t that simple. There are a gazillion ways to eat it, after all. Some people like a good steak sauce, some prefer a chimichurri, or maybe just butter and some salt and pepper for others. My favorite way to eat a steak is wasabi shoyu, a dipping sauce made of soy sauce and wasabi. But hey, it could be because I always eat my steak with white rice (which means I cut my meat up before I eat it and use chopsticks). How do you eat your steak?

Let’s talk about those lusciously colorful sweet potatoes. The purple one is the Okinawan potato, known for its sweet and creamy texture. It’s been called a superfood, and who am I to argue; we all know that Okinawans are some of the oldest living humans on earth. The orange one is the traditional yam, the kind we love on Thanksgiving. And the pale yellow one is the Japanese sweet potato, that I’ve heard can still be bought from food carts in Tokyo on a cold night. You’d have to be on a quieter suburban street probably, but it sure would bring back childhood memories for me. You can buy these at the market in season and bake them in your toaster oven.

Because it’s October, I really can’t finish this post without talking about pumpkins. One of my favorite desserts growing up local in Hawaii was butter mochi, the classic cake made with mochiko flour. Well, if you add pumpkin puree to the mix you can get pumpkin mochi cake and not feel left out of pumpkin season.

Adding the puree makes this cake a bit more pudding-like, but the flavor is ono; I guarantee it.And that’s how we do comfort food at our house. Whenever there’s any excuse to go a little beyond bacon fried rice for dinner (like using our Zojirushi stuff for example), our menu often gets more interesting. Ha-ha!

Products used in this post: Micom Toaster Oven ET-ZLC30, Indoor Electric Grill EB-DLC10, Gourmet d’Expert® Electric Skillet EP-RAC50

Please note that these recipes were not tested by Zojirushi America.

The Day Everything Turns Green

Posted on March 4, 2023 by Bert Tanimoto

It turns out about 54 percent of Americans will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day this year according to a 2022 survey, which got me thinking—why? Most of us aren’t even Irish. It isn’t a national holiday here, unlike in Ireland where it really means something because Saint Patrick symbolizes the arrival of Christianity. But it’s kind of a fun day to be green and all that, and celebrate with Irish food. They even have St. Patrick’s Day parades in Japan, because they know how to copy and make things distinctly Japanese over there, ha-ha!

I baked a hidden surprise Shamrock Pound Cake that I never knew I could pull off. This thing was like a magician’s trick, where once you know how it’s done, you realize how easy it is to create the illusion. It’s an old trick for bakers, but it wasn’t for me. So if it isn’t for you either, here it is in pictures.

Make some shamrock cake cutouts. I used ordinary pound cake mix, dropped food dye into the batter and baked it in a loaf pan. Get a clover shaped cookie cutter. Slice the pound cake into even slices the same thickness of your cookie cutter. Then press out your shamrock cake cutouts and set aside.

Now here’s the tricky part. You need to stand up the cake cutouts in another loaf pan like soldiers as best as you can. Layering the bottom of the pan with batter gives you a base that will help keep the shamrocks standing, as well as suspending it off the bottom.

Cover it all up with the rest of the batter until the shamrocks are completely hidden. Then bake the cake as per normal like the cake mix instructions say. When it’s done, glaze over it with lemon glaze (you can see the cookie cutter I used).

Let it cool completely before you attempt to cut it. The trick is to cut the slices along the same widths of each of the shamrock cutouts that you’ve baked into the cake. If you did a good job of standing them up tightly together before covering with the batter, the result should be pretty convincing. If you thought the inside cake would overbake or something, don’t worry—it doesn’t. Pretty cool, huh?

Everybody makes corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not a great fan, so we made Shepherd’s Pie instead, which I liked a lot better; mainly because I love ground beef. So apparently this Irish classic would normally use ground lamb, but since I’m not a big fan of lamb either—well, you get the picture. Lots of recipes for this simple dish online, but it’s basically exactly like you see here. Mashed potatos and a filling made of ground beef, peas and carrots that was sautéed with beef broth, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce.

I mean, it’s pretty basic—the only thing is that it does require some steps. You have to mash the potatoes, which you can do ahead of time before you make the meat filling. And like any casserole dish you have to bake it.

I guess technically if you use beef instead of lamb, this dish would be called a cottage pie by the British or the Irish, where it originated. I don’t think we Americans are that fussy about the name. It’s interesting to note that the name Shepherd’s Pie came from the minced lamb because a shepherd looks after sheep. And the mashed potato topping was meant to represent the sheep’s fleece. Makes good enough sense to me!

So what do you do with the leftover mashed potatoes that wouldn’t fit in the Shepherd’s Pie? You make Irish potato pancakes of course, which is what the Irish do so they don’t waste food. Also known as Boxty, this classic dish is a cross between hash browns and a pancake. It contains flour and grated raw potatoes, so combined with the mashed potatoes, Boxty has a uniquely smooth texture when pan fried—yet you can taste the grated bits of potato like hash browns.

Ireland and potatoes go hand in hand as everyone knows, and a lot had to do with potatoes being the food for the country’s poor back then. Potatoes can grow anywhere so it was the ideal staple food. You can find authentic Irish potato pancakes all over the republic today, including at restaurants that specialize in it and packaged for sale in supermarkets.

We had ours for an Irish style breakfast. Traditionally, we could have had some pork blood sausage too, but we didn’t have any. If you want to see that, check out Zojirushi’s Irish Breakfast here.

How are you going to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?

Products used in this post: Micom Toaster Oven ET-ZLC30, Gourmet Sizzler® Electric Griddle EA-DCC10

Please note that these recipes were not tested by Zojirushi America.

Happy Pies!

Posted on February 4, 2023 by Bert Tanimoto

Reply

National Pie Month is here and Valentine’s Day is coming! Let’s make hand pies—or are these empanadas? Whatever; I know they aren’t turnovers because they haven’t been folded over like one. Every food culture in the world seems to have their own version of a hand pie, both sweet and savory. The English can probably claim to be the original hand pie, with the Cornish Pasty dating back to the 19th Century.

The county of Cornwall, located on the southwestern tip of England, is a huge tourist destination known for its world renowned beaches. But it wasn’t always so—most Cornish people made their living in the tin mines centuries ago and the pasty was a quick meal for the miners and easy to eat. Miners could hold the pasty by their signature pinched crust, even with their dirty hands, and throw that part away after eating the rest. There were a couple of reasons for this—mining caused arsenic to come up and the miners didn’t want to ingest any for fear of poisoning. And a more colorful reason was to appease the fairie spirits of the mines, by leaving behind the crusts for them to eat. No harm in hedging all your bets to be safe in a mine!

I made 3 kinds of hand pies for National Pie Month with different ingredients.

The fillings were just fresh strawberries and strawberry jam, fresh apples with brown sugar and cinnamon, and store bought kalua pork (Hawaiian style) so I could have a savory one.

Just buy some ready made pie crust, cut them out with a cookie cutter and crimp the edges with a fork to hold the ingredients inside.

Coat them with egg wash and throw them in a Toaster Oven for 20 minutes. You can do them all at the same time and you’ll have a mess ‘o hand pies made to order.

Now here’s a question that needs answering. Is a quiche a pie? Of course it’s a pie. It’s a savory egg custard pie that you bake in an oven that originated in France, that you can have for dinner. You could also make an apple or cherry pie for dessert too, if it pleases you. What about a frittata? Is a frittata, which is also an egg custard, a quiche? NO, because it isn’t baked in a crust, and it isn’t French. A quiche needs to bake longer and has that creamy texture, and just smells like a tempting weekend breakfast.

My favorite thing to order at the pancake house in our neighborhood is the diced ham and scrambled eggs. It comes with a short stack of their famous pancakes, which I drown in maple syrup. The eggs are always fluffy, and I like to eat them with ketchup and Tabasco®. Doesn’t this slice of quiche kind of look like the same, except that it’s been baked in a pie?

Here’s my last pie for Pie Month. A humble slice of homemade custard pie, which happens to be my go-to comfort pie. Hawaii people are into custard pie—did you know that?

Local style custard pies are slightly different from the Mainland ones; a little creamier I would say, rather than eggier—softer and silkier in texture. The secret ingredient is using evaporated milk rather than whole milk or cream. And eat it chilled; that’s really the only way. Next time you visit Hawaii to binge eat all that amazing local food, save some room for a slice of custard pie. It’s a well-kept local secret.

Happy National Pie Month and Happy Valentine’s Day! This is still the best use for a pie:

Products used in this post: Micom Toaster Oven ET-ZLC30

Please note that these recipes were not tested by Zojirushi America.

09-September_qwest_pie_throwing_0111 (pie in face) by Seth Lemmons, under license by Creative Commons