Here’s a great yogurt drink: mix equal parts of Haggen 2% milk and Strauss Family Creamery organic vanilla nonfat yogurt into a capped bottle, and give it a vigorous shake until a good foam is formed. Put in the fridge for all day enjoyment.

Tonight we had a reservation for dinner at the Grouchy Chef restaurant in Mukilteo, across from Paine Field, in an industrial area. The most unlikely place to open a restaurant, a place cut out of a warehouse, which seems more fit for a window repair shop rather than a place where you could get a 3-course dinner served on great chinaware and white napkins. But after a real treat, we say we don’t mind of the location at all, and we hope he will stay in business for a long time to come.
What make this chef special to us are many, but most of all, it’s an echo of the dining culture that we came in contact with while vacationing in Japan a couple years ago. In Japan, grab a travel catalog, and you will see plenty of colorful advertisement pictures of vacation houses and B&B hotels that treat travelers rather well, with clean accommodation plus a western-style formal multi-course dinner included in the package. The dinners served by this one-man show is exactly this type of fare, which puts the emphasis on the food and the presentation, a cha-do of the culinary, one where, once you know the rules, you can relax and take in the taste and sight of the feast.
Come and be amazed at how efficient this chef runs his show. A small man, clean cut and rather handsome, he embodies one aspect of the Japanese character that we find rather fascinating. Just remember to make a reservation, order when he beckons to you that he’s ready to take order, order and pay at the counter, and don’t use the cloth napkin to wipe your mouth or blow your nose.

Winter is here, but one of the tastiest gold of the sea has been in season since mid-November in the area: sea urchin, uni. The local ethnic seafood markets occasionally stock live uni harvested on local waters. We’ve had the luck to check the markets when they had uni in stock, so this has been a great year for enjoying uni so far. Here on the west coast the harvested uni can be green, purple, but more abundant is the red type. At the sushi restaurants you can never get your fill of uni, so getting them live from the market and prepare them yourself is a must if you want to satisfy your crave. Six urchins are enough for 2 people to savor for 2 days. The uni deteriorates fast even when kept in the fridge, so finish them within 2 days for the best texture and taste.

Be warned: cracking up the sea urchins and getting to the delicious yellow gold can be both an intimidating task and an appetite killer, but the result is rewarding if you are really into uni. I would recommend not eating the uni right after preparing it, to give it a bit of time to mellow out a bit, and also time for you to clean up the sea smell from preparing all that good stuff.

To prepare, you need a duckbill pliers or a small ax, a pair of tweezers, salted water, and trays of strainers.

Extraction: Lay the uni so the mouth faces up, then crack the shell into halves straight down. Use a long handled spoon to scoop out the pieces of gonad. The gonad (called roe, or uni) from both sexes are equally valuable. Rinse the roe in cold water, using a pair of tweezers to clean out the remaining membranes.

Cure: soak the roe in cold salted water for up to 15 minutes, but I normally just give them a 5 minute bath at most. Then drain them and place onto the strainers, covered and place in the fridge overnight.

The best quality roe has good clor and apprearance, smaller than 5cm (~ 2 inches), and free of leaking fluid, thus many prefer the smaller urchins which they believe tend to produce higher quality roe. It’s all in the perception. Commercially prepared uni is soaked in a chemical (anhydrous potassium alum) to keep them firm, so the freshly prepared homemade stuff definitely has a taste advantage there.

From October, the Chum caviar is available freshly cured at my favorite Russian caviar factory outlet. You can buy it in the half pound or one-pound tub.

Salmon caviar never catches on here, because it’s historically has been used as bait for so long, there is no more mystic or respect left. But Europe and Japan are where the market is for salmon caviar.

Osetrina, Russian for sturgeon, is delicious cold smoked. You can eat it just like chicken. A Ukrainian friend of mine introduced me to it, and we got a half-pound of the steak at a Russian outlet. The price was very affordable at $9.80/lb.

I wasn’t brought up to be a fish-eating guy, but over the years they have grown on me, and my wife, she got total credit for changing me in that aspect. After the trip to Japan and a visit to Tsukiji market, I came to appreciate the beauty and taste of a fresh fish.

So now, whenever I visit the local Japanese fish market, I am always on the lookout for a fresh one, and boys I’m always tempted every single time. On the most recent visit we saw golden snappers from New Zealand that looked sooo sexy, I was tempted to reach out and caress its golden body and mesmerized by its big dark eyes. Winter is the best time to have this fish. Justput in on the grill with nothing but coarse salt and pepper, to enjoy its sweet taste and melting fat.

Occasionally we would get a dozen Kushi oysters and enjoy them with lime and may be a dash of tabasco. These are small but taste the best.

Fresh seafood today included spot prawn tails, full of eggs hung outside their underbelly. These were larger ones so they would be called botan ebi in sushi terminology. Their meat was so sweet, one would think sugar was added. Sauteed on high heat in a cast iron pan, ymm!

The sun was out today’s morning so we went to Edmonds for a walk. While my wife was checking out some shoes at mu-Shoe, I dropped into The Resident Cheesemonger for a look. Since we’ve never got introduced properly to goat cheese, I asked for a recommendation, and settled on a Pave de Jadis from the Loire valley. Wonderfully mild with a hint of lemon, no wonder people says it reminds of spring. This cheese is definitely on our list from now on. I was told that it’s seasonal, so I’m glad we found it today. We always prefer soft cheese and this Jadis is soft, a bit crumbly, and it pops in your mouth. I also bought a wedge of Cotswold, will try that next.

Halibut kama is the gill collar of the halibut, meaty and flavorful.
Rub: sea salt for a couple hours.
Grill: throw on a grill, skin side first. Absolutely no need to use oil, as you won’t believe how much fat it can drip out. It’s OK if the skin burns. Then flip to the other side and broil until golden. Trust me, the golden color is not due to any sauce, it’s just oil that caramelizes the meat.
Serve hot with daikon oroshi and lemon wedges, with any sauce you may desire, such as ponzu soy sauce.

Halibut kama shioyaki