In Memorium

Congratulations to Angela Y from San Diego, CA, the winner of our Sandy in France Sweepstakes.

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Some people become good cooks because their moms were bad cooks. My case was the opposite.

My mom was a really good cook, and since I took good food for granted, I wasn’t motivated to try to cook it myself.

It was only when I stumbled into a food career that I began to take cooking seriously. So I can’t say I learned from my mom, while attached to her apron strings.

But one thing my mom taught me – if only by the food she made – was what good food should taste like. And that palate – the ability to taste and to correct seasonings – was learned at the dinner table, eating her food.

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Try Okonomiyaki, a Savory Japanese Pancake

By Sandy Hu

I’m still reliving my trip to Japan and the wonderful meals we had. Whether an o-bento from the fabulous Japanese department stores that devote their basements to prepared foods and food gifts, to portable eki-ben meals from the train station, to ramen shops and izakaya, to more formal restaurants, our meals in Tokyo and Kyoto were uniformly artfully presented and well-prepared.

In Tokyo’s Asakusa district, after a temple festival, we wandered into an okonomiyaki restaurant. Often called Japanese pancake or Japanese pizza, okonomiyaki more accurately describes a savory, dense pancake filled with such ingredients as chopped cabbage and sliced pork, beef or seafood, then topped with okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise and a generous sprinkling of katsuobushi, shaved bonito flakes. The bonito (skipjack mackerel) fillets are steamed, aged, dried and shaved so thinly they look like wood shavings.

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