‘Meals’ is a place for home cooks to share food they’ve made for themselves. In this first post, I wanted to share the satisfaction I had when a few pre-prepared pickles helped me create a delicious and cohesive weeknight dinner.
Takikomi gohan is a one-pot rice dish with chicken and mushrooms, which seemed quite straightforward to make and very comforting. When I looked at my fridge I realised I had already made 3 pickles that could complement this dish, and it turned into a delicious, balanced and easy meal. I’ve been experimenting with pickles for a couple of months, and this was a lovely coming-together of my experiments – along with my longstanding fondness for making miso soup.
Recipes
The meal
I recently bought Emiko Davies’ Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking: Memories and stories from my family’s kitchen, and wanted to combine a few dishes from the book into a meal. I’d already made two types of pickled ginger from the book (gari and beni shoga) a few days previously – the latter sending me on a bit of an unexpected voyage of discovery about vinegar. To have alongside these I decided to make takikomi gohan, a comforting shiitake mushroom and chicken rice bowl, along with a light daikon and carrot salad.
The process of making the takikomi gohan was totally new to me, and I enjoyed the methodical nature of it. Davies makes clear in the recipe that the important thing is the layering; you simply need to put a layer of washed uncooked rice at the bottom of a pan, put some carrots, marinated chicken, mushrooms, and dashi (stock) then bring to the boil and simmer for around half an hour. This is very straightforward and gives more than enough time to make the carrot and daikon salad – which is a bit like a very mild pickle as it principally involves rice vinegar and sugar.
While the recipe recommends dried shiitake mushrooms to make the dashi and put in the rice bowl, I used a combination of regular dried mushrooms and black fungus, and these still tasted rich and gave the dish some depth. I also quite regularly make my own miso soup, and so had some bonito dashi in the fridge (if you want to make your own, I recommend The Wok p.519) which I combined with some tofu, spring onion, wakame seaweed, and miso paste (many varieties are available, I personally prefer Yutaka Organic). Having dashi ready to go in this way means it only takes 5 minutes to make miso soup – the stock will keep for about a week in the fridge and much longer in the freezer.
I served everything together, including as a final touch a yellow daikon pickle I had in the fridge alongside the two varieties of ginger and the salad. Being able just to grab these out of the fridge was so helpful, as they gave different strong flavours to complement the rice: the yellow daikon being sweet, the gari similarly so but with the spice of the ginger and the beni shoga being more salty and a little sour. As these were all pre-prepared it meant my main focus could be on the takikomi gohan which I hadn’t made before.
Impressions
This ended up being a great combination of different dishes, and served to demonstrate how much extra flavour having different pickles on hand can introduce. The takikomi gohan itself was every bit the comforting rice dish it was meant to be, if a bit more subtle than I was expecting. Next time I would consider adding a few more mushrooms or kombu (dried kelp) to the dashi to make the dish more salty.
Having made a few recipes from Gohan, I can definitely recommend it for anyone wanting to make Japanese food at home.
