Cabbage, sushi, and sharp knives
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Cabbage, sushi, and sharp knives Tuesday May 9
Tonight when I got home, I finally bested the Super Cabbage™. Three weeks ago, I had a party, and I went food shopping beforehand. Spring cabbage had just come into season; they were huge and mad cheap. I'm talking a head the size of a bowling ball for a dollar. That sucker barely fit in my fridge. Having seven people over, I thought people might get hungry, and cabbage-based okonomiyaki is a great way to feed the masses. Yet between Emily's guacamole, my Three-Cup Chicken (recipe to follow later this week), and a few other dishes that people brought, we were all stuffed.
So here I am, left with a bowling ball of cabbage.
I despise throwing out food. One, it's food, I mean, hello? Two, I paid for it, so it seems like throwing out money, and three? If I throw out an ingredient, it probably means I can't make the thing I wanted to make in the first place (thus instigating the purchase).
In this case, the latter doesn't really apply, but nonetheless I resolved not to throw any bit of Super Cabbage™ away. Cabbage keeps for quite a while if you treat it right; even if it starts to go bad, it doesn't "go bad" in the way that milk, meat, and tomato sauce do (college memories, m-mm). It starts to wilt, and given that it's a pretty sturdy veggie in its own right, that doesn't make it so bad. Especially when you're going to fry it anyhow.
Super Cabbage™ wasn't having any of that wilting talk. For weeks, I kept taking leaves off, and it was as if the inner heart of the cabbage was breeding, possibly getting too chummy with the onions (who sprouted stems unusually soon, I'm suspicious). Point being, I made okonomiyaki at least five times, which actually takes a bit of cabbage, and I still was only making small dents in the thing.
Tonight, after weathering weeks of culinary battles, I finally defeated the little bastard.
What I failed to anticipate was that upon finishing off the Super Cabbage™, the sense of raw power and freedom would go to my head. I would feel a sudden urge of creativity and inspiration to cook, as I was now released from the neverending spiral of, however tasty it may be, making the same damn cabbage-laiden food three to four times a week.
This past weekend I had some great fresh sushi. Today, while picking up eggs at the store, I thought "what the hell" and bought one of those bamboo sushi mats. I already have seaweed. I have rice. I have cucumbers and carrots. I have vinegar and sugar. Mmm-hmm.
While I was making these kappa rolls (cucumber rolls, but incidentally kappa is not the word for "cucumber"), I decided that the most prudent thing to do would be to save them in the refridgerator for tomorrow. After all, I'd already eaten, taking down the cabbage beast. Now, I know what you're thinking. "Mark, I know where this is going, you ate the rolls, you couldn't help it, right, gotcha, what's your point" but there's actually more to it than that. Yes, I did eat the rolls.
It's because I had to; they were falling apart. This isn't because I made them poorly, though; I have the skillz.
Oddly, it's because my knife wasn't sharp enough to cut them (without smushing the result) into pieces.
I bought a decent set of knives for $150 a few years back, and I've tried to take good care of them. I like them so much that I actually brought them with me to Japan, in an effort to save on up-front moving costs. I always considered them sharp, but after today, I've determined that there's a whole new class of "knife" that I don't even know about: the kind that sushi chefs and pros use. I'm talking iron chef here. I'm talking have-to-keep-it-locked-up-so-no-one-dies sharp.
I'm in the right country for sharp knives, so if a windfall comes my way, hide the kids.
And don't think about commenting "did you try the serrated knife too?", because you bet your bottom dollar I did, and it actually produced even more of a mess.
I can use my knives to halve skinned chicken breasts, ripe tomatoes, or whatever with relative ease -- but I can't sever wet seaweed that's less than a millimeter thick, and easily tearable with one's hands. How Zen.
