Let the web help you cook

Even though the internet is quite the mixed bag, it can be a wonderful resource when it comes to food and cooking. Sometimes it is nothing short of amazing. (There seems to be a food site out there for almost everyone and everything.)

Case in point: in my house we miss some of the culinary touchstones of our old home, Hawaii. Like sushi.

Sure, sushi has become more common across North America. But restaurant sushi can be expensive. And we don’t actually want all the fishy toppings. The vegetarian spouse and I crave what people in Hawaii call “cone sushi” (inari), and cucumber or takuan maki (roll).

As if anyone needed proof of sushi’s global appeal, here’s a recipe for takuan maki in Dutch. Don’t speak Dutch? Here’s a sushi roll tutorial in English. (Disclaimer: links are not necessarily endorsements, just pages I found instructive for the purpose at hand.)

Thanks to T&T Market (near the Ottawa airport) it’s become easier buy suchi rice in quantity and the all-important aburage, or fried-tofu wrappers for the inari. (It’s possible to make aburage at home, but it’s a messy hassle. Here’s another site with info on that.) Of course, it’s always been easy to buy or grow cucumbers. It’s even easy to buy or grow daikon – a vegetable I recommend, if you are not familiar with it already. Here’s something from New Hampshire Public radio about ways to use daikon.

But to date I cannot find takuan – yellow picked daikon – for sale in this area. I finally decided I should try make my own. Ta-da! The internet knows all. Here is a page on making takuan the traditional way. (Tradition is great, but that looked too hard for me, this time of year anyway. Although I love the photo of rows of daikon tied to a balcony to dry.)

You want easy? The internet has easier versions too. I plan on trying “The Domestic Man”version as soon as I finish planing my garlic, which has a higher priority. (Yes, that should have been done earlier this week. But our chimney was being rebuilt, the power went out and the well broke. Move over, garlic.) Drilling deeper into the Domestic Man site I was pleased to read a defense of white rice, which I selfishly appreciated, as a life-long consumer of that blessed staple which is now generally derided as inferior.

Strong affection for familiar food is pretty universal. The risk of losing favorites is one of the hard parts about moving to a different culture. I asked a man from the Baltic states what he was missing most, food-wise, in Canada. A look of longing came over his face as he said “good, dark bread – they just don’t have that here.” He was probably missing something like this, and I must say, it looks delicious. (This is more Russian than Baltic, but here’s a site with an homage and recipe for Borodinsky bread, a dark rye specialty.)

OK. Maybe pickled daikon – or really dense rye bread – isn’t your special craving. (I’d be surprised if they were!) Still, anyone who wants to try recreate their own favorite taste experience – from a far-away home, or maybe a dish discovered on some great trip – can probably track it all down on line.