Chart: Global Food Commodity Prices Return to 2021 Levels

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A California Dreamin’ Cookbook of ‘Izakaya’ Favorites

SIMON DALY wrote . . . . . . . . .

From Okinawa to Hokkaido, coaxing the best out of local ingredients through seemingly simple cooking methods is, pretty much, the essence of Japanese cooking. The ingredients vary, but the methodology remains the same.

Now imagine the setting is San Francisco and you have the core precept of chef Sylvan Mishima Brackett’s recently released “Rintaro: Japanese Food from an Izakaya in California.”

Born in Kyoto to a Japanese mother and an American father, Brackett, 48, spent his first year in Japan. The young family then emigrated to the Sierra Nevada foothills, where they constructed a family homestead in a classic Japanese style. Throughout his childhood, family trips back to Japan were biannual affairs.

Perhaps that explains why Brackett operates Rintaro as if the Golden State were a far-flung prefecture of Japan.

As an adult, Bracket worked under Alice Waters at the famed Berkeley, California, farm-to-table institution Chez Panisse before making his way back to Japan. While he dipped his toes into the kaiseki (haute Japanese cuisine) scene, it was less curated and more “direct food,” he says, that truly resonated with him.

“I’d been in Japan and eaten lots of Japanese food, but I’d never really been to an izakaya (traditional Japanese pub) until … I was in my 20s,” Brackett tells The Japan Times. “And then you go out drinking and smoking and you go to like seven places, and I was really just blown away by all of the izakaya culture. I definitely wanted to specifically work in an izakaya or wanted to learn that kind of food.”

“That” honest but elevated izakaya fare forms the core of “Rintaro.” It’s a primer for anyone looking for a Japanese approach to make good ingredients sing no matter where in the world you happen to be.

Despite the comfort food foundation, you quickly glean from the recipes in “Rintaro” how detail oriented Bracket is.

“I purposefully didn’t make it an everyday weeknight sort of cookbook,” he says. “I wanted it to reflect the actual work that goes into making something well.”

Pages upon pages of step-by-step instructions give the reader precise processes for staples like how to make the perfect ichiban dashi stock — along with niban (a subtler, double-steeped version of ichiban stock), too. For breaking down fish for exquisite sashimi or chicken for perfectly portioned yakitori skewers, “Rintaro” is your perfect all-in-one repository.

“In Japan, there is a depth in literally everything, so I grew up with that,” Bracket says. “The mentality of not reverence exactly but respect for the generations of knowledge that have accumulated.”

During Brackett’s formative culinary years, an introduction from Nancy Singleton Hachisu to Nakatani Kanji, owner of Saitama’s Soba Ro, seems to have been pivotal. Brackett says he was taken under the wing of Kanji, a jazz-loving, foreign car-driving, Murakami-esque master, for whom he worked hard, played hard and, time permitting, napped between services on the restaurant’s tatami floor. How diligently the small staff worked from cooking to cleaning made a lasting impression on Brackett.

“He’s the most heartfelt and intuitive cook I’ve ever met,” he says.

Soba Ro is where Brackett learned to make, slightly incongruously, wheat udon noodles, and the from-scratch process features prominently in “Rintaro.” Unsurprisingly, udon has become one of the dishes he’s best-known for: Rintaro’s kamatama udon (noodles served with a raw egg and dashi-infused shoyu) have remained basically as he was taught.

“Rintaro” has recipes for everything from seasonal salads and side dishes to family favorites like oden (an assortment of simmered comfort foods often served in winter) and even his mother’s gyōza dumplings, complete with how to make the wrappers. What does not grace the cookbook is an octopus recipe you might expect from the cover, as well as the same image gracing the menus at the restaurant. The motif was in fact borrowed from an old oden restaurant and stems from a love of post-art deco Japanese graphic design, the sort you’d find on old-style matchbooks that used to be given away at Japan’s cafes, bars and less-reputable nighttime spots.

In an age where traditional knowledge is being forgotten, “Rintaro” is a treasure trove. It’s not necessarily a cookbook you’ll use daily, but when you do, you’ll learn something. The attention paid to topics many cookbooks gloss over is epitomized by the rice section. Using American Japanese hybrid strains (something Brackett notes is like himself), rice at Rintaro is continuously cooked in small batches throughout service: every 30 to 45 minutes, four cups at a time in a clay nabe (pot).

It’s truly a labor of love and an inspiration for me to give my automatic rice cooker a rest every now and then — to remind myself how Japanese basics are best done and, perhaps, to get a little closer to how things still should be.

Source: The Japan Times

 

 

 

 

Home-cooked Character Bento

 

 

 

 

Lupus Can Pose Hidden Risks to the Heart

Enlarge image . . . . .

Michael Merschel wrote . . . . . . . . .

Up until it nearly killed her, Dr. Chantrise Holliman was not worried about the harm lupus could do to her heart.

The educator had been diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder in 2006, when she was in her early 30s, after a doctor realized it was what had been causing the excruciating pain in her joints. But despite occasional flare-ups – a rash on her upper arm, swelling in her hands – Holliman figured she was in pretty good shape.

After all, she was running half-marathons and watching her diet. “I was eating the kale,” said Holliman, who lives in Savannah, Georgia. “And I thought I was healthy, until I almost died.”

The heart attack came in 2018. Doctors told her that it wasn’t from traditional heart disease – her blood pressure and cholesterol levels, in fact, had been fine. Still, an artery was blocked. And that was how she found out that lupus poses serious risks to the heart.

“I began to learn that years of not taking the medicine I needed to take for my lupus, missing doctor’s appointments, not managing the lupus the way that I needed to, had done damage,” she said. “And that’s where that one blocked artery came from. But I didn’t know any of that. Until I had my heart attack.”

Cardiovascular problems are common with lupus, experts say.

Lupus turns the body’s immune system, which protects against viruses and bacteria, against itself, said Dr. Maureen McMahon, a professor of medicine and rheumatology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead of just attacking foreign invaders, it starts to attack the body’s tissues.”

Estimates vary about how many people are affected. A study published in Arthritis and Rheumatology in 2021 used information from several Centers for Disease Control and Prevention registries to estimate that as of 2018, about 204,000 people in the U.S. lived with lupus. Among them: entertainers Toni Braxton and Selena Gomez.

Lupus can affect anyone from children to older adults, McMahon said, but it most commonly affects women of childbearing age. The pooled CDC data indicate that the prevalence is nine times higher for women than men, and it’s highest among Black women. It also affects Hispanic women at higher levels than white, Asian or Pacific Islander women.

Although lupus has several variations, the most common form is called systemic lupus erythematosus, or SLE. Symptoms include rashes, sunlight sensitivity, joint pains and abnormal blood counts, McMahon said. It can involve organs such as the kidneys, brain and heart.

The varying symptoms can make SLE hard to diagnose, McMahon said. Holliman lived that experience. She’d been to the emergency room several times, where she was told her pains were probably just a pulled muscle or related to her running. She credits a friend who led her to a primary care doctor who, like Holliman, is Black, and was aware that she was in a higher-risk group and quickly diagnosed the problem.

The cardiovascular effects of the disease also vary from person to person, said Dr. Michelle Petri, a professor of rheumatology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “Lupus is a heterogeneous disease,” said Petri, head of the Johns Hopkins Lupus Center. “Each patient is unique.”

Those effects can be serious. A research review McMahon co-wrote and published in the journal Lupus in 2023 found the increased risk of stroke, heart attack and cardiovascular disease to be about two to three times higher in someone with lupus compared to the general population.

But younger people are affected disproportionately. A study published in Arthritis Care and Research in 2020 found that 18- to 39-year-olds with lupus had a higher incidence of a heart attack or stroke than 50- to 65-year-olds in the general population. A frequently cited 1997 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology estimated that women ages 35 to 44 were more than 50 times more likely to have a heart attack if they had lupus.

Lupus also can lead to pericarditis (an inflamed lining of the heart) or myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle). Several studies have identified cardiovascular disease as a top cause of death in people with lupus.

It can do harm in several ways. It can damage the inner lining of coronary arteries, Petri said. It also can speed the development of atherosclerosis, where plaque builds up and clogs arteries.

Inflammation from lupus might also be playing a role that is not fully understood, McMahon said.

The risks from lupus would be on top of standard heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure or whether someone smoked. “Lupus itself causes a risk above and beyond those things,” McMahon said. She likened the level of added risk to that from diabetes.

Given such risks, McMahon said people with lupus need to pay extra attention to lifestyle choices related to diet, exercise and sleep that can help protect against heart disease. That can be a challenge, she said, because lupus can make exercise painful, and steroid treatments can cause weight gain and other problems. (Petri said there are efforts to eliminate steroids as a treatment for non-renal lupus.)

People with lupus also should work with a cardiologist in addition to a rheumatologist, McMahon said, noting that some large medical centers now have programs that combine cardiology and rheumatology. Even without such a program, a cardiologist can help assess risks and order specialized scans. She said the threshold for deciding whether to do such tests should be very low, “because you can’t always predict just by looking at a patient whether they’ll actually have accelerated atherosclerosis.”

McMahon said she has seen a lot of progress made in helping people with lupus. “We fortunately have so many more treatments than we used to,” she said. And she called clinical trials for future treatments “exciting.”

Holliman said she has not had a lupus flare-up since 2018. But that ordeal still affects her.

Lupus severely complicated her recovery, her cardiologist told her. Her immune system fought off medications given to treat her heart attack. Her heart stopped and had to be shocked several times. Infection set in. She had already been dealing with lupus-related Raynaud’s syndrome, which restricts the flow of blood. Doctors had to amputate her legs, and she nearly lost the tips of her fingers, ears and nose, too.

But to the amazement of her doctors, Holliman pulled through. She now works as a contractor for the CDC, designing instructional materials, and retells her story as a volunteer for the American Heart Association.

She urges people with lupus to take care of themselves. Before her heart attack, she would see a doctor only when she absolutely needed to. As a mother, wife and teacher, she thought, “There were things I had to do, and things that needed to get done. I didn’t have time to be sick.”

Now, Holliman tells her fellow lupus patients, “Don’t wait until your body’s falling apart before you go to the doctor. Make your appointments and keep your appointments. I was the queen of making appointments and then canceling them because I had, quote unquote, ‘other things to do.’ I did not take this disease seriously enough.”

Source: American Heart Association

 

 

 

 

Warm Cockle,Clam and Potato Salad

Ingredients

2 lb cockles
2 lb Venus or cherrystone clams
2 shallots, 1 sliced, 1 finely chopped
1 cup dry white wine
8 oz marble-sized potatoes, a mix of colors if you can find them
1 tbsp good red wine vinegar
4 tbsp olive oil
1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
ground piment d’Espelette (chili powder)
salt

Method

1. Wash the cockles and clams well in cold water. Tip them into a very hot saucepan with the sliced shallot and the white wine. Cover and steam for 6-7 minutes until the shellfish have opened and are cooked. Drain and collect the cooking liquor. Discard any shellfish that do not open.
2. Pour the liquor into a small pan, bring it to a boil and reduce by half. Strain the reduced liquid through a fine sieve and keep it warm.
3. Pick the meat from the cockles and clams, saving a few clam shells for decoration.
4. Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender. Peel them or not, as you prefer, and toss them while still warm with the cockles, clams, vinegar, oil and cooking liquor.
5. Add the parsley and the finely chopped shallot, and sprinkle with a little piment d’Espelette before serving.

Makes 4 servings.

Source: The French Kitchen

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