New Addition: Den Deli

You may have noticed a new addition to my top restaurant list. Den Deli. It is the newest addition to the "Den" trilogy. (Sushi Den, Izakaya Den, and Den Deli.) Thanks to my good friend Julie J. who informed me of its existence and also recommended it.

It's a casual place where you can get steaming bowls of noodles, such as ramen and udon, as well as ready-made deli-style foods to go (or dine-in), such as salads and bentos. They also make fresh Japanese-influenced sandwiches. Seafood and other Japanese grocery items are also available for purchase.

Jake and I took the kids there a couple of weeks ago. Jake ordered the ramen, I ordered the miso ramen, and we ordered one of the udons for the kids to share. Let me just preface my comments with this: it is extremely difficult to find real, Japanese restaurant ramen in this country, particularly if you don't live on the West coast. We were thrilled to find it here, finally. And they did a pretty darn good job of it, too. The kids' udon was quite delicious, also.

We also tried the hijiki salad and shumai (Chinese-style meat-filled dumplings) from the deli case. Both good, even though the hijiki salad was not to my liking. (It's a 'shroom thing. It was made with a shiitake base, and you know me and my thing with 'shrooms.)

Let's see if I can remember what else Den Deli offered: sushi, o-nigiri (balls of rice, wrapped in seaweed and filled with either salmon or pickles), Japanese potato salad, other salads, edamame, miso grilled cod, and Sushi Den's famous banana cream pie.

I highly recommend it. www.dendeli.net (the site is not up as of this writing, but soon to come)

Momo-what?

I got this book from Jake for my last birthday. It is Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan. David Chang is the chef--a New York chef. It's a fun read as well as a cool cookbook. The recipes are things that he has either served in his restaurants or things that he likes to make and eat that he doesn't necessarily serve in his restaurants.

So far, I've made the ramen, one of the ssam recipes, the pork buns, the ginger scallion sauce, and the fried chicken. All great recipes, and definitely a springboard for my own culinary creativity.

Here are some of my thoughts thus far:

1. The ramen recipe--I took an entire day just to make the soup broth and then another entire day to make and assemble all the other ingredients. Also, it was quite a task finding all the ingredients. It involved going to various grocery stores and an Asian market, as well as doing some research at a gourmet food store. But the end result was AMAZING flavor.

2. This is not a cookbook for a casual cook. I think you really have to be into cooking to even want to delve into a lot of these recipes. In other words, there's not a lot of quick-n-easy going on here. But again, the food is really really good.

3. Mr. Chang boasts about how good his fried chicken is. He isn't kidding. I tackled that particular recipe, mostly because I am also a fried chicken nut. (I LOVE LOVE LOVE fried chicken.) Even though the process invoves brining, steaming, and frying, and then also creating the sauce/dressing that goes with it, it ended up not being a particularly difficult recipe. Totally worth it. Seriously, the best fried chicken I have ever made, and I dare say, the recipe is almost fool proof.

I would recommend the book based solely on the fried chicken recipe, even though, I believe, the main draw of the book is its ramen recipe.

So, if you like Japanese/Korean/Chinese-influenced cuisine, and you also enjoy cooking, get this book!

Here's the fried chicken--I may have taken a bite out of it before I thought to grab the camera. Looking at this, I'm just thinking that Safeway has chicken on sale this week--I need to get some.


Here's my little dude enjoying the fruits of my labor.

I wish I had taken a photo of my main dude enjoying the chicken. (He ate half of the entire chicken, by the way--a sure sign that it was that good.)