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In the kitchen with Mai Yasue

This week, enjoy a peek into islander Mai Yasue’s kitchen. Yasue is a professor in environmental studies at Quest University, a pescatarian dedicated to eating sustainable seafoods and mom. 1.
Mai
Mai Yasue could not cook without her favourite knives. The one on the left was sent from Japan by her mother.

This week, enjoy a peek into islander Mai Yasue’s kitchen. Yasue is a professor in environmental studies at Quest University, a pescatarian dedicated to eating sustainable seafoods and mom.

 

1. What’s your favourite kitchen utensil?
My Japanese knives…One was given to me as a wedding gift from my dad who is slightly obsessed with sharp knives. When he comes over to visit, he goes straight to sharpening the knife (rather than, say asking how we are doing). The other knife was a gift from my mother. She sent it to me from Japan when I asked her for a good knife for my three year-old daughter to use. Rather than sending me a small, dull children’s knife, she sent me a super sharp, light ceramic knife. She always says you cut yourself more with dull knives…which is probably true.

2. Who is your biggest culinary influence, and what did they teach you?
My parents, of course. They taught me to use quality, in-season vegetables and seafood. With high quality food, even with very basic preparation, food can taste amazing.

3. When did you realize you loved to cook?
I first started cooking for largish groups when I was working at a remote seabird colony. Eating good food becomes much more important when there are no options for going out to eat.

4. How has living on Bowen influenced your cooking?
Because it is harder to access fresh seafood and produce on Bowen I tend to go food shopping much less often. As a result, I tend to strategically plan and make a lot of cooking decisions based on the goal of reducing food waste and using the space in our tiny yard as efficiently as possible to grow some basic greens, so that I can stretch out the food that I have over a longer period of time. This has made me into a much more creative cook than when I was in the city.  We supplement our food with the garden and the eggs from our chickens and quails. Yesterday we were very low on produce in the fridge and so we had potato, chives, kale, chard and mustard green soup from our garden. It was totally random, but very delicious, even for my picky daughter who doesn’t always love greens.

5. What are you cooking/eating lately?
Barbecued and salted mackerel. Sustainable, healthy, easy to make and super cheap. You gut the fish, salt it and the just put it on the barbecue. You can even barbecue the bones and eat it, they taste like oily, salty, crunchy chips. Amazing.

Temaki-zushi recipe

This is a great speedy dish to prepare. It is ideal if you have lots of guests (including children) coming over because picky eaters can just pick and choose what they want to eat. I have some recommendations on fillings, but feel free to improvise depending on what you want you have in the house:

Cook short-grained white rice. After it is cooked, add sushi vinegar (rice vinegar, mirin*, and salt)

Cut nori seaweed into quarters

Cut the following into 5-10 cm and 1 cm wide strips and lay them out into little sections on a single round plate: carrots, smoked salmon, avocado, cucumber, smoked tofu, tamagoyaki (Japanese omelette, omelette with soya sauce, mirin* and salt)

Top with nasturtium flowers, borage flowers, lettuce, mizuna, arugula from garden

 

Pan fry the following:

Shitake mushroom (add soya sauce/sake/sugar) at the end

Oceanwise side-stripe shrimp (add nutritional yeast and flax oil at the end)

Grill and slice the following

Wild pacific salmon (salted) or Mackerel (salted)

Albacore tuna (raw) – Dice and mix with green onions and soya sauce or Dice and mix with hot sauce (Lao Gan Ma or Sriracha) and seasame oil . You can also use canned tuna and mix with mayonnaise, miso and soya sauce if you don’t have fresh albacore tuna.

Put all the fillings out at the table, along with a pile of cut-up seaweed quarters, soya-sauce, wasabi and mayonaise and let the guests make their own rolls

 

Making the hand rolls

Place one seaweed piece in your hand, and then add a small amount of hot rice.

Add any of the ingredients that you want on top of the rice

Add wasabi or Japanese mayonnaise

Create a cone (kind of like a burrito) and eat

* You can replace mirin with sugar or maple syrup

 

In the past few years, The Undercurrent has featured food stories and recipes from Amrita Sondhi, Rich Ralph, Becky Dawson, Mark Pennington and others... if you’ve got a friend or neighbour with a recipe or two to share, let us know! (editor@bowenislandundercurrent.com)