Mitsuwa Marketplace

Forgive me if this post makes no sense: the coffee machine spat out water speckled with grinds this morning instead of the usual normal coffee, so I'm flying without the assistance of caffeine. Unfortunately, we didn't do too much cooking over the weekend. We spent the majority of the day on Saturday in the suburbs, running various errands and having dinner with D's family. I was somehow able to convince D to take me to this wonderful Asian marketplace we'd heard about on Check, Please! which is one of the best local shows on PBS. Each week, the guests on the show visit three Chicago-area restaurants -- each guest picks one restaurant -- and they sit down to discuss the places and their experiences with host Alpana Singh. Alpana is fun to watch on television -- she's quite a personality -- and you know she knows her food, and her wine: she's the youngest person to ever pass the Master Sommelier exam, which is quite a feat.
A few weeks ago, Check, Please! featured Mitsuwa Marketplace, the largest Japanese grocery store in the Midwest. It's actually a chain, with most locations in California (and one, mysteriously, in Jersey) but it was far from a big-box experience. Although it is quite large, and the majority of the building is occupied by the grocery store, there is a sizable food court (which is what our visit was mostly for, aside from picking up some sesame oil and scallions) as well as a travel agency and a bookstore. Aside from the oil and onions, we had a third mission: a bentō box. D picked me up the cutest, greenest bentō in the store, complete with strange slogan: It Is So Wonderful To Be Able to Maintain Your Dreams is scrawled across the top of the box, as well as on the accompanying bag. I was kind of nonplussed by the selection of bentō boxes, but I was able to find the perfect one anyhow. In case you don't know, a bentō box is a Japanese-style take-out container or lunch-box, complete with small compartments for different types of food. It's all about pleasing presentation and compactness, which are two things that I am quite fond of.
The marketplace is overwhelming: since I don't speak Japanese, it was kind of a confusing venture, but we made out perfectly. We had a bit of luck: at the food court, everything is written in Japanese (with English titles that mean very little to me) but all the vendors have display cases with each meal inside, numbered and titled to make it easy to order. I wanted something noodle-based, and although many places had lots of soups that looked heavy on the noodles, I wasn't looking for liquid. I wanted a solid, stir-fried mass of wiggling noodles in sauce. Enter yakisoba!
Yakisoba is a fried-noodle dish made with cabbage, onions, bean sprouts, carrots, ginger, seaweed, and fish flakes. It's not too spicy, but it has a bit of a kick -- at least the version that we ate did. It's also quite healthy, aside from the sodium in the sauce, which is typically made from sosu, a Japanese worcestershire sauce. We split a gigantic plate between us for $3.40, which is a steal, especially since you get to stand there and watch it being prepared, which is extremely fun. They make it on a giant grill, and while we waited, three more people ordered yakisoba, which meant that they just kept adding more noodles and sauce and veggies to the pile. By the end, the entire grill was nearly covered in noodles.
It was fantastic, and we ate the entire plate in no time. I was full, but D wasn't. Good, because we hadn't tried the sushi, which was, according to D, downright fabulous. I personally don't eat raw fish, so I wasn't even able to try a bite of the tuna maki, but for $3.00 D got a large tray-full (twelve pieces total) which he says was delicious. The look on his face while he ate it confirms this fact: that's got to be some great sushi. They also sell sushi-quality fish in the grocery component of the marketplace, which is obviously very good. I considered buying a slab or two, but we weren't done with our errands, and it would have gone wrong by the time we were able to refrigerate it. I'm cool with that, though: just means we'll have to take another trip back!

Yakisoba (Adapted from Mitsuwa Marketplace recipe)
Peel and julienne one large carrot and one half an onion. Remove the core from one half cabbage and cut into long, bite-sized strips. Rinse a cup of bean sprouts and drain well.
Rinse a package of yakisoba noodles and place on a plate. Cover with saran wrap and microwave for one minute -- this keeps the noodles from sticking together when you stir-fry them.
Heat one tablespoon oil in a frying pan -- or, you can cook one slice of bacon, diced, in the pan, which is what they did at the marketplace -- and add the vegetables. Stir-fry the veggies until they begin to wilt. Add the bean sprouts last, however -- you want them to retain some crunchiness. Add the noodles and mix well. Once everything is incorporated, add the sauce. Most noodle packages come with a sauce packet; if not, you can use about 1/4 cup Japanese worcestershire sauce. Coat the noodles and vegetables with the sauce and heat through.
Serve with some grated ginger, seaweed flakes, and fish flakes on top.
Oishii! (Delicious!)

Salade Niçoise Sandwiches

Although a specialty ingredient is required for this recipe, it's still really fun to make -- if you can get your hands on some olivada, a intense black olive paste made from pitted and brine cured black olives. We could not find this ingredient, and I'm afraid to say that the sandwiches suffered slightly as a result. Instead, we used an olive tapenade made primarily from green olives. I can only imagine how good the sandwiches with the black paste are -- I'm still looking for some good olivada, and I'm sure that Treasure Island, a "European-Style" market we go to often, has it somewhere.
Anyhow, these sandwiches are great to bring for lunch if you have access to a fridge, excellent paired with a bowl of soup for a dinner, and are easy to make in bulk. You just need some time to let them sit in the fridge. The recipe is another one from The Bon Appetit Cookbook (sponsored link) which I truly, truly love. It's a hefty tome, but it's beautiful and bright (I love the orange text and dust jacket, and the white embossed cover is a really nice touch) and it stays quite flat so you don't lose your place. I hold it open with a big binder clip when necessary and that works perfectly.
We made these sandwiches over the weekend while working on our graduate applications. He's done now, but at the time I believe he had two left, and we were working most weekends trying to get everything put together. These were a simple distraction and allowed us to continue our work practically uninterrupted as they sauced around in the fridge until it was eatin' time. We served them with some state fair potato salad (recipe forthcoming) and it was a splendid, fatty meal. Although fish is quite good for you, and we halved the amount of mayonnaise in both recipes, so it wasn't as naughty as it could have (or should have) been.
The recipe is named after a traditional French dish from Nice, Salade Niçoise (pronouced ne-shwa) that consists of tuna, egg, capers, green beans, artichokes, cucumbers -- a slew of things that aren't in these sandwiches. I suppose that's because they're a variation on the dish and wouldn't taste as good in this form, but it's hard to explain why they chose this name in that case. Most likely because it sounds fancy, and this is a fancy sandy. You could even serve it at a dinner party if the theme was right. The original recipe makes six, so something tells me that's exactly what the maker intended. I have cut it in half, to make three sandwiches -- save one for later and split it with a bowl of soup for a tasty lunch or dinner, if you've got a lot of soup. I'll bet this would be fantastic with red lentil soup.

Salade Niçoise Sandwiches
Start with a 1-pound loaf of soft french or italian bread. Cut into three sections crosswise, then cut each piece in half. These will be the bases for your sandwiches. Open the slices so that you are working with six pieces of bread.
Mix 1 drained can of tuna packed in water with 2 tablespoons drained capers, 3 tablespoons of mayonnaise, and 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice. Season with ground pepper. Make sure the tuna and sauce are combined well.
Spread 1/2 a tablespoon of olivada on each piece of bread and cover each slice with a fair amount of arugula or watercress -- trim off the bitter, hard-to-chew stems as you're washing the leaves.
Spread the bottom slice of bread with approximately 1/3 of the tuna mixture -- there will be no leftovers that aren't in sandwich form -- and top with thin slices of tomato and red onion. Place the top piece of bread on the sandwich.
Wrap each individual sandwich tightly in aluminum foil and refrigerate for at least an hour. They get saucier the longer you can wait, so bear with the clock for as long as you can before digging in. The result? An intensely briny, delectable sandwich with just enough zest and flavor. Plus, it's not very complicated to make, and most of the ingredients are already in my kitchen. You can substitute the olivada with a homemade version by throwing some pitted, brine-cured black olives in a food processor and hitting "puree" until they form a tasty paste.

This post was edited on 2/6/2007 to add a link to the Red Lentil Soup recipe.