May I have…
…your attention…
…please.
Thanks.
I haven’t eaten tempura in quite a long time – since before I went in for surgery to remove the tumor that had latched on to my tongue. On Friday, I made an offhand remark to my mom and sister that we should have tempura Saturday evening. At home, of course. I’m a huge fan of tempura. When I would go out for sushi, my first course would always be tempura at Yoshi’s: vegetables and shrimp, in a convenient size that would not fill me up to the point where I couldn’t then stuff my face with a few rolls.
These days, I can’t eat as much in one sitting as I used to, no doubt due to that whole eating through a tube thing for a year. Still, I can eat small portions, and tempura is perfect for that.
I decided on a variety of vegetables: fresh green beans, sweet onions, peppers, mushrooms.
Some zucchini.
And sweet potatoes.
There needed to be some protein in there as well, so I added some shrimp.
I’ve never made tempura at home before. I suppose it was always much easier to just go out to eat it. but I have to say that the process is not that difficult (if you handle the batter properly, and have all the mise en place set up), and the rewards are excellent.
The one thing you can’t do when cooking this is walk away. Line up the food, the flour, the batter, the oil, and keep the assembly line going.
The food goes in the oil for a very short time – after all, we’re not frying it to death here.
A quick rest on a rack was all that was needed. We ate it almost as fast as it came out of the oil, with a typical dipping sauce – minus the dashi, which we couldn’t find anywhere in this town. I hear the Internet ordering calling my name for that.
We’ll be doing this again for Superbowl Sunday in a couple of weeks. Interested in some tempura goodness? Drop on by.
Funny, I cut out sushi after my throat cancer – the changes in my taste suppressed the good and accentuated the bad; but what I didn’t think about was missing the sides, the tempuras and yakitoris. Maybe I should go try again?
I think if we quit trying then we’ve lost a part of ourselves in the battle that from an overall standpoint, we won. I keep returning to the things I used to love to eat, even if now I might as well be eating sand, because I’m hopeful that eventually, my taste will return to some semblance of normalcy (or in the case of spicier foods, that eventually I’ll retrain my mouth, much like training a child to eat something). I keep trying to eat things that are difficult for me to eat because I need the practice. I’ll admit to bouts of despair that anything will be close to normal again, but if I don’t make the effort, I’ll never know. And somehow, to me, not knowing is worse than not trying. I highly recommend trying everything and anything – although I find that if something isn’t seasoned pretty well, it’s difficult for me to taste it at all.
I never thought about yakitori. Mmmm. Meat on a stick.