Karl’s Japanese Bar Style Sunday Dinner

Last week, Jan and I went over the hill to Santa Cruz to visit her “new” brother. While we were there, we stopped by a large book store that was going out of business. The cookbook section was fairly picked over, but as I was perusing the fiction section I found a book Izakaya: Japanese Bar food—someone had obviously picked it up and then changed their mind, leaving it “where ever.” Their loss, my gain.

Karl’s Japanese Bar Style Sunday Dinner

Paging through the book I put place markers whenever I came to a recipe that I thought I might like to try. When I finished I had marked easily 70% of the book. The recipes I finally decided to make were: beef and green onion skewers; shiitaki and sesame skewers; onigri with tuna and Japanese tartare; and Japanese pickles. I served the leftover poke by itself as one more side dish.

However, being me, I could not make them as written—I had to go all California Fusion on some of them. Jan challenged me to make the beef skewers Santa Maria style. I thought I could do better than canned tuna in the onigiri. The mushroom recipe, however, were too perfect and simple to change.

Note: I also made a crab and wakami salad, but it came out so disappointing that I decided not to post it.