Friday 6 July 2007

Okinawan dishes


I found this photo taken a while ago. Apart from miso soup, three other dishes are typical Okinawan dishes. The rice dish is called "Ju-shi" which contains pork, carrots, shiitake and spring onion. I added hijiki, a type of seaweed, that time. The carrot dish is called "Ninjin shirishiri" which contains carrots and eggs. The other dish you can't see clearly is actually a pork dish called "Rafute."
I love those three dishes.
As you might notice, we have many pork dishes in Okinawa. We eat almost every part of the pig - even pig's ears! It might sound disgusting, but actually really nice and crunchy :-) When we have pork, we always boil it and wash off excess fat and boil again. I do that a few times to remove fat when I use pork in cooking. Traditionally, we eat pork with lots of other vegetables and seaweed, so pork would a small portion of the meal. (especially, in pre-war time, pork was eaten only on special occasions.)
We eat a big portion of seaweed, vegetables, herbs, tofu (Okinawan tofu is the best!), and have many kinds of dishes which are different from Japanese.
I will write more recipes for our dishes.

1 comment:

Nigel said...

I came across your post while doing research on shirishiri for my own blog. It's great to see someone writing about Okinawan food. I'm trying to learn to cook Japanese, but Okinawan is different in a lot of ways. Can you recommend any good Okinawan dishes for a beginner to try?