Eating With Your Eyes

I wanted to make Oyako-don (親子丼) for supper today and post the picture on the blog. Oyako means "parent and child" in Japanese, and in this case, it references the use of both chicken and egg in the recipe; don is short for donburi which is the deep ceramic serving bowl used in Japanese dining.

Generally speaking, if the name of a Japanese dish ends with "-don", it is a one-bowl meal that features carbs (in the form of rice or noodles), protein (chicken, pork, beef, fish, eel, or whatever else strikes your fancy), and vegetables (sprouts, onion, carrots, mushrooms, etc.). I have a particular fondness for donburi cooking -- it's soothing to cradle a warm bowl in your hands, a whole meal in one vessel, bathing your face in the steam and aroma of the food. And when you're done, there's only one bowl to wash... yay!

The trigger for cooking Oyako-don was watching chef Josh Dechellis challenge Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America. The secret ingredient was chicken eggs. Dechellis' specialty is Asian cuisine and one of the dishes he made -- to my delight -- was the Japanese Chawanmushi, an ultra-light egg custard which I associate with fond childhood memories. However, it disappointed me that nobody thought to pair chicken with egg as in the Oyako-don. The more I thought about it, the more I craved it.

What I hadn't counted on was how the Oyako-don would look in a photograph. The sight of it can make my mouth water because I know what's in it and how it tastes. But to a gaijin (foreigner) who has never had it, let alone heard of it, it's actually quite ugly. I tried to take photos but it looked like a pale brown slurry slopped on a bed of rice. Which is so unfair given how intoxicating the smells are and how wonderfully savory and comforting the flavors are. I thought the problem might be with my photography skills but a quick Google search turned up professional photographs that looked just as bad.

Which of course is a reminder that we eat with our eyes as much as with our mouths and noses. A few years ago, I discovered that azuki (sweet red bean) plus cream cheese was a pairing made in heaven. I made some mini tartlets filled with a puree of azuki and cream cheese. The taste was lovely but the filling had the sickly purple-brown hue of squashed earthworm. I would be embarrassed to serve something so revolting to the eye.



It took me nearly a year to reinvent the combination in the form of my Azuki Brownie Cheesecake: by keeping the two ingredients in separate layers of the same dish, the unfortunate melding of the colors was avoided while preserving the flavors. This will be one of the recipes going into the cookbook.

I'm going to see if there is an appetizing way of plating Oyako-don. Stay tuned.