It's early April, the sakura are in full bloom, and spring is in the air. Except that it's raining right now and an icy wind is blowing all the blossoms off the trees. Oh well, at least I have my shin-shōga. Shōga is your average piece of ginger, brown-skinned and sharp, and shin-shōga is its younger, springtime version, pale, thin-skinned and mild. It's this ginger, sliced and pickled, that is mounded up next to the green plastic leaf in your box of lunchtime sushi.

But pickles are only the beginning for shin-shōga. Because it has the fresh astringency of ginger without the bite, you can use it raw, and it is especially tasty when julienned and added to salads. When cooked, it loses its bright crunch, but the delicate fragrance wafting up from any dish you've added it to makes up for it. With soups and rice, you can toss in the shin-shōga right at the end of cooking and let it soften a bit in the residual heat. That's what I do when making this early-spring rice, a mix of young ginger, fresh crab and thin green onions.

Some notes about ingredients: Young ginger is a popular ingredient in other Asian cuisines, so you should be able to find it at Asian supermarkets from spring through early summer. I buy my cooked crab meat in the sashimi section of my local grocery store, where I sometimes want to cry when I see how beautiful and cheap everything is. Imitation crab meat is not a suitable substitute. Finally, the green onions in Japan are typically much thinner than in the U.S., about half the diameter; look for the thinnest you can find or just use one thick one.

Kani to shin-shōga gohan (Crab and young ginger rice)

Makes 2 servings

1 cup Japanese rice, washed and drained
2-inch (5-cm) piece of young ginger
3.5 oz (100 g) cooked crab meat
2 thin green onions

Cook the rice in a rice cooker or on the stovetop as usual. (See the directions for cooking Japanese rice here.) When the rice is almost cooked, peel the ginger, cut in half crosswise, and julienne. Thinly slice the green onion. When the rice is cooked, add the ginger, crab and green onion to the cooker or pot and stir to mix everything in. For best flavor, serve immediately.

My favorite supermarket discovery this winter was daikon greens, the leafy tops of the giant white Japanese radish, sold with immature daikon still attached. They are sturdy and bitter, with a faintly spicy radish flavor, a welcome change from the usual vegetable suspects like komatsuna, spinach and mizuna, which are quite watery and mild. Usually, after thoroughly washing the daikon greens, I roughly chop them up and briefly blanch them in boiling water, adding the white radish nubs first and waiting about a minute before adding the leafy parts.

As with all vegetables I parboil, after draining I don't cool them by rinsing them or putting them in ice water. Instead, I use the traditional Japanese method of fanning them for a minute or two with an uchiwa (paper fan), which keeps them from becoming water-logged and flavorless. I use one of those promotional uchiwa handed out on the streets of Japan during the summer alongside the promotional tissue packets. (If only all advertisements doubled as kitchen and/or beauty aids....)

To season the greens, I normally just pour on a little soy sauce and sprinkle on some toasted white sesame seeds for a quick and lazy ohitashi. They'd also be delicious tossed with a miso-sesame dressing. But my very favorite way to eat daikon greens is to wilt them, raw, with a little salt, then mix them with freshly-cooked rice, where they cook in the residual heat. It's a method I picked up from Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art and it brings out the warm, spicy aroma and flavor of the greens like nothing else.

Nameshi (Rice with greens)

Adapted from Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji

Makes 2 servings

1 cup Japanese rice, washed
1 cup daikon greens or other bitter leafy vegetable, washed
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cook the rice as usual. (See the directions for cooking Japanese rice here.) While the rice is cooking, chop the greens into 1-inch pieces, including the immature radishes if attached. Put into a bowl and sprinkle with the salt. Rub the chopped leaves with your hands, squeezing them and dispersing the salt until they are slightly wilted. Drain any accumulated liquid.

When the rice is cooked, add the wilted greens and radish pieces, then lightly stir the rice until the greens are evenly incorporated. Replace the lid and let sit for a couple minutes before serving.

For at least the last year, it's been a goal of mine to master enough cooking-related kanji and vocabulary to be able to follow recipes written in Japanese. With a few exceptions, most English-language Japanese cookbooks focus on time-tested, classic recipes -- excellent for mastering the basic techniques of Japanese cooking, but not so helpful when you want to whip up one of those crazy, modern-meets-ye-olde-Japan dishes you can find at any good izakaya. (My favorite dish at the best izakaya in my town, for example, is a kabocha-stuffed eggroll served with a dipping salt spiked with cinnamon and sugar. It's like a crispy pumpkin-filled savory churro.)

The only solution is to delve into one of the many Japanese-language recipe magazines crowding the bookstore shelves. With this in mind, a year ago (a year ago!) I bought 15分でごはん! (15-minute meals), a collection of quick recipes published by a popular food magazine called オレンジページ (Orange Page). Once upon a time, I set out to make some kind of lotus root-ground pork dish because the instructions looked easy (the picture of the finished dish actually looks completely vile), but never did. Yesterday I decided if I was ever going to conquer a recipe, it should at least be something I would want to eat. So I flipped through the now rather dusty and dented magazine once more and picked out　白身魚の梅あえのっけ丼 (white-fleshed fish with plum dressing over rice). After about an hour with my dictionary and with the aid of the step-by-step pictures, I had a list of ingredients and the instructions pretty much figured out. Minus the rice-cooking time, it all came together in the promised 15 minutes, and nearly as easily as if I had been cooking from a recipe in English.

The resulting dish was simple and light, the flesh of the kanpachi turning buttery beneath its dressing, brightened by the bits of tart umeboshi. This would be a perfect summer meal, much like my beloved maguro no tataki don, but with a hot bowl of wakame soup, it worked equally well as a mild winter night's dinner.

A note on ingredients: The original recipe suggests using tai (sea bream) or other white-fleshed fish; I instead went with the less expensive kanpachi (amberjack), an oilier, less delicate fish. I think this would work equally well with hamachi, maguro and even salmon. Use whatever you like to eat as sashimi.

Kanpachi no ume-aenokke don (Kanpachi with ume dressing over rice)

Makes 2 servings

2 cups (400 g) cooked rice
3.5 oz (100 g) sashimi-quality kanpachi (or substitute the fish of your choice)
daikon, 1 1/2 inch (4 cm) piece
1/5 bundle of mizuna, rinsed and dried
1 large or 2 small umeboshi
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
pepper to taste

Peel the daikon and cut into matchstick-sized pieces. Cut the mizuna into 1-inch (3-cm) lengths. Remove the seed from the umeboshi and dice the flesh. With a very sharp knife, slice the fish into 1/2-inch (1-cm) width pieces.

In a bowl, mix the olive oil, salt and diced umeboshi. Add the daikon, mizuna and fish, then toss together using chopsticks, distributing the dressing evenly. Taste for seasoning and add more salt if necessary. Scoop the rice into a bowl and top with the fish and vegetable mixture, making sure each serving gets a good amount of umeboshi. Sprinkle with pepper and serve.

The supermarket shelves in Japan are stocked with instant gomoku takikomi gohan (five-ingredient-boiled-together rice), but little do the Japanese housewives know it's so easy to make from scratch! Actually, they probably know, so I don't know what the problem is.

Besides being an easy, one-pot meal, this dish just reeks of autumn. Literally. Every time I open my rice cooker after making it, the steamy scent just makes me think, Autumn. Mushrooms. Crunching leaves. Gobō. Mmm...

The orginal recipe I followed (from the half-Japanese, half-English Recipes of Japanese Cooking) calls for chicken thighs as one of the five ingredients, but I have successfully made a vegetarian version with abura-age (deep-fried tofu). And even if you have an aversion to konnyaku, that gelatinous, flavorless devil's tongue jelly, it is an essential part of the dish, providing occasional chewy mouthfuls that liven things up.

Gomoku takikomi-gohan (5-Ingredients Mixed Rice)

Makes 3 servings

1 1/2 cups Japanese rice, washed and drained
3 oz/80 g chicken thighs
2-inch piece of carrot
1/3 gobō
2 dried shiitake mushrooms
1 package konnyaku strips
1 cup dashi or chicken broth
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons, plus 1 teaspoon sake
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce, preferably usukuchi shōyu (light soy sauce)
1/2 teaspoon salt
mitsuba or other leafy green herb, for garnish

Put the chicken in a bowl, sprinkle with 1 teaspoon sake and let stand while you prepare the other ingredients.

Put the mushrooms in a small bowl and cover with 1 cup water to soften. Cut the carrot into matchstick-sized pieces. Scrape the gobō with the back of a knife under running water to clean it, then cut into thin shavings. Rinse if desired. Drain the mushrooms, reserving 1/2 cup of the soaking water, then remove the stems and cut into strips.

Pour the stock and reserved mushroom-soaking water in a medium-size pot and add the mushrooms, carrots, gobō, konnyaku and chicken (with sake and accumulated juices). When it begins to simmer, add the sugar and sake and continue cooking for 1 or 2 minutes. Add the soy sauce and salt and simmer for another minute.

Drain the ingredients into a sieve over a bowl, keeping the solids and liquids separate. Put the washed rice in a rice cooker or pot and add the solid ingredients. Measure the strained liquid; add water or pour off some of the liquid so it measures 1 1/2 cups. (Use slightly more liquid if you are cooking in a pot rather than a rice cooker.) Pour the liquid into the rice cooker or pot and cook as usual. (See these instructions for cooking Japanese rice on the stove.)

When the rice has finished cooking, stir to distribute the ingredients. Garnish each serving with a few mitsuba or other herb leaves.

The summer heat and humidity descended last weekend and, not wanting to cook anything beyond rice, I thought it was the right time to experiment with maguro no tataki don, or minced raw tuna over rice, especially since June is apparently when maguro tastes its best. The quail egg addition was inspired by a dish I had at an izakaya in Osaka a few months ago. I've recently been eating a lot of myōga, a kind of ginger, so I sliced that up and threw it in, along with lots of green onions, some grated ginger and chopped shiso. The fresh taste of the herbs mixed with the buttery fish, the slippery egg and the hot rice was so good I ate it three times over the weekend. (In part because I didn't know what else to do with a dozen quail eggs.) I hearby proclaim it The Official Delicious Coma Dish of Early Summer 2006.

Some notes on ingredients: Myōga and shiso are both available at Japanese markets, but if you can't find them, you could substitute other leafy herbs. Shiso is said to taste a bit like a combination of basil and mint. Cilantro might also be good and would make me jealous because I can't buy cilantro here. Quail eggs can most likely be found at Japanese or Chinese markets; a fresh, organic chicken egg yolk could be substituted.

Maguro no tataki don (Minced Tuna and Herbs on Rice)

Serves 2

5 oz/150 g sashimi-quality raw tuna
1/2-inch piece of ginger, grated
1 1/2 Tbsp chopped green onion
1 myōga bud, thinly sliced
1 shiso leaf, thinly sliced
(or substitute 2 Tbsp fresh herbs for myōga and shiso)
1/4 tsp soy sauce, or to taste

1 cup freshly-cooked Japanese rice
1 quail egg or 1 organic chicken egg yolk

Using a very sharp knife, mince the tuna. (Or buy already-tataki-ed tuna from a Japanese grocery store. And yes, I did make up the word "tataki-ed.") In a small bowl, mix the tuna with the ginger, green onions and herbs. Add the soy sauce and mix.

Spoon the rice into two bowls and top with the tuna mixture. Make a small hollow in the middle and crack the egg into it. Serve with Japanese pickles and mugi-cha, cold barley tea.

When making liquor (like sake) from a starchy substance (like rice), the starch must be changed to sugar with the enzyme action of a substance (like saliva).

…Wait, what?

It’s true. The first sake in Japan was made at big rice-chewing parties. Everyone in the village would show up, chew some raw rice, spit it into a container, then go back home, content in the knowledge that they would soon gather for another village party, this time fueled by spit-soaked sake, known as kuchikami no sake, “chewing-in-the-mouth sake.” After the chewing party, water would be added to the saliva-rice and then the mixture would be monitored until it smelled alcoholic—what poor sap had that job? and was he likely to drink the most or least at the party?—at which point, everyone would gather again to drink their very communal concoction.

This type of liquor is not exclusive to Japan; in South and Central America as well as other parts of Asia, people were chewing their way toward drunkenness during the seventh through tenth centuries. In Taiwan, the custom was practiced until the early twentieth century. In Hokkaido and Okinawa, the northernmost and southernmost parts of Japan, they prepared the drink for special festivals and only women chewed the rice.

Luckily, koji was discovered, a useful little mold which not only turned starch into sugar for sake, but also came to be used to make miso, natto and soy sauce. Where would Japan be without you, Aspergillus oryzae?

…Drinking a whole lot of backwash, that’s where.

It used to be all sake was taruzake, sake stored in casks made of Japanese cedar, sugi, which imparts an woody, spicy taste to the drink. Now that sake is usually brewed in enamel-lined stainless steel tanks and stored in glass bottles, the wooden taru casks are only used by a few brewers and taruzake has become a specialty drink usually consumed around New Year’s, often sipped from little boxes also made of cedar. It makes sense as a cold-weather drink; the earthy, cinnamon-like scent and flavor are as comforting as spiced wine. Plus, after spending a winter in Japan, the smell of damp sugi will inevitably remind you of steamy Japanese baths, one of the only places you can actually find warmth during that cold and terrible season.

But the first time I drank taruzake, it was spring. And it wasn’t sake brewed in a wooden cask, but sake stored in a big jar with a piece of fresh sugi floating in it. It was close enough. The sake was a golden yellow and smelled more strongly of wood than I expected. (Indeed, high-end sakes are not used for making today’s taruzake because the wood taste overpowers anything else.) But after my first sip, I was hooked. The woody taste and smell were different from anything I had ever tried before.

I have to admit I was already a big fan of the smell of Japanese wood, which may be why I liked it so much. I have been known to ride my bicycle in the evenings past the factory near my apartment that always seems to emanate either the scent of fresh-cut wood or fragrant wood smoke, just sniffing. Pine is fine, but there’s nothing like the smell of cut sugi or hinoki (Japanese cypress), the latter being an especially popular scent for incense, bath salts and the like in Japan.

I’ve never seen bottled taruzake in the stores, so when I spotted a sugi sake set at a local recycle shop, I quickly snapped it up. Not only is it nice to look at and handle—both the tokkori and the cups are light and smooth—it imparts the perfect amount of cedar scent and flavor, so I can have a sort of homemade taruzake whenever I like.

Until kitchens with gas and plumbing became common in the 1920s and ‘30s, housewives in Japan had to cook rice on a wood-burning stove, a complicated process which required maintaining a low flame, then a high flame, then—at exactly the right moment—removing the wood from the fire and finishing the cooking over the coals. All this, and without lifting up the lid to peek, which would have ruined the pressurized conditions needed for the rice to cook properly. This was a jingle used back then to describe the rice-cooking process:

Hajime choro-choro
Naka pa-ppa
Akagao ga naite mo
Futa toru na.

First it bubbles,
Then it hisses.
Even if the baby is crying from hunger,
Never remove the lid!

So housewives would stand patiently over the stove as the rice cooked, using the various sounds and smells coming from the pot to decide when to pull the burning pieces of wood out of the stove. Most likely while wearing a kimono and standing a dirt floor, which was the standard for traditional kitchens. Ye olde Japanese housewives were hardcore.

Nowadays, of course, almost everyone has an electronic rice cooker, which became household staples after they debuted in Japan in 1955. The rice-cooking process is the same—low heat to slowly warm everything inside the pot, then high heat to stew the rice in boiling water, then very low heat to let the grains steam in the remaining water—only now it is monitored by electronics rather than women wielding burning pieces of wood. I guess that’s what they call progress.

Japanese rice is short-grained and more sticky than the long-grained rice eaten in countries like Thailand and India, which makes it easier to eat with chopsticks. The ideal Japanese rice is tender, full-flavored, glossy and moist; to achieve this, the rice must be thoroughly washed before cooking to remove all surface starch. Measure your rice into a bowl, cover it with water, swish the rice around until the water becomes cloudy, pour off the water and repeat the process until the water runs clear, usually after four to six rinsings. You can save the starchy water for watering your plants (which I do) or boiling vegetables. After the final washing, drain the rice into a mesh colander and let the excess water drip away for a minute or two.

When cooking Japanese rice, the official water-to-raw-rice ratio is 1.2:1, but, in addition to preferring whole numbers to fractions, I prefer rice that is a little more stiff and sticky, so I use a 1:1 ratio. Also, I get my rice from a teacher at school who has a rice field, and I find her rice is a little less dry than store-bought rice. (I know, rice from a real field! It’s a novelty I still appreciate.) Rice is harvested in the fall and the grains gradually lose their moisture during the course of the year, so they are their driest at the end of the summer, and you may have to add extra water then.

Japanese Cooked White Rice

Note: I always use my rice cooker when making rice, so the stovetop directions are based on the instructions in Washoku by Elizabeth Andoh.

Makes 2 cups cooked rice

1 cup Japanese-style white rice, washed
1 cup water (or 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons for drier rice grains)

If you have a rice cooker: Place the rice and water in the cooker and start it. Once the active cooking cycle is over, make sure the rice remains in the cooker for 10 minutes, lid closed, to steam the grains. This ensures the proper texture. Stir the rice before serving.

If you don’t have a rice cooker: …You should get one. It’s worth it. In the meantime, put the rice in a straight-sided pot with a lid. Let it sit in the water for 10 minutes to absorb some moisture.

Place the pot on high heat and bring to a boil, which should take 3 to 5 minutes. Don’t open the lid; instead pretend you are a Japanese housewife and listen for the sounds of boiling (choro-choro) and look for the steam chattering the pot lid.

Reduce the heat to low and cook for about 5 minutes or until you hear a low hissing sound, indicating that the water is almost absorbed. If you have to peek, now is the time to do it, but replace the lid quickly. Increase the heat to high for 30 seconds to dry off the rice.

Remove the pot from the heat and let the rice steam for 10 minutes with the lid on. Stir before serving. There will probably be a crusty, browned layer of rice in the bottom of the pot. This is a delicacy in many rice-eating countries. In Japan, it’s called okage. You should eat it, either by mixing it in with the rest of the rice when you stir, or by itself, sprinkled with a little salt.