If you’ve not enjoyed Tempura before, you are missing out.

Last night, I made tempura vegetables for perhaps the 10th time, and experience makes everything better, doesn’t it?

Fried food is yummy, but most people think that it’s bad for your health.
Well, it can be, because oil is powerful stuff, and cooking is powerful stuff, and food is powerful stuff.

But if you do it right, it’s very relaxing, and it builds your health.

As for the oil, I use a 50/50 split between Sesame and Safflower, and afterwards I strain it, and keep
it for one more use in the fridge, or up to three weeks, before I toss it. Contrast that with the average
fried clam shack, which may use hydrogenated oil, animal fat, vegetable oil with pesticides (such
as cottonseed), or perhaps they just cook with the same oil over and over. Yes, that can be bad.

I use the same cooking method as the pros, but my tools aren’t quite as professional. However,
I did recently spring for a wide gap basket for letting the oil through and cooling right after cooking.

For food, I generally use vegetables such as lotus root, carrots, rutabegas, mushrooms, cauliflower and broccoli,
zucchini and summer squash. Last night the cauliflower and lotus were the stars, but the rutabega is right up there.
We also used tofu, which I don’t think I’ll use again. It doesn’t have that crunch.

Anyway, I made two nice dipping sauces, one from soy sauce, another from mustard, and served it
with some raw daikon (helps digest some of the oil), and after we took photographs, we went to town
and it was all gone in a flash! Right after, we had a nice homemade pickle to help us digest all that oil.

My wife said: “That was the best Japanese meal I’ve ever eaten.”

Recipe upon request…

David@kaganmedia.net