Media Noche, Japanese Style

Last Christmas Eve, I was, as usual, on my feet for hours preparing our Noche Buena. I kept everything simple, though. Two kinds of spaghetti (three-cheese for the kids, Pinoy style for the yayas), ham, tacos, nachos and jap chae.

Noche Buena

In my Facebook account, I captioned my Noche Buena photo, "A simple meal for Christmas Eve" and earned this comment: "Simple?!" So I posted, "Nadaan lang sa presentation 'yan. (The presentation made all the difference, that's all.)"

For New Year's Eve, we decided to go Japanese. I made maki, mini spam musubi, tamago sushi, and my current favorite―green tea panna cotta.

Media Noche

I admit, this meal looks really simple. But I didn't compromise on the ingredients, so for this, I give you permission to accuse me of being anything but simple. But contrary to what others may believe, preparing Japanese food isn't at all that difficult.

Before, I was scared of making anything sushi. But thanks to a cookbook given by the Ridao Family, I discovered that making sushi is a breeze (see Turning Japanese). And the Tsukimi Soba? I kinda cheated on that one. I found a bottle of Soba sauce from the supermarket and decided to use that instead of making the thing from scratch.

But the Green Tea Panna Cotta, now that's a different story. It was scratch or bust. So I searched for a recipe online and found one at foodandwine.com. However, I had to tweak it a bit to suit my available ingredients.

Green Tea Panna Cotta

Ingredients:

• half a liter of fresh milk
• white sugar, to taste (start from half a cup and work your way towards your preferred sweetness)
• 1 brick Nestle cream
• 6 bags green tea (I got mine from Saizen)
• 1 box Alsa unflavored gulaman, green
• 320ml water (I used the measuring cup which comes with the rice cooker.)
• 1 brick Nestle cream, chilled
• black sesame seeds

First, place milk and sugar into a pan and heat over low fire. Bring to a boil while stirring constantly. Adjust sweetness to your preference. Then, add the entire brick of all-purpose cream and continue stirring until the cream is completely incorporated. Remove from heat.

Add the green tea bags and allow to steep for a while. I let mine steep for an hour, until the cream-green tea mixture was lukewarm. Remove the tea bags and gently squeeze out excess liquid; discard tea bags. Your mixture should taste like the green tea frapp sold in popular coffee shops.

In a separate saucepan, dissolve the gulaman powder in water. Cook over low fire, stirring constantly, until the mixture comes to a boil. When all of the gulaman has dissolved, turn off heat and pour the gulaman mixture in a thin stream on to the creamy green tea mixture while stirring. When all of the gulaman is incorporated in the creamy green tea mixture, immediately pour into individual serving containers. (You may use wine glass, champagne flutes, sundae cups or individual plastic molds.) Leave in the fridge until set.

Before serving, pipe on some of the chilled cream in the center and sprinkle with black sesame seeds.

Happy New Year!