Eat In for Japan!

Wow! I haven't posted in quite a while... well, I have good cause to do so this week: check out Eat In for a Cause on Facebook! This isn't a formal non-profit or anything like that - just a community concept that I'd love to see catch on beyond my little circle.

I woke up at 4 am on March 11th (the number 11 has had bad juju of late - wonder why??) to the clock radio BBC reporter's story of a massive 8.9 magnitude (now known to be 9.0) on the east coast of Japan, and the subsequent tsunami. I groggily got to the airport to catch my flight to San Francisco, and obsessively watched CNN on the airplane tv the whole time. I'm still thinking about this tragedy constantly - as I thought on that flight, and since, if Japan isn't ready for a huge earthquake tsunami, who the heck is??

The photos of people looking out at the devastation really hit me hard - when would they be able to have another decent meal? It's still cold/wintry - how will they stay warm? And let's not even get started on the pending nuclear disaster - too much to comprehend.

Maybe it's also that I've been wanting to go to Japan lately - love the food, the people, the bath concept (was at Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe last year - amazing!), and work for a Japanese company (Hitachi Consulting - a subsidiary of the "big Hitachi" in Japan - who's "Hitachi City" is on the east coast of Japan!). Most recently, I learned to love sake at Sake Nomi - a great little sake shop in Pioneer Square in Seattle, owned by friends of friends... basically, I guess Japan has been on my mind.

All in all, I've felt the urge to DO something - more than Haiti, more than the tsunami a couple years ago (although I did donate then)... how can I make a bigger impact? Little ol' me??

Well, what about asking my friends to make donations at my next Tuesday Supperclub? Easy enough - so I did! We had a Japanese themed Supperclub (sorry, Irish - should have been corned beef this week), and all in all raised $1,010!!! that's about 10x what I able/willing to raise on my own... which made me think - WHY DON'T I TRY TO TALK OTHER PEOPLE INTO HOSTING A DINNER PARTY WHERE PEOPLE DONATE MONEY TO JAPAN OR WHATEVER CAUSE THEY CARE ABOUT MOST??????

Sorry for the shouting - it just hit me like a runaway nuclear reaction (sorry for the bad image - can't help it!)...

So - this post is all about HOW to make this happen (at least how I've done it), WHAT you should make (see recipes below - or other posts for easy "feed a crowd-able" recipes), and WHEN you should do this (for Japan - right now!).

The Scene:
Having Akane help set the tone with some delicious, beautiful homemade inarizushi (eaten faster than photography), and a MASSIVE bottle of sake from the affected region in Japan (as she put it, probably the last time in a long time, due to the devastation and potential radiation that we'll be tasting this sake). For newcomers, I host a weekly, Tuesday (usually) night Supperclub where the rules are: bring some cash to cover expenses (usually $7-10), and a bottle to share. I buy the ingredients, everyone helps cook, we eat later than we should for a Tuesday night, and have a fantastic time! See other posts on this blog for more details/examples.

The Menu:
- Appetizer: Inarizushi (Akane, can you post a recipe, please?)
- Sake-Steamed Chicken with Ginger and Scallions that had been featured in the NYT just last week. Only deviation from the printed recipe is that I doubled it to feed 12 (two 4-pound chickens, let them steam for about 20 minutes longer), and spatchcocked the chicken to make it fit in my steamers better (I didn't bother to remove the breastbones, just leaned on them to crack them and flatten the chickens - and of course kept the backbones to make stock!)...
- Spinach with Sesame Shoyu Dressing - one of my favorite ways to eat spinach - and yes, I bought 4 1 lb. boxes of baby spinach, leading the cashier to comment on my love of spinach :-)
- White rice (come on - you're eating low-fat chicken and a ton of spinach, cut yourself some culinary slack!)
- Cucumber and Daikon Sunomono - I added about 1/2 as much daikon to the cucumber in this recipe - but used the recommended amount of dressing
- Mochi ice cream (store bought)

People seemed to enjoy the dinner - AND donated lots! :-)