TOKYO FLAVORS, NEW YORK STYLE Goes to MallorcaTOKYO FLAVORS, NEW YORK STYLE、マヨルカへ行く
This summer, we tried Japanese home cooking in Mallorca, taking Tokyo Flavors, New York Style beyond our New York kitchen—all the way to this beautiful island in Spain!
We stayed at the home of our friend, where we enjoyed wonderful local food, homemade paella, beautiful beaches and mountain views.
And, of course, Yoshiko couldn’t resist doing some Japanese home cooking in her kitchen.
Cooking in someone else’s kitchen is always an adventure. You don’t have your usual equipment or ingredients, so you have to improvise. Yoshiko brought a few Japanese essentials from New York, including shio kombu, katakuriko (Japanese potato starch), Japanese curry powder and soy sauce, then combined them with ingredients we found locally in Mallorca.
The menu included avocado and tomato salad with shio kombu, tofu steak, Yoshiko’s mother’s stir-fried eggplant, Japanese ginger pork, and curry-flavored chicken piccata. We even used Mallorca’s famous local salt and substituted white wine for sake in the ginger pork.
One of the best surprises was discovering that our friend had an electric slicer, allowing us to make the beautifully thin slices of pork commonly used in Japanese cooking. Yoshiko may now have a new item on her Christmas wish list—if she can find somewhere to put it in her New York kitchen!
But the best part of the evening wasn’t any single dish. It was sitting around the table together, sharing Japanese home cooking with friends and hearing their reactions in different languages.
And the story didn’t end with dinner. After we returned home, our friend sent us photos showing how she used some of the leftover Japanese ingredients—including cucumber mixed with shio kombu, a popular and easy combination in Japan.
Japanese home cooking doesn’t have to stay in a Japanese kitchen. With a few key ingredients, local produce and a little improvisation, it can travel almost anywhere.
We hope this is just the beginning of our Japanese home cooking journey beyond New York!
