I’ll Teach You Everything I Know: A Recipe for Ninjin-gohan

This is Half Recipes, a narrative recipe column by Nina Coomes on what it means to feed and care for yourself and those you love.

Ninjin-gohan (Carrot Rice)

Ingredients

• 2 gou short-grained white rice (A gou is the unit of measurement I was taught to use to make rice as a girl in Japan. It’s also the unit of measurement of the small cup that came with my rice cooker. The internet tells me one gou is about three-quarters of a cup, so two gou of short-grained white rice is 1.5 cups.)

• 1 medium carrot, peeled and minced

• knob of ginger, minced (see previous essay for what I think is a knob)

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

• 1 tablespoon sake

• 1 tablespoon mirin

• either 1 teaspoon dashi powder or a square of dried konbu (roughly 2 by 4 inches)

Directions

1. I begin this recipe by confessing something to you: I never wash rice when I’m making it for myself. I know, I know, as an Asian I should be ashamed. Call it laziness, but if it’s just me eating the rice, I simply plunk a cup of rice with the correct amount of water into my rice cooker, hit cook, and let my round Zojirushi sing me its rice-cooking song.

But because I make ninjin-gohan for J most often, and because I care that the grains of rice she eats are clean, taste sweet, and aren’t muddled with the slightly bitter dust left on unwashed rice, I start this recipe by placing two gou of rice into my pot and filling the pot with cold water. I whisk the grains with my hand, letting them release chalky clouds into the liquid. I drain the pot slowly, cupping my hand around the grains so they don’t fall into the sink, and then I do it again. I whisk and drain, whisk and drain, whisk and drain until the water runs clear into the sink.

2. J is the first person who ever asked me to write her a recipe. I was texting her about some salmon cakes I made for dinner, and she asked me to send her directions on how to make them. Normally, I would send a link from whatever website I’d copied, but this was a recipe I’d dreamed up based on what was in my fridge. I had to write out the ingredients and steps myself. J still has the recipe I wrote taped to her fridge. Over the many years I’ve visited her apartment, I’ve had cause to reread my directions. Looking back on them, it’s so clear I was frantic to impress her, wanting to be funny (lots of ALL-CAPITAL-LETTER DIRECTIONS) but useful.

3. Fill your rice pot with the appropriate amount of water. (I know different people have different thoughts on this, but I just follow the guidelines written into the side of my rice-cooking pot.)

4. J and I became friends when I was living in New York, an experience that entailed moving to a city where I knew no one. That first year was among the loneliest of my life. I dreaded the yawning expanse of time provided by weekends and often offered to get to the office early or work late simply to avoid spending time by myself. It was a year of growth, a year of becoming comfortable with taking a book to the bar and ordering for myself, of learning to enjoy my own company and talking to strangers. But I didn’t make a true friend until J.

J and I went to the same college for undergrad, but our paths never crossed there. Instead, I met her at a party thrown by a mutual acquaintance in Brooklyn, a year after I’d moved to New York and two years after I’d graduated from college. I was ending my first year of adult life, and though the idea of going to a house party thrown by someone I barely knew would have scared me a year earlier, by then I was used to the slight discomfort of forcibly getting to know someone. But when I got to the party, everyone seemed to know each other but me. And though they weren’t unwelcoming, the many inside jokes and contextless conversations made the evening feel like a lost cause. I called a cab to take me home early, but just when I was about to leave, J, someone I’d never seen before, came barreling up to me, standing inches away from my face.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re Asian. I’m Asian. Let’s talk about Asian American issues.”

My cab was already downstairs, but I had the immediate instinct that I needed to talk more with this person. I told her I was leaving then but would find her on Facebook and we could make a plan later. The following week we had dinner together, and by the next month, we were having dinner together multiple times a week.

5. Set the rice aside. Peel your carrot and mince. Peel ginger and also mince. Because these will be cooked along with the rice, they should be finely cut, about the length and the width of a quarter of a matchstick. If you want to skip mincing the carrot, you can also finely chop a third of a bag of shredded carrots.

I feel like I can see a little bit of myself in the affectionate, loving way she sees me.

6. J is perhaps my first friend who went out of her way to tell me that the food I made was delicious. She is certainly the first friend who has made food for herself based on what I’ve made for her, and she is also the first friend to text me requests for certain menu items—panko-breaded fish, or an array of crisp, seasonal salads. It’s a simple, maybe trivial thing, but when J shares her enthusiasm for my cooking, I feel like I can see a little bit of myself in the affectionate, loving way she sees me. What a gift it is to be asked to feed a person, but what a further gift for that person to ask if they might be taught to make what you make.

7. Pour soy sauce, sake, and mirin into the rice pot, directly into the water. Place the minced carrots and ginger evenly across the top so they are also submerged in the water meant to cook the rice. If you are using powdered dashi, add it in with the soy sauce and sake. If you are using dried konbu, place it on top of the rice-carrot-ginger mixture.

8. By now, J and I have shared countless meals and supported each other through many life experiences. One of the places J supported me was at my wedding, where she was a bridesmaid. I was and still am mostly confounded by American bridal culture. I read all the blogs, scanned the magazines, even checked books out from the library, but when I got married, I felt like a foreigner and a fraud—more often self-conscious and nervous than confident and happy. I didn’t even quite understand the idea of a bridal party, just that it would be awkward-looking if my husband had people standing next to him at our wedding and no one was standing next to me. So I asked my sister, my sisters-in-law, and a few of my friends to be my bridesmaids, including J.

I did not have what currently seems to qualify as a “regular” bachelorette party—there was no multiday trip to Nashville, no coordinated outfits, no penis-shaped cake. Instead, I invited my bridesmaids to a nail salon two nights before my wedding so that we could get our nails done. My initial thought was that it would be a fun way to run an errand, given that I wanted a manicure done before the wedding anyway. But the evening was far from a pleasant chore. It was a raucous, delightful night, somehow divorced from all of the pageantry of weddings. We ate Costa Rican food, we listened to Rihanna, we gossiped and laughed. I felt completely cradled by the precious love of women. At the end of the night, after a few covert cigarettes were smoked and half of the women had gone home, I found myself in my little sister’s apartment. Everyone was silly and happy and sprawled like puppies on my sister’s bed. I stood over them for a moment before joining them, reveling in the view of my sister sideways across her bed and J cheerfully wedged in by the wall, of these two women who meant the world to me. This person is like family to me, I thought to myself. And then, for a moment, I was outside of my body, thinking about what it meant for her to fly to Chicago from New York to celebrate my marriage, to cuddle my sister, to tease me and joke so that I took myself less seriously. I realized I must be like family to her too.

That we were family to each other.

9. Hit cook on your rice cooker as if you were preparing a normal pot of rice. When the rice is finished cooking, discard the konbu square if using. Give the rice a good stir, dispersing sweet carrots, zingy ginger, and savory rice equally.

10. When I was little, my grandmother made us this dish whenever we got back to Japan after a long stint away in the US. Ninjin-gohan is a dish that tastes like homecoming, like welcome, like thank god you’re here, I’ve missed you so much, you who are cherished and dear to me. Tomorrow, J flies from New York to Chicago to spend the week with me and my family. It is one of many such trips we’ve taken to continue our friendship, despite the many cities we’ve lived in. In the afternoon, I plan to pick her up from the airport, her favorite snacks in tow. But before that, in the morning, I’ll be in the kitchen, washing rice and slicing carrots. I will prepare the meal that marks love, the ninjin-gohan I always make when I see her, no matter the city we’re in.

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