Locomotoring

When I took a whiff of Matsutake mushrooms at Signona’s, I knew that I would have to make Matsutake Gohan. My version has Minnesota Lake wild rice, the ghost varietal, matsutake mushrooms, pearl couscous, pine nuts, dried tomatoes, salt fermented plums, green Szechuan peppercorn, black cardamom, bay leaf, cinnamon leaf and leeks. This meal was in honor of the Day of the Dead, a tradition I have adopted to honor those who are are no longer with me today. The first to pass away was my grandad, in fact, it was many decades ago this day. I was still a child then. He used to write long letters to me and might have played a strong hand in nurturing my contemplative nature.

The phrase “I Like to Take the Scenic Route When I Cook” is the title of a November 2025 newsletter from Yotam Ottolenghi. My cooking style has been described as my love language. I don’t see it that way but I didn’t have words to describe it until I came across Ottolenghi’s Nov newsletter. And then it clicked. I too prefer the scenic route when I cook. In any month, there is at least one day when I would just like to open a can of sardines and a bottle of wine for dinner. But most times, food is a journey, sometimes an hour, sometimes a day or three, and sometimes, a few seasons.

Here are some of the journeys I undertook with this dish.

I have been loving the texture of rice when cooked in a kamado-san. It is possible that asian rice cookers do as good a job, but my kamado-san indubitably looks better. Several years ago, I had heard Rajiv Surendra talk about his Sri Lankan cooking clay pots with tremendous passion. I had seen my mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother cook in aluminum pots. But Rajiv’s passion for this old way of cooking, still common in southern India, had sent me searching for clay pots on the internets and I invariably landed on Japanese donabes at Toiro. From there, kamado-san was love at first sight. Now, many rice dishes later, it has developed a patina.

I have also been paying attention to indigenous cooking, ever since we started hiking and I started noticing the native vegetation. Sean Sherman had made me curious about Minnesota Lake wild rice, the ones that are canoe harvested. This Gohan uses Bineshii’s wild rice, the particular variety is ghost rice (presumably for its lighter color). It takes 10 minutes to cook following a 30 minute soak and tastes like nothing else does – it is like chewing on wild and earthy mushrooms.

While cleaning the Matsutake’s, I recalled the winter of 2023/2024 when we had wild foraged for mushrooms with a friend. We had brought back Matsutake’s that were as large as my palm. The house had smelled of pine for days.

The rest of the ingredients in the Gohan evolved as I puttered about the kitchen. The pearl couscous and pine nuts are a nod to Ottolenghi’s rice pilafs. I owe my joy for cooking to Ottolenghi and his crew. Cooking everyday from his books was one of the few ways I kept my sanity during the pandemic. The tomatoes were dry farmed near Freedom, CA by Live Earth Farm, my CSA. They were subsequently dried in my kitchen and marinated in a neutral oil. I noticed herbs and crushed coriander seeds in the marinade. The leeks come from Freedom too. The salt fermented plums are from two seasons ago when the tree in the front yard decided to yield nearly 50 lbs of fruits. We had tentatively followed Noma’s fermentation guidelines and had dried the fermented plums for longer shelf life. If anything tastes better than small batch plum jam, it is salt fermented and dried plums. Bay leaf is from the yard as well. The green Szechuan peppercorn and cinnamon leaf are part of my California pantry – from The Mala Market and Burlap and Barrel respectively.

It could be a one pot dish, but it is rare for me to make things in one pot. I decide to use a hand forged carbon steel gratin pan from Blue Skillet Ironware to prep. This pan took me two years to acquire. Every month, I would submit my name for Blue Skillet’s lottery. My name eventually came up and that is how I have the gratin. I laid a Bay leaf and a cinnamon leaf at the bottom of my kamado-san. The cooking process started with softening the leeks in butter in the gratin. The butter is from cows that graze a bit north of us in Marin and Sonoma county. Sean Sherman would not have suggested the use of cow’s milk butter. Cows are not native to North America and yet, they are now integral part of Sonoma landscape and our local creameries. Once the leeks are softened, I transferred them to the kamando-san. I then toasted the pine nuts and the pearl couscous in butter and transferred them to the kamado-san. Finally, I toast thinly sliced the Matsutake mushrooms, pan fried them and transferred them to the kamado-san.

In a separate bowl, I measured out the wild rice and rinsed them gently. Then I transferred them to the kamado-san and added the necessary amount of water. I thought of my mother winnowing rice – I couldn’t be sure if it was a real memory, but if it was, it belonged to the days when we used to get rationed rice and the rice needed a whole lot of cleaning. My mind meandered to the kayaking trip this summer that had us accidentally exploring the muddy channels of Bair Island. I topped the rice with dried tomatoes along with its marinade. I added a couple of fermented plums. I used a mortar and pestle to crush a black cardamom and added to the kamado-san. I toasted some green Szechuan peppercorn and add to the kamado-san.

The salt went in along the way. I had chosen a fir salt to accentuate the pine-y flavor of the mushrooms. The fir tips were harvested in the town of Weed in Shasta county earlier this summer, dried and crushed with kosher salt. I remembered my friend who had shared the basics of fir tip harvesting with me.

While the rice rested in this aromatic water, I opened up a can of sardines. They had came to us from Donostia Foods. I call them my earthquake stash. The sardines had been marinating in the can in olive oil. Before they were in olive oil, they were roaming free in the waters off the coast of Galicia in northwest Spain coast. They were wild-caught and hand-packed fresh from the sea in olive oil and salt. I took them out of their original olive oil marinade and marinated them in red wine vinegar, crushed garlic, dry thyme and ramp, and red pepper flakes.

I started the fire under the kamado-san, but I didn’t cover it with the lids until the water started to bubble. Once the lids were on, I set an alarm for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, I shut down the gas and let the gohan rest while I opened a bottle of wine and gave gratitude to my departed family and friends.

Naoko Takei Moore (aka Mrs. Donabe), who introduced me to Donabe cooking, would have frowned at the number of ingredients I had added to the Gohan. And yet, the meal turned out to be one of my more successful experiments. Perhaps the fact that the dead were watching over me helped.