Tag: Guest Author

Japanese Inspired Fantasy–and Cooking–With K. Bird Lincoln

K. Bird Lincoln writes fantasy inspired by her love of the Japanese culture. Today K. Bird is sharing 2 easy Japanese recipes for busy writers and their picky families.

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Confess. When someone says “Japanese Food” you immediately think of either nigiri-sushi with glistening slices of pink, raw fish riding on top of rice or dudes in tall, white hats flipping shrimp over a grill-table. Japanese means expensive restaurants with issues for people with shellfish allergies, right?

It’s okay, that’s what I thought too, until I ended up marrying a Tokyo boy against all my wildest expectations. But that’s another story.  After living for six years in Japan, though, I found out, surprise surprise, that Japanese housewives have ye olde standby dinners that don’t involve exotic ingredients and are fairly easy to put together. We are all busy moms and need to feed our family, right?

So here are two recipes I learned from Tokyo housewives, with ingredients you can buy even at a higher end grocery store in a Midwestern town or at an Asian grocery store if you’re lucky enough to live near one. (I live in a mid-sized town on the windswept Minnesota Prairie and they’re all available here.) This is a sneaky way to introduce Japanese flavors to even meat-and-potatoes picky eaters. So next time you want to go to an expensive restaurant with dudes in tall hats and your kids say “I don’t like Japanese food” you can be all like “Yes, you do! And you just ate it for dinner last week!”

  1. Niku Jaga (braised meat and potatoes)This is perfect for writers because it’s literally like 10 minutes of chopping/sautéing and then you can just let it sit and simmer while you go back to the computer and get your daily word count in. I love having potatoes that literally melt when you spoon them up so I tend to leave it simmering at low heat forever. The one special ingredient you need is dashi broth. That’s the broth made of combination of fish and konbu seaweed. You can buy it in handy little packets at any Asian food store or on Amazon. I send you to Nami’s Just One Cookbook for the classic take on Niku Jyaga that involves thinly sliced beef. But since I don’t eat beef, I use chicken. You could use pork or beef or whatever.Ingredients1 medium onion, cut in to wedges
    5oz (140grams) boneless pork loin (or chicken breast) sliced thin
    1 small carrot, cut into wedges
    2 medium potatoes, pared and quartered
    1/2 inch fresh ginger, peeled and minced
    1 tablespoon vegetable oil
    2 tablespoons sugar
    2 tablespoons soy sauce
    2 tablespoon sake (or dry sherry)
    1 cup Japanese dashi broth
    About 1/4 cup green peas or snow peas cut in halfStir-fry the onion, meat, carrot, potatoes, and ginger in vegetable oil in a heavy skillet over low heat for 3 to 4 minutes. Combine the sugar, soy sauce, sake, and dashi broth in a mixing bowl and add to the pork and vegetables. Continue to cook over low heat until most of the liquid is absorbed and the vegetables tender. Add the green peas or snow peas and cook a few minutes more, or until the peas are tender. Serve hot with plain rice.
  2. Hambagu (hamburger steak)This recipe is literally scarfed up by my teenagers. I usually end up making rice, and then following the recipe up through cooking the patties, turn off the stove, leave the pan, and then going back to my computer to write. When everyone gets home, it’s only about 10 minutes to “finish” off the dish with the sauce and then we can eat quickly. So the one special ingredient here is Bulldog sauce. If you’re interested in authentic home-style Japanese hambagu, I highly recommend Cooking with Dog. (Actually, you should go click that link anyway, because it’s a veritable treasure trove of recipes where a female chef shows you how to do everything and her adorable poodle, Frances narrates in pretty funny Japanglish).Go out and get yourself some Bulldog Sauce (Amazon if you’re desperate, but I found Bulldog sauce at my local Hy-Vee grocery store and pretty much at any Asian grocery).For the recipe here, I started with Just One Cookbook recipe and then “healthified it” with ground turkey for my family since I don’t eat beef. I also go with my Tokyo Boy’s sister’s sauce rather than the several-ingredient one Nami uses, but that’s personal taste. Pretty much everyone loves it. And you can serve it with mashed potatoes or Japanese potato salad or rice, roasted carrots and a green salad and it’s awesome.

    Ingredients

    ½ large onion chopped finely
    ¼ tsp. salt
    Freshly ground black pepper
    1 lb. ground turkey
    1 large egg
    2 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
    ⅓ cup (20 g) panko or any other kind of bread crumbs (sometimes I just crumple up a piece of whole wheat bread)
    1 tsp. salt
    Freshly ground black pepper
    Optional seasoning add ins: chopped garlic or powdered garlic, celery seed, tarragon

    Sauce

    2 Tbsp. butter
    1/4 cup ketchup
    1/4 cup Bulldog tonkatsu sauce

    Add the meat, egg, milk, Panko, chopped onion, salt, black pepper (and any of the optional seasonings that turn you on) in the bowl and mix all together. Mix the meat well with your hands until the mixture gets sticky. Make about 6 oval shaped patties. You can put them in the fridge for 30 minutes to overnight for seasonings/meat to combine, but I often don’t have the time for this step.

    In a large pan, heat oil over medium heat until shimmering and place the patties gently on the pan. Indent the center of each patty with 2 fingers because the center of patties will rise with heat. Cook the patties about 5 minutes. Do not flip until nicely browned.  Cover and cook for 5 minutes to thoroughly cook the inside of the patties (adjust cooking time depending on thickness). Then uncover and transfer patties onto a plate. Into the juices, put the butter, Bulldog and ketchup and stir. Put patties back into the pan, nestling them into the sauce (you can also add oven-roasted baby carrots here and make them saucy and delicious too). Cover, turn down to simmer/low, and cook for another 5-8 minutes to make sure meat cooks all the way through. Serve with mashed potatoes or rice or oven roasted carrots.

For more recipes I recommend Nami’s Just One Cookbook or Cooking with Dog. Or you can check out my slightly more “Midwesternized” recipes, as well as musings related to being a breast cancer survivor, sf/f writer, and chocolate on my blog. Signing up for my newsletter The Mossy Glen will net you sporadic emails with access to free short stories and chocolate giveaways.

Interested in Japan-related fantasy? Check out my medieval Japanese fantasy series, Tiger Lily, on Amazon, or my April 2017 debut Urban Fantasy about a biracial girl in Portland, Oregon who discovers mysterious things about her Japanese father, Dream Eater.

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Bird Lincoln is an ESL professional/writer/mother/breast cancer survivor living on the windblown Minnesota Prairie with her family and a huge addiction to frou-frou coffee and chocolate. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she has spent more years now in Japan and on the West Coast than in the Midwest. She also writes tasty speculative and YA fiction reviews under the name K. Bird Lincoln on Goodreads and Amazon.

Running the Bases With Shei Darksbane

 

Running The Bases’ guest this week is Shei Darksbane. Shei is a co-founder of Darksbane Books, which publishes diverse representative speculative fiction.

  • What are 3 of your favorite fantasy characters? (Please say where they’re from)

This is so hard. I love so many characters so very deeply. But if I have to respond, and I’ll refrain from answering on my wife’s characters 😉 since then I’d have far more than 3 to name anyway… I’ll say Kvothe from Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles, Starbride from Barbara Ann Wright’s Katya and Starbride series, and Bentley and Corman (sorry, they come as a pair!) from Craigh Schaefer’s Daniel Faust series. Gosh this is hard. I could name wonderful characters all day long!

  • What is 1 fact about your book/series you’d like a new reader to know?

One thing I can say about all our series is that you don’t have to be LGBT to enjoy them. They are not LGBT stories for LGBT people alone. They are stories. And the protagonists and some of the other characters are LGBTQIA+. Some of the other characters are diverse in other ways too, such as race, religion, and disability. Our mission is to create excellent stories just like any other great fiction with a focus on excellent plot, characters, development, world building, etc… but featuring characters with traits that are under-represented in media. So if you’re not a lesbian, or not “into lesbians”, it doesn’t matter. You can still enjoy these stories. They don’t focus on “being a lesbian”. They focus on kick-ass heroines, witty dialogue, and deep world and character building. They just happen to be lesbians instead of straight.

  • What’s your most and least favorite things about being an author?

Favorite thing: the feeling I get when someone tells me that they were thrilled to feel represented in my story. Just knowing I’m helping someone feel like “*this* represents me while still being in my favorite genre” (since it’s hard to find LGBT representation outside of romance/erom/erotica)… It makes me happy. Because I want that feeling too, and rarely find it. When I stumbled upon Barbara Ann Wright’s series, I was just so excited because for once, the plucky heroine wasn’t drooling over a guy who I’m sure was quite attracted to straight girls, but for me, it just broke my connection with the character because I couldn’t feel it. The story didn’t have to be just about them being lesbians. But just seeing lesbians in a great fantasy story helped me feel like I was a part of that world in ways many series, even my favorite series by my favorite authors never did. I still enjoy The Mercy Thompson series, but I’ll never be as connected to Mercy as I am to Starbride, for instance, because ultimately, I can share in Starbride’s emotions more closely than I can in Mercy’s.

So when I get a note or a review where someone says they were so happy because for once they felt represented, it absolutely warms my heart.

Least favorite thing: revisions. 😑 gosh I hate it more than even blurbing. lol

  • Why does diverse spec fiction matter to you?

I think I’ve managed to answer this all over my other answers… But to say a final word on the matter, it matters to me because there are so many young people out there who are struggling to feel like they belong in a world that is often far to cruel to them. I want to help build a world where they can find themselves in a book just as easily as anyone else. I want the LGBTQIA+ readers to find themselves in Dakota,in Ashes, in Riv’s massively diverse crew. I want them to feel like they can truly slip into a story and immerse. I want them to FEEL the romance budding between two girls in the story, and not simply *know* in their gut with dread that the relationship is probably going to turn out to be just friendship or even some gay-baiting and it’ll never simply be that they’re actually going to be in a romance… right? Because that never happens in fiction… No one does that.

Well… we do that. That’s what we’re here to do. We’re going to make sure those books exist for the people who want them, and honestly, I feel there’s a lot more people who want them these days than not. You don’t have to be gay to want representation and diversity. You don’t have to have a particular skin color to want to see characters who aren’t white. You don’t have to be disabled to want to see some disabilities (physical and mental) represented in your stories. And you don’t have to be a social justice warrior to want to see women handled respectfully without bashing men, a lack of toxic masculinity, and generally just respect to all kinds of people in the fiction you read. It means so much to me to be able to contribute even a little of this kind of material to the great library of humanity. I know what it feels like to be endlessly frustrated because you never find yourself represented in fiction, and I’ve seen the harm it does. I watched a video once where they showed kids two dolls, a white and a black doll. They asked questions like “which is the good doll” “which is the pretty doll” ” which is the ugly doll” “which is the bad doll”. The message was telegraphed so I expected to see the kids saying what you’d expect from this society. It hurt, but I knew it was coming as the little kids kept saying the white doll was good, pretty, and the black doll was bad, ugly. But when they showed the black children answering those questions… and they said the same… it absolutely broke my heart. I cried. I cried so hard. Because why should those precious, beautiful children believe they were ugly or bad? Our society has a lot of work to do, and I don’t pretend that one couple writing diverse fiction can change these things, but I refer to the famous parable of the starfish. If we can’t make a difference to all of them, at least we’ll make a difference to a few. And maybe one day, there will be enough authors doing the same, that we will have contributed to a real change in society. Maybe one day, the lesbian girls will know they can find a book about a strong heroine they can find themselves in and know they won’t have to deal with that heroine then falling for a guy they don’t feel any connection to. Maybe one day, girls of color will know then can find themselves as the heroines, the beautiful and good heroines in fiction too. Maybe one day, no one will really have to make a big deal of their protagonist being gay, black, non-Christian, or disabled anymore at all…  Because maybe one day, all fiction will be diverse. I hope for that day. But I believe we must be the change we want to see in the world. So we’re doing what we can.

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