Autumn Appetite and Outdoor Cooking

It will come as no surprise to my friends and the neighbors that we are crazy about food and cooking outdoor. Autumn always brings the best weather for the latter as well as "Autumn appetite". Aki no shokuyoku, in Japanese, means the natural increase in appetite that comes with cooler weather. For us it means we break out the Shichirin charcoal brazier. Basically this miniture stove is used to grill fish over a frugal portion of charcoal. They are available in home centers for less than ¥1000 ($10 USD) and come in various shapes. They are made from a special type of clay and we replace ours about every 2 years.

The above picture(right) of thin sliced pork rib meat wrapped around Japanese basil (Shiso) demonstrates how to cook Yakitori or skewers of chicken and other goodies.

But diverting from the norm of 3 or 4 pieces of charcoal there are more interesting things one can enjoy.

For steaks, thick burgers, and Dutch oven cooking a hotter fire is needed so you should build a strong fire by adding coals to your base fire. The photo above left shows small pieces of wood added to some charcoal to speed up the process. My wife has baked biscuits and even an apple pie using a Dutch oven on a shichirin. Needless to say the apple pie was a lot of work, but the baking was extremely simple. There are plenty of pages devoted to Dutch oven cooking on the Web. Below you can see how she lowered the pie into the Dutch oven onto a steel trivet. She used aluminum foil(heavy duty) to lower and remove the pie. The top crust was a little over cooked so it's not necessary to load up the top of the oven with hot coals.

With a little ingenuity and a lot of patience you can do a lot of cooking on the little shichirin.