Travis Heermann's Blog, page 3

Cooking with Cat – Steamed Pork Buns are the Food of the Gods

Back when I was living in Japan, about 2003-2006, one of the foods that I fell in love with was nikuman ???, steamed pork buns. They could be found in any convenience store, and they made a great meal for someone who didn’t feel like cooking.

They come with various fillings: pork, beef, chicken, shrimp, veggie, even sweet custard. They are particularly comforting when the weather turns chilly and they’re all steamy and warm.

I was planning a vacation to Japan with the family in March 2020. We’d been planning it for years, and it would have been the first time I’d been back since returning to the States. I was excited to show my family, whom I didn’t have then, all the sights.

A secondary reason for going to Japan was professional, as I was in the midst of writing Tokyo Blood Magic, the first volume of my Shinjuku Shadows trilogy. I wanted to visit some important Tokyo locales, refresh my memory, gather some inspiration, but it was not to be.

As you might guess, COVID-19 derailed that, four days before wheels up for Tokyo. I was crushed, and nine months of isolation has not done much to help that state of mind.

Nevertheless, writing the book did assuage some of my disappointment, as I spent a lot of time in Google Street View, walking virtually around the streets of Tokyo. Writing the book was a fun way to reminisce, and also learn about places I didn’t get to visit while I was living there, such as Shizuoka, Ginza, and Roppongi.

There’s a scene in Tokyo Blood Magic where our hero, Django Wong, a ninja warlock, has his bacon saved from a very dangerous monster by a wisecracking alley cat, known only as Cat. Cat, however, is far from normal, and it’s not clear exactly what he is until Book 2, Tokyo Monster Mash.

Amid snarky repartee, Django and Cat venture into a convenience store for some post-fracas grub, where nikuman becomes a big part of their bonding. Cat becomes Django’s supernatural sidekick.

So in this Year of a Thousand Cuts, I wanted some comfort food for the Virtual Book Launch Party, which my wife and I put together over Zoom a couple of weeks after Tokyo Blood Magic was released. So I made some nikuman, and the attached video tells the tale so much better than text.

This recipe is adapted from Japanese measurements. Credit for the original goes to Namiko Chen.

Nikuman, Steamed Pork BunsINGREDIENTS

DOUGH

2 1/3 cups all-purpose white flour, plus more for dusting2 scant Tbsp sugar1/2 tsp salt1 tsp baking powder1 tsp instant yeast1 Tbsp neutral-flavored oil (vegetable, canola, etc)2/3 to 3/4 cup water

FILLING

2 shiitake mushrooms (without the stems), finely chopped1/2 cup water1 green onion/scallion, finely chopped4 leaves cabbage, finely chopped1 tsp kosher/sea salt3/4 lb. ground porkAbout 1 Tbsp grated fresh ginger1 tsp sugar1 Tbsp sake1 Tbsp soy sauce1 Tbsp toasted sesame oil1 Tbsp potato starch/cornstarchfreshly ground black pepper

INSTRUCTIONS

First, we make the dough. Put all dry ingredients in a large bowl (flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, yeast). Add oil and mix. Once the oil is thoroughly mixed in, slowly add the water while mixing. Mix until incorporated.Flour your hands and knead the dough into a ball. If dough is too dry, all a tablespoon or  two of water.Sprinkle a smooth surface with flour, move the dough onto the surface, and knead for 10-15 minutes. If the dough is too sticky, sprinkle it with a little flour. After 10-15 minutes, dough should be smooth and silky.Form the dough into a ball. Grease the bottom of the bowl with neutral flavored oil and put the dough in the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and put it in a warm place to rise for about an hour, until the dough doubles in size.Meanwhile, it’s time to make the filling. Remove the thick stem parts of the cabbage leaves, then chop them finely. Sprinkle 1 tsp of salt onto the chopped cabbage. Massage the salt into the cabbage. This will begin to draw out cabbage’s moisture. After about ten minutes, squeeze the excess moisture out of the cabbage.Add pork, mushrooms, and scallions to another bowl.Squeeze the excess moisture from the chopped cabbage, then add it to the pork mixture.Add ginger, sugar, sake, soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, and starch. Sprinkle on some fresh black pepper to taste. Mix well. Cover and refrigerate until dough is ready.When dough has finished rising, divide the ball in half. Roll each half into a log shape, then cut each log into five pieces. Then cut each piece in half.

Note: If you like big buns, and you cannot lie, you can cut your dough into larger sizes and use more filling for each one.

Lightly dust the balls with flour, cover them loosely with a damp cloth, and let them rest for ten minutes. (In the video, I missed this step!)Roll each ball into a flat circle about five inches in diameter.Cut twenty squares of parchment paper, about 3” x 3”.Take a circle of dough and place 1 1/2 Tbsp of filling in the center.Fold the dough into a pouch around the filling. It works well to hold the pouch closed with thumb and forefinger while folding up the next bit of dough. First, it will resemble a taco, then a crab rangoon. As you fold in the corners of the “crab rangoon”, you’ll end up with a little pouch. Then pinch these corners together and give them a twist to seal the bun. Put each bun on a piece of parchment paper.Cover the finished buns with plastic wrap and let them rest for 20 minutes. (In the video, I missed this step, too.)Prepare a steamer with boiling water. Put buns in steamer, about 2” apart. They will swell during steaming process. Steam for 10-15 minutes, (10 for small buns, 15 for large ones).Enjoy!

The result: they were delicious.

The texture of the bun was a little bit off, maybe because I missed a couple of steps with letting the dough rest. Another reason might be because I live in the Denver area, and altitude can certainly affect cooking and baking in unexpected ways, which I didn’t account for in my procedure.

Cooking is much like magic and writing. A little here, a little there, bits and pieces of accumulated experience and creative wisdom. I hope you’ll give this recipe a try for yourself. If you do, let me know how it goes. Here in the endless Winter of COVID, maybe we all need a little more comfort food.

LAUNCH DAY – Tokyo Blood Magic

A cultivation urban fantasy full of action, ninjas, magic, and a wisecracking cat for fans of Bleach and Yakuza: Like a Dragon!

Get it Here: https://geni.us/ShinjukuShadows1

Travis Heermann, author of the Ronin Trilogy, the Hammer Falls, and many other adventures introduces a whole new world of magic. Tokyo Blood Magic is the first book in the brand new cultivation series, Shinjuku Shadows!

He’s never failed a witch hunt before. Until he must hunt the only woman he’s ever loved…

When Django Wong, a modern-day ninja turned sorcerer, takes a job to track down a newly Awakened witch, he discovers that his target is not only his lost love, but now she’s an enforcer for the Black Lotus Clan, a ruthless yakuza syndicate.

But time can change a person. Is she the girl who used to love him, a yakuza slave, or a deadly black witch?

With a smart-mouthed magical house cat as his ally, Django must protect her from other Hunter-Seekers sent to kill her until he can learn the truth of her allegiance. And not only that, if he can’t stop her from stealing a powerful magical relic, the Black Lotus Clan will launch a bloodbath in Shinjuku’s streets.

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Just breathe…

For the first time in longer than I care to consider, I feel like I can breathe.

We’ve all known for a while that last week’s election would be a fork in the road in America’s history. (I’d venture to say, the history of planet Earth, because the  U.S. is too big and influential not to affect everyone, everywhere.) We just didn’t know which fork would be taken.

And now we do.

This last week has been a week I will never forget. In between bouts of anxiety and jubilation, I kept going back to the vote count about every fifteen minutes.

The night that Trump was elected in 2016, an African-American friend of mine, a fellow author, was assaulted in downtown Denver by two men wearing Trump masks and MAGA hats. That was the beginning, an omen of what was to come. The list of high crimes and petty cruelties is staggering, and it’s not something anyone is going to forget, likely ever, especially those who have been further marginalized or victimized by this administration or his cultists.

Another thing came home to a lot of people I know last week. My home town, a village of less than a hundred people now, suffered its first fatality to COVID-19. Tom was a guy I’ve known all my life. His wife was one of my Sunday school teachers. When I was still living there in my twenties, we played softball together. He was a Vietnam veteran, a farmer, a truck driver, a B&B operator, and he was at the VFW every Saturday night cooking hamburgers and french fries. I always liked him. I hadn’t seen him in probably twenty years, but I am saddened by his passing.

And just like almost a quarter million other casualties to ineptitude, negligence, and narcissistic hubris, it didn’t have to happen.

I’ve known for a long time how badly the state of the country was weighing upon me, stifling me, but I never realized the extent of it until this week. The daily deluge of WTFery ate up huge chunks of brain space as I tried to process what’s been happening in the world and in my country.

I believe in this country. I cherish its ideals. And we have gone so far astray. Writing SF and historical fiction requires a person to be really good at extrapolation and making historical connections, and because of that I’ve been terrified since 2016 of what America could become–a fascist, dystopian nightmare.

Sometimes it sucks to be right.

And living history is way more difficult, more grueling, more punishing, more crushing than studying it. Nobody wants to live through hard times. The keyword here, however, is through. When you’re going through hell, keep going.

This week I’m reminded of how much writing requires the freedom to focus. Doomscrolling (a recent neologism), checking the news every five minutes for some sign of hope (hopequesting, another neologism), and the chains of despair and anxiety draped in between don’t leave much space for a clear mind. Every writer I’ve talked to at all the virtual cons I’ve attended in the Time of COVID has lamented the same thing. We’ve all been suffering not just one crisis, but four or five of them stacked on top of us.

We’ve been living with an abusive spouse, a narcissistic cult leader. We’re battered, beaten down, gaslit, and diminished. But we’re still here. We’re not safe yet, but the end is near.

For the first time in four years, I have enough hope to go on. Hope that the white supremacists will be stuffed back into their hateful little warrens and starved of attention until they devour themselves. Hope that maybe the country can stand for something beside greed, kleptocracy, and ego, that maybe there will be some justice done, that we can start tapping the brakes on climate change at the eleventh hour, that we can rebuild bridges to democratic allies after setting fire to them in favor of dictators and tyrants, that we might prevent another quarter million deaths, that American may no longer be a global laughingstock or an object of pity.

This week, the civilized, democratic world breathes a sigh of relief.

For those of you from overseas who’ve sent good thoughts, thank you. On Saturday, I received a pile of messages from friends in Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and the U.K. “Hooray! America returns to sanity.”

For every American who voted, thank you.

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Cover Reveal!

Coming to your e-reader or favorite bookstore on December 8, 2020!!

This might be my favorite book cover ever!

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