Palladion

I don't think I've ever really seen mixed meat hamburgers in the States. Occasionally some people will through in a bit of onions, egg, or bread crumbs for their own personal burgers, but I've never seen something like that offered in a restaurant. If you go too far with the binders, you end up tasting too meat-loafy. My favorite is the simple hamburger. I like a good, juicy, rare (all beef!) burger, covered with cold lettuce, tomato and carmelized (or raw, sweet) onions. On some type of toasted bun. As long as the beef is good and not overcooked I don't really need cheese or sauce.

I've seen a couple of Japanese recipes for stuffed squid. In one, the squid is stuffed with the cooked tentacles, naganegi (long Japanese onions), and flavorings and then quickly broiled. In the other, the squid is stuffed with uncooked glutinous (mochi) rice and then simmered in a soy/sake/mirin mixture. The one recipe of this that I have seen calls for a pressure cooker, but I don't see why it couldnt be done in a regular pot. So, obviously, we have one example of a short cooking and one of a longer, drawn out slow cooking. I think which one you're going to want to choose will be based around the state of your stuffing, whether it's already cooked or not, how much you want the flavors to meld, etc.

I read this post a few days ago, and decided that it sounded like a good, very simple meal. So I gave it a shot tonight, and was impressed by how well it worked out. I have no real experience with Sri Lankan or Indian curries, but it was certainly tasty. I added a few things to add some complexity to the flavor. I cooked a small handful of dried chickpeas earlier in the day and added them and the water that they were cooked in. I also added the juice of one lime and a little sugar to balance the sourness. Also threw in a tiny bit of natural peanut butter. Used chicken breasts instead of thighs, because it's what I had on hand.

For knives, I highly recommend Union Commerce Co., Ltd. It is on one of the side streets, with a suit of armor on the sidewalk in front of their shop. Great selection, (much more than appears on their website), great prices, and they speak English! Nishi-Asakusa 2-22-6. Taito-ku Tel (03)3845-4040 Union Commerce Co., Ltd. (Kappabashi Knife Shop) That actually is the place that I stopped in that weekend, and I stopped in again before heading to the Thai Food Fesitval. I ended up buying a 24cm Sugimoto knife. I really wanted to like the Globals, given their good reputation here, but I ended up not liking the all-metal handles that they have. I definitely agree with the recommendation. Almost all of the shop's knives are in open display cases, so you can just pick one up and see how it feels in your hand without having to ask the salesperson. However, no one there seemed to speak English (I went on Saturdays both times; that might have something to do with it). But the salesperson that I talked to was very patient and helpful, and tried to explain everything to me in simple Japanese. I'll have to go back at some point soon to pick up a steel and a waterstone; I did not want to walk around the Thai Food Festival for 7 hours with a waterstone in my bag!

I edited my post to add some captions to the pictures of food. Hopefully my information is correct. Prices were the same that Torakris mentioned. Almost all of the main dishes were ￥500 again this year. Noodle dishes were ￥400 or so. Desserts were in the ￥300-400 range (more expensive if they used fruit). The tapioca drinks and the bags of glutinous rice were ￥200. A few stalls were selling bags of Jasmine rice, in ranges from 1 kilogram up to 30 kilograms! I picked up a 1 kilo bag to try out. Torakris, you've mentioned that you make jasmine rice quite often; do you steam it or cook it in your rice cooker? How much water do you use?

I went! I went on Saturday (after checking the weather and seeing rain forcast for Sunday). I arrived there around 1:30 in the afternoon and stayed until 8:30 or so (it closed at 9:00). It was packed. People here had posted that it was crowded, but I hadn't expected the throngs of people milling about. When I first arrived at 1:30, there were long lines in front of every single stall. Here's a shot of the crowds: It seemed worst right when I first got there, though that was probably more the intense sun and heat. Once I had a chance to walk around a bit and get my bearings things seemed more manageable. You'll have to get someone more knowledge about Thai foods to really discuss the food itself; I hardly know anything about the subject (though I'm planning on trying to learn to cook some of it, as the ingredients seem to be fairly easy to obtain in the Tokyo area). I had a curry, a spring roll, and some Pad Thai. Prices were a little bit higher than I was expecting, particularly considering the small-ish portions (compared to, say, the large helping of yakisoba you can get at a typical vendor), but they certainly filled me up. The curries seemed to be around ￥500, and the noodle dishes were around ￥400. I also indulged in a sweet tapioca drink. I actually wish I had been hungry enough to go for some more food, something like the coconut sticky rice with mango and some of the papaya salad. I had stuck with familliar food in the beginning and never did get a chance to experiment with some of the more unusual (to me! again, I have basically no experience with Thai food) fare. There were a wide variety of stalls at the festival, rangind from large restaurant setups which were spread over multiple stalls and served over 20 different items to small little stalls where they just grilled squid and sausages. This guy is in the beginning stages of making Phad Thai, I think. The noodles are still quite white; the sauce and vegetables will be added in later. Vats of stuff. I would guess the one on the left to be a red curry. I have no idea about the one on the right. Prep and making of Som Tam (papaya salad). Unripened papaya is used for the salad, so it is more a vegetable than a fruit. It, other vegetables, chilis, and other ingredients are cut up into tiny slices and then bashed around in a mortar and pestle. Grilling chicken on top of big pots? I didn't really think much about this at the time, but now it seems kinda odd. Along with the food stalls were a variety of stalls that sold fresh fruit, mostly cut up in single serving sizes for immediate consumption. The popular fruits seemed to be rambutans, mangoes, mangosteens, and pineapples. Vendors were also selling coconuts. There were also vendors selling different kinds of Thai groceries. All kinds of things were available, though the main focus was on instant products: instant curries, instant soups, instant pad Thai. The most elaborate of these shops actually constructed a covered, walled space that people walked into and browsed through. This shops was packed throughout the whole day and I never ventured inside. And there were some vendors selling crafts, goods, clothes, CDs, and other Thai goods. I don't really have a lot to report about them. The live entertainment (besides watching all the cooking going on) was held on a large ampitheater. I caught the end of a jazz band's set, then sat through a quiz game promoting Thai rice. After that was one of the major acts, the Patravadi Theater. This theater group performed a mix of acts, mostly traditional Thai stuff, but also some non-traditional stuff. They acts, which had no words, were set to music which was mostly provided by four muscians who sat off to the right of the stage, though the non-traditional act used recorded music. And their non-traditional act, which started out with mime and then moved into coreographed fighting: After the Patravadi theater came a band playing a mix of popular Thai songs (or so I surmised). I listened to this for a little while, but I wasn't particularly interested in it, so I wandered off to look at the food stalls for a while. I came back for the last act of the night, the Boy Thai Band. I wasn't expecting much, given the name, but I really liked them. It was a group of 9 men, all middle-aged or so, and they played rock-y jazz music, with some Thai flavors mixed in. The 9 performers played: a saxaphone, a Thai xylophone-like instrument, a Thai flute, an electric keyboard, an electric organ, two guitars, regular drums, and traditional Thai drums. They brought out a female vocalist for one very fast and jazzy song; that one was my favorite. Sometimes they would split their group up a little bit and have just the traditional Thai instruments play for a few songs. All-in-all I had a great time, and I was glad that I decided to change my plans to arrive at 1:30 and stay for the rest of the day (I had been planning, up until the previous day, on arriving at 10:00 and then leaving at 1:00 or 2:00 to run other errands). It inspired me to try to learn to make some Thai dishes (as I mentioned, the ingredients are relatively easy to buy here in the Tokyo area; there's even a store in my small city of 70,000). If anyone's interested, you can take a look at the other pictures that I took (or larger versions of these) here: http://cwru.risukun.com/FolderListView.asp...ood%20Festival/ just click on "camera 1" or "camera 2" for the pictures.

I, too, have been buying dishware and whatnot from the 100 yen store. I've finally decided to get some new plates and bowls to replace the cheap plain white ones that my predecessor was using. I'm also finally getting around to getting new glasses to replace the Winnie the Pooh ones that my predecessor had. The dishes at the shop in my city aren't of quite the same quality as the ones that Torakris posted, but they're OK, and are much nicer than the ones that I've been using. About the pans, though, good luck (and let us know if you find anything promising). I was actually worried that I wouldn't be able to find good, cheap non-stick pans here in Japan so I brought two pans from America when I came last summer (a 10 inch Calphalon and a 12 inch Anonlon). I was glad I did.

Yeah, I think they're the same thing. I liked them quite a bit, but, as you say, they are rather expensive, too expensive for me to actually buy. Thanks for figuring out what I was talking about from my really vague description.

So I've lived in the Tokyo area for the past 9 months, but managed to not have all that much to do with the city. But recently I've become very interested in food and cooking, which lead me here to egullet (did a google search for cantonese style char siu bao and ended up reading an extremely interesting discussion about dim. Anyway, thanks to Torakris's helpful sticky posts about buying food in Japan, I visited Ameyoko-cho last weekend. It was fun, interesting, and useful, as I was able to find lots of stuff that I had not had a source for previously. Based on that good experience, I decided to check out a bunch of Tokyo's market and shopping areas. First stop: Tsukiji Fish Market. Didn't go for the early-morning experience, ended up arriving around 9:00 or so. It wasn't what I was expecting -- I don't know what I was expecting, but I know that wasn't it. Still, it was fun. Besides for seafood in various forms, one of the big street foods that I noticed was the sweet rolled egg omelette things (called dashi-maki tamago, acording to one paper that I have here). There must have been at least 4 different stores selling the stuff. I tried a small sample at one of the shops; it was wonderful, fresh, hot, airy, and sweet. Easily the best one I've had yet. Now that I mention it, though, all of the other ones that I've eaten may have been either in school lunch or at parties with the other teachers from school (either way, the food kinda sits there for a while). Also noticed another snack, it was a sweetened black been, I think, either in a pale white (sugar?) coating or green powder (tea?) coating. The name had three kanji, and the last one was 黒, but I forgot to write down the rest of it. They were interesting, but not interesting enough for me to buy a package of the stuff; they were quite expensive. I don't think I saw this particular item at Ameyoko-cho. Took the subway to Ginza, just for a quick look around. Didn't stay long. Next headed out to Asakusa. It's not a food market, but has a bunch of shops in one area. Anyway, I had never been there before, so I decided to check it out. It was really touristy; lots of the shops were overly gaudy. There were a lot of places selling food. I saw a lot of dango and freshly grilled rice crakers. Saw a snack there that I hadn't seen before. It was okoshi, a sweet, puffed rice cookie that looks a lot like a small rice krispie treat (though without the marshmello). I really liked the ones that had peanut mixed in. If I wasn't on a diet, I probably would have bought a package for further "study". There were a number of shops selling this. There were a lot of freestanding stalls selling the typical festival foods (yakisoba, yakitori, okonomiyaki, and takoyaki) around the big shrine. I've never been to Asakusa before, so I didn't know if this was an everyday thing, or something setup for a particular reason. Then I walked from Asakusa to Kappabashi, the restaraunt supply district. I was looking for a new chef's knife (I bought a somewhat cheap one from the local home center back when I first arrived in Japan, and it's just not good enough given the amount that I use it). Took me a while to find a few specialty knife stores, but I eventually found a few (they were off the main road). I talked to a salesman in one of them for a while. His first recomendation was a Y4000 or so Misono. I played around with it and the nearby ones for a while, but decided to do a bit more research on the internet before making a purchase. My Japanese isn't nearly good enough to have a good discussion about knives, and I'd rather not buy another stopgap knife that I'll use for half a year and then upgrade from. I was also looking to see if I could find a cheap bamboo steamer (for cooking the aforementioned char siu bao) but I didn't see anything promising. Finally, I walked from Kappabashi to Ueno, and visited Ameyoko-cho again. Didn't buy anything, but walked around the place again. Street foods were the same as the previous week: lots of stalls selling roasted chestnuts, and also a number of shops selling fresh fruit on sticks (pineapple, melon, and strawberries). Two stands were selling what looked kind of like miniature okonomiyakis that were cooked in something like (or perhaps it was) an imagawayaki mold. I'll probably hit the Asakusa-Kappabashi-Ueno route again next weekend, after going to the Thai Food Festival. Mostly to go to Kappabashi and buy a knife (also want to pick up a suribachi).

Hmm, thanks for the info. Perhaps I should give it another shot: that first natto experience that I had was with natto that was served with my school lunch (I teach at a Japanese middle school). That might be a bad basis for an aversion to natto.

Ugh, natto. I wanted to approach it with an open mind and at least give it a fair shot. I handled my first package of it with a little trepidation. Opened it and began to stir the gooey muck. But I didn't even get as far as properly stirring the stuff. The smell alone sent me running. Good luck to you with it, but I decided it wasn't an acquired taste that was worth acquiring.

I'll just offer up an alternative view on the Japanese school lunch. I teach English on the JET program, at a middle school. Here, the school lunch simply isn't that great. Some days it's just bad. It's not particularly good to start with, but the major problem is that the food is all old and cool. The rice and the soup (if we have either of them) come hot in their own insulated containers, one for each classroom, and so are dished out somewhat fresh. But everything else for the meal comes already divided in individual servings in a little tray (one tray for each person) and ends up slightly below room temperature. Food is cooked in a centralized facility and then brought to school. It's delivered sometime during the second to last period before lunch, so it spends (on average) an hour and 15 minutes or so sitting outside the students' classrooms. The system that Torakris describes sounds wonderful; I wish it were used here. Anyway, here's last week's menu: Monday: Sliced kobbe (hot dog bun-style bread) with strawberry jam, hanbagu (Japanese meatloaf patty), vegetables cooked in ketchup, french fries, a piece of grapefruit Tuesday: chiken and pork hayashi rice, fruit salad with white gelatin cubes 甘夏 (I don't know how to pronounce this) Wednesday: Plain rice, miso broiled sawara (Spanish mackerel), "crab" "siu mai", some mixed Japanese vegetables, sumashi soup Thursday: Crescent, Vegetable Kurokke, yakisoba, boiled wiener, wonton soup, piece of kiwi fruit. Friday: Bamboo shoot rice, broiled pork, potato salad, miso soup, strawberry and piece of grapefruit. Doesn't sound too bad on paper, does it? Now imagine it at room temperature. Greasy yakisoba, a fast food delight, but now all the grease has congealed on the noodles and vegetables.. Here's a couple pictures: Last friday's lunch Today's lunch (Fried squid, udon, a hard-boiled egg, fruit somethered in a sweet cream and yogurt sauce, and two little mochi balls with a sweet syrup and sesame seeds) The other JETs here and I all like the days when it's just rice and a sauce, like curry rice, hayashi rice, or sukiyaki. Not because it's particularly good (though they are better than most of the other dishes served), but also because the sauce comes in the soup bucket and is ladled onto the rice before serving, so it's served hot, rather than slightly below room temperature. (I actually tried to post this last friday, which is why it deals more with last week's food, but I didn't realize that it would take so long for my account to be activated.)