MomOfLittleFoodies

I picked up some of the Morinaga Kokuto Caramels when I was visiting my parents in Los Angeles... I love them. The flavor reminds me a lot of the piloncillo that Dad would buy us as a treat occasionally. It has that same molasses-y kick to it.

I made pork chops over the weekend that were kind of like tonkatsu... thicker than the usual cutlets, but with the panko breading. I had to get a little creative since my eldest can't tolerate egg. I made my own tonkatsu sauce using ketchup, worcestershire sauce and grape jelly.

Handsome little guy you have there dougery... Congratulations! I'll also fess up to owning a spam musubi mold.

Instant ramen was a weekend lunch staple growing up. Mom would throw eggs, frozen mixed veggies and leftover meat into it. I like to pour beaten eggs into mine while it's cooking, and occasionally add a drizzle of toasted sesame oil.

Does anyone have a recipe, in English, for the Japanese style napolitan spaghetti? My father-in-law has told us a couple of time about the spaghetti his grandmother (from Japan) made that sounds very close to the Japanese take on napolitan spaghetti. I was thinking that it would be fun to make him some.

I saw at least four varieties of this candy at the Nijiya in the City of Industry in CA a couple of days ago.

Jason is right about those ume pretz... they're very weird tasting. I love ume, but those ume pretz have an odd anise flavor going, which is not something I'm used to with ume. I also picked up some Chocolat Orange Pocky... very good.

Speaking of 100 yen shops... This Christmas, my mother-in-law bought us these medeval torture devices....er, massagers, that she found in a local shop called Ichiban Kan, which is a small chain of Japanese Dollar stores in the Bay Area. I read a newspaper article that was written for the opening of one of the other shops in the chain, where they said it was based on the 100 yen shop concept. Very painful little gadgets, those massagers.

At most of the Japanese restaurants I go to here in California (mostly in the Bay Area and Central California), the salads that come with the meals have corn in them, often with a mayonnaise and miso dressing. Since I'm not fond of the dressing, I almost never eat them.

I make a beef roll, wrapping sukiyaki beef in parboiled carrots and green beans, slather them with teriyaki sauce, and broiled.

See if you can find some that were grown in California. I get satsumas, clementines and fairchilds that are grown in the Central Valley and they are very sweet.

I've done something similar to taco rice before, were I brown ground meat, add uncooked rice, taco seasoning, and chicken broth, and cook it until the rice is done. It's never occured to me to put it in maki sushi though. I'll have to try that. My favorite local Japanese restaurant has a beef and green onion maki on their menu. I haven't tried it though. Cheryl

Sometimes they put temporary tattoos in the botan boxes rather than stickers... that's what was in the last box I bought.

The Buddhist temple that my mother's family attends does mochitsuki every year. The first batch and last batch of the day are always pounded by hand, using improvised usu (big metal mixing bowls set in concrete inside galvanized steel wash tubs) and traditional kine. All of the batches between get the usu/kine treatment, then get run though machines and hand rolled. The Buddhist temple my husbands family goes to sometimes has a mochitsuki demonstration for the Sunday school a couple of weeks after New Years, using my in-laws stone usu and another family's kine.

Bao is the Chinese name. It's my absolute most favorite thing to get in dim sum restaurants, and I pick up a few of the baked kind when I go to the local Pan Asian market.

I'm going to try making the jam too. Mom's going to ship some kaki to me on Saturday.

Kaki... god I'm so jealous. My grandparents have a huge kaki tree in the backyard, off of which the sweetest kaki I have ever eaten come from. My mom brings home a big shopping bag full every fall, but since I'm 400 miles away, I'm stuck paying anywhere from $1-$2 per pound for ones that aren't quite as good. In baking, I use fuyu kaki just like apples.

I've done this before. Before my eldest was diagnosed with egg and soy allergies, I used to make san shoku donburi. Rice with tamago soboro, niku soboro and green peas.

I'm not fond of sweetened eggs either, although I do like to drizzle sweetened shoyu over plain scrambled eggs on a hot bowl of rice.

I've had them before, and I find that they're less sweet than the orange sweet potatoes or "yams" here in the US. I can find Japanese sweet potatoes at Whole Foods Market occasionally, and I like them done up in tempura (along with green beans). American sweet potatoes make lousy tempura.

I'm also quite fond of UFO yakisoba. I've managed to find the "fresh" version at the local Pan-Asian megamart. I use the Maruchan variety if they're out.

But what about including fast food places? The OP did say "be brutally honest". ;-) ← In that case, for that weekend it was Mc Donalds and In-N-Out. We were on a road trip, as with my oldest son's food allergies, those are places where we can always find "food" he can eat.

Ah... as far as Glu-Cola goes, the lemon-lime flavor is the easiest to get down, particularly if it's ice cold. The orange one was pretty nasty. I had to down a bottle each time I was pregnant.

salt umeboshi lemon pepper ginger garlic

Four words: Fish Flavored Beef Jerky. I was at the yearly bazaar that the Japanese Buddhist church that my IL's go to, and they were handing out samples of it at the booth they were selling beer, sake and soft drinks at.. That stuff violated so many levels of wrongness.