Ohba

I tested it back in winter and it's about neutral. But I think it's just bad soil structure and lacking good organic matter, so I'll dig plenty in this winter.

Thanks. That will be useful, and one thing I want to do a lot better with next year's plantings is get spacing, grouping and arrangement much more organized. This year was a bit haphazard, so the garden is not an especially pretty sight. As eating the results is my first priority, I can live with that, but better organization should mean more space to use. It was interesting to see what succeeded and failed. I ended up with more eggplants than I really needed as a result of some cheap seedlings, 70 yen apiece, that I really just threw in the ground and left to themselves. More of those next year, I think. Everything else, I grew from seed. Cucumbers were very easy, as was zucchini, which is still producing. It takes up a lot of space, and I just planted a single seed, so God knows what to do with the other few dozen seeds in the packet. I was a bit surprised that pumpkins failed, I had been given some seeds, and they germinated well but didn't thrive. Never even got close to producing an actual pumpkin. Spring onions and chives - total failure. Green beans were mildly successful but the plants didn't look healthy, and the crop was small. All herbs in pots either struggled or died, with the exception of basil and dill, while the same herbs in the ground thrived. This was despite some considerable attention to the pot plants - I'd prefer the herbs in pots because they look good and it saves garden space. In the ground, even lemongrass is reasonably happy, and has been okay into November this year. Nira - grows wild, probably from the neighbouring garden. Can't pull it up (and throw away) fast enough. "Perpetual spinach" is an easy grower, very useful as extra green stuff for salads, or as a spinach substitute for cooking. Rocket and radish were both easy, green pepper and chillies reasonably so. I put tomatoes in way too late, but they stayed in good condition. They didn't start ripening until the end of October (but SHIT they taste good), and a lot are still green now. No, the real problem is wanting to grow everything, and not having the space. An allotment is starting to look like a strong possibility.

Very interesting to read your post, Gautam. By the way, can anyone here give advice on planting during November or December? (greater Tokyo area). What to plant, and any other handy information you can think of. I'm not doing SGF, but space is rather limited, probably somewhat under 50 square metres of usable ground. It's my first winter season, and I also have in mind the possibility of using it to just get it ready for spring. The soil contains a lot of stones still, and doesn't have ideal structure yet, although spring, summer and autumn were quite successful for growing vegetables and herbs.

"Indian chilli powder" will be dried chillies, powdered. Wikipedia has a page on chilli powder, but in trying to distinguish between types, what's up there at the moment seems to contain some very questionable or incomplete information. You'll be able to find information about cranberry beans with some basic internet searching, but here's a page that should be useful: Cooks Thesaurus (Beans) If you can't find the chilli mix you're after, the four of five base ingredients should be easy enough to find, so that you can mix your own. You just need to hunt on the net for a mix recipe that you like the like the look of. And an advantage is that it could well taste better than something that's been sitting around premixed for too long.

Don't get me wrong, there's some great food to be had in England, if you're lucky enough to find a good market or specialist vendors, or you grow your own. The situation is very patchy though. Try getting good quality fresh fish and seafood in some (many) cities. And I can't help thinking that if England looks so appealing, where you come from must be in a really bad way. You'll be blown away by the rest of Europe. My main impression on my trips home to the UK is that the food ought to be so much better. A walk around my local Tesco - who have effectively supplanted the independent food suppliers in my town over the last twenty years - doesn't do much to dispel that impression. Britain and the States share far too many awful food habits, which companies like Tesco* will be only too happy to export to the rest of the world. Whether they're a symptom or a cause of our lousy food culture has ceased to matter. *Some information from Wikipedia to give an idea of what a force Tesco has become in Britain: "According to TNS Superpanel Tesco's share of the UK grocery market in the 12 weeks to 18 June 2006 was 31.4%. Across all categories, over £1 in every £8 of UK retail sales is spent at Tesco." By the way, there's a book by Joanna Blythman called Bad Food Britain. The title is self-explanatory. To be honest, it's a bit of a grumpy whine, and the style grates (referring to "Bad Food Britain" instead of just Britain is for tabloid hacks, not supposedly serious writers). I found myself wondering if she's prone to exaggeration. She focused on ready meals a little too much - do people really eat that many of them? But then, maybe the reality is actually even worse than I thought.

Has this been answered yet? There's the obvious, eGullet's Indian food forum, which has some incredibly useful information for cooks of all abilities - detailed descriptions of how to properly cook in the spices in, for example, so that their flavour is brought out fully. Or the discussion on making paneer, which is a perfect demonstration of what a forum can do that a cookbook or TV program can't. Madhur Jaffrey has published a range of cookbooks in the UK, all the ones I've seen are well worth picking up. She's probably the best known writer on Indian food in Britain. The earlier ones published by Penguin are text only, but still excellent. There are also her various television series, all BBC, I think. Interesting, though some of these fall more into the food+travel+local colour category. There are many other good writers, and dozens of fine books on Indian food are available nowadays. There are plenty of websites too. You just need to filter them a bit more carefully---some post a lot of recipes that are obviously adapted to local (non-Indian) taste, ingredients, and cooking methods, and I don't think Indian food is well served by those kinds of shortcuts.

First, some mathematics. "But every so often I begin to wonder if there could be a different way, a way to eat good quality stuff and do it cheaper than I do now." + "It is nothing for the two of us to use a whole pound of meat and throw out the left overs, if there is any." = Incredible. To achieve your aim of cutting the bills, you need to organize and educate yourself, probably nothing more than that. Why educate? Well, what you said above is a glaring contradiction. So is your observation that healthy food is more expensive, when you also said that you eat "huge, I mean huge" portions, suitable for four rather than two people. Portion size is your choice, but it's worth either considering cutting down, or accepting that what you spend now is a lifestyle choice. Educating yourself also means finding out how other people eat, reading cookbooks, accumulating food knowledge, etc. You say you like cooking Chinese, well you chose the perfect example, it can be incredibly economical (e.g. congee). But you probably have to know your Chinese food quite well to really do it effectively (free education is available over at the EG Chinese forum.) Budgeting is where the organization comes in: a monthly budget is handy, but it's easier to set a daily target, or at least a target for each time you go shopping. In my household (we're in Japan) we have a daily budget that converts to about $6.85. That's for our evening meal for two. I don't really cook for leftovers, as everything gets eaten on the day usually, and I never buy to freeze. Our daily budget covers fresh ingredients but not basics like rice/sauces/oil/salt/sugar etc. There are often days when we can come in way under budget. But we eat an awful lot of fresh fish and shellfish. Even so, we don't find our budget excessively difficult to meet. Having the daily figure in my head helps me choose what to buy and cook.

Chappie, I am envious! I have to buy lemongrass in Asian stores. In one of the stores, they have packages of ground-up lemongrass. As you have done that before for a rub, you might want to do up packages of just ground up lemongrass and freeze them. The ones I buy are in blocks about the thickenss and size of a sandwich. I usually chip off a chunk, thaw and use. It seems to retain the flavour. ← Easy to grow, if you have some garden space and live in the right zone. You can buy a fresh stalk, stick it in an inch of water in a glass for a couple of days, and it should start to sprout roots. Then shove it in the ground, water it from time to time, and you're done. It's not very ornamental, though.

Those should be very different, although the season seems around the same. Hokkaido hairy crabs are sea crabs, different colour, size and look from the Chinese hairy crab. In my own please-don't-flame-me opinion, the Hokkaido crabs are far better. Certainly the crab I had at Ye Shanghai in Hong Kong, if it can be considered at all representative, was not a good introduction (and it's an overrated restaurant, by the way). Cost me HK$400, and it was SO ordinary. That's the equivalent of 6,000 yen, for which in Japan you can expect (and demand) excellence. There's a photo of Japanese hairy crab in this Tsukiji thread: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=94730 Scroll down to about photo no. 17 or 18 - you'll know it when you see it. Maybe someone can post a link to Chinese hairy crab photos for comparison. Shouldn't be hard to find in Google though.

Certainly wouldn't. The site is www.lemagnolie.com. You'll have to navigate around a bit to get to the olive oil. They're a farm and agriturismo (very nice one, too). It's not the best designed website, though. The oil however, is wonderful.

That's some nauseating sales copy. I don't think I'd want tasting notes from a man who talks about "insanely bright" olive oil, or "game plans", come to that. What a cheeseball. In the linked discussion, someone commented that their olive oil, picked up on a trip to Tuscany, was better. It's certainly worth looking into ordering direct from producer countries. That's how I've been getting it. The stuff I bought is FedExed, so it only takes 3 days to arrive in Japan from Italy, it's about 110 euros for 6 litres, shipping included, and the quality is fantastic. It's from Abruzzo, not Tuscany, but I can slum it.

That's a bold claim. I don't think even supermarkets have tried to cop credit for that yet.

We British are indeed breezy. Oh yes.

Just to clarify, I'm not calling North Americans shallow for not having a knowledge of regional Japanese cuisine. I'm saying that their knowledge of Japanese regional cuisine is shallow. There's a difference there, the former being judgmental and the latter a statement of fact. Quite right. My mistake.

I can see both sides of the argument here. First off, not that many restaurants are about education, they're just businesses. So visiting a few even supposedly authentic restaurants isn't going to be much of an education in a country's cuisine. And without visiting the country in question it's almost impossible to get a proper idea even of the ingredients used, let alone the subtleties of regional variation, even if you read up. So is it shallow that North Americans don't appreciate this? Not really. I mean, why would they? On the other hand, I can only feel pity for the kind of people who won't eat fish or try to expand their horizons a little. That's just pointless. Still, excessive reverence for another country's food, or timidity about one's own supposed ignorance, can be going too far the other way. High-priced Japanese restaurants overseas perpetuated a high-end image for Japanese food, and perhaps kaiseki has encouraged us to believe that it is all about spareness, beautiful presentation, seasonal ingredients. Of course that plays an important role in a lot of food even at the lower end. However, there's a lot of earthier, hearty foods, large portions, and lack of subtlety to be found as well. Which is also good. One of the best, or at least most enjoyable introductions to food and of course drink in Japan is to hit an izakaya. A good izakaya. Myself, I don't spend much time in the realm of kaiseki (actually I've never had a kaiseki meal) but I eat plenty at both the expensive end when I can afford it, and the cheap end, and I don't think I'll ever get tired of Japanese food. Probably won't ever understand it especially well either, but that doesn't bother me.

Well, I agree with you on quite a few points, probably most of them. Personally, though, I'm not a huge fan of farm subsidies in the first place, and the distortion you mention is one of those absurdities that subsidies tend to give rise to. It's been quite interesting hunting around on the net for figures, in terms of things I didn't know about before. Some of the US figures are very illuminating - this was originally a fruit thread, so I guess I shouldn't hijack it any further - but I'd recommend having a look at the tonnage produced (similar to Japan's), and annual rice income (not impressive considering the subsidy; the USDA website has the stats). I mention these because Japan's well known for its carefully protected and heavily subsidized rice industry, and journalists rarely miss opportunities to mention it (as in the article on fruit that started this thread). American rice subsidies seem to be less well known, or at least less talked about.

Don't all subsidies involve that process though? Take the US, a heavy subsidizer and heavy exporter. I did a check on rice subsidies in Japan and America. These are the first stories I located where a figure is given: Times, US subsidies BBC, Japan subsidies These figures are 2 billion dollars a year for Japan, and 1.3 billion dollars in a single year for the United States. And according to the Economist, the American rice subsidy accounts for 8 percent of total farm subsidies (link). I'm aware that taking from 3 different sources could be a problem, and I'm open to suggestions on more accurate or better figures and ways to compare, but a few things are striking here. First of course, is that in pure dollar terms, whatever the total tonnage, America appears to be spending (in subsidies) over half of what Japan does to produce rice. In Japan's case though, its production sustains its population of 130 million people, and rice is unquestionably its most important crop. Additionally most of the rice produced is consumed domestically rather than exported, and almost all domestically consumed rice is Japanese. There is a restricted market to keep out exports, but I think the question of fair trade becomes moot if you read the Oxfam claims on how America subsidizes crops and what happens to the rice it produces. This is always the problem with subsidies - questions of fair trade go right out the window. Is Japan's subsidy system less worthy if it allows a predominance of small, family run farms to survive than America's or Europe's, which may favour large and even corporate-scale businesses that in turn export to countries who can't compete?

There was an article in the Guardian newspaper this week about Giorgio Locatelli, and the book. Link.

I think the quality of fruit and most other food in Japan is extremely good. It's true that uniform looks can be overemphasized. It's also true that you can find gimmicky food at wacky prices. God do overseas journalists love those... It's also true that you can find bad food. But in general, the freshness, taste and quality of food, whether locally produced or imported, are beyond reproach, and paying more here for a particular product usually gets you a better version of that product, up until the law of diminishing returns sets in (that applies in most fields of production anyway, not just food). Sure, it's more expensive than many other places (though direct comparisons are not always appropriate - try fish for example). And subsidies are one but definitely not the only reason. Looking at it from the other side of the coin, you could argue that Americans (to take the article's country of origin) are almost rabidly devoted to low prices and high quantities. It's practically seen as a right. It hasn't necessarily served the food culture well though.

I second that.

Last weekend, I had some fennel plants to get rid of, and they went very well with lentils. After boiling the lentils and adding them to onion and garlic softened in a small amount of butter, the chopped greens were added. It was purely an experiment, but I think the flavours go very nicely together. It might look like a big amount of greens, but fennels use up a lot of air and after chopping, it won't be nearly as much. Even with about a quarter or third of greens to lentils, the aniseed flavour of the greens didn't overpower the dish. I'd make it again, but I haven't got any plants left now. If you've got any "bulb" at the bottom, you can slice it thinly and add it raw to salads. Get rid of any outer parts that look fibrous, first.

That was why I said "the average consumer". A $3 price difference per pound eked out over numerous plates of pasta adds up to cents per serving, not dollars. At the risk of sounding callous about the less well-off, most people can take that hit. This is before even factoring in the lower quantity required when using proper cheese instead of soapy ol' Kraft flakes. Gram for gram, a half decent parmesan will stretch much further.

As indeed they often are. However, not because they are cheap, but because they are made by companies like Kraft. Kraft might be cheaper, I wouldn't know, but a little real Parmesan goes a very long way. It's not beyond the reach of the average consumer. Actual money saved with the processed product is probably as minimal as actual labour saved. The main saving with Kraft is flavour.

The Japanese have a lot more than sushi - there's quite a variety of raw meat on offer in restaurants and izakayas. Horsemeat, chicken, and beef are very common, and duck, lamb, wild boar, and others are also eaten. I don't know the full list, but as Japanese restaurant owners and food connoisseurs can be very adventurous, you can bet it will be long.

True enough. But I bet I'm not alone in having learned over the years that two things you will never get definitive and reliable information on, whether from knowledgeable friends or published reviews, are films and restaurants. Reviews and recommendations can be a rough guide and an interesting read, but at some point you just have to follow your own judgement.