Ohba

And what a dull place the world would be if they did.

It sounds like they don't even understand the freedom to express an opinion.

Thanks Torakris - reading down this thread, I was starting to wonder if anyone was going to mention fish! I've often wondered why barbecues in Japan are usually fishless. My memories are mostly of cheap supermarket meat, and half-burned, half-raw vegetables. In the end, that (and the even worse barbecues in Hong Kong) was a sort of negative inspiration for me. When I bought my first barbecue, I decided to try making different food each time, and to do as much fish as meat. The results were always good, and it was very easy to do. Unfortunately, I can't break out the barbecue where I live at the moment, but there's certainly no shortage of great, fresh ingredients to try. Fish should be top of the list.

Most of these things are just pale imitations. Japanese curry and mapo doufu, in particular, are so different that you could barely make the connection between them and the originals if you came later to the Japanese version. I think they are very far from improvements on the original, even if, at their best, they might be quite tasty in their own right. Incidentally, mapo doufu in Hong Kong, or most places outside Sichuan for that matter, is no more authentic than Japanese. It's just a well-known Sichuan dish that's been bastardized for local tastes, and unsurprisingly come off the worse for it. It's hardly even worth comparing Japanese and Indian curry. The term "curry" applied to Indian food covers such a wide variety of dishes and flavours as to be practically useless. Japanese curry resembles few if any of them. It's usually sweet, gluey and often suffers from the spices not being adequately cooked-in.

The store's okay, but the food is just, well, cafeteria food.

I wouldn't be in any hurry if I was you.

Thanks, Helen. I think I'll be getting one of those from the Rakuten list, then.

Thanks for the links. I live in a UR kodan apartment.

I want to buy a water filter to install on my kitchen tap. Our tap water has quite a strong chemical taste that makes it useless for drinking. What should I look for in a water filter of the types commonly sold in Japan? I see that basic prices are around 6-15000 yen although my wife tells me that on the forum where she posted questions, people were talking about 100,000 yen filters. I reckon that's strictly for the freaks - all I want is for the water to taste good enough to drink after filtering. Any advice/recommendations?

I think I've seen manuka honey all over the place in the Tokyo area. As you say, it's not cheap, but it is quite easy to find, even in non-specialist supermarkets. I was also interested to find out that a pot plant I bought a few months back, called New Zealand tea tree, not a name I was familiar with, is the same thing as manuka. Under my care, it passed away, unfortunately. I'll have to try again next year. Nothing but the best for our local bees.

No way is there anything wrong with black olives just for being black olives. However, if you're buying a cheapish canned product then you are not tasting olives as they should be tasted, and it's that they're canned, not that they're black, that's the problem. Fine if you enjoy them anyway, but olives are not a generic product, and they can be so much better than that.

Really? Is that a comment on the type of restaurants you eat at, or your cooking skills? Much as I love to cook, and to eat at home, I would emphatically disagree. ← Unless you eat at only the highest-end places, or those that specialize in molecular, you can do it, with a little time, patience and the right tools. ← Maybe you. That doesn't automatically extrapolate to "most of us", or to "can" (as opposed to "could", diluted by the qualification that we need the "time, patience and the right tools"). No, I almost never eat at high-end restaurants, they're out of my budget. But of the places I do eat at, I don't believe that what I "can" make is equivalent to what they do make. Not because their skills are so rarefied that no one can acquire them, but because home cooks don't necessarily make the kind of food that is served in restaurants, they don't have, or need, the same training, and they are not likely to have access to the same resources. When I eat out, it's for the food, not usually (or at least not primarily) for the service, and the idea that I'm saving myself the bother of washing up or making a mess in the kitchen never occurs to me. "A little time, patience and the right tools" could apply to the acquisition of skills in almost any field, say, furniture making, but then it's a long leap to the assumption that most of us, even if we are practitioners, are sufficiently skilled to replicate the work of a professional. Even just 85 percent of it.

Really? Is that a comment on the type of restaurants you eat at, or your cooking skills? Much as I love to cook, and to eat at home, I would emphatically disagree.

I agree. Those descriptions don't even belong on a menu. If it's good enough, the food should be able to speak for itself. If you absolutely need to know more, you can always ask. The word "heirloom" is valid in terms of the seeds and the plant variety, but that should be of interest primarily to the grower. I don't believe a diner's experience is greatly enriched by knowing that the tomato is heirloom any more than it would be by being informed of the specific variety that goes into the salad or pasta sauce.

Ah, bickering over the taste of Roman food. How can we not love the Gullet?

It's rarely the studies themselves that are at fault, but the reporting of the studies. I think this has long been a source of frustration to many scientists, and I recall seeing a complaint that even the science correspondents of newspapers are prone to badly misinterpreting the findings of studies. The effect is intensified when non-specialized journalists take a positive or negative finding and twist it to "drinking red wine is good for you" or "according to a new study, you might want to think twice before reaching for that slice of cake", which reduces it to the level of the moronic.

Thanks again.

The McLibel book might have been published 5 or 6 years ago, but the original leaflet on which the libel case was based was from 1986. This of course, was the pre-internet age, but by the time the case had been concluded, 1997, the leaflet, What's Wrong with McDonald's, was more widely and easily available than ever before. Of course, since then, they've had worse publicity from Fast Food Nation and, particularly, Supersize Me. But then, as McDonald's pointed out, they would never advocate eating fast food every day for a month. Does this count? http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/schinamp_12sep98.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/187292.stm

If only I did, I'd be rich, a man of my intelligence. However, I buy bottled water because the local tap water in my part of Japan tastes of chlorine or some such chemical. I'd much prefer to drink tap water, but it tastes unpleasant enough to render tea or any drink with ice cubes in it just about undrinkable. I don't know if this constitutes poor purification or just a difference of opinion between the water company and the end-user. I keep meaning to get around to buying a water filter, but first I need to find out a bit more about how they work and if they work. In the meantime, Coca Cola (yes, they have long tentacles) have found a way to get money from me, which is the only way they'll do it, because their flagship product tastes like piss.

The price is good, certainly. I think the dimensions might be okay. Until my budget straightens out, this could be the one. Thanks for the link.

"Drizzle." Especially as used on menus. Oh and snobbery, it may be, if you insist, but linguistic, not food snobbery.

Thanks, there's some good information there. I'll probably go with a microwave/oven type. The sizes look okay, for the bigger ones, anyway. I'm somewhat constricted on price, and it seems they are the best value, compared to oven-only types. I'm still trying to work out how a tiny convection oven, not good for much, gets to be 30,000 yen. Perhaps there's just no demand for them here?

Probably not breaking new ground here, but which food words/phrases make you wince? A very short and incomplete list: Babyish: I've got a certain horror of cute abbreviations like "cukes" or "veggies". "Delish" is not a word for adults. Or "Yummy". Or "tummy". Vulgar: "Cook-off" "EVOO". Can't we just call it olive oil? Pretentious: "Wok flashed". Stir-fried, more like. "Molecular gastronomy". Odious. Just plain annoying: "(It's) to die for". Be my guest.

So far, I haven't located my source (without an oven, I'd just be torturing myself). In the past I've always gone for quality over price, which was quite easy to do in Hong Kong, as there was both imported free range chicken and local market versions, both good. If the chicken's too cheap, I tend to pass along. I'd rather eat better quality chicken less often. I think I just prefer the largest oven I can afford. I don't want to feel like I'm compromising on size. I'm pretty sure my roasting trays were considerably bigger than 8 inches. I wouldn't want smaller than I had before. If the combination microwaves/convection units don't involve a compromise on oven quality, I'll be more than happy to get one.

As always, thanks for the replies. What I'll be on the lookout for is one with a decent capacity. I'm looking to roast chicken fairly frequently, leg of lamb if it can fit, but never mind turkey, a meat I'm happy to live without. Some of the ovens I've seen, like a convection-only model that I looked at today, wouldn't be much use for roasting anything bigger than a quail. Oven that can't roast a chicken - well what's the point of that? I noticed ovens with steam function for the first time, but I'm not really sure what those are. Toaster ovens would be a non-starter - I've got one already, and it makes very nice, well, toast, but I don't cook with it. Temperature control is too important.