JasonTrue

I've never seen it that way, but since curry pan in Japan usually involves some sort of shredded pork or other meat, I haven't eaten it very often. (In Seattle one of the local Japanese-style bakeries made theirs only with potato so I've tasted a not-very-remarkable version, and unwittingly eaten some made with pork).

Gaku Homma's Japanese Country Cooking, while not without a few faults (my early edition has some translation errors and a couple of factual goofs), is a pretty good introduction to traditional techniques, history and folklore. He's more focused on describing what's behind the food than say, precise recipes. However, he doesn't cover much of the urban cuisine that people associate with Japan (sushi, okonomiyaki, and so on); he's more focused on the kind of food that people in rural areas, particularly around Akita where he's from, ate.

The left, lower item is a "curry donut" and the center, lower item is "curry pan" or curry bread.

I can't believe I missed the Icheon pottery festival by one day I went to it about 4 years ago, but it was in the fall that year, so I had just assumed I had no chance... Hiromi and I just grabbed some "amai amai" corn from a yatai at Hirosaki park, Aomori prefecture and pronounced it "very sweet"... I tasted it and thought, really? This is so ordinary... Then I realized that the corn I usually buy from Sosio's in the summertime, or even most average grocery stores, has been hybridized to the point of extreme sweetness and outdoes even the sweetest corn in Japan, and presumably Korea. However, I often crave the soy-sauce grilled corn sold all over the place during festivals and in street-food heavy areas in Japan... I noticed it in Korea, too, but for whatever reason was always too full to indulge, and it was usually sold in pairs, already wrapped in plastic, and presumably fairly close to room-temperature.

Surely true for the wasabi, but I believe the vinegar is used to simulate the fermented rice-fish combination that was the most notable characteristic in the dish from which sushi evolved.

I might be in the minority, but I kind of like no-reservations policies, at least some of the time. One time I made the mistake of going to Marco's Supper Club, which was completely empty but totally booked. The four of us were forced to sit at the bar, because they had no tables (only about 20 empty ones). We were there about an hour, ate and drank a fair amount, and during that time, almost nobody ever actually occupied any of said booked tables. On a school night, which is the best time to actually go out to eat for an urban dweller, though perhaps not to be in a scene, or to be drinking, no-reservations policies rarely end up being a problem. The best time to go to Lark, or any popular restaurant, is on a Tuesday or Wednesday night. There are fewer commuters, fewer scenesters, and sometimes better food. I know the weekend is date night, but I find myself increasingly impatient with the waits (even with reservations) at the better places around town on Fridays and Saturdays. No reservations policies on weekends when I go out on impulse often ends up meaning I get seated faster than if the same place took reservations. Many waiting-list-only places happily take a cell phone number and call, so I can go have a cocktail next door while waiting. Anyway, for a place like Marazul, if it's still in that highly-crowded see-and-be-seen mode, I'd much rather avoid the whole fiasco of weekend dining.

My crack research team (namely, me doing jetlagged wiki and google searches) indicates that it's actually ssalbap ( 쌀밥), however, in Icheon, ssalbap has a very specific meaning. Most of my Seoul friends were just thinking that "ssalbap" means we ordered rice, which in the strictest sense is true, but not quite the whole story... However, the ceramics gallery owner I visited in Heyri knew what it was instantly. He explained to his wife in Korean what we ordered based on my abortive English explanation, and ssalbap was enough of a shorthand for her to understand. (Most likely as a pottery collector he's spent a fair amount of time in Icheon). I'm recovering from the painful decision of some well-meaning friends of mine to take me to a restaurant I'd never heard of called "Bennigan's" last night. Neighboring Insadong, no less... I should have considered the bright green neon sign bad news, but I didn't know what I was getting into until I had already agreed. When we got inside I detected the distinctive stench that all American family restaurants serving lots of fried potatoes and large mechanically sanitized plates share. The highlight of the meal was a fizzy frozen strawberry lemonade, which probably would have made the meal tolerable if the restaurant had the good sense to make it with three or four shots of vodka. The overcooked spaghetti with the syrupy sweet tomato sauce and various overcooked vegetables was left mostly unfinished... it made Red Robin seem positively gourmet. I asked for some parmesan or gochu flakes, but apparently that's not Irish American enough, and the restaurant doesn't keep any on hand. I was able to dull the pain with some yakgwa and omijacha when we later went to an Insadong tea shop.

Yes, fortunately Korea is an easier place to be a vegetarian than Japan, in spite of higher overall meat consumption. As in Japan and China, I have to make some concessions on things like soup stocks and so on, but small requests are generally accommodated (can you make that jjigae without pork, please?) and there are more foods that are typically prepared without meat or fish than in Japan... I was in Hyundae department store earlier today eyeing all the fresh mountain vegetables... alas, I don't think I'll be doing much cooking here, even though I do have a passable mini-kitchen in my hotel. Tonight's dinner is likely in Insadong... I'm not quite sure where, but it will probably be a fancy tofu place or perhaps Sanchon... I can't quite eat like that in Seattle, so I'm willing to pay the premium for elaborate Korean meals on vacation

Hiromi dug into the crab quite joyfully... As usual, I didn't eat any of the carnivorous/seafoody stuff. I was less observant of things with animals in them

Yes, sorry I haven't been so quick to post myself... except for last night when I was so sleepy it took me two hours just to rouse myself from the hotel to fetch dinner, I've barely kept up with email and the like. I've been waking up at 6am every day, though. I've have posted the first half of the meal we were served at Pulhyanggi Saturday night in Seoul. (two extravagant meals in one day!) (Pulhyanggi, part 1) Here are the rest of our our Icheon trip photos, including the part where our bus driver got pulled over for violating various traffic laws. The rest of our Pulhyanggi experience should be posted within the next day, and I'll post some Namdaemun market photos as well. (We learned that we shouldn't speak or respond to Japanese in Namdaemun market if we want even moderately fair prices).

A nearby Korean market keeps dried persimmons in the freezer. That should work. Savory recipes for fresh persimmons I've done... for dried ones, not so much. There is a fairly well known Indiana pie recipe though...

While certainly not Chinese, the fortune cookie wasn't originally catering to American tastes. (If they were, they would have been much sweeter anyway). Near as anyone can tell, they evolved from Japanese sweet sembei, and most sources agree that they were invented by a Japanese American who presented them as business gifts enclosed with thank you notes. A few years later, a Chinese-American noodle company started producing them with fortunes inside and they quickly became popular.

They're upside down and I used 1 inch muffin forms, but the texture is totally different than muffins (a kind of indescribable crispiness that yields without breaking). There's no yolk, for one thing. The flour quantity is very minimal; the nuts (typically almonds) are proportionally more than the flour. And the number one difference: brown butter! I've sometimes baked them flat and sliced them into cubes, as Licorous seems to do in my hood. Those look like upside-down muffins. How are they different from muffins? ←

Top Pot is a dangerous thing... now 2 out of the 4 weeks in my new day job we've had a bunch of them brought in. Since I also work a short hop from Belle Epicurean (aka Belle's Buns) and Gelatiamo, I really have to make sure I get more exercise. Tony Bourdain covered a strange-ish Portland place that has maple bars with bacon on them, to which he responded favorably... I bet that could get some TV coverage in Japan if it were offered there. I do wish I could buy fresh An donuts in Seattle. The few Japanese-style bakeries in Seattle (Fresh Flours, Seabell, Hiroki) don't have deep fryers. Though I think an donuts are kind of disappearing in Japan, too. Hiromi commented that Krispy Kreme had done a good job of mob marketing, which seems to be essential to creating an initial following in Japan... But she didn't seem to hold out much hope for them, based on her experience with their donuts in Seattle. (I think they were brought to the office where she did an internship, so they weren't the "hot donuts now" experience) Personally, I find their signature donut too sugary and the others too artificial-tasting, and I suspect that over the long term Japanese will react similarly. Either K.K. will adapt to local tastes or fail. (Hiromi seems to prefer the vegan Mighty-O donuts in Seattle; I find them less appealing than Top Pot's). Occasionally in Japan I get a craving for Mr. Donut. Azuki cream, matcha glaze, etc... hmm... dangerous.

I was craving the idea of black sesame financiers. The first attempt wasn't quite what I was after, but I made some tweaks, and this version tasted pretty nice: Kurogoma financiers with kuromitsu (from my blog) It's served with kuromitsu, a Japanese molasses-like syrup, which makes it even better. The recipe, hopefully reasonably well recorded, is here .

"flocon d'avoine" or "flocons d'avoine" seem relatively easy to find online, so perhaps online shopping would work. Rolled oats were, to the best of my knowledge, invented in Europe (perhaps it was somewhere in the UK, but still...), so I can't imagine they'd be hard to find in an E.U. world. In Germany rolled oats were often incorporated into multi-grain breads, and I could swear I saw some breads in Amsterdam made with some. If they weren't in the baking ingredients section of a typical middlebrow supermarket, I found them among other cereals, muesli, and so on. In Dutch, havervlokken are also relatively easy to find online, with some Dutch brands and a number of Belgian sites coming up within the first two pages of results. One online source (published by the Mormon church) indicated that in Belgium that rolled oats would also be found near other cereals.

I find "housemade" to be occasionally useful as a descriptor, as it distinguishes items that are readily available from foodservice vendors (mayonnaise, bread, pickles, etc). I don't care whether they say "housemade" or "homemade"... a restaurant is a house of cuisine rather than a home, so I'm happy with the former and not pedantic if they use the latter.

I'm not sure I understand... They were reasonably widely available in Germany, and certainly so in the UK... In German they're called Haferflocken. Why would you need to find a substitute?

Seattle also has the "Dry Soda company", which is fairly nice... sounds like it's in a similar vein.

Almost every use of beans in Chinese cuisine I can think of (or Japan, for that matter) is either sweetened or fermented, with the notable exception of soybeans. Mung beans, white beans, something similar to azuki (red beans) are all used in sweet dishes. Fermented black beans are used in sauces, and perhaps a few other fermented beans beyond the obvious soybeans (miso/den men jang). Savory applications for non-soy beans in Asia are relatively sparse...

According to a Polish neighbor of mine in Germany who also learned Russian, Pierogy and Piroshky are actually the same root with different shrinking suffixes. (Erniedrigung in German, if I remember correctly) (Edit: I should say two different diminutive forms... forgetting my linguistics vocabulary) However, pierogy are decidedly the Polish/Russian equivalent of ravioli, jiaozi, gyoza, etc. Piroshky are Russian stuffed breads. Piroshky Piroshky in Seattle serves both, I believe, but focuses mostly on the stuffed breads. I don't recall the Granville market place having Piroshky, but they did have vareniky/pelmeni/pierogy. Seattle, and even more so Bellevue, had a wave of Russian immigration in the latter half of the 80s, and some tech-related migration after that. Sorry I can't help with finding piroshky in Vancouver, but I would be shocked if there weren't a few options. There used to be an even better Russian restaurant in downtown Bellevue up until about 6 years ago, though they had awful service. They flopped when they decided to move to a bigger, more expensively decorated place closer to Microsoft, and their version 2 restaurant has since become some sort of Indian restaurant. Is piroshky really the same thing as perogies? I did a bit of searching on the web and many sites describe them as bread or pie-like turnovers. Apparently it's also called pirozhok (singular) pirozhiki (plural). There use to be a lovely Russian Ukranian resturant on Main Street next to Heritage Hall (near 14th) that served the best perogies and piroshkys. What was interesting was, the restaurant was always full of Chinese people. Those perogies must be reminiscent of dim sum dumplings maybe...? Does anyone know what happened to that restaurant? Did the close permanently or did they move? ←

I'm finding that as I change my eating habits, and as average restaurant bills steadily climb in Seattle, Japan is starting to seem similar in price to what I'm spending these days in the US. While I don't find $6 soft drinks in Seattle yet, wine or sake by the glass is roughly the same price as in the US, and a typical dinner seems to work out to be similar to all but the cheapest Seattle options. Sales tax, generous tipping, and irritatingly large portions in the US make urban dining in the US pretty pricy. Plus right now the exchange rate is favorable for the US dollar... I just realized prices appear to be substantially cheaper when I arrive April 27 than my trip last March. My parents are planning to come to Japan with me this fall, and they weren't shocked by average hotel prices at all. (I usually stay in a weekly apartment when I'm in Tokyo for at least 8 days, though... that makes things even cheaper).

It's also worth pointing out that in Japan the age puffs used for inari are almost always simmered with water or dashijiru seasoned with soy sauce, mirin, and sometimes sugar briefly before using, so the Japanese culinary convention would be not to add any additional soy sauce at serving time. It's rare (maybe not unheard of) to add additional soy sauce to dishes already seasoned with it. I like my inari with beni-shouga or, in a pinch, kizami-shouga.

I just looked in the refrigerator at my booty from Beecher's last Saturday, and wow... you're right... I never realized I was paying $30.95/lb for that cheese. But it is certainly worth it. Tonight I baked a bit on a baguette with asparagus, onions, slathered with a bit of brown butter. Intense. Dangerous. Hiromi is quite addicted to blue cheese in general, and that one in particular... whenever I have the Rogue River blue handy she eats most of it.

This one matters only if you cut lettuce and store it for several hours. The lettuce will brown prematurely because the cell walls have been cut; torn lettuce tends to tear along, rather than through, the cell walls. If you serve and eat the lettuce straightaway, it won't suffer. ←