JasonTrue

I can't imagine... Although I'm quite fine with a saucepan and I base my proportions on recommendations from Gaku Homma's book, I've never seen burnt, dry, or soupy rice in my rice cooker. (My girlfriend seems to believe rice cooker rice is superior, so I don't use the stovetop method as often as I used to). But it's a fairly decent Japanese rice cooker that does a good job of trapping steam and making fuzzy adjustments to cooking to avoid. I don't think it's capable of burning rice, but if I leave the rice in there overnight in "keep warm" mode, the rice touching the vessel becomes a bit yellowish and crunchy, almost like the old "kama-meshi" pots. Soupy only happens when I use a lot of water and the "okayu" mode.

Basmati is long-grain, and decidedly not bland. Actually 2:1 seems like a fairly large amount of water for Calrose or Japanese rice... I usually use 3:2 for small amounts in a conventional pot, and about 4:3 for larger amounts. Alternatively, whatever the rice cooker tells me, which should work out to be pretty close to 4:3 or so unless I'm making okayu.

Baumkuchen is decidedly German, but is decidedly easier to find in Japan than in Germany. I remember seeing it at a small number of places... I suppose it might be easier to find in larger cities than Marburg.

Maybe it was just the person doing it, but when I've had rice prepared via the boil and drain method, I've found that most of the charm of the rice--texture, aroma and flavor--disappears. The rice sometimes seems waterlogged. I don't get it. I've seen people do it, but I didn't realize that this was a "technique." Long grain rice won't really stick to itself much using the normal steaming or absorption methods, anyway. But then, I might be strange. I cook farro in a rice cooker.

My experience involved a bunch of middle aged Germanic waitresses and several indistinguishable overcooked mishmashes from completely separate sections of the menu, served in dramatic dunce-cap topped metal serving bowls. Yes, 'suck' was too kind.

Machines I saw at Hoteres Japan the last few years took a larger block of ice and a die/mold of some sort and I believe melted that into the right shape... usually large spheres, soccer balls, etc.

I don't really know because I presumed the worst when I read the ingredients on the Zen Green Tea Liqueur bottle. I just use matcha, sugar and gin and infuse for about a week. However, the Hermes one in Japan was only about $10/bottle to Zen's $27-30. Tantakatan (the shiso shochu) is actually pretty cheap and is somewhat available in North America... I've heard it was served at some place in Vancouver, BC. Although I like it quite a lot, my girlfriend always prefers to bring something more remarkable when she comes to Seattle. Ooh! That sounds good - there's a great selection of sake and shochu at the Japanese markets here in LA, but I've never heard of the shiso flavored version. I recently found a cocktail blog written by a guy in Shizuoka, and I'm very curious to know more about the wasabi liqueur in this cocktail. Jason - I'll look into the matcha liqueur as well. Is it significantly different from the Zen Green Tea Liqueur that's sold over here? ←

I think the "new" news is that the portion sizes in American Chinese restaurants haven't changed that much, and all of the previous warnings that CSPI raised in 1993 are still equally relevant. Considering how typical American families order in US Chinese restaurants, it's not an unfair warning. An order of general tso's chicken and one of sweet and sour deep fried something or other and fried rice and and a token vegetable stir fry for a family of four may be a hideous-sounding choice, but it's not an atypical order. It would be nice if the headline were more precise, indicating that this doesn't reflect traditional Chinese cooking, but how would you compress that into 7 or 8 words? It's partially the headline writers that are at fault, as with nearly every other study that gets mainstream news attention. Considering the size of the plates that make it onto the table here, I would be surprised if the same family actually finished all four dishes in one sitting... In China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan I rarely see portions on the scale of what seems obligatory in suburban vinyl booth-filled "Chinese" restaurants. I sometimes forget that when I stray outside of my usual preferred spots in the Seattle area; the few places I usually go mostly tend to have more sane portions and let me order more variety. The same is true for the kind of Mexican food typically served in US restaurants... CSPI is not making a mountain out of a molehill; they're making noise about the mountains of crap we consume. They're not trying to represent "traditional" cuisine but the restaurant fare Americans know. Perhaps they have some obligation to clarify that they're not making the claim that Chinese are eating unhealthy food, but I think it was reasonably clear from the context, especially if you read their press release rather than a journalistic interpretation of it. The sad thing is that "Chinese restaurant food" is so narrow in scope and so predictable in the US, and yet so foreign to most Chinese. Considering the calorie count on the indicated dumplings... those must be some huge dumplings. I've seen some of those monstrosities in a thankfully defunct Bellevue Chinese restaurant and they were nearly inedible. One fatal flaw in the actual CSPI recommendations is the advice to skip soups to reduce salt intake. Soups in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and even European cuisine, salty as they may be, help moderate appetite impulses, and I recall that another study several years back that indicated people who regularly eat soups consume fewer calories overall than those who don't. And nobody eats a "bowl" of such soups... 10 grams salt in a typical 150-200ml serving would be inedible, so there's no way the study represents proportions in terms of what people actually consume.

I think avoiding Chinese restaurants east of the mountains is a good rule of thumb. I was subjected to a particularly awful one in Yakima many years ago and I wouldn't wish that on anyone....

Paraiso lychee liqueur is nice (and the more popular Dita, but Paraiso seems a bit nicer), and Hermes has a matcha liqueur (too sweet for me, so I make my own). However, I'd recommend asking for some good imo-jochu (sweet potato shochu). I know California has a reasonable variety of shochu these days (especially compared to Washington state... argh), but I suspect there's some higher end stuff that doesn't get here, and I'm also sure the US price is at least double the Japan price, considering how expensive ordinary Iichiko is here.

According to Mari's blog, Lawson, a big convenience store chain in Japan, is starting a promotion to give away non-disposable chopsticks, referred to as keitai hashi. "Keitai" is also short for "mobile phone", so I guess these are "mobile chopsticks."

Scampi is, I believe, Italian for a variety of lobster, which might be a langoustine. However, in the US, you can be pretty sure that you're going to get shrimp.

In China at an unremarkable tourist restaurant en route to the Great Wall, we noticed an item translated as "strange taste nuts" on the English+Chinese menu. I do believe the Chinese text indicated peanuts, but I read only a little bit of Japanese and it only gets me so far in China. Our colleague had been fed chicken testicles at another restaurant in China, and refused to entertain the idea of ordering nuts of any kind, especially if a strange taste was their selling point.

Sounds like curdling to me... Citrus and cream is tricky to marry, which is probably why I am so easily impressed by a tart lemon gelato.

good point... it's a glass canister, right?

Well, the "deliberate" part is bunk. People deliberately eat fugu, knowing that there's some risk, but there's no way the chefs are deliberately leaving poison in or intentionally transferring small amounts of it to the flesh. Japan has liability laws, too... The organs which have high concentrations of the neurotoxin must be carefully removed or they can cause cross-contamination. Small amounts of the toxin, or some other chemical that produces the numbing effect, may be present in the rest of the fish, but are not intentionally added to other parts of the fish. This kind of problem also occurs in other animals, with less immediate consequences: butchering cattle, for instance, often cross-contaminates meat with e. coli because of errors when removing the intestines, for example. (Caveat: I have not, and will not, eat fugu, but this is merely due to my vegetarian habit) There are also different species of fugu with different toxicity attributes: http://www.coara.or.jp/~sueyoshi/data03/fugu03.html This page indicates the gender of the fish also affects the toxicity: http://www.coara.or.jp/~sueyoshi/data03/fugu04.html So does this idea of minute amounts of posion being deliberately left in Fugu have any more reputable source than a novel? ←

Isn't that one of those combinations that curdles? I believe bartenders have particularly offensive names for cocktails that involve Bailey's and citrus.

My blog has a black sesame sauce recipe describing how to make godoufu. I more or less stole that from a Japanese recipe. I think Jo-shinko just translates as rice flour. It's non-glutinous.

I'm hoping asparagus and morel frittata with shallots will be breakfast in just a few weeks.

It's not an everyday menu item for him, but it was Del Cook in Nose Valley (apparently it's technically Osaka, but not exactly in town). Some photos, though we were to distracted eating to take any pictures except of the chef himself and the surroundings, are on: http://blog.jagaimo.com/archive/2004/10/18/269.aspx Which restaurant? I'm just a hop away from Osaka, and I love yuzu! ←

I don't find it grassy, but it is hard do describe. 蓬 is the rarely used kanji for yomogi, which may help your Chinese grocer, if the same kind of yomogi is used. I've found that for some herbs and vegetables common in Japan, China, and Korea, there are often fairly substantial differences; also, some kanji have slightly different meanings... the kanji for yuzu seem to be understood as grapefruit in China.

The "pounded" ones I've had often had a coarse texture. I keep forgetting the name for them (and each region probably has a different name), but the one on my mind is often oblong rather than ball-like. Yomogi (mugwort) or matcha could theoretically be used for the green dango in sanshoku dango, but yomogi is more common. I think the red ones are usually just food coloring (as was the case in the recipe Hiroyuki referred to), but you could use a bit of beet juice.

There are probably more recipes for dango than dango-makers. OK, that's perhaps an exaggeration. But I've had them made from rice flour, pounded rice, glutinous rice, joshinko, with and without yomogi, with various kinds of sauces such as mitarashi dango, or dusted with kinako, or almost plain, sometimes with nori. At home I've made them with a dough including nagaimo and snuck them into suimono. I must have them all!

I have a homemade seville-orange mascarpone sorbet in my freezer right now, concept stolen from a yuzu mascarpone sorbet I had at a French restaurant in Osaka... and I've made lemon-cream cheese (aka "cheesecake") ice cream before... On the other hand, I don't think I'll be making an ice cream with Stilton anytime soon. I'll leave that to Iron Chef.

I'm glad that cupcakes are now starting to make my croissant habit seem like a budget-conscious choice.... When I came back from Germany in 1996, I thought it was extravagant to spend $1.50 on a plain croissant in Seattle when they were only about 70-80 cents in the little university town where I had been living. Now that my Besalu pain au chocolat is cheaper than cupcakes, I won't feel so bad being self-indulgent