JasonTrue

I like Boka quite a lot (though I'm obligated to mention the disclaimer that Chef Seis has been a good customer for me via Les Cadeaux Gourmets, and I've sold Boka a few yuzu as well). For me, Boka is essentially smartly re-imagined comfort food. The space is beautiful, though self-consciously over-the-top, more than nodding to L.A. for inspiration. Hiromi and I both felt a bit old there on a Friday night (we are 31 and 33)... I'm not sure what was up with all the 21-22 year olds surrounding us, but we were still quite comfortable. I haven't been to Tulio yet even though it's been there for ages.

Yuzu juice has character, but I still think my ponzu isn't finished until I've grated a bit of zest into it. Butter and soy sauce are a fairly good combination, and I think some acid would work with many dishes for which butter-soy sauce tastes good, so ponzu-bata makes sense to me. In Seattle, maitake tend to be about as expensive as shiitake, or sometimes even more expensive than that. Enoki are also surprisingly expensive, though not outrageous. I do like enoki-bata a lot.

Ponzu is really little more than soy sauce, citrus juice, sometimes vinegar, and optional soup stock. Since my nabe usually is konbu-based I find it's enough to just use the liquid that comes from the nabe whenever you put something in your ponzu bowl, so I rarely add any additional dashi. You should also add fresh zest of some citrus (yuzu or bitter orange would be nice), or yuzu ichimi (dried yuzu peel). The bottled ponzu often has additional ingredients. Some manufacturers I've talked with use daidai (bitter orange, like Seville orange), especially if they're from Shizuoka; some use yuzu, some use sudachi. Many use some obnoxious combination of additional "amino acids" (read: msg) and ambiguous flavorings meant to simulate dashi while simultaneously being too bitter to come from a normal concentration of dashi. However, some people actually expect that obnoxiousness Yuzu ponzu or yuzu+daidai ponzu are my favorites. I would just seek out yuzu juice made without salt or preservatives. There's nothing wrong with lemon or lime, it just doesn't taste very Japanese. This time of year you can get seville oranges in the US, so give that a try if you can't find bottled 100% yuzu juice. Kumquats (kinkan) can be nice, but they produce even less juice than yuzu. However, thinly sliced kinkan may produce some of the magic that yuzu peel offers. Mexican limes (aka Key Limes) might be a worthwhile alternative. http://www.ripetoyou.com/ has yuzu sometimes, and seville oranges more often; this time of year, the yuzu won't have more than a few drops of juice, but the skin might be fine.

Send her to "Mura-kara-machi-kara-kan" in Yuurakucho with no particular instructions, and see what happens. It's a regional food specialty shop, featuring gifts from all over Japan. There is usually good yuzu juice there (made without salt or preservatives). There is also a Hokkaido specialty foods shop across the way, and a Okinawan specialty shop a short walk away from there. Similarly interesting shops can be found near the South Exit of Shinjuku station, but Yurakucho is kind of a mecca of packaged specialty foods. My blog has a picture from our hotel bed with some of the stuff we bought in March (and some other more detailed photos on this page. It's now a pilgrimage stop for me.

There was decidedly coffee footage, and a token coffee mention in the "here are some cliched ways I could start this show" opening bit, but nothing in the show particularly focused on a visit to a coffee shop.

More precisely, the highest-priced items on the menu tend to have the lowest margin. If the cost of ingredients is, say, $50 it's usually a hard sell to demand the usual 20-35% cost of ingredients, but you might sell that item for $100, and the pasta or salad that costs $2.00 in ingredients can sell for $10 or even $12. Fast food is sometimes an even worse value, if you're looking from a cost of ingredients perspective. However, I don't pick items on the menu based on "value." If I did, I'd stay home. I am usually buying a complete experience, not just food. On my "I'm just too tired to cook but not too tired to eat" nights, it might not be a very extravagant experience, and maybe I'll be price sensitive, but I'm not weighing the cost of ingredients heavily. On more celebratory occasions, I'm buying someone else's creativity, their indulgence, hopefully the conscientiousness of their staff, and leasing space and time, all at once.

I have a cookbook acquired in Germany that's hard to beat. Jane Drews, "Haste Mopped, Kannste Kochen", or with dialect quirkiness ruined in translation, "Have bike, can cook." This essential but slim volume, with a lobster attached to a tailpipe on the cover, offers practical advice on techniques for cooking with a motorcycle. Cooking times are generally given in kilometers, with some adjustments for engine size. Among the essential tips include foil-wrapping techniques, methods for properly attaching foodstuffs to the bike, and how to adapt common household work gloves into a protective covering. Recipes include predictable items such as sausage and grilled fish, convenience foods such as fish sticks and frozen spring rolls, vegetarian options such as roasted mushrooms with parsley, and more ambitious fare such as coq au flens and one-pot stews. There's at least one suggested cocktail (a sidecar, of course). The author indicates that she's tested the recipes. Strangely, no longer in print. I can't imagine why not. http://www.torpedo-emscher.de/wr/union/rak...oppedkochen.htm

Well, there were at least two that I noticed... and maybe someone slightly familiar at Salumi.

It has some translation weaknesses and probably some apocryphal information, but Gaku Homma's Japanese Country Cooking is excellent for understanding the origins and reasons behind common Japanese ingredients and techniques. The author was a folklore museum curator and currently lives in Denver. Growing Up In a Korean Kitchen is the best Korean foundational cookbook I've seen, though the Dok Suni book is also interesting.

It's not particularly exciting but the vaguely Lebanese restaurant, Mediterranean Kitchen ,is fairly reliable and reasonably priced, and generally has decent service. The only problem is a fascination with large serving sizes, and that there's no point in ordering appetizers as a result. It's also heavy-handed with garlic, which is either a plus or a minus, depending on your perspective. The group I went to Seastar with left with mixed reviews. My only real complaint with it is that it had this very sterile-feeling interior and corporate vibe... I remember they actually had a staff member responsible for event booking sales, though I don't know if that's still the case. Also worth considering, depending on how you order, is the Japanese/slightly Hawaiian Flo, which had fairly decent small plates. Some things were quite decent (I always have a weakness for dengaku nasu) and some things were a little less so (mostly their fusiony things). (I haven't been there since perhaps 2003, so things may have changed). When I lived in the Eastside and didn't have better Italian options, a girlfriend and I often enjoyed Salute, but it is occasionally inconsistent, and I'm not sure if it has the same owners or not these days. I also haven't been there for years.

I suspect they were "missed" due to the fact that they've been around forever. I'm very fond of Nielsen's Bakery. I didn't know about them until they became a customer of mine sometime in 2005, so feel free to take my opinions as hopelessly biased. The best thing about Nielsen's is the croissant-like pastry made with poppy seeds. The "potato" is also interesting, though very sweet thanks to a marzipan topping; it reminds me of a cream puff, but it's turned into a deception of an ordinary potato. Their Danishes are also quite respectable. They also have the Sarah Bernhardt (Danish rum ball?), which you can find variations of at places like B&O. Most of the pastries are thankfully more modestly sized than most bakeries around town, so I can sometimes handle two. That being said, they sometimes use a heavy hand with sugar, and they don't have much in the way of savory pastries save for that poppy seed thing. You will need coffee. They also have a lot of items not available anywhere else, other than some overlap with Larsen's, which for me features unfortunately monstrously large pastry.

Strange... After years of neglect, Scandinavian has the beginnings of possible trendiness in Seattle, with the re-imagination of an old dive bar as a hip Scandinavian-themed cocktail lounge, complete with Aquavit concoctions and pickled herring. And a German beer/restaurant project is approaching mini-chain status. And we've somewhat recently become home to a "cute" Ethiopian restaurant with a slightly less austere-than-usual interior in the form of Cafe Soleil. Latin American cuisine, while not at all dying, is so 4 years ago here. Maybe we continue to operate in a trend vortex in Seattle.

I believe my usual source for cacao nibs has been World Spice Merchants below the market, though it's been a while... These aren't easy to find anywhere. It would have been a serious search effort even when I lived in Germany.

I think New York Cupcakes aspires to be a chain. They have a location in Bellevue Square that's been around for a year or more. For an occasional indulgence, I liked the Bellevue location's "Black and White" but haven't really been there very much. There aren't many days when I can take that much of a sugar hit all at once; that's why I'm also not such a huge fan of the other cupcake institution, Verite/Cupcake Royale, which seems even more sugar-heavy to me. The decorative work at New York Cupcakes is more impressive than Cupcake Royale, but I have a hard time with the sugar at either place. The $1 version at Cupcake Royale and the half-size cupcakes at New York Cupcakes I can occasionally handle. The think I don't understand about the nascent cupcake industry is why people will spend more on a cupcake than on, for example, a far more labor-intensive croissant. I guess this nostalgia thing doesn't hold as much sway for me.

I haven't been in Safeway for years after a series of disappointments, but maybe in a pinch I'll give that a try. In regular supermarkets, coconut cream is often sold near ingredients for cocktails, such as tonic water, key lime juice,if it's the same thing I assume you're referring to. The cocktail stuff is occasionally disturbingly pink. In Germany at Thai markets I occasionally also found a dried product called coconut cream, which I think was meant to be reconstituted. Alternatively, if you want the most natural coconut cream possible without a lot of work, avoid shaking your cans of coconut milk and skim it from the top half of the can. In supermarkets, five spice powder is often stored away from other jars of spices, instead found in the "ambiguously Asian" section usally in an aisle of other foods deemed "ethnic." It's usually from Sun Luck, which is a brand of last resort for me. Their five spice powder is made with regular black pepper, if I recall. I've never bought all-butter puff pastry anywhere other than PFI; the all-butter stuff at Larry's or Metropolitan was about twice as expensive and folded like you describe. I sure would be happy to have a more convenient source, but the price at PFI probably can't be beat. Around the country, Pepperidge Farms seems to have a stranglehold on the supermarket frozen puff pastry market with their shortening-based product.

There's a 95% probability that Saito's Green Tea Tiramisu is made by Hiroki in Greenlake, across from Eva's, just inches from Kisaku. ←

I have the ground up furikake ready to toss with the popcorn the instant I've dumped the popcorn in a bowl, and shake vigorously. Sometimes I melt bit of butter in the hot pan and shake the popcorn while drizzling that on, but I'm more likely to do that with truffle salt. The popcorn must have some fat coating it in order to have any prayer of the furikake sticking, though no matter what, some always seems to settle to the bottom of the bowl. I think the sesame oil will burn without added high smoke point oils. The good part of the sesame oil flavor would be overpowered by that. Though I have added some sesame oil at the very end of popping.

I hope she wasn't trying to eat at Volterra for less than $40 a day.

Yes, that's where I stole the idea from. Someone gave me a few packages once, around 1998. Since Hurricane's microwave popcorn goes for about $4.50 a package in Seattle, I started making my own on the stove. I think the same company started selling pre-popped bags, at least around Portland, which seems to have a larger Hawaiian population than Seattle. The sesame oil idea sounds nice, though I think it needs to be balanced with a higher smoke point oil to keep the flavor from burning away. Furikake popcorn is very popular locally in Hawaii, where it's marketed as "Hurricane Popcorn." Some people even mail packages to friends and relatives on the mainland! ←

No, but I use nori furikake (and occasionally additional salt) or sometimes umejiso-furikake plus sugar ground with a suribachi for popcorn.

I've had this at a Korean imperial-style multicourse restaurant using ginseng instead of ginger... thin slices, thick honey, and surprisingly refreshing. This is a wonderful idea! Ginger and sugar/honey would go very well together. I will try this sometimes! ←

That sounds like "haw flakes", which are made from (or at least flavored like) a red-fleshed fruit that, when peeled and seeded, looks similar to lychee but is more sour (Chinese Hawthorn berry?); unpeeled, it looks kind of like a crabapple. Haw Flakes on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haw_flakes In a hotel buffet in Beijing, seeded hawthorn berries were served like you might find gooseberry or fig compote in England. Apparently it can also be sold candied: http://www.itmonline.org/arts/crataegus.htm

The opposite experience seems to be in effect at okayu-ya-san, recently trendy with women trying to eat low-calorie lunches. There's a popular chain that I've been to in Ueno and one other location around Meguro. Photo: http://blog.jagaimo.com/images/ul/okayu.jpg Described on: http://blog.jagaimo.com/archive/2006/03/20/2350.aspx When I've been to such places, I've never seen an unaccompanied male diner (including myself, to be fair), and customers were generally more than 90% women.

Miso is used in some braised dishes like nasu-no-miso-ni (it's closer to a braise than the ni suggests), an eggplant dish. I like miso and butter together to season some simple vegetable and mushroom dishes.

Melon-flavored melon-pan is pretty rare. Inside Japan I can't think of any time I've seen it except perhaps in a way that was meant to be clever (as in wordplay). It's far more common to see the standard unflavored types. Also, any flavored melon pan tend to be convenience store variants, since those ones already start out pretty uninteresting in flavor and texture, and they need all the help they can get. The name is supposed to have come from the decorative sugar streusel pattern, like "pineapple buns" from Hong Kong bakeries.