SuzySushi

That looks great! What's the method? Standard mixing & hand kneading, like bread? How much liquid did you use? Water only? Did you need to let the soba dough rest before cutting? Did you run it through a pasta machine or cut it by hand? Curious minds want to know! I have buckwheat flour in the house right now because the other day I made crepes... Soba is one of my daughter's favorite dishes!

Never purchased either, but to add to chrisamault's advice: ask! Because these ingredients are somewhat weird (and possibly expensive? dried shrimp roes?) they may be kept behind the counter instead of out in the open. The Asian supermarkets here all have a food-medicine section, which is where they keep stuff like ginseng, white fungus, and birds nest, as well as Chinese medicinal herbs. Or, if they don't normally carry them, they might be able to special-order some because they know they'll have a customer (you). I even do this with regular foods at my local supermarkets -- if they don't have what I want, I'll ask if they can special-order it for me.

Okay, so I have this large (15+ pound!) pumpkin my daughter won yesterday. She drew on it but didn't carve it. I have no idea what variety of pumpkin it is -- it's locally grown, bright orange all over, and a little taller than it is wide. Is it worth trying to cook, or am I likely to end up with a fibrous, inedible mess?

Simplicity itself: Tiny wild strawberries served on ice at a restaurant in Rome. They were a revelation to me: until that time, I'd only had tasteless overbred California strawberries. A great runner-up for a "prepared" dessert was the fresh raspberry tart we had in Versailles. Impeccably fresh raspberries carefully arranged on a thin layer of creme patisserie in a perfect pate sucree tart shell. Give me perfection of flavor over chi-chi presentations any time.

I eat octopus, but have never prepared it myself. Most often, it comes as part of assorted nigiri or chirashi sushi. The stores around here also sell iidako, tiny whole octopus in a sweet-spicy-salty sauce. My husband loves that, but I can tolerate it only in small quantities because it's so salty. I think it's meant to be eatn as a snack with alcoholic beverages! My favorite octopus dish, however, was a marinated octopus salad served at a Greek restaurant. Ohhhhhhh was that good!!!

We get a lot of exotic tropical fruits here in Hawaii -- lychees, rambutans, longans, jackfruit, guava, cherimoya, passionfruit, soursop, dragonfruit, durian... (Haven't seen mangosteen yet, though...) Most of them are grown right here, though not on a commercial scale like mangoes and papayas.

An ex of mine used to get pissed and say "DO YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH ME OR KELLER" needless to say that girl is out of my life. ← My husband has no problem with that! He pores over the cookbooks with me!

I have two tall bookcases in the bedroom devoted to cookbooks. They're my bedtime reading! This also makes it easy to sit on the bed surrounded by cookbooks when poring over ideas for a menu or comparing recipes.

My recipe for Haupia doesn't use dairy milk. Haupia Serves 8 (small portions) 6 tablespoons cornstarch 6 tablespoons sugar 1-1/4 cups water 1 14-ounce can coconut milk Mix cornstarch and sugar together in a saucepan. Add water and stir to dissolve. Mix in coconut milk. Cook on medium-high heat, stirring frequently, 3 to 4 minutes. When mixture starts to bubble, reduce heat to medium and cook 2 minutes longer, until thickened. Pour into a mold or an 8" square pan that has been wet with cold water. Chill to set. Cut into portions to serve. Variation: Mold in a ring mold. Unmold and fill the center with cubes of tropical fruit.

The Japanese use chestnuts in both savory and sweet dishes. They're commonly sold already peeled, cooked, and candied in syrup (in jars); and hot/roasted, ready for peeling (in small paper bags, with an X cut in each chestnut and even a handy plastic guitar-pick-type implement for peeling them!). You can also buy vacuum-packed foil bags of roasted, peeled chestnuts from China that are ready for snacking or recipes. In Asian markets here, the latter cost about $1 for an 8 (?) ounce bag! Typical Japanese recipes include: kuri gohan -- chestnut-studded hot cooked rice kuri manju -- baked sweet buns with chestnut filling kuri kinton -- a sweet made from mashed sweet potatoes and chestnuts kuri yokan -- logs of sweetened red bean paste "fudge" studded with whole or broken chestnuts and various Western-style fancy pastries that use candied chestnuts as filling or garnish. The Chinese, BTW, sell dried chestnuts, which need to be soaked overnight to reconstitute, then cooked to soften. They're most often used as a potato-like starch in stews and braised dishes.

Similar to... I don't remember where I read this but... one way to keep a toddler happily occupied is to place honey on his/her fingers and give him/her a feather to play with!

Your culinary instructor is most likely correct. Many people of Asian descent are lactose intolerant, and dairy products are not part of their culture. Cattle were raised in ancient China, but their main purpose was as draught animals. For the most part, the Japanese didn't eat beef until after Commodore Perry opened Japan to the West in 1853.

I'd spend it on re-tiling the kitchen floor with ceramic tile. But that's just me.

Hmmnnn... I've never had a problem with my towels and I've used the same ones for years. I use heavy, plain white cotton kitchen towels (I don't remember where I bought them, maybe Williams-Sonoma?) -- not terrycloth -- that are reserved strictly for cake-baking. I wash them immediately afterwards with All-Free liquid detergent (my standard detergent) and Clorox, and machine dry them without using fabric softener. Then I fold each individually and put it in a Ziplock bag, where it rests until the next use. Don't know if any of this is useful to you!

Oh, yes... we're still letting our 9 year old think that fried calamari rings are just different French fries!

Another lamb-lover here! I think the two main reasons for its relative unpopularity in the USA (eGulleteers excepted!) are the "cute" factor and the strong lamb-y smell when cooked improperly. My mother used to cook lamb chops when I was a child - she never trimmed the fat first, overcooked them (broiled), and the house would reek! Lamb isn't easy to come by in Hawaii. I usually pick up a leg of lamb whenever I can, cut some into steaks, some into cubes for stews, and grind the rest.

Now if it's a cheese danish, the answer might be ambivalent. But peach danish, no contest!

Welcome back, spaghetttti!!! I missed you!!!

Relocating to, or opening a third location? (My husband didn't make it to town on Tuesday.)

Ohhh.... ohhhh.... I yatsuhashi!!! Could also post the recipes??? Pretty please???

I second this! Our daughter also loved the tofu from miso soup and to this day (she's 9), it's like pulling teeth to get her to eat green vegetables but she loves miso soup with wakame (and I can sneak in some spinach ). I'd read the labels to check the sodium content on the miso, though. Different brands/types have lower sodium than others.

My husband has the further theory that if the noodles had been in the bowl, they had probably been left out deliberately as a votive offering -- and were not just something that someone forgot to eat or threw away.

A bottle of peppermint extract that's been around since before my daughter was born. She's 9 now, so go figure! I only use it for Christmas cookies, so one bottle goes a long way. (Just sniffed it and it's still potent.)

Hear, hear!!

Doesn't longan (Chinese) translate to "dragon's eye"? Wonder how they got "cat's tears" in Malaysia! ← No, it's "cat's eye." The name of the fruit is "mata kucing" and "air" means water or juice and is not part of the name of the fruit. Look at Tepee's explanation above. ← Ooops... my bad!