SuzySushi

Salt. Sugar. Vinegar. Blue cheese. (I once made the mistake of adding too much blue cheese to a pasta sauce and it was damn near inedible.)

I'm thinking of making Hina Sushi, basically musubi that are dressed up like dolls. This is the only picture I could find now on the Net: http://photos.durbn.net/people-mark/DVC00082_1

I often do that if I'm making chirashi-zushi just for me and my husband (my daughter won't eat rice that has vegetables mixed in, so she gets "plain" seasoned rice). More expedient than buying & cooking each individual ingredient.

Hmm, and when I had a mudbath at Calistoga, my first thought was that it was the texture of chocolate-chip cookie dough.

We visited Shirokiya today in search of Girls' Days treats, and bought the following assortment: (The color in the photograph is slightly off under my kitchen fluorescent lights -- the blue wagashi is actually a delicate tint of lilac.) There were several more red-and-green filled cakes like the ones in the center, but they got eaten before I could photograph them! Most of them were made by Miyakawa in Los Angeles; I didn't see any that had been flown in from Japan (maybe they were already sold!). Strangely enough, I also couldn't find any pastel sugar candies like kompeitou or those pastel rice krispies (do they have a different name?), but they did have some cookies wrapped in cellophane printed to look like kokeshi dolls.

Isn't it?

Okay, here's the recipe for tofu-based chocolate mousse. It is so rich that small portions suffice. Magic Mousse Serves 8 or more 1 12-ounce package chocolate chips (I use Ghirardelli Double Chocolate) 2 12.3-ounce packages extra-firm tofu 2 tablespoons orange juice 1 teaspoon orange extract 1- In a microwaveable bowl, microwave chocolate chips, stirring at 1 minute intervals, until just melted, about 3 minutes. 2- Place tofu in a food processor or blender and process until mushy. Add juice and extract; process again. Add melted chocolate and process, scraping down sides occasionally, until mixture is creamy and no streaks of white remain. 3- Turn into individual dessert dishes or a graham cracker pie crust. 4- Chill 2 hours until firm. "Why extra-firm tofu if it's getting blended anyway?," you may ask. I haven't experimented with soft tofu, but I have a hunch it's because the extra-firm sets up better in the finished product.

http://www.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1...od_050225162228 Why is rice consumption declining in Japan? More "Westernized" diet? ← For some reason, I couldn't pull up that particular article. But rice consumption has been declining in Japan over the last three+ decades (it peaked in 1962), as it has in most higher-income Asian countries. Most Japanese can afford to eat more meat than they traditionally used to. It's also more common to eat wheat-based products like bread and pasta.

I don't know exactly why, but it just seems like when I visit foreign locales I just have to sample the Chinese cuisine, and I know this is the case with a lot of other Chinese people as well. I think we Chinese take a certain amount of pride in the fact that Chinese can migrate to places all over the world and use their skill and ingenuity to create a successful business, despite not having a lot of education or knowledge of the local language. Even though the food may not always be fantastic at these establishments, it's kinda nice to see how our "cousins" around the world are doing. ← Good response! And I'm not Asian, but I try Asian restaurants in Europe for the same reason I do here: because the restaurant looks interesting, because I'm curious about what Asian food in ______ (name the city or town) is like, and because and I don't always want to eat the same type of cuisine every day.

Okay, what's the recipe? (And I know what you mean about recipes that speak to the soul: Japanese curry rice and mapo tofu are two of my "comfort foods," right up there with good ole American mac & cheese.)

Of course they are symbolic!! and of course I had to do a search on the internet to find out why!! Here is what I found: Special foods served on Hina Matsuri, for example, include hishimochi, a diamond-shape mochi with green, white and red layers. "The green layer represents the freshness of spring and fertility; the white, winter and purity; and the red, the color of spring flowers," Young said. Other foods traditionally served are clam soups with spring herbs, which represent purity and recognize the new season, and a sweet, mild sake, symbolizing longevity and happiness, that even the girls could partake of. from here;: http://starbulletin.com/2002/03/01/features/story4.html ← I'd also read somewhere (but am too lazy to hunt down the source) and it stuck in my mind, that the clam soup -- they're tiny clams served in their shells -- represents wishes that the girls will grow up to marry happily because the clams have symmetrical hinged shells, kind of like the Western "two peas in a pod" notion.

I'd also have to go with New York as the most interesting food city... to me... on the basis of the immense variety of ethnic cuisines available, especially at the lower- mid-price range. Looking for Afghani? Argentinian? You can find it. Peruvian? Polish? Here. Tibetan? Turkish? No problem. Same goes for ethnic markets, if you know where to look (and this includes the boroughs outside Manhattan). The Asia Society's website, BTW, lists a whole slew of Burmese restaurants in NYC. How good any of them are, I don't know from personal experience. http://www.asiafood.org/restaurants/burmese.cfm

I'm another "substitute tofu for paneer" fan. I also occasionally make Japanese curry with tofu. Mashed tofu is also a decent substitute for all/part of the ricotta cheese in lasagna. But my very favorite tofu recipe is a Chocolate Mousse that can be served as-is or used as pie filling. It's the richest chocolate mousse imaginable, and no one ever guesses the "secret ingredient." I adapted the recipe off a package of Mori-Nu tofu, adding orange extract as flavoring. [Edited for typos]

No, but the 98-cent and 99-cent Japanese stores in Hawaii are basically the same thing. Except for some American snack foods and candies, all their products come from Japan or China and I imagine most are custom-made for the Japanese parent companies.

← Interesting! I'll have to keep an eye out if I'm passing through Orleans. There may be more Cambodian-owned Chinese restaurants than we know! The only way we learned our restaurant was owned by Cambodians was that the staff began a conversation with us about my husband's Hawaiian shirt, which naturally led to a discussion of where they came from... the reason I don't remember the food very well is, by the end of dinner, they had brought out a round of drinks for us as well as themselves... nothing like kicking back with the Cambodian owners of a Chinese restaurant in France!

Since I'm a pretty new member and haven't yet had my say, I'm going to resurrect this fascinating thread... I'm a pretty adventurous eater and have tried big game, insects, fugu, etc. (I draw the line at dog, cat, or monkey) but if there's one common enough food I don't like, it's anchovies. They spoil the taste of a Caesar salad dressing for me, and if they're on pizza? horrors! They make the rest of the pie inedible. A friend of mine won't eat sweet potatoes in any form. There's no accounting for tastes.

Spaghetti with olive oil, chopped fresh tomatoes (or barring that, a can of chopped yellow tomatoes), garlic, and slivered fresh basil leaves.

Huh. I have several Australian cookbooks with recipes for what they call "dim sims" (spelled with an I), what the Chinese call shu mai. The Australian cookbooks basically make them by wrapping an egg roll skin around a ball of filling, then steaming or deep-frying them.

Interesting thread! The biggest change in my cooking over the last 15 years was, then I was single and cooking mostly to please myself. As a result, I was much more experimental. Now that I'm married and have a family, I need to take their food preferences into consideration. For instance, my husband dislikes chicken thighs, so any recipes I have using dark-meat only have been shelved. We recently found out that my daughter is highly allergic to pine nuts, so they no longer enter my kitchen (although I still have a batch of pesto frozen that I intend to finish when she's not home). My stepson was a vegetarian for several years while he lived at home, so that changed meal plans.

The Japanese wooden drop-lids are used for a different purpose: to weight down the ingredients under the liquid, so that they don't roll around in the pan. A Lebanese friend of mine weights her stuffed grapeleaves with a heatproof plate, for the same reason. To keep condensation from dripping back into the pan, the Japanese sometimes wrap a piece of cloth on the underside of the lid of a pan, securing it around the handle with a rubber band.

Off-topic but, when I've complained to manufacturers about defective food packages -- one particular incident comes to mind where a supposedly vacuum-packed pouch didn't seal properly and the food inside was spoiled -- they've ALWAYS sent me scads of coupons. Why would I want to try their products again when I don't trust their packaging method? (Or maybe this is their cheap way of buying off consumers, if no one cashes the coupons in.)

I've eaten Chinese food in Europe, but can't say for sure it's been "Europeanized." A friend who lives just outside the Chinatown in Paris (yes, there is one!) once took us to a Chinese restaurant there. I recall the food being okay, just not what I was used to from back home. But was it Frenchified? I can't tell. We also (trust us to sniff out Asian food wherever we travel) stumbled across a Cambodian-run Chinese restaurant just down the street from our hotel in Narbonne, France. There, I recall, the food was quite good. My sister had Chinese food in Yorkshire many years ago, and the meal she described was distinctly peculiar for its substitution of English vegetables for Chinese vegetables, which weren't available at the time -- but that's going back 15 years or more. Things must be very different now.

I agree with the four to six portions per rabbit estimate. It depends on how the rabbit is cut up. The rabbits we bought in France were always cut into six pieces. The ones we've gotten here are cut into quarters.

Actually, Mrs. Kurdziel was my fourth-grade teacher, one of the best teachers I've ever had. She brought in chocolate-covered ants and grasshoppers for us to try one day, and even brought a dogfish to class when we were studying cultural aspects of Canadian aboriginal people. I can only hope that my son will be fortunate enough to have such adventurous teachers guide his educational career. ← Mrs. Dinofsky was my third-grade teacher. She's the one who brought in the chocolate-covered ants to try, described her adventures eating rattlesnake steak in the Southwest ("tastes like chicken"), and introduced us -- well, me, anyway -- to the joys of eating raw cauliflower and broccoli! (Before that, I'd only tasted the overcooked mush my mother made.)

Raisins, really? I also tried them when I was in grade school and thought they tasted like chocolate-covered Rice Krispies. It was probably the crunch factor. ← You didn't happen to have Mrs. Dinofsky as a teacher, did you?