nakji

I love peas....peas and rice sound fantastic. When do fresh peas come into season in Japan?

Sorry to torture you! The chicken was even better on the second day, too. I think this book was written to serve as an introduction to Korean cooking, for those who have never tried cooking these sorts of dishes before. It's definitely not a cookbook for purists - several recipe call for cilantro, which is very difficult to find in a typical Korean grocery store. I suspect it's a stand-in for ga nip. It's quite accessible for people working from their local supermarket. I think Korean food is an easy cuisine to start cooking- you don't have to add a lot of different sauces to your pantry. If you already keep soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and sesame oil on hand, you only really need to add gochujang and gochugaru to turn out most of the recipes in this book. And those things last forever in the fridge. Those potatoes were so good, I ended up eating them cold out of the tupperware for breakfast the next morning.

Oiishi-so! That looks delicious! If you want to be really crazy, substitute good maple syrup for the mirin, and don't add any other sweetener. It makes an excellent glaze for salmon. I basically have a one litre bottle each of soy, mirin, cooking sake, and sesame oil in my pantry, and it hardly seems a day goes by that I don't use them. May I present the truly excellent Soy-mirin-dashi ratio topic for your perusal? I had a lovely tamarind sauce while living in Vietnam - basically a few tablespoons of tamarind, thinned with stock and simmered with ginger, garlic, chili, and lemongrass - after about 10 minutes of simmering, strain; adjust for sweetness; reduce, then thicken, if you like with a cornstarch slurry. Gorgeous with pan fried chicken, but it would also make a good dipping sauce. So do I, most of the time! This happens to me a lot, too. I think your idea to make calzones for nights when you don't want to cook is an excellent idea.

That stew is really excellent if you use a bit of baguette to soak up the juices - just sayin'. If you've got any leftover, consider that for breakfast!

Another interesting note: In Australia and New Zealand, the presence of lettuce, cucumber, and tomato or any other vegetables on a sandwich is often called "salad". As in, in a Subway, they would ask, "Do you want any salad on that?"

You could try mixing a little of it into white rice, and cooking them together. I used to enjoy rice like this quite often in Korea. Is there anyone you can gift it to? Whenever I make an excess of pickles, I take them down to my vegetable guy, and he enjoys the novelty of that. I have no idea if he actually enjoys the pickles or not, but bringing food to people generally spreads good feelings around. Or you could just eat it for breakfast, which is what I usually do with banana bread.

I put dinner together from some of the recipes that interested me. This is the sort of book that has you prepare a few "mother sauces" for the recipes. Now, Korean food doesn't have a wide range of seasonings that go into it - at least not if you compare it to Thai food or other cuisines - but the proportion of these seasonings is key; especially if you consider how much chili goes into some dishes. I'd always thought that my ddalk galbi needed some tweaking, as it erred too much on the side of sweet and thick. So when I started to prepare the recipe for dak chim on page 108, I got excited, because I knew I was approximating the right proportions for its crack-like sauce with the gochujang yangnyeom p. 30. Basically a paste of Korean chili paste, chili powder, garlic, ginger, oyster sauce, and some other seasonings, this forms the base for many of the spicy recipes throughout the book. Kind of like a Thai curry paste. Making it, I had the brainwave to use my Japanese ginger grater on my garlic cloves as well, effortlessly turning them into garlic paste without even needing to peel the cloves. If any of y'all knew this trick beforehand, and didn't share - you've been holding out! I blew through the garlic cloves like nobody's business, and the peels helped protect my fingers. This recipe calls for patty pan squash, but I substituted zucchini, as it was more readily available. It also called for carrot and potato, with which I substituted a lone sweet potato that was lurking at the bottom of my pantry, in the spirit of using up what I had on hand. Seriously delicious stuff, and the seasoning was spot-on. This recipe is tabbed, and I imagine will become a kitchen standard. On the side, I prepared seasoned spinach from page 73. The other side-dish that I remember fondly from Korea, but haven't been able to recreate using my own juju are delicious new potatoes with a sweet-salty sauce. Sure enough, this recipe is in the book on page 126. I couldn't find the small new potatoes that are so perfect for this recipe, so I settled instead for some smallish old potatoes that I cut down to size. Ironically enough, the hardest part of this dish for me was finding the corn syrup it called for - doesn't corn syrup go into everything these days? But it wasn't to be found at my local shops. I substituted something ominously titled "glutinous starch syrup", to no ill effect, I feel. I seem to recall the syrup used in Korea was clear as well. Another hit, I think these would go great with steak. I tried very hard not to go back to the fridge to snack on these later. I had some kakkdugi and some multi-grain rice to round out the meal. Great stuff, and I've just begun to scratch the surface.

I forgot to add that you should cook the soy and mirin together a bit first - and maybe add a bit of sugar to it - reduce it until it's to the thickness of your liking. This is an excellent "tare" for wings, meatballs, and any other pieces of chicken you see fit to grill.

Your plating was lovely. The fish looks especially nice - I like the touches of the flower and - is it a small pile of grated daikon? What was frozen into the ice bowl?

Okay, so cold is out, but we all still agree there should be some sort of dressing. Does a salad also need to have more than one main ingredient? As for defining a dressing... Some sort of sauce, usually comprising more than one ingredient, which can include vinegar, oil, and other seasonings? It's helpful to think of things that aren't salads, and see what is true about them.

The Korean Table by Taekyung Chung and Debra Samuels I learned to love Korean food at the source. Even while I was living in Korea, however, I struggled to find a useful English-language cookbook that could help me recreate the dishes I loved there. It wasn't a major crisis, however - I could always ask my Korean "family" for pointers, or at the worst - refer to the back of the packets for directions on using products. Now I'm in Japan, I can't bear to pay the prices of Korean food in the restaurants (charging for panchan! Scandalous!) and I want to make it at home. My husband, who was initially cool to Korean food, now craves it. I like to make the few dishes I learned for my friends in Japan, because Korean food has such happy memories for me. In fact, when I was in Seoul over the holidays, seated, as ever, around a table in a galbi restaurant, I was talking with a friend about a mutual friend of ours, now living in Canada, and what he missed the most about living in Korea. "This," he said, "Sitting around a table with my friends, cooking dinner, eating, and drinking soju." There is something about the Korean table, the way that everyone cooks, shares from the same dishes, and eats the same food, that brings you together. Some of my favourite memories from Korea include my friends and I, huddled outside a station exit, trying to negotiate what kind of food we would go for that evening. So I was thrilled when I was listening The Splendid Table podcast to hear that there was a new English-language Korean cookbook out. This book covers a lot of the basics that I've been interested in making, along with some things that I've never seen, but am very eager to try out. It also contains a useful section on Korean ingredients, and the recipes contain suggestions for substitutions for an American audience. I've been trying to change my diet to one based on vegetables and whole grains, and Korean food - as much or even more than Japanese food, I feel - focuses on healthy dishes. It's not all barbecue! And because there are so many vegetables involved, it's a naturally cheap cuisine. Even better in winter - Korean food makes use of a wide range of fermented and preserved vegetable side dishes, which last several days in the fridge. It's the perfect cuisine for people who don't have a lot of time to make dinner in the evening. You spend a little time getting the dishes together, but then you can feast on them all week, as long as you've got a bit of fresh rice to round out the meal! I can't wait to start cooking from this book.

Oh, I've been meaning to make that one for a while now. I'm buying a big bag of lemons at the market today for some other projects - I think I'll make that on Tuesday. I'll just need to get some fettucine.

I wish I had access to this program. I wonder if there are any plans for DVDs? I saw an episode when I was in Canada last year. My mother absolutely loves it, and we now trade Jamie Oliver recipes back and forth. I think his passion for cooking, and getting people to eat good food really come through.

Well, as an EFL teacher, I get asked questions like this all the time. Let's look at three things that are a salad from your list: tuna salad cobb salad greek salad Of course, my first impulse is to answer: a salad has vegetables. But looking at tuna salad, if vegetables are present at all, they would be there in small quantities as a garnish or a textural contrast. All three items are mainly served cold, however, and are held together with some sort of dressing, so I would say that those are the most important qualities making something a salad. Salads can be served warm, but then aren't they usually billed as warm salads? Which would lead me to believe that most people expect a salad to be cold, and must be warned if this will not be the case. Let's think of some more examples and see if this holds true. Also: Don't the British call tuna and egg salad "Tuna Mayonnaise" and "Egg Mayonnaise"?

I can't help but coming up with more Japanese ideas -I hope that's okay. Chicker liver yakitori? If you really like chicken livers, that is. Skewer and brush lightly with a 50/50 mix of mirin and soy, then grill. Enjoy with beer. Or, you could make chirashi-sushi, if you have the makings for sushi rice and some eggs around. Prepare your rice as you would normally, season it with salt, sugar, and vinegar to turn it into sushi rice. Then place it in a bowl, and top with cut-up pieces of omelette, fish roe, and sliced vegetables like cucumbers. It's very refreshing. Make soup with the squash, then garnish with the pancetta?

Can you elaborate on this? Did you reduce the wine first, then add it to the sauce? My objection to carbonara is usually that it's too eggy and rich to be interesting after a couple of bites.

I think this is a common problem that leads to accumulation and waste. How many times have I been cooking something when I've looked at the recipe, seen a small portion of an ingredient called for, and cycled down to the supermarket to get it? Then ignored the 3/4 full bag of it on my shelf for another month? Or six? I'm trying to be more flexible now - if a recipe calls for rosemary and I only have thyme, well; then, that goes in instead.

I walked into our local department store basement today, and was overwhelmed by the smell of houjicha. How could I resist its siren vanilla scent, when they're roasting it fresh? I bought a 200g bag for 400 yen; and used a tablespoon which I infused about four times during the day. It was smoky and delicious; perfect for a rainy cold day.

What kind of greens is he growing?

It's a whole fish, right? My impulse would be to defrost it in the sink with water or in the fridge for a day or so. I'm no fish expert - I always err on the side of caution, so once it's thawed, I'd probably heat in up in a fry pan. Could you split it down the middle, grill or fry it, then pull the central bones out and flake it? You could serve this with miso soup and quick pickled vegetables -a great way to make cucumbers you have today turn into side dishes later in the week. You could also serve this with some Japanese-style omelette and frozen vegetables tossed in sesame dressing.

Your freezer looks to be the size of my fridge. But surely that is a small freezer by North American standards. The spec sticker on my fridge/freezer says it will hold up to 30 kg of food. As for the smoked trout, can I recommend a maze-gohan? Cook some short grain rice as you would normally, flake your smoked trout, and mix it through your cooked rice. Mould in a ramekin, and turn it out on a plate; top with black sesame seeds or katsuobushi. Bonus of being able to use up some random Asian condiments in the back of your cupboard.

My husband has announced he would like to start eating okayu in the morning for breakfast. I'm happy to start making it, as I feel like we waste a lot of money on bread. It's likely I'll be making it from left-over dinner rice, since I don't have a rice cooker with a handy timer. I have a recipe in Andoh's "Washoku", but would welcome any input on how to make it nicely. I'm not a huge fan of okayu myself, but it would be much cheaper than steel-cut oats in the morning, so I'm willing to compromise. How do you make it, and what toppings do you like?

Well, it wouldn't be possible for me to go a week without shopping, since my kitchen is so small, I only keep a day or two's worth of groceries on hand as it is. My fridge isn't even big enough to pass muster as a bar fridge to most North Americans. But I'll be happy to play along with suggestions to help people use things up.

I spent 500 yen at the allotment stand today, which got me two huge carrots, a beautiful new cabbage, five giant leeks, another hefty daikon, and a double-wide bunch of spinach. Half the spinach was incorporated into a bean soup for lunch, and the other half will be stir-fried to go with a curry for tomorrow night's dinner. Part of the daikon went into mushroom-daikon-pork nabe for dinner, and the other two thirds are lurking in my fridge. I already have a big container of kakdukki kimchi in there, but I may have to put another batch on to use it up, and give it away. Carrots were diced and grated - the grated went into a coleslaw made with the cabbage that will serve as a good side dish for lunches over the next couple of days. The diced carrots were boiled up with some olive oil and chicken stock for yet more lunch soup. The leeks were used instead of onions in the curry, soups, and nabe. That 500 yen went a long way! Everything was cut as finely and evenly as possible to reduce cooking time, and thus my gas bill. The key ingredient, of course, is time. I usually spend one of my days off doing food prep for the week. Others may find that their time saved is worth spending a little more on food. Neither my husband nor I prefer white rice, so we're happy to cut it with all manner of things.

I made an Italian-ish bean soup the other night myself. Cannelini beans, several chunks of parmigiano rind, red chili flakes, dried oregano, olive oil, butter, and a single dried Thai chili. Delicious. ← Chili! I will add some to my soup tomorrow when it's reheated for lunch. Genius.