nakji

Homemade babaganouj? Eggplants are in season, right? I just char them on the grill and add lots of garlic, lemon juice, and sesame paste. I'm not sure it'll make him popular with his classmates, though. Alternatively, yogurt still seems to be pretty cheap - I drain mine in a coffee filter and add grated salted cucumber and lemon for a tzatziki twist.

I had lunch at a kaiten sushi today (in Kawasaki, Japan), and saw a man remove the hotate from his sushi, wallow it in his dish of shoyu, and return it to the rice; whereupon he downed the whole lump in one bite. Is this the done thing?

It's great for me to see these pictures of a European fish market, as my experience is limited to Asian fish markets. I was especially happy to see the pictures of the little octopuses, which I love so much I named myself after them (in Korean of course). I'm used to seeing them live in tanks, however, as in Korea they're often eaten while still squirming. They're also delicious grilled and dipped in Korean chili paste (gochujang) that's been thinned with a little rice vinegar.

Well, I just got back from Hanoi, where I spent a significant amount of time eating, cooking, and shopping for things to bring back to Japan with me. I spent about an hour on the Japanese Customs website obsessively reading about restrictions, so I hope I didn't inadvertently bring in something prohibited. Most of the stuff here could probably be sourced somewhere in Japan, but I haven't the time, inclination, or adequate train fare to go hunting it all down, and since it was all so cheap and readily available there, I snapped it up. Pictured from the top right - A kilo of Cafe Mai's Paris Mai coffee, IMHO the finest to be had in Hanoi; Chin-su Hot Sauce, for fried rice and general dish-doctoring; Vietnamese Honey (the item I was most worried about bringing in - animal product?) Chili salt, for dipping and seasoning fried things; Sesame candy, for o-miyage gifts to co-workers; Tamarind paste, for a recipe I learned while there - chicken in tamarind sauce; Perfume mushrooms (dried) for spring rolls; Palm sugar, for Thai dishes; Taro candy, for some of my students; Chicken powder, a vital seasoning agent in many North Vietnamese dishes; In the middle, a box of Milo for my co-worker, who got hooked on it while doing a homestay in Australia, and who maintains the Japanese version "just doesn't have the crunchy bits"; On top of the Milo, a bottle of pho broth seasoning, if I ever get up the energy to make my own pho; On the left of the Milo, a thin braid of Russian smoked cheese, for snacking; Next to which are some curry packets pressed on me by a friend, and some rice papers, which I imagine will eventually form spring rolls - I learned a neat trick or two on this trip for them; And in the far back a box of Huong Nguyen green bean cakes - more souvenirs to press on my unsuspecting students and co-workers. Not pictured is another bag of coffee my husband swore was the best he ever had - purchased somewhere near Dien Bien Phu. Regrets? I forgot to pick up the fried shallots to go in the spring rolls, although I've seen them in Japan (although for a much higher price!), as well as cashews, which are unbelievably good in Vietnam. Now I need to get cooking.

See? Now I feel compelled to guess. Anyone else like to play along? I'm guessing: saeng nakji (d'uh) bbeonddaegi sea slug bosingtang dolphin and/or whale loach (just for the name) periwinkles soondae, not because I think it's weird, but many people might from the look of it. live steamed shrimp ...pretty much anything they sell in those seaside restaurants, actually - the stuff that dwells in tanks... Cass and Hite. Chocopie.

Oh, I thought it was only me who did that. I hardly ever eat bread in Japan, but I'm reasonably happy with the things the Anderson chain of bakeries put out. As for tonkatsu, which I love, and tonkatsu sandos, which I admire but rarely indulge in, I'm intrigued by these pictures. I usually don't eat the convenience store versions, since with all the filler in the meat, they basically amount to breadcrumbs, coated in breadcrumbs, deep-fried and then served between two slices of bread. Carbs like that, I don't need. But these Maisen ones look meaty and worth a try. I couldn't find a website for Maisen using an English google search (cursed Canadian laptop!) - can anyone tell me if the sandwiches are available in the Yokohama area?

What network is this show on? I've never heard of the show before as I basically live under a rock when it comes to TV programming. Can you comment on some of the things they'll be covering?

I love her books! Try the sesame chicken salad - it's grand. The broth that forms in the microwave is incredible. I've also made her somen salad to great acclaim. I can't help with the chinese soup paste, as I can't recall making a recipe that called for it, but the wine is, as far as I know, Shao Hsing. I use it interchangeably with sake, depending on whatever I've got in the cupboard. Although I only recently found out that the supermarket sells cooking-grade sake. Until that, I'd been using Hakkasan. I have a large tub of Knorr chicken base in my kitchen as well. Vietnamese cooking uses it a lot, and I find it useful for adding flavour, as a kind of MSG substitute. There's probably no reason why you couldn't do the same until you get it sorted. I wouldn't let anything get in my way of making some of her recipes!

Spot on, spot on. In fact, my boss lost at least three cats as well to local neighborhood stockpots. C'est la vie! It's important not to get too attached. This is really exciting for me to read, as I'll be back in Hanoi tomorrow, if everything goes to plan. It's great to get revved up for my trip. I've not travelled extensively in the south, however- did you notice a dramatic difference between Northern and Southern cuisine?

I'm seeing a sort of Venn diagram here. In one circle, there are some people want a truly delicious and beautiful looking cake to have for dessert, or a special celebration, or whatever - these are the people you want to make your cakes for, right? And then in another circle, there are people who see a cake as a kind of symbol, a blank slate for conveying their celebratory wishes on, one that happens to be really sweet, and perhaps, if the occasion demands, blue? And you don't really want to make those kinds of cakes, and those people normally sort of self select, and just get a cake at the supermarket, but occasionally (or frequently?) in the space where those two circles overlap, you have customers coming in asking for a delicious cake which is also blue? It sounds like you're eager to establish your business, and so you've been decorating cakes on demand, and maybe compromising a bit on how you'd normally present your cakes. I'm not really sure about the sort of market you're in, but I'd be worried that if you start making all sorts of compromises on how you present your cakes, that eventually your market may start to see your cakes as the supermarket kind- blank slates, as it were. At the same time, you don't really want to lose the sales...I would suggest a compromise. Let your customers know that you're not really a cake decorator, as suggested above, but try to work out some way that birthdays, anniversaries and the like can be recognized. Maybe you could develop a chocolate/white chocolate plaque onto which a message could be piped or transferred, and charge a small premium for adding it?

Or you could go to a completely crazy place and use it to coat chorizo, as per post 185 in this thread. Sugar covered meat? Yes, please.

A random sampling of this week's groceries: (from xe.com, 100 yen = .92 USD) Corn, 5 ears for 200 yen Japanese cucumbers, 1 for 29 yen Eggs, 10 for 208 yen English muffins, 4 for 158 yen Rice vinegar, 300 ml for 88 yen 1 kg potatoes, 200 yen Red onions, 2 for 100 yen Boneless chicken breast, 2 for 421 yen White sugar 500g for 178 yen Milk, 500 ml, 130 yen I shop at a farmer's market for my produce, and take advantage of the vegetable stands in my neighborhood to keep my grocery bill down. Cheap rice can be had, if you're not fussy about quality, for around 1,600 yen for 5 kg, which is the largest size bag I can reasonably get home on my bike and store in my cupboard.

I'm glad you finally had a chance to try it! I love that recipe - I should put it in the "Recipes that Rock" discussion. If you like that style of cooking, and like Japanese food, I really recommend Harumi Kurihara's book, "Japanese Cooking". The recipe is on the New York Times site: Scallops in Miso Mustard Sauce I've been looking for an excuse to make it again, and my in-laws are visiting this week, so I might trot it out.

Isn't it because of price controls from dairy boards in Canada? I always thought that was the reason our dairy was so much more than in the US. Anyway, it's nothing compared to what I pay here in Japan. Butter, when I can find it, is 398 yen for 200 g - around $3.70 US - things like sour cream and whipping cream are so expensive, I never even consider buying them.

Jjang! Thanks! Gochujang comes in a red tub (or jar, sometimes) but I think you could use any red chili paste to get the flavour, as long as you don't mind the heat. I have a picture of what it looks like here. I think the cilantro is a good choice, because it has a kind of sharp flavour like ganeep, which Koreans use in a lot of their dishes. Is ganeep the same as shiso, does anyone know? They look the same. So how did you learn about Dakdoritang? I've never seen it outside of Korea.

Ooooh, that's one of my favourite dishes from Korea! Once, my friends and I were on an island and stopped into a country restaurant for lunch. We ordered the dalkdoritang and the cook killed a chicken on the spot for us. There's fresh, and then there's fresh. Recipes for it that I've seen call for a pressure cooker, but that looks like it was baked in the oven - was it?

My husband loves hard-boiled quail eggs in his bento - I think they're a pain to peel, so I just pop them in in their shell. Here I used some for a "Totoro" themed bento I made for our visit to the Ghibli museum in Mitaka, Japan. They're quite common as a panchan in Korea, too, where they're served whole with salt and pepper for dipping, or included in potato salad. But the best way I ever had them was hardboiled and wrapped in bacon. It was at a lunar New Year feast somewhere in Vietnam - they were the perfect little mouthful, although I can't imagine how long the ladies must have spent peeling them, because there was a huge platter for every table, and there had to be at least 100 people there.

I'm not quite sure why, but this made me laugh out loud. My husband came home with some punnets of raspberries that he got for the unbelievably low price of 150 yen each. Considering they usually retail for about 900 yen each (around $8 US), I was thrilled. I didn't want to waste them all on out of hand eating, and I already had some frozen in the freezer. Then I had a brief flash of kitchen serendipity, when I saw a had a few lemons that needed dealing with, and a box of Fauchon butter cookies that a student had given me. Ta da! Lemon raspberry parfaits. I made a custard with the lemons and crushed the cookies up, which was about all I could manage in a hot summer kitchen. This thread makes me so sad I don't have an oven

Isn't vichyssoise a cold soup? I've never made it, but it's got potato, leek and onion, so it sounds quite good. I always steer away from melon soup, too, since I don't really like melons. I didn't really want to call my soup as gazpacho, since I don't think a real gazpacho has corn in it. It would have gone nicely with corn chips, though, now that you mention it - I don't see what would be wrong with that! I fell in love with a cold soup in Korea called mul naeng myeon. It's a light beef broth that's been semi-frozen. Cold, chewy buckwheat noodles are nested in the middle, and garnished with julienned cucumber and nashi pear. It's topped off with a cold hard boiled egg and thin slices of boiled brisket. They bring it to your table with mustard and vinegar to season the broth, sesame seeds, and scissors to cut the noodles. Once again, I lament the absence of a drool emoticon.

Has anyone seen the new Pretz flavours in the recloseable bags? I picked up some basil and pumpkin flavours over the weekend, and I really enjoyed them. The pumpkin flavour was a nice blend of salty/sweet - it would be really good with beer. I found them at my supermarket, but I haven't seen them at the conbini yet.

Every time I walk by my local vegetable stand, I can't resist buying another bag of tomatoes. I've been watching them grow and ripen on the vine since the patch owner put them out - gosh, was it in May? I've been mentally rubbing my hands and say, "soon, my pretties, mwahaha". Is there anything better than getting garden fresh tomatoes without all the work and heartbreak that goes into growing them yourself? And for 100 yen a bag, you can't go wrong. Today I put several large ripe ones into my blender, along with some stale bread, garlic, salt, pepper, olive oil, and sherry vinegar. Chilled, with a dollop of corn jumble salad, I had a great soup - in the style of gazpacho.

For presentation, could you make a tartufo-style ball, using kinako instead of cocoa? Then it would look like a frozen mochi, sort of. You could do an umeboshi layer, surrounded by a sweeter, creamier layer - I'm not sure what, although I'm imagining houjicha or kinako moulded around it, and then dusted in more kinako powder. Something red to garnish. That might be too fusion for what you had in mind, though.

Mmm, those all sound great. The kinako one, especially. How about a houjicha flavour - am I spelling that right? I mean, roasted tea. It has a pleasant smoky vanilla taste that would make a fine ice cream, I think. Other seasonal suggestions - sakura? sweet potato or kabocha? Chestnut? Mikan sorbet? What about a take on those waffle cakes with red bean - koiyaki? Red bean ice cream with bits of waffle inside? Or ichigo daifuku, with strawberry ice cream and mochi pieces?

When I lived in Vietnam, where rice is harvested three times a year in some places, I noticed a difference in the taste of rice - it had a stronger taste and fragrance, to my mind, like the difference between coffee you've been keeping in your freezer, and coffee that you've freshly ground from fresh roasted beans. In Korea, a lot is made of eating fresh rice at Korean Thanksgiving (Chuseok), since that's the time when the crop is harvest. I noticed, as Prasantrin has mentioned, that it seems to cling together more, and yield softly in your mouth. As for basmati, I'm not sure, but I've seen it labeled as "aged" before, too. I don't know what the difference is there.

I feel really intimidated by fish. And I'm surrounded by good fish, so I feel like I should be taking advantage of that, and every week I walk into the fish section of my local supermarket, stare blankly at the array of fish laid out, and then turn around and walk back into the tofu section. Do I have to use fish the same day I buy it? Can I stick it in the freezer to defrost and use later? Do supermarket fish come prescaled? I have so many questions...