Blether

Thanks, Heidi. Yes, my family (me as one of the kids) too discovered "La Vache Qui Rit" in France in the 70's. Softer, creamier, richer, whiter and more tangy than Dairylea, all at once, right ? Here, I've only ever seen the standard no-extra-flavour kind; and it's only been here for the last 5 or so years, IIRC. Maybe we can blame big French company Lactalis, whose acquisition of McLelland's means that since, oh, 3 years ago we also get to enjoy imported Scottish cheddar in various maturities.

RRO, I'd invite you over, but I know you already have a man on the go. And I've seen his frighteningly gnarled hands ! The duck livers look & sound like a fantastic way to start the day. Here, it was my favourite Kilimanjaro coffee, and breadmaker-white toast with (1) Laughing Cow cheese and deli Milanese salami, and (2) homemade yuzu curd.

Does "veloute du jus", aka gravy, count ?

Hi, xoknives. Comgratulations on losing your breaking your duck. My no-knead bread goes like this: mix ingredients. Shape. Put in loaf tin. Allow to rise. Preheat oven. Bake. Your approach sounds unnecessarily complicated

Oops - from the UK I'm used to 'Mo' - and "Moe" (both vowels pronounced) is what the maids say in Japan's 'maid cafes', isn't it ? Today's breakfast: a 100yen salted-and-dried (I mean bought that way) hokke. I don't usually keep daikon/mooli, but I had some small swede on hand, which is much the same thing, and grated a wee pile of that to drizzle ponzu over. And I added a wee spray of parsley, because yes sir, I'm a gaijin.

Ha ha ha. Commercial kitchens ? No, the sum of my experience is one or two nights (ETA: in 1982 or so) as stand-in dishwasher in a family-run regional hotel (which did have a good rep for its food), when my friend whose regular gig it was couldn't make it.

This is a great idea for a thread, and I like the drama in this first post It's a field I know little about. I'll be reading along avidly.

Of course I'm being flippant using the expression 'jiggery-pokery'. I've always been very comfortable with physics: I don't feel phased by the thermodynamics aspects at all. In fact I've found I can make great pizza that I enjoy very much using my home microwave/electric oven at 250C, and an ordinary aluminium baking sheet - no stone, no lumps of metal, no preheat any longer than the built-in one. I do find that flour & method are key. I posted somewhere on eG about the things I was doing when I first got into that, back somewhere in the mists of time. Yes, that's certainly true. Lately I've found myself gravitating more and more towards exploiting what's available to me here - rather than just recreating things from back home. Both are enjoyable, but the former provides as good eating, for less money and trouble ! These 'exotics', here, are things that come cheap from the wholesale supermarket (shrimp), that I pick from the tree in the building's grounds (natsumikan) and that came as a gift (the yuzu). I'm embarassed sometimes that I've never made more effort to learn to prepare 'real' Japanese food, but on the other hand I have been able to find some few small ways to work with Japanese produce and ingredients. Anyway, this is the stuff I'm eating day to day. You mentioned that you know yuzu. Natsumikan is an orangey fruit with a much more sour juice and a bitter character to the zest, just like seville oranges, and I've waxed lyrical (wittered on, at any rate) before about the marmalade I've made from it. The Japanese peel it and munch away at the fruit - too sharp for me, really, though I'll eat along to be sociable. Your 'forks' are wonderful. You're making those yourself ?

So, choose good flour... long rise... and whatever flavour of oven jiggery-pokery lights your candle. I see.

Yes, thanks for the report from Wako, RRO. That's one of the best-known chains, with a good reputation for quality. I expect we'll see more from there (and of course we have Prawncrackers' report from Wako in Fukuoka at #8 here).

Not to worry, the local lasses qualify as kurisumasu keeki when they're still unmarried at 25... You must have been posting just when I was. Your uni-ikura-negitoro don looks killer - three of my favourites. Did you guys spot the "Bikkuri (surprise !) donburi", the biggest one amongst the signage ? "JPY3,980; free if you can eat it all within 15 minutes" Ha ha !

I couldn't resist these (a common theme, I admit) when I saw them on display. Sashimi-quality amaebi shrimps in great condition, around USD2.50 for the half pound pack: I did this for you guys - if it had been just me, it would just have been the shrimp in a heap. Yes, I know they are just in a heap. Wasabi & soy. I pulled off the heads and sucked out the tomalley, as we discussed here. An incredible concentration of deliciousness. These shrimp are good, too, because there's no vein to deal with, and because they're so easy to peel. I scoffed each in turn, head and meat, and they didn't last long. I have the debris saved for infusing in oil. Followed by a simple salad of mizuna: - with a dressing of neutral (in this case peanut) oil, grated onion and some men-tsuyu noodle-sauce concentrate and konbu ponzu. There's a picaresque tale behind that one if anyone wants to hear me rabbit on more. It's turned cold again, so. Followed by something I've been working up to: winter citrus meets the nursery, in natsumikan marmalade steamed sponge pudding with yuzu-natsumikan curd sauce. I've posted the sponge in this thread before. Saucing with curd is something I've been planning to do for ages. I didn't want something quite as thick as curd by itself, so I started with the juice of another natsumikan, fresh from the tree, mixed with honey. I added about the same amount of yuzu curd, but with the amount of juice out of one natsumikan, the sauce was going to end up too thin. I beat one more egg and got it to thicken back up to something like custard just in time. Yes, the natsumikan are back in season again: the sponge has marmalade from the batch I made last May. Garnished with a couple of leaves from the tree. Aw. Rich buttery sponge, tart-and-sweet, intense sauce. Yummy !

The ramen does look good - nice, rich soup. Of course the isolation-partitions are a sad social comment - or another chance to build a bridge and appreciate the ingrained experience of overcrowding in these islands of cake.

Hi, dcarch. The naan looks great (I have a chicken curry in the works at the moment - chickens defrosting in the fridge). How do you go about it ?

Oysters. About USD2.50 for the 5: ETA: oh yeah, I used my trusty screwdriver again, but paired this time with one of my sailing gloves, for that don't-care-about-the-briny-after-aroma ease of mind. It suited the job well.

In Japan... my bit of it, anyway, for a while there (summer last year ?) there were more baddies than usual in several bags. But it's better again now.

Today - a parmesan cheese omelette, and a head of chingensai (~bok choy) chopped and flash-fried in the bacon fat & fond. Toast & natsumikan marmalade again to follow, and tea. Ann_T - ha ha ! That's three of us. Kim, you & me. Those both look delicious. Moe ? Moe, Moe... Moe. What's Moe ?

ChrisTaylor, what Brits call "fish cakes" are a ready-made supermarket standard there, and a popular dish to prepare at home. The normal fish/spud ratio is indeed 50:50. I've talked about them from time to time on eG - once here with a photo. I think it's important to taste the mixture before breading & frying. They can be very bland - salt, yes of course. Otherwise the usual suspects to give some zing - lemon, parsley. The Brit standard, again, uses white pepper. Of course plenty of other things work if you've a mind to use them - black pepper, garlic, you can think up a list just as well as I can. Chris A, I too think smoked paprika is a great choice, and I think "earthy and wonderful" is spot-on.

Not to me. It looks at least that much.

I got all excited when I saw Almondmeal's recipe this afternoon. I've been sitting looking at my last three yuzu, and thinking once again about fruit curd & 'steamed' sponge, also made in the microwave. I had half an hour free, so following the recipe, I did this: - zested and juiced three tired yuzu that were turning soft into a wee pyrex bowl on the digital scale - 25g, almost an ounce. Added the juice of half a lemon, because yuzu zest has plenty of flavour to go round and whilst I knew I'd be looking at a small batch, I didn't want a micro one. Total 38g. - 38 x 3/7 = 16g sugar added to get the 'puree', or to me, syrup. Total now 54g, very nearly 2 ounces. - added 54g light brown sugar (I don't keep caster), stirred in, microwaved 600W x 20s, stirred, 20s, stirred. The syrup was getting too hot for eggs but the sugar wasn't all dissolved, so I gave it another 20s, stirred and sat the bowl on the marble tabletop to pull some of the heat back out. - weighed several of the various-sized eggs from the box of the delicious eggs (qv) that I like to buy, and out of 69g, 55g, 56g & 61g, chose the 61. I cracked that into a very wee bowl on the scale and it came to exactly 54g - a result. - finger-tested the syrup temp after a few minutes, and stirred in the beaten egg. (I used a flexible silicone spatula throughout, so's to waste nothing in emptying bowls). - Microwaved, stirred, microwaved as follows: 600W x 15s + 10s + 10s. 300W x 10 + 20 + 20 + 20 + 10 + 10 + 10s. I was seeing little scrambled-egg-oids at the end of some of these zappings. At this point I decided the game wasn't worth the candle, put some hottest tap water in a saucepan, sat the bowl on it and got to balloon whisking in the normal fruit-curd fashion, with the pan over a medium flame. - the curd thickened up nicely, and I stirred in the 54g piece of butter to stop & finish it. I think using the MW for the first syrup heating makes sense. Certainly for a batch this size, it was more trouble than it was worth for the egg stage, as well as putting the integrity of the product at risk. I'd want to use a straight-sided container if I ever tried it again with a bigger batch. (Doing scrambled eggs by MW, it's always the strip round the rim of the bowlful of egg that cooks first). Thanks, Almondmeal, for the impetus at least to get round to the fruit before they went past the point of no return. It was touch and go getting the zest off them with the yuzu so soft: I had to press to get the grater to bite, and they were splitting halfway through grating as a result. Yuzu curd turns out to be stunningly good. If you ever get your hands on a few, give it a try. (My camera battery crapped out just as I started, so no photos - but keep an eye on 'Dinner!' if you're interested...)

Thanks for a well-rounded summary, and for taking the time, Mjx. gfweb pointed out that AIDS isn't even an auto-immune disease - it's a virus attacking t-lymphocytes. Of course, there are those in the world who seem under the impression that disease statistics are reliably collected by the extensive, bureaucratised health services prevalent in the third world. Apparently the ministry of health of Mbongoland does report a high incidence of "possession by evil spirits" (DSMX). "There are no auto-immune diseases in the third world". Nice piece of politicised pseudo-science, right there. If you're going to denigrate mass media 'science', Karri, you'd be better to find alternative sources for your own. There's a political dimension to the teacher-student relationship, too. And you're talking like you want to study by yourself. Hobbesian enough for you ?

Nada. Like it says on the, uh, tin, liver sausage / liverwurst, the soft, spreadable kind. Not the slicing or rough-minced ones.

Thanks for saying so I've said it in this thread before, but it's my favourite breakfast and has been since I was 5 or younger. Buttered toast, bacon, raw tomato... you have to eat it to believe it. By all means have some lettuce. Before or after. Ouch on the shake. But you had better things to do somewhere along the line, right ?

Both Parsley and basil taste stronger (not in a good way) after bolting. Parsley's OK, because for its first year you can rely on it, so just alternate plants. Basil, you do have to pinch off the flower buds as BarbaraY says. Coriander, I gave up on after reading that you pretty much have to plant fresh every two weeks because of it going to seed. Chillis will do very well where you are. I envy you the wild thyme; lemon thyme is good to have to hand too, particularly for the likes of seafood gremolata.

Pulled lamb is very big in Turkey, isn't it ?