torakris

Shopping for food in any country can be daunting, there are just so many choices!! add in the foreign foods and...... I would like to make a thread listing our favorite non-snack items(we have threads for those ones!!). Do you have any product you have found on the shelves of a Japanese store (in Japan or elsewhere) that you just can't live with out?

word for 10/28: スズキ suzuki (sue-zoo-key) sea bass, sometimes referred to as sea perch

nooooo! the grape one is so much better!

the black sesame ones are my current favorites! melonpan, those soft salad ones are all over here, I always thought tey were a kid's sembei.... The reason I thought still think) this is that whenever I go to a friend's house the soft salad sembei go into the kid's oyatsu (snack) bowl and the mother's snack on somethingelse.....

mushrooms are on the cheap side right now because it is their shun (season) but I can't imagine them going cheaper than average especially with the stores struggling with their other vegetable prices.

I eat almost any except for the sugar coated ones as well! My kids don't really like sembei so I rarely have them in the house....

what are your favorite sembei? here is a short article on sembei with some nice pictures: http://www.bento.com/phgal-sembei.html

10/27: beside s the dishes mentioned above amadai can also be founs as a hoshimono (干し物), a semi-dried fish product, and as a mushimono (蒸し物), a steamed dish. amadai in a semi-dried form: http://www6.ocn.ne.jp/~ogiso/syohin/amadai.jpg

today's newspaper says that two more people died from eating that same mushroom.... http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getart...n20041026b3.htm Ten more people have been diagnosed with acute brain disorder in Akita Prefecture, and two have died, the prefectural government said Monday, possibly the result of eating a type of edible wild mushroom. The deaths of a woman in her 70s and a man in his 60s brought to four the number of people in Akita who have died from the acute brain disorder since mid-September, and to 10 the total number of deaths in Akita, Yamagata and Niigata prefectures. Like Hiroyuki said before, they were over 60 and both had kidney problems....

It doesn't actually look like really sugar does it...? I found though that it works well for adding to cold drinks as it dissolves quickly, never actually tried it for cooking though.....

Thank you for that information! I had thought they were edible, so I was puzzled by the deaths....

I always use the ready-to-eat kind! Actually I use a prepared pack that includes the prepared kuri as well as a "soup" for cooking. You can use just regular Japanese short grain rice, but I prefer it with a little bit of mochi-gome (glutinous rice) added. I ususally use 2 1/2 cups (the Japanese 180ml rice cup) of regular rice and 1/2 cup (again the same rice cup measure) of mochi-gome. To flavor the rice use dashi (a simple konbu-dashi works well here) instead of water, add some sake, about 2 tablespoons and about a teaspoon of salt, I also like to add just a splash of soy sauce. Cook in a rice cooker (or on the stove) adding teh prepared chestnuts with the rice. serve with goma-shio.

melonpan, thank you for the recipe for that anchovy dish!!!!! I have eaten it a couple times and even seen recipes for it but now I am going to try it!! In Japan, most of the recipes use shishito, a Japanese green pepper on the very mildly spicy side. I might give it a try with that as chile peppers are hard to come by here.....

I just ran across this story: http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20041024p2a00m0dm015000c.html An elderly woman who had been hospitalized with an acute brain disease she suffered after eating "angel's wing" mushrooms, has died, prefectural government officials said Sunday. The death has brought to eight the number of patients who died of an acute brain disease after eating the mushroom in Niigata, Yamagata and Akita prefectures. Looking on the internet says this isn't a poisonous mushroom... anyone know anything about this one?

Pretty much if you have been to one department store basement you have been to them all, I don7t think there is too much difference, a lot of them even have the same stores....

word for 10/24: 地震 jishin (gee-sheen) earthquake Japan had a major one last night, more about it in this thread: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=54064

hey! next time give me a call! I can help you spend more!! sounds great and much better than the dinner I had tonight......

word for 10/23: 西京焼き saikyou-yaki (sigh-kyo yah-key) Saikyo refers to saikyo miso, the sweet, white, made from rice miso from Kyoto. Fish is usually marianted in the white miso (often mixed with mirin) for a couple hours to a couple days before grilling. Amadai is delicious when cooked in this manner. saikyou-yaki (not amadai though..) http://e-shinsen.entstore.co.jp/resip/image/resip65_01.jpg

No, I haven't. It seems to be for sale at all of the Tokyu department stores in my area for 315 yen ( about $3) so it is a fairly reasonable price. I am not sure if it is a limited time only thing or what. I do want to pick up a bottle to see what it is like though....

my kids picked up some snack at the store a little while ago, it was like a gummy bear coated in chocolate and bad chocolate at that. I actually spit it out, it was vile! My kids downed the whole box.....

I used to make these wondeful pumpkin cookies for the big Halloween party my friends and I used to put on. The first year I made them about 2 months later two of my friends announced they were about 2 months pregnant, didn't think anything of it. The next year I made the cookies again, this time 2 months later found 3 of my friends were pregnant, none of them had been planned pregnancies..... My friends forbid me from making anything with pumpkin..... I am actually sort of scared to cook with it myself.....

of course it is! Glad to see so many tomato soup lovers!! I am going to pull a can out for lunch with my left over focaccia....

I try and try to avoid this thread, but I am always sucked back in..... I only picked up 12 on my trip to the US this summer and I swore I wouldn't buy anymore until Christmas but last week I picked up: Home Baking by Alford and Duguid ( found this for just 1,000 yen , less than $10 at Amazon Japan's marketplace, there was no way to pass it up at that price!! ) Williams-Sonoma Savoring Provence Catalan Cuisine by Colman Andrews --these last two I aslo picked up at amrketplace for about $6 a piece and a Japanese book on cooking fish so add 16 for me....

That really depends on the person. In my case, I probably go to one of those shops two or three times a year, only to buy a gift before visiting someone. As for mattcha, I never drink mattcha at home; I drink sencha only. ← The only person I know who drinks "real" matcha at home is a fellow American friend... As for the cake shops, I go about the same as Hiroyuki about 2 to 3 times a year... and I think most of my Japanese friends go about the same...

The Japanese use a lot of words that are not Japanese in origin like marron and don't really know the true country of origin, often falsely assuming they are English words. This just happened in one of my English classes where all of my students assumed the word for questionnaire, (ankeeto アンケート) was English but it is actually from the French enquete. information about egulleteers and typhoons damage can be found here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=53996&hl=