torakris

Donations of a digital camera are always welcome!

Dropwort is truely a wonderful vegetable, if you can ever get your hands on it give it a try. It is also known as water celery or minari in Korean and seri in Japanese. It is a common hotpot ingredient and it also often used in making napa cabbage kimchi. What is called sesame leaves is actually the perilla plant and is actually a misnomer, they are not related to the true sesame. Perilla (called kkaennip in Korean) is similar to the Japanese shiso but almost twice the size. I have used shiso to make this kimchi and it is really good!

Okay Jin we all know how you feel about konnyaku! But it just isn't oden without it!

What's your favorite kimchi? What is one of the most unusual ones you have eaten? Check out this site for some less common examples: http://www.kimchi.or.kr/english/kind/index.html

Oden is a wonderful dish, filled with almost anything your heart desires yet usually focused on fish paste cakes. Oden is most popular as a winter food stall item, though there are odenya (oden restaurants) that serve it all year round), it is also the only hotpot that is equally popular in the summer. It is one of the main foods offered at food stalls at Japanese beaches and during summer festivals. For a comical look at oden check out the following site: http://www.amychavez.addr.com/news/coax/ Oden was the topic of the TV Champion show last week, where they were searching for the best oden stall in Japan, the winner besides including the regular offferings of fish paste cakes, daikon, eggs, konnyaku and beef gristle had apples and bananas in his pot as well.

Jason, looks great! I love the way that roasted peppers go with this type of fritatta, occasionally for a party I will serve it with a side of my balsamic-roasted pepper relish.

Just finished Sunday dinner: sirloin steak cut into large cubes, rubbed with grated onion, salt and lots of coarsely ground pepper, sauteed until medium rare then sake, soy sauce, and butter are added to the pan to create a nice sauce. Meat is placed on the platter covered with watercress and shiso and the sauce is poured over everything, very, very nice! lentil tomato soup served with lots of lime and a tomato-cilantro salsa potato salad with celery and greeen olives dessert (to be eaten after we get teh kids out of the bath): chocolate chip oatmeal cookies I don't know what is wrong with me, I am on some sort of cookie crusade this week!

Saturday night: Made a huge pot of oden --Japanese hot pot of various fish paste cakes, hard boiled eggs, daikon, konnyaku, etc napa cabbage pickles witha sweet-sour flavor celery pickles with a karashi (Japanese mustad) sauce dessert: double chocolate cookies from Christopher Kimball's Dessert Bible I might be making these everyday!

I made the last two recipes I listed in the above post and although they were both good, I had a couple complaints. In the cashew sauce there was an ungodly amount of tonbanjian (Chinese chile sauce) even halving the amount left you tasting nothing else. Also in the instructions, they neglect to tell you exactly how to make the sauce. They tell you to grind the cashews and then the next step has you adding the sauce to the cabbage. I mean it isn't hard to amke a sauce but they don't even say anything like mix the ingerdients together. The second recipe was good too, but next time I won't bother with the mustard, instead base it on the grated apple and grated onion. in this recipe as well, the instructions were a bit lacking especially about the ginger, they gave no instructions on what to do with it, grate it, sliver it, or slice it? Do people check these books or what?

My mother during one of her 8 pregnancies had an awful craving for laundry detergent, never acted on it though. It wasn't me, I was the Pepsi baby, it was the only thing she could drink!

On my third day in a row of making (and eating) choclate cookies, I am starting to rethink my original post asying I had no cravings. As I was planning out the next weeks menus I was also drifting to everything with beef in it!

Well, I did what any good mother would do, I fed it to my kids! Made a corned beef hash for lunch... And no one liked it, Thank God for Costco frozen tortillas!

The bags of Jasmine rice that I buy have instructions that say just to rinse the rice once. I recently bought a bag labeled Thai rice, that I assumed was jasmine, based on the assumption I had that all Thai rice=jasmine rice. however when i opened the bag I knew it was different becasue of the lack of smell. It is just a plain (boring) long grain rice with out even the nuttiness of basmati. I think we are going to be having a lot of fried rice while I try to use this up.

Margret, like you I at one time tried all the different varieties and always came back up the plain old karashi/soy ones. I have a hard time with the large beans, a koh-tsubu girl myself! my husband's favorite way of eating it is with chilled noodles topped with natto, the little balls leftover from tempura making, scallions, and okra.

Just opened up my Japanese cookbook to look up the recipe for deep fried mountain potato and lo and behold the first step says the peal the poatao and place it into a bowl of vinegared water, then cut it and place it back in the vinegared water. It says that this will remove the aku (skum?), but nothing about itchy hands. Anyway for deep frying the potato should then be washed and well dried, then coated with katakuriko (cornstarch should work as well) then deep fry until light brown. I may as well give the rest of the recipe: after deep frying the nagaimo (mountain yam) then deep fry chicken thigh pieces that have been marinated with a little sake and soy sauce. In a pan bring to a boil 3 cups dashi 1/2 cup mirin 1/4 cup soy sauce add the nagaimo and chicken and simmer for3 to 4 minutes garnish with thinly sliced shishito (Japanese green pepper) or scallions

Awbrig, this ones just for you! Friday dinner: aromatic duck curry from David Thompson's Thai Food ---absolutely delicious! stirfried spinach topped with deep fried shallots napa cabbage salt pickles sprinkled with nampla and lime Thai rice dessert: leftover chocolate hazelnut cookies

NeroW, I made that recipe a couple months back, it was on the Epicurious site's top 30 (is it 30?) for a looong time. I initially balked at it, cream sauce with a seared tune? it really seemed like a mismatch, but it was really good!

I can agree. In my experience, nearly all Japanese households use rice cookers (okay, I haven't visited nearly all Japanese households ) Several posters have already mentioned that an important aspect is convenience. Put the rice on in the morning and serve whenever. Better half and I had an old Sanyo, the type with the spring-loaded on-off switch and aluminium bowl. Could get burnt bits at the bottom if you left rice in it for over twelve hours or so. Still used it almost every day for years, though. Two years ago got a Panasonic with the then-latest Induction Heating technology. I think this is an even more recent trend than neuro-fuzzy and might be worth searching for. Results are flawless. Although ... Got the Panasonic in Japan. Due to the fact that a suitably heavy duty voltage transformer (I'm in the UK) seemed rather pricey in Japan and because such a device was bulky and heavy, I thought I was being clever by getting a cheap building site type transformer back here (the type used for power tool safety). After much gnashing of teeth, bizarre behaviour by rice cooker, emails to Panasonic and experiments by me it transpired that the cooker did not _quite_ like the 110V from the transformer and really, really needed almost exactly 100V. Now using big old scrounged variac. IH is the "newest" technology feature on rice cookers and the good ones are running about $500, the one I am currently lusting after can cook the rice in 13 minutes! Living in Japan and having visited many houses, I have never seen one with out a rice cooker and most housewives I know would buy a rice cooker before a microwave! I actually don't use the keep warm feature on mine for more than an hour or two because i find it gives the rice a slightly off flavor. Leftovers are refrigerated and then heated in the mcrowave. I find this tastes more liking freshly made rice than the stuff that has been sitting in a rice cooker for 8 hours. My rice cooker is a couple years old, so the newer models may have improved this. The feature I would never do without is the timer. I make lunches for my husabnd and since he leaves the house about 5:45 I would ahve to wake up at 4:30 to make fresh rice. Instead I prepare it the night before, set the timer for 5:30 and ahve freshly made rice very morning. This also is wonderful when I am going to be out all day and want fresh rice for dinner, I can program it to be ready at any time!

and freaky is just the word for it!

We really need a drool icon! I saw t-bones at the Costco by my house (Yokohama) once and only once and my husband really wanted them but at something like $20 a piece they were way out of our budget. Maybe I will rethink it when we get the grill out.

I have to admit I did not grow up on canned stuff, the only cans in our house were tomatoes and tuna, even vegetables were fresh or frozen. Thus I have never tasted corned beef or spam. This stuff actually borders on gourmet in Japan and actually can only be found in the International (gourmet) supermarkets and for ridiculous prices, a can of spam runs about $7! I was at my MIL's house yesterday and she suddenly brought up the corned beef and proceeded to give my ways to useit, the first was simply a type of hash with potaoes, next was mixing it with mayo for a sandwich (I started losing it around here) and then she went on to taking some canned sardines and rolling the corned beef inside them and then storing them in the fridge for a snack, at this point I lost my lunch!

Snowangel, I am so jealous! This is my type of dream vacation, no fancy hotels for me! Once my youngest ( currently 2) gets older I can't wait to have more exciting vacations, my true love is white water rafting, though my husband inssits I will never get him in the boat! We go camping a couple times a year, usaually 3 to 4 days at a time and take evrything we will need with us, I refuse to go shopping while camping. It usually takes me a good week to figure out the menu, but hey that is the fun part! Obviously you are limited with just the use of a stove but I think stew/ hotpots would be the best bet as these are a good use for the hardy winter vegetables (that will hold up best in back packs!). I carefully plan everything down to the amount of salt and pepper needed, spices for stew/curries are always premeasured and put into baggies, or else I season the meats before leaving the house, when possible I trim the vegetables to make more space. I usually try to plan meals that can actually become two (dinner and then a lunch), or else I prepare part of the next days meal the day before. For example after cooking rice for dinner, I make some of it into onigiri (rice balls) for the next morning's breakfast, or if grilling vegetables I set some aside for the next day's sandwich. One of my favorite sanwiches is to take a alarge round loaf of bread, pull out all the insides, then layer it with grilled vegetables, ham, tomato slices, basil or arugula, spread with a black olive- garlic paste put the top back on, wrap in foil and leave over night. This makes a wonderful for when at a beach or a park. My parent's once left for a family trip leaving my 2 year old sister still playing in the basement, we had only gotten a block or 2 when my mom counted heads and realized one was missing! Never happened again.

Check out this threada on salt: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST...t=15332&hl=salt I have always kept table salt around for baking and just two days I made a cookie recipe from the Babbo cookbook that called for kosher salt, so I used it and on certain bites I could actually taste the salt melting in mouth and was quite put off by it. I think I am definitely go to stick with table salt for my baking needs.

I'm with the not enough liquid in the pan faction.

This is way too popular in Japan, they often market products for a single season, never to bring them back again or else changed in some way. The most noticeable are the drinks especially beer, each company puts out a "new" spring beer, summer beer, fall, beer, or winter beer. I don't drink beer so could care less actually but one summer I found this wonderful raspberry tea (not like that crappy American heavily sweetened stuff, the Jaapnese normally don't sweeten their teas) and drank it every chance I could get and sure enough once fall hit it was gone never to be seen again. My local co-op also used to have these delicious ground meat and cabbage croquettes breaded and frozen, all you had to do was deep fry them, they were great on busy days and the kids and myself devoured them. I bought a pack at least once a month and suddenly 2 years ago they were gone! The Japanese have this prune-yogurt drink that is really, really good! That one is still there! For now at least