Anna N

That is the Georgian bread that I dream of! Perhaps one day I will attempt again.

Classic brownies from The Artful Baker. I used black cocoa powder only because we were discussing it on another thread. My granddaughter has declared these the best brownies ever. Not being a connoisseur I have to take her word for it. She will get one or two if her dad is generous and he usually is.

Exactly. Insufficient return on investment at least for me.

No worries. I know you have a good sense of humour. I’ve seen it many times.

I think you’ll find in time I do not exactly shy away from a challenge.

No issues whatever. Cannot imagine cooking on anything else.

You, too, must have missed the emoji.

I wasn’t questioning the origin of spice. I am fairly certain I know that it’s not a western cultivar. And my attempt at a joke apparently fell flat. Cabbage rolls are what the Japanese call “yoshoku” meaning foreign or very specifically western foods. So I was laughing at myself. Hence the emoji.

Scrapple.

I know you were not asking me. But I can’t help but tell you that they almost finished any desire on my part to ever bake anything ever again.

Canadians don’t have a temper. Did you not know that?

I feel exonerated for my boring posts. I’ve sparked a fire.

It will improve the colour but not at all sure it does much for the flavour. YMMV.

Korokke (croquettes) which are traditionally made with potato and ground meat. They are occasionally made with kabocha squash. I had no kabocha but did have a number of small winter squash that had been given to me. I also had another leftover nikomi hamburg. I roasted the squash, combined it with the crumbled hamburg, shaped into patties, dipped into flour, egg and Panko and deep-fried. Very satisfactory.

It might. But if you wanted to look up very many recipes I’m sure it would be painful. It seems somebody made a very arbitrary decision. I have a lot of Japanese cookbooks in English and not one of them fails to give a transliteration of the recipe title.

So the blogger responded and said yes that it was a binder but that it was said to be also something that kept the flavour in the meat. Seems to be based largely on a tradition. They were quite delicious so I am not inclined to question its inclusion.

Yes, I was with you couple of weeks ago and I picked up a tiny basket of it.

Taking a page out of Duvel’s book. Nikomi hamburg meets hakkebøf. One of my late husband‘s favourite dishes from his native Denmark was hakkebøf - again a cross between a hamburger and Salisbury steak. A hamburger made with onion gravy and often topped with a fried egg. My interpretation: Beneath the egg is a Japanese hamburger left over from dinner yesterday evening. The side is cocktail tomato wedges tossed with pickled ginger and a little pickled ginger juice.

Nope. I hope @liuzhou will chime in again and explain it.

Now that I have not seen. But I can’t say that I was looking for it. Trips to the Asian store are infrequent and only rarely leave time for leisurely exploration. But I will be on the lookout for it on my next visit.

Thank you. You make it all worthwhile to post these things when I find them. Foraging in my fridge is as challenging and as potentially perilous as I care to get these days.

Love the single-headed garlic which you introduced me to. It is becoming more common now in our Asian stores and I have a few bulbs in the house.

Nikomi hamburg which has been unappetizingly translated as “stewed hamburger”. However, for someone who is not a fan of hamburgers but is a fan of Salisbury steak this is a tasty compromise. There are probably as many versions as there are Japanese families. In this version ground pork and ground beef are combined with seasonings and binders, formed into oval patties, browned, and then finished in a sweet and sour sauce. Served with rice, steamed broccoli and tomatoes.

This will likely only interest a minuscule portion of our membership — those who live in southern Ontario. Still I was startled to learn that pawpaws grow wild here. Here. "These are actually the first wild pawpaws that I've seen," he said. "I first read about pawpaw trees. It just seemed like this exotic tree that seemed too mythical, too bizarre to be true."

Hachisu Is very much involved in the effort to preserve Japanese traditions in cuisine and also in other areas. She can be quite rigid at times which as a non-Japanese living in another country I find very irritating. She writes in English for a non-Japanese audience and I think such rigidity is unwarranted. But that’s just my opinion. Also, and this is directed more at the publisher than the author, when you are presenting a cuisine to an audience that is quite unfamiliar with it, and where presentation is so crucial to the cuisine, then you need photographs. You need many, many photographs. You need at least as many photographs as are found in Tokiko Suzuki‘s Japanese Homestyle Cooking. 😊