smallworld

Thank you, SuzuSushi and Pompollo! I'm glad it's not just me. Now that I think of it, that last batch did seem a bit soapy. I ended up chucking them, but if it happens again I'll use them cooked. Just curious- some recipes (using raw shiso) call for them to be soaked in ice water. Apparently to make it milder. Does anyone bother?

I agree that Japanese food magazines are generally better than American food magazines. I love the step-by-step pictures. Sometimes I find the layout a bit crowded and unattractive, though. I'll buy the housewifey cooking magazines like Orange Page, Lettuce Club, and Esse once in a while, but I'm not impressed very often. There are far too many ads and non-cooking stuff. Also, most recipes emphasise quick, easy preparation above all else. Instead, I like Kyou no Ryouri, which is food and cooking only. I like that there is always a mix of classic, traditional recipes and creative new dishes; with quick-and-easy recipes mixed in with more challenging, time consuming ones. Plus featured ingredients, dishes, cuisines ect. are explored in much greater depth than most other cooking magazines. I also really like Elle a Table (Japanese edition), not sure if it counts though.

Well I wouldn't say it doesn't taste like shiso, in fact the shiso flavour is really strong and sharp. The minty lemony flavour is in addition to that.

Does anyone ever get shiso with a sharp, strange flavour? This has happened to me a few times. It's sold as regular ao-jiso, looks totally normal, and it's not until you start to eat it that you notice. The flavour is unpleasantly strong and is similar to mint. Some leaves even have lemony flavours. Why does this happen? Is there anyway to remove the odd flavours (I tried soaking it cold water for 10 minutes but it didn't help)?

Found this articleabout New York robatayaki, yakitori, and yakiniku restaurants in today's New York Times (free membership required). An excerpt: Also a slideshow, yakitori recipe, and restaurant list.

Wow Kristin, did you find a hidden thread, or create one by pulling posts from other threads? Either way, thanks! Here's a short article from the New York Times (membership required) about the RanKing RanQueen stores in Tokyo. Not specifically food-related, but the shops do sell trendy snacks.

Problem solved. I had been using an dark Italian roast, with very oily beans. And like I said in my previous posts, when I made cold brewed coffee, there were always some grinds that floated to the top of the mix and stayed dry. Even after 12 hours of seeping. But recently I tried a more medium roast, with greaseless dry beans. And the cold brew worked perfectly- when I added the water, the coffee grinds sank to the bottom and each grind was saturated. It seems that the oil in darker roasts acts as a barrier to cold water and prevents saturation. So cold process coffee really only works with oil-free beans. I wonder why the Toddy instructions (or any of the various directions for DIY cold process coffee) don't mention this?

Thank you. My husband loves sweet drinks and is in a major lychee liqueur phase. I'm sure the idea of making his own would really appeal to him (he can't wait to try my strawbery liqueur, which should be ready any day now). Lychee is expensive but I've seen it sold for reasonable prices in Chinatown. I'll have to make a trip there soon.

Hmm. I'm not sure if you'll be able to find a "traditional" recipe for salman skin salad. I've seen it only a few times in Japan, in trendy fusion type places or maybe an izakaya. When I want to add salmon skin to a salad, I usually just grill it really carefully (it burns easily). I'm sure baking in a hot oven or grilling in a toaster oven would work too. If it's not salted salmon, I'll just sprinkle a little salt on the inside of the skin first. I love salmon skin rolls, but have never seen them in Japan.

Thats exactly what I do. Shio momi, boil, resalt and squeeze lime on. Still in the pods for me. ← Yup, what she said. They beans are still in the pods, but you get enough lime flavour from the shell when you suck them out.

How did you prepare the lychee? I prefer Paraiso to Dita. I agree about Dita's artificial aroma, and think Paraiso is a bit better.

I agree: edamame are best boiled and salted. Fresh, of course. But for variety, I think they're great in cooking (especially in rice and sunomono), and I like to occasionally add flavours to boiled edamame. Salt and lime is a classic, and I like the idea of roasting them with chili. The fresh ones are just starting to come to the markets, so I'll try it soon. Kristin, where do you find decent frozen edamame? And for 198yen??

(Any chance of getting this pinned, Torakris? There are plenty of articles about Japanese food that should be shared, but they just get lost when a new thread is created for each one.) This is the place to share any articles about Japanese food you find. Please give a short description of the article or a quote, and mention if it's from a subscription-required site. I'll start with a few: Demystifying the Market: Kanji-ridden packages often hide delicious treats not to be missed, from Metropolis Six must-try Japanese products. For the love of soba, from the Toronto Star (subscripton required) Introducing soba to Canada Soba for starters, from the Toronto Star (subscription required) Three (rather fusiony) recipes for soba.

Yes, you get a sticker, Helen- a big gold star! I think my MIL bought the those bentos for our lunch because she knows I can't eat rice on my diet. Very sweet of her, and I didn't have the heart to tell her that with all the sugar in each highly seasoned delicacy, the entire bento was likely off-limits. So I had to eat the whole thing (oh, the sacrifices we make for family)... So did you figure out a good hanami bento to make? I'm not going to bother for today's hanami. We'll just drop by a depachika on the way and pick something up.

We visited the in-laws on the weekend and were given these hanami-bentos for lunch. We didn't actually go cherry blossom viewing, we just ate the bentos for fun. Quick quiz: The bento includes savouries and sweets, but no rice. Why not?

Some of the best, and most interesting, Japanese style spaghetti I've had is at Kyou-fuu Spaghetti Pontoiru, in the Shinjuku Subnade (underground walkway/shopping complex). The spaghettis are all light and adorned with Kyou-yasai (Kyoto vegetables), yuba, katsuo-bushi, ume and the like. On a recent visit, my husband and I shared these two: Eggplant and Wa-fuu meatsauce spaghetti. Ume and chirimen-sanshou spaghetti with chicken soboro. Both very nice. The meatsauce was pretty much a fancied-up niku-miso, and both seem easy to duplicate at home. My husband has promised to make the ume-chirimen pasta for dinner tomorrow night, and I'll be taking on the meatsauce pasta next week.

You'd think that by now, two years later, consumers would be savy enough to avoid this rip off. Well, not this consumer. I must have completely forgotten reading this thread, because the other day I saw "matsu-kinoko" on sale at the supermarket. At 400yen for a small pack of three or four, it was expensive, but I was curious and just had to have some. I might have overlooked it, but the packaging and accompanying signs didn't say anything about matsu-kinoko being a cross between shiitake and matsutake. What the signs said (I think) was that these were the world's first cultivated matsutake. Wanting to prepare them in the simplist way possible, I grilled them. They weren't bad, but as I wrote in my blog, they seemed more like shiitake than matsutake. I wasn't very impressed. Curious, I did a search of eGullet and found Hiroyuki's wonderful information quoted above. I'm such a sucker. What I can't believe is that the supermarket agreed to carry them. People have such short memories!

Good example. How about strawberries? You can make them into jam or ice cream or eat them with cream or dipped in chocolate. But strawberries are always best just as they are. Preferably eaten right there in the field. And scallops. Sauteed in butter with a little salt and pepper. How could you improve that?

Yup. Raw onions in salad. Occasionally burgers or sandwhiches too, but it's mostly in salad that they bother me. I mean big chunks of regular onion. Doesn't happen often (maybe just in Japan), but when it does it just brings tears to my eyes. Literally. Sweet onions? They have them here, at least red onions. Bring 'em on. Wasabi is not provided as a condiment for sushi in Japan. All you get is what's already in the sushi. And you'd think sushi chefs in Japan would be able to get the amount of wasabi in each piece of sushi right, but in many cheaper kaiten-zushi places each piece will have a different sized smear of wasabi- seemingly at random. Or maybe (shudder) to mask the flavour of fish that's past its prime? The lesson here, obviously, is to not go to cheap sushi places...

Wasabi. Raw onions.

I think the fact that Nakano is not in the guidebooks will make it more fun to explore. It's an interesting neighborhood- not exactly central but not suburban either. Very busy and crammed with all sorts of shops. It has a bit of a shitamachi (old downtown) feel to it. Don't know of any specific places but Frank's Dining Out in Tokyoand Tokyo Food Page mention some Nakano restuarants. The Ainu restaurant sounds interesting. The Underground Tokyo Guide has a very brief bit on shopping in Nakano, and a longer section on Koenji, a really great neighborhood one station away.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I do sometimes leave my Toddy brewing in a cooler part of the house, when the fridge is too full. But I would never ever do this in the summer- things go bad fast here in the hot and humid months. (I usually dry my used grounds out in the sun to reuse them around the house, but in the summer if I leave them in the house waiting for the sun to come out, they'll have mold growing on them less than a day- yuck!) And I would hesitate to leave the bucket uncovered- who knows what could get in there- yucky smells, bugs, dust... Jeez, I sound like the Anal Retentive Chef here (Phil Hartman RIP). I've tried changing the grind, and the problem disappears if I use a finer grind. I guess I won't try that anymore. No more stirring either. Yesterday I tried using more water than called for, which worked. I brewed it longer than usual, about 16 hours, and the coffee tasted the same. Unless it turns out that longer brewing times are bad too, I'll try it this way from now on.

Easternsun, that is so odd. I've had my share of unpleasent service in Japanese restaurants, but I've never been refused a doggy bag. True, doggy bags are not the norm, and the the food is likely to be roughly wrapped in tinfoil or plastic wrap and often leaks all over the place, but I've always been able to take home uneaten portions of restaurant food. My mother-in-law, whose doggy bags really are for her dog, has always been able to bring home her food as well. Sounds like the staff at that restaurant were just jerks. Care to name it so we can avoid it?

Hmm. As I understand it, the long lifespans of the Japanese are a recent phenomenon. It would be nice if this article (or the many others on this subject) addressed this, and explained why "the traditional Japanese diet, part of the nation's culture since ancient times" is only now producing longer lives. Or if a little balance was added by mentioning the unhealthy aspects of the Japanese diet, like high sodium levels or the almost complete lack of nutrition offered by the staple white rice (oligosaccharide and gamma aminobutyric acid, both found in many other food sources, notwithstanding). I don't doubt that the traditional Japanese diet is extremely healthy, but so are many other traditional diets. And hasn't the increase in lifespans coincided with the introduction of non-traditional foods, like milk and a wide variety of fruit? Couldn't the year-round availability of fresh fruits and vegetables, a recent occurance, help to explain longer lifespans? Could it not be that the long lives of the Japanese can only be explained by a combination of many factors, such as improvements in medicine, high education and literacy levels, mild climate, and increased wealth?

Thanks, Torakris. Yup, I pour it exactly like you do. And same as you, the second pour will saturate the dry grounds on top, but then the mix will bubble a bit and the newly wet grounds will sink and expose some dry grounds. I'm starting to think the measurements are wrong- the instructions are American so I converted them to metric. I've been assuming that 1 cup = 240ml and therefore 9 cups is 2.130L. And that 1 pound of coffee is 454g. If these are off then that would explain my problem...