helenjp

Kankoku Hiroba...I will remember that!! Elder son was born in Kabukicho at a small Red Cross hospital there...maybe that's why he likes spicy food so much! I was surprised to hear that ingredients are disappearing from supermarkets out your way too...I thought it was because we are on the east of town, which is definitely less wealthy than the west -- you can see the difference in what people on the trains are wearing as you travel from east to west! I made some kimchi at home once or twice...it tasted really good, with oki-ami and squid etc., but it was VERY hot! I like all kinds of namul, because bibinbap is surely THE healthiest all-in-one meal there is. I have one excellent Korean cookbook which is very detailed, but the library and the internet are great sources for quick versions. Most surprising discovery: mabiki daikon (the tiny daikon that are thinned out of the fields) pickled in a flour and water paste. That was a great pickle! I also like hot somen with niku-miso -- it's a fast meal, the kids love it, and if I have niku-miso in the freezer, they can make it themselves...and it deals with that backlog of somen that sometimes results when temperatures drop very quickly in the autumn!

Kris, I read in your bio that you like Korean food. I find Korean food goes so well with Japanese meals that almost every dish I try becomes a regular on the family menu. Best discovery so far: tofu/okara burgers that include ground sesame and sesame paste -- they actually taste GOOD! We used to have a supermarket that sold coarse-ground chili and other Korean ingredients, but that closed down, and supermarkets around here sell fewer and fewer exotic ingredients as the economy continues to drag.

OK...top to bottom... My husband comes from Hokkaido, and proudly states that the food is the best (surprise surprise). It has a lot of influence from the NE regions, but people immigrated from all over Japan, including coal-mining regions in Kyushu, and then many of those who fled Manchuria also ended up in Hokkaido. An interest in American food came along with US-influenced pastoral agricultural technology. It certainly does have access to great ingredients, but lots of crops traditional in other places (like nashi pears) cannot be grown in Hokkaido. North-east region (Northern Honshu): a lot of soy-simmered dishes and preserved foods -- the long cold winters make for great soy, miso, sake, and pickles. I've always had a hankering to live in Sendai...not too far north, but out of the big cities... This kind of cooking PLUS excellent seafood is found right down the western coast of Honshu (facing the continent). Noto Peninsula and Kanazawa probably represent this food best, and Kanazawa also has inherited the Kansai temple cooking traditions. Tokyo-Chiba-Yokohama...everybody has commented on that already, but rural eastern Chiba (the Boso peninsula) has access to a lot of seafood, good beaches, and some dairy farming. Nagano, Yamanashi etc. Center of Japan's wine industry, and a lot of other fruits also grown there. Food is pretty much down the middle; much as for North-east, but the climate is not quite so severe in winter, and so there is a bigger range of vegetables. This is soba country, and they eat buckwheat dumplings as well as the usual noodles. Nagoya -- famed for miso-based versions of food which in other regions is cooked with soy. Miso and pickles come downriver from inland, and they also have seafood and get good beef and pork from the Wakayama peninsula. The city itself is not a beauty spot, but both Nagoya and Osaka are small enough to get out of at weekends. Kyoto, yeah, yeah, as expected. Like all the inland cities, there are more salt-fish and fresh-water fish. I spent time in Osaka so I like the food of this region, but Nara is perhaps more fun to live in -- a much older city and less "refined", with a new technopolis on top of it -- making for quite a lively population. Of course this is the center of the Chinese-influenced temple cooking, but you will also find a lot of it north and south down to Wakayama. Osaka is very much a trade city -- lots of its best-known dishes are quick, cheap and cheerful rather than elegant! Osaka has a lot of udon too. Shikoku -- udon is the most famous, but once I'd eaten sashimi in Takamatsu, I've never bothered to spend money on expensive sashimi in Tokyo -- it just doesn't taste good enough to be worthwhile. People along the Inland Sea eat a wider variety of fish than in Tokyo. Hiroshima -- culturally, this is a very interesting city. REdevelopment after WWII has brought people from all over Japan, and it has a lively music and arts scene, as well as some excellent restaurants, I hear -- haven't stopped there though. Can't comment much on Kyushu, except for the obvious Chinese influence -- lots of egg noodles, stir-fried mixed dishes etc. Nagasaki is a beautiful city, and it has great Chinese food. I've never eaten mooncakes as good as the ones my sister and I ate high on the hills behind the city, watching the evening settle over the harbor. The rest of the time I spent in Kyushu is a blur, and as we stayed at youth hostels, the food was definitely of the cheap and cheerful type. Hope you enjoy wherever you find yourself posted.

Just uneducated ideas... I have experimented with sweet potatoes a bit, because we have various October family celebrations. I tried a sweet potato dacquoise, substituting steamed and sieved sweet potato for nuts -- but that really needs some nut flour as well, the sweet potato alone was too moist. It might be better as a base for something with an intense chocolate layer on top, for example. Sweet potato vermicelles were successful though. I cooked them much as for chestnut vermicelles -- soaked the prepared sweet potatoes for a couple of hours (brightens up the color when they are cooked) and cooked them gently in milk and flavorings before sieving out fibers then using for vermicelles or in custards or creamy fillings. Sorry I can't remember what I used to flavor the basic sweet potato paste with. Regards

Hoshi-imo!! My son's all-out favorite snack! Hoshimono in general don't seem to be great favorites with men and children -- maybe it's my cooking skills, but I've given up trying to serve them dried daikon. I'm the only one who likes stuff like tororo-konbu or koya-dofu, maybe because I lived in Kansai for a while. Can't say I have any passion for zuiki (those dried strips of sato-imo stalk). I saw some dried hime-chiku (the skinny kind of bamboo shoot) once which were good in nimono and takikomi-gohan). Maybe my favorite is extra-long hijiki. A friend who comes from Kujukuri-ga-hama on the Boso peninsula often brings me back a bag of wonderful hijiki. When it's as well-developed as this, it is nice to cook with aburage and pork. The small kind I prefer with mini-tomatoes and a mustardy vinaigrette dressing! Regards

Every day recently my kids come home from school and request 1 mochi grilled with grated cheese on top, and 1 grilled and dunked in soy and wrapped in nori. I'm rather fond of awa-mochi, which is usually little dumplings made of mochi-grade millet, served in a thick zenzai sweet azuki soup. Very yummy, but definitely not diet food! Regards

Also the "fueru wakame" is never going to have the best texture. It is DEFINITELY easy to use, but salted wakame or even fresh, is much nicer. Sad, but true.

I like the "less is more" concept for takikomigohan -- otherwise they all tend to taste the same. Annual favorite -- maybe beef and young gobo. Kuri-gohan is great, but a hassle to make, as noted. Chicken rice made tonight...3 cups rice with 1 diced chicken breast cooked in butter with 1/4 to 1/2 onion, whatever fungi is on hand, 1 green pepper, and 1 roughly chopped tomato and a pinch of salt and pepper. Another one I keep forgetting about...satsuma-imo gohan with azuki beanas. Or conversely, plain rice (with a tab or so of mochi rice) sekihan with the addition of satsuma-imo. Regards

Talking of Japanese food overseas...took the family to a small Japanese nomiya/restaurant in Auckland NZ where we had enjoyed the food last year. Some NZ fish make good sashimi, so we ordered our favorites...not one available this year. That should have warned us, but we went ahead and ordered sushi and sashimi...the sashimi and the nigiri were good...the makimono were horrible -- pasty rice and sloppy mayo-drenched fillings! However, we noticed that there was much less raw fish used in the sushi as a whole...local population wins again, eh?

This isn't a fair question! Autumn goes from nearly summer to nearly winter...hmmm I like the fact that veges get a new lease of life before closing down for the winter...nasu and kabocha in particular... As for cooking, I noticed some nice recipes for old favorites like sanma in the latest issue of "Suteki Recipe". Didn't dare add to the cookbook pile at home though... What about takikomi-gohan? Everybody at home likes plain white rice, but I like takikomi-gohan with barley when nobody's watching me cook! Regards

My son's friend, a hard-boiled LEGO player who is at our house daily, has been exposed to Marmite and Vegemite so thoroughly that I finally had to send him home with his own supply. He's the only Japanese person I know who eats either, though. Puzzling, as a little hatcho miso spread thinly on toast will save a desperate Downunder exile from sure extinction. My husband won't touch it after he mistook it for chocolate spread one day... I don't like using either in cooking -- and I don't like it as a hot drink either. But on toast with cheese etc., yes YES! Personally I like it with butter on potatoes!

I do have some ichi-monji knives, and yes, they did rust worse than some of the others...but as I said, these knives were in storage. I had them in a box in a dry place, and my helpful mother moved them to the basement... I sanded mine with 360 or 400 grit then 600 grit wet sandpaper, then buffed them with a cream abrasive, using the stem end of a daikon or carrot. Then I re-polished them on a medium and a fine emery stone. Not perfect, but much better. They actually need the blades professionally reground, as they have a few nicks -- they're over 20 years old now.

sanshou and szechuan pepper... Sanshou is the dried green fruits, szechuan pepper is the dried ripe red fruits...and that's the entire difference. I used to work in a Chinese grocery, and got to know szechuan pepper there...it's great stuff, but I think that both sanshou aned szechuan pepper really need to be fresh to be enjoyable.

I'm not a great celebrator of tsukimi these days...but when I first came to Japan, I had a great tsukimi up a mountain in the Wakayama peninsula with some Japanese hippies who were doing their version of the Japanese-soldier-found-in-jungle-unable-to-believe-war-ended-30-years-back thing -- the 60s were not over yet, back in 1979. They served imo-shochu with steamed sato-imo topped with a little miso, as well as matcha and home-made joyu-manju (the type that have a big chunk of anko surrounded with a sketchy covering made from grated yam, steamed). My last "real" Japanese tsukimi was a very sad one, so if I make things for my family these days, I prefer to make Chinese mooncakes -- actually carved a mold for them long ago, but now I make them Shanghai style, with the dough simply wrapped around the filling and baked.

I bought most of my knives in the Osaka douguysan-doori over 20 years ago...all traditional knives. I'll check the names later and post if anybody is interested, but I can say this...the yanagi and the na-kiri, with rather light blades and plain whitewood handles, have rusted very easily (they were stored for some time). My deba and another all-purpose knife (wide like a na-kiri, but rounded at the tip (unlike a western knife which has a rounded cutting edge at the tip, it is rounded down from the top to the straight cutting edge) both have reddish handles with a strong woodgrain, and heavy blades. They have been much more resistant to rust, and I use them a lot -- the weight of the deba is great for cutting through bones or sinews, and the sharp-angled point makes it great for tricky jobs too. I prefer a na-kiri for slicing vegies thinly, but the multi-purpose knife makes it out of the drawer first every time because I like the heavier weight! I also have a tiny aji knife, specifically for gutting those tiny fish, but it is also a great attractor of rust, no help when working with brine to make home-made himono. The best-used of my collection for general purposes??? It's my trusty 25-year old cheapie "Kaicut" stainless steel knife, bought at a Daimaru Peacock supermarket at my local station in Osaka...it's a good size for my huge hands, sharpens readily, and holds a cutting edge for a reasonable time.

yup, mugi-cha...I take it for granted until I'm out of Japan! Ebisu beer...people have been known to marry one another when they find out that they both prefer Ebisu! Unfavorite new happoshu..."Herb and Half" or is it half and herb, I think from Sapporo...shame on their name for coming out with this stuff! Ume-su...like ume-shu, but made with vinegar. This is incredibly good stuff, but when I made my last mega-batch, I didn't label the ume-shu and ume-su bottles, because I thought any idiot could tell the difference between shochu and vinegar. Two or three years later, "any idiot" *can't* tell , because the vinegar has mellowed so much!

I don't like the glop level of Japanese roux curries...while my kids think it's the ultimate...finally found a compromise that suits. I make the curry with the usual suspects, then add curry powder (S&B or my own mix) AND ground peanuts, at a rate of half a packet per serving. This makes a rich taste without a slimy texture. And great for diets... DH's favorite is pork, shiitake, and potatoes, with shishi-togarashi added at the end. Made with Japanese roux OF COURSE

shiba-zuke...I like it so much that I also make a homemade quick version using eggplant cut thin and tossed into salted water with soy sauce added along with a couple of cucumbers cut thin, a pack of shiso leaves shredded, some shredded myoga and maybe ginger, and put under weights,and then drained and squeezed, ready to eat. Regards

Kobayashi Katsuyo was one of my favorite cookbook authors when I first came to Japan. I even recall references in those books to cooking with her then small son! Kobayashi Katsuyo had a very practical approach -- she never accepted "the right way" if her experience didn't prove it, and she was always keen on ways to make it easier to produce good family food efficiently and easily. Kentaro's food also seems to be very practical, but more wide-ranging and gutsy! Regards