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OK, here we go... You don't need to blanch garlic for pickling in miso or shoyu. To pickle in honey, etc. you should pickle garlic under a weight with about 4% of the garlic's weight in coarse salt for 2 days or so, then wipe dry, and drop into a jar of honey. The garlic miso I pickled last week is not ready to eat, but the miso is smelling nicely of garlic. Don't pack the miso right to the top of the container - it will absorb moisture from the garlic and overflow...which is why I've already taken some out to use as a flavoring. This garlic I expect to leave for several months, but if the garlic is very young, and you like it powerful and crispy, you could try a nibble in about 4 weeks? Back on page 1 of the blog, I pickled some young ginger and myouga shoots in salt. That was the first part of a 3-step pickle, which (hastened along a bit) is now ready. After 2-3 days in salt, it was removed, drained, and re-pickled in sake with a little red ume brine. It should have stayed in that for at least a week, but I took it out, drained it again, and re-pickled it for the final time in red ume brine only this time. The 2nd pickle makes it juicy, the 3rd pickle adds color and makes sure the pickle keeps well. I've only just put it in the red ume brine, so it has not taken up much red color yet. The container has a springloaded screw-down which exerts pressure on the pickle. This type of table-top pickle container is often used for making small quantities of quick pickles. A piece of ginger and myouga are on the plate in front of the container. I've read so many interesting posts in the year or so since I joined eGullet, so I'm very happy if this blog has sparked the least little tickle of a developing idea! So, bye from me, and from my husband, who has washed dishes while I blogged and is looking forward to a change of shift, and from son1 and son2. They've decorated a bamboo stem for the Tanabata star festival on July 7, which celebrates the conjunction of Altair and Vega, under the guise of "starcrossed" lovers Weaver Maid and Herd Boy. Most decorations feature paper nets which represent the weaving, lanterns, stars, paper chains, and slips with wishes written on them. I'm afraid ours has paper airplanes and wishes related to certain politicians on it...but I love Tanabata all the same! Because...there is NO FOOD associated with it! I have yet to hear of a single traditional Tanabata food, and I love relaxing and enjoying a festival I don't have to cook for. Hope you all enjoy the next blog...I'm looking forward to it!

Forgot to say, newly-pickled umeboshi are incredibly sour, and are normally allowed to mature for a few months before eating. I always keep a few out though, as husband loves that mouth-puckering sourness! Umeboshi, once dried, never seem to rot or mold. They will dry up and develop salt crystals, but you can either eat them as they are, or spray them with white liquor (shouchuu) to remoisten them. I am not sure whether commercial umeboshi keep that well, however. They often contain sugars and flavorings.

Dinner tonight was definitely family cooking - after marking all afternoon, I was trying to cook with son2 wanting my advice on each of 12 pieces he was considering for a music exam, while son1 was standing over me bellowing in his just-breaking voice "I'm hungryyyyyy". He'd already had half a bunch of small Delaware grapes and a glass of milk, but he sounded so near tears that I abandoned finishing touches and slammed dinner on the table as fast as possible: Winter melon soup - I cooked two chicken breasts gently in water with around 1/4 cup sake. The chicken was removed and shredded. The broth was flavored with about 1 pinch of salt and 1/2 tsp soy sauce for every remaining cup of liquid. Into the liquid went cubes of winter melon, and the soup was cooked gently so that the winter melon would become translucent and soft without getting pulpy or breaking up. It is nice cooked with chicken wings, and a little wakame, but not tonight... Chicken salad: the shredded chicken breast had half a red onion grated into it using my bamboo "devil's grater", a very speedy instrument of vegetable destruction. Two shredded cucumbers were added, and a mustard/mayo/yogurt dressing added. Red peppers: With son1 about to implode, I abandoned plans to grill the red peppers, heated the frying pan to smoking point, and fried them so that they werre a tiny bit scorched and smoky, to counteract the blandness of the chicken. Onioroshi Chicken salad with red bell peppers Winter melon soup winter melon (winter gourd) The umeboshi which I set out to dry on Friday are ready. These were *very* soft, so some are a bit squashed. Notice there are crystals of salt on them...they will reabsorb when the umeboshi are stored in containers. The red umeboshi were placed in red ume brine every night ,and dried during the day. The plain ones were just left for 3 nights and days. My camera is not good with yellow tones, so just imagine that the greenish tone you see isn't there! New-pickled umeboshi (niiboshi) One last point...it's one thing to know that your pickles are ready...how to tell if they have gone off?! Salt-pickled vegetables sitting in their own brine or a pre-made brine are vulnerable to mold. As long as the brine is crystal clear, everything is hunky dory. If the brine starts to go cloudy, either move to the next step of the pickle faster, or wipe the walls of the pickling container with some form of strong alcohol, and spray the surface of the pickling liquid with alcohol, remove drop lids, boil, spray with alcohol, expose to sunlight etc and repace. If mold appears, a complete veil of opacity is bad news, but you may be able to remove it, drain the pickling brine, boil it up, cool it, and place brine and pickles in a new container. If it is just an island or two floating on clear brine, the problem is minor - remove the mold, and clean up the container as described under cloudy brine. If you are considering making your own pickles, why not start with fermented dill pickles? There are some good instructions available from some of the Midwestern college agriculture department sites. Another great place to start is Claudia Roden's "Middle Eastern Cooking" section on pickle-making. The brine plus vinegar method makes for a particularly fail-safe result. I haven't finished the promised fukujin-zuke, so I'll post a fukujin-zuke topic on the Japan forum in case anybody is interested. I'll be signing off with one last post this evening...sorry for the entirely TOO MUCH INFORMATION, hope you have enjoyed some of it!

I don't know what is used in Malaysia, but Polynesian people in New Zealand use a sort of serrated reamer to gouge the flesh out of the opened nut before squeezing out the "milk" or "cream". I think I'd start looking for a canned coconut cream or milk, myself...

Thanks for all the comments! I think I'm blogging for about another 12 hours...forgot to ask Soba if he meant Monday my time or Monday his time! A bit delayed, but here is what went in husband's lunchbox today - thin-sliced pork wrapped around a slices of cucumber and red bell pepper, pan-fried, then a quick swish of vinegar, soy sauce, and chilli sauce around the pan. Red bell peppers are a luxury vegetable here, curious since green bell peppers are one of the cheapest vegetables. I was very pleased to find a bag of them going cheap... He had rice with sa-go-hachi pickled cucumber, and some spinach with the pork rolls. Our breakfast was a good example of the kind of "western" food we have! We had hot dogs...but, since supermarket hot dogs taste disgusting, I buy a slightly better type of small sausage for boiling, and put them in small butter rolls, with tomato and cucumber. Yogurt, black tea...everything else as usual...world hasn't ended yet... After that, I went shopping and had a cup of coffee at the local Tully's with an English friend. I do most of my supermarket shopping on Mondays, and buy fresh produce elsewhere during the week. I had the same pork rolls that my husband had, and stirfried myself some tougan (winter melon) with onion and dried thyme in olive oil. I've got a thing about thyme at the moment, but I know my husband doesn't like it, so it's a Monday special!

Well congratulation petite tete de chou! Sounds as if the color is right. I wouldn't expect it to be very dark if you were roasting hulled barley. Alejita, I don't know if Korean and Japanese mugicha are exactly the same, Torakris would know better, but I'm sure they're pretty close.

natto-making site in weird English This site says 1-2 days at 104deg F (I think - 40degC, in any case) is what you want to aim for. Another site said that using their rice-cooker "keep warm" setting was a bit too hot for making natto, which makes sense, as an ideal climate for bacterial growth while your rice awaits dinner time isn't a great sales point!

"Oshinko" is just restaurant talk for pickles - the words display their Chinese origins, so it sounds more formal, and more polite. People do use the term at home, though, too. I checked further, because people do feel that there are some slight differences in meaning, although both are used fairly loosely, and found that while some people had one idea, others felt the exact opposite was true Natto...I remember a miso maker telling me that nobody who worked in the plant was permitted to eat or have natto in their homes, because of the danger of cross-contamination. Since I normally make miso, and I'm also somewhat allergic to soybeans, natto has never been high on my list of pickles to make... I don't think it's very hard to make. I'm pretty sure that a rice-cooker with a keep-warm temperature (or, in this weather, a pack of proto-natto wrapped in an insulating blanket of some kind) would do the job if innoculated with a pack of fresh natto. I also remember reading that natto made in big pots in farmhouses would last about a month, whereas the small packs we buy at the supermarket last around a week, and many people won't eat supermarket natto more than 3 days old. Natto makers normally use rather small varieties of soybean, to provide a greater surface area for the culture to spread over. Small beans also make it easier to eat the natto without having to chop it.

Japan is not the country to let a good tax opportunity go! All wines and beers *are* taxed, but the rates are different, and the criteria are different too. I accidentally said hops, when I was thinking of malt. Sorry. In the case of beer, it was decided that a beer-type beverage needed roughly 2/3 malt to be anything like a beer, and so malt-content was chosen as the criteria for tax on beer, and the scale was heavily weighted to beers with malt content of over 66.7%. Nothing was malt content under 66.7% was permitted to use the name "beer". About 10 years ago, some enterprising brewers started making beer-like beverages with malt content half or less of the minimum legal content for beer, and called it "happou-shu", which basically means a bubbling alcoholic drink. The first ones tasted truly dreadful, but they were cheap...and luckily for the brewers, this was just at the point where Japan's economy was losing altitude and having a few attitude problems too. Last year, revenues from beer tax dropped so far that the government decided that they had better go after happoushu too. However, there was a huge consumer protest, along the lines of "You stuff up the economy, ride roughshod over the constitution, then duck off to Korea when it's time to pay for your political joyriding, you can at least let us buy a bit of cheap booze to forget all your sins, since you obviously can't or won't do anything to mend them"... I can't recall the exact outcome, but I think the projected tax hike was slenderized considerably. Currently, the price difference is about 1:2 or 3:4, depending on the quality.

I just realized that I forgot to answer Hillvalley's question, waaaay back. Cucumbers were sitting in a plain salt brine. How do I know if pickles are done. Hmm. To quite an extent, it' a matter of taste - some people like their ricebran pickles still green, shiny, and firm, with a flavor which is still reminiscent of the fresh vegetable...others like them with a strongly developed sourness, and completely limp. My husband falls in this camp, but I think my kids prefer their pickles less "mature". For long storage, there are several points to check. One is whether the vegetable has exuded enough moisture - the "brine" of vegetable juices and salt" should amply cover the total volume of vegetables. The vegetables should be wrinkled, and dull in color. Once they have reached that stage, it is a matter of taste how long you leave them...and in many cases, this type of salt pickle will be "refreshed" by soaking in clean water, and then re-pickled in a more flavorsome way that doesn't keep so well, for more immediate use. I am in fact planning to use those cucumbers and some other vegetables tomorrow to make fukujin-zuke, the pickle commonly eaten with curry. Fukujin-zuke itself would not keep more than about a month, I think. Umeboshi will grow mold while they are still in brine, so they are prepared for long storage by drying for 3 days before being re-packed in clean containers. The few that I dried on Friday should be ready to store tomorrow. Meanwhile, I had better do some actual work(translation)!

..let's just say that after 20 years or so, memory fades! Chopstick rests. My favorites are the birds that look rather like flatfish. They even have tiny feet on the undersides! Hiroyuki, I wonder which restaurants you remember from your time in the area? Many have come and gone in the 8 years we have been here. One of my favorites is a soba restaurant which serves a very pale type of soba. Here's our cold salmon chazuke ... komatsuna greens at the back, grilled salmon topped with a paste of wasabi and nori cooked in mirin and shoyu, cold green tea and ice-cubes added at the table. If I'd thought of it, I would have used the bitter gourd pickle instead of komatsuna, as the weather was heavy and sticky. I made some red shiso drink - recipe link. We had some during the afternoon, and refrigerated the rest, mostly for pouring over shaved ice. Another pickle where acidity causes the pickle to turn red ...young ginger shoots in sweet vinegar Actually, the ginger is much redder now than when I took the photo. We ate this last night with the sardine sashimi as a refresher, but I forgot to post the photo. I also forgot to mention that husband ate EIGHT spring rolls intended for the whole family, and was in danger of life and limb when our sons discovered the crime! Tonight's dinner was very similar to the eggplant and green bean dish we had earlier in the week. I added chikuwa (fish sausage) and atsu-age (thick fried tofu) this time, and also simmered slices of a small flounder in soy sauce, mirin (sweet sake) and ginger, and made a small dish of boiled spinach. We delivered dinner to my parents-in-law, which is why there were so many soft foods on the menu. We used to take dinner and eat with them, but when they are really tired, we just drop something off for them. We had rice and natto with dinner, and also some typical Matsudo pickles - "Yoichi-zuke". These are tiny eggplants pickled in cultured rice, soy sauce, and a little mustard.

Red Shiso Drink This syrup is usually drunk with about 2-3 parts of water and ice. It has a faintly medicinal, herbal flavor. Best kept in the fridge. By the way, although it is possible to save shiso seed from your own plants if you wish to grow it yourself, the color tends to become less and less intense without rigorous selection - probably better to buy commercial seed each year. 300 g red perilla (shiso) leaves, 1 bunch 2 pt water 1 c sugar, honey, or sweetener - to taste 1 T lemon juice, optional 1/2 c rice vinegar or cider vinegar Wash shiso thoroughly, tear shiso (perilla) leaves off main stem (no need to be fanatical about it, small stems don't matter). Soak in plenty of water, as shiso tends to be dusty. Bring water to the boil, add shiso, boil 2-3 minutes or until red shiso leaves have turned greenish, and water is a dark bluey-purple. Drain leaves, reserving water. Dissolve sweetener or sugar in hot water, add lemon juice and vinegar. Once vinegar is added, the color should be an intense magenta pink, like Campari. Add more vinegar if color seems muddy. Allow to cool, bottle, and keep refrigerated. Keywords: Non-Alcoholic Beverage ( RG1099 )

Red Shiso Drink This syrup is usually drunk with about 2-3 parts of water and ice. It has a faintly medicinal, herbal flavor. Best kept in the fridge. By the way, although it is possible to save shiso seed from your own plants if you wish to grow it yourself, the color tends to become less and less intense without rigorous selection - probably better to buy commercial seed each year. 300 g red perilla (shiso) leaves, 1 bunch 2 pt water 1 c sugar, honey, or sweetener - to taste 1 T lemon juice, optional 1/2 c rice vinegar or cider vinegar Wash shiso thoroughly, tear shiso (perilla) leaves off main stem (no need to be fanatical about it, small stems don't matter). Soak in plenty of water, as shiso tends to be dusty. Bring water to the boil, add shiso, boil 2-3 minutes or until red shiso leaves have turned greenish, and water is a dark bluey-purple. Drain leaves, reserving water. Dissolve sweetener or sugar in hot water, add lemon juice and vinegar. Once vinegar is added, the color should be an intense magenta pink, like Campari. Add more vinegar if color seems muddy. Allow to cool, bottle, and keep refrigerated. Keywords: Non-Alcoholic Beverage ( RG1099 )

Americans in Japan will be celebrating July 4 today...hope US gulleteers are looking forward to their July 4 "tomorrow". We've had our breakfast -- fresh herbs, onion, chopped tomato and cheese grilled on French bread, plus yogurt with frozen mango (great use for marked-down overripe mangoes) -- and I've set the rice cooker to be ready for a quick post-church ochazuke (rice with green tea poured over it) with grilled salmon for lunch. Hiroyuki, you wouldn't recognize Koude - the area between there and the station is now completely built up with new housing. Hardly any fields of naga-negi (dividing onion) left. Chopstick rests...photos to come! Pickling activities for today are turning the umeboshi over as they dry outside in the sun, and mixing pickles in progress, and cleaning containers so that no mold grows where the pickling bed has spattered the container. And - off-topic, but in case anybody wondered - my kids got bored and wandered off to play Lego long before I concluded that most of The Rocky Horror Show wasn't perfect family viewing!

Boris, there's nothing airy about everyday Japanese food!! I think the reason it looks that way is that restaurant food (in the average Japanese restaurant) is based on formal bento or kaiseki (formal tray settings) - and both of these are intended to be eaten with sake. In kaiseki, rice comes last, while at home, rice is right there on the table with everything else. I think the "boil it and bang it on a dish" comment was aimed at my friend's mother-in-law - who belongs to that generation of women who grew up during WWII. She worked all her life as a cram-school teacher, and as cram-schools are open during afternoon and evening, I guess she never had time to even think about cooking anything more challenging. My kids are now settled down watching their first ever showing of "The ROcky Horror Picture Show" with the remains of husband's beer snacks -- the ubiquitous kaki-pea - a kind of salty, very slightly hot beansize cracker, and salted peanuts We had a lazy dinner...rice, miso soup with tofu and wakame (made by my husband while I nipped up to the shops to return a bottle of wine with a hole in the cork and a taste and effervescence to rival Pepsi), and iwashi namerou (fresh sardine chopped with fresh herbs. It's been a hot favorite at our home since I read that it tastes best with liberal dousings of vinegar. When I fillet sardines these days, I often remove the tiny bones down the center of each fillet, creating 4 sardine "sticks" instead of 2 sardine fillets. These are very handy frozen, and often appear in lunchboxes. Picture's a bit gross, sorry... The finished namerou was served in a lovely heavy cut-glass Edo kiriko bowl, which doesn't show clearly... ...and accompanied by my husband's beer, which he felt deserved a showing. The beer is a happoushu, a work-around which avoids the government's high tax on hopped beverages. When they first came out, they tasted dreadful, but now give beer a pretty close run for the money. Husband prefers Sapporo's Nama Shibori, but he gets Sapporo Ebisu Black when feeling rich! Not to be outdone, I took a picture of the German pewter wine cup my husband bought for me in Germany - it contains a very safe Soave, which is what I swapped the would-be Pepsi for. Next, I'm thinking of talking about some kitchen equipment!

I'm curious about "roasts" in the crockpot...can you steam-roast in your crockpot with no liquid at all? I tried it with a chicken (in New Zealand, I don't have a crockpot in Japan) and was impressed - it was nice and juicy.

People do it all the time to ME! I get really annoyed when short elderly ladies practically garrot themselves with the handle of my shopping basket by trying to get under my elbow to have a good look at what foreigners buy! Last time somebody asked me if I knew how to cook what I'd bought (burdock root), I told her gushingly that it was wonderful for ikebana, and the silly woman bought the whole story, and was asking me for details I have to admit that was quite a while back though...nowadays they're usually more discreet! I do get a kick out of looking baaad in the checkout queue, and make sure that I put the unhealthiest stuff right on top -- why should the snoops know that I don't think the supermarket vegetables, fish, and meat are worth buying, so I buy my "real" food elsewhere?!

FIrst off, soba-miso and takana. From what I can guess, it could be either of the two soba-miso types that Torakris mentioned, mixed with takana-zuke...but there's always the possibility that takana-zuke (a salt pickle) is soaked in water to remove the salt, and then re-pickled in soba-miso, and served with a little of the pickling soba-miso still attached to it...just guessing, though. Bitter gourd, no I didn't blanch it. We had some with breakfast this morning. Last night after 3 hours it was still way too tart (not just bitter, but mouth-drying). This morning, after a good 12 hours in the quick pickle (asa-zuke) solution, it was refreshingly bitter, but also flavoursome. I do rinse the ricebran off, partly because it can be very sour, also it is gritty to eat. Miso, sake lees, or cultured rice pickles are usually wiped clean, but occasionally served with whatever was adhering to them when removed from the pickled bed. This morning, as well as the bitter gourd pickles, we had a speedy breakfast of toast and a tomato omelet, and raced out to catch a morning session of the Harry Potter movie. After that, we had lunch at a soba restaurant. Husband wanted ramen, but was voted down yet again...at one point, he used to cook most family lunches, and after serving ramen every time, the kids revolted, and now claim they can't stand the smell of it. They will eat it cold or with homemade stock and extras...occasionally. At the soba shop, husband (who dislikes soba, patient man) had udon with pickled sansai (various wild plants and funghi pickled in brine). Son1 had tempura soba, with a tempurad prawn whose length had been extended indefinitely by some magical means (we call that "prawn in court robes" - the batter is usually called "koromo" or robe, but court robes come in 12 layers...). Also eggplant and green pepper tempura. Son2 had plain soba (mori-soba), his favorite, and I had bukkake-soba - cold soba topped with grated daikon radish, finely chopped natto, and scallions, plus okra, nameko funghi (slippery), red bell pepper, cucumber, and pickled sansai - with a side dish of wasabi and sliced Japanese dividing onion (naga negi) to be mixed with the soy sauce-based sauce, and tipped over the noodles and vegetables. Delicious! On the way home, the kids talked us into a Yubari melon-flavored softfreeze icecream (these are orange-colored). Sorry, I forgot to take the camera... Culture shock...there are ups and downs...it's sometimes a shock to find that you can't cook in your mother's kitchen because she has no chopsticks. Racism - rare these days - haven't been yelled or spat at by passers-by since 1980. People don't go into their Marcel Marceau mode every time I heave into sight these days, but yes, I have encountered some racism - from the major (can't rent an apartment, westerners are too anti-social to be trustworthy mothers or community group members etc) to the minor (street salesmen handing out packs of tissues suddenly whip their hands behind their backs as I come down the street, as if I'm about to grab them in my talons and snarlingly shake them down for their tissues...). My kids have had trouble at school, but usually the racism is not the prime cause, just extra fuel to the fire. When I asked if kids still called them names, they rolled about laughing and said they wouldn't be able to stir out of the house if they were to start worrying about *that* level. Now to have a cool glass of mugicha, and get ready to make a fresh sardine "namerou" for dinner (a hash of sashimi-grade sardine, ginger, scallions, shiso, sometimes myouga, and either shoyu or miso and usually vinegar. I was going to use yellowtails, but the sardines looked much fresher. Will post with pix in about 2 hours...

Sorry I helpfully confused the issue... I meant to say, that I had some mallow, and, surprise surprise, it was mucilaginous, just like jews' mallow = melokhia, it's namesake. I'm surprised it's hard to grow where you are...it seems to grow very easily in Japan, though the bugs are rather fond of it. It does seem to have affinity with chicken, doesn't it? I like to make melokhia/chicken soup, but wish I could try an authentic one!

I got to eat mallow not long ago, and it has that same "mucilaginous" quality that melokhia does. Am I a race traitor if I say I like it? Especially cooked and then chilled, on a hot day?

It is just possible to add the vinegar mix before cooking the rice, but really, most of the flavor is destroyed by the heat. Ain't worth it. Tip rice out of rice cooker in to a big flat bowl, and "slice" the rice as you pour over the vinegar mix. There are various vinegar mixes, depending on your taste, and also on the style of sushi. For 4 cups of raw rice try 1/2 cup of rice vinegar, 1-2 tablespoons of sugar according to taste, and 1.5 tsp salt, all dissolved into the rice vinegar. I don't recommend using oil - you want the grains to stick together a little, and oil will keep them separate. Also, sesame oil has a very strong taste of its own. I don't wet the nori at all - usually, just leaving the sushi in the bamboo mat for a minute or two will allow the nori to cling properly to the rice. Good luck!

I thought they were just for show until I ate one...they taste WONDERFUL! I like them stuffed with sushi rice. Mix in a little of what you fancy into the basic sushi rice, and pop a spoonful inside each flower.

Hiroyuki, I'm shocked! I'm actually more shocked by that than by the idea of making a hole in an anpan and squeezing mayonnaise into it, but that's a whole nother story. I'm really here to say that, just for you petite tete de chou, I bought some loose mugicha. Here's a cup of it waiting to go into about 2 liters of boiling water. According to the packet, I'm to let it boil 3 mins, turn off, stand 30 mins, strain and chill. At the shop I also saw a VERY dark roast of mugicha called "Black Gold". But actually, I'm looking forward to getting my roasted buckwheat out and making soba-cha!

bleudauvergne, it'll be interesting to see what your approach to French cooking is in 10 or 20 years time! Broader and deeper experience is one thing...middle age exhaustion is another! At present, my main aim with cooking is just to keep on keeping on, finding ways to save time and money without too much dishonor, and also to jog my memory about food-before-kids. If I'm not careful, my kids will develop more sophisticated tastes while I'm still stuck in the food-for-little-kids mindset, and I'll be legendary for slapdash, horrible food that always tastes the same! I try very hard to keep on learning... Before pool, son2 ate these inari-zushi (sushi rice stuffed into a pocket of flavored thin-fried tofu) while he puzzled over Dad's "Balrog's Chinese Character Class" worksheet! For dinner, the boys and I had a unagi chirashi-zushi. That's a salad-style sushi with grilled eel (kabayaki), slices of thick omelet, shredded green shiso, and shredded nori scattered over it. The base sushimeshi (sushi rice) had squeezed cucumber and pickled sansho seeds scattered through it, and the rice was cooked with konbu (kelp), a little ginger, and an umeboshi in it. I used ume brine to "wilt" the cucumber, and also a little in the sushi vinegar. Boris, you were asking about fish sausage... Here's chikuwa (I like it split open, with a dab of wasabi, then stuffed with shreds of cucumber wrapped in a green shiso leaf - as far as I'm concerned, that's speed with honor!). and satsuma-age, one with octopus in it and one with green soybeans in it. Eaten with a good soy sauce and wasabi. While son2 did his worksheet, I cleaned and sliced a bitter gourd (goya), and put it to soak in quick pickle mix. Under the pool where the boys swim is a 5-storey supermarket complex, containing this specialist pickle shop. I asked if I could take photos, and at first he said the supermarket management wouldn't permit it, then he chased me down in the supermarket and said he figured that nobody could stop HIM taking photos using MY camera, so he kindly took these for me... This is only the lower half of his pickle display. Most of these pickles he buys in, but he probably makes some of them. Each product area has the pickle, plus a lacquered tray with tiny samples on it, and a few bags of the pickle ready to sell (the white "O" shapes are the neatly twisted tops of the plastic bags!). Under the display are bins to toss your toothpick after eating samples. The pickle man is a great favorite with my hungry boys, and they always rush to tell him their latest news. Here are his ricebran pickles ready to sell. I'll post pictures of some of his other pickles later, when I've prepared some to go with husband's beer...when he finally gets home to drink it!

Thanks for the responses, people, now to answer some questions Shiso taste...red shiso does have a faintly herbal, medicinal taste to it...you barely notice it if you have it with strong flavors like umeboshi, but you will notice it in shiso drink (oops, now that I mentioned it, I better make some. It's a good drink, and a nice alternative to the poisonously colored syrups sold for pouring over shaved ice). The tiny red seedling leaves (benitade) served with sashimi are also red shiso. Yes, I really do make my own miso. I don't have any to show you at present though, because I decided to skip making any in spring, and make it in December instead, to allow it to stabilize before the hot weather comes. It REALLY isn't hard to make. Also, with big projects like umeboshi and miso, my husband always helps. As somebody said, pickles are not about skill, but about where you put them! In other words, avoid rapid fluctuations in temperature and direct sunlight, and you'll be fine. Another wise saying is that if you make miso once, you must make it for three years in a row before you give up. Of course, by then the whole process is automatic, and no problem to do! "Grilled cheese for lunch"? I should be so lucky! I'd be delighted to read about people having grilled cheese for lunch! On Wednesday, just for a laugh, I looked for the biggest "block" of cheese in the supermarket. I was in luck! They had a 100g (about 4oz) chunk. We had a 1oz stick each, and that was the end of our bulk supply of cheese. Cost about $US3.00 for the chunk. Is "plum wine" a misnomer, yes it is. It isn't wine, but a distilled rice liquor called shochu, and they aren't plums, but then again, they are not as fuzzy as an apricot (or as smooth as a plum). P. mume are sold in the west as sterile flowering peaches, but I have not seen any fruiting varieties outside Japan. The process of macerating fruit and sugar in alcohol is really the same as a western fruit brandy. Have I been to Hondoji temple? We live about 15 minutes' walk from there, but on the other side of the station. I only go when they have "free entry for locals" day! They do have some nice veges and pickles there, and pretty "hydrangea" boiled sweets as souvenirs of the hydrangeas in the temple gardens. One of the few restaurants my husband will agree to go to is near there - a "Lotus Lodge" (Biwa-tei) chain restaurant that offers Japanese food. It's a regular venue for family events - it has chairs for my elderly parents-in-law, and serves Japanese food, and it is not mainly a drinking place -- we never take father-in-law, an alcoholic, to a restaurant where he is going to be surrounded by people drinking. Learning to cook Japanese...I would have taken lessons when I first came to Japan in 1979, but I was on a Japanese government scholarship, and felt sure that they didn't intend me to spend it on cooking classes (but maybe I was wrong...). So I bought the Big Sister of cookery magazines, the NHK "Kyou no Ryouri", and pored over it with my dictionary. I asked around to find out the big names, and was told that Masaru Doi was the biggie for Kansai (western Japan) style food. Here it is below, 25 years later...no guesswork in this one, it's all text, with a few drawings and occasional black and white photos. Nowadays most of the dishes in here turn up in magazines as "Nostalgic Dishes of the Showa Period", and in case you wonder, I'm 45 not 105! The women of my mother-in-laws' generation were mostly girls during WWII, and never learned to cook traditional food until their 20s, if at all. My first mother in law (I was widowed a long time ago) belonged firmly to the "boil it and bang it on a plate" school. My current mother in law is a more recent addition to the family than I am, so she is not trying to initiate me into family traditions either. She grew up in Taiwan, and learned to cook the traditional dishes of her region while working at a daycare center. Government-run daycares tend to be big on traditions, and her co-workers belonged to a traditional cooking group. I also learned a lot from Japanese friends in New Zealand, who had to do a lot of thinking about what really mattered in Japanese cooking, in order to make their work-arounds successful. They made rice-bran pickles using breadcrusts or chicken feed! By the time my Japanese was fluent, I realized that my Japanese cooking was too orthodox -- like cooking from Julia Child every day! I started asking questions, and buying family magazines, checking newspaper columns. Shopping is a great way to learn to cook, too. The family-run fish shops or vegetable shops quickly figured out from what I bought that I liked to cook, and showered me with advice, and often freebies too -- as they said, they'd rather give away something that needed to be used quickly to somebody who knew how to use it than have to throw it out. Vegetable shops very often pickle what they don't sell fresh, and they are a good source of practical information and new ideas too. Which brings me to western cooking. I bake bread most days, partly so that I can have whole wheat bread, and partly because I got sick of toting home so many tiny bags of bread each week. I make yogurt, and laban (yogurt cheese), and my husband lived nearly 10 years in NZ, so he is happy to eat a western breakfast too. One reason I like "grilled cheese for lunch" blogs is that they keep me in touch! Otherwise, I am stimulated by the local foods and dishes I see around me, and forget all about cooking something western. When I asked my kids what western food I cooked, the only things they could name were steak and lamb chops (though that might have been in the hope that I was actually planning to cook whatever they mentioned!). When I came to Japan, I found that most Japanese women expected me to be a great baker, especially of cookies. NZ has no great baking tradition - fruit cakes, shortbread, scones, and drop cookies are the usual items - so I bought a few American cookbooks and had a great time learning new things. I'd never heard of "white cake", for example. While the children were young enough to be having birthday parties, and mothers came with their children to play, I did a lot of baking, but much less nowadays. I guess our picnic lunches are still likely to have sandwiches AND sushi though! Japanese cooking these days is pretty eclectic, so I suppose women who themselves like to make salt pork and roast chicken don't think twice about me making umeboshi and miso. Also, just as elsewhere, some people hate to cook ANY kind of food! I'm surprised though, that my young university students are more and more positive about cooking if it comes up in class. One young man accidentally said "No" when I asked if he had cooked his own dinner the night before, and came up to me after class, red-faced and anxious, to assure me that he HAD helped, and he COULD cook his own dinner. Both boys and girls seem to think that everybody should be able to cook some kind of meal for themselves, and my sons learn everything from cooking rice to miso soup, salad, and stirfry during 5th and 6th grade. Maybe not fine cuisine, but a good start to feeling confident in the kitchen! Now I'm off to cook sushi rice and leave it cooling while the boys are at swimming class - a fatally familiar pattern to our evening meals recently. Friday night is "day off" for me, and we often buy a bento...but husband tends to leave his untouched while he has a FRiday night beer, so recently I've been trying to come up with things that 1) Are ready to eat SOON after the kids get in the house after swimming (hungry 12 year olds howl a lot louder than hungry babies...), 2)Tempt skinny husband to eat something with his beer, and 3)Allow me to teach an English class over the phone at 8:30 as a favor to my old calligraphy teacher's family!, and 4) Can be put together between getting home from work and leaving for pool.