helenjp

Fast and speedy post here... Breakfast was our normal yogurt/fruit/toast/boiled egg/pickles routine. Nothing new to add there...but, as I rush out the door to work, I'd like to pause and raise a cheer for all the men who support family cooking by helping prepare and clean up, and making it obvious that they think it's an important part of family life. Couldn't cook 60-70 servings a week AND teach AND translate (and blog!) without that support. Gotta go...husband's nearly fnished the dishes

It's never sweetened! Viscosity -- not noticeable. Maybe there is some, but you'd need instruments to measure for it. It's such a standard that nobody seems to play around with the taste -- except for using it in blends with other Chinese/Japanese herbal teas, where it helps cover up less palatable tastes!

In the late '90s, Sony marketed the original Postpet, an e-mail program which allows you to keep a virtual pet in a customized "room" on your screen, and use it to deliver e-mail to other users of the same program (it will function as an ordinary e-mail program too). Pets have various functions...some will deliver mail very quickly, but then go AWOL, or write silly messages to your correspondents. You have to download snacks to feed your pet, or it will stop delivering mail... Sony used to sell downloads, but fans also wrote various "snack" routines featuring favorite or seasonal foods. Some snacks are innocuous, but some cause things to happen... Sony Postpet trial download page postpet functions description Unfortunately the Singapore English site was closed down...

The color of the tea also has to do with the variety of barley used, as well as the roast! Generally a lighter roast is higher class (because a darker roast produces more tea per unit of barley), but also hato-mugicha, made from Job's Tears, produces a much lighter mugicha. Nice, but expensive...

Usually you bring the roasted barley and the water to the boil, and then turn off. Some people strain the hulls out quite early, but I usually allow the whole thing to cool before straining. How much barley to how much water...err...maybe 1/2 cup per liter of water??

Congratulations Lucy on losing 10lbs! I'm really intrigued to watch you cooking "low glycemic" in Lyons, while I do the same in Japan (though not quite the same, as I am rushed at the moment and also have young kids). This adaptability is what makes me think that this is a good way to eat - it is amenable to anybody who is prepared to cook their own food, no matter what they like to eat. When I first walked into my local supermarket to shop after I started dieting last year, I realized how little of the supermarket was relevant to me - how LITTLE of a supermarket is devoted to fresh produce and plain, unprocessed dry goods. I lost 40lbs following the Sugarbusters plan last year, put a good 5 back on being lazy over winter, but found the benefits to health (allergies etc) and energy enough to stick with it with or without further weight loss. (Quite agree that Sugarbusters treated their debt to Montignac scurrilously). Japan is famous for its "sweet/salty" flavors, which always puzzled me, given how recent an addition sugar is to the Japanese diet, but I now believe that underlying that is the "sour/salty" flavor range which fits better with Japan's South-East Asian cultural roots (which precede the Chinese/northern influences). My obsession with pickles led me to another thought...that maybe pickles are about as old in the human diet as cultivated starches? That the additional starch in our diets was well balanced by the addition of soured foods?? Just wondering... I'm also enjoying the pix of Lyon - haven't seen any since my elderly penfriend sent me some postcards "to decorate the wall of your grass hut"...I often wonder just what his image of New Zealand was like!! As you were Lucy, as you were - great to hear your progress!

Boris, the non-alcoholic ume drinks are all intended for kids...and therefore made with heaps of sugar. In fact, they are very pleasant drinks if you make them less sweet. (While umeshu or plum wine, made with white spirits, is wonderful stuff, the alcohol does extract the harsher almond tastes as well as the milder fruit taste from the ume...and umeshu is always considered a ladies' evening tipple in Japan, presumably because it is traditionally made very sweet. Apparently well-brought up ladies used to drink a sip or two of mirin (sweet rice wine), but never sake, in times gone by... Anyway, I realize that I haven't blogged what we actually ate today. Breakfast was our usual..bread (today muffin rounds toasted with green scallions, canned tuna, and grated cheese and black pepper), home-made yogurt with bananas or kiwifruit, English tea for us, milk for the boys, who occasionally venture to have a cambric tea. Lunch - husband's lunch was an absolute standard...rice with umeboshi, cold Chinese chive omelet, grilled salt salmon, and komatsu-na with soy sauce. Komatsu-na is a standard green in the Tokyo area, and in rural places, maybe more so than spinach. It is more fibrous, but also sweeter. Komatsuna - Japanese mustard spinach I had (what did I have??)...a square of home-made whole-wheat flatbread, and yesterday's wilted salad. I SAID leftovers... Dinner had to be put on to cook while son2 went to classical guitar lesson, so out came my trusty insulated pot. I scored a half-dozen eggplants from the infamous vegetable shack and deepfried them plus some green beans from the same source, rinsed them in hot water, and put them in a soy sauce/mirin/dashi stock plus some green bell peppers and the remaining Chicken Simmered in Soy Sauce and Vinegar from last night. When we got home, the eggplant was juicy and flavorful, and the beans were sweet rather than grassy flavoring (a quick "blanch" in hot oil often gets rid of harsh flavors). I left a "teabag" of dashi soaking in water while we were out, and made miso soup with Chinese chives and egg when I returned. Finally, chilled tofu with a dressing of ume paste (in the "ume pyramid" photo in a previous post) with a few coriander leaves and a light dressing of mirin and soy sauce. With that, I had some "Kretikos White Wine of Crete" from Boutari, a wine I bought out of curiosity (and cheapness) the other day. It turned out to taste...of nothing at all! Slightly sour, but I guess simple and inoffensive is better than a rich and complex confection of off flavors? Husband is yet to eat his, but!!! some is left over for lunchboxes tomorrow, so I congratulate myself on a successful meal!

Hmmm...the only way I would make it to Chiba Costco or Carrefour is if somebody held a party there... Are you listening, guys??!

Umeboshi.... Every year in late February, our two prunus mume trees flower. They are a pink-flowered variety, and soon the tiny, furry ume are growing. I watch the weather in case it is too cold or rainy for them to ripen well, or so dry that the tiny fruit falls off, but usually by mid-late June, the fruit are beginning to turn from intense apple green to a faintly white-green. I pick some then for umeshu (Japanese plum wine) and also for plum vinegar drink. I'll upload the recipe later - recipe gullet seems to be in a bad mood right now. This morning I had an ice-cold ume vinegar drink with water, a just reward for hours of slaving over cool pickle pots. This is what my no-sugar umeshu looks like about a fortnight into pickling...I was a bit mean with the ume, should be closer to 1 part ume to 2 parts white liquor. Snack cake filled with an ume taken from umeshu. So...time passes, and in late June, the ume are a yellowish-green. I like umeboshi to be large, fragrant, and soft, so I make them with almost-ripe ume. I can do this because the ume are in my garden, not bouncing around on a truck. However, riper ume do burst during the pickling process more easily. I tried to take photos of this, but the ume ripened on a very busy weekend this year, so it was all we could do to get them harvested. We laid plastic sheets under the trees, son1 took the long extendable clippers upstairs and clipped fruit off the top branches, I climbed a ladder and picked, and son2 put on his bicycle helmet to guard against falling fruit, and shook the lower branches with a stick, while husband raced around picking up the fruit and sorting it. The riper fruit were immediately put to soak in cold water. Very ripe fruit will only need a few hours, not more than 5-6 hours. Barely ripe fruit may need 12 hours. It seems that in old times, people soaked ume up to 3 days, but nowadays, it is more common to lay not quite ripe ume out on newspaper, or layered between newspaper in a box, and leave them for 1-2 days before soaking. The soaked ume are carefully wiped to remove gum, dust, etc, and the stem end flicked out. Wiping with white liquor will help prevent mold problems and dissolve any sticky urban sootydust, but over liberal use may prevent the ume from softening when pickled. Let the ume dry, but don't be fanatic, a little moisture may help the salt penetrate. Now weigh out your coarse salt. I use 20%, which is old-fashioned, but I think appropriate for Tokyo's heat (especially because it doesn't get cooler at night). Those who are willing to use more white liquor may use 10-15% salt, those who want to do things the way great-grandma did can try using 30%! Your pickling container should be clean, well-sunned (sunshine is really the best protective against mold), and wiped out with alcohol. It will need a lid. Toss in a handful of your salt, and swish it around the bottom. Now start layering ume and salt, keeping layers even (helps the weight stay on evenly, which prevents rotten or floating ume on one side and squashed ones on the other!). Dust the last of the salt over the top, cover with a neat layer of plastic wrap, add a drop lid or plate to even out the weight, and then add your weight, twice the weight of your ume (roughly). You won't need quite such a heavy weight if you are using riper ume, or large quantities - they will weigh each other down! Cover with a plastic bag and a lid or cloth. In a few days, the liquid should have risen to the drop lid. Replace the wrap if necessary, and reduce the weight to about 1/2 of what it was. One of my current tubs of ume after about 2 weeks. Sorry, the color shows more green than the bright apricot-tan the ume really are. At this point, I add the salt-pickled red shiso (perilla) leaves, like so... Now I replace the droplid and weight...in this case a plastic bag full of water, in a plastic container. Now the fun begins -- keeping mold at bay while the pickling is in progress. Rounded white "salt-mold" is considered harmless, but it can also invite more noxious mold, so it needs to be picked off, liquid and container sprayed with alcohol, plastic wrap replaced, weights sterilized, etc. When the rainy season ends, or whenever you think you have 3 days' fine weather, the ume should be removed from the pickling liquor and placed on trays to dry. I normally use a multi-tiered hanging net shelf, like a camping pantry. My ume are very soft, so I use perforated silicon paper to avoid sticking. Here are a few which I dried early to show you...these are the ripest and squishiest of all those I pickled this year! They are now out in the sun drying. At night, I will put half of those into red umesu (the brine which rises from the salt-pickled ume, colored red by the shiso leaves), and put them out again to dry tomorrow. It is this which makes red umeboshi so red -- simply steeping them as they pickle will not create an intense color. When they are thoroughly dry, normally 3 days, sometimes longer for ripe ume, I will store them in pottery pickle jars. Here are my favorites. The brown one is the usual type, the green one I won from a cookery magazine. The deep groove around the top is supposed to hold a little water, creating a seal when the lid is in place. The umeboshi inside are 1-2 years old. Finally, a line-up of umeboshi-related products...all made at home except for the red umesu and salt-pickled shiso, which I buy ready made these days. From top to bottom...salt-pickled red shiso (perilla leaves) used in this state in umeboshi and other pickles such as shiba-zuke). 2nd row, ume paste made by chopping blemished ume and mixing with salt, pickling under a weight, drying the whole containerful in the sun, and storing in the fridge - useful for sauces and marinades. On the right,natural color umeboshi. 3rd row, red umeboshi, and (hard to see) very small umeboshi. Bottom row, white and red ume brine.

Enjoy your pickling, smallworld...I can't think of another branch of cooking that offers so much for relatively little work! Now that the fresh garlic is in season, you can pickle it in soy sauce or honey too. In miso or soy sauce, the salt and/or other acid-loving cultures keep botulism at bay. I don't preserve garlic in oil any more, but in salt, soy sauce, or miso. (Vinegar turns the starch in the garlic bulb blue, always interesting to see!). When making honey-garlic preserves, most people seem to blanch the peeled garlic and/or rub it with about 4% of the weight of garlic in coarse salt, and put it under a weight and pickle for 2-3 days, turning over once a day. If the garlic is not really fresh and juicy, you could add a tablespoon or so of water to get the salt penetrating the garlic as fast as possible. Take the salt-pickled garlic, drain, wipe, place in a jar, and top up with soy sauce. You can get fancy and add sansho, chiles, etc.

The rice bran pickle bed isn't actually pink - I tried to alter the color of the photo, but that was the closest. It starts out a sort of light tan, but the color tends to be absorbed by pickles and also changes as the pickle bed becomes more acidic - a mature pickle bed will be a dull brown. Yellow takuan is not dyed if made properly - it turns yellow as it pickles. I forgot to say that the photos show the ingredients BEFORE they were all covered up by the ricebran or the miso! Miso pickles can be kept at room temperature in most cases (fish and meat pickles should go in the fridge, and garlic miso is certainly fine just sitting in a cupboard. Unlike softer vegetables, I will leave the garlic in the miso until I plan to use it. As the garlic is used, I will also use the flavored miso to season meats for grilling, etc. I could use the same miso for other pickles for a while, but not indefinitely, as the miso is gradually losing salt to the pickles. Garlic pickled in soy sauce can also be left in the soy sauce as it is used. This is an excellent time of year to pickle new crop garlic, while it is young and soft. For meat and fish, a miso bed is more of a marinade than a true preserve. Miso which has been used for other pickles is often used for meat and fish, because it cannot then be used for vegetables. It is normally used two or three times for mild-tasting fish, and then once or twice for meat or stronger tasting fish such as sardines, before being discarded. The pickled meats or fish are normally grilled, but they burn much more easily than salted fish. Miso for meat and fish "pickles" is often mixed with sake lees (sake is fermented using the same type of cultured rice as is used for miso, and after the sake is made, the sake is pressed and the lees used for pickling) in varying proportions. Vegetables pickled entirely in sake lees become Nara-zuke - the translucent, amber, sweetish pickles, usually made with gourds, but also carrot or daikon radish (firm vegetables). In this case, the vegetables are not left in the same pickling bed - every few months, the sake lees are replaced, sometimes repeatedly over 1-2 years - one reason why handmade Nara pickles are so expensive. I will post more on this later, but today I want to finish some umeboshi-related pickles and also get some actual work done! Lunch will therefore be leftoverama.

Ume Vinegar Drink or Umeshu Plum Wine This is a non-alcoholic variant of umeshu (Japanese plum wine). You can substitute honey for the sugar - use a little less. Don't use normal baking sugar, it tends to set in a layer and not dissolve. Get big lumps of candied sugar from a Chinese or Japanese grocer's if possible. kg ume (prunus mume fruit) l mild vinegar (cider, rice) 200 g rock sugar Substitute 2 liters of shochu/white spirits for the 1 liter of vinegar if you want to make (alcoholic) umeshu or plum wine. Choose firm, unblemished, unripe green ume. They should be "green apple" color, not yellowish. Rock or candy sugar (a yellowish version is available in Chinese shops, the Japanese type is whitish) will make a beautiful clear drink. If you must use regular sugar, try to get the coarsest granulation available. Wash and dry, allow to dry completely. Layer the plums and sugar in a clean, wide-mouthed jar. Pour over the vinegar or liquor, and set aside to mature. It will be drinkable in 3 months if you used the full amount of sugar, if you use none at all, it will take a good 2 years to mellow, and will still be much less mellow. Remove the fruit after 3 months, although you can leave it in longer. I leave the plums in, and in the following spring, add several handfuls of ume blossom to the jar. The following autumn, I remove fruit and flowers and set aside for one more year before drinking. Don't discard fruit - it is often used in poundcakes, or simply split and stoned, and served with green tea. To make umeshu or "plum wine", simply use shochu (white spirits, 35% alcohol) instead of vinegar. Traditionally equal weights of sugar and fruit are used, but you can adjust the amount to taste. Umeshu can be served "on the rocks", but either ume shu or ume vinegar drink can be drunk with a little hot water, or in a tall glass, 1 part drink to 2 parts water and ice. Keywords: Non-Alcoholic Beverage, Fruit, Japanese, Easy ( RG1095 )

Ume Vinegar Drink or Umeshu Plum Wine This is a non-alcoholic variant of umeshu (Japanese plum wine). You can substitute honey for the sugar - use a little less. Don't use normal baking sugar, it tends to set in a layer and not dissolve. Get big lumps of candied sugar from a Chinese or Japanese grocer's if possible. kg ume (prunus mume fruit) l mild vinegar (cider, rice) 200 g rock sugar Substitute 2 liters of shochu/white spirits for the 1 liter of vinegar if you want to make (alcoholic) umeshu or plum wine. Choose firm, unblemished, unripe green ume. They should be "green apple" color, not yellowish. Rock or candy sugar (a yellowish version is available in Chinese shops, the Japanese type is whitish) will make a beautiful clear drink. If you must use regular sugar, try to get the coarsest granulation available. Wash and dry, allow to dry completely. Layer the plums and sugar in a clean, wide-mouthed jar. Pour over the vinegar or liquor, and set aside to mature. It will be drinkable in 3 months if you used the full amount of sugar, if you use none at all, it will take a good 2 years to mellow, and will still be much less mellow. Remove the fruit after 3 months, although you can leave it in longer. I leave the plums in, and in the following spring, add several handfuls of ume blossom to the jar. The following autumn, I remove fruit and flowers and set aside for one more year before drinking. Don't discard fruit - it is often used in poundcakes, or simply split and stoned, and served with green tea. To make umeshu or "plum wine", simply use shochu (white spirits, 35% alcohol) instead of vinegar. Traditionally equal weights of sugar and fruit are used, but you can adjust the amount to taste. Umeshu can be served "on the rocks", but either ume shu or ume vinegar drink can be drunk with a little hot water, or in a tall glass, 1 part drink to 2 parts water and ice. Keywords: Non-Alcoholic Beverage, Fruit, Japanese, Easy ( RG1095 )

I've seen edamame in chirashi-zushi. You can also wiggle them out of their papery skins and mash them to make a zunda-ae dressing (savory for veg, sweet for rice dumplings). I finally figured out how to get the salt to stick to the pods (duh!). I boil them in salted water, of course, then drain them and immediately put them into a big bowl with coarse salt in it and mix them thoroughly before all the moisture has evaporated off the pods. That way, you get a nice "salt jolt" as you suck the beans out of the pod!

Actually barley seems to roasted in the husk (not the full husk, as far as I can tell). You'd get a mugicha-ish taste if you roasted hulled barley, but probably weakish. I've often thought that mugicha probably tastes like the numerous roasted cereals used as coffee substitutes during WWII! I used to make mine from loose roasted barley, but it got to be a problem dealing with the dregs from 6-8 liters of barley tea per day, so now I use mugicha teabags. Son1 went off to school this morning with a thermos full of chilled mugicha - several years ago, there were scandals about the quality of school water. Instead of doing anything about it, most schools simply averted responsibility by requiring kids to bring a drink bottle...

Iaido...that's a variant of sword-fighting (kendo)? I do know there is a sumo stable nearby, as I occasionally see the young rikishi shopping at the supermarket in their cotton yukata kimono, with their hair in topknots. Woody Oak...I'll check it out. Most of the restaurants in Matsudo are clustered in about 3 areas, none close to us. The '70s tower-blocks have quite a few good bars around them, but husband is not a bar type of guy. I guess the taste for pickles is like most cultured foods -- you either love them or hate them! Do you think it is harder to acquire a taste for cultured foods from another country (I was going to say culture...) than fresh foods?

I'm never sure how far the kids distinguish between western and nonwestern food! Son2 has always been the pickier eater, but recently he talks about food and menus in very specific ways, and is cautiously interested in most things. Probably the hardest taste for them is strongly herbal seasonings. Their tastes are pretty pleb - they think instant gravy is nectar! I usually cook rice at night, because I need it for husband's lunch box. I've also seen husband pour soy sauce over delicately flavored western dishes once too often...but I suppose most meals involve some mismatch of cultures. How about cheese toast...with mustard and nori seaweed, for example? We often have it for breakfast. One of my students swears that the perfect breakfast food is natto (fermented soybeans) flavored with ketchup...grilled on toast!

I loved those photos! Straaaange as it may seem, my sons love Malaysian/Singaporean sweets. Why? Because they used Sony's Postpet e-mail program which has various characters who deliver your mail and go and "play" on your friend's screen. The pets need to be fed with downloadable snacks -- most of the Japanese ones weren't free, but the English home page was based in Singapore, and had a gorgeous array of traditional sweets! When we actually went to Singapore, we just had to try out one of everything we had been feeding our "virtual" pets.

Pickles... Roughly, pickles in Japan fall into these groups. Basic salt pickles - either dry salt or brine. Usually intended for long storage, and often for vegetables which will be re-pickled in other forms, e.g. most of the popular commercial pickles such as fukujin-zuke, shiba-zuke, etc. Varying amounts of fermentation are permitted, depending on the type of vegetable. Cultured seasonings - soy sauce, miso, sake, natto, vinegar, etc. usually involve basic ingredients, and usually salt, and always some kind of culture starter. Condiment pickles - miso pickles, soy sauce pickles etc. Usually the pickles are enjoyed as snacks, and the pickling medium is used as a seasoning or condiment. Other cultured pickling mediums - bettara zuke, karashi-zuke etc depend on cultured rice. Rice-bran pickles - a mixture of rice bran, water, and salt, which is permitted to develop lactic acid-producing cultures. Semi-preserves -- foods simmered for a long time in soy sauce, such as tsuku-dani. Quick pickles -- food marinaded in a sour/salty mix, but not fermented. Expected to be eaten within 24-36 hours. I should warn...I have made a number of pickles to show you, but I would not normally have all these going at once, because of the danger of contamination from the "wrong" cultures. At least, I am careful not to open one cultured pickle when I have recently had another one open! I also don't touch my umeboshi-in-progress with hands that have touched miso or nuka-zuke recently. We make a number of pickles every year - sauerkraut or hakusai-zuke (salted Chinese cabbage), but not in large quantities as the winters are so warm recently. For that reason I prefer to make sauerkraut, which requires a slightly warmer temperature (daytime temps around 17deg C, 65degF). I still make miso, though it gets harder to keep it in good condition over the summer. I occasionally make takuan, which is basically a sweet variation of nukazuke ricebran pickles, but again, this pickle does best at lower temperatures. Without fail, we make umeboshi (salt-pickled and dried Japanese apricots, prunus mume) every year, harvesting 15-20kg of fruit or more from our trees. I will deal with umeboshi in a separate post... This year, we started a ricebran pickle bed, after a long hiatus. My purpose was to increase our vegetable intake without increasing my time in the kitchen! The supermarkets no longer stock raw rice bran, and I don't go past the rice shop so often, so I bought a ready-matured pickling bed in a plastic box. Surprisingly good! It is now at the stage where it will get sour if I am not careful to replace salt and use a little mustard (a great anti-microbial!) from time to time, and add extra rice brain as it gets sloppy. Cucumbers normally take half a day, eggplants up to a day to pickle. Fortunately the boys regard the pickle barrel as a type of pet, and mix it three times a day, removing the soft pickles and adding fresh vegetables. Ricebran pickled cucumbers are slightly yellower-fleshed than fresh cucumber (Think takuan...) how to make ricebran pickles Howver, probably the easiest pickles of all are miso pickles -- put almost anything into miso! I peeled 2 heads of garlic and stuck the cloves into around 1lb of red medium-flavored miso. I don't expect to eat this until winter, though it could be ready earlier...the usual rule of thumb for longterm pickles is to leave them through one change of season at least. Here are two pickles prepared to the "shita-zuke" or "pre-pickling" stage, ready for the final pickling tomorrow. Cucumbers pickled in brine. Normally this process is repeated with fresh brine (or the old brine boiled and re-salted) every time the cucumbers develop white spots, until autumn. At this point they are "furu-zuke" or old pickles, and will be used in things like shiba-zuke or fuujin-zuke. The photo shows the cucumbers immediately after putting them into the brine. I then added a plate, a weight twice as heavy as the cucumbers, and covered them. Young ginger and myouga buds can be salted under a weight before being pickled in red salty umesu - the liquor exuded by umeboshi in the salt-pickling stage. These have been blanched and are about to be salted and weighed down. Well, nearly 1 am again...tomorrow I will talk about umeboshi, and also pickles which use byproducts of umeboshi production such as the salt-pickled red shiso leaves, or the clear or red umesu "vinegar". Good night!

Now the maddest part of my week is over, maybe I should introduce myself I'm a New Zealander who first came to Japan at the age of 20, lived here on and off, and settled here in 1990 with my Hokkaido-born Japanese husband, who was living in NZ when we met. I first lived in Osaka, so I still have a great affection for the food of west Japan, which is less strongly seasoned (=less soy sauce, basically!) than east Japan food. How did I get interested in cooking? My mother and grandmother believed without question that everything home-made was better than everything bought. They also believed in knowing how to do things properly, and were confident that THEIR way was the proper way! From them, I inherited a pride in the ability to preserve food, although I make more Japanese-style preserves than western ones now (family tastes, availability of ingredients, and also climate - jam is difficult to store over the warm, humid rainy season). My mother was too ill when I was young to teach me to cook - my memories are of struggling to get dinner alone in a dark kitchen rather than working side by side with her, so I inherited more of an attitude than actual recipes. I don't have the skills or the determination to be a professional cook, but I think that family food is worth doing as well as possible. We rarely eat out - partly because there is little incentive to pay good money for bad food in the area where we live - so I like to make some special meals at home for guests or family occasions. An interest in family food leads naturally to an interest in traditional cooking, I think. To answer questions...unsweetened canned black coffee has been available for a few years (3? 5?) here. It's not a great taste...but it tastes pretty good when changing trains on long, midsummer commmutes! Is this Tokyo? No - Matsudo city, on the "wrong" side of the Edo River -- up in the northwestern "horn" of Chiba province. Traditional produce, scallions, Japanese dividing onions, and Asian pears (the nijusseiki was developed here), soy sauce, mirin (sweet rice wine), eggplants pickled in mustard. The area where I live was once a government-approved waystation for official travels from Mito to Tokyo, and before that there was a castle which was razed, probably by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who didn't like to have other warlords too close by! There must be remnants of the wealthier style of Edo cooking somewhere, but I have not found it. Most of the people here came after WWII, when there was a brief push to farm the rather waterlogged floodplain, but soon the area became a factory area, and so the population has never been wealthy - hence the lack of great restaurants or fine foodstuffs. My father in law ended up here by asking his cousin what the cheapest area near Tokyo was! The poverty and the small distance from the sea mean that good fish is hard to buy here (there is an area called "Funabashi" or "boat-wharf" nearby, but that was reserved for the emperor's use when he came hunting on the Matsudo uplands, thus preventing fishermen from using it as a port AFAIK). ...getting back on topic...Chinese friends dismissive of cooking. To be bluntly honest, my Chinese friends locally are incredibly rude about Japanese cooking, and I doubt if they think much of each other's cooking either! One of them is always saying "Japanese cooking - boil it and bang it on a plate, that's not cooking!". My husband likes this saying so much that he uses it to describe a translation job done without revisions or corrections! Do my Japanese friends think I can't "really" cook? To be honest, I think they've fallen over all the pickle containers in my corridor so often that they believe I *do* cook, whether I *can* or not. Fish sausage -- a deep, dark area! The kind in the soup was "satsuma-age", which originates in Kyushu. It is usually made from surimi (white fish paste) and various flavorings, and includes eggs and maybe tofu. Chikuwa is just seasoned white fish paste (from memory) shaped around bamboo, hence the tube shape. Hanpen is white fish paste with yama-imo (a kind of taro), steamed into fluffy, mild cakes. Good satsuma-age is excellent stuff - and is proudly served sashimi-style in western Japan, with soy sauce and wasabi. Even in Tokyo, good quality satsuma-age is expensive. I'm just off to put some pickle recipes on recipe gullet, before I post about pickles. Meanwhile, this is what happened at dinner...Last night I put chicken wing drumlets, soy sauce, vinegar, and seasonings into my insulated saucepan, and left them to cook overnight. This morning, I simmered them until the stock was reduced, and put them in the fridge - ready for tonight's dinner, plus a few day's lunches. Photos and recipe... Chicken Simmered with Soy Sauce and Vinegar I also fried some pork liver with Chinese chives for son1 and myself (the others don't like it). Son1 has just finished exams, and is also growing rapidly...and this is known as "stamina cooking" in Japanese! Pork Liver Panfried with Chinese Chives The meats were served with a salad of komatsu-na (a green leafy veg) seedlings and lettuce with a mustardy vinaigrette, rice (of course), cucumbers pickled in cultured rice and salt (sa-go-hachi), and miso-soup with wakame (sea-lettuce), shreds of Japanese dividing onion (naga-negi), and yama-imo of uncertain age kindly (?) donated by my ageing mother in law. The menu was designed so that I could prepare it after returning from work and before taking sons to lessons, and so that it would be edible from 7:30 until 10:30pm, as on Wednesday, only son2 and I eat together, and that only barely, as I have to walk Mr. Lonelyhearts son1 home from cram school. He eats either before or after cram school. Off to recipe gullet I go...

Young ginger shoots pickled in sweet vinegar A pickle made around May-June, before rhizomes have fattened up, and served with sushi. Traditional method 5 T rice vinegar 2 T sugar 1/3 tsp coarse natural salt My method 5 T umesu (plum vinegar) 2 T mirin (sweet rice wine) to taste - umesu varies in salt levels In June, the young ginger shoots come onto the market. The immature rhizomes are sold together with about 1 foot of green shoot. These shoots are trimmed to say 6", and the rhizomes divided so that there is one knob of root for each green shoot. Peel rhizomes if necessary, or simply rub papery skin off if young. Hold the stems bunched in your hand, and immerse the ginger roots in boiling water for a few seconds. Have ready the seasoned vinegar mix - zap in the microwave to dissolve sugar, otherwise simply mix in a tall glass,　and immerse ginger. Stand the container in the fridge if you intend to keep the pickle for a few days. The pink color will continue to develop for about 12 hours. Eat within a few days. Keywords: Japanese ( RG1091 )

Young ginger shoots pickled in sweet vinegar A pickle made around May-June, before rhizomes have fattened up, and served with sushi. Traditional method 5 T rice vinegar 2 T sugar 1/3 tsp coarse natural salt My method 5 T umesu (plum vinegar) 2 T mirin (sweet rice wine) to taste - umesu varies in salt levels In June, the young ginger shoots come onto the market. The immature rhizomes are sold together with about 1 foot of green shoot. These shoots are trimmed to say 6", and the rhizomes divided so that there is one knob of root for each green shoot. Peel rhizomes if necessary, or simply rub papery skin off if young. Hold the stems bunched in your hand, and immerse the ginger roots in boiling water for a few seconds. Have ready the seasoned vinegar mix - zap in the microwave to dissolve sugar, otherwise simply mix in a tall glass,　and immerse ginger. Stand the container in the fridge if you intend to keep the pickle for a few days. The pink color will continue to develop for about 12 hours. Eat within a few days. Keywords: Japanese ( RG1091 )

Sa-Go-Hachi Cultured Rice Pickle This is Akiko Murakami's recipe, translated. Her pickle recipes always respect her long experience, and are full of useful adaptations. This recipe uses about 1/3 less salt than the traditional method. Freeze-dried koji (cultured rice, used for amazake drinks, and for making miso) is available in furry mats or as loose grains. The loose type is easier to use. You can also buy dry sa-go-hachi mixes. At one time these were very salty and took a while to mature, but recently seem to be better. 1/2 c coarse natural salt 1 c loose freeze-dried koji (cultured rice) 2 c short-grained rice, raw Wash raw rice well, and put in rice-cooker with 2 and 4/5cup of water (40% more water than rice, by volume) and cook as usual. Fluff up the cooked rice, and sprinkle the koji over it (or crumble the mat-type koji over the rice), mixing as you go. Move to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and wrap the whole thing in a towel and leave overnight. Next day, mix in salt, and place in a lidded container in the fridge for 2-4 weeks to mature. To use, wash vegetables (carrot, daikon radish, egglant, cucumber, lotus root, etc.) and place in pickle bed. Cut harder vegetables into chunks, but leave softer vegetables whole. Leave in pickle bed for 5-12 hours, until soft. Wipe clean, and slice to serve. These pickles have a mild flavor, without the sourness of nuka-zuke. Keywords: Japanese ( RG1090 )

Sa-Go-Hachi Cultured Rice Pickle This is Akiko Murakami's recipe, translated. Her pickle recipes always respect her long experience, and are full of useful adaptations. This recipe uses about 1/3 less salt than the traditional method. Freeze-dried koji (cultured rice, used for amazake drinks, and for making miso) is available in furry mats or as loose grains. The loose type is easier to use. You can also buy dry sa-go-hachi mixes. At one time these were very salty and took a while to mature, but recently seem to be better. 1/2 c coarse natural salt 1 c loose freeze-dried koji (cultured rice) 2 c short-grained rice, raw Wash raw rice well, and put in rice-cooker with 2 and 4/5cup of water (40% more water than rice, by volume) and cook as usual. Fluff up the cooked rice, and sprinkle the koji over it (or crumble the mat-type koji over the rice), mixing as you go. Move to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and wrap the whole thing in a towel and leave overnight. Next day, mix in salt, and place in a lidded container in the fridge for 2-4 weeks to mature. To use, wash vegetables (carrot, daikon radish, egglant, cucumber, lotus root, etc.) and place in pickle bed. Cut harder vegetables into chunks, but leave softer vegetables whole. Leave in pickle bed for 5-12 hours, until soft. Wipe clean, and slice to serve. These pickles have a mild flavor, without the sourness of nuka-zuke. Keywords: Japanese ( RG1090 )

Nuka-zuke Ricebran pickles Bags of dry seasoned nuka-doko (ricebran pickling bed) mix are available, and vary in quality. Boxes of ready matured wet mixes are usually better quality. It isn't hard to make your own, but it takes a week or two (depending on temperature/season) to mature. It's easiest to start in spring, when temperatures are warm but not hot, and the pickle bed matures just as the first summer vegetables become available. Pickling bed 2 kg rice bran 300 g coarse natural salt (15% of weight of ricebran) 2 l water, boiled and cooled (roughly equal weight with ricebran) Additives strip of dried kelp, wiped clean 10 dried chile peppers (adjust to taste) 3 pickled sansho berries Japanese type not Chinese Dry ground mustard, a handful, slows fermentation Vegetables to pickle eggplants, halved or quarted whole cucumbers bell peppers chunks of cabbage daikon (Japanese radish) in quarters carrot sticks Boil water and allow to cool. You can boil the salt with the water if you like. Use fresh ricebran, and use as soon as possible after purchase so that the oils do not become rancid. Some people like to dry-roast the ricebran over a gentle heat in a wok, stirring constantly. Allow to cool to room temperature. Mix water, salt, and rice bran. Add enough water so that the mixture forms a ball when squeezed, but remains loose and crumbly in the bowl. Additives can be added now or after maturing for a couple of weeks. Transfer bran mixture to a lidded container, and press some vegetables into the pickle bed. As long as they are clean, almost anything will do at this stage -- the first round or two of pickles are normally thrown out. Set container aside in a fairly dark, cool, place. You MUST mix thoroughly every day, up to 3 times daily in hot weather. If this is impossible, move the pickle bed to a plastic bag and "hibernate" it in the fridge. I suspect it would freeze OK, but have not tried it. Vegetables are ready when soft (or for carrot, when somewhat soft). Always take pickled veg out, wash or wipe clean, and store in the refrigerator if not wanted immediately - old pickles will quickly invite bad bacteria or excessive sourness. If you pickle a lot of watery vegetables such as cucumbers, remember that the pickle bed is losing salt, and as salt levels drop, fermentation and lactic acids will increase. Add a sprinkle of salt and dry mustard every time you remove vegetables in this case, and add more rice bran (and proportional amount of salt) if the bed becomes sloppy. You can drain off excess liquid, but this tends to affect the flavor of the pickle bed. Don't overdo the mustard - pickles should not taste bitter or hot. Keywords: Japanese ( RG1089 )