helenjp

I guess one reason why you haven't heard of "Edo-mae" is that it is the default for good sushi in the Tokyo area, it's so "normal" that not everybody thinks to mention it. I had much more molded or oshi-zushi when I lived in Kansai, especially in Nara and south from there in the Wakayama peninsula. As for price...I just never go to good sushi shops in Tokyo. At the prices I can afford to pay for a family meal, they don't taste anywhere near as good as sushi I have eaten in Shikoku or further north, in Iwaki. I'm not sure if it's the holiday mood, or the fact that I grew up eating very fresh fish...or what. Before we had kids, husband and I used to go to the local sushi shop. The sushi always seemed barely average to me, and to make it worse, the owners and a cluster of regular customers shared a passion for dogs. The loud conversations were never a pleasure to overhear, and after one evening spent listening to arguments over the best way to crack fleas, we never went back... Now that we have two hungry boys, even a trip to kaiten-zushi bankrupts us. I almost always buy fish or sashimi, and make edo-mae chirashi, or tegone-zushi, or sometimes aji-topped nigiri at home. And just a word of warning...at the supermarket, I was horrified to notice that the "tuna" in some maki-mono and in the temaki-zushi contained pork and beef gelatin. Yuck! No wonder it looks like petfood roll...

Started me thinking about the relationship between Kansai sushi and Kanto/northern types...and here somebody's done all the hard work for me! Enjoy... History of sushi in English I suppose that when fish was cheap and easy to obtain, grains were the luxury ingredient...now the reverse is true, and so we have larger portions of rice topped with small amounts of fish, instead of whole salted fish preserved with a grain stuffing. And I can't help thinking that grains like millet, which don't disintegrate so easily, may have suggested fish roe and fertility, and that may be why sushi has always been such an auspicious food??

What a fascinating experience! I've read that sushi's ancestor is something like the Tohoku salt-pickled (fermented) layers of rice and salmon (darn it, can't recall the name), and that Edo cooks started adding vinegar to the rice to approximate the flavor and create a quickly-prepared, milder flavored snack. The "pickle" roots may explain why sushi has always been a snack. Until I read your description, it never occurred to me that sushi might have other old roots, but when I lived in Osaka, the old people seemed to feel that oshi-zushi (sushi rice pressed into long bar-shaped molds, with vinegared fish such as saba or salmon on top, and sometimes sandwiched between preserved oak leaves or other leaves, and sometimes thin layers of suki-konbu) was the Real Article, and would always have it for formal family occasions. I have a book on Edo-period cooking...must drag it out and take a closer look... Thanks for your interesting record of the old school sushi you ate. You'll have to go back and find out more, purely for academic purposes of course....

I've read every post in this thread. I love blue cheese. As for WHICH blue cheese, that 's easy - any and every tiny fragment of blue cheese that I find (only too rarely) on sale in the area of Japan where I live. I'd really like to be able to buy more than 3 oz. at a time. But I guess, since most packs are only 2 oz., that I should shut up and be grateful! I draw the line at "blue" processed cheese though...

I think the thing with the green-lipped mussels is 1) they're big, and 2) they contain various whatsits supposed to be very healthy. Green-lipped mussels are only one of NZ's mussel varieties, and I find it tiresome that I can't easily buy blue mussels when I'm in NZ too. Sorry you are finding reduced choice in the UK too -- must be one of these aggressive alien species!

I failed to notice this!!! I took my family to Obana today (Minami-senju - get off the train, weave your way along the north side of the JR tracks back toward Tokyo, along the little road that has a temple on the left and a graveyard on the right, past a couple of business hotels, to a place that looks like a well-to-do private house with an inexplicable flag in the garden. If you're lucky, you don't have to wait..it was rainy, cold, and early today, so we waltzed straight on in, and I ordered the una-juu before my husband realized that 2,500 yen per unajuu, unadorned, was the CHEAPEST unagi on the menu. Haven't been there for nearly 20 years, but I always planned to take my family one day. I used to set out from near Oji station with friends on a summer afternoon, and we would walk slowly eastward until we arrived at Obana around sundown, and settled down to wait our turn on the benches outside the restaurant. It hasn't changed. The eel is still very soft, the tare much less intrusive than the rank and file unagi tare, the rice soft but not mushy (steamed, not boiled). It was good. My kids were almost reconciled to the various disappointments of the day (the nearby aviation high school was just too good to be true, but it doesn't take out-of-area students, our local festival was cancelled and kids lost the opportunity to busk for a little pocket money...), and I enjoyed reliving a few memories. Verjuice, what did you have at Obana?

Even in Japan, we sometimes add potato starch or cornstarch to tempura batter to avoid high gluten levels. You might want to try that, as US flour has fairly high protein levels, I think. All cornstarch, on the other hand, makes the batter brittle. Another way to avoid developing the gluten is to mix as little as possible, even to the point of having lumpy batter. With meats and some fish, I like to add a little ao-nori (green flakey seaweed) to the batter. Frying needs to be done rapidly so beware of adding too much cold food to the oil at once - definitely less than half the surface of the oil. Hope you're enjoying your experiments!

Looks good! Chardgirl, you don't need to drain the juice after salting - it all stays in the bag till ready to serve.

Hard to tell, of course when one unscientific yogurt maker analyzes another unscientific yogurt makers' output over thousands of miles! However, if the amount of pectin remaining in your yogurt is negligible, maybe your yogurt has got contaminated by one of the more "stringy" cultures. (Or maybe there's some weird playoff between the temperature, the seasonal variation in the milk, ad infinitum...). Every now and then my yogurt does suddenly start to smell different from usual -- not necessarily bad, though - and then I just go back to the supermarkat, buy another batch of my preferred "mother" yogurt, and start again. My yogurt maker is very like the "Miracle" one used at andiesenji's office. It's so easy to use I could kiss it, if it weren't such an unhygienic procedure!

Probably it is the pectin...pectin and calcium do strange things together, a characteristic which is used in a particular kind of green "ume" or plum preserve in Japan. Less likely alternative: there are some cultures which do make "stringy" or "gummy" yogurt.

Mirin-fuu choumiryou(literally, "seasoning resembling mirin")... ...will have less alcohol, will not be made through a true fermentation process, and will have added flavors (usually satl, but also flavors ranging from sake extracts to MSG). That is why is is more useful for pickling than true mirin. My favorite is Aji no Haha brand, made from rice, kouji (the fermentation culture), and salt, but I doubt you would find it outside Japan. Alcohol can slow down the pace at which ingredients absorb salt, but if you are only using a little, then true hon-mirin is probably OK, with a tiny bit of salt. True hon-mirin's advantages show up more in other cooking techniques. A sure sign as to which is which is price! If it's cheap, it's probably mirin-fuu choumiryou or one of it's relatives, not real mirin! An interesting thing I found on the web Cabbage Asazuke in Japanese For this recipe, you weigh your cabbage, put it in a ziploc bag and sprinkle 2% of that weight in coarse salt over it. Add a little shredded ginger or red pepper/slices of dried chili if you wish. Now knead the cabbage in the bag for 2-3 minutes, close the bag, and toss in the fridge. Should be ready in half a day, and remain eatable for a week. That's the basic. The interesting part is that you can add a little honey, which should simulate the complex flavors of mirinfuu choumiryou nicely, and you can also substitute umesu/plum vinegar (the salty pickling liquid exuded from the ume/plums when making umeboshi) for half the salt. That would give you more complexity too. The NHK TV program "Tameshite Gatten!" (Try it, You'll Like It!) recommends a homemade mix of 1 tab each of mild rice vinegar and true hon-mirin, plus a pinch of salt. You could reduce the salt and use mirin-fuu choumiryou and rice vinegar, or use no salt and plum vinegar. If you want to add honey, it might be nice to try cider vinegar. Off to the kitchen to try the umesu variation on yet another $1.00 cabbage...(and adding Aji no Haha to my shopping list, because today I GET PAID!!! FROM TWO PLACES AT ONCE, EVEN!).

Oddly enough, she's never made dashi when I've been there - maybe because my father in law dislikes most vegetables with a strong taste - myouga, for a start, most mountain vegetables, and most raw veg too! "Dashi", not the soup stock type, is a kind of chopped mixed salad, very refreshing in summer, and a great time-saver for farm wives in their busiest season. The recipe I have calls for a couple of eggplants to be sliced and soaked in water while cucumbers, myouga, shiso leaves, and fresh ginger are diced fairly finely. Then the eggplant is squeezed dry, chopped, and added to the salad, which is seasoned with katsuo flakes and soy sauce. You can add quite a range of other vegetables too, but the Big Four are basic to the dish.

Squashed soybeans, yes, uchimame. Color...Definitely black soybeans are used as well as the ordinary kind in Yamagata, so the ones you describe from Miyagi should be the same. Sometimes they are fried a little and added to dishes, sometimes popped as you describe and eaten as a snack. Haven't had them that way myself...and haven't heard the term petanko mame, but it sounds exactly right!

Getting back to business... I dropped by my in-laws' today, and found that my mother in law had proudly made us dinner. She didn't serve any Yamagata dishes, which require a lot of chopping that she is no longer up to, but I borrowed her book, published 20 years ago by the "Life Improvement Action Group" in Yamagata. Leafing through it, I find a recipe for rice cakes (but really more dumplings, as these are not dried or grilled) made from glutinous rice and wheat steamed together, pounded, and dipped in kinako (toasted soybean flour). This is traditionally eaten around now, when all the rice seedlings have been transplanted into the flooded paddies. Eat to the accompaniment of the "Sanaburi-mochi" song! We've just missed the first showing of the "kukina" - a kind of purple/white-flowered rape. My mother-in-law was quite at a loss to describe it - "It's just...kukina!" - a good witness to its pervasiveness. In Spring, the unopened budding stems are eaten as a green, much like nanohana. One recipe mixes tender-crisp boiled kukina buds with shredded carrot and squashed soybeans, which have been briefly fried in sesame oil, then simmered in soy sauce and sugar, and allowed to cool before the greens are added. Later in the year, kukina goes into miso soup - here prepared by an elementary school class, and is pickled for use in the winter. In the autumn, after harvest, neighbors used to gather, each bringing a little of their crops, to party and drink imo-ni soup. Sometimes this is like buta-jiru, and sometimes it has small taro potatoes, shreds of beef, mushrooms of many kinds, and long onion or negi, and is seasoned with soy sauce and sugar. Here's another description. Later in the winter, the barrels of pickled vegetables and the salted, dried, and smoked fish and squid are used at almost every meal. When you finally get sick of pickled greens, you can simmer them till tender, drain, toss in a handful of squashed soybeans, re-season with soy sauce and sugar, and serve up for a change of pace. About those squashed soybeans...Steamed (or at a pinch, boiled) soybeans are hit with a wooden mallet, one by one, to flatten, but not pulverize them. These are then dried and stored for use in soups and stews. This area of Japan is known for heavy snows, and the people who live there know to Be Prepared. They use the dried vegetables used in rural cooking throughout Japan, and they also dry things like mitsuba, that nobody else would even consider using dried! I have found what looks like a wonderful resource for regional food and cooking in Japan - Rural Net. That is, if I wanted to pay 24,000 yen per year to access their files...

Talking of stuffed cabbage, there is a nice recipe for layered (instead of stuffed) cabbage and good quality sausagemeat in Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book. Must try this when back in NZ with access to sausagemeat again... Must convince husband that we really NEED a food processor, so I can make my own... I plan to have cabbage leaves and a dipping sauce with tonight's dinner, which is a kind of fresh-sardine pizza (fresh baby sardines knocked down to $1.00 a tray at the supermarket yesterday). Those thin, eggy cabbage pancakes for breakfast tomorrow??? A stamina breakfast is needed for all-day orchestra practice...but if I feed the child THAT much cabbage in 24 hours, he may be excused from orchestra early !

Heeeeh (That's a Japanese heeee, not an English tee-hee with an amputation). Serving all sorts of things on bamboo shoot "leaves" sounds interesting... Thanks for the umeshu link, Hiroyuki. She has an "Umeshu nuta" recipe down the bottom which sounds very interesting...

Lots of stuff that I could think of but top of the list is... $3.00 heavy denim aprons from the hardware store. They last for years, they never look gungy or wrinkled, and the rope neck and waist ties can easily be adjusted to fit anybody in the family.

I'm sure I have more nemesis, but I avoid them so perfectly that I've forgotten what they are. Meanwhile... Sourdough -- I live in Japan, where sourdough starters are not growing on trees (unlike everywhere else, as you know). I read this website, and I SAW THE LIGHT...it works...no exposing to air, no mail order, etc...just whole wheat flour) Sourdough starter using WW flour, no unpredictable airborne thingies Biscuits. This is not about recipes. My mother and grandmother both made wonderful scones using absolutely opposite approaches. The thing they DID do the same was to give the dough a brief but definite knead (about 3 turns in the bowl), and bake them at the top of a very hot oven - 425 deg. F or so. Biscuits should be placed very close together (maybe even so close that they need to be pulled apart when baked). When removing them from the oven, I usually put a worn out teatowel on the cooling rack, and loosely cover them with half the teatowel so that they don't dry out too much as they cool. Choux paste...I last baked it 25 years ago...when I was bringing them to a friend's party. I was running late, so I put the last two batches on the back seat of my car, still cooling on the baking trays. Then I set off, and took a corner way too fast. Oven trays landed on floor of car, knocking every last atom of air out of the choux. Arrived at party with nice range of chewy pancakes...

Yes, karikari ume, not umeboshi - they're not dried! I think the key to crispness is including eggshells in the initial pickling, from what I remember...the calcium bonds with the chloride in the salt and prevents it from pickling the ume too fast?????

...I don't think so! He's definitely a "furu-zuke" himself -- if I cut back on the salt, he might just rot... Fish sauce/lemon juice Thai style salads -- yes, that has been our big salad item for the last year or two - it goes extra well if you mix the cabbage or lettuce with mizu-na or something juicy like cucumber or daikon shreds. I like it so much I'm guilty of serving it way too often... I can see I'm limiting myself by not wanting to serve creamy sauces or pastas with rice...may have to have a few (gasp) rice-free meals to explore the wonder that is cabbage!

Snap! I was just going to say that we enjoy cabbage and asari (clams of some kind??) with spaghetti. Crispy pancakes...sort of like mini okonomiyaki, maybe? That gets a frequent airing in our house, because I lived in Osaka when I first came to Japan. Butter and cabbage, great when I was in the Auld Country, but here I'm suspicious of exactly how long shopkeepers believe that butter can sit on a shelf... Cabbage and bacon seem born to each other, don't they? The cabbage soup I like best is vaguely based on one from Georg Lang's book on Hungarian cooking. It is made with chicken, and has plenty of white beans. A favorite of my younger son's. Haluski? - cabbage noodles? This definitely requires further investigation! We make potstickers with cabbage and chinese chives (and pork) too. Asazuke - thanks for the hint, Hiroyuki. My Hokkaido-born husband grew up with his Akita-born stepmother's tastes in pickles, so I've never gained confidence with the "lightly pickled" versions, which are so nice as a salad. I did make cabbage kimchi once. It was surprisingly hard to get all the ingredients, but it did taste good....just incredibly hotter than the storebought kind! Now off to bed for me...son told me at 6pm that he has the Great School Expedition tomorrow, which requires the Great Festive Packed Lunch to be produced before I leave for work. It would be when I have almost no food in the house...luckily the cabbage stand man outdid himself and had a bag of fresh snowpeas there, and luckily the brown money jar had $1.00 in it!

My ume trees, unpruned, are laden this year, despite dark mutterings from the neighbor, who thinks I neglect them and thereby threaten the cultural heritage of the nation. I've discovered an ancient batch of low-sugar umeshu, which in this 3rd year has mellowed in to a very pleasant drink. I'm now debating whether to try an experimental jar of non-sugar umeshu made with a good quality shochu and green ume only. Any comments, warnings, or recommendations on type of shochu? Ume vinegar (made the same as umeshu, but with vinegar, for kids) does that too -- after several years, I can't tell the difference between the white liquor and the vinegar version. When I made them, the difference seemed so obvious that I didn't bother labelling the bottles...oops! Umeboshi - I like to make them from ume that are much closer to ripening than usual - they make big, soft, fragrant umeboshi. The hitch is that we live in a valley and have a shadey garden, so by the time my umeboshi are pickled, the red shiso is often no longer in the shops (fewer and fewer people must buy it, because these days it is in the shops only for 2-3 days). What I call ume paste is actually not sieved umeboshi, but a preserve made from imperfect ume -- read about it a few years back. I slice the ume into chunks, avoiding birdpecks etc., and layer with salt in a tabletop pickling container, apply pressure, and pickle as usual. Come drying time, the container goes outside for 1-3 days with the lid off, then the paste is packed away for storage. This sloppy preserve has a lovely tawny apricot color, plenty of fragrance, and makes a great marinade as well as dressing (cut with dashi and shoyu). I also make "failure" mini-umeboshi, and was delighted to find another neighbor who also preserves them the "wrong" way. I buy the little umeboshi designed to make kari-kari umeboshi (crunchy umeboshi), and instead pickle them like normal umeboshi. They are less sour than the usual ones, and thus more popular in kids' lunchboxes. Last time I made kari-kari umeboshi I thought they tasted much better after a winter in the fridge, although the books advice you to eat them immediately. Whew! Hope the wind tonight doesn't blow too many ume down...

One thing that's worth considering is how thirsty high-protein diets make you. And maybe you'd miss the fragrance of fruit, so herbs, spices, flowers, citrus??? Especially something for that bad mouthtaste that people talk about. I don't follow Atkins, so I hope I've got it right, but how about a lemon and lemon thyme sorbet alongside or layered with those creamy items? Or by itself...or just extra-special sugarless long, tall drinks and iced teas? I used to make a soft creamy cheese scented with rose geranium leaves, but after 20 years, don't recall details. It's a classic though, so should be around somewhere. Nut cakes, definitely - I used to wonder why anybody bothered with wheatflour when I first discovered European nut tortes! Would some non-Atkins low carb dieters be tempted by small portions of weird and wonderful fruits? People mainly want to be uplifted and excited by dessert -- how about a plate with a lapel-ready flower (or something else portable), a twig or a tendril or two, and a few small fruits with stem and leaf still attached. Starfruit and small polished worrystones (you know, the semiprecious or nonprecious type sold in dishfuls in shops that sell crystals etc) ? I'm taking this too far, I know...

That sounds good, and since cbarre02 mentioned "sour raisins" I've been thinking of using some ume paste as a topping - but a lemon/ume paste/soy sauce dipping sauce sounds good too. Maybe with fresh kinome leaves? Used to occasionally eat at a yakitori shop that served huge, torn-up hunks of cabbage leave with a sake/miso dipping sauce as a beer snack. ...Retires to kitchen to cook skinflint version of sweet and sour pork while considering The Adventure of the Cabbage... ...and also recalls that son has developed morbid fear of caterpillars in the cabbage if it isn't pulled apart and washed thoroughly. Comes of reading at the table - he had a bug between his chopsticks and practically on his lips before he noticed...

Almost always so. It's cheaper, and when the wallet is bursting its seams, home-cooked treats are a better bargain than food from the only kind of restaurant that my husband is prepared to pay good money for... Husband often cooks Saturday lunch, though. I do prep in advance, particularly meat/fish - marinading, pickling in miso, etc. Rarely enjoy veg that have been frozen, but do prepare sauces etc. The person who can be bothered thinking about it, which is usually me. Interestingly, the fussiest son is also the most interested in food. He's not adventurous, but he will tell me precisely what he would like to eat, and how he wants it presented. He eats everything now (age 10), voluntarily, though cautious about new things. A few years back, we bargained - he could choose one item that I would never require him to eat, the rest he had to eat some of...and I promised not to serve up food that he hated too often. I'm often busy at the end of the working day (on the days I work at home) or home late, or running kids to activities. It's easy to get into an efficient but boring rut. I counter that by checking through my files (or eGullet!) before I plan my main shopping trip of the week. Cheap shopping usually means the same old same old, so I permit myself one or two "special" things during the week, especially as mealtimes are a big part of our family life. Well, we have two boys (10, 12)...I have no trouble picturing the flow of conversation at the Mayhaw table as Mayhaw described it! Our main problem is not discussion but BOOKS AT THE TABLE. We normally eat at a low Japanese table, so books, magazines etc on the floor are fatally easy to reach. Husband and I like to read while eating too, but three meals a day with book in hand is surely too much? Boys protest very creatively EVERY time I try to suggest normal dining manners. They maintain that a book or two just sparks the table conversation nicely... Japanese men rarely get home early for dinner - 10pm is very usual, 8:30 means a special commitment to leave the office early - so breakfast is THE family meal for us, and I cook accordingly. Dinner hours vary from day to day, but are written on the fridge!! That's because the afternoons and evenings are so busy that I have to cook to the clock. Cram school is starting to cut into the dinner hour, so the cramee eats part of dinner early, and has rice and miso soup with the other son and I on return. I always sit and have a cup of tea with whoever is eating. Thanks to extensive wildlife, food is NEVER eaten outside the kitchen or dining room here, and all supplies are kept in airtight boxes. I think blatant is the way to go! Why bother if you're not all excited about it? One son is very adventurous about anything new, and manages to talk everybody else into it. It's worth having the whole family at the supermarket from time to time, so they can see the materials and fantasize about how to eat them! Husband is extremely conservative, but decided that he would eat anything when he saw how much the kids enjoyed things that he didn't like at all. He seems to have actually developed a taste for some of those things. Rice, miso soup, and soy sauce are on our table all the time. I've given up protesting when people pour soy sauce on the roast chicken stuffing...