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Sounds good! I was thinking about "singeing" it to release a bit more sweetness, but your suggestion is in another class, and we have wonderful, soft, new-crop onions around at the moment too.

Gnocchi. I'm not sure whether I'm not preparing them correctly, or whether I just hate 'em. So long since I ate them in a restaurant that I can't even remember what I'm aiming for... Copper bowls for meringue, yes! I lost mine moving houses, cities, countries, who knows, and I notice the difference. Jams and preserves. This is an area where experience will definitely make a difference, and KarenS' advice is right on the mark. If you warm the sugar a little before you add it, you can cut cooking time down even more (the shorter the cooking time, the brighter the color). My mother and grandmother made lots of jams etc., and watching them made it much easier for me. You will come to notice the difference in the bubbling foam as the jam approaches setting point. To me, the foam starts to look finer overall, with big, coarse "eyes" in it. There are several tests for setting point -- a big spoon dipped and held sideways should show the drips slowly merging and dripping off in a big "flake" rather than a drop; a little jam dripped on a cold saucer should form a skin - blow on it and the surface will wrinkle. I remember the first time I made marmalade -- it was so thin that I returned it to the pot, and boiled the hell out of it. When the jars finally cooled, the marmalade was not certainly "set" -- when I tried to get some out, it refused to part company with the rest of the jam, slipping off the knife and sproinging back into the jar like a rubber band!

There's an honesty-box vege stand just round the corner, for veges grown locally by a retired farmer. At this time of year, the only veg on offer is rather loose, but tender and juicy spring cabbage. I'm a particularly faithful customer at this time of year - first pay of the semester yet to arrive, translation invoices take 3 months to grind through the system, back-to-school expenses, car warrant due ....at less than $1.00 per cabbage, this guy has my entire loyalty. These are some of my staples - what are yours? Bubble and squeak with lots of green outer leaves of cabbage, and only a little potato, well-softened with butter...that was good - the first 5 times or so... Thick chunks of bacon simmered with cabbage and chickpeas in beer and spices. Cabbage slaw with seedling mustard greens, dressed with tiny dried whitebait and sesame seeds, fried in sesame oil and cut with soy sauce and lemon juice. Cabbage simmered in a mild-flavored stock with thick-cut deepfried tofu. "Breakfast salad" of shredded cabbage with walnuts and shredded chicken breast. Thin-sliced pork rolled tightly around shredded cabage and ginger, tied up and microwaved or steamed and served in slices with a ponzu (citrus/soy sauce) dressing. ...next?

Food gifts...I'm assuming this is for people who don't normally cook Japanese style? At Narita Airport there's a store which sells brightly colored candies shaped like sushi, vegetables etc, and molded rice flour and sugar "rakugan" candies in pastel flower and leaf shapes. I think there's a store in both terminals. Those are light weight, easy to get through customs, and pretty. I like them, but they are very mild flavored, and not everybody likes them. Kyoto is the best place to buy rakugan though, and also the hard, sweet "kawara-senbei" (roof-tile senbei, flavored with cinnamon and dark sugar) that come in small curved rectangles about the color of gingerbread also make good gifts. The mini-sized ones especially don't shatter in your luggage as easily as ordinary senbei. Kyoto also sells round hard candies flavored with cinnamon (nikki, clear or light brown), black sugar (kuro-zatou, dark brown), peppermint (hakka, clear) and sometimes ginger (shouga, light brown). Old-fashioned Meitan Plum Candy (Meitan Doroppu) seem to be easier to find in Kyoto too. Made with plum extract and brown sugar, they look like this Salted double cherryblossoms are another Kyoto specialty, though you should find the small jars in supermarkets too (usually with the teas, as a blossom is often dropped into a cup of green tea or hot water). They keep for ever. At supermarkets and corner convenience stores look for tubes of Koohii Beat (chocolate coated coffee beans), and small packs of Apollo Choco (strawberry and brown chocolates shaped like Apollo spacecraft), handy for small gifts. Koala March (koala shaped chocolate-filled snacks) are always popular with kids when I take them, plus all the seasonal candy/choc bars with wild names. How about drinking snacks like shredded dried squid (saki-ika) or sliced smoked squid (ika no kunsei)? Peanuts coated with spicy batters, especially wasabi (horseradish) - these can be found somewhere near the dried squid in supermarkets. If you don't mind glass, you can buy small bottles of (expensive) specialty soy sauces in department stores. These are used for sashimi etc, not for cooking with. Got that duffel filled up yet?

I did NOT, not, not, need to know that! My sister lives in the Netherlands. It's all her fault. I would never have known about them otherwise. However, the joy is more in the anticipation for me - I usually find that when I actually bite into one it is sweeter than I remembered. (They even stock them at Toys R Us from time to time, but not very nice ones).

Wakame does vary a little bit -- the better grades expand to quite wide fronds with a certain thickness to them, while the cheap ones are very thin and tatty. Normally you soak the fronds, then cut or tear off the fine whiteish "stem" that runs along one side of each frond. Then fold the fronds up and slice finely. If you do this before they have fully expanded, and then toss the shredded wakame back into the water to finish soaking, it is easier to handle than waiting until the wakame is fully reconstituted.

Interesting! My husband comes from Hokkaido, and although he's extremely stingy about spending more than necessary on food, he wouldn't consider buying dried wakame, and is quite the connoisseur on different types of salted wakame. A friend brought me back some ash-dried wakame from her home-town. It was nice, but it was quite a chore washing the ash off every time I wanted to use some.

...that sounds about right! We have no daughters, no nieces, no Aunties, and no Grandmas...so Childrens' Day aka Boys' Day is BIG here! We used to gather herbs for the bath locally (except for the Iris) but recent pork-barrel roading projects seem to have eliminated the very last of the wild yomogi. I think the chimaki are more of a Kyoto thing, and the oakleaf dumplings more of a Tokyo thing, but recently supermarkets stock both. I like the faintly grassy taste of chimaki, but it's hard to find nice ones. This year was too cold for the usual chirashi-zushi, so we had a warm "steamed sushi" with unagi. I usually put slices of thick baked egg (atsuyaki tamago) on it as well, but thanks to the sudden change of plan, I forgot ).

I think there seem to be two streams of "slow food" thinking in Japan at present -- the "plenty of time, plenty of money" market which is always targeted by purveyors of fine foods, whatever catchphrase they are using, and those who think that slow food or slow living are a guideline rather than a socioeconomic grouping. As Hiroyuki says, slow food is how we always eat...but I think it's with an extra commitment to local, seasonal food. Interesting definition on this blog site: Watch out - it's all in Japanese! His "three principles" are - ingredients or dishes grown or prepared locally; good quality ingredients or dishes; and manufactured or prepared according to traditional methods スローフードの３原則 　　1. 　地元でつくられた食材や料理であること。 　　2. 　質のよい食材や料理であること。 　　3. 　その土地の伝統の方法で製造されたり、調理されていること。 A couple of new books (in Japanese) which seem to concentrate more on preparation of ordinary Japanese food, and less on Italian food or local rarities: 本物を伝える　 日本のスローフード 金丸　弘美 http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4...2869974-9762706 スローライフ、スローフード 「食」から考える明日のライフスタイル 大谷ゆみこ　編 http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4...2869974-9762706 And back to my original interest in regional cooking as Japan's slow food -- a few recipes in rather surprising English from Hokkaido. Hokkaido being what it is, these recipes do not deal with "wajin" food and techniques that have been around since Izanami and Izanagi, but instead show local ingredients and powerful influences on local history. http://www1.tcue.ac.jp/home1/english/stude...s22/a2/dosanko/ I plan to hunt around for some local recipes in English for other areas of Japan, heaading south from Hokkaido, and will post as I encounter interesting items.

Well, we have a battered helmet from the youth group in the coal town where the boys' great grandfather lived - they presented it to him for many years of service when he retired, blinded by coal dust, to live out his last years in an old peoples' home way down in Tokyo. When I put that helmet up for Childrens' Day, I think very hard about families... Our sons, on the other hand, think about nothing but the food associated with the festival. As we trekked all the way out to Narita to the Aeronautical Sciences Museum today, I am not looking forward to cooking tomorrow, but it's going to be salad-style sushi for sure. Some years it gets shaped like a carp streamer and decorated with cucumber and hardboiled egg slice "scales"...but some years...not.

bracken is a traditional food of Maori people in New Zealand. My memory of the correct drill is hazy, but I think the roots were soaked in running water before use. I don't recall hearing about the shoots, and now I can only remember the Japanese way of using ashes. Bracken fern is a big link between NZ and Japan for me. Apart from the food, and bracken fronds as a design motif in the art of both countries, I have vivid memories of eating salted long-grain rice using home-made bracken stem chopsticks, dressed in a crepe paper kimono with crepe paper flowers pinned in my hair...we start school in NZ on our 5th birthday, and I started school just in time to study Japan and participate in the culminating Japan festival. The teacher couldn't believe that anybody could eat plain, unflavored shortgrain rice, so she did it her way! I do believe that she told us that bracken shoots were eaten in Japan, so she must have done some homework.

What a lot of interesting comments! Walking to school. I'm really glad that when my kids were at kindy, I was able to walk to and fro with them. I resented it frequently, because I often had to leave my 1-hour-to-deadline jobs to go fetch my kids, but we watched and talked about so many things, and rarely had the kind of grumps from them or lectures from me that are so frequent with car trips! That said, Japanese schools are really playing with fire on safety issues. The group "walking bus" thing is only used here at for the first month for first-graders, and when there have been reports of incidents in the neighborhood. Schools keep kids in without contacting parents for any old reason (from "decorating the classroom", to "class discussion", to "rewriting sloppy classwork") so we have no way of knowing when they are legitimately late, and when they have been shoved in a car and taken 100 kilometers away. A man tried to drag a girl into a car not 10 meters from my house. Luckily she screamed and kicked, and he ran away. Several times a month, my kids come home with a report of flashers or other weirdos trying to grab kids on their way to and from schools within few minutes' drive of us. There have been incidents with knives, and overnight kidnappings within the local middle-school catchment area -- way too close to home for me! I can just remember the debate over whether or not Japan should change it's postwar bread-based (easy to transport/serve/store) school lunch system. Japan was just starting to feel its oats in the 80s, and apparently sent people to study the French system closely. They were impressed by the amount of effort, money, and other resources that went into making sure that French children knew that their traditional foods were an important part of their culture, as well as the basis of their health, and as far as I know, the current system is heavily influenced by the French attitude. In New Zealand, I observe that school lunchboxes have grown huge -- partly to accomodate waterbottles, but mostly so that parents can fit a whole packet of crisps in there. Culturally appropriate? You betcha! And yet, when I had these junk food vacuum cleaners for Japan Club, they were game to try sushi, vinegared salads, green tea, etc. Must stop raving and go and check the two school lunch menus for next week, to make sure that I don't serve up the same stuff for dinner that they were given at school that day!

Yup, I agree that it takes a while to decide how you WANT your nimono to taste! I'm on the opposite side from Torakris, I spent my first years in Japan in Osaka, with a mother-in-law who was a young girl during WWII, when shortages of sugar and soy sauce accustomed her to even less seasoning than Kansai people usually like! Recently I've been using mirin rather than sugar for many things. I think it gives a less cloying finish (maybe...). Favorites: Any kind of green bean nimono, especially age-ni (deep fried and dropped hot into the seasonings and simmered a little to take some of the oil out). Nasubi "inaka-ni" styles. I'm willing to spend ages crosshatching them. This is another great candidate for age-ni, because the frying sets the purple color of the nasubi which is usually lost. Kabocha - in a magazine years ago I read about putting your chunks of kabocha in a pot, sprinkling with sugar (fairly generously) and then LEAVING till next day. The kabocha gives off lots of water, and simmered on a very low heat (this does burn easily) you get a fuill-flavored kabocha that is not mushy. Sweet potatoes simmered with lemon. Hijiki - I think our family likes every type of hijiki nimono that has ever been invented! A friend sometimes brings long, glossy black dried hijiki from her hometown on the east of the Boso Peninsula...almost a crime to eat it. Mother-in-law was delighted that a friend had dropped off a hometown delicacy for her -- "dongoi". Known elsewhere in Japan as "itadori", these are the peeled tender runners of Polygonum cuspidatum, which is an invasive weed in the US, I believe. Unlike most wild food, this was only mildly chewy, a bit more "doughy" than a green bean. And Torakris...just two words....buri daikon...

I'm aware of the "genmai is dangerous" argument that has developed in recent years, because my brother in law read a popular book, and took to his bed for a week because I "poisoned" him by serving genmai twice in as many months. (Mind you, he takes to his bed for weeks for a variety of reasons...) So I looked into it. I'm willing to admit that there may be reliable evidence that genmai is harmful, but I'm having a hard time finding it! I also admit that I haven't searched exhaustively. Neither have I looked much into the argument that genmai is manna from heaven and a cure-all for every ill. It's food... I'm sure that genmai is best avoided by some people - those with irritable bowel syndrome are likely to get a stomach ache, and they certainly won't absorb much nutrition if their digestive systems are constantly irritated. Likewise the elderly who can't chew, and who have weak peristalsis -- any high-fiber food could be dangerous for them. The article that Hiroyuki mentions comes from a website run by Mr. Asai, health-food shop owner and one-time chiropractor. He describes the dangers of genmai as known to "lots of healers and practitioners of traditional Asian medicine". But no names are given. Some anecdotal evidence of acids in brown rice harming teeth are given, and a simulation of the effects of eating brown rice vs. white rice over 40 years using the "O-ring" test are given. The test is described in the site below...I would dearly love to see this test in practice, though I would find it hard to accept it as a substitute for 40 years of data! I like genmai with curry, and I like it cooked with hijiki...but since I didn't grow up eating rice (and I'm actually somewhat allergic to it, so I eat boring stuff like mugi most of the time), it's not a battlefield for me. Hope I didn't offend, just didn't feel that that particular article was a great argument for the anti-genmai position.

Hmmm...I tossed out last year's school payment schedule and have not got the new one yet, but I remember being told something like 300-350 yen per child per meal, and that that was a "cost-only" price...and that's roughly what I recall the monthly fees to be. I have yet to see what we need to pay for middle school lunches Our local elementary has roughly 2 rice meals for every bread/noodles meal averaged out over the month.

Found the middle school menu... A: naan bread, ground pork curry, chinese bean thread vermicelli salad, cabbage soup, egg custard, milk B: pork curry, salad as for A, royal soup (??), egg custard, milk, rice A: almond roll, fried fish, german potato salad, chinese egg-drop soup, kiwifruit, milk B: rice, mackerel simmered in pureed daikon with nameko (tiny fungi), pickled spring cabbage, miso soup, kiwifruit, milk A: spaghetti with meat sauce, baked potato, tofu and vege clear soup, acerola berry jelly, milk B: rice with bamboo shoots, grilled salt salmon, green beans panfried, vegetables with sesame, clear soup, fruit yogurt, milk A: milk bread roll, tofu with funghi in arrowroot-thickened clear sauce topping, kinpira-style wakame (sea lettuce stalks, Italian soup, Japanese kiyomi orange, milk B: Rice, ma-bo tofu (ground pork simmered with beancurd in a miso-y sauce), vinegar-dressed wakame (sea lettuce), Chinese chives and egg drop soup, Japanese kiyomi orange, milk A: Almond toast, Chicken in a lightly seasoned broth, Burdock and wiener sausages panfried, spring cabbage with sesame dressing, Chinese greens and crabmeat soup, Fruit salad with rice-flour dumplings, milk B: Rice, Chicken teriyaki (glazed with soy sauce and mirin), corn saute (??), greens and thin strips of fried tofu, simmered together, miso soup, fruit salad as for A, milk Whew!

Ooh, school lunches again! Son#2 started middle school. He has a choice of bring-your-own (voted down by Mum), or A or B menu. A menu is designed to go with bread, and B menu is designed to go with rice, but it seems rather flexible. However, the main course ingredient is the same - so if A menu is fish fried with flaked almonds, then B menu is fish simmered in miso. Son spends a long and happy half hour each fortnight filling out his lunch choice form. His main question is: Which menu looks BIGGER? We pay for lunches. I'll post a sample later. Son #1's elementary school menus are noticeably different each time the head of cooking changes (they are rostered for several years at a time to schools around the city). First week of school lunches for the year from elementary school (April menus guaranteed to contain seasonal foods, something luxurious, and kid favorites like curry): Brown sugar rolls (not sticky, just brown!), milk, hamburgers with funghi sauce (in APril???), beefun rice noodle soup, handful of dried fish, apple Rice, milk, ma-bo dofu (ground pork simmered with beancurd in a miso-y sauce), parched soybeans, kiwifruit, corn potato (??) Rice, milk, veges simmered in broth, fresh sardine fillets grilled with herbs, canned white peaches, handful of dried fish Stirfried chinese noodles (with pork and vegetables), sweet rice dumplings rolled in toasted soybean flour, milk, shrimp dumplings and young bamboo shoots soup, apple Rice cooked with bamboo shoots, milk, wild vegetables simmered in a thickened broth, deep-fried scallops, parched soybeans

Do general-type menus not exist in Japan??? Maybe not as a table d'hote so often, but in effect, they do exist. "Teishoku" usually means that the main dish comes with pickles, appetizer/side-dish, soup, rice. Some restaurants don't even list these items, it's just assumed that they are included when you order a "main dish" item. The great alternative to table d'hote is the maku-no-uchi bento or fiormal bento. In that case, all items are served together in a partitioned box (soup, rice, and maybe pickles separate, and very possibly last), so the order of eating is up to you. In those bento, you may see a little bit of sushi in the line-up, but sushi was never designed to be part of a meal, more of a snack or light meal. In a reasonably good restaurant, the rule is that the rice should not appear until the sake drinking has finished. The reason given is that you should not have two rice products on the table at the same time, but actually, drinkers won't touch the sweetish soft rice while they are drinking, so it is better to serve it hot once they have finished drinking. Also, many Japanese feel that rice cleanses the palate, so they want to enjoy it without other competing flavors at the end of meal, just tea and pickles to go with it.

When I first came to Japan, I lived in Osaka. I had temari-fu often, but I didn't actually get to see kuruma-fu until last year. And now that I'm near Tokyo, I never see anything but fake temari-fu...must be an East-West thing.

Another "green" kinpira is piman (green pepper) kinpira. And yes, it's a great lunchbox item too!

1) Husband and I like kukicha best of all the green teas. We used to like a horribly expensive type called "karigane". Then we had kids... 2)Mugicha. Anybody got any great ideas about what to do with the discarded mugi if you make your mugicha from loose roasted barley, and not teabags? 6 liters worth of mugicha per day in summer produces an awful lot of soggy wet barley. 3) Just to throw a spanner in the works...I heard that a green tea version of chai was popular in the US, so when I was back in New Zealand, I just had to try it. I liked the Healtheries version, which is gingery, and posted packs to all my friends in Japan as a novelty. It took off like a house on fire! They all wanted more (and have never been terribly interested in other herb or specialty teas). ...so...unable to buy the Healtheries tea online, I ordered a green tea chai from the US. It was totally different -- intended to be drunk with milk, an Indian type green tea base, and heavily spiced with cinnamon. It wasn't as popular, probably because the tea flavor was less evident, and because cinnamon is much less used than ginger here. Anybody ever seen flavored green teas here in Japan of the type popular in western countries in recent years?

Hmmm...interesting! Japanese friends tell me that the Carrefour in Chiba has mostly Japanese stuff, so they don't find it exciting enough to make the long drive there. I haven't been to Carrefour, though it is close to the Chiba Costco, because both are incredibly inconvenient if you are not driving. Chiba Costco is not physically far from where I work, but I have to take two trains and a bus to get there! I've only been twice to Costco, and doubt if it's worth renewing my card, because the stock is rather unpredictable -- I can't be sure of finding what I went there to buy. They have a great range of frozen foods, but most Japanese fridges don't have much freezer space!

My husband's company used to have their offices in Hiroo. He highly recommends the inexpensive basement Thai restaurant right opposite the Hiroo subway station...but he can't remember the name of the restaurant! Also...plenty of restaurants in the big complex near Arisugawa Park (Arisugawa Gardens??? couldn't find it online), and in Ebisu Gardens near Shibuya (within walking distance of Hiroo if you're persistent). Generally a good area for restaurants anyway, Japanese and French most popular, with South-East Asian following fast behind. The map on the link at top included lots of familiar names, and there are details elsewhere on the same site. The German bakery near the station is a very familiar Hiroo landmark.

Thanks a LOT for your blog! It was truly enjoyable, and ridiculously nostalgic for me. I grew up on New Zealand's Manukau Harbour (which is mostly the drowned valley of a long-gone river, with a narrow exit to the sea and therefore lots of mudflats). I've lived in Japan most of my adult life, but I still dream of that coast almost every night. I acknowledge that possibly my husband misses the mountains where he grew up as much as I miss the sea, but in my heart, I don't really believe it! I hear what you say about generations coming and going on the same land. The hills and valleys that my grandparents farmed have been hacked about beyond recognition, but the coastline where my children play has barely changed since their grandmother played there. You have me looking forward to the next time I can gather my relatives (from mudflats all over the world, natch, you can only change so much when you move away from home) on the home beach for a driftwood barbeque. But not shrimps and crawfish for us -- more likely smoked mullet, vinegary mussels, and salty butter on fresh bread! Thanks again!

I was tearing out the door yesterday and somehow erased instead of posting...hooray, I hear everybody cheer... I lived near Ikebukuro 20 years ago, now I need a map to get around there. However, the word is that there are lots of specialty ethnic meat shops and groceries west of Ikebukuro and also west of Shin-Okubo. Cooking....try Tokyo Gas -- they run classes on various themes, which allows you to pick and mix, and they are usually not expensive. Check your local city office too, and get on the mailing list or watch the local newspaper, which will have announcements tucked in among all the ads. Cooking classes run by cooking schools are likely to be expensive and much more rigid in sticking to traditional techniques and seasonings. Very good, if you know that that is what you want to learn.