helenjp

Hmmm...lots of water before performances? Somewhere I read that a Japanese violinist discovered that wolfing down several very sugary desserts just before a performance gave her the needed edge...lucky it doesn't give her the sugar shakes and make her drop her violin! I vote for pie too! I don't have the pastry touch, so I'm more than ready to be filled with admiration. [...slinks off to FRY not bake some lamb pasties...]

I didn't make sushi in the end either...son's violin teacher got the bit between her teeth and extended his lesson by an hour...so I bought some sushi on the way home. Son was so tired he cried into his soup, but perked up when he saw the Doll's Day cake I'd bought for dessert. Symbolism?? Shellfish in Japan usually do symbolize women, in a very...err...intimate way, though most particularly the akagai. I like making these hina-zushi though...a small ball of sushi rice, with a thin omelet wrapped round it for a kimono, and usually a tiny hard-boiled plover egg for a head. Scroll right down to the bottom of this page for an illustration (the top half is about making your own hina dolls from craft clay). Hina-zushi

I devoted my cooking future to a particular Japanese cookery writer (whose name I forget for the moment...) when I read her words: "Fancy packed lunches are just a way of decorating the lunch box lid. You might as well tip a heap of ketchup, mayo, and nori onto the lid, stir it around some, and slam it on top of the bento, for all the use it will be by the time the kid opens it at lunchtime..." Which is why, perversely, fancy rolled "futomaki" sushi actually do make a really decorative obento! homestyle futomaki sushi futomaki with butterflies, snails, turtles...

Saturday...new cabbage salad, wilted by having crispy fried scraps of pork thrown over it. Miso soup and rice, as usual... Sunday: nipped out for half an hour and ended up taking the whole family to see the last Lord of the Rings movie...luckily dinner was a slow-cooked lemon sofrito of chicken with white beans cooked in the broth. Spinach with garlic/yogurt dressing. Rice, miso soup, as usual... Monday: Son cooked the miso soup, apparently hoping to put off tidying his room. The miso soup had young cabbage, bamboo shoots, and scraps of pork in it. I butterflied some fresh sardines and put them in salty water for a half-hour, then grilled with EVOO, vinegar, and red pepper, served over a salad of watercress and seedling turnip leaves, grilled yellow peppers. Rice and natto, just to convince my husband that we still live in Japan. Tuesday: Lamb. Heh heh. Husband hates it...when he notices what it is...he'll be sure to catch on if I cook it with dried fruit; but maybe not in those round crisp-fried dumplings with Chinese chives (nira)?

Now I get it...when the Beard Papa in our local supermarket complex shut down, it went to New York... When it opened, the queues were legend. But after a while, nobody bought enough to keep the place running. I think they had a choice of vanilla or chocolate custard cream, and mini or regular size puffs. (But memory is a little hazy). I agree, the filling is a little bland. My guess is that the main aim of the pastry is for it to keep crisp for several hours, as sweets are such a major gift item here...and it's important for guests not to go open-handed, to the point where children headed out to play at a friend's house get loaded up with some very strange items in a desparate attempt to find a potential "gift" among the stuff lying around the kitchen!

This is fun! I'm enjoying it all... Drowning in envy over all the cupboard space. I have a Japanese kitchen, which means the whole kitchen including sink, counter, and stove-top, fits in about 9 feet of wall space. No cupboards elsewhere, so I have wallpaper covered apple cartons stacked on the fridge etc. to hold things like cake tins. Yes, yes, where are the pix of Ryan's village?! My 12 year old is a "make-it" guy, has to be reminded about the "no soldering before breakfast" rule from time to time. If Ryan has recently started the saxophone, the water problem may resolve itself has he gets better control of his breath - beginning flute-players tend to use too much breath and produce roiling rivers of condensation too. Congratulations on the theory pass. I am deeply impressed...my 10 year old is starting on pieces from the Suzuki Book 8 in violin (but is not a Suzuki student), and he STILL can't tell me the names of the notes on the staff. I once took a music book that he said he needed all the way to New Zealand, only to discover that he wanted it because he liked to look at the cover illustration while he played... Snacks today...10 year old has a friend to play, another kid saw them walk past and invited himself. They motored through 1-2 steamed pork buns each, plus apples and some tiny fried pastries. While they were upstairs, 12 year old's friends turned up to lure him out to play. I could have sworn they didn't go past the kitchen, but when they set off, they each had a pork bun in their hands... I also prefer to grit my teeth and feed visitors rather than have kids wandering aimlessly around for hours. We have the "go and eat at XXX's house" thing here too -- best yet was before 9 on Sunday morning, and "Can I have some breakfast please?"! Yesterday was Doll's Festival -- I've always made salad-style sushi, but this year the violin teacher got the bit between her teeth and the lesson ran on an extra hour, so I bought the sushi -- shock! horror! Now off to take the 10 year old to guitar. He wants to start learning a Japanese instrument too. No, no, and no.... We don't have slow-cookers in Japan, but we do have a saucepan that fits inside a big insulated outer pot, like a modern haybasket. Curry for post-guitar dinner is sitting in there right now...rice is in the cooker with the timer set!

I've been wondering for the longest time what Monkey Bread was! Thanks for the pix and recipe! Now please tell me what a Koolaid jammer is?! Glad to hear that other kids go to bed at 9pm. That's incredibly early in Japan. Hope Ryan's presentation went well. My DS#1 was up at 5:30 this morning, fretting over homework. He said he couldn't sleep because he was worried about 1) homework, 2) the end of the world, as evidenced by Bush in Iraq and chicken flu in Japan, and 3) whether he was going to trip and make a fool of himself on the stage at graduation. Snack today was rice balls stuffed with grilled salt salmon. I was informed that two of these was a "nibble", and that I'd better produce the real snack pronto. No dice. Good luck with the music. I try to keep practice my flute to be able to accompany DS#2 on his violin or guitar, but he lets me know that I'm holding things up...

New recipe yes, new process, no. I agree that concentration helps - I HAVE had disasters that came down to plain, unvarnished, slapdash negligence on my part. But for my mother-in-law??? Maybe not. She married my father-in-law a few years ago, and if I stuff up, she always coos, "So LIKE you, Helen...".

Sounds a bit like kushi-katsu (skewered katsu, literally, but oh, so much more...). I think I'd abandon my family and move back to Osaka alone if I could have kushi-katsu once a week! The crunchy breadcrumbs, the fact that everything is hidden until you bite it...the shishitou, the pork, the shiso...I wish I could even remember the rest!

I first lived in Osaka when I came to Japan, so that's the style of okonomiyaki that I "grew up with". I like monja-yaki, but it's just too deviant to be a regular on my home menu! Recently took a nephew from Hokkaido to eat monja-yaki - he was totally stoked to be having such an exotic dinner! We have a great Hiroshima-fuu place nearby, so I never make it at home -- why compete. Nagaimo -- yes, has to be included, but even the dried, powdered kind is better than none. Failing that, plenty of egg (though monja-yaki addicts might disagree). It makes a difference if you use dashi instead of water to mix, but if that's too much hassle, stirring in a packet or so of katsuobushi is a fair alternative! VeryApe, from past experience my guess is conversely that you maybe had too much batter for your cabbage. There should be only enough to bind the whole mess together. Some people say that the monja-yaki rules apply to all okonomiyaki: cabbage should not be cut ultra fine, but once the cabbage and batter are poured onto the plate, you should use the little "kote" (hmmm - sharp spatula??) in a rapid stamping motion which cuts up the cabbage, forcing the juices into the batter, and keeps the batter in contact with the hot plate. Funnily enough, I'm planning an okonomiyaki breakfast for tomorrow morning...tuna sandwich breakfast (extremely exotic for a Kiwi) the day after, all courtesy of eGullet! I lived on this when I was a student in Tokyo -- not only cheap and filling, but also saved on washing up if I turned it straight onto my calligraphy practice paper and ate it directly from the paper!

With two boys, you would think that Hina Matsuri would be nothing to us...not so, ever since they discovered that FOOD was involved. They like hina arare (sugar coated puffed rice and beans, in pinks, yellows, white, and green) http://www.big.or.jp/~loupe/links/ffete/shtml/hinaarar.shtml and any leftovers go on their breakfast yogurt! Somehow strawberries have become traditional Hina Matsuri food, and the supermarket today was doing a roaring trade in sponge rolls and cream-filled cakes of all kinds, ready for girls' parties tomorrow. My husband says that in his day, both boys and girls were invited to parties at girls' houses, but these days that parties seem to be for girls only. (Considering the fragility of the doll sets, I can only rejoice!). We always have chirashi-sushi (salad style sushi) and a clear clam soup on Hina Matsuri. Our dolls consist of a simple set that I painted myself. We have Boys' Day things, but the boys' grandfather is not the doting kind, so our items are mostly home-made.

Interesting to hear about school meal breaks. Here in Japan...Boy Who Eats #1 starts middle school in April, so I don't know the schedule yet, but they can have a hot school lunch or bring a packed lunch, to allow more time for sports practice (school sports clubs are sort of cadet military here...) Boys Who Eat #1 and #2 are currently at elementary school. They get two 25 minute play breaks, separate from eating -- lunch is collected in class sets from the kitchen by the children, served by them, eaten in the classroom (teachers eat the same menu), and tidied away by them. After lunchtime play, the kids also do 20 minutes of school cleaning before afternoon classes. They sometimes get a 5 minute play break on days when classes continue until 3:30pm. (Classes start at 8:20, they are supposed to be in their classrooms preparing for the day by around 8am). When they are at school in New Zealand, the boys' preferred packed lunch is a roll-up with hummus and smoked fish or chicken, or cold fish fingers with sweetcorn. NZ lunchboxes have become huge, to accommodate packs of crisps and bottles of softdrink. No more canned spaghetti sandwiches or marmite/potato crisps/lettuce sandwiches! I guess we are moving to a bigger breakfast and a smaller dinner pattern, partly because I am now out teaching more days than I'm at home translating. Most of my northern american friends serve pretty much what each family member requests for breakfast -- a novel concept for me,, but I bet it gives kids a reason to get up!! At first I couldn't figure out how there would be enough time to make several different breakfasts in the morning, but then my kids are out the door 1 to 1 1/2 hours earlier in the morning in Japan than in NZ. Breakfast (and husband's packed lunch, which includes cooked rice) is over here, and my term doesn't start till April! Another cup of coffee and a slow start on my work for me!

pork rolls with two stuffings: oyster and mushroom stuffing (mushrooms left over from Sons & Gang snacktime pizzas), and walnuts with apricot/apple chutney beet greens with vinaigrette, tiny thin asparagus miso soup, rice

So, were there any left-overs? I was just about to post a topic on Boys Who Eat. My elder son just turned 12. He usually finishes his meal with a sigh, a pause, and..."I'm hungry!". He hasn't started growing yet, either! Today The Sons and two mates ate two home-made pizzas and several apples, plus assorted stuff that they brought with them. In doing so, they consumed all the cheese for tomorrow morning's breakfast...and darn it, I haven't got time to run to the supermarket every day! A couple of days ago, I was at school for the end-of-6th-grade pre-graduation hamfest, and was shocked at the number of mothers who called out "So glad your house is right next to the Middle School...I'm sure you'll be seeing my son on his way home every day next year!" I got *really* worried when I started hearing the same stuff direct from the sons -- not so much a plague on first-born sons as a plague OF first-born sons. As they all know, home-made snacks do get served at our house...but I'm often phone-dueling my way out of deadlines at that time of day, and when I work away from home, I get back about the same time as the descending hordes. How do people cope with Sons & Friends who come to eat? Take out another mortgage? Buy a very large freezer (and in Japan, a second house to store it in!)?

Gosh darn, don't know that the en-sai that I know and love looks very similar to the photo you have there of water convolvulus...but in Japan it is often sold when just coming into flower. Long beans -- I knew them in English as snake beans. Hard to buy in Japan, but I can sometimes get seed -- has to be sown a little later than regular string beans, as it needs warmer weather, but then you can get young beans at just the right stage. Why is it that Chinese vegetables have so many English names?! Somewhere I read that stirfried green veg almost always respond better to seasoning with a little salty water rather than a direct sprinkling of salt, and b'golly they were right -- much crisper texture without excessive wilting. Oyster sauce?? I don't know why, but the taste has really palled on me. I almost never use it any more. Red fermented bean curd?....don't I wish I knew where I could buy some!

Saturday night we found the second-floor window of a Thai restaurant near my brother in law's new apartment....and diligent searching revealed tiny dark wooden stairs up to a tiny door -- ducking under the next floor's staircase brought us into a tiny 10-seater restaurant, run by a tiny middle-aged Thai woman. It looked as if she mainly served home-style food for local Thai girls, but she did a great job of feeding the 5 of us -- husband and I had a green curry of chicken and aubergine with rice and a small salad, brother in law and one kid had a sweet/salty dish of pork and kikurage (cloud-ear) with rice, and our other son had (I think) a thick pork stew with rice and a fried egg! We munched on fragrantly herbed deep-fried fish patties dipped in hot oil sauce while we waited. We look forward to our next visit... I put off the supermarket run till tomorrow, so tonight's dinner was miso soup with tofu and wakame (sea lettuce) rice sweet potatoes deep-fried in 3 different shapes, served first for kids and husband to nibble while waiting and watching our newly revived TV salad of mizuna and small amount of shredded salad, vinagrette with sesame seeds deep-fried chicken, soaked in milk seasoned with salt and curry powder, into which I mixed some flour and baking powder (because we'd run out of eggs). Turned out much better than I deserved! As for aging foodstuff, Kris, my old friend's even older mother gave me some butter that was over 3 years old a while back!

Rice mixed with chewy fried shiitake chunks Pork skewers basted in mustard, cider vinegar, and thyme, with a fresh apple/apricot chutney (recipe straight off the net) Spinach with yogurt cheese, parmesan (Shaker box type...no fresh at the supermarket), walnuts, and a very little EVOO Big fat tomatoes with salt and pepper Red miso soup with fresh whitebait, few shreds of fried tofu, and sugarsnap peapods

Just a thought...is the constipation in any way related to the inability to walk? My mother-in-law was hospitalized a few months ago with a blockage in the intestine. Just a lump of food residue, basically. She has chronic, bad constipation, and basically, her intestines have just stopped pushing and shoving the food through, and the constipation has stretched the intestines, making it easy for food to pile up too... We were told that the usual remedies for constipation in the young and healthy were *not* recommended here...as her intestines are not "pulsating" any more, food with a lot of fiber will just worsen the blockage rather than move things along. We were encouraged to keep her food soft, with a high water content, and get her to drink plenty of fluids as well. She is back to eating dry crackers and pickles as usual, but we try, we try... Sounds as if a word with your father in law's doctor and the nutrition staff of the nursing home could be helpful...

Granola for some reason, when I use raw oats for granola, it tastes best to me with slivered dried apricots and a generous amount of sesame seeds (the Japanese toasted type) mixed into it. Unfortunately the kids have discovered my private supply, and a batch no longer lasts as long as it used to...

"Bought stuff" 3 days in a row while finishing a mega-translation! That may be a record for me... Brown rice (which my brother-in-law thinks is my way of saying Die!, but he eats it anyway) Miso soup with asparagus and egg Broccoli rabe (nanohana) quickly stirfried Yakitori (chicken skewers): liver, thigh meat, thigh meat and onion, and chicken meatballs. Bought -- which means it came with a really gluey soy/sugar sauce on it. Dessert: ponkan, a kind of citrus. You deserved to have all those oysters yourself, Torakris, after opening them. Don't know that I have ever seen an oyster knife in Japan...

FOOD CULTURE WHEN GROWING UP... Started out with my grandmother's cooking...the cooking of an Edwardian tomboy, spoiled youngest child of a well-to-do family, who married a country farmer with a northern English heritage, and sets up house just before the Depression. So my mother started out following the farmhouse way of eating, with solid breakfasts of porridge, and casseroles or soups for dinner (because she'd grown up eating her main meal in the middle of the day). Special day dishes were all the Edwardian favorites, I now realize! By the time I was a teenager, the '70s had hit, the oats had all been turned into granola, and the casseroles had given way to her interpretation of Indonesian curries (the Australian fascination with Indonesia had seeped through to New Zealand). At boarding school, I ate canned peas and warm cornbeef-gelatin moulds, mashed potato with "bones", watery stewed apple inexplicably colored purple..and copied dozens of recipes from European cookbooks in the school library while digesting those indigestible meals! My mother didn't encourage us to cook as children, beyond telling anybody passing through the kitchen to "toss a cup of flour into that bowl, would you?", without ever mentioning what exactly it was that was being constructed. When she was sick (often), I was expected to know instinctively how to cook dinner, and remember scary hours alone in the dark kitchen, trying to lift heavy saucepans up onto the chest-high stove. However, a decade later, she would have cooking projects lined up for the holidays, and would be waiting enthusiastically for us kids to come home from school and learn to make bread, etc. I mostly learned to cook elsewhere, but in her kitchen I learned that it was normal to cook, and to be interested in doing it well. MEAL TIME IMPORTANT? Definitely! Having to eat before or after the family meal was always good for a lot of sympathy...except for infringements of manners, see below. COOKING IMPORTANT? Yes, very! Grandmother lived nearby, and she and Mum bolstered each other up in their belief that nobody else in the world cooked properly but themselves! They treasured family recipes, but were also very keen to try something new and to swap recipes with friends. ELBOWS ON TABLE? "Any joints on the table shall be carved" was the rule. Bad manners led to the dinner plate being moved to a newspaper on the floor, and an invitation offered to the offender to eat with the dogs. WHO COOKED? Mum. Grandmother also a great deliverer of "a bit extra that I made" of this or that, always in a steel or enamel bowl. I didn't cook at home until I had been away at boarding school and was living with friends while at university. My mother sniffed at my attempts when I was a small child, and it wasn't until she was old and I realized that she often made my recipes when she felt lonely, that I started to realize what cooking meant to her. RESTAURANT MEALS? Surprisingly often, especially as they got older. Eating out was my mother's preferred form of entertainment, and she always had a mental list of places she wanted to try. KIDDY TABLE? Nope. Parents bought a table which had originally belonged to a Fijian aristocrat, built to entertain a tribe at a time. When guests came, 1-3 leaves were added to the table, and kids were expected to behave. The kiddy table didn't arrive until my grandparents moved to a smaller place, and the grandchildren were all nearly teenagers. FIRST WINE? At university, with friends. Too young to go to bars with my friends, because I entered university early, so they took pity on me and we had parties at home instead. Parents very teetotal. When I suggested that we have some wine for the toast at my wedding, my mother burst into tears... PRE-MEAL PRAYER? Always. Gabbling the prayer also frowned on... ROTATING MENU? Nope - definitely "as the spirit moves". But I do remember several dishes that would always turn up on the rare occasions when my father wasn't going to be home for dinner. Most of them pretty sleazy, but very nostalgic now. Ground beef stew with frozen mixed vegetables and dumplings, anyone? DO I MAINTAIN THOSE TRADITIONS IN MY OWN LIFE NOW? I live in a different culture and country, so not directly. We can't eat dinner together, so I'm always concerned that we eat breakfast together. However, food eaten at home is mostly cooked at home, and it's important to me to be able to make all the basics -- though that turns out to be miso and umeboshi, not bottled peaches and homemade bread! If we don't eat my mother's and grandmother's recipes at festivals, I still believe that food is a big part of family traditions and we make the festival foods for Japanese celebrations at home. The kids sometimes hanker after bought birthday cakes, and they are welcome to choose that, but in the end they always choose a home-made one so they can order exactly what they want...and that was one tradition I didn't think we'd follow, since birthdays are not big in Japan! Next??

Not in olive oil?? I had noticed that it ferments a little... I keep some in vinegar, mainly because I like watching the cloves slowly turn blue. It also is VERY useful to have a small jar of garlic cloves in soy sauce, preferably with a little sweet sake (mirin) added. After a good long while, the thinly sliced cloves make a nice addition to the beer snacks, and the soy sauce is a very handy seasoning.

Eat them with stinky cheese? I like them with the date-expired Norwegian Ridder that sometimes goes on special at Daiei. It has an especial funk to it - camembert too mild and creamy (though that's good too), blue cheese too sharp. Note: you can't put apricots and cheese into your mouth indiscrimately. You have to have the cheese on top, apricot on the bottom. This is really important.

Interesting...I'm a 5th-generation New Zealander, but my great-grandmother used salted butter in her shortbread, and I was frequently told that a Scot might use salt without sugar, but never sugar without salt. Great-grandmother's family came from some long-forgotten Scottish island...via Sydney! The matriarchs of my family were supremely confident that unsalted shortbread was inauthentic and deserving of contempt, but I have no idea where they got that confidence from! I know that many people prefer to use unsalted butter for most baking and add just a tiny amount of salt, but I just can't do without that saltiness! For me, chocolate cake just HAS to be made with salted butter! Regards, will be interested to see other responses.

I like the quinoa breading idea too. Keep the ideas rolling please...I cook quinoa as a rice substitute fairly often, as I'm allergic to rice (a small problem in Japan...). I'd enjoy being able to cook it so astonishingly well that the rest of the family would eat quinoa more often, and save me the work of cooking two grains for one meal!