helenjp

You're covering a lot of varied and interesting topics! Who can argue with tastes in food? I have a son who dislikes prawns (usually a big FAVE with Japanese kids). Allergy or not, it was pretty clear that there was a certain taste he strongly disliked (he wasn't that adventurous anyway, but he really had a "No compromise. Ever" attitude about certain fish sausages, scallops, squid...or shiitake mushrooms). He's whittled the list down to prawns now, and never had a problem with other fish, so I have no plans for training sessions in prawn tolerance! As for unadventurous sportsmen...when I worked as an interpreter, I was always interested to see who wanted to eat at the hotel, and who wanted to get as far away from hotel food as possible. A new theory of personality, maybe? Enjoying the blog!

Thanks for the blog -- my classes started back this week, so I've just caught up! Your Japanese feast takes me back...I'm sure my Japan addiction started when I was 5 -- in New Zealand, we start school on our 5th birthdays, and I arrived at school just before they started studying Japan. I came away with the impression that Japanese people lived in paper houses and rebuilt them everytime it rained. A persistent but short-sighted culture, I thought... We had a "Japanese feast too". The teacher cut us all "chopsticks" from bracken stems, and brought a supply of back-up teaspoons to eat our salted boiled long-grain rice with. Our parents were told to make us kimono out of paper. Apparently it was supposed to be newspaper, but my mother was new to it all, and made mine out of fancy colored crepe. She was humiliated. I was delighted! When I was back in New Zealand the past couple of years, I have run a 6 week "Japan club" at the local primary school. Too late, the principal warned me that all the wildest boys whose parents had enrolled them in karate hoping to discipline them had signed up enthusiastically... We had a "feast" to end up too! I had a good number of polynesian kids, so I had plenty of takers for sushi with raw fish as well as a salad-style sushi, and the usual beloved snacks and candies.

3 year mirin...well, well! I heard from old ladies when I first came to Japan that the women of their mothers and grandmothers generations drank mirin in small amounts -- it was for some reason more genteel than drinking sake! And I remember reading a novel by Ariyoshi Sawako about postwar Tokyo, describing the heroine's mother blithely disregarding necessities to secure a good sweet sake or mirin (can't remember which) which she used as a skin lotion!

Japanese sausage is one thing I buy very cautiously. I think the quality has improved in recent years, if you are selective, but it used to be the one thing guaranteed to make me throw up (sorry for the detail). What to do with it (if you actually eat it)...make sausage octopus! This lunchbox favorite involves cutting the bottom end of a sausage into several strips, leaving them attached at the "head" end. When fried or boiled, the "legs" curl up. I quite like the lemon/parsley and shiso flavors, but my sons won't let me put them in the shopping basket because they have nitrates (nitrites?? forgotten the English version!) and insist on the really expensive varieties.

Hmmm...I used to have a cat called Big Boy...so that's where he got to!!

Pink ginger...it seems to turn pink more reliably if the ginger is young (and fresh). Hence young ginger shoots are almost always pale pink when pickled. Red color in vinegar...seems that vinegar usually enhances reds, alkalis produce blues. You can waste some time by putting some finely chopped red cabbage in vinegar...turns red....add soap....turns blue...add more vinegar...turns red again...etc. Scientific explanations?? Well, don't look at me!

Must've been too complicated! I couldn't remember it all the way to the kitchen, so I tossed them in a LOT of turmeric, no flour, some concentrated lemon juice, took brat #2 to a music lesson, and came home and deep fried them. Served with red pepper and lots of salt, more lemon. I loved them -- thanks for that recipe! It piqued my interest because I love fresh turmeric with fish. The Japanese have decided that fresh turmeric is a health food, bless 'em, and so I can now buy it at a little stall by a vege field in front of the station (stubborn owner refuses to sell last plot of land despite surrounding development). Fresh turmeric ought to go well with chicken too, though it would be a bit mild for fried or baked wings. My usual wing thing is a simmered number: Can't just spot the recipe, but basically simmered in plenty of mild vinegar and soy sauce (plus water), with garlic, cinnamon stick(s), dried chilis, and star anise if desired. Add brown sugar if you just can't help yourself.

If your chicken takes a long time to cook or is not as crisp as you want (apart from having crowded too many veg in) is your oven a bit small? A small oven can take a while to get back up to heat when you put something big in, like a chicken. As for quality...brining saves the sadder chickens, but quality does count! There was a reason why people used to buy either a "boiling" or a "roasting" chicken...quite apart from the flabby, flavorless factory chickens that are today's standard issue.

My basic mix is nira (Chinese chives] and ground pork, usually with some cabbage, or sometimes chopped beansprouts instead. Plus dried shiitake. Recently I prefer to add a bit of chopped up beanthread vermicelli instead of cornflour, because it doesn't get so pasty. Seasoning: salt, pepper, sake or vinegar, a little sesame oil, and either soy sauce or miso. A Chinese friend (from Fukien} says a little sugar is essential. Trouble with making your own gyoza is that you get used to "the mixture as before" and shop/restaurant gyoza just don't taste right, even if they are much tastier than ome-made! I make them at least once or twice a month, and it seems to take no time at all to fold up a batch of 60! I know there are crimping gadgets, but I'm sure they would take longer

Oh yes? More new stuff? MOS is where I take my work when procrastination gets really bad at home...they have the best of the cheap coffees around this area, and the tables are pleasantly solid and big enough to spread a few files around.

I don't know about favorite, but shirako (those cod sperm sacs) always brings back memories! The first time I ate this stuff in a nabe, I asked my host what it was. That dear old fellow, a shy and gentlemanly elderly bachelor, blushed scarlet and stuttered like a boy before he could bring himself to tell me! I must admit I'm not all that keen on fish eaten with their trail...especially sanma (saury) without adding the bitterness of the trail to it.

An '80s music fan, hmmm....well you can figure out how much older I am than Kristin when I tell you that my younger son heads off to school many mornings belting out Cat Stevens' "Wild World" as he trudges up the hill! Kristin's photos have added a real glow to her detailed blog...and life in Yokohama looks so exciting compared to Matsudo, even with our great annual Shin-Matsudo Samba Parade! After I posted my photos, I realized my dear elder son had turned the camera to "low resolution" so as to squeeze in LOTS of photos of trains. Our big New Year outing was a ride on a go-nowhere local line that still uses pasteboard tickets and has manned wickets on the platform. I forgot that the cash machines would be shut for THREE DAYS over New Year, so we have been eating frugally -- lots of tofu and Chinese cabbage! We did the trad thing and ate osechi for the first two days, then moved to nabe for dinners, and lunched on left-over nabe reheated with udon noodles or rice or mochi. Lunch is often noodles. We have yakisoba sometimes too, but these days never ramen -- after my husband made ramen at the weekend once too often, and provoked a Ramen Rebellion from our sons, who have refused to eat it for several years now! Our "easy weekend favorites" tend to be okonomiyaki (thick savoury pancake with cabbage and pork, topped with worcestershire sauce, mayonnaise, nori flakes, and shaved bonito) and gyoza (Japanese version of Chinese potstickers -- ours are usually pork and Chinese chives, with cabbage, bamboo shoot, dried shiitake, and beanthread vermicelli). My husband is about to leave for a fortnight in the Netherlands and Germany, and requested a "proper Japanese curry" for dinner tonight -- pork, potato, carrot, and onion, cooked in an incredibly thick curry roux. My family likes it as thick as concrete...yuck...but I've discovered that replacing the roux with peanut meal makes it thick without being so pasty. That was the first time we've cooked white rice this year -- husband is a mochi maniac, and we have them for breakfast, fried in a little butter till crusty, or grilled with cheese on top, or grilled and basted with soy sauce and wrapped in nori, or even with soy sauce and Japanese mustard. The sweet types are not popular in our house, though red bean soup with grilled mochi is. We got out the takoyaki pan again, and made extra-small Dutch poffertjes (yeast-raised dough baked on the stove-top in round molds) for breakfast yesterday. Kristin mentions living on cold coffee...I have to practically hide my coffee-drinking on holidays. Husband drinks coffee at the office, so at home he likes English tea with breakfast, and green tea thereafter. We like a kind of green kukicha (includes stalks) -- it is a little milder and lower in caffeine than straight sencha. Sashimi...I grew up near the sea, so no hesitation in eating fresh fish raw, but I dislike the ready-cut fish steaks sold at the supermarket- it's not as fresh as the fillets or whole fish labelled "suitable for sashimi". On the other hand, I've learned plenty about preparing fish (and vegetables) through Japanese cooking. I don't buy saba (mackerel) for sashimi, although I love vinegared saba sashimi -- it does have more parasites than other fish, and it goes off very quickly -- there's a Japanese saying about "mackerel starts going off before the fish is dead". I have the impression that quite a lot of Americans are not comfortable with eating fish in any form, let alone raw?? Or have I just come across an atypical selection of Americans, maybe? I don't buy beef in Japan (grain-fed beef tastes greasy and bland to me, and I stopped buying it altogether when I first read that Japan was importing animal-based cattle feed from the UK.), so we do eat fish several times a week. The cheapest are always the oily fish -- sardine, saury, mackerel, and small yellowtail -- either fresh or salted. Salt fish are normally grilled and served with something like ponzu (soy/citrus juice/dashi). Die-hard northerners like my husband pour soy sauce over their salted fish. The more seasonal and local fish are often not expensive, but the supermarkets don't stock them because they are not well-known, even to Japanese consumers. One sign of an increasingly mobile population... The Japanese fishing industry, like the rice industry, is heavily protected, making these traditional foods unnecessarily expensive, and ironically encouraging young families to eat more bread, noodles, and red meat! Reply to a much earlier question about illegal immigrants here...plenty of Filipinos and Chinese, both legal and illegal, but illegal labourers (spotted on building sites, in fish markets, packing and transporting goods) are often from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, and a suprising number from North and East Africa. It seems that there is a feeling that Japan, being non-Christian, is more pro-Muslim than other developed countries. Japan hardly ever issues working visas for blue-collar jobs, so by definition unskilled workers tend to be illegal - makes it so much easier to boot them out whenever the unemployment figures start to go up... Other Asians tend to be "legal" -- I think they either come from wealthier countries, have university degrees, and are here for specialist jobs like computing, or they come from countries like Myanmar where only a tiny fraction of the population gets abroad, and those that do tend to be the elite. The university where I teach has more Chinese students than any other public university in Japan, and there are always a few in my classes. And even in run-down Matsudo, there are always 2-3 kids with 1 or more foreign parent among my kids' classmates -- not that the schools acknowledge them, the textbooks paint an unchanged society of "Taros" and "Hanakos" learning about their traditional festivals from their grannies and grandpas -- when in fact, Mom might be Chinese, and granny and grandpa are probably more into pachinko and classic motorbikes than the traditional handicrafts and string games the schools are always fruitlessly urging grandparents to come and demonstrate in class!!

Forgot to say...if Kristin does all her serving on her chopping board, mine is all done on the open door of the microwave! As for otoshidama...we hand out pocket money to our kids and Keiji's nephew, and also to his father and wife. There are plenty of "six-pocket kids" around here -- single offspring of only-child parents, meaning that one child has access to the purses of two parents and 4 grandparents with no other kids to spend their money on! Our kids get a much smaller haul, and complain that Dad is pretty stingy -- but they have Christmas as well!

Wow Kristin, that was quite a spread, and great photos! Your ozouni is the way we normally make it, but this time I used fewer ingredients (the better to fit it in the bowls!) -- just chicken, komatsu-na greens, trefoil, and...shimeji, because I absent-mindedly used up all the shiitake in the teppanyaki the other day. The boys sat in the comfort of the kotatsu (low table with a heating unit under it and a quilt or blanket to spread over your legs) and prepared all the veges for the nishime simmered veges. One is holding a burdock root, and the other a large type of taro --yatsugashira -- seen only at New Year. Our finished osechi...bowl of red rice (should be a small plate, but husband complains that's not enough...) side dishes of tazukuri (tiny dried fish candied in sweet sake and soy sauce with almonds and sesame seeds) and namasu (shredded daikon and carrot salad, topped with ikura)...and served with a glass of sparkling apple juice, a treat for the boys. We don't serve the traditional spiced sake. In the photo, the nishime is on the left (simmered root veges), then kinton (sweet potato puree with lightly toasted chestnuts). The middle box had buri pickled in sweetened miso then grilled, raw salmon pickled in salt and honey, broccoli in a ginger/onion/soy/vinegar dressing, chicken meatballs in ginger glaze. The top box, which is supposed to contain the "lucky" or really traditional New Year foods, had much the same as Kristin's photos show, plus some kohada fish pickled in vinegar and millet. Other items - black beans, egg and fish puree roll, kelp rolls...and 5 prawns PLUS ONE SAUSAGE, for the son who hates prawns!!! Happy New Year to you all! And Kristin, congratulations on the wonderful food, wonderful photos, and wonderful family -- you and your kids look like a walking motto "You Are What You Eat"!

We tried that, but our cable connection is so bad it's like watching the fight in triplicate! We've gone back to the battle of the singers, and our younger son is at this very moment (11:36pm) yelling at the singers for missing notes in one of his favorite songs. We had our toshikoshi soba too...we passed on the tempura at the supermarket, and made an "oyako tsukimi" soba -- chicken and a poached egg, with nori and chopped green onion. I still haven't finished the New Year simmered vegetables, owing to a last minute trip to the bookshop with husband, who felt he didn't have enough books to last an entire day, and also somewhat under the influence of a NZ Cloudy Bay Riesling my husband bought me for Christmas, not to mention an hour or two lolling in the kotatsu reading Martin Cruz Smith's "Tokyo Station", just too depressing, but don't forget to read it all the same!

"Pacific oyster from New Zealand"???? Kris, you've been had! Those darn things are invaders off boats from Japan -- big, flabby, and tasteless. The NZ oyster to go for is the smaller, darker Bluff oyster...not now in season, because it's summer there.

Well, that may be a better option than "Dessert", which I thought for a moment referred to the picture of you, and not the picture below! You look like you are surviving the partying veeery well! We had that buri-daikon (shhhh!) for breakfast along with a congee. Same again for lunch...in the afternoon the boys are going to help me make the namasu salad and the simmered vegetables for the New Year box.

It's really Kris' blog, I'm just the hijacker...providing a little contrast. My bilingual boys are finally in bed after a loooong teppanyaki dinner. I cut the ingredients and wrapped thin slices of pork around veges, while my husband made two dipping sauces -- one miso, and one with onion and ginger, spiced up with Chinese chili paste. We tossed some Chinese egg noodles on the hot plate at the end for the really indefatigable appetites. There were 7 for dinner, including son's friend and his father. My boys have spoken both languages from birth, and they read English well, but it's been hard work for all concerned! Cookbooks are a great way to encourage them, but kids' cookbooks were a waste of time -- the dishes were unfamiliar and relied so heavily on packaged products that a normal "from scratch" cookbook was easier for them to follow. But then they discovered that unlike cooking, a book on something like Java Script programming is accessible to anybody who can read English. I liked Kris' survey of what her kids thought was Japanese or western food...must try it with my kids! My husband lived overseas for too long to be a Japanese food purist, but now that he's over 50, he certainly prefers basically Japanese food. Of our younger friends, those who grew up in Tokyo and surrounding areas (even rural regions) are much more international than those who grew up in more distant provinces. Even some good cooks from the provinces dislike flowery Indian spices or intense mediterranean herbs. The most popular "foreign" tastes for home cooking seem to be a kind of 80s ethnic all-purpose East Asian flavor, hot and spicy, with clean flavors like coriander leaf or lemon. I live in an area where there is still a sprinkling of light industry. There are hardly any Europeans, except for a few language school teachers on one-year contracts, but there are plenty of Chinese and Filipinos, and illegal workers from across Asia, especially from Muslim countries. There are good, cheap Chinese, Korean, and Indian restaurants serving the owner's regional food, and generally boring and expensive Italianate restaurants run by Japanese owners -- the trendy stuff just doesn't seem to survive the trip east over the Edo River! We go for the cheap and cheerful regional Japanese restaurants such as our local Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki shop. Even more often, we eat at home, because one husband, one live-in brother-in-law, and two big sons eat a LOT!

oops, the takoyaki images... http://images.egullet.com/u7941/i1820.jpg http://images.egullet.com/u7941/i1821.jpg http://images.egullet.com/u7941/i1822.jpg

Now that it's lunchtime, we have finished breakfast! Son's friend stayed over, so we made takoyaki for breakfast...except that the takoyaki had hung around the fridge too long, so we had to replace it with bacon. I used a commercial takoyaki flour mix (flavorings and baking powder added), made up to a thin batter with beaten eggs and dashi. The "solids" were red salty pickled ginger, chopped long white onion, chopped cabbage, and fried bacon slivers. Here's three photos: ingredients, boys turning half-cooked octopus balls, and sorry about the pitiful blobs in the third one, not a great image -- it's actually two octopus balls with mayonnaise, thickened worcestershire sauce (tonkatsu sauce) and green nori and katsuo flakes on it. Went to the rice shop yesterday to pick up our mochi (photos later) -- two big sheets of mochi for grilled mochi, soup etc, and a small decorative New Year's one. Nearby, the vege shop had all kinds of exotic veg only seen at New Year, so we stocked up, and moved on to the fish shop. We bought dried salmon strips for husband to snack on with his beer, if he can fight the boys off successfully. We bought fresh salmon to pickle in salt and honey for our New Year's box, some little fish pickled in millet, and (just shut your eyes, Kristin!) some buri to make buri-daikon with! Last night for dinner we had nabe, with a pack of frozen crab claws sent by sister-in-law from Hokkaido. We had the daikon (precooked) and the Chinese cabbage simmering in dashi in the pot, waiting for the delivery man to bring the crab! I'm sorry, everybody hoed in, dipping their crab in lemon and soy sauce, before I could take a photo. Later, son's friend's father dropped by. As he has gout, we made him an ozoni soup (dashi flavored with soy sauce and mirin, chicken, greens, and grilled mochi, and citron peel) instead of the crab, and everybody else also had grilled mochi in the soup from the crab nabe.

I'll try to be a bit more discreet in my posting...hope you had a great time last night Kristin! Now off to that other great institution...cram school...would you believe it's more fun than regular school?!

Takoyaki translates as "octopus grill"...what they ARE are little balls of very sloppy batter, flavored with savory stuff like powdered katsuobushi (the dried tuna shavings used for soup and garnishes), and with curmudgeonly amounts of chopped boiled octopus in them. They are cooked in a heavy iron pan with small round depressions in them. Once the batter starts to set around the edge, you flip them over with a bamboo skewer, until you have a soft round ball - the batter should have lost the raw floury taste, but still be liquid in the centre. These are brushed with a sweet shoyu tonkatsu sauce, sprinkled with green onion, katsuobushi, and sometimes a squirt of Kewpie mayonnaise, and eaten as a snack. An Osaka tradition, sold from carts outside stations on cold winter nights, but popular all over Japan. Sons have a friend coming over later in the day, they'll probably make some then so I'll post photos later.

While Kris is dancing... Here's a photo of the snacks my husband likes to eat -- three types of squid snacks (soft dried, medium hard, batter-fried), a cod-flavored string cheese, two types of peanuts -- spicy in thin batter, and a sweeter one in a thicker batter, and a mixed snack of tiny deep-fried fish, almond slivers, and deep-fried black soybeans. The beers are Sapporo's Black Ebisu, and their Happoshu "Nama-shibori", known in our home as "Tama-shibori" for its diuretic effect... http://images.egullet.com/u7941/i1792.jpg And here's some lightly grilled dried squid...nice and chewy, for the boys to eat -- too tough for their Dad, but at least it slows the boys down long enough to let him get a mouthful or two of HIS snacks before they descend on those too! http://images.egullet.com/u7941/i1794.jpg I did take a photo of the chazuke (basically green tea poured over rice), but something happened to it... as a nod to the new year, we added yuzu (citron) peel and black sesame seeds to the grilled salt salmon and spinach with our rice. A good quick meal! Boys are talking of takoyaki for breakfast...over my dead body, I would like to say, but as I haven't baked any bread today, they may win out yet...

We had bread for breakfast too...a tough loaf that was the first to come out of our ultra-cheap $50.00 replacement bread machine. Over half of Japanese families have bread for breakfast, according to a survey run in the NHK cooking magazine. The survey was made by some kind of "Breakfast Promotion Group", part of an agricultural co-op from a rice-producing area of Japan...naturally, they want to see more rice eaten at breakfast and lunch. Apart from Kristin's enthusiasm for and knowledge of Japanese food, she must be in one of the best places in Japan for great eating. Close enough to Tokyo to try the newest trends, an international population with plenty of access to Chinese and Western restaurants and foodstuffs....if I read much more of this blog, our family will be making one of our rare trips to Yokohama! We live in an ex-industrial area northeast of the Edo river...some outlying areas have developed minor trendy zones, but around here, there's an underlying belt of farmers who were given previously useless land under Macarthur's redistribution of land scheme. These people never made much money out of farming, because the land is either swamp or clay hills, but they have done veeery well out of the postwar housing boom! The fields of negi (onions a bit like leeks) and the nashi orchards are now rare. The poor-quality rice fields have gone, and the characters for the place names have been changed from "Wasteland" to "Luckyland"!! Apart from sweets made to resemble the old ferry punts across the river, our only local specialties are soy sauce and mirin, not to mention the Nikka whiskey plant which somehow, in this river flood plain, is able to boast of using "pure mountain water"!! Further up the coast from us, Hitachi's home town has a sweet shaped like a combustion engine, called "Motor Monaka" -- a crisp rice-flour wafer shell filled with bean jam! We are about to make that well-known Japanese speciality, spaghetti with tomato sauce, for lunch. Our kids are a bit older than Torakris', so our holiday menus feature things that the boys can join in cooking. Older son got a much coveted takoyaki (octopus dumpling) grill for Christmas, so that is getting heavy use recently too. It makes great Dutch poffertjes too! For dinner we will be having sake chazuke -- rice topped with grilled salt salmon and some spinach, with hot green tea poured over.