helenjp

I think you may be better off buying non-Japanese brands if your main aim is to make jelly. Red Man is not a Japanese brand. I use a product by Kanten-papa called "Ina-aga A", but that produces a gelatin-like texture that sets at room temperature, not a chewy kanten jelly texture. Plain konnyaku starch is not that easy to buy even in Japan, and rather expensive because it's a popular diet aid. I don't know about other areas of Japan, but I don't think I could get it in just any supermarket where I live. People buy it from sites like konnyaku-mura (e.g. you can buy 10-count boxes of 50 gram sachets, totalling about 1 lb of konnyaku powder for about $US25), but they don't have an English website, and I don't know how widely they distribute their products elsewhere. People don't usually make dessert konnyaku jellies at home, they use the powder as a low-calorie bulking agent, or they make the ultra-chewy kneaded-style gel that is used for noodles or the grayish slabs of konnyaku.

I normally keep it inside while I fill the container, then outside (preferably out of the sun) while it matures. The spigot closes nice and tightly -- even if you tip the container, it won't leak unless it's open.

Got this out of a recent issue of Eiyou to Ryouri (Nutrition and Cooking) magazine. ABURAGE and GREEN PEAS MAZE-GOHAN Cook rice as usual. Per half-cup of raw rice (one modest adult serving) allow 1/2 slice of aburage (thin-sliced deepfried tofu) 1-2 tablespoons of fresh or frozen green peas. In a dry frying pan on low-med heat or in an oven-toaster, dry-fry or toast the aburage until crispy but not necessarily browned. Sprinkle over about 1/2 tsp soy sauce per slice of aburage and allow to soak in briefly. Cut into small squares. Boil peas very briefly until cooked, drain, shock in cold water if necessary. Mix the aburage and peas into the cooked rice lightly. The soy sauce adds a salty tang that goes surprisingly well with the mildly sweet green peas.

It doesn't seem to attract what my sons call the "6-wheeled carriages", but I suspect it may attract vinegar flies in summer, and I do recall having trouble with maggots (that can't survive in the compost, but are still no fun to see) once or twice while the compost was "maturing" outside (it collects in the container mixed with the EM powder, then you are supposed to let it sit in the container, fermenting and shedding moisture, for a few weeks while you start filling your alternate container, and then finally you are supposed to mix it with soil, at which point it rots down very quickly). The container does shut firmly at the top, and it has quite a fine drainage plate at the bottom, and a little spigot to drain off the liquid...so how flies got to it, I could never figure out. The smell is not a big problem (less so, I think, than the smell of bagged up kitchen waste awaiting collection day in summer) if you are sufficiently generous with the EM bokashi. At the fermenting stage, I hear that aerating your compost with a layer of torn up cardboard here and there in the container makes a big difference to bugs and smells, so I plan to try that too. I wondered about mixing the collected waste and EM mix straight with soil, and found a magazine reference to a woman doing just that in small bags on her balcony - turns out she using something called the "Kadota method". This involves making a batch of soil, rice bran, and in winter a starter such as the EM powder, and either mixing that with the compost. The soil/compost mix is either buried under more soil in a planter or in the ground, or left in in a woven polyethylene sack on a couple of bricks for aeration. Since this skips the problematic step of maturing the waste/bokashi mix before layering with soil, I'm hoping this might be the ultimate solution! It's also done in smaller batches - much easier. So far I've buried one 20 liter batch in a 40 liter container layered with plenty of soil and EM bokashi, and topped off with plenty of soil, so far so good, but I'll report in another couple of weeks. This will probably house my goya plants this year (last year it was an excellent home for a deep-planted tomato.) Living in an apartment or small house, I don't think there's any point telling yourself that you will compost ALL waste - it just may not be practical. Any reduction in waste is a good thing, especially if it helps produce food and reduces smells.

Looks like a lot got done! I approve of the shiso rice for summer. Just as well I didn't get to post my suggestion for a quick pickle, as it would have doubled up - rubbing yukari (rubbed dried red perilla and salt) into something like turnip or daikon slices, squeezing, and maybe dressing with a very little vinegar. What type of shiso did you use for your rice? And how did you prepare it? Will be looking forward to your reply, but it may take me a while to solve router problems and get back to reading this topic!

No, I agree with you, and was in fact returning to this topic for that same reason, when I spotted your post. It is one reason why it's such good practice to include vegetable trimmings in rice, though post-war Japanese such as my husband really prefer white rice. I did want to revise starch prices, because trends such as rising wheat prices worldwide and the fading boom for sweet-potato spirits in Japan have changed the old ideas about "cheap" vs. "expensive" starches. The wartime starch-stretchers are healthy, but non-rice grains have become exorbitant luxuries. Taro (sato-imo and relatives) is no cheaper than sweet potato, and supermarkets seem to devote less space to them each year. It's a pity, and a loss to Japan's cooking. I'll add a recipe or two to the rice topic, anyway. As you say, you have to change your thinking to avoid sticker shock - we think that 400 yen for a cabbage is ridiculously expensive, yet that would last most families for 3-4 meals, while the same amount of money spent on meat or fish may or may not be enough for one family meal. One of my favorite strategies for healthy but economical eating is the "ichijuu issai" approach - instead of the typical array of side-dishes, one hearty soup and one bulky side-dish (plus pickles OF COURSE!) are served. This approach inevitably uses more vegetables, and is the original everyday temple fare. Another strategy for saving on vegetables is not to use an entire packet for anything, but to save a little to add variety to another dish...e.g. the little bit of carrot that didn't go in the chikuzen-ni (simmered winter vegetable mix) is shredded and boiled with the chrysanthemum greens, making a change from my usual way of serving them.

Well...I like to make the chicken sofrito out of Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern Cooking book (not at all like an Italian Sofrito - this is lemony yellow chicken simmered gently under a fine coating of oil). When I've done that, I pull out the chicken and use the broth to cook yellow hardboiled eggs and naga-negi (for bento). And finally, I simmer those white beans in it, and either freeze them until my family have forgotten about yellow food for a while, or serve them with lemon juice and olive oil (whatever else takes your fancy). They also make excellent white bean an - even easier to make than the regular sort, because there is more bean than skin. Mame-gohan is good with all kinds of dried beans too, and pale beans like shirobana or tenaki etc. mean that you can use the liquor to cook the rice in. Ditto for miso soup and using the bean liquor instead of dashi. I like juicy greens like komatsuna stalks or rapolini with beans in miso soup.

Son1 asked for "fish and chips" for his birthday dinner. I decided not to make another disappointing attempt to chip Japanese potatoes, as there were only danshaku on sale anyway, so I sliced them very thin with a mandoline, soaked them until they were crisp and wavy, dried them, and fried them crisp. This takes a surprisingly long time, but they came out very well and didn't go limp. It's a labor of love, though, if you want to make as many of these as a teen boy or so will eat. Satsuma-imo sweet potato fries: They will go hard if given the slightest encouragement. They need to be fried till they start to puff just slightly, and have a spot or two of brown on them. Some Japanese sites recommend freezing the raw, sliced potato and then frying them while still frozen, draining, and re-frying. A more extreme version of the low/high temperature double fry method. I have yet to try this... Coating potatoes - I wondered the same thing...wasn't impressed with the results! I think the way to do it would be to parboil very thick chips or chunks and maybe shake them gently to rough up the surface before frying???

Sounds good! You could use your sake cups to serve small portions, if you are not planning on serving cold sake. Cut glass is fine - even quite ornate types...look up edo kiriko. Low stemmed "trifle" dishes would work too, and the kind of big glass plates people serve pavlova on look good with summer Japanese menus too. Summer serving ideas Sunomono in wooden bowl - my only doubt is whether the vinegar would help dissolve off-flavors out of the wood! You could line the bowl with a (non-toxic) leaf to provide a layer between the food and the wood, or do a trial run first. When I lived outside Japan, I also often found that I didn't have enough "authentic" dishes for larger groups. The tray idea is a good solution, and in summer, Japanese or other Asian baskets (with a dish, leaves, or asymmetrically folded paper in them) are airy and attractive too. If little mounds of things on a tray looks too same-y, try putting some of the things in symmetrical stacks or rows, or on a leaf or piece of paper on the tray. Paper is your friend, and you should be able to buy cheap bundles of practice paper for calligraphy, which you can simply fold in half asymmetrically (so that you can see all the corners). Origami-style containers are good too for drier things. Oddly enough, autumn menus often have a "dustpan" shaped container for tempura, meant to evoke a collection of leaves raked together by a gardener tidying up a garden! Greenery for summer tables: bamboo leaves, green Japanese maple leaves, green shiso leaves. If fried oysters are too rich, you could try grilling them on the half-shell, and serving them with soy sauce/citrus juice (one of the native Australian limes?) and crumbled nori. (Nori goes very well with oysters). Abalone is more of a summer dish than oysters, but if you are not sure about the texture, what about a trial run? One importer recommends thawing them under running water, but that seems like a waste of flavor! Otherwise, you could try sprinkling them with sake and thawing them slowly in the fridge. If you want to cook them in sake and soy sauce, you can do most of the cooking on stored heat - the minute the flesh starts to contract, turn off the heat and leave the covered pan for a while. If you think it's going to overcook, you could take out the abalone, then return it when the broth is closer to lukewarm, allowing it to cool in the broth in the fridge, absorbing flavor and moisture. Hope you have a memorable meal!

Pancakes - yes, and okonomiyaki is not only cheap in itself, it's open to all kinds of variations which take it down to a quick snack or up to a balanced meal, such a hotcake-size okonomiyaki with a sprinkling of green onion instead of pork; or a hearty but economical version with pureed tofu substituted for part of the mixing liquid. Muffins and quick breads...I must admit, I think twice about turning on the oven, because of Japan's high electricity costs (that's just one example), which have stepped rates that increase substantially if you go over certain levels, or if you have a high-ampere breaker. It's one reason why I use my breadmaker rather than baking bread in the oven.

Staple starch survey...this reflects prices and availability in urban areas, where (according to my figures) cheap spaghetti, very cheap bread, and cheap dried udon are cheaper than rice. However, that is less likely to be true in provincial areas where rice is cheap (and bought in bulk) and discount retailers rare, or for urban families who have rice sent free or cheaply from rural relatives. Average rice price: 100g = around 35 yen (100g is just a little over 1/2 a Japanese measuring cup, and in my family, that's the average serving). Cheapest way for urban dwellers to buy rice: 20 or 30 kg lots (in 10 kg bags) over the internet : 100g = 28-31 yen. That's the equivalent of 1350 yen for a 5 kg bag, but I haven't seen that price available retail myself. (Conversely super high grades 100 g = 100 yen). It's immediately obvious that padding rice out with vegetable trimmings etc. can bring the per-serving cost down by 20 or 30%. Bread, assuming 2 slices of 8-cut bread: 30 yen per serving @ 120 yen per bag; 45 yen per serving @180 yen per bag Bread in a bread machine - for a loaf the equivalent of a bag from the supermarket, using 300g flour, the cost of flour would be 75-120 yen, plus 17 yen (cost of 1 egg or 100 ml milk), plus unspecified costs - yeast, sugar, salt, oil, energy costs. I therefore assume that it is cheaper for me to bake good bread unless I buy bread at less than 150 yen per bag (and cheap bread usually includes whey but no whole milk or egg). Spaghetti: 100g dried = 25-50 yen (super-low discounter vs supermarket price) Udon: 100 g dried = 20-50 yen ( as above, discounter vs supermarket). Supermarket frozen udon 1 serving = 60 yen. Bifun - 100 g = 25 yen, discounter At discount levels, soba is priced the same as udon, which must raise some questions. Sorry, forgot to price potatoes and sweet potatoes.

Pot. A knife is something I am holding in my hand and adjusting every second that I use it. Annoying as it is, I can use a mediocre knife, and at the very least, I can sharpen it. A bad pot, on the other hand...nothing you can do about a pot or pan with a thin and dented bottom, a shaky handle, a badly- fitting lid, an unelpful size or shape. Sure, with experience you can guess what's happening inside that monster as your food cooks, but other than a flame-tamer and a bit of string for the handle, there's little you can do about it! For example, I was given my pots when I turned 18, and bought most of my knives when I was 20. After a quarter century of wear and tear, I replaced a couple of knives with average quality mass-produced Japanese knives...and a couple of pots with the very best I could afford. What makes you think that? My 18th birthday pots and pans were Scandina brand, and apart from composite handles that loosened sometime in their 3rd decade, they are as good as they ever were. But Scandina disappeared long ago.

Hey, looks good. I find that the soy sauce/mirin marinade tends to catch easily and darken if I cook it a little too long or at high heat...but it tastes so much better that way than insipid or underdone! That really looks very tasty.

If I were to try and make up for lost income solely via food savings, our food budget would be halved. Grow-your-own - I've bought a new bucket for EM bokashi and the starter culture, and am pleased to see that the bucket is much easier to use than the old style was. Unless you want to spend a lot of money on electric kitchen composters, I think this is the most realistic way to compost in Japan's crowded housing situation. Energy seems expensive here, and I find my bills go down noticeably if I'm careful to add another item to the pot for later use; use my pressure cooker or thermal cooker to save on gas, or my breadmaker to save on oven use. As people have said, half the battle is to not waste what you've paid for! Let's revive that "three ways" topic - that approach is a real favorite for me (and more fun to cook), especially as freezer space here doesn't encourage the "big batch/freeze half" approach. Quick-pickling stretches the life of vegetables, and also means one less cooked dish to make! If you want to go a bit further, buy one of those ready-matured nuka-zuke bran pickle beds that will come on sale in a month or two, or mix up a bag of sagohachi rice koji pickling mix (the mixes are less salty than they used to be). Vegetable scraps - scrubbing well and peeling thickly provides enough about twice a week to pad out gyoza fillings, dry curries, or mabo-dofu, or make a fried rice or maze-gohan. As well as kinpira, you can make an excellent "daigaku-imo" from thickly cut strips of sweet potato peel. Everything starts to taste the same if you put all the scraps in together, so I often keep root veg scraps separate from green veg stems or fungi stems/trimmings. Padding out: tofu is really a workhorse. It even makes good okonomiyaki! Beans, on the other hand, tend to be expensive, though still better value per cup of cooked volume than meat. Substitutes: lard is cheaper than butter (which has not come back down to pre-butter-scare prices). In baking western goods, sesame seeds are a cheap substitute for nuts, ama-natto or even green peas or fresh ginger substitute for dried fruit, and tea and local herbs and fruits substitute for vanilla, brandy etc. End of season - mochi are currently half the price they were earlier in the winter, and so we are having ozoni for breakfast/lunch, with plenty of hakusai. With higher wheat prices affecting noodles and pasta as well as breads, bargain bin mochi look like a good buy to me. Where to shop - keep a "low-price" notebook. You'll find that certain shops consistently offer the lowest price on certain types of goods, and sometimes you can spot cycles in discounts for certain items. You can buy bulk non-food items such as dish detergent in many places, from office supply shops to discount liquor shops, but bulk items are surprisingly NOT always cheaper than those tiny refill packs. 100 yen shops - excellent for singles and couples, not always the best price per volume unit for families. My brother in law finds the 100 yen single-serving vegetable packs very useful, but for us, it is cheaper to buy bigger packs at the green-grocery or supermarket. Gyoumu-super - Good places to find large cans of oil or soy sauce etc, and generally good for traditional dry goods such seaweed mixes or sesame seeds. Big bags of cubed dried tofu are good buys too. 800g packs of grated cheese are much cheaper than at the supermarket. For meats, I think the quality is sometimes so awful that it's a waste of money, and the pre-prepared items such as pre-breaded pork skewers are cheap enough, but still more expensive and poorer quality than home-made. However, items such as frozen grilled salt salmon or free-flow packs of pork scraps are handy for bento if your family have outgrown the expensive supermarket versions with their tiny servings. For bulk raw meats other than chicken, you might do better at places such as Hanamasa. Gyoumu super offer huge packs of harusame (beanthread noodles). I use these to make something I learned as "Samoan chop suey" - originally chunks of pork fried with lots of garlic and onion, with soaked harusame added and seasoned GENEROUSLY with soy sauce. These days I make it with slices of age-dofu (thick fried tofu) and vegetables with some oomph, like daikon greens or rapolini (the kind of "grown up" na-no-hana that's sold the past few years). ...and finally, carrying bottles of home-made mugi-cha with you definitely saves money, if you can find a place to drink it!

Come to think of it, considering that most convenience store bento are eaten chilled, it's surprising how little affect that seems to have on the choice of side-dishes. Maybe there are more soft and creamy dishes like Japanese-style potato salad, or mayonnaise-dressed burdock root etc., but rock-hard deep fries are common! Hiroyuki, do you think your children find onigiri faster to eat than plain rice? I pack plain rice for my family, because my pickle-loving husband has been warned to reduce his salt intake, and I'm afraid to use really salty (and tasty!) fillings for onigiri, or too much furikake (salty sprinkles). As for the hassle...about twice a year, I calculate how many years of bento-making lie ahead, to the month!

When the temperature gets close to 40, I start using "enclosed" cookers such as my bread machine or pressure cooker - they heat the kitchen up much less than longer cooking over a gas flame or in an oven. Pressure cooking also means that food is cooked at high heat, so I have fewer hygiene worries, and I find that pressure cooked meat absorbs flavorings very well and is extra tasty cold in sandwiches, salads etc.

Refrigerated bento ! No, because it's supposed to be freshly made...if you use leftovers, they are supposed to be re-seasoned and re-cooked. This is mostly a nod to the climate, and partly another chance for one-upmanship. E.g. getting up at 4 am to make Sports Day bento is more worthy than getting up at 5 am. It's interesting - the idea of chilling food is quite new, even from the point of view of hygiene - some schools now get kids to put their bento bags out in the corridor, which is a little cooler than a sunny classroom, yet there were bento WARMERS in many kindergartens. Thermos lunchboxes are almost never used to keep things cool in summer, only for winter use. Much of East Asia regards chilled food as reprehensible anyway, don't you think? Also, the use of agar jellies and rarity of milk desserts such as custards means that refrigeration is less of an issue. I don't usually send fruit other than grapes or tangerines to school, but cut fruit soaked briefly in salted cold water before packing is quite common. The little subcontainers are very handy to set an agar jelly in (I like a product called Ina-aga A, which contains agar plus konnyaku mannan, but I bet that vegetarian jelly mixes from India and elsewhere would be similar, and would also set without refrigeration). If you include squares of agar gel with fruit salads, or strips of soaked agar (thread type) or harusame (cellophane noodles) in vegetable dishes, the extra moisture creates a cooling effect when eaten.

Yes, agar will over time release the water it is holding "enmeshed" in its structure. Depends on the holding temperature, but I expect you will see noticeable weeping after 3 days. ...byproduct of chats with my late first husband, who was a biophysicist!

Nakji, I really like the idea of adding a sour note to soboro! Meat stirfried with finely pickles (takuan, takana-zuke) is quick and good, but I hadn't thought of taking that approach to soboro. Thanks! Peter, happy bento-ing! I figure one reason why Japanese bento have become popular even though there are many "cooked packed lunch" traditions in the world is the use of shallow containers, dividers etc. that make food easy to eat and add visual variety, and the generally un-sloppy nature of bento food. Without the theater-going "maku-no-uchi" bento culture of giving lunchboxes a sense of fun and occasion (and also making them weapons of social one-upmanship!) maybe the modern everyday bento would never have become so eclectic. But the groundwork is all there...the extremely uniform nature of kindergartens, schools, and workplaces belying the intense competition underneath...how could a good Japanese wife and mother NOT use the lunchbox to either demonstrate what "regular guys" her husband and kids are, or conversely to cut them out from the herd! It makes me laugh when I see the uniformity of the choices in my sons' different bento-environments - at one school, the lunchboxes are all the latest...at another school, bringing anything but a flat aluminum box is bragging...

Sausage-making sounds fun! One thing I've finally figured out is that I don't need to give people a mountain of stuff! Two muffins, a small bunch of fresh herbs, just enough fresh-picked snow peas to liven something up...and what the Japanese refer to as "cutting a bit off the hem", or re-gifting a little bit of things you receive. One nice thing about pot-lucks and baking bees, canning bees etc. is the way it puts you in touch with people who live nearby...dining out seems to be more for friends you already know well.

Hiroyuki's Recipe 2 is the same approach that is used for yakitori tare...it makes a noticeable difference for yakitori, so if you have the ingredients, I imagine it's worth doing the extra work for eel too.

Saladfingers, if you are not a good cook now, with your approach, nothing on earth is going to stop you being one very soon. Home cooking is a real passion with me - it's a totally different scene from restaurant cooking. I totally agree with Pierogi. And as maggiethecat says too, learning to cook from the book is just the start...learning to keep on cooking when you have no time, you're feeling sick (or your "clients" are busy, grumpy, or sick!), you've got no money, you haven't shopped recently...putting together something that looks good and tastes good for family from 8 months to 80 years, under any circumstances - now THAT's the exciting part of home cooking. As for the memory thing, when I was expecting my first child, I decided to calculate and memorize proportions to save myself time while my children were small. It was incredibly freeing! I can't think of anything that is more likely to generate innovation in your cooking. Second up, I made a habit of thinking about what various ingredients were really doing in each dish. I know it's obvious, but when I started thinking about texture as well as flavor, I found my innovations were more successful.

I've been thinking about this a lot. Saving on food-costs is one thing...what I really don't want to lose is the pleasures associated with food! Most of us at eGullet cook well enough to make our food dollar do what we want. How can we create, share, and give the pleasures of plenty without having to use a paid venue? How can we make or enjoy gifts of food or meals without feeling a sense of privation when avoiding expensively rare or exotic things? Turning down a dinner invitation means losing touch with friends, cutting down my "neighborhood dinner run" budget means losing a connection with my neighborhood...and more, even when I'm able to afford more than basic foods, my reactions are on a primitive level that is out of synch with the real level of distress. But heck, I'm of a generation that has lurched from economic crisis to economic crisis, and THIS time round, I am NOT going to part with my zest for life or the part that food plays in my life. One thing I can do is to hire community facilities VERY cheaply for cookfests with friends and neighbors. Gosh, if I hurry, we can all get together and make miso, and if we all do it together, none of us will have to cope with the usual costs associated with making big batches of food!

Definitely not anticipatory savings here, either...the paycuts have begun, some clients have gone bankrupt or posted big deficits, the major home maintenance and repair jobs roll around again, retirement and the specter of forced early retirement loom, relatives need a helping hand, and the kids get closer and closer to university age (we have two teen boys who eat plenty at home and also take a packed lunch daily)... We never did eat out much or buy many ready-to-eat luxuries, but the following items have also gone to never-never land: Cups of coffee bought while waiting for kids in various locations. Kids have always taken a bottle of home-made tea with them to school and elsewhere, now so do I. Coffee for home use - I'm the main coffee drinker, and I can get through a lot working from home. I've gone back to keeping whole beans in the freezer for occasional indulgence, and drinking more fresh or dried home-grown herb teas. Sage is my favorite these days, and dried red shiso is good too! In Japan, a slice of raw ginger helps a lackluster pot of black tea along too. In Japan, olive oil of any kind, cheese, nuts, butter etc. are exotic delicacies. I've gone back to standard oils heated and infused with herbs and spices, grated cheese is eked out with natto and/or mayonnaise on toast, or replaced by home-made yogurt cheese. World cheese prices have dropped, but retail prices have not come down in Japan for any dairy products. Nuts are mostly replaced by peanuts or sesame seeds, and butter is replaced by oil or lard. Re-calculated starch-food prices - used to be that wheat-based products were often cheaper than a rice-based meal in Japan, but not any more. Potatoes are sometimes a better buy than either. Snacks. Snacks have always been a controlled substance in my home, no grazing goes on. Snacks now are more likely to be sandwiches, rice-balls, fruit, or home-made cereals, rather than purpose-bought snack foods. Conversely, there are some areas where I'm spending more. I decided to take that snack dollar and buy bulk tangerines more often than we used to, because it's clear that we catch fewer colds when we eat them daily.

This website quotes a Korean source as saying that the plant was introduced to Korea in 1990, cultivated first on Cheju Island, and later elsewhere in Korea. However, citrus interbreed with immodest ease, and hybrids are incredibly complicated - I once dreamed that I got hold of a HUGE chart with photographs showing the heritage of all fruiting citrus on earth....I was so disappointed when I realized I had only been dreaming!