helenjp

It looks as the line is a ring around the potato...if it's brown, it might be disease, but if it's black (and the potato was a bit softish outside), it's more likely cold damage, either in the field or in storage.

Scubadoo97's experience is about the same as mine - nice, clear stock. As some people commented upthread, the proportion of fat may be what makes the biggest difference, but I usually include only green onion tops, not round onions (too sweet). No problem with deposits on the bottom, but my current PC (Fissler) has a heavy bottom. As for temperature, "let 'er rip" is my philosophy! 30-45 minutes at full pressure for a 4.5 liter PC, natural release.

Removing dubious parts of whelk, refers to Japanese "tsubugai", but basically the same procedure.

You can chop them really finely and add them to meat pastes (patties, pies, Chinese dumplings, stuffings etc.). The wrap idea would be good for using the (blanched) upper green leaves, but what about making a tasty meat paste to stuff the V-shaped lower part of the green leaf with. Steam, serve with yogurt and a spicy oil drizzle, or a loose tomato-based sauce??

If you are thinking of making miso, now is a good time! Check places such as Tokyu Hands or your Co-op catalog for kits, or ask the local tofu maker if you can buy a few kilos of beans. Short-ferment miso is often made in early Spring, but I find that it spoils too easily in the hot Tokyo weather we get nowadays. "Little cold" starts right after New Year, peaking at "Great Cold" around Jan. 20, and ending at "Start of Spring" (around Setsubun, Feb. 4). So basically, any time in January is good miso-making time!

I think that personal and regional preferences still play a big part...my favorite miso might easily be your pet hate. There are so many regional manufacturers not easily available elsewhere, and the biggest manufacturers offer everything from high quality to cheap and ersatz...so it's hard to identify "this" brand as the one to go for. However, if you are looking at miso in the shop, dump the ones that say "dashi-iri" - they include flavorings which mean that you can mix them with water instead of dashi stock, but the flavorings tend to be artificial, overdone, and very samey. The dashi-iri types are usually softer, so they are easier to mix smoothly with water, but it's all about convenience, not taste. With pale miso, check that the miso at the top of the pack hasn't started to discolor and darken (means it's old). The color should always be bright, not grayish. An open pack should never have dry crumbs, and it should not smell alcoholic - just savory. If you can still find the kind of shop that will mix miso to order and allow you to taste, make use of it! They have become very rare, but you may find one in a department store basement. Generally, very smoothly milled miso is a convenience item - traditionally, people dissolved the miso in a bamboo dipper in the soup, and discarded the lees. Nowadays, people are more likely to return the lees to the soup, to increase the nutritional value of the soup. Finely milled miso can be dissolved without straining. What's wrong with "convenient"? It tends to be associated with miso that has not been fermented long enough (tastes raw, floury, pasty), and has been made with cultures instead of koji rice, and with ground instead of whole beans or grains. There are only two well-known smooth traditional miso: white and red. The rest have some texture remaining from the grains or mashed beans they are made from. White miso if from Kyoto (and to some extent Echigo, Kaga and nearby Japan-sea coast, I think, though I've heard there is white miso in Hiroshima). It is hard to buy good quality white miso in Tokyo - it tends to have sake lees and mizu-ame in it. It is fermented only briefly, and so is soft with high moisture content and relatively little salt. It doesn't keep well - use it fast, keep it cold. Red miso - matured for a very long time, which means that it is dry and a little hard to handle. Salty but mellow, and the long fermentation means that the ingredients have largely broken down to form a paste. If it's soft, it's probably aka-dashi (red miso mixed with dashi and other flavorings), which is easy to use but of course doesn't keep as well. Other miso tends to be made from rice and/or rice koji starter, with a proportion of barley or soybeans that varies according to the region. Very roughly: RICE MISO: Mild, light color, lower salt: Kansai, Kagawa (Shikoku) and Inland Sea coast of Honshu down to Hiroshima. Mild, red color, lower salt: Tokyo Medium-mild, light tan color, lowish salt: Shizuoka, Kyushu Medium-mild, red color, lowish salt: Tokushima and other areas Flavorful, light tan color, saltier: Kanto and central, central Japan Sea coast, widespread throughout Japan Flavorful, red, saltier: Kanto, central, northern Japan, Hokkaido BARLEY MISO: Mild/lower salt: Kyushu, Shikoku, lower Honshu Flavorful/saltier: Kyushu, Shikoku, Kanto SOYBEAN MISO: Aichi, Mie, and Gifu region The chart came from an old article by a guy at the Chuo Miso Kenkyu-jo in Tokyo, and I see there's a similar one here with luverly photos as well. Miso site (Japanese and English)

I was thinking some more about this...here in Japan, household budgets are still common. I often write down what we ate and rough costs on a big calendar in the kitchen. Does tracking or budgeting your food spending actually help to reduce expenses - or free up money for those soul-saving luxuries? Or is it just a PITA? The other thing with clamping down on food expenditure is BOREDOM - nobody likes to feel forced to restrict their choices. Does it help to cook a large amount of something, and then swap a portion with a friend who also cooks? Gardening...for me this is as much about boredom as budgeting. With limited ground and sunshine, I want maximum bang for my bucket, and so I like things like snowpeas and herbs, which only need a small amount to lift a dish out of the ordinary, and young greens, which are ready to harvest and re-plant so quickly.

Oh yes, pull out your pressure cooker! It really dents my gas bill, does away with the "I forgot to soak them" excuses with dried beans, and I can't get over how clear the stock is when I make chicken carcass stock in the pressure cooker. Also makes better pulled pork than any other method I know.

The Eating on the Cheap topic is a good 'un. In Japan, dollar shops sell small, often pre-cut packs of vegetables, and these are really a better buy than whole vegetables for one or two people...but not for a bigger family. On the other hand, with a family of 4 or sometimes 5, including 2 teenage boys, I'm finding that options such as re-using vegetable scraps or peels work much better than they used to - I accumulate scraps fast enough to use them while they are still fresh and tasty. Otherwise, I think they'd have to go in the freezer to accumulate. Sweet potato peels: sweet potatoes cook best when peeled thickly anyway. If you scrub them well, the julienned peels can be deep-fried and served salted or herbed like french fries; or even fried, drained, and then quickly caramelized Chinese style. About twice a week the finely chopped vegetable scraps go in with raw brown rice to cook, or with some green onion tops for fried rice, or even cooked into a loaf of bread (especially carrot peels). If they are fried gently first, they go well in dry curries (I get enough finely minced vegetable scraps to double the volume of meat) or soupy dishes - but they can taste earthy and rank in watery dishes without that initial frying. If you bake your own bread, it is really worth collecting the crumbs! How about herby crumbed cheese on toast for a true double-take discount delight?

Crockpot works well. Yes, less sugar works, but the cooked beans won't keep as well (they do spoil surprisingly fast). Use a little sodium bicarb too - when I came back to my experiment, I found it had darkened up a bit more, just took time.

Leeks are hard to find in Japan. If you do spot one, it will be calling itself a poronegi or a riiki/riiku. Ordinary naganegi don't soften enough on cooking to substitute - they are a slightly different plant, actually. Best bet would be the short, stubby Shimonita negi.

Kitchen paper - if you pull the coating film off the inside surface of an opened-flat milk carton, you have a nice, sturdy, absorbent surface for putting wet or greasy food on. And if you don't rip the coating off, you can use them as disposable food prep surfaces, as Hiroyuki has mentioned in the past too. Oil filters - used to buy the special paper filters to filter used oil after deepfrying, but these days I pull a tissue in half and use one layer as a filter. (A double layer takes too long to filter the oil).

I agree with andiesenji that pomelo peel often lacks aroma. On the other hand it's good in Chinese recipes... For very thin peels, what about rolling them up and using a needle and doubled strong thread so that you can hang a whole string of them up to dry? Thanks for the tip on steaming fruit for glace!!! I have a trad French method for glace whole fruits, but it does take a long time and use an unbelievable amount of sugar.

Black beans - to some extent, the result depends on the quality or freshness of the original beans. Kuromame are not western "black beans" or "turtle beans", but a black cultivar of soybean. The color in the skins leaches out easily in water, so don't use too much water - best to keep adding enough to keep the water level just above the beans. Metal salts do the best job of shifting the color towards deep blue/purple/black. Unfortunately, some are toxic, and some make the beans hard...that's why iron is such a popular choice. Rust is better than iron, but even a non-rusty nail will help, and so will cooking the beans in a cast iron frypan or Dutch oven etc. You can rust the nail by dropping it in salty water for a while. Finding an iron rather than a stainless steel nail is becoming difficult. I used a rusty, bent corkscrew for my experiment, but wouldn't care to eat anything cooked alongside it! Lab results: using water extract of eggplant skins Metal salts: Rusty iron: good black Eggshell with membrane peeled off: greeny-blue Sodium bicarbonate: similar to eggshells, and less troublesome to use. Not enough to create intense black by itself. Seasonings: ***shochu: produced a black almost as dark as rusty iron*** sake: pink mirin: relatively little effect on color light brown sugar: slightly black salt: slightly black soy sauce: of course hard to tell, but cheap soy sauce made color lighter and pinker, good fermented soy sauce intensified color. ginger juice: slight darkening I usually don't use rusty nails in kuromame, and add ginger, black sugar, soy sauce, and salt. I don't soak the beans, but alternately simmer and soak beans in the seasoned cooking liquid. Today's take-home lesson seems to be that it would be worth using shochu and good-quality fermented soy sauce. Don't forget visual tricks - if you add something like white or yellow pieces of lotus root, or red wolfberries (kukonomi) or other decorative elements, the beans will look blacker than they really are. Adding a little mizuame (rice malt) to the cooked beans will make them look glossier and therefore blacker too.

Thanks for the report....wonder what the commercial batter mix has that's different... Out of interest, do you think the type/brand of beer makes any difference? I find almost any light beer works fine.

Very timely - but can you give me some idea of home-made gluten-free flour combinations that work well with fruitcake? A gluten-intolerant friend is coming to stay...I'm eyeing my bag of purple sweet potato flour and wondering how she'd feel about purple fruit cake.).

Something I see more often in Japan than anywhere else is cubes or stamped-out shapes of jelly suspended in jelly of another color. The cut-outs are usually made in a firmer jelly, with the surrounding jelly slightly softer. For example...cubes of coffee jelly in milk jelly...star-shaped cut-outs of pale-blue mint flavored jelly in a clear soda jelly...cubes of various colors of jelly in a light-colored jelly.

I wondered how different the two fish were...please keep us updated on your experiments! What about oyster fritters (battered oysters)? Since they are pretty wet, would the same treatment suit your haddock if you want a heavier batter? I think your thin batter is probably better eating with soft fish though. Kara-age...despite the photos I see on the web, kara-age usually doesn't look much different from a battered fry - difference is really just that the fish/chicken flesh provides most of the moisture. Take a look at this Mebaru karaage. The dark coloring comes from the fish skin - the fish is black rockfish - and also from the use of soy sauce to marinade the fish. I use this technique with western seasoning.

In Japan, "tara" (cod, relative of haddock) is not much used for tempura, presumably because the flesh is rather watery. Not all of these ideas will suit your kitchen set-up, but here goes... You could try adding some vinegar to a standard (non-beer) batter, which should improve both crispness and color. You could substitute cornstarch for some of the flour in your batter, with or without egg...and add a very little sugar (or vinegar) to improve browning. You could use eggwhite instead of whole egg in your batter - either gently beaten; or with flours blended in to whipped eggwhite. You might even want to skip the batter, and try one of these two methods: "Kara-age" style: marinade the haddock pieces in just a little of your preferred seeds, herbs, or other seasonings (including a little salt, soy sauce, or small amount of some other salty sauce that won't burn when fried) and lemon juice/wine/vinegar, then add a generous amount of cornstarch so that all pieces are well floured, drop straight into hot oil. That and the following method are used for chicken in Japan, as chiicken sheds moisture very easily. Works well for soft fish too. Cracker coating: Dip in flour, pat off excess (unlike previous method), dip in loosely beaten eggwhite, dip in crushed crackers (however coarse or fine you like), fry.

Try searching for "houhin". Teapot only on English shopping site Set including water-cooling pourer and small teacups, Japanese shopping site. As you may guess from the shape, these pots are not for use with boiling water, so they suit any tea which is best infused with water ranging from "hot bath" to "stick your finger in and realize it's way too hot for a bath". If you pull your finger out instinctively when you've barely touched the water, it's too hot for this type of teapot. There are many types, from earthenware to porcelain, just choose whichever type you prefer.

Kansai-style chanko nabe! My favorite proportions are roughly based on an internet discussion in Japanese I read: water or chicken stock or water + 1-2 tsp chicken stock powder (the gara-soup stuff is best) or cubes 70 g miso (very roughly 1/3 of a Japanese cup, or 1/4 of a US cup) 1 T soy sauce 1 T mirin/sugar (or 2 T noodle soup concentrate instead of the soy/mirin) 1-2 cloves garlic, grated to a pulp 1 T toasted sesame seeds 2 t Japanese toasted sesame oil 1 t ginger juice, or grated/shredded ginger to taste Mix all that up till smooth, heat in your nabe, and away you go! A little chicken and a lot of tofu and vegetables is the way to go. In theory, udon noodles are nice to finish, but we rarely have enough appetite by then, as the rich miso/sesame broth is very good to drink too.

Yes, I've seen those two-stick packages occasionally too! I now have several little bags of fruit soaking in either brandy with CC lemon (a lemon soft drink, rum, or Asahi's "Ginger Draft" beer (OK to drink, but even better for cakes!). Ginger ale + brandy/Grand Marnier works well too, both to soak fruit and to sprinkle on finished cakes. What are your favorite soaking and sprinkling liquids/liquors?

How did it go? Your oven capacity is 31 liters, so it's big enough that you have a good chance of success. I don't alter the temperature in conventional recipes when using a Japanese convection oven. Maybe because Japanese ovens are pretty small, I find that food doesn't seem to dry out the way it did in large western convection ovens I've used in the past. Prasantrin's tips for baking large items in a Japanese oven are spot on! As for Japanese oven manuals, frankly, I think it's better to ignore them and go with your own experience and trusted recipes. The manual recipes seem to be written for people who are scared of doing more than heating a frozen pizza in their new ovens. I just got my new oven delivered, and the manual recipe for pie pastry raised my eyebrows till they were practically stuck to the ceiling!

Thank you for the fruitcake cookie recipe - I find Japanese friends enjoy the spicey fruity taste without the mature aroma of fruitcake. I have used angelica in fruitcakes when I can get it (especially light fruitcakes), and love the combination of violets and citrus....but until I get a source for them, that will be a dream. I think they would be great for a summertime downunder fruitcake. Anybody feel like experimenting? Currently candying some green "oroblanco" grapefruit peel for some color contrast. It takes several days to finish the candying process, but I like grapefruit peel in fruitcake...anything to avoid a cake dominated by the excessively violent sweet and sour taste of most candied pineapple.

Yes, mature ginger is the trick! This is a good time of year to make it (in the northern hemisphere), after the main ginger harvest. I thought I invented this all by myself until I discovered that it was a well-known Chinese dish - made myself a hot ginger milk drink and forgot to drink it.