helenjp

Bitter melon is used in Asia as a food plant - especially in summer. Generally, salting, frying or soaking in oil, and adding sugar will ameliorate bitterness - sharp/sour flavors will emphasize it. Combining bitter foods with "heavy" meats such as pork works well - the bitterness lightens the pork, the fattiness lessens the bitterness. Gentian root would be incredibly bitter...are gentians still in flower where you live, because if so, you might consider making a "jam" or candied petal conserve to provide a visual as well as a taste accent to something rich. Hops are so beautiful...suspended in a beer jelly? Silk tassel (Garrya elliptica) - it wouldn't be Garrya fremonti your herbalist friends had in mind? Doesn't flower until winter, though you could perhaps use the rather hard and shiny fresh leaves to serve something on - giving them a sharp slap or bang to release some of the aromatic elements before using them. Mahonia (oregon grape) - that powder is presumably inner bark or root? Can you get dried berries or blossoms? I don't know if the dried blossoms would be as fragrant as the fresh flowers are, though. Note: Bitter foods often affect the body in dramatic ways...best to use in very small quantities unless you are very familiar with them.

Ran out of marmite, butter and cheese prices through the roof, and getting sick of canned fish...my teenage son looks askance at my own breakfast favorite, which is olive oil and vinegar sprinkled on bread and topped with a herb or dukkah-ish mixture. What he wants is a savory spread, preferably tomato-ey, for his breakfast toast or sandwich. What he wants is something exciting, by tomorrow; what I want is something that keeps a little while on the shelf or in the fridge. My imagination stops at a pickled curry spread or a cold ratatouille or caponata... Inspiration please, preferably with recipes or photos!

Perilla is an annual, and don't those grapes look good! I'm wondering if the rather wet summer plus sudden burst of heat is going to give us a good grape season this year...was your father pleased with his Kyoho, Hiroyuki?

I've been fiddling around with rice icecream for a while. The trick is to get it starchy but still soft - it doesn't break up as easily as long-grain rice, so a few turns in a suribachi (mortar) seem to help. The flavor is surprisingly positive and good. Haven't tried things like rice "milk" though. Ginger - and there's quite a difference in flavor between the new ginger that's available now and the ginger that's available in main fall harvest time. How about a new-ginger icecream with a green-shiso sorbet? Red shiso - the health drink made with vinegar is actually much more palatable made wtih lemon juice - the faint herbal flavor of the shiso comes through better, and the lemon juice produces a pleasant pink color rather than violent red/magenta. That might make the basis for a nice sorbet. From snacks that I've made recently, I think that black beans （or other "endou" type beans) cooked with a little salt are excellent with sweet snacks (soak overnight in lightly salted water, then cook and allow to cool in lightly salted water - 1 tsp salt/1 li water). However, they might be better served WITH rather than IN the icecream or sorbet...and maybe a few cubes of unflavored kanten (agar) gel and black-sugar syrup for a minimalist mitsu-mame.

Hi, sorry for the delay...bit busy on the home front recently. I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, but does this help at all? Barley is mostly eaten in Japan as a "healthy" alternative to rice - long ago, it was also cheaper than rice. Sweet potatoes (satsuma-imo) was also once a cheap substitute or "stretcher" mixed with rice, and is also a popular vegetable and snack food. Recently, both have become more expensive (though it is a long time since they have been really cheap), and also harder to get, because brewers pay good prices to reserve crops for making spirits. I think the "imo-shochu" boom has passed its peak, but a year or so ago, I noticed that even in fall (peak season), vegetable shops and supermarkets seemed to mostly have second-rate sweet potatoes, in smaller quantitities and at higher prices than usual.

Looks great! The coffee suggestion sounds good - a middle of the road coffee would be "mocha blend", which manufacturers would like to us believe contains some light-raost mild beans such as blue mountain or mocha. If you are shopping in Japan, one 4 g sachet of agar powder (kanten) will set 500 ml coffee firm enough to cut into cubes. If you want a softer set, you can use up to 1 liter of coffee for 4 g - set it in the container, stir around to break up slightly, pour over a little milk, and slurp up or "drink" through a fat bubble-tea straw. There is also a product called Ina-Aga-A (mixture of starch, gelatin, and agar) which sets to a gelatin-jelly consistency AT ROOM TEMPERATURE. It is easy to buy in summer, harder to buy in winter. Use 1 10g sachet for 550 ml coffee (about 400 ml if you want it considerably firmer). I like to use this product to make a very lightly sweetened milk jelly to serve in unsweetened black coffee.

Thanks for the great amount of thought you have put into the task of hosting. Best of luck with other ventures...

OK, I'll disagree! I only once recall the rice of a nigiri-zushi falling apart, and I think that sushi packed that loosely will fall apart as readily in your fingers as in your chopsticks...if you are used to using chopsticks, that is! Of all the sushi joints in all the towns in all Japan that I've been into, nobody has ever asked me whether or not I planned to use chopsticks before filling my sushi order, and I think they would if they thought it was important. And in case you wanted to ask, there is enough fine sushi in my history to make this evidence relevant to the question of etiquette! If the sushi rice is fresh and glossy, then it has enough "stick" to stay in one piece. If it's crumbly rather than soft and very slightly springy, perhaps the rice is a lower quality rice without sufficient amylopectin, or perhaps it has been sitting around a little too long. The "hands" option seems to be regarded as anything from acceptable to laudable, but chopsticks are not a solecism. As for forks etc., that's a separate issue, isn't it? In a Japanese sushi shop, you would simply need to bring your own fork if you wanted to use one.

Great aluminum bento boxes! I use one for one of my sons, as the flat shape fits into his over-stocked school bag much more easily. Aluminum also disperses heat much faster than plastic, and important point in summer. Reheated rice - I read that it's best to freeze rice, even for overnight storage, and then reheat it thoroughly in the microwave. I agree - but from a taste point of view rather than a hygiene point of view. Microwaving frozen rice makes it hard to use an aluminum box, and it's easy to warp a plastic bento box that way, so these days I just mold the rice in the box, then freeze it separately. With 3-4 lunches to make every morning, I usually cook fresh rice these days. Summer bento rice - drop an umeboshi in with the raw rice, when the rice is cooked, break it up and mix into the cooked rice. Or grate some ginger into the rice, or mix sushi vinegar and/or chopped Japanese pickles into the hot, freshly cooked rice. Western graiy mustard - I usually use it as a dressing, with soy sauce and vinegar. I don't find it pungent enough to cut through the mellowness of white miso for karashi-miso etc.

I do the same thing when I want to get dinner made in a hurry - though in a much mor slapdash fashion. Luckily, there are certain vegetables which seem to improve with freezing in contact with the miso. Cabbage is the one that springs to mind, and fried tofu strips are also tastier that way than when added last-minute to soup.

I have to agree with Hiroyuki here - etiquette is always going to require that you keep at least half an eye on what everybody else is doing, especially if you are somebody's guest. I recall encountering The Great Sushi Debate for the first time way back in the early '80s sometime, when it seemed that gourmet diners were out to convert the great unwashed...and they were encountering resistance to The Message even back then. If there's a consensus now, it is that there was never a time when either chopsticks or hands were 100% "correct". My first mother in law gave me one of the popular books on Manners (the type of manners where you regard yourself as a disciple of the Such-and-such School), and not even that laid down an ultimate Law of Sushi. I recall more people in Osaka eating nigiri with chopsticks, probably because nigiri is not basically a Kansai style, and most people eat rolled or pressed sushi wiith chopsticks. I think that hands are probably more popular in Kanto, even now. Some people say that nigiri with hands derives from street-food service, while nigiri with chopsticks originated in sushi served as a light meal eaten at home or restaurant. I might eat sushi with my hands in an owner-chef shop where the chef(s) are preparing the sushi right in front of me (especially at the counter)...but I can't recall seeing anybody eat with their hands at a conveyer-belt sushi shop. As for home-delivered sushi, you need to at least take your sushi with chopsticks, as they are not served individually, and they are packed in so tightly that you couldn't pick one up without your fingers touching your neighbor's share of sushi... Women are much more likely to use chopsticks, and it is certainly rare to see a woman past her youthful glory eating nigiri with her hands nowadays, just as it was 20-30 years back. Hard-to-see advertising pic, showing man eating nigiri with his hands, woman eating some type of sushi with chopsticks. Very famous picture of woman with a plate of sushi (with chopsticks). The sushi is not exactly the same as modern nigiri, but it is certainly a related type.

Lots of interesting material here. I think the biodiversity argument is extremely important, it looks like icing, but in fact it's the whole cake - rigid genetic design = fragile genetic design. As far as control and responsibility goes, I think the considerations are mostly focused on anticipated legal battles, and not on the fact that plants and microbes are likely the most important living things on the planet - maybe the only ones that are really needed? If we want to consider the possible consequences of a misstep in agriculture, let us recall that a good proportion of the world's arid and low productivity regions are the result of salinity caused by poor management of natural and cropped plants. We've had the odd few thousand years to work on this problem, but still haven't got it figured out...what are the chances that we have the impact of GM accurately assessed and under control? Can't we take the GM budget, and spend it on understanding how soil and water function together? GM just seems like a quick and dirty fix to me - how about the miracle golden rice that is being touted as the answer to vitamin A deficiency in India - I heard that even in experimental plots, workers were having trouble with allergic reactions to the daffodil component that had been forced into the rice. The danger here is that initial testing won't find very many people with daffodil allergies - but after eating the rice or handling the plants daily, many more people tend to develop allergies. Just imagine what happens if a big percentage of a staple crop in a country with little excess in food production is switched over to a highly allergenic crop whose seed is controlled and possibly designed to be infertile at producer level, and is controlled by a single company... Wouldn't it be cheaper, easier, safer to encourage people to grow tough old Malabar spinach in pots by their front door, if Vitamin A is such a problem? (And there are many, many more dark green Indian vegetables anyway). Do we *really* need a patent-protected restricted distribution product to "solve" this "problem"? Here in Japan, we are told so much about the Japanese respect for nature and the environment being THE reason why GM crops or seeds are not permitted...yet many agricultural high schools have kids experimenting with GM plants as a matter of course, with little oversight, and certainly little management of where the resulting plants are grown and what happens to their seeds. The issue of cross-breeding is a problem - these are highly specialized plants, after all - and yet, the possibility of turning over large portions of our food supply to plants which are designed to have only sterile seed would be even more terrifying...

Japanese food is rarely hot, but Japanese people these days enjoy quite a few hot dishes and condiments from other cultures...similar situation to European food, probably.

Korean made - that could be different - it will have some type of miso in it, but I don't know if it will definitely be rice miso. Probably less sweet. I have been meaning to try a Korean brand if I spot one. Kochujang in lunch boxes...usually as a variation of flavoring stir-fried things in miso, sometimes a tiny, tiny bit plus some grated onion in beaten eggs for omelet...sometimes instead of soy sauce in sesame dressing for spinach.

I read about ambergris-flavored coffee in An Account of The Manners and Travels of the Modern Egyptians (Edward Lane, 1838 or so) that ambergris were dropped in the coffee-pot. I feel dreadfully nostalgic for this wonderful book - where did my copy go? Thanks to the internet, you can read it too - here's a small excerpt: Well, not exactly musk...

Time that passes in quiet contentment...a pretty table, even if it is decorated with a leaf or a bowl of fruit rather than elaborate tableware...I agree with small, individually made items, or at least small servings to give a sense of openness to the meal. In other words, if the cooking is labor-intensive, the eating should somehow seem almost casual, no work at all! One dish of hand-rolled short or filled pasta would thrill me, I think! A perfect consomme or other clear soup does sound wonderful, especially for a woman friend. However, boiled fish (for those who like fish) is a very fine home dish, because the fragrance of the fish is not lost by waiting. And at this time of year, small berries such as currants, and small early vegetables must still be a pleasure to find in the shops? Do the Dutch make anything as old-fashioned as junket or other delicate curds to go with such fruit? That would go nicely with a glass of a smooth dessert wine. However, if the evening is to be pampering rather than overwhelming, would a light, crisp beer be as nice as wine?? A beer would open the way to small open sandwiches on wonderful bread, plus aromatics such as fennel, a tiny amount of friend shrimp, some local mussels or other shellfish, a rich vegetably something in condiment quantities...

I won a Japanese water-sealed pickling crock years ago. I use it, it's very nice, but I don't think I'd walk past 10 other crocks just to get to that one. You may well find reasonably priced crocks in Japanese or other east Asian stores. I use the "boiled rock", "boiled plate", method for preparing pickles. If you create the right environment, the flora you want will thrive. It's also a good idea to have fermenting pickles in a place where temperature doesn't fluctuate too much or get too hot, and away from lots of passing people. There are some excellent sites on traditional fermented pickles from the extension services of various midwestern universities, if you care to google. Crunchy pickles usually have calcium added at some point in the pickling process.

At least as they are made in Japan... Kochujang: Rice-based miso, chilis, heaps of sugar or rice barley malt. Mildly hot. Toubanjan: Bean-based miso, chillis. Hot. I think the toubanjan is more versatile (I put it in chilli, curries, and hot soups too), because you can add miso and sugar/honey if wanted, but kochujang is so very useful for lunch making that I have no difficulty in keeping both in my fridge.

Kurozato Kit-kats, yes, the family member who liked "unagi custard icecream" also liked these. I find them a little borderline. Recent "find" is the "salted youkan" mini-bars from Kashihara. Son ate quite a few...but then the next day they covered the glycemic index in school health class!

I've found that apple mint and similar fruity mints don't work all that well in drinks - maybe the aroma is too delicate for an icred drink. Peppermint...many different types, but if the camphor/menthol note is too strong, why not try a mixture of spearmint with just a little peppermint?

Extra fat - now that probably is Okinawan. Daikon and ham is a favorite combination throughout Japan, but Daikon and spam sounds old-fashioned. The soup sounds interesting. Can you tell me more?

Spam Fried with Daikon Recipe from Cookpad, a big everyday recipe site in Japanese. 1 can spam, sliced thinly 300g (roughly 12 oz) daikon, peeled and sliced thinly 1/2 tsp (roughly) Japanese sesame oil (goma-abura) 1/2 tablespoon soy sauce black pepper if liked. Heat pan, fry spam in sesame oil till it sheds fat, add daikon and fry till translucent and soft, sprinkle over soy sauce, turn a few times, turn off heat, add black pepper and a little finely chopped scallion or parsley. Again, don't know if this is specifically Okinawan - to me the dishes listed seem reminiscent of easy family cooking of that period, rather than local to Okinawa.

I have certainly heard this before...was it son's guitar teacher who told me that his guitar teacher in Spain maintained that tobacco was the only leafy vegetable needed?!

You can certainly simmer it in soup - I sometimes use it as a substitute for winter melon in Chinese soups (I even have a recipe for the fluffy stuff that surrounds the seeds in winter melon), but melon rind takes a bit longer to absorb the flavor - make today, eat tomorrow is the way to go.

Yeah, mirin-fuu / aji-mirin is fine for most soups and nimono, especially cooked kanto-style, because the strong taste of the soy sauce makes the difference between real and fake mirin rather academic. However, because it's salted (originally to get around liquor laws), go lightly on the salt and soy sauce in your recipes until you've done a taste test. Hondashi and other brands of "additive-free" instant dashi both contain yeast extracts, but Hondashi also contains some straight MSG (and sugar, surprisingly!). Yeast extracts can't help but contain some MSG anyway, but I find the taste less aggressive and uniform than straight aji-no-moto (MSG).