helenjp

noodle (m,enrui) topic I was just coming looking for this topic when John revived it! It's not really worth making cold dashi for more than 2 people, as it takes up room in the fridge, but it's excellent for one or two people. As Hiroyuki says, it's a method that has been used for a while. It works best for katsuo dashi, and fairly well for niboshi (though they really need heat to release full flavor), but dashi with a lot of kombu tends to spoil very quickly.

Herbs - now until Golden Week is the time to buy seedlings - after that they are extremely hard to find. Same is true for seeds, though not quite so extreme. I've only once seen tarragon plants for sale. Bay plants however seem to be fairly easy to find. Verandahs/rooftop and heat/direct sun: Ohba is so right! I think that's why those unsightly white polystyrene boxes you often see outside people's shops actually work pretty well. I put wooden "tiles" (of the sort that people sell for "flooring" their balconies) under pots, and either double-pot or put something along the edge of the balcony to keep direct sun off the actual pot or planter. Ag./hort universities don't seem to have a service for the public as with North American universites, though if you ring one up, you may get a friendly crazy professor who likes to keep in touch with the public. JA (Noukyou) may be a better bet.

I am sure rosemary would be excellent, and it's second on my list to try after mugwort. Since mugwort is a bitter, and rosemary is an aromatic, they may each need something else to balance them. I'm thinking of combining candidates in an extract (simmered 5-10 mins) first to see how they work together, and judge quantities. Googling rosemary beer produced this handy small resource on brewing and herbs. Mansgarden herb list

Excellent resources, thanks! eGCI Homebrewing Classes Q&A for the classes I think I might print out the class, and write in the metric conversions, then start checking equipment and hunting for a kit...I have a few weeks before the herbs I want to use will be at the right stage. As for finished alcohol content, lower is definitely better than higher for me and my DH - any particular recommendations for beers or ales below 5% alcohol?

Thanks, that's excellent advice, especially for a beginner. I did know from sourdough that the "non-yeast" herbs must be carrying some kind of wild yeast, but as you say, that's one complication too many to start with. I think I can find brewing supplies here, though to be legal in Japan, I would need to keep finished alcohol content below 1%.

Thank you for that advice - and one more question! Is it possible to induce fermentation without yeast, by using meadowsweet, as mentioned in Grieve's Modern Herbal? I'm thinking that this might produce only a modest fermentation, producing some type of "small beer".

So which did you prefer, the Sapporo Nama Shibori (one of the better happoushu, I think), or the Asahi beer? And to think that my elder son spent the whole day moaning about how life was never any fun, not for even one second, when he could have been showing Scud around his beloved Akihabara! I won't tell him, as it will just underline his conviction that he is doomed to a life of misery! That meal looks spectacular. I used to think that Osaka was a place where the top hotel restaurants were often the best picks - maybe that hasn't changed?

You are right, this dish sounds "almost familiar". I will definitely try it. - the leaves are not toxic? I ate the berries when I was a kid, thoughtfully sharing them round the family so as to cause my poor mother to panic in a way never to be repeated...until a few years later, when I talked a friend into sampling arum lily with me .However, if S. nigrum leaves are edible, I know of plenty of wild plants growing nearby. Cleome...how do the leaves of the garden varieties like hassleriana compare with varieties such as C. monophylla? Can you eat them? (Thinking of a few neighbors' flower gardens... ). Lagenaria - in Japan, it's mostly ornamental, though I've heard you can eat the shoots - but have not eaten the leaves. Too early in the year to try that yet, though. By the way, do you know whether Malabar spinach used in western Africa, or only on the east coast? That's one plant I grow every year.

Looking speculatively at the wild mugwort nearby, I wondered what home-brewed herbal beers were like. Has anybody made them? Tasted them? Seen them on sale? Apart from mugwort, I've always been curious about nettle beer, but the only fermented beverage I've ever made was ginger beer. How hard are herb beers to make? (Seriously, curiosity is going to kill me one of these days...). The nearest thing I could find on this subforum was a reference to heather ale.

I like those touristy linen teacloths. After a while, they get very thin, and are just right for straining cheese and various other purposes. Not disposable, though. Similar to the coffee-filter idea, In Japan, I can get a kind of fill-your-own teabag, which allows me to put herbs, seeds etc. straight into a pot of liquid. I am not sure how easy they are to find in other countries.

That was fascinating, thank you! Dried fish...one of the world's great resources. It's a pity that so many freshwater fish species are quickly overlooked when other food sources become available - the same is true in Japan. Taro (colocasia spp.) leaves are traditionally eaten in Japan - and right through the Pacific. I've often wondered if "slimy" starches are particularly valued as food in hot climates, because they are so good at holding water. O. glaberrima is African rice! I only knew that it was used for some genetic experiments - how different are the cooking characteristics from O. sativa? I'd love to see your Ibo recipes, though I doubt if I could buy either of the spice blends you mention!

Experiments done! I tried making it with cornflour and with Japanese warabi-ko (bracken-root flour). I liked the bracken-root flour version a bit better. However, I never achieved that blinding whiteness you see in the photos, especially of packaged Haupia mixes. Is there any way to counteract the slight grayness of canned coconut milk/cream?

I got me just such a handy man, I'm glad to say. In a country like Japan where people work late and commute long hours, having one partner stay out of the kitchen would make a relationship pretty hard work, I imagine. Sadly, it seems that men who cook think that breakfast is too serious a business for bedside dining - no cups of tea in bed for me! As for whole generations whose men or women do or don't cook, I agree that the idea that "women didn't work" is laughable - it wasn't even true in Victorian England. Maybe it's never been true in any urban society, while equally unavoidable in in many rural societies. But even in rural Japan, there are easy dishes made in particular seasons when farming women need to be in the fields most of the day. Just goes to show how ambivalent suburbs are! As for the emotional content of food, there's an art to giving and receiving any gift, I guess. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen when relatives came to stay, because I just couldn't help myself. Let's hope that it was a cornucopia that I was offering, and not a force-feeding funnel...

Ooh, at last we get to see what the neighbors are up to! I like the peanuts on the table - if nobody is eating peanuts, it's not China, I've heard, but I somehow didn't think of Beijing as following that rule. Wide green-bean noodles....this needs further investigation! How else do you eat them?

I heartily agree, and I do use vinegar, though often I go the opposite way from that recipe and reduce the vinegar very fast before cooling it a bit and adding the butter. That brings out the sweetness in the vinegar a little, and it blends nicely with the butter and soy. You can "freshen" the vinegar taste with a little sprinkle to finish. Wine or sake are good too. And Japanese recipes seem to use about 1 tablespoon each of butter and soy sauce to cook a small side dish, so it's only a tiny bit of butter per serving. Try cutting the combined butter-soy "funk" with some fragrant citrus like sudachi peel, yuzu or other citrus juice, or a bit of miso, or a pungent herb or scallions. I haven't figured out why, but I think that the butter either needs to be barely melted, or lightly browned before use - taken past the cloying stage anyway. On the other hand I remember that Chufi's Dutch butter-braised beef cooked very slowly in butter tasted good, so maybe cooking butter thoroughly makes the difference! Could be that less-then-fresh Japanese butter and "economy size" soy sauce play a part too - I think I'll experiment with some good soy sauce and report back.

Yippee! Somebody made hot cross buns! I'm sure they used to be a Good Friday thing, and now they seem to be an Easter Sunday thing. Which spices did you use, austramerica?

Wonderful fruit cake! That really is a great recipe, and is going straight to my files, thank you. Crystalized ginger, yes, yes, try it! It's wonderful in fruit cakes. P.S. So overpowered by the fruit cake I forgot to say thanks for the blog, I enjoyed every crumb of it .

We had "oven-fried" karaage today . Marinaded as usual, shaken with katakuriko, and baked for 20 minutes at about 220 deg. C. The coating was not like a deep-fried coating at all, but it was a nice light variation. Double-frying: I was thinking that you might come back to this as your kids got older! I find that it's hardly worth it for a small batch, but if you are making a big batch (dinner plus obento), by the time you have finished frying the first batch, it's time to start the second round anyway. The chicken stays juicy, and rotating the chicken means that you don't get the last few pieces over-browned from cooking in dirty oil at the end.

Can't help much with tomatoes, sorry - since I have either morning OR afternoon sunlight, I decided to go with one or two grafted mini-tomatoes - smaller fruit ripen faster with less sunlight, grafted vine makes vigorous growth despite a small "footprint". This year I'm thinking of getting a "midi" variety. Tomatoes would need to be sown after double-flowering cherry blossoms flower if you wanted to sow seed outdoors. But if you want to sow them with a plastic "hat" on a warm balcony, once the regular cherry blossoms come out, you could try. If you can sow them indoors and then pot them up ready to plant outside once the temps are in the mid-20s, I'd go ahead (she says irresponsibly!). As a rule of thumb, watching local flowers is a useful guide to temperatures in your own locality: *Really tropical plants may need temperatures around 30 degrees C to germinate. *Tender summer vegetables and subtropicals should be sown in May, once the double cherry blossoms are over (over 20 degC), or started earlier indoors or with heat/protection. *Most vegetables and herbs can be sown when the double cherry blossoms flower. * Some slightly hardier ones can be sown once the regular single cherry blossoms are scattering (15-20deg.C.) - or you can start sowing now, despite lower germination rates, to get a succession. * If you see bees on plum blossom, the temperature is probably over 12 deg.C, and although there is a risk of sudden cold snaps, you can try some of the hardier vegetables such as komatsuna, especially if you provide a hot-cap (plastic bag, upturned cutoff plastic bottle etc). Biggest danger this early in the season is dry soil and drying winds, so watch the soil moisture. Seeds - I normally buy either at home centers or supermarkets, or sometimes flower-shops or, surprisingly, department-store hobby areas will have unusual seeds. Tokyu Hands has seeds, though I think not as many as they used to. From the back of my gardening magazine, a list of online vendors, plus my favorite Sapporo Nouen (haven't used them though, strictly window-shopping ). Sapporo Nouen, tomato page British Seed, amazing array, Japan-based despite name. Takii, major seed producer Sakata seeds, another biggie Fujita Seed, along with British Seed and Sapporo Nouen, a good place for the rare or exotic.

I can add my recommendation for those dry guides put out by university extension services, preserving jar manufacturers, and the like. Whatever other resources you come to enjoy, those guidebooks are designed for easy reference, and they are always well-tested. The other books that I use are almost all out of print. One thing that did take me a couple of decades to figure out was that if I'm buying produce instead of hauling in bathloads of excess produce from the garden, I don't NEED to make huge batches. I can make small, stress-free quantities!

I have a feeling that seasonality may come into it too - the meat industry seems to think that nobody wants to eat anything but lamb, preferably spring lamb that is just a few months old. The question is: are they correct? Is consumer pressure or marketer pressure the reason why I can't remember when I last saw something labeled as "hogget" (12-24 months) even in a New Zealand butchery/supermarket.

I guess I don't find a concern with bodies out of place, since everything we eat (or even smell) affects us. Nutrition is part of food - why wouldn't we want to talk about overeating/undereating, allergies, nutrition etc? That's why food is so interesting, to me - the intersection of function and delight is fascinating enough to keep a person busy for a lifetime. I love plants and airplanes for the same reason, but I digress...

The image of a sucking pig playing guitar will stay with me a while... By the way, do you remember how the seabass was prepared? Just curious...

So what is the ugali in the photo made of? That's what I heard, from friends who lived in Mali/Chad or further west, and from a fascinating book I read ages ago about the relations between the coastal and the inland peoples in the west subsahaharan area. The whole area sounds so complex, and I'd love to know more. My sister's geothermal class included a fair number of east African students, and that was the first time I realized how much closer their food was to Asia. There seem to be quite a few legumes of the cowpea family which are used in a limited way even in Japan, but I'd love to know how they are used in Africa.

Your vegetable box sounds rather like the Japanese ones (range of vegetables from root vegetable staples to cheap all-round greens and a few seasonal delicacies). I don't order them now, but you can usually order "two person box with eggs and bread" or "family box without eggs", etc etc. Love the vegetable cookbook recommendations! The Girl Scout cookies were a real eye-opener! I thought that Girl Scout cookies only came in one flavor, and that they had some kind of Girl Scout badge embossed on them, certainly not girl-power slogans.