helenjp

Boiled tea-towel in strainer or colander method: Why boil? To avoid contaminating the yogurt, also a pre-wet cloth is more efficient than a dry cloth strainer. Why a tea-towel? Because straining yogurt will eventually rot the fabric, so you may as well start with something cheap to replace.

For large amounts, boiled tea-towel in a colander.

Ah! That reminds me! What herbs/greens do you actually encounter in salads? In Japan, houttuynia cordata (lizardtail plant, chameleon plant, fish mint) is just a herb, but since I heard that it was used in salads in Vietnam, I've occasionally used the very young shoots early in the summer, before they flower and get tough and gnarly tasting. Is it a seasonal garnish in Vietnam?

I just put a little oil on the bottom of the pan. The cooking time was shorter than for a really meat-heavy filling, because the tofu keeps it lighter, and also the tofu doesn't really need cooking. Once the tops and bottoms were browned, I added just a little water and put a lid on, barely cracked, and steamed them a few minutes until they were slightly soft but still a nice green. I'm in Japan.

Yup, zucchini are surprisingly sensitive to weather and pollinators - in NZ, they grew like weeds; in Japan, it can often be too cold and rainy (onset of monsoon) or too hot, though I'm not sure whether it's the pollinators or the zucchini that are suffering the most. Didn't see this thread until after dinner, sadly. We had zuke on zuke: 1. Zucchini chunks cored, then stuffed with a mix of ground chicken, crumbled tofu, and a bit of leftover chickpea dal, flavored with thyme and the cumin from the dal. Ends dusted with cornflour and fried on both ends. 2. Clear chicken soup with the cores from the zucchini and a little parsley. Very simple.

That's a point - I buy "shiitake tea" which is essentially the same thing, and use it to dress things too. Nobody's bringing you any fruit?

A funny thing about fuyu persimmons - their color deepens when exposed to acid food such as yogurt. This means that a yogurt-dressed bowl of mango and persimmon with a few thin quartered slices of lime starts out as a boring bowl of yellow chunks, and overnight turns into a beautiful range of yellows and oranges. I'm happy that it's July - in June there is not much fruit in Tokyo that has not been in cold storage. So it's gather loquats while you can, and roll on Asian pears and peaches!

There are some types of food that only ever seem to be served in hospitals. In Japan I swear it is miso soup with bean sprouts AND cabbage AND onion AND sometimes slivers of fried tofu...and a lot less miso than usual. What's the equivalent in China? A Chinese friend having a baby was moved to take the baby and run out of hospital earl,y because her mother in law would arrive every morning with the daily quota of TEN hard-boiled eggs... Hope you will soon be on the run too!

I have too many for the size of my house, and one reason is that there are too many badly formatted (basically, unformatted) Kindle cookbooks. I feel cheated when I open a Kindle cookbook that is just a collection of PDFs, with no links from either the Table of Contents or the index. The following kindle cookbooks DO have a functional index - I have many more that are just unusable. Not all of these are good cookbooks, of course - I'm just incurably curious and have a weakness for amateur books. Drink-related books ore notable for their good formatting though! Ottolenghi's Plenty Venegas' Taco Feast (because for me, tacos are an exotic food that I don't understand very well!) Binnur's Turkish Cookbook Bittman: What I Grill and Why Duguid: Burma: Rivers of Flavor has only a section index, which I normally dislike, but each section head contains a list of recipes, and even individual recipes have hot links for every reference. Wilson: The Book of Marmalade (TOC and hotlinked index) Buhner: Sacred and Healing Herbal Beers (chapter TOC and hotlinked index) Beranbaum: Rose's Heavenly Cakes Gee: Sweet on Texas Lucia: 20 Best Italian Desserts (not very Italian but yes, it does have an index...) Bobrow: Bitters and Shrub Syrup Cocktails Holbrough: 100 Years of Cocktails (Chapter TOC and hotlinked recipe index) Loeb, Garces: Shake, Stir, Pour - Fresh Homegrown Cocktails (Chapter TOC and hotlinked recipe index) Brears: Jellies and their Moulds (Chapter TOC and hotlinked recipe index) This even has hotlinked FOOTNOTES and as a cookbook it deserves a shrine more than a mere shelf.

In 2013, "washoku" or Japanese food was recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. That changed the game plan considerably here in Japan, because there was suddenly a need to make Japanese culinary techniques accessible to foreigners at a professional level. It's not easy, but it is becoming possible. I don't know whether to advise you to study Japanese HARD now while getting some kind of hospitality/food preparation/cooking qualification, and then coming to Japan, doing a 6-12 month language course to get you up to the required language level; or to apply for a MEXT scholarship and come straight to Japan. I suggest you enquire through places like Tsuji Academy - they will tell you whether they are used to getting students in their teens or their twenties. 1) You will need a HIGH level of Japanese - usually level 2 of the NLPT JLPT exam (you can sit it in the US, assuming that that is where you are). Level 1 is the highest (professional translators and interpreters aim for this) and Level 3 is often required for jobs with contact with Japanese people, e.g. hospitality. There is a short-cut - getting a certificate of completion from a Japanese-language school. I assume that schools have to be recognized or certified in some way. 2) Increasingly, food professionals in Japan go to some form of vocational college before they start working at a pro level. These courses tend to be from 1 to 3 years, and they typically start in April. However, the big schools are starting to set up courses that start in the fall, to suit Europeans and North Americans. Tsuji Academy is a particularly famous example. You should check the reputation of any vocational college carefully, and make sure that they are really interested in and capable of teaching foreigners. 3) Cost. I figured there must be some kind of assistance available for non-university study, and there is: MEXT Scholarship for Specialized Training College Students . This scholarship gives you 1 year of language training plus money for 2 years of senmon-gakko ("specialized training college") which is the standard course length. You should find the nearest Japanese consulate or embassy to you and see what information they can help you with. If you don't get a good reception, try again when there is somebody different on the counter....if at all possible, go in person (after phoning/mailing) because Japanese people really hate to say No to your face! Senmon-gakko sometimes offer scholarships too, like this one from Sanko Gakuen, but you need to have specific qualifications in Japanese language - a bachelor's degree won't do. 4) Professional qualifications. Typically, Japanese chefs acquire their professional levels through a kind of apprenticeship system after they start working. This was a real handicap for foreigners, who would graduate from Japanese senmon-gakko and then not be able to get a visa to remain in Japan and work long enough to get advanced qualifications and recognition. THAT system has changed since 2014. This article from the Japan Times (2013) explains the problem and the proposed changes. The visa rules have now been changed, although there seems to be a lot of oversight, so small, individually-owned restaurants may not want to deal with all the paperwork. Good luck, and let us know which area of Japanese food you are interested in, because each program has a different focus.

I haven't used it for a while, but was surprised at how mellow lemonade is when a good handful of lemon balm is added at the soak peels and juice stage - you still have all the aroma, but less bite.

Spring herbs! Yesterday I was trotting round the side of our house to my compost bin when the neighbor popped up and gave me a handful of Italian parsley seedlings over the fence!

Yes, distribution. The best thing I got out of belonging to an organic food co-op was the chance to host farmers for the annual conference. It was REALLY interesting - for them, as they said they rarely had the chance to spend reasonable time talking to other farmers with similar goals, and for us, because we got to hear exactly where the shoe pinches. Restrictions set my major buyers seem, to me, to be too punitive for rural producers, who are already isolated and disadvantaged in their access to markets. As people move off farms, the ability to produce secondary streams of income must have become more difficult, so we need new alternatives. Maybe townies need to take their tech, educational, hospitality and other skills to rural areas rather than send soup? It's not just tech handouts, either - the more time that urban and suburban people spend with food production workers, the more those people and their families will see rural work as something they could do too, and do profitably.

Candy craft! I often walk past a tiny shop making amazing pulled candy - I really like that they go to the trouble of running a stall with fun and affordable bits (not "bits" as in the festival you went to, though!) at a local temple festival too. Where do women eat? I can't help myself, I always do a male/female rundown when I'm in a restaurant. At chains like Obon de Gohan (Meal on a Tray) there are always more women - maybe because they can mix and match more freely, there are plenty of side-dishes, and the food is quite light. There's one in Terminal 2 at Narita if you want to try!

Since I've been living in Japan for decades now, I understand this problem very well. My husband only occasionally enjoys dishes made from "stewing" cuts, because he doesn't really appreciate the kind of dish where meat taste permeates everything. Meat tends to be quite highly seasoned because it will be a distinctive accent eaten with a fairly high proportion of bland rice or noodles or vegetables. Going for very lightly cooked steak with that serving style is like trying to sub raw tomato salad for salsa or ketchup. Other cuisines where well-cooked meats accompany starches are a good fit for our table too - Middle-Eastern and Indian dishes, for example. I think the original poster's problem may be less about cooking methods, and more about cuts of meat - is there any kind of East or SE Asian meat store where you live, or have you considered trying mail order to get the thinly sliced meats that work best for SE Asian food? Alternatively, you could try chilling or partially freezing your meat and slicing it thinly yourselves. My DH does enjoy steak, but he's a well-done guy too - so we save steak for western-style meals where "his" plate's contents never wander onto "her" plate.

Funnily, what this thread reminds me of is the time when absolutely STELLAR food and service made a huge difference to a meal. DH and I were dealing with a heavy problem that was threatening to turn out just as badly as it possibly could, and DH was so worried that he couldn't eat or sleep. I managed to persuade him to stop and have something at a Russian cafe with a very restful interior where we had eaten once or twice before. As we approached the door, I realized that it was no longer a cafe, but a rather upmarket (for the area) restaurant. It was very early for dinner, so I decided not to risk trying to persuade DH to look for somewhere else, and in we went. We were obviously not their target customers, we'd been awake all night and looked how we felt, but FOH seated us in a quiet spot, and turned not a hair when we ordered only soup, and when, having eaten that, DH had relaxed to the point where he was ready to eat a little more and ordered something else very light, maybe an appetizer course. What I particularly remember is that not only were our insignificant orders cooked and presented beautifully, but the service couldn't have been better - quiet, efficient, and perfectly timed.I have no idea what the kitchen thought, but together, kitchen and servers created a very memorable little oasis of peace and refreshment in our day.

That's because you're polite. I am always tempted to cross my eyes and drool...

Well, men, boys....depending on the location.

Don't laugh, but I have never been to Yoshinoya. It's one of those places that I feel a little bit uncomfortable in as a foreign woman! But then, there is no place where a woman with a Kindle cannot eat.

You went to Itoya, I imagine? I try to stay away from there, because I have a leetle problem with paper lust. Seriously approve of the ankimo/prawn roe tofu breakfast. We didn't get further than finding some central Japan "oyaki" - fried/steamed dumplingish buns filled with miso-flavored vegetable mixes.

Sorry about the pervs, it's the season for them unfortunately. But the identifiable kind that talk to you are the easiest to deal with. We get half a warm day today, so hope you're out with your hanami lunchbox!

LOVE those glasses, and dripping a nostalgic tear for Shinsaibashi. Coffee and ristretto for breakfast, sounds like Osaka to me. Have a good time with Blether!

Gosh, stay safe and stick to Kyoto tofu??? Just catching up with your epic adventures now after spending a week with a visiting friend - while you were knocking yourself out in Kyoto, we were having a modest lunch at Chef's V (cafe run by MOS group of MOS hamburgers) in Landmark Tower, Yokohama, enjoying the view of the sailing ship Nihon-Maru in the rain; while you were sake-ing in Kyoto, we were drinking a dry Kaga sake with whitebait at Wasai Yakura in Kamakura (good but still affordable and accessible...just as well as I bought a really nice Hagi-yaki teacup there), and while you were all over Asakusa, we were storming Shibuya cafes (L'Occitane's cafe has a good view of Shibuya crossing, Hiki Cafe was very relaxed, wifi). We did spend 2 days combing Asakusa and Kappa-bashi for coffee paraphernalia and table ware though. Enjoy the rest of your stay! Are you coming back up to Tokyo?

What helps me most is to leave the sandwiches under pressure (wrapped in a slightly moistened cloth, under a spare cutting board) for a while before cutting. As for serrated knives, it must depend on what kind of serrations it has, and how thick the blade is - I have only one, and that is too big to use on the average sandwich. On the other hand, ceramic knives are easy to find, and sometimes useful for soft sandwiches. Of course I could just put the sandwich on the floor and tell the cat to leave half for me...

What's in season now is citrus...kumquats, ponkan (mandarin/pomelo cross, but quite small and fairly easy to peel. We eat a lot of those in season), a few boring late satsuma mandarin, and various other tangors and tangor/ponkan crosses. The amanatsu (type of natsu-mikan) start appearing now, and are pretty good for marmalade. Greenhouse/hothouse strawberries - they are expensive throughout the winter, but after Doll Festival (March 3) the price starts to drop rapidly, and we can really go to town on them! Apples - the conventional wisdom is that you shouldn't buy them after Doll Festival, because they are starting to get mealy. Loquats? Not yet!!! There used to be tree over the road, but the commercial varieties have more flesh. They definitely are something to peel and nibble at leisure. Imports - raspberries are easier to find now. Once it gets hot, they go moldy so fast it is difficult to buy them. Dragonfruit, longan, mango, banana, and blueberries are imported year round, and recently we seem to get durian and green papaya fairly regularly, and even occasionally blackberries. Frozen mango and berries are fairly easy to find, and sometimes South American frozen fruit pulps (including passionfruit, yay!). Starfruit, babaco, passionfruit...never. When I first came to Japan (during the reign of the previous Emperor!), fruit shops were basically places to buy expensive, huge, and not very tasty fruit to put on the family altar or give as gifts. Families shared one huge, glossy, tasteless apple for dessert. Only satsuma mandarins were cheap, and in fact the market was so glutted that foreign students used to eating more fruit ended up with orange palms from eating too many! I think the quality and availability of fruit in Japan has improved hugely.