helenjp

Heck, they have them in our local Daiei, even the Kyoto one! Want one?

I had never thought of doing that with frozen raspberries! Sentiamo, do you have a favorite kiwifruit jam/preserve? At this time of year, I often get the less glorious kiwifruit from the Japanese crop - not such good eating fresh, but good for jam. I like to put ginger with them, but would love some new ideas!

I really like plk's positive ideas - themes that look forward rather than back. And I guess it may be worth finding out what kind of cake the wedding cake was, and NOT having the same type of cake as a base?

No doubt the sixth graders ate their Panamian dessert long ago, but I'm becoming fascinated by this real crossroads of food cultures. El Amor por la Cocina is a blog from Panama, with lots of recipes (in Spanish). Cocina del Mundo has a Panama section too, and includes a recipe for the Cocada mentioned in Cooking Diva's blog. The basic cocada recipe seems to be one coconut, grated, cooked up for about 20 minutes in 2 cups of brown sugar (heated until dissolved) or 4 cups of cane syrup (maybe boiled down a bit?), with cashew nuts as an optional extra. I don't read Spanish, but with a little thought and a little Googling, you can figure quite a bit out!

Golly gosh, feijoa juice! I wonder if they included the skins, because feijoa pulp is kind of creamy beige (and happily turns brown in the blink of an eye). Feijoa were introduced to New Zealand early on, and grow in many a back-garden, so I've drunk many types of feijoa juice, but none like that one. I wonder what other ingredients it may have included. The lychee martini has been very popular in Japan for a while - mainly via Dita liqueur. Is this the first time you've encountered it? Enjoying your hard-working efforts, and yes, let it rain potatoes!

I'm not totally sure what the teapot strainer is - did you mean the nylon/plastic inserts for teapots? The idea of putting a glass in to weigh things down sounds like an excellent idea, too. Thanks! (Petals often seem to "repel" water and float - I wonder if anybody has had difficulty in using violets for infusions?)

I would try a drugstore, or maybe a department food basement (I believe you can get them canned, as well as in tablet form, not to mention fresh). Good luck!

There's a handy source of news on NZ wine and wine events at the Fine Wine Delivery Company. I can't comment on their service, although they do ship outside New Zealand, but appreciate the news summary on their site! NZ has had hot, dry weather from mid-summer onward (I don't think it was dry in spring/early summer, but I wasn't paying attention to the NZ weather then, sorry), so I'm looking forward to this year's wines.

Yaki-shio, or dry flaked salt that has been dried over (high) artificial heat, is also available, but is really only used for sprinkling or as a condiment. The coarse, wet salt that we see does (ideally) contain more than just sodium chloride. It usually contains magnesium chloride, and other minerals (as John says, the type that are found in nigari). I always heard that this type of salt dissolves more readily, but when I googled in Japanese, I found an explanation that maybe makes more sense - heating converts some into an insoluble form...so I guess the wetter salt IS more soluble, not just because it's in a wetter form, but because it's chemically different in some aspects. Now somebody should come along and prove me wrong!

How do other people keep light petals under the surface of the alcohol when making floral liqueurs? I'm thinking of using a tea-bag sachet (easy to buy in shops here) and weighting it with a well-boiled rock, but am afraid that the sachet may taint the liqueur, or not be as resistant to alcohol as it is to hot water. Last autumn, I made some chrysanthemum liqueur (this is one of those East Asian things - tastes very medicinal, and touted as a headache cure!). The petals floated very persistently, still haven't sunk 3 months or more later. WIth other herbal liqueurs made from sturdier greenery, I use rock sugar, which weighs the greenery down - by the time the sugar has dissolved, the leaves etc. are no longer inclined to float. However chrysanthemum petals do have a "waxy" tendency to resist water, and the floating layer of petals turned brown on top, though those underneath retained a bright color and leached surprisingly little color. I usually add a couple of handfuls of Japanese ume (p. mume) blossoms to last year's ume-shu (plum "wine"), and I'm considering making a blossom-only liqueur this year.

Garbage disposals in the sink are very rare in Japan. Almost every kitchen sink has a very wide drain, into which a plastic or copper basket is inserted. Often a nylon net is put over this, to make cleaning easier - fine food waste is trapped in the net, and can be tossed into the garbage instead of going into the waste water. The whole thing is covered with either a rubber lid (which allows spoons to get into the trap undetected) or a coarse wire mesh "lid". Japanese sink with drain cover, filter basket, and rubber "lid" The drawback, as you can see from the photo on the left, is that they can get pretty vile to clean out. The web page is actually about the "correct" way to clean your kitchen sink garbage trap to look like the photo on the right! The good point is that they are incredibly low-tech.

OK! I didn't read your post properly, sorry. Back to the drawing board...

Price drops markedly after Valentine's Day! And then for a little while, the hot-house strawberries are cheaper than the field ones ever seem to be (when they finally get here).

Insects, oh yes, in a house this old, they are a fact of life. So is fumigation...another good reason to have food in ultra-airtight containers, which all get taped shut and put in big bags before fumigation starts. I'm thinking that despite the advantages, I had better not be too ambitious, so I may make one attempt with 10kg/22 lbs split into two containers, and see how things go. Thanks for information on container sizes and volumes - I have converted them all into metric, and most seem to match up. However, 1 cup of flour weighs not much more than half a cup of water - it takes up almost twice as much volume. Sugar, on the other hand, is almost exactly equivalent to water in weight!

I think your unripe mango must have had quite a lot of starch that had not yet converted to sugar during the ripening process. Starch will gel quite nicely when cooked - so I'm guessing that's what happened! Sound like a good theory for now?!

Yes, just enough water to cover the bottom of the grill...but some new ones say emphatically NOT to put water in. Is yours a top-only fish grill, or a top and bottom "ryoumen-yaki" type? In the latter case, you can cook all kinds of things, but in the former case, you are limited to things that you can turn over, or which only need top heat. So you can make dengaku in it, if the item only needs the miso topping to be grilled. Or you can make cheese toast - you have to toast one side of the bread, turn it over, then top with cheese and grill. If you want to wrap things in foil, you can cook little parcels of fish, meat, and vegetables, turning as needed.

Scroll down for photo of girl breaking bread into bowl at table set for paomo A Japanese visitor to Xi-an says that the bread was almost like dried bread, very crisp, and that he was told to break it quite finely into his bowl - and when the soup (meat and cellophane noodles) came and he spooned it over, he realized that the dried bread swelled so much that the original pieces needed to be much smaller than had imagined. He said that it was served with garlic pickled in vinegar, which people scattered on top of their soup, meat, and dried bread, and that some people also added green coriander leaves or chili paste. Other Japanese people say that the Xian version is more heavily seasoned than similar soups they ate in nearby regions. Some say that they've made it using naan bread or English muffins baked at a low temperature until dry and crisp. Recipe for Yangrou Paomo You could skip the noodles in this recipe, or replace them with cellophane noodles (mung bean vermicelli). The soup recipe - mutton bones, chili pod, ginger, garlic and onions - sounds similar to mutton seasonings for Mongolian dishes. My guess is that bones are removed, and meat cut off and returned to the soup. Seasonings are salt, pepper, cumin and garlic - no soy sauce. Take a look at the China forum, there are a few mentions of seasonings for Islamic-influenced dishes in western China. Here's hoping that somebody more knowledgeable weighs in! - "yangrou" means lamb, so if you search for "paomo" you might find some references to the beef version too.

So how are all those ovens doing these days? I killed mine with a lemon meringue pie and as it's 10 years old, and came from a friend in the first place, it may be time to replace it. However, the new generation of combi oven/microwaves are very different from the type I have. Any recommendations...or warnings ? Also, any comments on flat-bottom no-turntable microwaves (uneven heating?) or the current steam/water oven types (how well do they work for conventional purposes? Are they messy? I hear they don't really reheat uncovered food as well as claimed?) I don't care for all those auto-menu things, just want a basic microwave and a good oven with at least two shelf positions (my current one has only one position, very high, not very useful for anything except baked potato). Buying two separate items is not really practical in my kitchen.

A whole store for petfood.... . I am totally astonished! I wondered about the "packing down" effect of flour - I keep about 2-3kg (say 5lb) in a small pink Hello Kitty rice container, but figured that the weight of the flour might mean that 10x that amount wouldn't take up 10x the space. And yes, all those points Prasantrin mentions apply - that's why I've never stored a large amount of flour in Japan before. I think I would use 25kg of bread flour in about 6 months, so it would have to keep through the monsoon season. . It would be useful to be able to buy 10 kg /22 lb bags, but most varieties are only sold in 5 kg / 11 lb or 25 kg/ 55 lbsizes. Large rolling bins/garbage bins - I doubt I could find them here, but out of curiosity, how airtight are they? I currently keep flour and rice in containers with a tight seal.

I don't have much counter space, so I used to use a floured cloth...then I got a pastry cloth, which is a kind of canvas. It is a very good surface for rolling out dough on. As to whether or not it is essential - that really depends on how often you make pastry or rolled cookies.

OK! A US quart is just a little over a liter, right? 10 kg/ 22 lb bag should take up close to 15 liters (15 quart) from what Prasantrin says, with 20 liters a more practical size, from what PastryGuru and Marya are saying. 50 lbs split into 2 containers - that sounds much more practical than one big container. Rolling containers sound even better. Not a commercial kitchen, just living in Japan, where packs of bread have 6-8 big slices, and flour comes in 2lb (1 kg) bags - the"big" 2 kg pack of bread flour is pretty expensive.

It's possible that Dampier observed the process in Vietnam, but got the words from an on-board interpreter who spoke some other South-east Asian language. I have yet to untangle the history of either type of product in Japan, but in Japan at least, the divide between focusing on the fish, and focusing on the sauce/brine may be quite old. This is only tangential to your query, but here goes, just in case it helps "map" the cultural area of the product in your mind. Both are used in Japan, but the fish are not allowed to rot right down into a paste (at least, I've never found such a product). In Japan, the brine is pretty much topped up with salt and water as needed, but not replaced, since the cultures living in the fishy brine are crucial for both flavor and preservation. One site says that cleaned and butterflied fish are dropped into the brine for two days and nights (this is brine kept at a controlled temperature, so it could be longer at natural temperatures). Then the fish are pulled out, drained, and dried in the open air, much like any other Japanese dried fish. Fish pickled in this fish brine and then dried are called "kusaya" - this is obviously a Japanese word, based on "kusai" (smelly, rotten). The brine itself, used as fish sauce, has several names in Japanese - shottsuru (probably salt + broth/liquid, written as fish + soy sauce), ishuru, ushiru (fish + broth/juice/liquid), etc etc. It's all but impossible to buy, although it appears to have been used as an easily made substitute for soy sauce until quite modern times).

I want to order 10 kg or 25 kg (roughly 20 and 50 lbs) of bread flour, and suddenly realized I don't know how big a container I'm going to need! My mother had a purpose-made tip-up bin that held a couple of kids and a cat, never mind bags of flour, so I don't have a clear idea of how much volume 25 kg (50 lbs) of flour occupies. Can anybody give me an idea of how big (measurements or volume in gallons, liters etc.) their bulk containers are, and how much flour they hold? Thanks!

Oh yes, pollen is FOOD! In New Zealand, raupo (typha orientalis) pollen is made into a kind of cake or bread. Scroll down to Raupo - Maori bread In Japan, a similar pollen (from typha latifolia, although typha orientalis also grows here) was used internally and externally to stop bleeding - it appears in a famous folktale, used to heal a cheeky white rabbit skinned by enraged and vengeful crocodiles!

By the way - just exactly how much animal protein are people thinking of when we talk about "less meat"? About a quarter of a regular meat-food serving? For example, a regular serving of 3 oz (roughly 85g) of protein provides nearly half to a third of daily protein (according to the usual estimates of 50-60g per day) - and that's without counting in other foods consumed at the same meal. So a "lite" meat/fish meal would use only around 20g (3/4oz) of meat or cheese, or an egg, 1 cup of milk or half a cup of yogurt, or a 1/4 to 1/2 cup of nuts or legumes per serving - does that sound reasonable? So what does this translate into? I guess a Japanese menu of rice, 1/2c vegetables simmered in dashi, 1/2c green vegetables with a sesame dressing, miso soup made with dashi, a few more vegetables and a couple of strips of fried tofu would more than measure up. With a few tiny dried sardine fry scattered on the rice or a pack of fermented natto soybeans, there would easily be enough protein even for an adolescent.