helenjp

Still hemming and hawing about new oven - eventually I will cave and get one, I am sure. I tried baking paler shortbread years ago, and think it REALLY takes so much longer than you would expect. If you are baking at say 150 deg C or 300-325 deg F, be prepared for it to take 45 minutes instead of 15. When it's really nice and crisp all the way through, it's done, and shouldn't taste of raw flour any more. I think that twice-baked technique works particularly well with pale shortbread, especially if it is thicker than 1/4". Good luck! I knew I had started mine too high because the top was browning, yet the bottom had melted a little (that is, there was no longer a nice crumb structure). Even so, pulling it apart and rebaking it at a lower temperature helped a lot.

Yes, if you bake at a low temperature, you have to wait patiently until they are really baked, as they can firm up without the flour actually cooking if you are unlucky. I actually baked some shortbread for the first time in years, in my toaster oven, which has no thermostat. I used Japanese light brown sugar, ground almonds instead of the cornstarch/rice, and the toaster oven was a bit hot when I put them in, but they were definitely shortbread, and they lasted about as long as shortbread usually lasts. For the past few years it has become difficult to buy butter in Japan, but thanks to Valentine's Day, and no big baking demand again until Fall, this is a good time to find butter in the stores!

That's very interesting, thanks. I have lost the exact recipe, but "breakfast pancakes" made with breadcrumb/onion/bacon/parsley/egg should work in a waffle iron too, then.

This is interesting. I work in a building which houses about 4 different departments. I can tell who will get off the elevator at each floor from their clothing, and the kitchenettes on each floor are also very telling. Two floors below me, the kitchenette is crammed with a little table and a couple of chairs, a coffee maker, electric kettle, and small toaster-microwave. My floor's kitchenette has....a handtowel that I put there. I put a chair there, which disappeared from the kitchenette and reappeared on the agenda of the next departmental meeting. I don't cook anything more exciting than instant couscous in my office, but I do keep an elaborate tea and coffee set-up for visitors...the strawberry pot holds individually wrapped sugar cubes, and the enamel pot holds those individually wrapped Lotus cookies.

Is this a good place to ask about Weird Waffling? One day it occurred to me that I could make a waffle version of a Japanese okonomiyaki (savory pancake with very little flour and lots of cabbage and ginger, some pork) for lunchboxes. And then Indian pancakes make with ground urad dal and lots of herbs. And so on. The idea was that waffling them would allow me to use almost no oil (light spray on the waffle iron just for luck), and the texture would make up for any blandness caused by not frying the pancakes. The only hassle was chopping ingredients finely enough that the waffle iron would close properly, but other than that, I've enjoyed savory waffles with vegetables and besan flour (toasted chickpea flour) or semolina. Dal waffles are good but soaking and grinding takes time. Buckwheat waffles are still to come. Anybody else enjoying savory waffles?

Yes, I noticed that John's recipe was the same! Texture of the dough - I did think about how to describe that, but it's been so long. My family theory was that people whose hands were a little bit too warm for pastry-making were just right for shortbread. Mix the sugar into the flour(s), and then cut or grate the cold butter in, and rub in with the fingertips very patiently until the dough is like very coarse sand. When you use your hands to form it into a mass it should stick together with just gentle pressure. That description of a mass that cracks sounds perfect! Sugar will make the shortbread crisper, which counteracts the crumbliness that the butter causes. Without any sugar, the dough would just be hard (tough). Rice flour tends to be coarser than cornstarch or flour so it makes the shortbread dissolve into a sandy texture in your mouth. That's why I prefer it to cornstarch - cookies like Melting Moments (not the US style) "melt in the mouth", but to me, it feels as if they turn into a wodge of stodge. Caster sugar and fine sugar, yes, although the recipe said fine sugar, caster sugar is what we used. Flours. I checked the NZ flour protein content - aim for 7.5-10% protein content, preferably on the low end. But if your flour is on the higher side, just use a higher proportion of cornstarch/rice flour. Rice flour - after I posted, I suddenly realized why I only used about 2 oz rice flour. It's because I couldn't get western-style rice flour in Japan, and the local type is very finely milled, so using 4 oz made the dough difficult to amalgamate. 3 or 4 oz of western style rice flour should be fine. Sorry to be misleading. And baking temps - if your shortbread has a finely mottled or speckled appearance, the oven was too hot. But lots of people prefer it that way, and find the very pale type insipid, so bake it as long as you want!

Maybe the cornflour/cornstarch vs rice flour was originally a regional difference. My Scottish great-grandmother was a rice-flour purist, and her family came from somewhere in the western part of Scotland (an island??), and held such a strong influence over us that my sister and I thought the whole family was Scots in origin, until we noticed that the other family names were very far from Scottish! I can't test my recipe for you, sorry, as my oven is not working. When I dug out my mother's recipe book, covered in flowered oiled paper, I find that she has listed 8 oz flour + 3 oz cornflour (cornstarch), 6 oz salted butter, 4 oz fine sugar. I wonder if this is not her recipe, but somebody else's version that she wrote down as a curiosity, because she always used rice flour and spoke very scornfully of cornflour. I don't think I used more than 2 oz of rice flour though. I don't remember the exact oven temperature (325 deg F at most, maybe? Recipe says "very moderate, and I recall baking it at a lower temp. than my mother, but I've used a small convection oven here in Japan for so long that I can't give a good figure for somebody using a conventional oven). I used to chill the shaped cookies very thoroughly before baking as slowly as possible. The family thinking was that rolling, cutting and re-rolling was not a technique for shortbread - best to press, and failing that, pat out and roll just once or twice, then simply prick and cut into squares. Although the flour:butter:sugar ratio above is 4~5:3:2, I don't think that there is an exact "ideal" ratio, because apart from individual tastes, the water content of the butter, and the fineness of the flour and sugar will make a difference. Baking in Japan from NZ recipes was never difficult for me, but using US recipes designed for higher-protein flour usually required a lot of adjustment. I don't recommend reducing sugar content too drastically, because the texture will change. If you do cut down on sugar, though, you may find the rice flour texture better than the softer cornflour texture. "Shorties" were a richer cookie made with 9 oz flour, 6 oz butter, 5 oz sugar, 9 oz flour, and 1 t baking powder, baked like thumbprint cookies. Richer, but also much easier to make, and in my family, strictly an entertaining cookie, with no ritual significance at all!

A son brought me back a packet of 13-spice powder from Beijing a few years ago - when he went to buy some 5-spice powder, the shop assistant said that anybody who likes to cook would like the 13-spice blend better. I have to agree, although the 5-spice blend is good for cutting through very rich and oily foods, the 13-spice blend has more warmth...yet it's obvious that it belongs to the same family of spice blends!

Thank you so much! Your "city waking up" reminds me strongly of a section in the comic "Corridor" by Sarnath Banerjee, mostly set in Delhi/New Delhi, even though the cityscape there is more Muslim. Those front door/gate designs are made with chalk? I read somewhere that they were traditionally made with rice flour, as an offering to insects (and maybe birds?) and that this was one custom that some people still like to maintain in cities. When discussing traditions that are and are not maintained in cities, students were really puzzled about this, trying to figure out how "attracting insects to a food source" could fit in with urban life. Puzzle solved! By the way, I don't see that many women in your photos, except around market stalls. Is that the impression that you get when you are actually in the streets? And is it any different in Kerala from Tamil Nadu? Thank you for the Kerala photos too, I have often wondered how different those regions would be.

I first heard of the Pongal festival a couple of years ago - really interested to see what is going on! I get the impression that food in Tamil Nadu is the closest Indian food to SE Asian food, Really interested to see the food, the people, the shopping and the festival - thanks for showing us.

Thanks! That looks similar to the DJI Osmo Mobile mount, which has an app that can automatically track the presenter. What amazes me is the tendency for food videos to NOT have dialog or narration - just video to a BGM track with occasional labels displayed.To me, this seems to make video very passive. I know it's a hassle to add narration - do you think it's worth it, or is the image really more important for food videos than for other types of video? Video from Strictly Dumpling This is a "traveling" video that shows a variety of foods in different locations. It's fairly long, but I think the way he mixes visual media is good, and his narration is great! Sugargeekshow no narration BGM Video and BGM, no narration. Edited to pace the video. But without narration, it's hard to grasp the purpose of the video? Trailer for SugarGeekShow This must be a model for 1" video - mix-up of talking head and food video, seamlessly stitched together with the continuous narration. Unedited video of restaurant visit with BGM And just for contrast, a really simple short video, using the DJI Osmo mobile mount, no narration. There is a very short exterior shot to set location, but no real sense of context or purpose. Not intending to dis the person who made this video, it is just very interesting to see what a difference experience makes.

The thread on youtube plagiarism brought up comments on the power of video, reminding me that *you* people are just the people to ask about smartphone video. Smartphone photos of food, the lighting of, the composition of, is one thing, but video brings audio into play. I am really curious - if you felt comfortable videoing on a smartphone, would you prefer video to still photos and text? And why don't we make more self-playing "presentations" that allow us to text, narration, video clips, and stills? I have been thinking hardest about 1) lighting for interview videos, 2) audio-recording for interview or narration videos, and 3) processing. I'm still trying to figure out the simplest way to get good audio, and I'm especially interested in things that people can jump right into, so I've been looking at the WeVideo app for editing. Apple or droid, I don't mind, let me know what you like to see, what you want to make, and what you think!

Love your lidded nimono - it looks so pretty in a deep container. Kobumaki - I tried it with the herring and other fillings, and we finally decided that we really just like the kombu rolls without the filling! I used to make a recipe that cooked chicken drumlets and kobumaki together (but served separately). That was tasty, but the chicken-simmered kombu really doesn't keep well. Kuchinashi - it's possible to make quite yellow sweet potato without it, as long as you soak the cut sweet potato in several changes of water, and then when you cook it, replace with fresh cold water at least once as it comes to the boil (you can even repeat that step for perfection!). You served your kinton "chakin-shibori" style? They look so cute, and easy to eat too. Talking of amanatto, my favorite thing to do with left-over black beans (if cooked, I just drain them and rinse a bit, if dried, cook first) is to make a yellow okowa with sticky rice and kuchinashi and black beans. I add the cooked black beans at the end, to keep the colors separate, and it would work perfeclty with amanatto. It's what we often have for the first obento of the year!

I used to work in a Chinese grocery way back when. In English, we called this type "cloud ear". This is what I think is in your photo, though the underside is hard to see. "Cloud ear" (Japanese kikurage = "wood jellyfish", but written with the characters for "wood ear", which gives you some idea of how closely related cloud ear and wood ear are) and the pale "snow" or "jelly" fungus or mushroom (Japanese shiro-kikurage "white cloud ear/wood ear) are usually almost the same color on both sides when dried, and more translucent when soaked than wood ear. I think they expand more than wood ear. Wood ear have a dark top side and a slightly fuzzy pale underside. There is a special name for this "light underside" type in Japanese, but they are not common here, so they are usually called "black wood/cloud ear" (kuro-kikurage). They are usually a bit cheaper than cloud ear, but in many dishes where they are shredded, it is possible to sub one type for another. One reason why people are so eager to call everything by the same name is that the translucent type used to be called Jew's ear in English.

Yuzu vodka! Cool! In Japan I make yuzu-shu with a mix of yuzu and lemons (about twice as many yuzu as lemons) and shochu (alcohol about 35%). Japanese recipes say to take the peel out after around 10 days....if you peel it really thinly as for limoncello, you could probably leave it longer. If you use sugar, rock (candy) sugar dissolves much better than granulated sugar, which tends to form a layer at the bottom of the jar). Happy tasting!

We ate our dinner instead of photographing it, silly of me... * Kwati soup (Nepali bean mix from the Nepali shop that opened up nearby). It's a little bit hot and spicy, and the combination of different beans gives it more depth than some bean soups. We've had it most weekends this winter - I'm addicted. * Coconut rice * Fresh sardines butterflied and soaked in salt water, then sprinkled with turmeric, fried crisp, and served with lemon and fresh coriander herb. * Japanese naga-negi (leek-like dividing onions) sauteed with bok choy and steamed, served with little ado. Broccoli - been thinking of broccoli and potato all week, so yesterday's dinner was cubed potato sloooow-fried till crispy in a bit of olive oil with garlic, then allowed to cook through with broccoli florets and chunks of grilled salt yellowtail (instead of bacon). It was good!

Probably not the same as "long green pepper"...shishito are not pointed at the end - they are boxy, like the bottom of a bell pepper.

Yes, that's why - brown rice doesn't keep as well. But on the other hand, traditionally people kept their rice unhulled, and just hulled and polished enough to be going on with. And there is and was considerably variation in how much polishing people give their rice. I buy (hulled) brown rice, and polish it just before washing and cooking it. It cooks up to a soft white color, not the blinding white of fully polished rice, and you can just see the remains of the germ on the grain. The bran is useful too, for pickling and for keeping our compost active and in good condition.

I have a few recipes that I only use at New Year...there is one recipe for sweetened sweet-potato paste that I use because it does not recommend rice-malt syrup and other extremely sweet ingredients. However, every now and then I forget that the reason it is not too sloppy or too sweet for our family is because I only add half the recommended amount of regular sugar syrup. Oops! Other than error, the only reason I can think of for the ridiculous amount of syrup in the recipe is that the original must have used a particularly floury type of sweet potato. Add this to the long list of starch-based recipes that are extremely sensitive to local ingredients and conditions!

Osechi (food for New Year in Japan) for 2017 The jubako (lacquered set of boxes) has: Vegetables on the bottom layer (burdock root with ground sesame, kelp rolls, devil's tongue root twists, asparagus, simmered dried shiitake mushrooms) Meats in the middle layer (my husband's favorites - ham, nibuta pork roll, thickened omelet roll, and vinegared chrysanthemum petals and turnip slices). This layer doesn't look very decorative, does it! Mostly traditional goodies on the top layer (black beans in syrup, octopus in vinegar, datemaki egg and fish paste "cake" roll, chrysanthemum greens with sesame, sujiko salted salmon roe, vinegared little shad fish pickled in millet, steamed grilled fish-cake, honey gravlax, squid and salted smelt roe The lid of the box - it has a pine tree motif. Sweet potato mashed with syrup and mixed with chestnuts....I absent-mindedly forgot a step, so it's not as yellow as it should be. Dishes of vinegared shreds of daikon giant radish and carrot, topped with sujiko salted salmon roe Sticky rice and red cowpeas, topped with toasted sesame seeds and salt Clear chicken and dashi soup with fish sausage, chicken, snapper, carrot, sato-imo (a type of taro), daikon giant radish, Japanese dividing onion naga-negi, mustard greens, fish sausage, and dried shiitake mushrooms...but no grilled mochi (rice cakes) this year.

Anna, regarding cramming things in, I did think hard about the wisdom of doing so, but decided that 1) there was only a cup or so of liquid at the bottom, and 2) the chicken itself was not forming a solid mass in the pressure cooker. It turned out well, and I later realized that I'd seasoned it pretty much along the lines of Claudia Roden's sofrito chicken. Jane Grigson version of Hindle Wakes I cook them rather like this, that is, they are not roasted, but I also like less stuffing - a smaller amount of prune-intensive stuffing is better. It seems to suit small birds too.

My husband is completely mystified by the "cook large lump of meat in December" thing. I bought a whole chicken cheap on Boxing Day, and it is currently in the pressure cooker, waiting for the pressure to drop. Took some hard work to cram that thing in there (after browning and re-seasoning) along with a ceramic trivet which I think must have come from some long-dead rice-cooker, and even more work to get the pressure cooker lid shut on the last branches of rosemary (husband also likes me to reduce the rosemary to about 10% of its natural girth every fall). However, over the decades of living in Japan, I've come to quite like pot-roasted chicken. Hindle wakes in the rice cooker, pot-roasts in the pressure cooker - they are all good! Duck - suddenly able to buy duck from Nepali stores that have sprouted around our neighborhood. They are tasty, and they DO produce such a surprising amount of fat. The size makes them much more useful for me than a pig-sized chicken, and the dark meat goes really well with all kinds of Asian noodles.

My tiny garden happiness is that some self-seeded parsley has come up! Since my parsley grows on our north-facing front steps, it doesn't always set good seed, so I'm very happy to see the next generation. I'm out of the house about 14 hours most days, so rarely get into the back garden, but over new year I intend to dump the oldest compost around the drip line of our Japanese plum trees (p. mume, fruiting type), just to help things along come blossom-time. Best compost discovery has been that home-polishing brown rice produces a fine bran which is not only good for pickles, it keeps the compost heap clean and busy too. My spring "edible salad" plants always include nasturtiums, and for some reason, they are still flowering! Since I have so little time for our rather shady garden, I am all for leafy food plants which are next door to weeds - tetragon, Malabar spinach, garlic chives, chameleon plant and so on.

Very interesting, and Blue Dolphin thanks for the photo, I was indeed wondering what an unfiltered white would look like. Being a good Kiwi lass, I know very little about French wine, so this is all interesting to me.

Settled but not filtered makes a lot of sense, thank you.