helenjp

Good luck! I'm just waiting for a hunk of pork to cook, then I'll mix it with a yuzu jam I made a while back, and leave it overnight. I saved some boiled spinach from dinner - we had that with nori, while the bento portion might be dressed with sesame, or possibly mixed into an omelet (seasoning mix ready-prepared). Also from dinner was some sweet potato simmered with kiri-konbu (finely shredded dried kelp), soy sauce, and mirin. Rice is in the rice-cooker, with the timer set for the morning - and that's the bento done, unless I get enthusiastic and fry some eggplant in the morning. Sweet Dashi Seasoning Mix for Eggs (also for Nimono that you don't want to be totally dominated by soy sauce, such as pumpkin, tofu) 1 US cup (1.25 J cups, roughly) very strong dashi (use about 30g katsuobushi, i.e. triple strength) 200g sugar 50 ml mirin 50 ml sake 2 tsp salt 1/2 tsp soy sauce Simmer all together, allow to cool, squeeze katsuobushi dry. Keep liquid in fridge, and add 1 tsp to 1 tablespoon per egg for Japanese-style omelet dishes (less for usu-yaki soft omelet rolls, more for atsu-yaki firm omelet rolls). Don't toss the katsuobushi, fry it in a little sesame oil, add more soy and mirin if it seems to need it, add sesame seeds, sprinkle over your bento rice.

Yes - I was 30, and I remember that he was 38, because I persuaded his (much younger and more gullible) flatmates to bake a Big 4-Oh cake for what was actually his 38th birthday. No wonder his friends kept bailing me up in the kitchen and asking me if my intentions were honorable! All our entertaining seemed to involve food, probably because most of our friends were expat Japanese who wanted to eat nostalgic homestyle foods they couldn't get in restaurants - but also because I couldn't get out of the habit of cooking for crowds. I'm enjoying the tales, and noticing the effect that different lifestyles have - students and under-25s in New Zealand rarely lived in their own apartments when I was young - there wasn't a big supply of single housing. So going to your date's place for dinner usually meant chancing it with Mike's Very Strange Spaghetti along with all the other flatmates; while cooking for a date was never extravagant, because Romantic Candlelit Dinner for Two doesn't translate well into Pyromaniac's Special for Eight People Crammed Onto One Sofa.

The "spectacular" options I can think of would just be too much to do, when you already have a full Thanksgiving meal to organize. Easy options...some of the most elegant temple vegetarian cooking I know is served "stirfry" or "soup" style, but in fact the vegetables have all been cooked separately, then either mixed into the final sauce, or composed in the dish, and soup/sauce poured over - it really does look better that way, and avoids the "all tastes the same" problem. Make vegetables to scatter over the top of dishes in advance - cut inch-thick pieces of carrot or daikon (giant radish) and cut them out with small vegetable or cookie cutters, or trim lotus root into petal shapes, then cut into thin slices. Blanch, and drop into sweetened vinegar* and keep a day or two in fridge. If you can get lotus root, trim chunks into petals, slice, blanch, and into sweetened vinegar. Blanch snowpeas, keep in fridge. Soak dried funghi and simmer in heavily seasoned soup. Scatter a few pine nuts or other nuts too - and a small chrysanthemums (all edible) few twigs of non-toxic red and green leaves, pine needles, grilled funghi etc look pretty too. Sweet Mild Vinegar 2 tablespoons of mild vinegar (rice vinegar etc.) 1 tablespoon each of vegetarian stock and sugar 1.5 tsp soy sauce

My city has two ichiba - the one furthest away from us was advertising a festival later this month, so maybe it's a nationwide initiative! Snacks for the whole school - yes, that's about when most people I know go to the ichiba too. I have heard that it's a good place to get big bags of flour if you bake your own bread though. Thanks for all the photos - by the way, Hiroki, did you try the NZ Kiwano? I've never been sure how to eat them, though most people seem to use them in salads and sunomono as a kind of cross between cucumber and pomegranate.

Gosh, actual meals, and real restaurants!!! I don't remember the first actual time when my dear unintended and I shared a meal - we were both part of a group of Japanese-tour guides who used to hang out at a certain Chinese restaurant, eating well and telling tall stories about our travels..."You remember the lady who opened her suitcase and got undressed in the middle of the airport concourse?", "Nah, that's nothing, what about the guy who kept walking round with his pants down, asking everybody to try to figure out the combination on his money belt?!" I do remember that we usually ordered tofu steamed with prawn paste, until we got sick of sending them back because they tasted of bleach; and fish with black bean sauce. One day everybody else was late arriving, and dear unintended got drunk waiting - then proceeded to hit me over the head with his chopsticks, maintaining that all his troubles were due to my refusing to marry him. Hey what? Marry who? The first thing I cooked for him was a bento lunch when we were working together. He liked it so much that after that he got really obnoxious, ringing me up to put in orders for what he wanted in his lunchbox and telling me what to leave out. So I started bringing him McDonald's Fishburgers, pretending to mishear him when he asked for McFeast Burgers..."Want me to pick up a burger on my way back to the office?" "Yeah, sure, get me a McFest." "McFish? Gotcha." "McFeast! McFeast, I hate fish! Not McFish." "OK, stay cool, you want a McFish, I understand." "Noooooo!" First actual meal...he turned up late to a party I was giving, where all the food was laid out buffet style on a low table. Never one to catch discreet social signals, he sat down at one end of the table, pulled all the serving dishes towards him and polished every single one off, exclaiming how good they were. My other guests were so tickled at this strange sight that they just egged him on! Sorry to go on so long.

That's interesting! I have a small, Japanese table-top combined function/oven. I'm pretty sure it uses convection, though it doesn't say so in the manual - and I consistently find baking times are too long for my oven. I've always thought that it was partly because my oven was pretty airtight, and the small size meant that heat reflected very efficiently??

I've used them various ways, but my favorite is to dress them with sesame seeds, Japanese style. Just like the walnuts andiesenji recommends, nutty flavors seem to really complement carrot greens. Check the fronds, and pull off the outer ones if they look too tough or withered. Fresh green rather than really dark green is best. Cook quickly in boiling, salted water, refresh in cold water, squeeze, and chop into matchstick lengths or even shorter. Make "enough" sesame dressing: 2 parts soy sauce, 1 part sugar or mirin, 10 parts toasted sesame seeds. Start with say a half-cup of sesame seeds for around 3 carrot tops. Sesame seeds - traditional method: unhulled sesames shaken in a dry pan till they pop, then quickly tipped onto a cloth, and crushed with the back of a knife till about half the sesame seeds are crushed, then mixed with soy and mirin or sugar. Lazy m ethod: take ready-ground toasted sesame and add about half as much again of ready-toasted sesame seeds, add seasonings.

In this situation, I'd ask each difficult guest to bring one dish that s/he could eat him or herself, in a quantity of say 5 servings. If you prepare one other dish that would suit one or more special needs, then every person will have at least 2 things to eat. A bit minimalist, but does that sound workable?

So many good ideas! I have a set of cutters for making really small gingerbread houses - but never thought of using them for gifts. So much cooler than cookies - thanks! Potstickers: great, great, great gift for people with big freezers! And you pass the "good wife" test for the number of folds on your potstickers too. Aprons - I believe this is an item whose time has come round again. I'm considering ordering from here...or maybe drafting some in my sewing software. Reasoning: there's a need for "visitin' wear" aprons for community or school events etc, when every right-thinking Japanese woman is in a smart apron with a designer logo on it, and the social failures (=me) are in $3 numbers from the hardware store. I like to have a handtowel handy,so I add either a button to hang a looped towel from, or a kind of large, horizontal belt-loop for threading a towel through. Flavored salts - that's another great idea, maybe a tiny set with spiced salt, citrus zest salt, chili and spice salt, green tea salt... I asked my boys what they liked best to receive - they came up with HOMEMADE JERKY! That was their compromise on the question of "Gifts to eat now, or to eat later?". They were distressed by the idea of receiving food NOT intended for immediate consumption, and were all for cookies, breads, fruit cake, etc.

Yes of course, but once you get lamb and potato together, you are halfway to Mongolia, and rapidly leaving Japanese cooking behind you! Add cabbage or hakusai, nira, and some fat udon, flavor the broth with salt and ginger...

I guess the first requirement is that the flag be the focus of patriotic feeling - which isn't the case in all countries. In Japan the "hinomaru bento" was promoted during the war as a way to glamorize austere eating. I doubt you'll see people eating it on national holidays or festivals.

My chrysanthemums are just starting to flower, so Kiku-shu will shortly be made, probably with a "20" or "25" shochu. I hear that instead of using the fruit of western pears to make liqueur (normally with white liquor), you get a lighter, less viscous, and clearer result if you just drop the peels into a jar of liquor (and sugar to taste) whenever you have one. Run to your store, the season is nearly over! Here's something to surprise you - Murasaki-shikibu-shu! I see the neighbor has some hanging over the fence, positively obstructing the traffic, so I'll do my civic duty and report back in a few months. The berries have little taste, and purple colors tend to go blackish over time, but it's worth a small experimental jar. Murasaki-shikibu is Callicarpa japonica (Japanese beautyberry) and Ko-murasaki-shikibu is it's close relative Callicarpa dichotoma (smaller, weeping branches, probably what you have in your garden if you think you have C. japonica!). Oh yes, and the biggish red crab-apples currently in the shops (hime-ringo) make good liqueur too: 500g crab apples - wash, dry, and either leave whole and prick with bamboo skewer, or halve. 100g rock sugar 1-2 lemons to taste, zest and fruit only, discard pips and thickly peeled white rind 720ml "30" shochu or 900 ml white liquor

Pretty hard to figure out what somebody else ate, but could it be Japan's answer to Korean nori? Brush the nori lightly with sesame oil, sprinkle with a little dry-fried coarse sea salt (yaki-shio) and toast lightly. Apart from that, expensive nori is probably part of the answer - there is a lot of variation. I discovered that from the bottom up, by buying nori at discount groceries - it looks like and tastes like old, discolored, lace curtains. And then there was the black nori (the unpressed dried "clusters" of nori) that released red (dye???) into the water when I tried to make nori-chazuke out of it.

Absolutely what Sandy said, and also because it involves tangible "things" instead of the blizzard of words I normally live with. I like to grow what I can in the tiny space I have, and it gives me pleasure to pick things, anticipate and then make the planned dishes, and see if I can get them to the table without losing all the wonder of the simple and amazing fact that "plants grow". Cooking FOR somebody is also pretty therapeutic for ME, if not for the hapless recipient! For over a decade since she married my father in law, my mother in law has disparaged the dinners (and their manufacturer ) I took once or twice a week, but I kept taking them because I couldn't figure out any other way of maintaining communication, and the chopping and simmering made me feel I was at least trying. I couldn't stop myself, even though I had to admit that maybe she was right, and everything I made WAS really horrible! But a couple of years ago, she started throwing comments like "You're the only person who has ever cooked for me" in with all the put-downs. When I cook for her these days, it's like a kind of promise that I won't ever give up on her, cantankerous old fruitcake that she is!

NealH, thanks for the link - I've made similar recipes with soybeans in the past. Messy, but good! Why don't you try posting about bean snacks in the India forum for some more tips and recipes along similar lines?

The Takara Hon Mirin is a good choice, and readily available. And Hiroyuki, if you ever buy that 10 year old mirin, I should hope you don't bury it in equal quantities of soy sauce! I remember an Ariyoshi Sawako novel where the rather vain elderly mother insists that buying a good mirin to pat on her face and neck is as important as buying food, in postwar Tokyo.

You mentioned that the shortbread is crunchy and golden brown. With the high proportion of butter used in shortbread, I've noticed that "overbaked" shortbread someties seems greasier, as if the butter was no longer absorbed by the flour. I hope a more experienced baker can comment, because I don't want to send you off on a wild goose chase, but I think I'd go for a slightly higher sugar content and a longer baking time rather than a higher temperature, if I wanted more browning and crunchiness. (Hoping I'm not way, way, off target!)

They work with tofu, I have some pix of a tofu/chicken version I made last week, which I will upload, but you could also make them with tofu only.

What they seem to be saying is that you are on your own - which is true, the hardware and firmware are designed for and tested with rice. As for why they say that neurofuzzy would be better, I'm sorry I don't know the answer to that, although it would be interesting to hear their explanation. Regarding porridge, yes oats do froth up (though rice congee does froth quite a bit too), and for that reason, you never want to be cooking congee or porridge at maximum capacity if you can avoid it. As for 13 hours, well maybe ideally...but the coarseness and hardness of steel cut oats varies quite a lot according to brand. I've never had problems when they've soaked overnight (timer setting), in any case. That would be less than 13 hours, but then I'm not wanting steelcut oat porridge to be as soft as a rice congee!

The flowers on mine are gone as well... You can also make the liqueur without lemons. The dried flowers are sometimes added to Indian tea or the stronger Chinese teas too.

What was I thinking! The season is all but over, but you may still have a chance to make fragrant kinmokusei liqueur! 200-300g kinmokusei flowers, don't wash 200g rock sugar or 1 small cup honey to taste 1-3 lemons (zest and fruit only, peel white pith off thickly and discard that and seeds) 1.8 liters shochu or liquor of choice Kinmokusei= fragrant olive osmanthus fragrans var. aurantiacus

Link to Sazji's Quince Liqueur post in another thread...just to corrupt you away from healthy ideas like membrillo!

Hello schaefsn, hard to say whether neurofuzzy is better or not, without knowing the basis for the claim that you read! I haven't tried couscous, but I have cooked quinoa and steelcut oats in my IH ricecooker. For oats of any kind, I use the "porridge" (okayu or congee) setting. I also use the "porridge" setting for anything I expect to take a while to cook. For potatoes, I usually put a small amount of milk in the bottom of the rice cooker, add the potatoes and seasonings, and cook on a regular rice setting. I haven't tried cooking potatoes since I've had my current cooker, but if I had a doubt it would be about the pressure aspect not the IH aspect. There were some things that were easier to do with old rice cookers, because the settings were simpler, but I think that neurofuzzy machines are just as hard to fool as IH cookers. For example, cake in a modern rice cooker is not easy to cook if the machine reads the weight and either refuses to start cooking or assumes that cooking time should be extremely short - the really old machines simply cooked...

One happy thing about Japan is that the supermarket versions of French bread always end up in the discount bin . They are not so great fresh, but they make good sandwiches in South/Latin American style - split them, pull out some bread if needed, sprinkle with the juice from cut tomatoes, tuna can, pickle juice, vinaigrette dressing, whatever, then load 'er up with green beans, french fries, tomato, onion, big hunk of deep-fried mackerel, meat, boiled eggs, mayo, whatever, batten down the hatches with a sturdy wrap of foil, grill if you like, and off you go.

No better guarantee of quality!