helenjp

Whew, I was waiting for somebody else to say that first! Some people seem to be happy with using Asian pears for baking, but I've found they tend to get flabby rather than soft, they turn slightly gray, and they lose their flavor. On the other hand, that mild, juicy, crunchiness makes them great in salads or cold soups - lots of good Korean recipes, if you care to ask on the "elsewhere in Asia" forum. (My recipes are Japanese-Korean!).

Here in Japan, the gourmet shochu (a distilled rice spirit) boom has affected the availability and price of sweet potatoes. For years I've been using sweet potatoes as a substitute for rice (to which I have a low-level allergy), but this year, there have been times when I can't find any in the shops. At least the shochu boom has made sweet potato too expensive to be used as biofuel! Biofuel in Japan is mostly made from imported palm or jatropha. Rapeseed is about the only domestically grown crop likely to be used for biofuel, and world prices for rapeseed, soy, and corn oils have already caused a 10% rise in the price of Japan's well-known traditional condiment, mayonnaise. This was the only food-price increase that received major media coverage this year! We are also told that natto and tofu made from "premium" domestic soybeans will go up in price, because a rise in the price of imported soybeans "necessarily" causes a rise in the price of premium-quality domestic beans, because the price premium is linked to the price of the standard product. I wonder how widespread this kind of thinking is?

I hope this doesn't sound pontifflicatin'... I guess volume/"packet of" works fine as long as cooking is being done in a fairly closed community whose members cook and eat much the same way. If outsiders like me want to use an American recipe, they have to adapt. OK. But...eGullet is just one of the causes and effects of the increasing ease of access we have to kitchens, cooks, and cookbooks around the world. If that's a good thing, then recipes should be more accessible. If it's not, well, furriners can continue to be warded off with sticks of butter ! On a practical level, it may surprise some Americans that a lot of their cooking is unfamiliar outside America - and while an American can bake brownies in another country using different flour, differently granulated sugar, and guesswork to approximate the measurements, I can't do it very well from a traditional American recipe, since I don't know too well what a brownie should be like! How many people are there like me using US cookbooks these days? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? I have two big US baking books I bought when I lost ALL my recipes in a computer crash just after arriving in Japan. One was by Rose Levy Berenbaum, and I still use it a lot. The other was by...heck, who was that? It must be somewhere on my shelves still, but I got sick of wondering whether Japanese flour required less liquid, or whether I'd made a mistake in my extensive, time-consuming penciled-in conversions from the volume/packet measurements - with the Berenbaum book I had a baseline to start from whenever I had questions like that.

Rather you than me! Thank you for your sacrifice!

Not sure about nordicware specifically, but I've found - twice, yes, I'm that stupid - that heavy, moist cake seems to permanently affect nonstick finish. Once was a fresh fruit cake, the other time was a traditional fruitcake cooked at low temperature for a long time. Maybe just bad luck, but I had no trouble when I used silicon paper to line the pans first. I did have trouble when I used pans without lining them (tube pans). P.S. Thanks for the heads-up on cooling pans, Rona, that could explain the fruitcake problems, as I often cook several batches, and want to re-use the same pans as quickly as possible. Nonstick spray...it's hard to get in Japan, and I only bought my first can ever last year - and certainly have had trouble with nonstick pans in the past 2 years that I never recall having before. Could be related...

Yacon was a bit of a fad here in Japan for a while, and can still be found fresh in supermarkets now and again, but to me it tastes unpleasantly of dahlias (they are related). Does the dried root have the same harshly aromatic taste? (Maybe I'm asking the wrong question - people often say yacon is almost tasteless apart from some sweetness, but I don't find it so). Yacon and sunflower roots both have some inulin, and it was researched here in the '90s, but reading about it in Japanese, I get the impression that inulin content is not as high as researchers originally expected. In Japan, the focus these days is more on the high galacto-oligo saccharide content - this type of sugar is supposed to favor "good" intestinal flora. I don't know what the other health benefits are.

I'm impressed! I'll be showing my homegrown engineer Peter's alternative use for drill presses (maybe this is what a bar for engineers should look like?). I don't think I have the Chinese moon-cake press that I carved years ago anymore - not hard - you carve the design in heavy relief on one piece of wood and insert a couple of pegs, then just make a circular hole in another piece of wood (plus holes for the pegs of course) and fit them together. My Dad used to replace broken plastic knife handles with nicely finished wooden ones. A pair of pliers and a strong wrist will make custom cookie cutters out of empty cans, but they are strictly disposable - too bulky to store.

Seems to be getting worse over the past 2-3 years - I turned over a packet of particularly strange looking "negi toro" maki at a supermarket once, and the list of ingredients included gelatin and beef fat.

Tare or sauce for yakitori There are easier ways to make tare, but this is particularly tasty, and has a good consistency without being floury. trimmings from chicken ml mirin ml soy sauce 2 spring onions, or green half of negi or dividing onion chili pod garlic clove g demerara or raw sugar Chicken trimmings - ideally about 4 wingtips, but any chicken part with plenty of skin, cartilege, and bone, but not much fat, is perfect. Grill chicken trimmings and onion until some browning shows. Bring mirin, soy sauce, garlic, and dried chili to the boil. Stir in sugar. Add chicken and onion. Simmer for around 30 minutes - a larger batch will take around 2 hours to achieve a slightly gelatinous syrupy texture and plenty of chicken flavor. Cool and store in a narrow glass jar - ready for dipping skewers of grilled chicken in. Boil up "tare" after every use, and strain and add remaining tare to any new batch that you make up. Keywords: Hors d'oeuvre, Sauce, Japanese ( RG2040 )

Tsukune Chicken Paste Serves 50 as Hors d'oeuvre. This chicken meatball paste can be formed around skewers, boiled, used to fill vegetables, or fried/baked in patties between sheets of nori or green perilla leaves. Go ahead and make the full amount, then freeze the g ground chicken g ground pork g chicken fat if needed, finely chopped g sesame seeds, toasted, or finely chopped chicken cartilege from breast eggs shiso (green perilla) leaves, finely chopped g finely grated fresh yama-imo (or 1 sachet dried) onion, chopped salt, pepper to taste Soak chopped onion in cold water - chop fairly finely, but allow some texture to remain. Season meat, and knead well until pasty. Ideally, use ground chicken from the tastier sinewy thigh areas. If the ground chicken is from breast meat, add some chicken fat. Mix in lightly beaten eggs, shiso leaves, grated yama-imo, sesame, and cartilege if used. Knead until paste forms one smooth mass. For skewers: Keep hands very wet, and form at least 2 tablespoonsful orf mixture around a wide flat skewer, or two skewers used together. Either place on a heated grill or on a greased piece of foil layed over the hot grill. Don't turn until pretty well done, as this mixture is soft. When nearly done, dip into a narrow jar of yakitori "tare" or dipping sauce (separate recipe)and grill briefly to finish. Repeat the process if you wish. Alternatively, wrap some mixture in a green shiso leaf or sandwich between two pieces of nori seaweed and fry or grill - good lunchbox fare. For meatballs: Have a pot of simmering water with a little soy sauce and mirin in it ready. Form meatballs with very wet hands and drop into water. Leave for about 1 minute after they rise to the top, and remove with a slotted spoon, drain and cool. Skewer and dip in "tare" before grilling to finish. Stuffed peppers: Halve small Japanese green peppers, remove veins and seeds, fill with mixture and grill, brushing meat with "tare" if desired. Keywords: Easy, Hors d'oeuvre, Chicken, Japanese ( RG2039 )

I keep forgetting how many options you have. In Japan, it's not till senior high school that you have any choice, up till then it's "everybody the same" unless there is a pretty big reason why not! So what improvements has the new head of catering made, and what kind of lunches do you make to take to school? Sorry for all the nosy questions, but you know, it's the details that count!

Hi Ce'nedra... about the photos 1) I think this might be a soft diet for an elderly person 2) This looks like the kind of menu you would see in a restaurant with okayu 3) This looks as if it might be Chinese influenced. Egg in okayu...I think most people would mix it in??? I forget who taught me to make Chinese congee, but I was taught to soak the rice, then grind it a bit to break up the rice grains - Japanese okayu isn't cooked particularly fast, but you should see very soft and swollen grains floating in a thickened, translucent gruel. You can actually cook okayu in tea - very nice when you are cold and tired! Sweet potato okayu...it's not sweetened like Chinese dessert soups, and I think Japanese sweet potato is not quite as sweet as US sweet potato - but if you see NZ kumara in Sydney, it may be a little sweeter than that. Usually the sweet potato is cut into cubes and cooked together with the okayu - but not a huge amount, just enough to add interest to the okayu.

Your son certainly has a healthy appetite! It's getting hard to find non-kaiten sushi shops around here, unless they are the ultra expensive kind. I'm surprised to see coffee at a sushi shop though - were you surprised, or am I out of date?

Zosui has the big advantage of being quick! Chinese style congee is popular in Japan, including congee made with medicinal ingredients, but the preferred texture of Japanese style congee or "okayu" is a bit different since it is made with short-grain rice. Just add either 3 times, 5x, 7x, or 10x as much water as raw rice, bring to the boil and cook rapidly for a while, then allow to simmer till done. You don't have to use white rice, you can use brown rice, or a mixture of white rice and other grains. Of course, anything salty, such as ikura, goes well with okayu, and rykomatsu's tasty-looking recipe for snapper is popular too. Umeboshi and other pickles are probably the most common when eating at home, and so are nori, ginger, and sesame seeds. Okayu is also popular with fresh herbs in it - you can blanch them and add them to congee just before serving, but I like to chop them finely and rub a litle salt into them, then squeeze out any bitter juices before dropping them in the congee. I think that 1 part rice to 7 parts water is about right forthis style of okayu. You can also make a thick okayu and then thin it with milk, and simmer for about 10 minutes - good for okayu with seafood or beans. You can cook the okayu together with other starchy ingredients such as satsuma-imo (Japanese sweet potato), various types of yam, or azuki or other beans, but usually they are cooked separately and added to the cooked okayu, to avoid discoloring the rice. Sweet potato okayu is a favorite in my family.

This is a tangled web in both English and Japanese, but as far as I know: What's called "marumero" (marmelo) in Japanese is the Persian (European) quince, Cydonia oblonga. (Sometimes it's called "something else oblonga", but same thing). That's what membrillo is made from, and is much less harsh-tasting. The fruit is slightly fuzzy, and bumpy. Even Japanese people regularly confuse them and call both marmelo and karin, "karin". Photos of marmelo flowers and fruit What's called "karin" in Japanese is Chaenomeles sinensis (sometimes Pseudocydonia sinensis, "Chinese quince", "flowering quince"）. These tend to be much sourer and more acrid than the true quince. The skin of the fruit is smooth, and the fruit are more regularly shaped than the true quince. Wikipedia "karin" entry Chaenomeles speciosa, "boke" in Japanese. My grandmother had a plant she called "japonica", and made a beautiful red jelly from it, as it has a lot of pectin - but whether she should have called it C. speciosa, or a C. speciosa cross, or C. superba, or C. lagenaria, or C. laganaria...who knows. It has thorns, usually red flowers (sometimes orange or white, but sturdy round petals and not like the elegant pale pink flowers of true or flowering quince), and is smaller than "karin". This blog talks about jam from "flowering quince" but the plant shown looks like some type of boke. Non-alcoholic recipes for Karin Syrups Karin honey extract recipe in Japanese - clean but don't peel karin, quarter karin and remove and reserve seeds, slice karin into a clean jar, put seeds into one of those big teabags used for mugicha (although since you're going to strain it later, why sweat...) and add to jar, cover with liquid honey and set aside for 1-2 months, stirring occasionally to make sure all fruit spends some time in the honey instead of floating on top. Strain out fruit and seeds, bring honey to the boil once to prevent fermentation, and store. Don't worry if honey crystallizes during storage. Add hot water and drink, especially good for sore throats. Local greengrocer tells me it's a good idea to add a bit of shochu or white liquor when making these, to avoid fermentation and improve extraction. Use roughly equal weights of honey and karin, though you may need up more honey to cover (up to 2 parts honey: 1 part karin is fine). Add about a 1/4 cup of shochu per jar, more if you wish. Karin Syrup (much like Ume Syrup) 1 kilo of karin, 1 kilo of rock sugar, 1/2 to 1 cup good mild vinegar or white liquor Layer fruit and sugar in a clean jar, pour over vinegar or spirits, leave about 1 month until sugar has melted and liquid risen. Strain and bring to boil once if you want to store it for a while. Dilute with hot or cold water to drink. Jam or Membrillo from Flowering Quince Fruits I have made a batch of extremely acrid/acidic jam from this fruit in the past, and if at all possible, I would use marmelo fruits for the following recipes. I think you would always get a stronger tang from flowering quince fruits than from marmelo. However, if you want to use them for candy, jam, or membrillo, leave them till they are dead ripe, on or off the tree (doesn't even matter if they get a few brown spots, you can always cut them off - this is true for boke fruit as well, but ten times MORE true for karin fruit). Karin Jam - Japanese recipe Even the author comments that some "shibumi" or mouth-shriveling bitterness remains. Clear Jelly (This is my bet for avoiding bitter aftertaste - membrillo is likely to be the bitterest, as it contains the minced fruit in a concentrated form) 1 kg karin fruit, or boke if you can get it 350g sugar (any more and the jelly turns darker) water Clean but don't peel fruit, quarter and remove seeds, slice neatly. Tip into pan, barely cover with water, simmer 20-30 mins (make sure fruit is well cooked, I think). Put a colander with a clean cloth (sterilize in a pan of boiling water) in it over a pan, tip fruit in and allow juice to drain naturally - don't press, or the jelly will become cloudy. If you are my grandmother reborn, turn a stool upside down and tie a cloth by its corners to each leg, with a bowl underneath it, and strain fruit through that, to avoid any taint of metal. Reserve fruit for next recipe. Add sugar to juice in pan, and boil till foamy and at setting point. (Stick a saucer in the fridge when you start cooking, when the foam has got past the roughest stage and has "eyes" in it, drip a little onto the cold saucer and tip - if it wrinkles slightly on top, it will slet. Alternatively, when you hold up a spoon from the liquid and it forms 3 drips along the side which slowly run together before dripping off, the jelly is at setting point.) Jam from reserved fruit Take the reserved fruit (around 600g), trim off the peels, put in a food processor with a little water. Tip into a pan with 500g sugar and simmerl, stirring well, till the color is a rich rose-pink, and pot. Despite the dire warnings about sugar proportions in the previous recipe, another recipe gives these proportions for karin jelly, 1 part by weight fruit, 2 parts by weight or volume water, 1.5 parts by weight sugar. Recommended sugar for really clear jelly is a coarse, crystalline sugar like "granule" or "white zarame". The first recipe says that if you include seeds, the jelly won't set well, but that has not been my experience, and the second recipe suggests that after you trim any bad parts out of the fruit, you simply chop it up, peel, fruit, and seeds all together - if you don't want to use the fruit for jam or paste. P.S. Rona, in my area the karin are still green on the trees, and the green grocer was shocked! Just shocked! that I would even ask about karin when it's still October - so it might be good to wait till the fruit on your tree are a nice buttery gold color before you make your move.

The moment I heard of this, I thought that feijoa was just born to be marinated in spirits. From where I am now, I can only dream, so can somebody please tell me if it's any good?

My golly gosh! Adelaide has a population of around 1 million right? The photos you show look like a comfortable crowd. Anyway, as for yakitori degustation, it's just too easy to make your own, so stick your nose in the Japan Forum.

FYI: Special Feature in this month's (November) NHK Kyou no Ryouri magazine on how to fillet mackerel.

As you know we all shop together (wouldn't it be fun if we could)... My everyday lists are: emails like this one to and from my husband *では餃子のかわを買って帰る。 (So I'll buy potsticker pastry sheets on the way home.) * Emails to self - hard to read the screen on the run... * whiteboard on fridge. Subject to sabotage from people wanting to write notes about lack of socks (look on your own bedroom floor, kid) or the words to their favorite songs. - back of old receipts, old envelopes, but must be cut neatly to receipt size! For special occasions, obsessive as it is, I get out the colored pencils (from 2003 New Year notes) This one says "4 ebi (prawns) and 1 sausage", reminding me that my brother in law was with us, and my younger son hated prawns. Normally I write the ingredients above each sketch, and keep a running total of common ingredients at the bottom of the page. However, if the picture is detailed, I often don't need to write anything to remember what I need - I picked this page because it actually had words on it! (But the pix aren't as pretty ). The note on the left was scribbled standing up in the church kitchen, and is a shopping and prep list for takikomi gohan (rice cooked with seasonings and vegetables). I have no shame, I write in English or syllabic script, not going to write "prawns" in characters without a good reason! Doesn't anybody else color their shopping lists in?

Tae.lee that was great, made me wish I were there to actually check out those stalls! Do you have any idea how many people went through the event?

I think you have to be extra careful to "separate" the somen as you drop them into the boiling water. - just sort of rain them down in an endless curtain of somen! I don't measure the time, I drop about half a cup of cold water into the pot twice as it comes back to the boil. Three times it the norm for dried noodles, but some somen are very fine and don't need that long - test after the second lot of cold water, and decide whether or not they are ready. I agree, always drain and rinse. I find it takes too long to cool a good amount of noodles under the tap - drain and dump in a bowl of cold or even iced water, rubbing the noodles together as if you were washing them - they won't break up. I dump noodles into cool water once, even when I'm going to use them in a hot dish (there are hot somen dishes ). You can then drain again and continue under the tap or with a fresh bowl of cold water if you want. Having them in a bowl of water rather than under the tap makes it easy to grab some noodles and arrange them nicely on the serving dish (where I cunningly conceal a few ice cubes in summer). For family use, a bowl of iced water with a seasonal leaf or flower floating on it is a perfectly fine serving dish for somen.

I'm inclined to think that it was caught legally if it lists both the area where it was caught and the area where it was produced - the people who don't fish legally are not the ones who advertise where they fish! It is a huge issue though.

Speaking of which...considering how many vegetarian families there seem to be in the UK, what do schools do about "elective" special needs?

I've been thinking about non-allergenic cakes recently, and liked banana the best of the egg-substitute tricks I tried - give the banana a really good thrashing in the beater to aerate it. Use banana to substitute not just the eggs, but any other liquid in the recipe (apart from oil or honey, of course). 1 lage banana would be the equivalent of 2 eggs, but if possible, use a minimum of 1 banana per cake recipe. I also added a tiny bit of baking soda (about two pinches per cup of flour). What about adding ground almonds as a partial substitute for the cocoa? Almonds would help enrich the flavor a little, as oil cakes seem to need plenty of flavor: the banana not only produced a good texture, the family voting panel immediately voted it first choice for flavor. I haven't tried it yet, because banana and oil create a nice moist texture, but suspect that syrup or honey instead of sugar may be another way to counteract the hard, dry texture eggless cakes can get. Another "fix" for eggless cakes where you don't want the banana flavor is to keep them thin (or slice them), be very generous with filling (drizzle with something nice before layering with filling, too), and leave them to sit for a while before serving. Orange almond cake (banana substitute) is extra tasty with orange syrup poured over the hot cake. If I could buy polenta or cornmeal (or heck, even some farina or semolina), I'd try a banana-raised middle eastern syrup cake version for you, because cornmeal has so much flavor that you will never miss the egg flavor. A little almond flour helps these too - google "almond polenta syrup cake" if you want an eggy recipe to tweak!

I guess so...I always feel as if I'm committing robbery! I haven't seen them in stores, and in fact thought there were fewer "teabag" style dashi products on the shelves just recently. Maybe that will change as the weather gets cooler.