helenjp

I think I've finished baking fruit cakes - 6 cakes and 3 dozen muffin-sized cakes. I started thinking about the chocolate issue, and so included big chunks of dark 6% chocolate and lightly toasted walnuts in the muffin cakes. A nice variation! I am happy to report that even my advanced English class ate them (Japanese people are usually a bit wary about fruit cake). The beginners missed out, because they meet in the language lab, where food is forbidden (as I regularly have to remind them). The 3 fruit cakes that I took in for the other English teachers, however, kept getting kidnapped, though they finally made it to their intended destinations!

...does all this remind anybody else of Kage Baker's "Company" novels??? ...or is everybody else too cool to admit they read that stuff ?

Awa-mochi is usually just a thick polenta/porridge made of Awa (foxtail millet, italian millet), though it is sometimes mixed with mochi rice and made into mochi cakes. I think you could use Kibi (proso millet) though it isn't as glutinous. Popcorn: use sesame oil to pop the corn.

Glorified Rice, instead of rice "polenta", you might want to try other grains such as hie (barnyard grass, barnyard millet, Japanese millet, echinochloa esculenta) it has a good flavor and texture cooked polenta-style.

Miso is great in all kinds of things...out front in cakes (OK in cookies too, but inclined to burn easily), especially good in mellow, rich tasting spice cakes or fruit cakes. Good in pumpkin pie, ice cream, custard (anything rich, that is),and as you might imagine, good in hamburger or meatball mixtures too.

Yeah, I got curious enough about a query on a translation list to look into it, and so found the Suntory product too . But "spumoni" in English refers to a dessert, not a drink, so I was curious about what people would call it in English...if they had it! But I think they probably call it something boring like Campari Grapefruit Fizz I'm also mildly curious about why the drink became *so* popular in Japan - I believe that lychee liqueur cocktails have become popular elsewhere too, but in Japan it's called a Dita 'moni, and I'm pretty sure that's not what a tall lychee liqueur drink is called in English! Am I fond of that drink? No - I'm a little old for canned cocktails - at least, I'm pretty sure the young girls who dine on a packet of babystar ramen snacks and a can of shochu highball outside our local station probably wouldn't care for me to join them!

I'm pretty sure they *do* carry out doyou-boshi - Chinese umeboshi are not dried that way, and they look quite different. This recipe shows the normal pickling procedure, with honey and shouchuu used in addition to salt at the main pickling stage. I think that's the standard way to make honey umeboshi at home. I've never made them that way, because Tokyo summers are so hot these days that I think they would ferment very strongly! I'm sure the store-bought ones are intended to be eaten as a kind of confectionery, with tea. They are extremely sweet - even though I soak mine in honey, they still are nowhere as sweet as the ones you can buy! However, since I make my own umeboshi, even ordinary salted umeboshi seem very sweet to me.

Suntory made a hit with a canned cocktail called "Spumoni" made like so: 20ml campari, 30ml grapefruit juice, tonic water to taste. Since then, it's morphed into versions containing fresh fruit pulp or fruit juices, in particular DITA lychee liqueur. This combination of campari and grapejuice with a fizzy mixer - is it known under another name in English, or is this ladies' tipple strictly a Tokyo item?

They are dried, they're just soaked again afterwards usually! Some people seem to include honey with the salt right at the beginning. I soak ordinary umeboshi for a day or two (changing the water) to reduce the salt content, then dry them again, and soak them in honey. They are perfect for son2's bento, as he doesn't like the super-sour ones I make for my husband.

I don't see any need to freeze trifle in time - custard itself was an innovation at one point in the trifle timeline, and it's a whimsical sort of dish anway. So, to avoid the dreariness of making one's own birthday cake, I considered persiancook's ideas, and made a family (low liquor!) trifle. Base: Dab of custard, then sponge sprinkled with grenadine and pomegranate seeds. Mid-layer: baked pears (they were Good Stuff, nice pears received as a gift, peeled and cut in pieces, and baked very simply till the corners browned and the juice caramelized), Mid-layer: more cake, pear juices, peach brandy Top layer: Not-too-thick egg-yolk custard (I can't buy custard powder here, even if I wanted to make it from a box), so as to soak into the sponge a little and run down the sides. Topping: Whipped cream with pomegranate seeds mixed into it, and more pomegranate seeds and some toasted almond flakes over the top. I really think it needed silver cachous too, not to mention small gilded cupids , but we enjoyed it.

I agree on the planning thing! I plan in 3-4 day segments - that seems to be flexible enough to cope with last-minute changes. Chufi's "Don't use recipe books" is a great idea. When I got busy, I realized that it took me longer to find recipes than to cook, so I decided to memorize the information I needed, and leave the recipe books for relaxation reading or major missions. I made myself think about favorite recipes, and analyze what the flavors and techniques are actually contributing - then it was easy to substitute and adapt confidently. Memorizing proportions rather than quantities speeded up baking too.

George Lang's Cuisine of Hungary has a jokai soup recipe, and also has a beans and sauerkraut recipe that is good. In fact, he has a lot of great soup recipes, apart from the bean soups.

Heck, in Japan we have soy milk with...cocoa, coffee, roasted barley, green tea. Black sesame, powder of toasted soybeans (kinako), azuki, combination of toasted grains. And then the fruit ones such as ume (prunus mume), mango etc.

That type of sushi is normally called donburi-zushi, not just donburi, so I think there is a clear distinction between donburi and things that look like donburi but have major differences! You can dribble the sauce onto the rice before adding toppings and more sauce, but that's different from providing a separately seasoned rice base.

I have a bamboo oni-oroshi, and I use it frequently. I use it for a kind of rough daikon-oroshi salad, along with cucumbers, and for grating vegetables to make vegetable soup (even cabbage can be grated!).

WE have personal donburi! One son has a fox, and the other a badger (assigned according to personality! ), while I have a cherry-blossom one in recognition of the petal-softness of my character, and my husband's is a kind of Chinese arabesque pattern (karakusa) - but I choose to interpret it as 葛藤(kudzu vine and wistaria), since he's not a straightforward person. An ideas for favorite donburi? With people in and out of the house at odd hours because of school or late hours at work recently, I think our menus need more donburi!

I'm wondering if all the dried strawberries I'm seeing recently have taken processing fruit away from the frozen strawberry market . Dried apricots - (the "fat" type, not the thin chewy ones) Costco. Dried blueberries - available, but in small packets at high prices, because in Japan they are touted as being good for eyestrain and poor eyesight, so are popular with IT workers and students (and their mothers). Flour - even the big 1-3 kg bags have become harder to find (downturn in breadmachine popularity?), but a helpful local bakery could help you get the really big bags (the 7-10kg paper sacks).

Hiroyuki is right, most Japanese people use a solid roux to thicken and flavor curry. It's primitive stuff - brown onions and meat, add carrots and potatoes, simmer, thicken with roux, dollop onto rice. Done! The type you have is probably designed to taste "nostalgic", so yes, it will be very sweet. If you recall the "curries" of Edwardian cookbooks, I think you'll know what kind of territory you are in! Japanese curry is not gourmet food - it's always been a comfortable and cheap dish. While it was once a family treat because it contained chunks of meat, the emphasis was always on "family" treat, with plenty of onion and not too much meat.

That's interesting! I've been waiting for satsuma-imo to come down in price at our supermarket. Prices are high, and in fact they haven't had much in stock anyway.

Ohba, that sounds wonderful! My plan for next year's garden has only one item - cut trees! The garden is already shady, even when the ume trees (and all the rest of them...) are under control. Our garden is usually 2-3 weeks late, unless I start with seedlings instead of sowing seed. However, plants grown from seed are often more robust. Pumpkins...both zucchini and pumpkins sometimes fail to set seed at high temperatures - so summer this year probably suited your zucchini, but may have been too cool and cloudy for the pumpkin??? Maybe your soil was a bit acid for the beans? Japanese soil tends to be acid, and a little liming wouldn't hurt. I used to just use a shell mulch where I had beans, I think I've seen it sold with those little pebbles in Japanese home centers. You can also buy 石灰石 (sekkaiseki) or limestone as a sort of flaky powder. A retired farmer has converted his remaining field to allotments, and I'm tempted too...though I believe you have to carry water from your own home??

Hiroyuki, I wouldn't be sure that high menthol = best peppermint in every case! Menthol is a bit harsh - excellent for things like moth-repellents. All Japanese hakka has high menthold levels, but I don't know whether the ultra-high ones were the most popular in the past or not. I think so too. I'd probably check old herbal remedy companies to see if they had old records with illustrations, but that's a long shot! Maybe you have a nice Shiozawa cultivar! I would like to send photos of my strongest-smelling mint, but middle school boys tipped the pot out a few weeks ago, and it has only just started growing tiny new leaves again.

I'm pretty sure apples (and probably other fruit) are stored, but I haven't ever checked into artificial ripening here. I should do that before I make any rash statements but that will take a couple of days.

That really struck a chord with me! I was old enough to be making and bringing parts of Christmas dinner to my grandmother's table, but it would be wonderful to have had them as guests at my own table. I'd serve something just a little new, in a familiar style...smoked cod roe on tiny crunchy toasted baguette rounds, a salad of new potatoes, and a few barely-flowering shoots of "Autumn Poem" pak choy. Then we'd have a crown of lamb, in memory of the days when our Christmas roast was hogget, and with it some of Japan's many types of funghi, mixed with quickly boiled Chinese chives (a favorite dish of my son's), kumara (New Zealand sweet potato) cubed and fried very slowly in butter till crisp, and a small salad with a mustard dressing. There'd be barely room for dessert, but that would be strawberries and boysenberries with cream, with a scattering of meringue crumbs in memory of my grandmother's friend, a patient woman who always made the meringues that my bustling grandmother could never bear to leave in the oven long enough to reach perfection! I often think of people who stayed at an official inn in our neighborhood, on the road from Edo to Mito, and what they would make of the foods and cooking styles used by the people who live in the area today!

What I found on labeling regulations seemed to indicate that HFCS can simply be labeled "corn syrup" (or even less transparent names) in Japan.

高果糖コーンシロップ kou-katou koon shiroppu is it's official name in Japanese, but I wonder how many labeling sins are hidden under the word 糖類 (tourui - sugars)、and I think that what is known as 異性化液糖 (iseika ekitou, isomerized syrup. Isomerization, in case - like me - you wondered, converts glucose to fructose) also mostly refers to HFCS. This means that HFCS is not usually treated as a separate category in labeling or statistics in Japan, and I couldn't even find figures for annual consumption. In fact, a quick look at labeling regulations suggests that it's legal to label it as "starch", since that's what it's made from...I did only take a quick look though, so could be wrong. Apparently the US and Japan are the world's top producers of this stuff (according to UNESCO figures, can't find my source though...). It's also very widely used in vending machine soft drinks and sweetened canned coffee, but as you say, I don't recollect seeing it labeled as such.