helenjp

Glace fruit - can be found at upmarket department stores and fruit boutiques, at upmarket prices. Recently I see glace kiwifruit around. It's worth glaceeing a little citrus peel - I sometimes freeze the peel in later winter and spring, and glacee it as needed. For baking purposes, you can be a bit more slapdash about the process. Sometimes I add shredded fresh ginger, to add a bit more variety.

Bump. Lots of good reading here!

UsI've seen cheese UNDER the pasty lid, but I plan to try this cheese crumble topping. Looks like something that one tweak would take a long way - any ideas?

I still like the simplicity of Swisskaese's recipe, but I also like to make redsugar's kuchen and top it with a mixture of slightly-drained yogurt and crumble - makes a nice, not-too-sweet breakfast.

Apple dumplings! I'm thinking of making some home-made marzipan to soak up juices and make a tasty layer between apple and pastry. Bad idea?

Bump! Any particular apple varieties that you particularly like to use in certain apple dishes?

Prasantrin, for baking fruit cakes in Japan, I really like the disposable paper cake pans. They don't conduct heat as well as a metal pan, so a small cake in a small oven doesn't dry out badly. I can only buy one size of round paper cake pan, and I think that your ingredients would make a smallish cake in one of these??? I think I usually make a 2-cake batch which is around double the size of your recipe... I sometimes douse the sweeter dried fruits such as pineapple in boiling water before soaking it in alcohol, as it is so very sugary.

Consider yourself lucky to get it lukewarm! At the inn where my husband and I spent our honeymoon, the food was so cold it was rock-hard, and the owner was wearing two cardigans, a muffler, legwarmers over trousers, and fingerless gloves...indoors! Of course, there's not just one type of Japanese food, and probably surprisingly few Japanese have a good understanding of how a set menu is put together. I think hibachi cooking is notr about formal menus and formal service, but about snacks with sake, or to a lesser degree, tea, as host and guests cook themselves up a little something over the charcoal and ash braziers used to heat the room.

Meiji's Bulgaria is what we use to make yogurt (that is, every few months we start again with a fresh pack of Bulgaria, not because the culture weakens, but because gradually other bacteria join the party and change the flavor). I wasn't fond of the original Nature yogurt (way too bland), but I'd be curious to try the Megumi type - haven't yet seen it around here.

I've often thought that the best way to understand how a Japanese meal works is to eat the traditional breakfast at an inn.

Hey that...err..."thing" would be great for making the kind of griddlecakes and muffins etc that used to be baked on griddles and hearthstones. I've wondered for a while whether a pizza stone would be usable in a Japanese oven with a turntable...would it get hot enough? And if you preheated it at the top of the oven in the oven tray then put it on top of a ceramic turntable, would the turntable crack? Could you take the turntable off and just use the stone?? I'm hoping somebody *else* will experiment!

I agree that really expensive fruit is often not very tasty - maybe it was once, but I think it tends to sit on the shelf while buyers go for cheaper alternatives! Apples: tart, green apples...I guess that's just a pleasure I will have to enjoy outside Japan. However, for the past...10 years?...I've been ordering 6 months' worth of apples by the carton from Tsugaru Kanjuku Ringo Kenkyuu-kai. I only order the cheapest (cooking/juice apples) but I find them much better quality than supermarket apples. The price works out to about 500 yen per kilo, which is cheap at the beginning of the season and expensive by the end of the season, but even two teenage boys can't get through 10kg of apples in one sitting, so they're a bargain as far as I'm concerned!

Thanks for reporting back! I'm glad to hear it was great. I know what you mean about mushy rice - and I feel that rice is generally cooked softer these days than when I first came to Japan. Because I buy cheap rice, I often add a certain proportion of Milky Queen (a type of short-grain rice which is "not-quite mochi") when cooking for onigiri or bento - it doesn't get so hard when cold.

Yes, do! Peppermint does grow wild in Japan (probably garden escapes), and of course in Japanese both peppermint and hakka are called "hakka", which doesn't help. I have many plants in my garden which I have picked from the side of the road, only to see the original plants destroyed by new carparks, buildings or roads. I don't pick from people's gardens , but I've seen so many beautiful plants disappear that I am not embarrassed to pick from roadside plants any more.

I think it's peppermint (m. piperita), but not hakka. My guess is based on - what look to be terminal flower spikes, but rounded rather than pointed. - quite sharply pointed leaves, but not particularly narrow leaves. - smooth rather than fuzzy leaves and stems - red stems and leaf stalks! M. piperita is descended from m. aquatica, and that's where it gets its sharp smell (rather than the warmer, sweeter smell of spearmint etc).

Seconded! No way for me to buy sourdough starters here in Japan, so I tried this method a few years back, and was instantly converted. What I like best is that there's hardly any risk of culturing bugs you don't want.

We used the blueberry buckle recipe in Recipe Gullet today, with tiny seedless Delaware grapes as fresh blueberries are no longer in the stores. It was great!

Ichiju issai - some photos from a cookbook featuring single-dish meals, the answer to the "makes too much food, takes too much time" problems of ichiju sansai.

Lemon Souffle - in Australia and New Zealand, that seems to be mostly known as Lemon Delicious...aptly named! I will look up the CI blueberry buckle recipe thank you - my son's school has a holiday today, and I promised he could do some baking as soon as the temperature went below 25deg.C, so... Your daughter's name means "sparkle" in Japanese - usually doubled (kira-kira) - certainly a name that suits her eyes. Is our family doctor unfriendly? No such animal here in Japan, you go to an "external medicine clinic" or hospital or chiropractor or bonesetter for wounds or injuries, a GP for a cold, an ENT clinic if your cold gives you an ear infection or clogged up sinus, and you drag your kids to the pediatric clinic if they catch the cold!!! You see the doctor for 3-5 minutes, and some of them manage to be friendly in that time, but they have no time to give individual care - same old drugs for almost every patient and condition. Having no family doctor means that many elderly people spend most mornings of the week at different clinics for different ailments or treatments - in our family we say "Grandpa must be feeling well this week, he's been to all his doctors"!

You have to wonder what they taste like fresh, don't you? Thanks for the photo!

I love the look of that blueberry buckle. Do you have a recipe? I'm a furriner, and I don't know what a "buckle" is, but frozen blueberries are available in Japan, and I'm certainly game to try making it! Interesting about diabetes - in my native New Zealand, there is also a very high incidence of diabetes with Maori and Pacific Island people. Here in Japan, I was told that some races (including Chinese and Japanese) seem to have a lower "trigger" for diabetes - it's associated with lower levels of obesity than for Europeans, and severe symptoms occur more often, apparently. My son's friend has grown up with a very ill diabetic father, and since he was small, has declared that he will be a chef when he grows up, so that he can cook traditional Japanese food that will keep people healthy. In New Zealand, I can't help wondering if moving away from traditional slower-digesting starchy foods like taro, sweet potato, fern root etc. has something to do with it too.

Eek - is that mint rust on your mint? If it is, I'm afraid you might have to destroy the plants. (I see insect damage too, and maybe the yellow spots are from the insects - if it is rust, you will see reddish or brown spots and marks on the back of the leaves eventually). I think the soil in your planter is probably too light and too dry for the mint - it needs more organic material and more clay (akadama). It probably wants a nice soggy place near your garden tap, not too sunny. It might be best to throw it out and get a new piece of mint next year. Meanwhile, my ?hakka? is doing well, but my green mint, yet again, has probably died - something ate it all, and I don't see any new buds! I'm about to pull out some yuugao growing in a planter on our balcony, and plant some beans or peas for spring, along with some green vegetable. Photos later...

Gosh, I had no idea that maitake logs were buried. I have never seen a photo of them growing - thank you! By the way, has your mint flowered yet? I ...uh..."picked" a stem of something that looked a lot like Japanese hakka growing in a corner of the horticulture department, that just happened to have roots on it...it's flowering just like hakka, with little bobbles in between each leaf node, not in one big terminal spike. It's very strong in flavor - not so pleasant as ordinary mint, because it has such a high menthol content, it's just like biting a mothball. Certainly freshens the mouth!

I think that possibly the biggest reason is that B. vulgaris was pretty much replaced as a hedging plant by other varieties of barberry with berries that don't taste as good - for example, the b. glaucocarpa which formed the farm hedges of my youth, and which is now banned in New Zealand. Also, b. vulgaris berries are edible, but the leaves etc. are not (although they are used medicinally). That may have led people to think that the whole plant was poisonous. Maybe the growth of trade also brought sweeter dried fruits such as currants and raisins within reach of ordinary people's purses, and as those ordinary people moved away from farms and into towns, the barberry hedges would have been less accessible too. And then, British food moved away from sweet/sour tastes in main dishes too! Even knowing what a barberry tastes like, it is hard to imagine mainstream applications, apart from the syrups/jams/tarts that hips, haws, and berries are still used for. Barberry syrup with soda sounds like a nice drink though...

I think the key is visual appeal, especially with one known ingredient visible (remembering that people are looking at things from directly above, and usually in a tearing hurry with lots of other people around), so they won't see cake texture etc, only the decoration. Sliced cakes (I feel) often sell better than whole, as they can be sampled/fed to kids on site, and the stacking of sliced cake does allow you to show the texture. For bake sales, I bake all cakes in small loaf pans. Cookies - presentation is the key, because they can easily look jumbled. I make a hole in the middle (or twist ropes of dough in to garlands) and string them, and dip only half in a glaze, so you can see the underlying cookie at a glance. Don't know about the US, but here in Japan most such sales are held in the morning or early afternoon, so I try not to make things look too, too sugary or gooey. Labels - do 'em on a word processor, and make 'em BIG, BOLD, and concise! Tepee, thanks for recipes - school bazaar next week here!