helenjp

Glad you've brought up the topic of hot water pastry - the photos are most instructive too. I tried it only once when I was very young, with a miserable lack of success, and have often thought of trying again now that I live in a pork-loving country! Beautiful pie!

It depends what you mean by "apprentice". If you just want to hang around and observe, then there's plenty of work at lowly places - my husband worked at one when he was a student, and my own students have similar jobs these days. However, because speed is essential and workplaces cramped, they'd expect you to speak reasonable Japanese.

I'll post a photo to go with this later, but the other day I unwisely told my kids to pick one pack of snacks each for the week...and one of them came up with Akita Morokoshi. My husband groaned, but they weren't expensive, so in they went. Not expensive! . Turns out there was a good reason for that. Apparently made to reward the leaders in some military campaigning or scheming, they seem to belong to the great tradition of military cooking - making artful use of stuff that didn't get thrown out fast enough! The "morokoshi" doesn't refer to "corn" here, but "moro-moro no kashi wo koshita mono" (better than all other confectionery). They are made from azuki bean skins (Ever wondered what to do with them after you've sieved cooked beans for koshi-an bean jam? Now you know.) and sugar, pressed together and molded like rakugan, turned out, and baked till hard and a bit toasty-tasting on the outsides. However, they have a distinictive harshness to the taste. I think the modern ones might be azuki bean powder rather than just the skins??? .

I'm actually not so sure about the vodka! I think he came from a class that probably took France as its model...for that period, maybe brandy??? And weren't the turn-of-the-century crowd fond of champagne and dessert wines??

Thank you! Spring-loaded...hmmm.

Gosh, I'm feeling seriously nerdy. I make ramen broth quite often, but it's mostly a chicken-based broth. Tonkotsu broth is a regional style which has only fairly recently become a national trend - my ramen book (which also contains a recipe for the noodles which I'm happy to say I have no intention of trying out) makes no mention of tonkotsu at all. I'll be happy to put the chicken broth recipe on this or another thread if anybody wants it - in a few days - this flu has left my eyes a bit sensitive at the moment.

You mention that your pressure-cooker is a valued piece of kitchen equipment...I'm beginning to get over misspending my youth cleaning soup off my mother's kitchen ceiling, and have been thinking about buying one. Can you tell me why you value your pressure-cooker so much?

Smithy, hope you're feeling better - I'm done with the shivers, anyway, and it's rather nice to feel hot and feverish in a cold Japanese house . Food import laws in Japan are more relaxed than in NZ, but they do exist - I can't bring in salami made with fresh meat, for example. Also, I've been so brainwashed by the NZ approach that there must be things I could bring into Japan if it ever occurred to me! I rather doubt if I could bring in lemons because they contain viable seed, but I'm not 100% sure. Soon we'll have birds in our plum tree here, eating the buds. The quilts actually insulate the heat so effectively that the tableTOP is not warm. About cats, a common winter pastime is watching the cat in the kotatsu make a fast exit when somebody farts... Hiroyuki, I rarely make hakusai-zuke these days, except for maybe a small batch in the depths of winter, because the winters have been so mild here that they don't develop a really full taste. My husband always says that hakusai tastes best when you have to break the ice on the pickle barrel to pull out a chunk of pickle... Son1 was writing "Mirai no Yume" (Dreams of the Future), while son2's grade did "Nagai Hama" (Long Beach, presumably a reference to the beaches on Chiba's eastern coast).

Cardamon coffee, my winter favorite! This has been fun! I meant to ask you, as another "expat", how you view your US food history and your current UK cooking environment. (Is that suitably vague and hard to answer?). Just curious to know if you think about it much!

Another dinner made by my husband - my little cold turned into a high fever with aches and shakes. So much for healthy eating! He made miso soup with wakame (using the Shinshu miso in the bean jam photos), rice, lamb stirfried with vegetables, and ate it with natto (the white packets), Chinese cabbage pickle bought from the sweet potato man who appears upthread, and some takuan and nara-zuke, bettara-zuke pickles on the far right. It's been great fun, and a challenge doing things (like making koshi-an) that I haven't done for years. Thanks for bearing with me. Fou de Bassan, I'd go for the tsubu-an rather than the koshi-an - much tastier and easier. I have tried it with a food processor - . It ends up being full of gritty scraps of beanskin - total failure. I think you could do it with the rub-through type of mouli food mill and then press through a sieve though - it may seem like a waste of effort to sieve twice, but it's hard, hard, hard work to try doing it in one step (and how do I know that???). As far as strained beanjam goes, the white (small lima bean) version came out more smoothly using a metal sieve than the straight azuki koshi-an. Prasantrin, I'll post in the Japan Forum about quinces. I researched a lot about them...and forgot it all. P.S. Chufi, if you make tempura add about 20% cornflour or similar - it keeps it crisp. Too much and the flavor suffers, too little and the tempura quickly gets soggy. Now to crawl back into the kotatsu - I've even talked my kids into bringing my pillows and blankets down here .

That's about what I do - I salt and squeeze them a bit, which takes the edge off any bitterness, and keeps them a nice color, but 7-herb congee is certainly not hard work. P.S. I'm never insulted by hearing about easy ways to do things - my artichoke-gazing grandmother used to say "Laziness is no good unless it's properly carried out!", which seemed to mean that it was worth using your brains to save your hands.

I forgot to talk about the actual food! We had our usual toast and yogurt this morning. Today is the last day of the boys' New Year holiday, so we are trying to get back on schedule in the mornings. In my efforts to stop the boys catching colds, I haven't been able to prevent myself from coming down with a 100% first-class, nose-streaming cold, so I started the day with a big cup of "Gingerbread Spice" tea with several slices of ginger in it. For lunch, we had sukiyaki-donburi -- added a few more maitake and some seri greens, plus a handful of soaked beanthread vermicelli, heated it all through in a frypan, then gently poured over some lightly beaten eggs. It's best not to use a lid, as they can overcook, but wriggling a spatula around here and there will allow some of the raw egg to flow down to the bottom. The top should still be a little wet and runny. Here's son1's serving - doesn't look as if there was any meat left over! BOTAMOCHI I saved a little of the warm rice, pounded it a little bit in a bowl with a half teaspoon of sugar till it was a coherent mass, then formed small rolls. I spread some wrap on my hand, sprinkled a tiny amount of salt on it, and spread a thinnish layer off tsubu-an. I folded that round the rice, adding a patch if necessary, and shaped the bota-mochi. Using cold beanjam is a key point - useless to try it with soft, warm freshly-made beanjam. "ohagi" is the polite term, "bota-mochi" is a more homely term. It's easy to see why this is a granny's treat - stuffing mochi with beanjam takes only a little, but covering a rice ball with it uses a generous amount. Finally, once lunch was cleared away, the inevitable occurred - we cleared the kotatsu so that the boys could do their New Year calligraphy homework. 175cm-tall son1's legs are included for scale (he wasn't using them, anyway - spent all morning in the kotatsu!). The square in the middle of the frame has a simple enclosed heating unit on the underside, and a thermostat dial on the front. The cord is passed through a couple of hooks so that it doesn't get pulled out by feet, and at the far right of the picture is a grey lump - that's the on-off control. Blankets and quilts go over this frame, then the table top leaning against the wall is lowered on top. The tabletop is not fastened to the frame anywhere, though in summer when the quilts are removed, some tables have a shallow peg/hole arrangement. Here's son1 doing his calligraphy...behind him is the MESS on the dining table (at the opposite end of our dining-kitchen from the counter and sink) - the stuff on the floor is mostly my work . The dining table is surrounded by ill-fitting windows - it's cold in winter, and in summer, it's too hot as it faces south - so we lost a dining table and gained a beautiful kitchen storage area... Dinner will be our last blogged meal - what shall we have, I wonder?

P.S. I realized years ago that my Japanese cooking skills were all from NHK "Kyou no Ryouri" magazine or books by stern-looking reputable chefs (not tarento ones)...that's no way to cook the daily dinner on a budget, so I started buying Orange Page and asking my friends about what really went on in their kitchens. That way I learned to stop cooking subuta (sweet and sour pork) according to Mr. Famous Chinese Restaurant Owner, and make it with ketchup like everybody else .

Abra: my grill pan is about 45cm x 32cm and I think we probably cooked 2 pansful of meat and vegetables. I think I probably used a total half cup of sugar - could have used a little more without being unusual. Probably used close to a cup of soy sauce. That's 100ml and 200ml by volume respectively. It works out that I sprinkled about a tablespoon of sugar on each onion, and maybe 2-3 tablespoons on 500g of thin-cut meat. Artichokes---I think I've only once or twice seen a fresh artichoke on sale in Japan - ONE withered artichoke in a bag, with a big price-tag. So I didn't bother! They are not common in NZ either. My grandmother had one or two growing in the orchard. She tried cooking one once, decided it was a waste of a nice flower, and after that, we just enjoyed watching them grow! NZ is SO strict on any kind of plant and animal product that traveling there with a suitcase of anything that used to be alive is a headache. I rarely risk anything more than commercially packaged snacks and sweets. Hiroyuki, I probably save money on ingredients and spend money on condiments, because the cost per meal is small, but the effect on taste is noticeable. However, some of those products were better quality than I usually buy. For example, I buy good quality mirin for New Year cooking...I use mirin instead of sugar in many cases, so I can't afford to buy best-quality mirin every day, of course. As for the soy sauce...I ran out of soy sauce on New Year's Eve, and there was only really bad quality and really good quality soy sauce at the convenience store! I do look for miso and sake without additives. However, I think that avoiding instant ramen probably has more impact on health than using cheap sake for cooking! Since I flavor things somewhat lightly, and also don't cook Japanese food for every meal, maybe I use less miso/sake/soy sauce/mirin in a month than the average Japanese household - I'm not sure. I'm somewhat allergic to soy beans, so I do buy miso and soy sauce that has really been fermented, as it seems to be mostly non-fermented soybeans that cause itchy rashes etc.

Prasantrin, I think you might use the deeper grill for Kanto style sukiyaki, as there is more liquid. In Kansai, people don't really think of sukiyaki as a "nabe" dish. It's a very good dish for one, as it makes great left-overs - just pour some lightly beaten egg over the leftovers next day, and let it just set - then serve "donburi" style over rice. Great for lunchboxes, even. As far as I recall, the sukiyaki we ate in NZ always tasted fine...as long as the beer didn't run out! Hiroyuki, I'm not planning on sending my boys to culinary school! I mean, I'd love it if they wanted to make a career out of feeding me for the rest of their lives, but I don't see it. Son1 wants to design airplanes - maybe he won't do that, but I'm sure he'll be some sort of engineer, or work with computers. He enjoys his food, but he eats anything and everything -he's an appreciative audience rather than an eager participant. Son2...music, or geology??? I can see him being a jeweller rather than a civil engineer though! He has many foods he dislikes, but he's also more interested in preparing food and trying new things. To be honest, the reason why they need to study so hard is that they need to get as far away from their current schools as they can, as fast as possible. I won't say any more than that Kogane is best for memories - your kids are better off at school in Niigata, I am sure!

Abra, I forgot to say that quinces here are different from European ones - they don't mellow when cooked. They are therefore usually steeped in alcohol or honey and used as a cough medicine in hot water. ...However, just to keep things confusing, the western quince is *also* sometimes available here.

For dinner we had sukiyaki, as I finally found some thinly sliced Australian beef. As he broke his second egg, my husband urged the kids to eat up - "This is it for 2006! You won't see sukiyaki again till 2007, most likely, so dig in!" When we thought about it, we realized that we ate sukiyaki most often in New Zealand, where we usually had it Kansai style. I don't think we had more Kansai friends than Kanto friends, so maybe the Kansai friends were just more determined to do things their own way! We never used a recipe, and I wouldn't know how to begin writing one, so here goes...no broth or other nonsense with this style, all you need is soy sauce, sugar (here I've used san-on-tou) and sake. Heat up the griddle nice and hot. Grease it with a lump of beef fat, or failing that, oil. Toss in some cut onions. Lots of onions, usually, but we like leeks too, so didn't use quite so many onions. You can see the sugar sprinkled on the onion. Now, in with the meat, spreading it flat as you go, alternating sprinkles of sugar with sprinkles of soy sauce and sake. Sugar fairly generously at this stage, to get the meat and vegetables to shed plenty of fluid. Don't overdo it though, you're not making toffee... Continue this process, gradually tapering off the seasonings a bit. You DON'T want this dish swiming in juice - we have a bit much juice here, a constant problem with an electric grill, as it is hard to keep it hot enough. We've added funghi (maitake and shiitake), negi dividing onions, and tofu. Later, we added Chinese cabbage, but were far to full to proceed with the konnyaku noodles or spinach (should be chrysanthemum greens, but there were none in the shop). Each diner beats a very fresh egg lightly in a bowl, and dips the food into the egg before eating. People often finish off with some pre-cooked udon noodles, but since it's New Year, we added mochi. Feeling full now?

Yes, it's steamed, and if you want to keep them, you can salt them. I buy them vacuum packed! In that condition, they are not very tasty, but the fresh young ones in season can be eaten, though it's not a particularly profitable experience.

Cadbury I have a feeling that gem irons are smaller than they used to be, but the old ones are certainly bigger than takoyaki...(I think gems are an Australian/NZ thing...a tasty memory!) Mochihead, Tawari is a very mild honey, but with a full flavor. It says "butterscotch" in the blurb, and that's not a bad description. OnigiriFB, I did that too - hope you have more success! I think I read about norimaki sushi in "Sasameyuki" (translated as "The Makioka Sisters") and decided that rice flour cooked with sugar and vinegar, wrapped in a spinach leaf might be pretty close ...I was about 15, so I should have had more sense than that! Before I describe dinner...the two rolled mochi were made from the same dough - basically joushin-ko or plain rice flour with a little bit of cornflour and a spoonful of sugar added, kneaded with hot water, steamed for 10 minutes, then kneaded, and rolled out. I've made it with shira-tama-ko (glutinous rice flour) in the past, and that was more successful. I didn't like the texture this time. The pink mochi was put together like this. I was getting a bit fed up by then, so instead of rolling out delicate pink petals, I rolled out a thing like a pink beach towel...(slight exaggeration). A little sugar is sprinkled on the board before rolling. A stick of boiled burdock root and white bean-jam seasoned with miso are added. The oakleaf mochi is made the same way. The bean jam is the koshi-an I made yesterday. The white bean jam is made very simply - about 100g of bean jam with a teaspoonful of white miso and a tablespoonful of water, heated and stirred until smooth. I also made another type of miso-flavored white bean jam. This one is made with a medium-flavored light brown miso (about 1 tsp), 150g white bean jam, and 45g mizu-ame, heated together till bubbly and pulling away from the sides of the pan. I couldn't buy the right sort of very fine wheatstarch wafer to fill, so I used these little ginger ones. The name of this confection is "tsuma-kou", or "Love My Wife" (or possibly "Miss My Wife"). Isn't that nice? We had a couple with a cup of green tea after dinner. P.S. The "wife" is probably a female deer - it's an autumn sweet, so the rustic miso is supposed to make us think of deer calling their mates in the hills...I think.

Son2 did famously on his mock exams...Yesssss! I had to take his hands off the plate so I could take a photo, but here's his reward - kashiwa-mochi (oakleaf mochi, filled with koshi-an (sieved) beanjam, and hanabira-mochi (petal mochi, filled with white bean jam flavored with white miso, and served with a sliver of boiled burdock root). Just about to go and retrieve son1 from his exams, so I'll post details later.

Last night, while finishing off the koshi-an, I started making two other types. One was a white koshi-an made from small lima beans, called "shiro-an" or white beanjam. I don't think that it matters very much what type of bean you use, although commercial confectioners pick varieties that cook up to a very white paste. The quantities and procedures are exactly the same as for koshi-an (sarashi-an), except that I don't add a pinch of salt as I often blend white an with miso. Secondly, I made a tsubu-an or whole-bean beanjam. Cook the beans as for koshi-an, until soft. Then drain the cooking liquid (no need to reserve it), and return the beans to the saucepan with sugar (same weight as the raw beans, or 20-30% less). Normally, you just proceed to cook the beans and sugar together straight away. However, I heard that it's a good idea to mix them together, slam the lid on, and leave them to cool/overnight. I tried it and I like it! The beans absorb the sugar without getting so squished. Here's a photo of the pan this morning - as soon as I put it back on the heat, the sugar liquefied, but at first glance, it looks almost solid). The bean jam is cooked until you can pull a spatula across the bottom of the pan and leave a mark, just as for koshi-an, and the bean jam is then cooled in the same way too. The beans have broken up somewhat with the stirring, but you can still see individual beans. This bean jam is MUCH easier to make than koshi-an, and every single person I know prefers it - more bean just means more flavor. One point - commercial sweets from a good confectioner will have much paler, more mealy koshi-an than cheap supermarket sweets. At the very least, the supermarket ones use mizu-ame (like corn syrup) and other sweetners and extenders, and I sometimes wonder if they make beanjam the CHinese way, including some oil (usually sesame oil) to add richness, as Chinese beanjam is also very dark. Now...to work!

A busy day today, but a relaxed breakfast to start it off. My husband slept in, so I skipped the yogurt (he likes to eat it with bananas year-round, but that combination strikes me as slimy + slimy - no thank you!), and served walnut bread with some NZ Tawari honey (it's normally runny, but it crystallizes very easily in cold weather). We also had grilled tomatoes (done in the trusty oven toaster, of course) and the only sausages that I really enjoy eating in Japan - lemon and parsley sauasages for poaching (a brand called "Entier" for some mystifying reason). The plan was to make corokke (croquettes) for lunch, but the smell of the gas heater in church convinced me to try something lighter - but this soup had to be put together at top speed to get son1 off to his cram school for 3 and a half hours of exams this afternoon. Don't ask me what this soup is - I couldn't tell you. Gently sauteed negi, garlic, potatoes, and a tiny amount of carrot in olive oil, a tiny handful of shimeji, topped up with a rapidly made chicken stock (would you believe even the carcasses cost USD4.20 per kilo?), some Christmas-shapes macaroni, an orange bell pepper, the last of the New Year ham, and some finely chopped winter spinach. Light, tasty, and FAST! In fact it was so fast that there was time for some apple. This is from the box we get delivered each month - this month it's San-Fuji. The yellowish splotches in the flesh are called "syrup" in Japanese and denote extra sweetness. I took son1 down the hill to cramschool, and bought him a small bottle of milk tea and a kind of muesli bar to sustain the inner man in between exams. His tutor told him he'd better come top of his class OR ELSE, but I'm secretly pleased that his cramschool is not vindictively competitive. I checked the local supermarket for Japanese sweetmaking supplies, partly out of curiosity. This supermarket really caters for the weary working Mum on her way home from the station, and sure enough, it had azuki beans, and the flour required for dumplings (i.e. the makings of "zenzai" sweet bean soup), but none of the more unusual rice flours or the beans required for white beanjam, or the wafers I wanted etc etc. Meanwhile, son2 is doing a mock exam with my husband, so I shall now go and put all the beanjams I've been making to good use, and get a snack ready.

Kitchen space...the standard unit of floor space in Japan is 180cm x 90cm, but this unit is interpreted creatively by space-pinching housing designers. Our kitchen is a so-called LDK (living-dining-kitchen )supposedly covering 9 of those standard units - the very smallest ones would be half this size (as my in-laws' LDK is), ours is on the large side, but some new apartments run up to 12 units. Our kitchen counter area runs the width of the narrow side of our rectangular LDK. It's very roughly 250cm across - the gas range bay is 70 wide, the prep area is around 80cm, and the two sinks and lip are roughly 1 meter. I think an 180cm total gas range/counter/sink width would be bog-standard in city apartments. In my brother-in-law's one-room apartment, I think his total sink and counter might be 45cm across - including a single solid element. His kitchen is just part of the lobby between front door and living/sleeping/dining room. MIzducky, I don't know that wealthy people really build larger cooking areas - partly because the size of the units is so locked into the standard floor-size unit. They are more likely to splash out on custom-designed storage and buy up large on crockery etc - I think most Japanese do like to have a big range of china and lacquerware if they can store it. Breakfast: few Japanese would have heard of porridge, and even fewer be willing to eat it! My husband won't touch it. However, bread is probably more common than rice for breakfast, especially in cities (I think this is partly the result of long commutes and resulting staggered departures of high school kids leaving before 7 for distant high schools or early morning sports, father leaving 7:30 to 8:30 for the long commute, young kids heaading off before 8am for school, and mother and preschoolers leaving before 9 for kindergarten - people want something quick that they can prepare themselves for breakfast, understandably!) Guys look their best at a sink? Do you think it's just that everybody looks better doing something than slumped in front of TV? The pink gloves are definitely his trademark though - his hands chap easily, so he buys M size gloves in the feminine pink shades, and I get the L size gloves in commando green! OnigiriFG, I finally realized what your screenname refers to. My son1 rather likes Fruits Basket cartoons, and actually, the English version is one of the best manga translations I've seen. Son1 makes me buy them though, because he's too shy to go and buy girly manga for himself! I first came to Japan on a Japanese government scholarship in late 1979 - spent 18 months in Osaka, then returned to NZ, where my first husband died unexpectedly. Then I wangled some more money out of another university and spent a year in Tokyo in 1985. I've lived in or around Tokyo since 1990. I studied some Japanese in high school too - thought it would fill in some time before I got to university where I could study Chinese ...30 years later... Nakji, we do have tai-yaki "fish" filled with bean jam. I'll talk a bit more about bean jam in my next post...

Good gracious, you people have been eating all night while I've been asleep! The spinach you had for lunch sounds wonderful...it would be good with our extra thick and crinkly winter spinach too. Almost good enough for me to derail our plans for lunch!

It's just past midnight, and I'm about to call it a day with the bean jams ready for tomorrow...here's the run-down on the koshi-an (sarashi-an). This is the smooth type of bean jam. First, bean jams are usually made starting from unsoaked dry beans. I started with 250g of azuki beans. Bring them to boil in plenty of water, drain, cover again with cold water and leave to sit for a while till they look less wrinkly. Bring to the boil, drain, and cover with fresh water. Repeat at least twice (but don't go utterly overboard, or you will lose too much flavor and color). Cook over medium heat - too hot, and the beans will explode and you will lose too much starch. The beans are done when you can squash one between your index and little finger. Drain (AND RESERVE LIQUID), and put into either a very coarse sieve or a ridged mortar. Crush roughly with a big wooden pestle...except that I inadvertently used mine to crush some aniseed for a recipe of Chufi's and now it transfers anise flavor to everything - so here you see my small pestle of sansho wood, and also a wooden spoon. When crushed, transfer to a sieve, and rub through. I tossed out my horsehair sieve last year, and find that the finished bean jam has a faintly gritty texture after using the metal sieve you see here this time. Don't be tempted to use a food processor - I tried it once, and the bean skin texture was much too rough. The idea is to separate the skins and the starch, not to break the skins down. Try to persist until you can see almost no white starch left. Carry out these two steps while the beans are still warm. In the bowl under your sieve, you should have dry, crumbly bean starch like this. Now pour the reserved liquid (or water, if you forgot and tossed out the cooking liquid) through the skins to release the last of the starch. Let the bean starch and water sit until the water is nearly clear. You can see here that I was too zealous in replacing water when cooking the beans - almost no reddish color left. Not to worry! If you don't have time to complete the bean jam in one step, you can leave it for several hours at this point. Now tip off the water gently, and strain the slushy stuff through cheesecloth or an old linen teatowel. Twist and squeeze firmly. This is not *quite* dry enough, but it's still workable. Return the squeezed bean starch to the saucepan, and add 250g of white sugar. (Edit: eeops - should be nearly equal quantities of raw beans and sugar). (You can reduce this amount slightly, but not much - say 200g? Any less, and the jam will be too floury, won't keep well, etc.). As soon as you start to heat it, it will turn dark, and become surprisingly watery, like porridge. Keep stirring constantly over a low-med heat until you can pull a wooden spoon across the bottom, and the mark stays for a second or two. The photo's all steamy, sorry. Now turn the jam out in spoonsful onto a metal tray (both these aspects help it to cool fast). If temperatures are high, use a fan or hairdryer on cool setting to cool it quickly - this will keep your "an" glossy. Although we call this "jam", it does NOT keep like western jam. Use in 2-3 days refrigerated, or freeze - it will get moldy much more quickly than even commercial bean jam. This batch has good gloss, but I noticed the difference without the horsehair sieve, and it is also not a perfect color. Tastes good though! More on how to use it tomorrow! To make white bean jam, carry out the same process using great northern beans or small lima beans.