helenjp

Omuraisu, no problem - was there something special about the way they did it for Lunch no Joou? Tempura, gotcha. We eat cheap though, be warned!

A couple of years back, the boys and I went to a Mongolian cooking lesson held by our local city government, and learned how to make hand-torn noodles in soup. We had that for lunch today - lamb broth seasoned with ginger, salt, and pepper, and with a little negi (Japanese dividing onion), potato, and semi-dried Chinese cabbage added. I made a salt dough with roughly 1 part of water to 2 parts flour by weight, let it sit for 30 minutes, rolled to about 1/4" thick, cut it into wide strips, and then stretched and pulled strips off and dropped them into the boiling soup. Here are the results: According to the Chinese thinking which is the basis for most traditional ideas of healthy diet in Japan, ginger and negi are warming herbs, and lamb is a more "warming" meat than pork or chicken. Plenty of hot liquids are also recommended to keep the mucus membranes healthy, moist, and ready to ward off colds! What better dish for today, which is the beginning of the two weeks of "lesser cold" - the time when air temperatures reach their lowest. The fortnight after that, when the earth, chilled by the cold winds, also reaches its lowest temperatures, is predictably known as the "great cold". Since son2 has an exam right then which he really can't afford to fail, my job for the next month is to do everything I can to prevent him catching cold.

Just after 10:30am here...son1 is complaining about study for a cram-school test on Sunday, son2 is groaning about studying for a very important exam in late January...so I gave them a "sashi-ire" (something slipped into a prisoner's cell)! One dried persimmon and a plateful of tongari-corn snacks on top of a book of grammar problems! That's it for me for until after lunch.

P.S. Is there anything in particular that anybody would like me to cook over the next few days?

Osechi food for New Year this year: doesn't appear in this thread except for a few leftovers, but here's a quick rundown. I worked till late on the 29th, had guests on the 30th, and found no festive decorations for our decorative mochi etc when I finally went shopping on New Year's Eve. I started cooking late that afternoon, and after breaks to cook and eat soba noodles with tempura, finished at nearly 2am (Much the same time as I'd worked till most of that week - think that had something to do with the headache?!), so the osechi is not a perfect creation. Also some photos were too blurry to include. Here's my juubako or layered box - it's nothing special, just lacquer on melamine, bought at Isetan in Osaka 25 years ago. Here's the bottom layer: nishime root vegetables simmered in seasoned dashi stock (lotus root, bamboo shoot, konnyaku, taro, plus dried shiitake, snow peas, and carrot "plum blossom"), simmered burdock root rolled in ground sesame, kelp rolls tied with dried gourd, simmered in heavily seasoned stock. On the side are black beans simmered with soy sauce and sugar with ginger, and decorated with red kuko no mi (wolfberries) soaked in sake. Black beans are one of the three "must have" New Year foods. Middle layer, makes me cringe, makes my husband leap for joy - nothing but MEAT! Ham, smoked turkey, grilled yellowtail, pink and white kamaboko, and salted kazunoko or herring roe (another important food, but not one of the 3, to my thinking) Top layer, which should contain the most auspicious foods, such as the black beans and the kazunoko. Instead, I put some of the more colorful foods and also some family favorites in here: smoked salmon (usually I make a kind of honey/salt gravlaz, no time this year), the 5-flavor namasu salad described earlier - namasu is another of the top 3 must have foods, kuri-kinton (sweetened mashed sweet potato with syrup-preserved chestnuts - if soaked before cooking and cooking water changed 2-3 times, you can get a nice yellow color even from the deadly pale sweet potatoes available this year), vinegared boiled lotus root with flecks of chili, and husband's top favorite, raw squid dressed with a tiny salted fish roe. After son1 took the photos (and sorry about the blurriness), I remembered the datemaki egg rolls ( a spongy roll made with steamed hanpen fish cakes and egg blended together, easy to burn if you make it at home and even easier to buy, and the tazukuri or gomame - the last of the top 3 foods - tiny dried fish dry-fried then simmered (almost candied) in soy sauce and mirin, often with a little sesame seed or nuts added.

Kamaboko - yes, see the thread on the link mochihead posted, it's a paste of white fish and if I remember correctly a type of yam, steamed. The texture is a little softer than the tubular fish sausage, chikuwa, which is traditionally steamed around a thin piece of bamboo. Abra, there are many types of ozoni, as it is such a traditional food that it has strong regional differences. Around Tokyo, it usually includes chicken, shiitake mushrooms, komatsuna greens, grilled mochi, and yuzu peel, and often daikon and carrot as well...in other areas, the mochi may be boiled rather than grilled, other vegetables may be added, you may find grilled yellowtail instead of chicken, or even salmon...there may be nori or fluffy kelp shavings in the soup...the soup may be made with white miso, and served piled high with katsuo shavings and kelp shavings...the mochi may even be stuffed with sweet bean jam! Hiroyuki, I once asked a guy I was interviewing which way he wanted his name spelt in an interview - Tahara or Tawara...he maintained he didn't know and didn't care!! I'll take a walk up to Hondoji with camera in hand just for you Hiroyuki - expect some changes, of course! I'd been putting it off until more shops had re-opened after New Year. I don't shop at Kita-Kogane so much any more - SATY is so expensive, and it's impossible to park at the supermarket which is now COMMODY, but was probably Matsumoto-Kiyoshi when you were here (it's changed hands at least twice since then!).

OK...feeling much better now, just that lightheaded post-migraine feeling left, so I think we will be eating lightly today. Here's son2's shot of his breakfast: homemade yogurt and banana, and toast with homemade kiwifruit and ginger jam, and with Dutch fruit sprinkles, a carefully hoarded present from his aunt in the Netherlands. I also made my husband his first lunch of the year, but that was before I'd had anything to eat - the resulting picture made my kids yell "Mum! We've got poltergeists!" I did a testdrive on son2's new lunch box - a pouch containing a thermos rice jar, and two half-moon shaped plastic containers for side dishes. Husband got hot rice with bettara-zuke (a sweetish daikon pickle made with fermented rice) and the umeboshi I made in my last blog, pork shreds cooked with takana-zuke (salt-pickled greens), slices of ham and kamaboko, leftover 5-variety namasu (shredded daikon and carrot with kelp, mitsuba, and chrysanthemum petals in sweetened vinegar), spinach dressed with ground sesame, and a small wiener sausage (so kindergarten, but he loves them!). Husband is required to report back on the temperature of the rice and side dishes. Then he will be allowed to revert to his favorite type of lunchbox, which he thinks was brought down off the mountain by Moses. You'll see that tomorrow...

Cranberry sausages - and I hope, the fat type of British sausage? Such as is never seen here, sad sigh...Sounds like a very good dinner indeed. I'm all for trying your less-fruity pudding - the smaller range of dried fruits available in Japan makes it easy to end up with oversweet substitutes. I can almost smell that slice of thin, crisp wholemeal toast you had yesterday too!

Hiroyuki, I know it's Ibaraki on NHK...and on the maps...but round here, where the girls all refer to themselves as "ore" instead of "watashi", it's pronounced "Ibarrrrrraghhi"! Tomorrow is the beginning of the "lesser cold" (shoukan) in the old Chinese calendar, and I have lots of food plans related to that. However, tonight I am going to bed early - still fighting a migraine that started yesterday as I waved my brother-in-law goodbye - I think that's all part of New Year too! While I languished, my husband made udon noodles for dinner, according to his patent method - bang it all in a pot, and boil it up! Never fails. He used most of the New Year kamaboko in it, reserving just a little for his first bento lunchbox of the year tomorrow. Looks like he also used some sliced chicken breast, komatsuna greens, very fine scallions, and a swag of mixed fungi that I had sitting in mirin (sweet sake) and soy sauce over New Year, for just such purposes. P.S. Sorry I am so uninteresting today, will make it up tomorrow, I promise!

Fou de Basson, I'm looking forward to hearing how your son's dinner went. Son2's best friend and "star twin" (they share a birthday) has wanted to be a Japanese chef since he was in kindergarten. He hasn't changed his mind once in the 8 years or so since then... I'll reveal all about the kotatsu later - with some photos of the structure. They are not expensive, in particular, ours is not expensive, just a bit bigger than usual. I'm glad it was cheap - otherwise I'd worry about the ink stains, the knife cuts, the heat blisters etc that already scar it! Photos of kitchen...I'll do my best, but it will have to wait a few days - I've pulled out a lot of stuff, trying to streamline things so that it will be easier to get up before 6am this year to make breakfasts and lunches. And I'm still in the middle of the pre-New Year spring clean, too! We're just munching a quick lunch of Japanese apples, raw ham, and string cheese, then walking over to pick up my camera - should take us an hour each way, with a donut stop as a special treat for my skinny, starch-loving husband. We'll take photos where we can, but many privately owned shops will be closed until around the weekend. We get a 25lb box of apples delivered each month from late September through late February, a great source of winter snacks and breakfasts, and for the holidays we also bought a box of mikan (Japanese mandarin oranges). Time to chase everybody into their coats and gloves - see you later!

Saffron does taste medicinal. My Iranian friend taught me to wrap it in a scrap of foil and wave it over the gas (or a hot stove) for a few seconds, till dry and crumbly (but don't let it burn, all too easy to do!). Then crumble it into your hot milk. However, it is an unusual taste and easy to overdo. A tiny pinch of stamens is normally enough.

Back to last night's dinner: we had gyouza (chiao tzu, potstickers). Here's my husband folding them - this is a job that the whole family often joins in, but my sons were (according to them) finishing their New Year's cleanout of their rooms. I've yet to see any evidence that the cleanout has even begun, meanwhile... I'll put a recipe in recipeGullet if there isn't one there, but if you scroll back up to yesterday's post, you'll see the ingredients: ground pork, dried shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoot left over from New Year, Chinese chives (expensive and scrappy), negi dividing onion, ginger, and an old friend from my last blog, garlic pickled in miso. Normally I would use cabbage or Chinese cabbage, but chose a cheap bag of beansprouts instead. I used a little of the miso, plus salt, soy sauce, sake, a teaspoonful of sugar and a splash of vinegar (recommended by my Fukien friend). The seasonings and "fragrant vegetables) are mixed with the meat until it is very pasty, then I mix in the chopped beansprouts/cabbage, etc. Here are the finished gyouza - this is the most usual way to cook them in Japan - fry on one side, then pour over water/sake, and steam briefly. Behind the electric griddle, you can see a bowl of soup - that's left-over ozouni, minus the mochi, and plus some extra root vegetables such as burdock and taro. At top left, you can see a small pottery jar of chili oil (raa-yu). I made about a liter of it at least 5 years ago, and fully expect that it could outlast me if allowed to, though it might lose a little savor. After dinner, the intrepid ate a monaka each (a thin wafer "package" filled with stiff bean-jam). Sorry about the photo, by the way. Then son1 disappeared upstairs to Skype his friend downcountry, update his blog, and fiddle with his server, while the rest of us watched a New Year concert of opera highlights on TV and nibbled tiny cookies from a well-known confectioner, Morozoff. A very old friend of mine sent them - and they are very much in keeping with her character and background - a famous but not trendy brand, from a maiden lady of a certain age who researches Coleridge but studiously ignores his rumored lifestyle!

Mochihead, I guess I pay between USD7 - 14 per kg of meat - the lamb is at the top end of my "everyday" level of spending, and anything below USD10 per kg is a find. Fish is flat out expensive. Sadly, dumping of caught fish in order to keep prices up is not unknown. We eat mostly what are known as "blue" fish in Japan - the oily fish such as sardines or mackerel, plus salted dried fish (these are not the same as Chinese salt fish, they are normally dipped in brine then dried in the wind). Abra, I used the "schnapper" spelling for old times' sake! I'm from New Zealand, from what used to be a small village on the coast of the Manukau Harbour. We spelled "snapper" that way in Australia and New Zealand way back then, though not now, I notice. I can still get a bag of flounder for NZD5 there, though there are only a couple of commercial fishermen left now. The fishing and farming village on the outskirts of Auckland that I grew up in is now one of South Auckland's roughest suburbs, sadly. The good side of that is the booming Polynesian culture of South Auckland, which my family was heavily exposed to through our local church. I've been living in Japan for over 15 years this time, and lived here as a student for 2-3 years at different times before that. We now live in Matsudo, which is a perfect match for Manukau in terms of general light industrial grimness, but also has an underlying culture of its own - it lies on the Edo River, and as the "do" part of the name tells us in Japanese, it was a river port serving the trade with Edo. Where I live in the northern part of Matsudo, there was an official waypost and inn on the Mito Road running from Edo out to Mito on the Pacific Coast of Ibaragi prefecture, and government runners and other travelers passed through here. The location is not by chance - the early Tokugawa shoguns of Edo razed all the castles near Edo that they could, to prevent opposition from building up, and the new Kogane-juku inn was built near the old castle and the surrounding Buddhist temples in the area, to keep an eye on local developments as well as speeding travelers to and from the Tokugawa Mito clan. One might think that the area would therefore have its own special dishes and confectionery, but I have found no trace of such things so far. One reason is that this is not traditionally agricultural country - we live just where the low, rolling land meets the river valley swamps, not good rice land. In former times, most of the upland area was given over to the herds of wild horses that the shogun's own horses were drawn from. The shoguns used to come and "hunt" here...in other words, they sat on a dais set up in an enclosure, and watched people hunt game that had been previously released into the enclosure! Hiroyuki, we got the Niigata rice because 1) I asked my husband to go and grab a bag while I lined up at the cash register, and 2) he said it was, oddly, cheaper than the other rice on offer - about JPY2200 for 5kg. We usually buy Hokkaido milk, being a little cautious about buying milk from the area surrounding Tokyo. That's partly because of dioxin, partly because I feel suspicious about the amount of milk labeled "fresh milk" from these regions, vs. the actual total dairy herd count! Those rice cakes don't contain mizu-ame - they have a much nicer texture. However, since my family thinks that "ozouni" means having 2 rice cakes in the soup, plus 4 more on the side, I think that I should look at cheaper options! Snowangel, about 25% of that grocery bill went on rice. Of course, we DID come away with 4 bags - Japanese-sized bags, that is . My sons currently have hot lunch at school. However, son2 will probably need packed lunch for 6 years starting this April, with son1 starting the packed lunch routine for 3 years starting next year. More of that later... I went to bed with a thumping headache last night, and when I got up this morning, found my husband and sons had breakfast all organized - they had reheated the porridge (half and half steel cut oats and fine oatmeal) in the rice cooker, dished up some home-made yogurt, and grilled themselves some mochi (rice cakes) to serve with nori (laver seaweed sheets) and soy sauce. Unfortunately, my camera is away for repairs until today, and son2's camerawork was a little shaky, so no breakfast photos, sorry.

Christmas pudding! In my kitchen cleanout, I found my grandmother's pudding trinkets and a stack of silver sixpences, so I think a Twelfth Night pudding is in my future! Thanks for the reminder.

Mmm, cheese! Keep talking, keep talking! I'll be checking back to see what happened to the potatoes...

Michelle, thanks to bird flu, swine flu, and BSE, sliced (shredded) lamb is one of the cheaper meats now. The pack that I bought cost JPY158 per 100g, works out about USD13-14 per kg, or GBP7 - 8. For premium trimmed cutlets, double that... I used to be able to buy chicken and pork at about JPY100 per 100g, now I mostly have to pay about 20% more than that, and chicken wings or breasts at JPY70-80 per 100g are a rare find too.

Marlena, I'll also be enjoying checking your side of the blog, as this is a time of the year when we eat more "Japanese" than "western" food. Mochihead, my mother in law has little appetite these days, and her awareness of what's what is a bit shaky, but every now and then she goes on a cooking spree...and the food either languishes in the fridge, or sits around in saucepans until somebody turns up to eat it. My husband and I once politely ate some rice that we were both sure was off, wondering why the other one didn't speak up, and suffered horribly for our manners! Michelle, there are somehow two separate thriving sushi outlets within the one supermarket here - we bought one tray from the upmarket one attached to the fish counter, and one from the cheap one attached to the deli counter. Supermarket sushi is of reasonable quality these days - though only in Japan. I forgot to say that the shopping and the dinner prep are lying on our heated table (kotatsu). You can see the covering blanket - under that lies a thick quilt, and below that is the electric hot carpet! We not only eat all our meals there in winter, we rarely leave the kotatsu for any reason at all if we can help it - much cosier to prepare dinner there than in the kitchen, which easily drops to 8degC (46degF) and below if I turn the heating off for 30minutes. Expect to become very familiar with our kotatsu during this blog. It's fairly big - but if you lie down to sleep in the kotatsu, please make sure your feet aren't in the face of the person opposite you; and if you accumulate more than 5 tangerine peels in front of you, you need to get up and carry them out to the kitchen, please! I'm off to bed now - it's only 11:30pm, but I'm keeping holiday hours for a day or two more.

Marlena and I decided to put our blogs up separately, because we want to see lots of questions, and would hate to miss any. We offer round-the-clock coverage for your every quibble, query, or latent culinary quest, so please don't disappoint us - ask away about the foodlife you see in our blogs, or whatever hidden aspects of food culture you think we might be trying to keep hidden in the shadows outside the blog world (that's right, isn't it, Marlena? ). I was wondering what to call this blog, when I realized that my husband's belly was all but telling me - the end of New Year in Japan is a blessed relief from a surfeit of BEANS and SWEET POTATOES! Talking of surfeit...while the third day of New Year started much the same as the breakfasts described way back in my first blog 18 months ago, lunch was very "oshougatsu" (New Year). On our way to my father and mother in law's, we picked up two trays of sushi and a tray of mixed fried hors d'oeuvres (and certainly out of the reckoning of most people's culinary oeuvres, I wouldn't want care to be named as the creator of a platter of deepfried pork with onion sauce, deepfried green bean and meat rolls, deepfried prawns, deepfried potatoes and sweet potatoes, and something flat and squarish which remained unidentified and uneaten to the last.) The sushi, however, was good. The expensive sushi was plump, glossy squid, sea urchin, salmon roe, schnapper, and tuna. The cheaper sushi focused more on things like cucumber rolls and omelet. Here's son1 forcefeeding son2 with a cucumber roll, just to set the tone of the blog... Here's what was left when we remembered the camera...the paper plates and cups are a nod to my mother in law, who is getting a little senile and gets terribly confused about laying the table - better for us to bring EVERYTHING, and take EVERYTHING home. Here's my mother in law dishing up buta-jiru (a winter miso soup with root vegetables and pork in it). After some bad experiences, we never eat anything at her table that we haven't seen prepared - this soup was unaccountably sweet, but she was once an accomplished cook, and you can see how she reacted when asked to pose with her soup! She's standing by her 2-ring gas burner, the standard cooking equipment for any Japanese kitchen. On the way home, we went back to the supermarket, and spent about USD73 or GBP42...with two big boys, I count our food supply in hours rather than days! Here it all is - the 10% off pork scraps, the NZ lamb, the wieners, the nori (seaweed) squares, the bean sprouts, the snacks, the tea, the udon noodles, the rice, the mochi rice cakes, the hot dog rolls...any questions? Now here's the prep for tonight's dinner. Any idea what we're having?

We're here! And enjoying! But a bit holidayed out for actual verbalized responses Thank you for everything, but from my son2, thanks in particular for the close-up of fresh mozzarella - a favorite of his.

Somewhere somebody was asking about the Wine and Noir kitkats...well, we tried them. Until tomorrow we are still on winter cram school schedule, and more snacks get into my shopping basket at the konbini than at the supermarket. The Wine flavor was definitely wine and not berry flavor, though a bit on the sweet side...so why did they make the thing strawberry PINK?! The Noir...it tasted like headache to me, or at the very least, like Oreos.

katakuriko - was once "dogtooth violet root flour" but is now potato starch! Use cornflour, wheaten or corn, as you prefer - cornflour (US cornstarch) is simply harder to find in Japan, so I use katakuriko here. If you're using Australian flour, probably adding some cornflour is a good idea. Good luck with the recipe! P.S. I like your name - I had a great aunt who worked as a typist (in the days when they were referred to as "female typists") for Cadbury in NZ, and was regarded as very fast, because she was the only one in the office who would go flying in the manager's son's little aeroplane!

This is a recipe my sister gave me, from one of her favorite cookbooks: Evelyn Rose, The New Complete International Jewish Cookbook I have the old edition, but I assume it's in this new edition too. It is basically reliable standard British food, but my sister HATES to cook anything that even MIGHT not work out, and this book is reliability made reality. Apart from that, I find that UK cake recipes work well with Japanese (haku-riki) flour. Hot Milk Sponge Cake 3 large eggs separated 150g fine sugar 100g cake flour (or 75g plain and 25g katakuriko) 75ml hot milk grated rind 1/2 lemon, optional but a great addition! 1 level 5ml tsp Baking Powder 1 pinch salt 20cm round tin, or larger ring tin, brushed with oil, shake a little extra sugar and flour round the tin and throw away any loose remaining sugar/flour. Preheat oven to 200deg. C Sift dry ingredients, grate lemon rind on top. Whisk whites with a pinch of salt until stiff and glossy. Break up yolks and add one by one alternating with sugar, a little at a time, till you have a pale mousselike mixture. (I actually don't use this method, I whisk the whites, then whisk the eggs till pale and fluffy with the sugar, and then fold together, but it's possible that the original method produces a more tender cake). Heat milk till it just bubbles round the edges. Place flour gently on top of egg mixture, pour hot milk carefully down sides of bowl and immediately fold all together gently with a large spoon till no white flour can be seen. Pour into cake tin, and sprinkle a little granulated sugar over the surface. Put cake into oven and reset temperature to 180degC and timer to 45 minutes. Check at around 30 minutes - if surface is firm and cake is just beginning to pull away from sides, it should be ready. Japanese ovens tend to run hot, and also are often fan-assisted, so the cake could be ready in 30 minutes, especially in a ring tin. If the cake has pulled well away from the sides of the tin, it's probably a bit overdone. Leave in tin for 10 minutes then turn out - I actually invert it like a chiffon cake. Fruit Cake - a type of fruit cake known as a "boiled fruit cake" or a porter cake is a great introduction to fruit cake - moist, without the strong perfume of a very dark fruitcake matured for several months. BBC recipe for Porter Cake Any dark beer will do instead of porter. This is my favorite quick fruit cake, though a real matured fruit cake would have at least twice this much dried fruit! Brandy and Ginger Fruit Cake 500-600g dried fruit (about half raisins, about 50g dates, and about 50g candied peel if possible, a knob of fresh ginger, shredded if you like) 115cc dry ginger ale (Canada Dry is better than Suntory for this) 25cc brandy (shochu would do) 50g cake flour with 1/2 tsp baking powder 115g butter, softened 115g fine sugar 2 eggs 50g glace cherries for decoration, optional Soak dried fruit in ginger ale and brandy overnight. Grease an 18cm round cake tin, line the INSIDE with baking paper folded in 3, Put a butter paper on the bottom of the cake tin and a circle of baking paper cut to fit. Or, use a disposable cardboard cake mold. A ring shape used for chiffon cake makes it easy to cook the cake evenly. Cream butter and sugar, gradually add eggs together with a little of the flour to prevent separating. Mix in fruit and liquid. Pour into tin, make a depression in the middle and push the mixture more to the sides. Press cherry halves around top if you like. Place a piece of baking paper loosely over top of cake. Bake 160degC for 2 - 2 1/2 hours, until a skewer comes out clean. Remove from oven. Stand in tin for 30 minutes to cool. If you want to, you can poke holes all over the cake with a skewer, and gently spoon more ginger ale and/or brandy over the cake. When lukewarm, wrap tightly in foil and keep at least overnight before eating. ...And Hiroyuki, my husband doesn't agree with me about eating fruit cake with Ebisu Black at all, sadly!

I made a hot milk sponge cake, split it and filled it with white chocolate ganache and crushed strawberries, then covered it with a softer white chocolate ganache flavored with a strawberry liqueur that comes out every Christmas. A few strawberries went on top. Last night my husband came home looking for leftover cake, and found only three guilty faces. He said he regretted not emailing us from work...at the time, he apparently thought it would be too uncool to email his family to reserve his share of the leftovers! I thought he didn't like sweet things too much, but apparently ganache falls into a special category. Meanwhile, we just cut the very last of the fruitcake...and put my husband's share on a plate. It goes remarkably well with a nice can of Ebisu black.

What a treat! I'm looking forward to reading your blog.

Yeah, we did - I'm just getting round to loading photos. 1) Sweet pumpkin soup with shiratama dumplings. Good! 2) Pumpkin shiratama mochi boiled then grilled crispy, with a mitarashi sauce (kombu dashi with brown sugar, soy sauce, mirin). OK, but not good enough to justify the effort (the pumpkin affected the mochi texture).