helenjp

Well, like any fried food they are best just out of the pan. So if you plan to revive them later, keep your bottle of sauce handy .

Jeniac, in my experience, the usual cause of heavy korokke has been adding too much other stuff to the potato - especially stuff like butter or cream, heavy in oils/fats. That's right, I came up with the "not more than half the weight of potatoes in other ingredients" rule by producing a few heavy (or even worse, disintegrating) korokke along the way.

I've heard that people in areas of China where watermelon seeds are *really* popular eventually develop a little notch in one of their top teeth, very handy for cracking the seeds open. Perhaps you could have your dentist speed things up a little for you?

Pamjsa, thanks for the updates, it's good to hear what's working best! Looking back at my boys' growth so far...8ish and 11ish seem to be periods when boys pack on weight before shooting up. When I inspect the girls in their classes, they seem to grow much more steadily! I personally think you're on the right track with sugar/juice. My skinny husband and thinnish son2 like starchy sugary foods, but rarely eat too much of them, and never get fat. My son1 has verged on being overweight at times, but for him starchy, sugary foods are fodder, never his favorites. As a teen, his skin is immediately better if he eats wholegrain breads, sweet potatoes, beans etc in moderate amounts...so I assume that while some people can eat more sugar and starch without problems, he is not one of those people! Son1 is becoming obsessed with computers, and it's harder to make him move - he hates team ball sports. I keep reminding him that school sports are *not* the only option for lifetime physical activity. He swims, but what he likes best of all is to get up early and go for a walk with me, monopolozing my poor battered ears with all his strange ideas as we walk! Snacks - I agree with the suggestion to just not keep them in the house. We have crackers, cheese, and apples at this time of year. Although not easy in Japan, another favorite is hummus or a vegetable spread, and some vegetables/meat, along with any kind of wrap. For the kids, the ideal snack is one that can be eaten with one hand while enjoying a relaxing pre-homework read. The kids choose and shop for (so that they understand what their choices cost!) and prepare (or help...) one dinner per week. They come up with things I'd forgotten I ever fed them. Table-top cooking is a great way to involve kids on busy nights when you don't want to cook at kid-pace. Try the okonomiyaki thread for good, hot cabbage and pork pancakes Japanese style!

While parents and schools have the best opportunities to instil good food culture, I suppose that the "good eating habits" concept is pretty wide, too. My son2 will try anything once, even though he has a long list of "don't like" foods. His best friend has wanted to be a Japanese chef since he was in kindergarten. He is *not* adventurous beyond the familiar palette of Japanese flavors..yet he likes sophisticated dishes which his classmates would surely refuse to touch. The Japanese school lunch program definitely helps, and the Harlem program coincides with what I see here. The bane of son1's life at junior high comes to school late and hungry, and goes home to either no dinner or a bag of snacks. Not exactly an education in fine food. However, even though he comes and goes from the school grounds as he pleases during the school day, he's apparently always in the lunch queue, and back for seconds too. He's been eating school lunches for 8 years now, and has become used to the idea that vegetables, seasonal specialties, Chinese dishes, and other strange objects will be found on his lunch tray. People will eventually eat what they see being eaten around them.

Try using a lot of something crunchy and/or with a lot of clean, sharp flavor...then gradually increase the amount of slimy stuff till you're used to it!

I made your apple pie yesterday Chufi, and my enthusiastic family finished it up for breakfast. It's too early in the season here for the fresh Buddha's hand citron, and I didn't preserve any citrus peel last year, so I added thickish shreds of tangerine/mandarin peel.

We have school lunch for junior high in our area. Kids can choose from 2 selections, which they order a fortnight in advance. I believe a vote was held some years back to decide whether to have school lunch or packed lunches at JHS level. It certainly seems to vary from area to area.

Son1, 13 BKF: Grilled toast with canned tuna and cheese, yogurt with raisins and bananas and a sprinkle of granola, hot milk LCH: Cold somen (wheat flour) noodles and dipping sauce, tempura DNR: Miso soup with pumpkin and wakame, plain white rice and takuan pickles, yellowtail teriyaki with finely grated daikon, natto with okra (and soy sauce), boiled komatsuna greens with soy sauce. SNACK: Instant corn soup. Asian pears. LATE NIGHT SNACK (not to be outdone by son2...): Grilled dried squid with a saucer of Kewpie mayonnaise. Son2, 11 BKF: Yogurt with banana (or pineapple!), toast with whatever you want (that means Nutella), and porridge with syrup. Cold milk. LCH: Spaghetti with meat sauce DNR: Grilled salt saba (mackerel), miso soup with wakame, potato, daikon, and spinach, plain white rice. SNACK: mochi grilled with cheese on top. Cold barley tea. NIGHT SNACK on Christmas Eve: (This section added at son2's request....grilled steak, roast potato with butter, boiled spinach with soy sauce with Chanmery nonalcoholic champagne!...but if I got up in the middle of the night I would get out my Gameboy and eat a club sandwich while playing on my Gameboy...) Edit: I should mention that things like "Night Snacks" don't happen here. That's the fantasy end of the menu!

Rubbing chopsticks...I don't think I remember when I last saw that in a restaurant - it is pretty bad manners . Expensive restaurants certainly use a better grade of chopsticks, but some people apparently feel that even the most expensive bamboo chopsticks should be the pull-apart type, just to demonstrate that nobody has used them before. And what about the chopsticks made from fresh, green-skinned live bamboo? They are definitely delivering a message about freshness! Teacups - I think the "grab any cup" thing is pretty modern. When I first came to Japan, every family I knew assigned cups, ricebowls and chopsticks to individuals. Sometimes they would move to the family altar after death - I remember seeing a special ricebowl and teacup etc being used for the main offering at a family altar, and a little line-up of deceased relatives' personal teacups (full of tea of course) behind that. I do the same thing that Prasantrin's friends do - regular visitors have their own chopsticks, and I remember which rice bowl and cup they have, and rarely use them otherwise. It's quite fun, and my sons' closest friends always rush to get *their* chopsticks with great pride.

When buying raw rice, to be honest I don't look at the brand so much as the appearance of the grains. Do they look translucent, rather than chalky? Are they a good size, nice and plump, an pretty uniform in size? No broken grains? No strange dark brown bits mixed in with the grains?

One of my favorite bento books made the same point - that basically you are creating a decoration which will be smeared all over the inside of the bento lid! It's worth thinking about an array of colors, and about a contrast of textures, and seasoning so that dishes will taste good cold - but the other stuff is really for mothers, not for the kids!

A slice of soft gingerbread! Wow! Thank you so much for your work showing us Dutch cooking - it's really nice to see the materials and the process, as well as the finished dish.

I buy koshiibuki when I can find it, sorry I threw the bag out before refilling my rice box! Akita Komachi is another good old standby. I quite liked Haenuki, but can't remember any particular characteristics. I don't buy Chiba rice, although of course it's easy to buy here, because Chiba has so many highways and factories etc Living here generates an attitude something like "a rice has no honor in its own country" I'm always suspicious that maybe the Koshi-hikari from Niigata at my supermarket is really Akita Komachi from Saitama, but probably that's the wrong attitude!

Grub, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that the origins of the dish labskous were English - I just worded my sentence very clumsily. What I meant to say was that the oldest version of the dish as it appears in English cooking seems to be based on the sailors' version! I'm sure you're right. By the way, Grub and Klary, I've heard that bread-thickened stews are still common in Scandinavia - are they part of traditional Dutch cooking too? And if so, are they associated with particular areas?

I baked my fruit cake in August in New Zealand, soaked it in beer, and shipped it back to myself in Japan...for the past 8 weeks, I've been dousing it in rum every 10 days. It's just reached the stage where past applications of rum have softened the cake enough that the fresh dose of rum soaks into the cake immediately. I'm thinking that I might soon taper off the rum and let it just sit, wrapped and undisturbed, for a month...

Lobscouse is the English version of labskous, and I think that the original English sailor's version was also thickened with hard tack rather than the modern potatoes. Seems to have changed quite a bit in its travels, except for the thick texture. Rabbit in butter - Is rabbit farmed for sale? I've eaten wild rabbit, and recall that it tasted quite gamey. I made some filled speculaas for a visiting child who is fairly adventurous, but even he was too astonished by the highly aromatic aniseed to finish his piece! Spices in baked goods are very rare here. I hadn't stocked up on ground almonds, so made a filling with coconut, soft-dried peaches, and tangerine juice and peel...just what you would use, right ?

I have made mukago gohan, and it was pretty underwhelming, though it looks cute and is somehow such a romantic dish. I've become sneaky in my old age, and sometimes make takikomigohan with all the usual things, but then brown some chicken thighs, wipe off extra fat, and lay them on top of the rice and sprinkle with sake to cook, so that I can serve them separately. Looking at Kiem Hwa's photo upthread reminded me of a very simple but pleasant dish - okowa (or mochigome/plain rice mix cooked in the rice cooker) with green peas. I like it with a few shreds of ginger stirred in just before serving.

Celery root and apples sound perfect with the Dutch-style beef - but the whole dinner is such an Ode to Autumn. Thanks for a great blog!

About types of rice available in Okinawa if you don't want to pay store prices...hope some of the Okinawa posters can help you there. As far as I can see, the charcoal simply "softens" the water and helps it penetrate the rice grain.

I think an Australian book would specify "cassia", because Australia and NZ follow the UK practice of using C. zeylanicum as "cinnamon", whereas the typical "cinnamon" flavor of US baked goods is definitely cassia. I used to work in a Chinese grocery, where we sold cassia bark in big chunks with red paper labels pasted on. It looked very like the RH photo, except that possibly the bark was even rougher. Hard to tell when comparing a small photo with a 20 year old memory, anyway!

http://www.tanagersongfarm.com/heirloom_seeds/beans.htmlDutch Blue Pea seed in the US Seems to be known as an Amish cultivar in the US.

Would you believe I was so obsessed with wagashi that I actually carved a mold like those in Hiroyuki's photos . What a wonderful experience for kids though. (Now I'm thinking to myself that perhaps I could make some koshi an, and a pumpkin and white bean an and get my kids involved.... I think we could make a reasonable pumpkin shape with saran wrap and a piece of string

Today i'm making the first oden of the season... In the morning, I put the (precooked in rice-water) daikon into hot broth in a thermal pot to cook slowly all day. The biggest problem is not to get carried away at the supermarket! One of my kids hates all kinds of nerimono, but tolerates chikuwa and likes hanpen. So our oden sometimes has homemade chicken meatballs in it. I'd like to include iwashi meatballs more often, but the shop-bought ones are horrible, and the home-made ones are a lot of work . Is anybody fussy about the kind of konnyaku they use? I like the texture of the ones made from whole konnyaku-imo rather than konnyaku flour, but I'm not sure that's really an issue when it's been sitting in broth for an hour or five.

Definitely not, since I'm slightly allergic to rice and soy , but I can eat natto and miso much more easily than kinako or soy milk. My favorite non-fermented soy product is probably age (the thin slices of fried tofu). If you buy a good brand and wash oil off before you cook it, it makes a wonderful addition to any type of slightly bitter green, such as daikon leaves.