helenjp

Torakris, that looks good! I was just racking my brains for salads that don't require same-day shopping, and which can sit for an hour or two without harm. (Just wait till your kids get older, and you'll understand the need for this kind of recipe!). Jason, I'm afraid my husband would happily fill a 9" plate with konbu and eat it all up! I've just been cautioned that my oden doesn't contain enough tied konbu strips A well-known Japanese food writer advocated separating the New Year konbu rolls into empty rolls of konbu (rolled a bit loosely, so that the broth gets right inside the roll) and chicken wings or drumsticks, cooked together but served separately., since everybody prefers the konbu itself to the usual filling of oversweet preserved herring. This "karappo konbu" dish is a big favorite in my home, though sometimes I roll the konbu around gobo (burdock root) instead of leaving the rolls empty.

Have fun with them! Pumpkin needs to be watched more carefully when frying as it browns easily...but you can't lower the temperature very much or the coating doesn't fry crisply. The only rule I follow with korokke is to keep the meat/veg to half or less the weight of potatoes/pumpkin used - more than that, and they tend to be soggy or fragile.

Made a giant batch of korokke tonight, to last through various bento, early dinners, late dinners, etc. 1) Pumpkin korokke with ground pork, onion, and a little curry powder and chili. The pumpkin had been roasted before mashing, so no problems with wateriness. 2) Lamb and potato korokke - lamb fried with Chinese chives, black pepper, and black sesame (nod to Jason). I double boiled the potatoes a la Jackal, curious to see if it makes a difference. The pumpkin were great, and I'm afraid son2 ate two AFTER eating a good serving of tempura and some sashimi! The lamb are yet to be sampled, but the unfried potato mixture tasted pretty good

The very thought that was in my mind recently! An earthquake a few months ago made it obvious that some of my books have to go. I've regretted some books I've got rid of in the past...particularly because I often read and apply ideas rather than making whole recipes. I'm also afraid of how much I've forgotten when I look into a book I haven't used in a while. I'm not looking forward to the task at all.

Chrysanthemum tempura. I think the nature of a chrysanthemum flower really makes it a fritter You have to hold the sepals with chopsticks, dip the flower in batter, then swish it gently in the hot oil so that the petals separate as they fry...like this scroll down to the second photo, the chrysanthemum flower is at the bottom of the photo.

I think you may well be right Adam. One of the oldest foods in Japan is assumed to be a kind of hearthcake made of a certain variety of acorn pounded together with venison.

Well, well, nothing new under the sun, it seems! Thank you.

Fresh sardines minced and combined with crumbs, spinach etc make a nice stuffing for onions.

No, that's definitely white sauce.

Made the dumkes, thank you! And thereby justified sending DH to buy aniseed from a Tokyo supermarket a while back...whew! This recipe works beautifully with nice dark Japanese sugar.

Funnily enough I just made a "cream stew" with salmon and scallops over the weekend. The box had "chowder" on it too, and sure enough it was sort of soupy and chowdery. More flavorful than the ordinary cream stew type, but also a little salty. We had ours with May Queen potatoes simmered in milk in the rice cooker!

That's interesting - Merlot might be a good choice for a Japanese winery. When I was in Hokkaido, I was talking with local people about the Tokachi Winery there. The feeling was that the local government applied pressure to produce "heavy" red wines that could be promoted alongside beef steak and lamb barbeque (both major tourist draws in the area). The fact that neither local winedrinking tastes nor the climate favored heavy reds just wasn't allowed to intervene!

Tony Blundell "Beware of Boys" - a boy is captured by a wolf, who agonizes over the best way to eat his catch. The "catch" sends the wolf on various wild chases after nonsensical "ingredients", which he uses to escape. The recipes make fun reading with your boy tucked up safe and sound, though! Redwall series...yes, if it's not about fighting it's about eating. It bored me to tears, but it must be boy stuff, because my DH enjoyed the books, even though English is not his first language. The Little Mouse, the Red, Ripe Strawberry, and the Big, Hungry Bear by Don Wood - for very young kids. The parent gets the fun of figuring out just exactly who is after the strawberry!

Oh, I made ours! I used pretty much the "Work in Progress" recipe, using beef and some lean pork spare rib chunks (or what passes for that in Japan). I made the chili beans separately. It was an interesting experiment. I thought I had far too much chili for our boys, but making it with much more meat and much less onion and tomato worked well - the chili heat just gets sucked up by the meat, it seems. I used a Shuttle Chef pot overnight, then reheated and set it in the container again all day. The meat was melting tender, and the sauce colored up deep red despite the smaller amount of tomato.

What about that maguro sashimi carpaccio that was all over the place like a rash a year or two ago? Mustard is a flavor I like with tuna sashimi. I put honey and salt on salmon sashimi, and let it marinade in its own juice with slices of lemon for 1-3 days, but with maguro, honey and soy sauce might be better. Or how about something based on kanzuri? Hmmm.

Chili recipes from the Geezer's Cookbook at macscouter.com was my first encounter with US-style chili. ...I hear that some people say that beans and chili should be cooked separately, served together, while others cook them together. ???.

Satsuma-imo soumen and saatuma-imo "yaki-imo" youkan I've had imo-youkan before - this was a bit more intensely flavored, but also incredibly sweet! Haven't tried the pink imo-soumen yet! Both of these were bought on a recent jaunt to Kawagoe.

It's the same way that noodles are boiled in Japan. I'm very interested to try this recipe, because it's similar and yet different to Afghan "mantu" steamed lamb dumplings, and probably similar to Mongolian lamb dumplings too! Coriander and chinese chives in the Afghan version: carrots and spring onions in your version...gotta try it!

Yep, it says on an edible fungi site on the internet in Japanese that buna-shimeji get stuff which looks like white mold, but does you no harm to eat. In my extensive experience of incubating fungi for long periods in my fridge I would say that fungi which have gone rotten have an unpleasant fermenting sweetish smell...please feel free to apply my research to your own situation if applicable!

Hiroyuki, I was surprised that the funori didn't leave flecks in the soba dough. This is hegi-soba, isn't it?? I've read about it, never eaten it - is it less chewy than regular soba? Or is it smooth but still chewy?

Mind you, Stash, your 2003 pic looks just like most of my students! That's a fine look anywhere in East Asia, I'd hazard a guess. You do look better smiling, though!

Heh heh, I think even that has its origin in medicine! I've made daikon steeped in honey as a home-cure for coughs and colds - the juice is quite nice! I did some more research...it seems that Japanese people rarely use honey bees to pollinate orchards (something I'd wondered about) for various reasons, instead using a non-honey-producing bee which is efficient and easy to move. The current "honey" regions of Nagano etc. use western honeybees which were introduced (presumably from the Kanto region) during the Meiji period, and which produce more honey per bee than native bees anyway (though I wonder if that isn't partly because native bees are more likely to be gathering pollen from trees and grain crops???). Anyway, wouldn't you know it, there's a website out there which claims that only honey from native Japanese honeybees suits the unique Japanese digestive system... The Japanese honeybee is probably not native, though long isolated from the Chinese strains it probably comes from - 7th century records say that an Empress released 4 swarms at Mt. Miwa in the Kii peninsula, but that they "didn't breed" - however, apparently the Japanese honeybee is more inclined to do a bunk than to swarm and remain in the same area, so maybe the swarms simply dispersed. In any case, Japanese honeybees certainly are/were centered on the Kii peninsula and parts of Shikoku, apparently. I wonder if honeybees entered Japan from China earlier than that - maybe at the same time as silk cocoons, since tradition has it that honey and silk both come from China???? Maybe that's why the idea of eating the larva rather than the honey became popular - aren't silkworm larvae sometimes eaten??? (Wracks brain fruitlessly for reliable information on the topic...).

When I first came to Japan, honey seemed to be regarded as a medicine more than any thing else. Apparently that old idea has been reinforced by the popularity of royal jelly; but considering that honey has been part of the imperial court culture since at least the 7th century, why do we see so little evidence of it in Japanese cooking? I think I know more traditional recipes for wasp larvae than I do for honey! All I see are western or western-influenced dishes, and the addition of honey to home-cure type drinks or occasionally preserves such as umeboshi (maybe coincidental that ume made it to Japan in the 7th century too??). So...what uses of honey can you think of - including western-influenced foods too, for the moment! Honey and rakkyou preserves...honey and ginger...honey and garlic....honey and ume... Honey castella sponge cake... ...and??

Kinpira...I've recently been shallow-frying satsuma-imo (cut in large dice) over a moderate heat either in butter or butter and oil...if you keep the heat on the low side, the outside of the imo gets crispy, and the inside is floury. They take quite a long while to cook, but it's all worth it, soooo worth it!

Hmm...this is interesting! We don't have a dagashi-ya within walking distance, ...but all the neighborhood kids know where the dagashi-ya is to be found, even though it's a 30-minute cycle trip, and make optimistic pilgrimages there before every school trip, because the amount of snacks they can take on a trip is defined by purchase price, not by quantity of food. The current head of 6th grade was practically lynched because she cut the permitted expenditure from 300 to 100 yen... I agree about those flat crumbed fried sheets, they come in tonkatsu and ebi flavors too, just as vile as the korokke flavor. The "surprise" lemon candies are one of our favorite small gifts for taking back to New Zealand. There are a couple of other types which have one chili-laden candy etc. Sour plums are a great choice for school trips, and the kid who pulls out a few just when everybody else is surfeited with candy and gum is very popular. That particular type of hard red plum doesn't seem to be available as "real" food, only as dagashi. Anybody else think that anzu are fading out of the dagashi scene? I rarely see those anzu ice candies around these days either - they are a really primitive mash of sweetened anzu (skins, fiber, pulp, the lot!) in a tubular thin plastic sleeve, just like the more expensive ice bars that you freeze and then mush up to suck out of the container. Hiroyuki, your dagashi past will come back to haunt you when your child is old enough to make frequent school trips!