helenjp

It's kamasu-sawara

Hatcho miso Freeze-dried koji for making regular miso

Yummy things to put inside baked potatoes? Home-made shake-n-bake style seasoning for oven-baked wings or chicken pieces?

Brad, you and your new daughter can surely succeed at this! My husband's father is an alcoholic. One of his sons doesn't drink at all, his daughter occasionally has one drink on special occasions, and my husband has a host of rules that he imposes on himself - not more than x drinks a day, not more than 1-2 times per week, never drink two days in a row, etc. etc. Maybe that's over the top, but that's his way of promising himself that his life won't be like his father's. As our sons enter their teens, we will be thinking about this issue too.

Dejah's cornstarch tip works - we make similar things in Japan with firm deepfried tofu. The "puff" type here is made with various ingredients added to the tofu, so I don't believe I've ever seen them slashed open and stuffed.

Yes, well...my family tradition has always been to cook over a fire at the beach. I checked the local fire regulations, and set up a small driftwood fire. We only had a small number of guests, with several children, so we all stuck to a tried-and-true winter menu: sausages on sticks stuck into a bank of sand around the fire, split rolls with mustard and a nice tamarillo ketchup found at the supermarket, hot-marinaded coleslaw, Samoan chop-suey (made with cellophane noodles, pork, and bok choy), apples and hot banana splits roasted in foil in the ashes. Home made lemonade to drink. Some passerby called up the fire service rather than trouble themselves to ask us if we knew what we were doing, so we had a visit from two firemen in full regalia. They OK'd everything and wished us a pleasant afternoon - which was big of them, considering they'd parked their fire engine on the cliff and toiled along the beach to where we were.

We're back in Japan now, but will take note for future visits! I have been to the Sky Tower buffet in the past - it was OK, but surprisingly popular with our kids and guests because there was a good variety. Tried to take a visiting student this time, couldn't get reservations in either the buffet or the a la carte restaurant. Instead I took my student to a small sushi place called Toki. The food that we actually got to eat was pretty good, but everything else about the place was terrible. Hardly anything listed on the menu was actually available, not even seasonal items, the services was abominably slow despite there being only one other table of guests, the waitress (wife??) of the chef forgot parts of what we ordered until 20 minutes after we had finished eating, and it took her an age to add up our tiny bill (what could we order, when they had nothing in stock?!) manually, with many re-starts. Son1 complained that he was hungrier than when we had arrived, so my sons and student ended up heading for the nearest Subway - what a ridiculous situation, and what a waste of a good chef! We did manage our major food ritual - fish and chips on our local beach watching the sun go down over the sea!

Snoopy thermos lunch set (Tiger) Ladies thermos lunch set (Tiger) The Thermos jar lunch set I bought... Incredibly cool Japanesque Thermos jar lunch set These are on the Amazon Japan site (scroll down to the bottom of the Amazon US or UK sites and you'll find a link to it. You can select "English", which allows you to view the search and order pages in English, but the individual product pages are in Japanese, so it's most useful for ordering things you already know about. Also, you will find more departments in the scroll-down box by the Search Button than in the "Browse Departments" guide below. You may have to fiddle around to find an English word that actually hits a live nerve - I got nothing searching in the Home and Kitchen sections for "bento" or "lunchbox" but "lunch" and the brandnames "Thermos" and "Tiger" brought up stuff (have to wade around a bit though),

Thank you Susan - and thank you for that photo of dinner trying to fight its way out of a forest of wineglasses - a truly inspiring sight!

I succumbed today and bought this thermos lunch jar by Zojirushi, though certainly not at the price given in the link! It'll go to school with son1 tomorrow, but the main aim is to provide my sons with a quick hot dinner on the increasing number of days when we are all coming in and out of the house on different schedules. However, I now have to change my thinking - from bentos which taste good and don't get hard when cold, to things which don't become sludgy in texture or dull in color when kept hot for several hours! P.S. These looked like a good compromise - they would be a good size for an 8-10 year old! I thought they were easier to manage than pulling out the stacked containers in the thermos type. They are also a bit lighter than the type I bought, because only the round "rice" jar is insulated - the other small containers are not insulated, though everything goes into an insulated carry-sack, so they won't get stone-cold, but on the other hand, they make it easy to include things like fruit. I saw the Tiger one and a couple of other brands (which had very slightly larger side-dish containers. Some came with a fork).

Skater brand bento boxes have been my husband's favorite for 10 years or so. The small lift-out containers can be reheated separately and also stop liquid from soaking everything else. You can also buy replacement packing strips which fit inside the lid to create a really good seal. I've never had anything leak from those boxes. However, I have had things leak from plastic lunchboxes bought overseas...but old-fashioned Japanese bento boxes weren't totally airtight either, and some people say that the airtight ones are more likely to result in food poisoning because they prevent the contents from cooling. I second Torakris' suggestion of paper towels - everything sits on them for a little while before being packed into the lunch box, even items with dressing which will then go into a foil cup. Another handy thing for cooling and draining boiled vegetables is a bamboo "seiro" drainer - it not only drains moisture, the bamboo also absorbs moisture from the vegetables. You can also use those roll-up bamboo mats used for rolling sushi. I save the small ones that occasionally come with other foods, as they are a handy size and even better than paper towels for squeezing spinach, draining omelets or boiled beans etc. etc.

That's a model bento, Torakris! Out of curiosity...which were the most popular items when people actually sat down to eat? (I'm secretly pleased that I missed the undokai bento routine this year, but I'm paying for it - son missed the school lunch order, so I have two weeks' of teen-sized bento to make instead...)

Ihave used the crock pot but in some cases a rice cooker (which seems to produce a slightly higher heat) works better to steam things.

There sure is a Sapporo Beer tour. I just got a flyer advertising a junior high school PTA mothers' trip...what happened to the flower arranging classes and whatnot that the elementary school PTA mothers used to indulge in?! Nikka Whiskey is also in northern Chiba prefecture.

andiesenji, thanks for all the details on glycerine. Anzu, I couldn't get those miniatures, which started me down the beer track. Anyway, I made two cakes, both with fruit soaked in stout, and one with Guinness over the top after baking (the other will be soaked with other liquors at home in Japan). I was cautious in applying the post-baking stout, and did a little at a time, but it seems to be in good shape. The Guinness-soaked cake was intended for a fellow NZer in Japan, but he turned up in NZ too, so off he went back to Japan with the cake in his luggage, and strict instructions to keep his hands off it until the weather cools!

The Thor Iverson blog makes very interesting reading if you are interested in NZ wine - worth tracking down the other instalments. I think NZ wine reviewers are too soft - time to start delivering a few wake-up calls to boutique makers of pricey but far from stellar wines. Even more than the notes on individual wines/wineries (and there are scattered mentions of Pinot Noir), I was interested by the general trend of his comments. The NZ wine industry is still very young, and a LOT of wineries are only 10-15 years old, or even less. I expect that the resources of even a high-flying boutique winery mean that they will have more variation in their wines/years than bigger wineries (guess alert). And then there are all those people who started up wineries without doing the headwork.... I've had some good and some poor wine while I've been in NZ this time (not many absolute duds, partly because I made the decision to mostly stay away from the under $NZ18.00 area). I do think the overall quality has improved, (although 2004 wasn't a great year, especially for reds). So much of the best wine is exported that you probably have a better selection (though at higher prices) than I do here in NZ (though I admit I'm not shopping at specialist outlets - the local wine shop now sells beer, a few wines, and Indian candies...).

Thanks andiesenji! I have made Guinness and Porter cakes in the past, they're surprisingly good, but always seem a bit light in texture for a long-keeping cake. I like that nuts in beer idea! I notice from one of my mother's old recipe books that she added 1-2 tsp glycerine when soaking dried fruit in anything non-alcoholic. But then she was a pharmacist, and there are quite a few unusual things in her recipe books!

Empty belly = empty brain There are plenty of kids in our area in Japan who won't eat anything better than school lunch all day. A good lunch can at least remove one disadvantage they face in their school careers. And as for the junk food fundraisers - I know what you mean, and it's pretty grim, isn't it? At least in Japan the suffering parents still run stalls to sell yaki-soba, pork miso soup, curry and rice etc., because we don't have to deal with the minute regulation of food prepared for public consumption (allegedly allowing one disgruntled woman to poison off an entire neighborhood of bitchy rival housewives a few years back, but hey, you gotta take a few risks for the 'hood now and again!). Even so, I notice less and less prepared-on-site food used at school fundraising events, and more and more commercially produced rice-balls...

Glace fruits: others may have had better experiences, but the one time I used glace fruits, the finished cake was just too sweet to eat, even though I cut the sugar quantity in half to compensate for the sweetness of the glace fruit. If I were going to use them again, I think I might douse them in boiling water to get rid of some of the sugar, then soak them in alcohol or dry them out. Candied orange and lemon peels - it's not hard to do it yourself, but I've taken to adding shredded fresh citrus peel. Tangerine/tangelo is especially nice.

I've made beer fruit cakes before, and the finished cake doesn't taste beery. I feel that the best option is hard liquor, because of the alcohol and sugar content; the second best option is a carbonated soft drink such as ginger ale (works very well), and then fruit juice, preferably citrus. Fruit loaves (pound-cake base) with tea-soaked fruits are nice, but I found the fruit absorbed a lot of water...maybe the sugar content of other soaking liquids prevents the fruit from becoming over-soft and pulpy when soaked?

Supermarkets don't seem to sell hard liquor at all, and the liquur stores = BULK sales! As Jackal10 says, I could bake with beer and pour spirits over later (when I'm back in Japan). That sounds like a good compromise!

I'm planning to cook this year's Christmas cake (fruit cake) in New Zealand and take it back to Japan with me, rather than take back all sorts of ingredients. Only one problem: I don't want to buy a bottle of brandy, rum, or bourbon for a single cake, and I think that polishing off the remainder may be a little beyond me! I'd like to use a stout or other dark beer instead, but notice that nobody proposes beer for long-keeping fruit cakes. I have used ginger ale in the past, so I'm tempted to think it might succeed... So. does anybody have a recipe for fruit cake using some form of beer, which they have found successful (apart from boiled fruit cake, which I do make, but which I am not sure would keep for 4 months???)?

I haven't lived in NZ permanently for 15 years, so I only know a fraction of the wineries which have been established or come into production over that period... A lot of good pinot noir comes from Hawkes Bay, Wairarapa, and Central Otago wineries, bad news for the budget-conscious, as areas such as Martinborough in the Wairarapa already command high prices for almost all their wines. Marlborough (and to a lesser extent neighboring Nelson) also produces good pinot noirs, and more sporadically, individual wineries in other areas. Because NZ is a beer-drinking country which started making wines, small wineries with limited production are more likely to be selling to people on their customer list rather than selling to the local market at the cellar doors. Some sell exclusively to export markets. some reviews to look at...and a few names to add to your list, though I couldn't comment on availability or value for money. Wairarapa Fairmont Estate Loopline Vineyard Matua Valley Wairarapa Martinborough Alana Estate Coney Wines (v. new, haven't heard anything of them) Dry River Margrain Martinborough Vineyard Murdoch James Nga Waka Palliser Estate Te Kairanga Martinborough Reserve Walnut Ridge Martinborough Voss Estate Central Otago The Big Picture in Cromwell, Otago, specializes in tastings and sales of Central Otago wines. Akarua (in Bannockburn) Black Ridge (in Alexandra) Carrick (in Bannockburn) Chard Farm (in Gibbston Vly) Dry Gully (only makes pinot noir) (in Alexandra) Felton Rd. Block 5, if you can find it...but also Felton Road pinot noir Gibbston Valley Reserve (another Gibbston Valley winery is Amisfield Lake Hayes, very new winery, and I haven't heard anything about their wines) Hay's Lake Kawarau Estate Reserve Mount Edward Central Otago (in Gibbston Vly) Mt Difficulty Olssen's of Bannockburn Packspur (in Cromwell) Peregrine Central Otago (in Gibbston Vly) Quartz Reef Rippon Valli PN Colleen's Vineyard Waitiri Creek (in Gibbston Vly) ...and having done all that typing and totally run out of steam, I now discover somebody better qualified has done a better job of it...so check out Central Otago and also Marlborough (click "NZ Wineries" on the bar at left) at Cuisine magazine's site!

lperry. thanks for reporting on your experiments. The texture of the boiled potatoes could be affected by the higher temperature as well as the direct immersion in water. Just curious...did you put the potatoes in cold salted water and bring them to the boil, or add them to boiling salted water? For greens, I've had good results when boiling them with a little oil as well as salt added to the water. I speculate that maybe it's just the coating of oil, or maybe the oil layer prevents the boiling water from cooling...I don't know.

If you stay in Auckland around Christmas, Waiheke will be nice, and so will Devonport (on the north shore of Auckland), a small peninsula with a strong seaside feel and increasingly upmarket (though a long way from Sydney's trendy seaside suburbs) shopping and dining. Pick a small private hotel or lodge. Central Auckland seems to be dominated these days by Universities and language schools, so that area is the most likely to shut down over summer - our academic year starts at the end of summer.