helenjp

How about "gruel" for a really unappetizing image! By the way, I should note that the congee setting on my rice cooker is a TIMER function - so it's not cooking slowly all night, though it is soaking in water all night, then starts to cook about an hour before the set time.

Sooo...how much salt for a 24-hour buttermilk marinade???? (Or a mix of yogurt and soured milk, most likely). Recipes I have range from 1/4 tsp salt to 1 tsp salt per cup buttermilk>

In the US, porridge *is* oatmeal, but in ex-colonies, oatmeal is the stuff porridge is made from (ground or cut oats, in their raw state). Steel-cut oats...kerosene...they certainly tasted different to me, but kerosene wasn't a description that sprung to mind! ...So where does your Spouse sit when he eats? I recall my mother saying that she complained for weeks that her food tasted of kerosene while staying at a beach cottage, and being told to shut up and stop being so picky, until somebody finally noticed that she was sitting under the lamp... Mush...now that is definitely not a colonial word "Mash" was for chickens, oh wait, we didn't call them chickens, we called them hens or fowls...

When I cook porridge in my rice cooker, I mix steel-cut oats half-and-half with extra thick rolled oats - definitely more texture and flavor than regular rolled oats, and if you can find extra thick WHOLE GRAIN rolled oats, consider yourself in porridge happy land! If you like your oats chewy, then pinhead oatmeal would be too smooth for you, I think. I've always mixed it with rolled oats for porridge, anyway.

Another research project has begun here...I decided that I'd lived too long without porridge, and ordered some. To me, "oatmeal" means primarily raw ground oats, not rolled oats or porridge. I quickly found that US steel-cut oats are coarser than the medium or pinhead "oatmeal" I was used to in New Zealand. (southern NZ's damp cool climate produces good oats, but they are mostly sold as rolled oats). I have/am about to try these brands/types....any other products to watch for? Favorite oatmeal uses? Bob's Red Mill Scottish Oatmeal This is the closest to fine, pinhead oatmeal that I know of - nice for baking, and nice for coating deepfried or oven-baked fish or chicken. I didn't know that BRM also produce steel-cut oats, so I haven't tried them. Arrowhead Mills Steel-cut Oats Much coarser than British-style medium oatmeal. McCann's Original Steel-cut Irish Oatmeal Almost identical to the Arrowhead product to look at. Crisper and with more flavor though, when I compared a tablespoon (raw) in a little milk. I like the steel-cut oats better than the Scottish Oatmeal for making porridge in my rice-cooker overnight though (on the congee setting, with less water). The Oatmeal cooked to a hard paste, because the water wasn't boiling enough to agitate it, whereas the long, slow cooking suited the AM steel-cut oats perfectly - have yet to try the "porridge test" with the McCann's.

Kris, that New England Cheesemaking Supply does a great job of shipping to Japan - they sent my stuff as "educational supplies", so it sailed through customs. That was years ago, but I had a good time with it. Wish I'd been a bit more ambitious! To sit or not to sit after flouring....I've always thought that you shouldn't let it sit between flouring and frying. I'll be interested to try a comparison.

I regret to tell you that Japanese doll's clothes books often have instructions on how to make extremely miniature mini plastic foods . Sylvanian Families books are particularly bad for this. All you ever wanted to know about how to make toy spaghetti from cotton thread and resin... But I digress...this is far from Kappabashi...

That foodproductdesign site has a heap of information on it, although technical. Why don't you do a roll-your-own? Japan has political reasons to favor konnyaku/konjac (as well as a lot of established technology in making konnyaku jellies), but apparently quite a number of things work well with agar - one of those sites mentioned xanthan gum but also remarked that locust bean gum seemed promising and was underused. Looks like most of them are used half/half with agar. Happy playtime!

My late DH#1 and I were running the "Japan Day" snack stall, and he was trying to figure out exactly how little agar he could get away with using ! Puddingy textures are possible, when using something that already has some viscosity, such as custard. However, if I were making something like that, I think I would try a mixed gelling product such as Kanten Papa for a gel with more viscosity - less brittle. It seems that combining certain products in some cases works much better than just one - a kind of 1 +1 = 3 idea. Lots of things work this way with agar, apparently - try googling for things like "agar" or "agarose", hydrocolloid, and synergy... edit: oops, hydrocolloid not hypercolloid

Hiroyuki and Ohba, in general I agree...but for sashimi, I think I'd have to spend 2-3 times as much to get the equivalent quality in Tokyo. (But maybe that's just the sweet taste of nostalgia!). But as for diving in off the street, that's always a great idea in Japan. Unless you see roaches moving in in busloads, stepping into the first restaurant you see will rarely expose you to anything more than a little confusion and a meal that was "only" passable - but it could just as well be great, and in small places often the whole restaurant, staff and other diners, will join in to make sure you (and they) get the most out of your experience!

I'm sorry...I should have known that, because I had a Malaysian student in my class last year, and I sure got to use her name often enough, as in "X, would you and your friend care to stop chatting for a minute there...." I notice Rasa Malaysia is available on Amazon Japan. But wow, expensive - have ta wait till term (=paychecks) start up again! Jackfruit Muffins...hmm, sure that's not a waste of a good jackfruit? The Kuali site is great! And by the way, I made agar flavored with that Philippine pandan/coconut essence today, with young coconut and pineapple in a milk/coconut milk syrup...finished it just in time for my DS2 and his best friend to race in from school and gobble it up. I told them it was a very serious experiment, and they better tell me just exactly what they thought about the flavors and textures! DS' friend is going through hard, hard times at the moment, and I just about teared up watching him motor through it all with a look of intense concentration on his face. He loved the young coconut and the sweet coconut/milk, butdidn't care for the pandan flavor, though!

I started digging up my late (first, that is, #2 is made of tougher stuff )husband's research into agarose (one of the gelling components in agar agar) yesterday, and never got the actual information posted... what is that stuff anyway??? tech stuff about different kinds of gums and gels Agarose basically entraps water in a porous mesh of tiny fibers. It's hard to say exactly how much agar you need, because commercial products are made from any of 3 different seaweeds, and they are made to different standards of purity. Also, powdered agar is reputed to produce weaker gels than block agar, with "string" agar somewhere in the middle. Agar gels made using block agar are also reputed to set to a clearer gel...but I don't find modern powders are as cloudy as they used to be. I think the difference is literally that the fibers have been chopped up smaller! The packet of powdered agar I used recommended 4g per 500ml water. That's a rate just a little under 0.01% - in exact terms, 0.14oz powdered agar will set 17oz water. The pack I made up today produced a firm but not rubbery gel at that rate. You can set up to 600ml of water with that amount of 600ml, but depending on the fluid you are using, you may not get such a reliable set at that concentration. Using stick/bar/baton agar. Normally a bar is 4g, but sometimes you get extra-long ones which are 8g. They are normally used at the same concentration as powdered agar. However, you normally tear the baton into 2-3 pieces (to fit in your bowl!) and drop it into a bowl of water to soak - up to an hour or two, and you need to weight it a bit. Then wring it out really well, tear the baton into smaller pieces into the liquid you want to gel. Heat (stirring) and proceed as usual. Some people say that you need to strain baton agar, as it is made directly from the seaweed and sometimes contains tiny amounts of insoluble fibrous material. It's not really possible to produce a "soft" gel with agar - either it is too weak to gel properly, and you get crumbly clumps in watery solution (unlike the custardy consistency of over-dilute gelatin), or else it will appear to gel at first, but will quickly start to "weep" liquid. It is possible to change the structure of an agarose gel by adding a tiny amount of salt. I think it weakens and softens the gel, but it could be the opposite, I'm sorry, I really don't remember... Acid fruits and agar gels: touch and go even when you heat the fruit first, and some things like papaya and kiwifruit enzymes are even trickier. Try it and see, anyway - I *have* set kiwifruit in agar, but it doesn't work every time! You could try doing a home-made thingo by alkalizing the water very slightly, but there's no guarantee that the agar wouldn't set in clumps... I also made a jelly using the Kanten Papa (agar plus konnyaku powder). That is used at a rate of 10g of powder to 550ml of liquid (coffee, in this case). That's 0.35oz to 19oz. I used 50g (2oz approx) of sugar per 500ml of liquid for both the KPP and the straight agar gel. The gel was a very nice texture, like gelatin, but a little lighter. It was a little bit soft, so I think a rate of 0.35 oz powder to 16-17oz liquid might be better. Then again, I wanted a gel firm enough to keep a shape. At the same time, I made up a packet of strawberry gelatin, using the same amount of water, to compare setting times. When my kids came home 2 hours later, the agar was set solid, the Kanten Papa was adequately set, and the strawberry gelatin was nowhere near set...the Kanten Papa looks like a great alternative to normal gelatin, since it sets more rapidly. Later: the strawberry gelatin is set, but not enough to hold a shape when cut. I actually like the Kanten Papa texture better.

Kew & TP, any recommendations on books in English on Malaysian food. I saw Nordin's book on Kuih listed on Amazon Japan and Amazon UK. My books are decades out of date! Can you bring me up to date?

Heh heh. When my mother cleaned out her kitchen, she said, casually, "You can have one of those cast iron frying pans if you want". "Sure," I said, and grabbed the best one, before she had even a second to rephrase her offer.

The Buko Pandan essence I got (coconut and pandan...I didn't know at the time that "buko" means coconut is shown on this page FERNA pandan essence Kew, not to worry - though thanks for the offer. The coconut-pandan essence I have is a clear essence. I see FERNA have other pandan essences, in giant plastic tanks even, so I'm sure I can find a straight pandan type in a bigger town, now that I know that some of their products are imported. I can even ring my Filipina friend, but although she's a good cook, she doesn't go in for sweets! I'm planning on using the essence in a jelly and coconut milk dessert, to test the difference between agar-agar jelly, gelatine, and the agar/konnyaku vegetable jelly powder I found recently.

Not yet...butcher happened not to have any ribs or chicken with bones, so I decided I'd rather wait. It will happen this week though, because school lunch service ends for the year this week so lunch will be back on the home menu

Ketupat - how strange, in NZ Maori people weave the same shape as children's toys, using strips of NZ flax...my kids have some that friends wove for them when they were little. I've never seen them used for anything, though. Thank you, thank you, thank you both for all the photos! I'm amazed how similar the look of the shops and foodcourts is to NZ (even the staff, considering how many Malaysian students are in NZ these days!). Markets are a little different, of course... One look at your blog, and my family started recalling all the things they liked about Singapore (apart from the game consoles in the Singapore Airlines planes, that is) so I guess we will be flying the long way round again next time we go to NZ... Just in case we have to wait a long time for another blog from *our* part of the world, here's a blog that seems to cover most of the bases....girl from Brunei who loves to cook, with Japanese boyfriend, living in Sydney...did we leave anything out?!

I started looking into US fried chicken after learning to make Japanese kara-age. I use yogurt or even milk instead of buttermilk. Marinaded overnight it makes for a wonderful texture, but I think the chicken doesn't keep as well??? I'll be following along...have no idea how to make fried chicken in a skillet, because I've only ever deepfried it.

Slightly bitter spring greens...What about making a pale green spring herb/wild herb miso rather than a yuzu miso? (Yuzu is a winter flavor). Salad...bitter or wild greens are often paired with rich flavors such as mild white or pale miso, and/or sesame. Slightly bitter shoots (such as asparagus) or leaves (such as garland chrysanthemums, but also other strongly-flavored herbs or leaves) are tempura'd, or deepfried in a whole or partial seed coating (sesame, but for fine cooking, white poppyseed can be used). They make a nice garnish too.

Hana yori dango...how about "hana yori danshi" ? I religiously buy sakura-mochi (Kansai-style, thank you) every year, but what I secretly prefer are good kusa-mochi, made from the new yomogi shoots which are at their best around cherry blossom time! So in fact, I'm not even looking at the blossoms, just scavenging for yomogi in the grass verges! Come to think of it, it's very strange that Japanese have never got heavily into edible flowers other than cherry blossoms themselves. There are plenty of native violets and dandelions...what's stopping them, I wonder?

Foie Gras, Fillet Steak and Avocado Rice Bowl (Donburi) seasoned with wasabi/soy sauce and also Babette of Beef Rice Bowl...rice stir-fried with shiitake, beef briefly grilled, then rolled in a frypan with an arrowroot thickened sweet/salty sauce of fried onion, soy sauce, mirin, and oyster sauce, liberal dose of chives. both from this book of dishes that restaurant staff eat on the job...so of course, the food is mostly aimed at young men doing physical labor, not under-exercised restaurant patrons . Yasui Sozai de Oishii Makanai Ryouri Not French but this dish looked pretty good...Minestrone with a small amount of Miso...usual minestrone vegetables, rice, fine vermicelli, mild miso, parmesan cheese to finish My thoughts exactly! Asians will be bored by old-hat "japonoiserie" garnishes, french people might not want to eat bitter gourd baked in pate feuillete...

Is the jicama that you refer to the same as this thing...yam beans? I didn't know it was so popular in Malaysian food.

Don't know anything about this guy, but he looks to be heavily into Australiana. Don't just look at the recipes though, there's other interesting stuff on the site. Benjamin Christie site Dining Downunder site a show involving Ben Christie and other chefs trundling round Australia cooking up this and that. Foodlovers site This NZ site is run by Helen Jackson. Quite an extensive site with forum, recipe competitions etc. Could somebody on the spot point us expats and interested furriners to other interesting sites please?

Not - it's made from toasted unhulled sesame seeds, not raw ones.

Thanks for the info on texture, after the second attempt, I was wondering if perhaps the cake was simply a Mud Cake variation... I'm thinking that the difference in flours is more important than I thought...and maybe my oven is a bit low in temperature. I use bread flour when baking US cookie recipes, and that has solved any problems...but it's a long time since I tried out a new US cake recipe. When I compared a '70s NZ/Australian version of the carrot cake being discussed in THAT thread, I found that the NZ recipe had 50% more flour than the US version, though otherwise all but identical. Hmmm. So I may need to actually increase the amount of flour (and check the oven temp with a thermometer) to bake it successfully in Japan.