helenjp

Hope it stays in business! I will PM you, though Shinjuku is a bit off the Mister n Missus date night route!

I don't know if this is quite proper, but here is a Japanese lazy panfried baozi recipe...the idea is obviously to imitate the fluffy type of dough. The texture is different but it does make for a quick, tasty snack. Dough (supposed to make 6 small dumplings) 150-160 g flour 2 t baking powder 2 T sugar 0.5 t salt 80 ml milk 1 T Chinese sesame oil (i.e. toasted sesame oil, not the middle eastern kind) Mix wet into dry ingredients. Knead quite well, allow to rest covered 15 minutes. Filling (whatever you like, this isn't what I actually used) 150 g ground pork 1 dividing onion, chopped finely 2 dried shiitake or Chinee black mushrooms, soaked and minced finely (reserve water if you want) 3 T finely minced bamboo shoot 1 t each of grated fresh ginger, oyster sauce, sugar 2 t soy sauce (I think that's too much...I tend to use a splash of nam pla, a pinch of salt, and maybe 1/2 t soy sauce, with or without oyster sauce. Miso or other Chinese seasoning pastes are also possible) 1 T sake or other rice wine Mix altogether very thoroughly with hands until pasty. Divide dough into 6, pat out on your hand (between layers of wrap if you like), dump a teaspoonful of filling in the middle and close up the baozi as usual. When all the baozi are ready, heat a fryingpan to medium-hot, pour in a little oil, line up the baozi leaving plenty of space, pour over 150 ml hot water (top up the shiitake liquid with hot water if you like) and put the lid on. Steam 3 minutes. Turn heat down, steam a further 5-6 minutes and then remove lid. Turn heat up for just 10 seconds to crisp up the bottoms, and serve.

Jam. Living in Japan, I've accustomed myself to many things, but Japanese jam is not one of them. I like jam to be tart and intensely flavored. Sweetish with a barely perceptible scent of something or other...no, I'd rather eat my bread dry, thanks. Fruit salads - apple, orange, and grape is truly a shudder-making combination. I think it may be because sweet foods often have a background bitterness, and if you combine that food with something sour, the bitterness will jump out from under the bed and GET YOU!

Different dishes, definitely...and each subject to endless variation. I think I like grilled cheese best with a chunk of solid cheese, so if I have only grated cheese available (usually the case in Japan), it's going to be toasted cheese. The good thing about toasted cheese is that if you are making enough for several people, you can mix an egg and seasonings or even chopped scallions into the grated cheese, and have a gooey soft-centered cheese on toast. As it happens, today's lunch was grilled cheese made with some indifferent ham and the wizened left-over end of a block of cheese.

Communal table - somebody commented that they are more common in casual places, and I agree. The tables that attracted me were more than just double-sided singles counters...they were a main feature of the restaurant. That is, the table itself was beautiful and unusual, a huge cut from a log with minimal finishing around the edges. I think it's best when edges are shaped so that people on opposite sides are not staring each other in the eyeballs - curves that require seating to be at a slight angle deflect the gaze of the person opposite you very easily. Objects in the center of the table can be of varying heights - a bowl of stones, for example, invites comment without blocking people off from one another, while flowers, plants, screens offer more privacy. At a casual place, I'd like to be able to choose either option. ...and to be honest, a power point and hotspot would go down well too! Maybe even a pinpoint reading lamp for the intrepid dining reader in gloomy evening restaurants! Regards Helen H

Yes, the bottoms on some brands can be very thin. I have a very old Shuttle Chef, which doesn't have a thicker plate on the bottom. I just use a flame-tamer underneath it. I use mine a lot, and am debating getting a smaller second one. They save energy and space on my cooktop (since I only have two burners), but the main benefit is having meals "ready to eat" without heating up. Ideals for households where people come home at different times, especially when somebody need to come home, eat, and run out the door again within 30 minutes. No futzing with plastic wrap and microwaving while precious minutes slip by, and no increasingly crusty pots from multiple re-heatings. Younger home-alones don't need to negotiate heat sources, they can just serve up and eat. The fact that they don't need a power source makes them excellent for tailgate picnicking. Obviously, food that likes a slow, gentle heat does best, but for some items, I prefer a pressure cooker (e.g. pulled pork, cowboy beans...anything where I want to really hammer the flavors in). Soups, foods with a delicate texture (poultry, fish, fruit), are particularly suitable. There is no evaporation, so a stew can be insipid if you don't brown it well and maybe add flavor later. Small amounts will also obviously not keep hot as long as larger amounts of food. Oatmeal is OK if you use There is a drawback - they will keep food hot for say 4 hours, and warm for 5-6, but you cannot set them in the morning and come home to a hot dinner at 7 pm - that is a job that only a slow-cooker or an oven/rice cooker with a timer will do.

With a smaller freezer, even small items can waste space: "one left over" grilled salt salmon steak, 1 chicken fillet, etc. I rarely cook for one, so when it's use-up time, making them into some kind of topping for rice is about as far as it gets.

Ice...convenience stores will likely close during power cuts, so I'm not counting on that. The idea of box-in-box sounds useful even within the refrigerator. I'm going to take a look at some of the insulated lunch bags around too, as they might be less bulky inside the fridge. Also thanks for the tip on marine grade coolers - I'll check our local fishing store while son2 has a (yet another) music lesson next door. I'm hoping that if I keep the fridge load down, I will be able to refreeze cooling pads overnight (in really hot weather, I notice that the ice-maker produces very little, so the easier I make its job, the better).

So far we've avoided the rolling blackouts that are taking place in other parts of Japan (perhaps because we live down the road from a major chunk of local infrastructure), but we are slated for up to 6 hours of rolling blackouts per day some time in the future. I fear that "future" = "summer". I know that eGulleteers have dealt with rolling blackouts lasting for days or weeks, so I'd like to figure out now how I can deal with it. Now that I work away from home most of the week, I usually buy groceries on my way home around 7 pm, and cook 3 or 4 meals at the same time. Cooked food needs to last 24 hours. Sounds like time for canned or retort pouch "heat and eat" foods or rice-bran pickled vegetables to me, and I'm clearing out my small freezer so that I can freeze water to help keep the fridge cool, but please tell me what else I'm missing! How can this work without refrigeration in 35 deg C (95 deg F) temperatures? Power could be off until 10 pm, and then go off again around 6 am.

Food supplies - having some kind of supply is probably useful. Elder son is now home from Sendai. He was in an urban area without power, phone, water, or gas, but with less quake damage than some areas and no tsunami damage. Sendai is one of the region's major cities, yet the situation was bad there, and is still truly dire in more isolated areas (I don't understand why they aren't making heli drops to cut-off hospitals and evacuation centers, but maybe I just don't know enough details). Son and his dorm-mates walked and cycled to all the centers they could reach to get water, and noted that none of them had food for distribution, and many had very, very limited supplies even for those sleeping in the centers. However, graduating dorm residents had clubbed together to buy a stash of long-lasting emergency food supplies such as canned crackers. That plus the snacks they had in their rooms at the time was all the food they had until they evacuated. They donated what they had left to a relief center when they left. Some students stayed behind to volunteer, but those in areas without utilities or food supplies decided it was pointless to stay on, relying on emergency supplies that could be used for others. I keep my very small emergency stash in a metal bucket with a lid and a cushion on top that doubles as a stool in our front entrance. Usually I just go through it twice a year and replace clothing and cycle canned food back to general use, replacing it with newer supplies, but I'm thinking that I will have a "Glad we're all safe" dinner using the un-needed supplies when I update them. What's in there: warm socks protective gloves rope handcrank torch/radio (apart from the ones in general use) coins tissues/1 roll toilet paper wet wipes big bandaids, bandage clips, cloth to tear for bandage or use as sling, string and rope film case with twist-ties, 2 sizes rubber bands plastic sheet, 2-3 very large plastic bags can opener, pocket knife chopsticks, spoons canned fish add-water rice sachets dried fruit tube chocolate gas lighter, matches wrapped in foil ID numbers/photocopies of important documents may add: enamel mugs, foil dishes antiseptic cream, bug repellent lightweight foil blanket Water - I used to keep 3 10-liter plastic canisters, but two split at the seams and flooded my kitchen floor, making me worry about the fridge wiring. Have yet to figure out a more reliable way to keep a small supply of water.

I might store gasoline if I lived in a grand country residence where I could keep my fuel stash at a distance, but I'd rather NOT have it go up right next to my back door! I'm a 3-dayer...but you know what they say about best-laid plans. As it happened, I was getting my eyes tested in a shop with an all-glass frontage when the quake hit. The staff and I made a hasty exit, me in my black metal testing specs, but we were on the highest, firmest ground in the area, and it was no worse than very scary. Yet when I got home, subsidence had warped our front door and I couldn't get in...so much for the emergency supplies stashed on the OTHER side of the front door. My shoulder is not strong enough yet for serious strong-arming, but fortunately a neighbor I alerted to a broken water-pipe came and forced it open for me...took a while though. Later check showed a lot of new cracks in the foundations, and one inside the house (old, pre-earthquake regulations) Not one of my family were home when the quake struck, so food and water supplies for the immediate post-quake period were not an issue. It took my husband 24 hours, and my younger son 48 hours to get home. My elder son is still in Sendai, where he was in a bus taking a freshman student and his mother to see the campus when the quake struck...it was just chance that the poor freshman and mother weren't stuck alone in a city they barely knew...home emergency rations not much good in that case either They all walked back to the small dormitory, which was undamaged but had no power, gas, water, or phone, and have been camped there since. The dorm had stocks of food, and I believe they got some drinking and maybe cooking water from an evacuation center. The students also pooled what food they had stashed in their rooms...4 days on student snacks, now there's a frightening thought. What he needs most is cash to pay for tickets home and some form of communication - it took 1 day to get a minute-long phone-box call and 2 days for him to get to an area where cellphone signals could be picked up. He made a phone call minutes after the quake that he obviously thought had not got through...all I could hear was his voice saying "the call won't go through...". Like Blether, we had a lot of breakage - maybe about 30% of our china survived? I've always liked lacquerware for durability, and sure enough, that survived, scratched but usable. Along with the clunky freebies from the donut shop! It took me half an hour to get into the house, and several more hours to work my way along the corridor, moving several bookcase-loads of books outside so that I could right the bookcases enough to wriggle past them. In the kitchen two cabinets had fallen against the fridge, so the room was literally knee-deep in smashed glass and china and other fallen items. Several more hours work right there. Cooking? Not a chance! I spent the night alone, in a house with a broken window and a door that couldn't be shut, let alone locked, and it just happened that I had dismantled our old gas cooktop ready to install a new one, so there was no way to cook anyway, and to be honest, I was not interested. I dined on the potato crisps I'd bought for my husband's Friday night beer, and a coke from the vending machine over the road (good old Japan, house subsides but vending machine goes on for ever). I almost never drink softdrinks of any type, so the old adage about sweet food for shock is true. When my family did get home, they wanted soupy noodles with lots of vegetables - something light and warm and not dry or hard to chew. If you have to evacuate on foot, I guess that a portable collapsible water bag or bucket plus some smaller containers for immediate consumption would be the most useful - if you have a chance to collect them. The worst tsunami in Japan struck a mere NINE MINUTES after the quake - no time to do anything but run. If you are sitting things out at home, that's a bit different - we had power, water, gas, and phone, though the water is a bit iffy, and blackouts begin tomorrow. My pressure-cooker has been very useful cooking stuff quickly in case blackouts meant loss of fresh food in our fridge. I had just been shopping before the quake struck, which was lucky, because the stores on Sunday were CRAZY with people buying everything they could get hold of. I expect to use my thermal pot to cook food and keep it hot (needs no electricity) once blackouts start too, as we are in the group scheduled for blackouts over breakfast and/or dinner prep time. I've heard that BBQs can be useful too, though I guess that depends on aftershocks....here in Chiba, on filled-in gully land, the house seems to be just constantly shuddering. We have a radio and a torch with a manual wind-up battery. Since torches and batteries disappeared off the shelves within hours of the quake, that has been an item that's glad to have. I have stored candles AND A GAS LIGHTER together in a box - had not thought to keep the lighter with the candles beforehand. Supplies - elder son hopes to get home from Sendai very late tomorrow night. he will be bringing two dorm-mates with him to stay the night and then see on their way home (being in the Railway Fan club, it's a point of honor to ensure that his dorm-mates can leave Sendai confident that they will reach their homes and not be stranded halfway). So in the middle of tidying up the mess here, we need to lay our hands quickly on bedding, toiletries, and perhaps underwear for refugees. Impossible to buy more food now, so I'm glad I have a good supply of beans! I always make sure I have some tar-tab cans of fish, tomatoes, and corn, and those will be useful too. We will just be passing on the favor that school friends did when they took my younger son in for two nights....the biggest lesson for me is that in an emergency, the people you need to look after are the people around you - you have to trust other people to look after the family members who are out of your physical reach. Around my area, it was mostly women at home alone or with young children on the first night after the quake - older children and spouses just couldn't get home. Money - both my kids should have had more cash on them than they did, even though I make sure my son carries between 1 to 2000 yen with him on his train pass and in cash. I didn't have a lot of cash with me either. We have always had an agreement with our kids on who to leave messages with and where to contact, but I had not considered a situation where evacuating a son would entail transport and other problems at this end as well as at his end. But in the end, all of us are safe, and I imagine that son's friends in Sendai are thinking more about their good fortune in being alive and unscathed, and are not thinking too hard about the blankets or chocolate biscuits or whatever that it would have been nice to have! P.S. Forgot to say - sturdy gloves for clean-up - I guess most disasters involve either mud/filth or breakages, if not both. We always have cotton gloves and they were useful. Also lots of garbage bags and assorted plastic bags, some large, duct tape, string/rope. Cardboard. What more could a person need?

Go to it! Hope it's a cheering occasion, and don't forget to let us all know - cheerful news would be good.

I'll try that thanks John...fridge space is a problem for me. I'd noticed that gentle heat was best, but had not thought of noting the exact time or temperature. I'm just about to break a new gas table out of the box, so now I have the perfect way to figure out how sensitive the settings are.

I do this...but it is more practical for me, cooking bento and dinners for a family daily, than it would be for a single person or DINK couple who eat lunch and dinner out often. I don't even consider buying a year's rice at one time. It might be possible if you bought UNHUSKED rice, which keeps better than brown or UNMILLED rice. However, while a restaurant might be able to run a husking machine, I've never seen a household rice polisher that would deal with unhusked rather than simply brown rice (I got curious and checked when I got my polisher!). I buy 30 kgs and have it delivered in 10kg bags. I keep 10 kg in my kitchen in a dispenser, and the remainder in a carton in my cool, north-facing entrance porch. I also avoid buying a large store of rice right at midsummer. My motivations were 1) high price and deteriorating quality of supermarket rice, 2) reluctance to store large quantities of polished rice at home, and 3) desire to eat less highly polished rice without distressing my husband, who not only dislikes brown rice, but has trouble digesting it. There are two types of household rice polisher - the type that cuts or chips off the skin, and the so-called pressure type that wears off the skin. The latter is considered to generate less heat and produce better rice. I ordered the cheapest 30 kg amount of rice available, and was very surprised to find that it was better than any of the supermarket rice I had bought recently - the grains were evenly sized and translucent, none of the mixture of chalky broken and whole translucent grains I was getting sick of seeing. The cooked rice was shiny, fragrant, and stayed moist and resilient in lunchboxes, whereas cheap supermarket rice is sometimes chunky and crumbly even when fresh. Last year's rice harvest was not of good quality, so I'm not sure that will continue to be true this year. You could probably get 10 kg bags of rice over the internet that would be at least reasonable in price but also of reliable quality. My machine is a Yamazen model no longer made. Cheap and efficient but I don't think you can really produce as much variation in the degree of polishing as the dial indicates. It is similar to this more expensive and apparently better Zojirushi rice polisher. The bran is very attractive to insects and rodents, so you need to keep the unit fairly clean and dispose of the bran efficiently. You can use quite a lot of bran in making rice-bran pickles (and I could swear that the pickle bed did not go sour as easily with fresh bran freshly toasted) and small amounts in other dishes, but most of ours went into the compost heap. It makes excellent compost for the same reasons that whole wheat flour makes good sourdough starter - the outer skin and hulls of grains contain micro-organisms that aid fermentation. You do have to be careful not to add too much rice bran to the heap though. Other household uses for bran - tied up in slightly loose-woven cloth and tossed in the bath, or used (also in bags) to polish/clean floors and other wood surfaces.

I agree with John - it's not that hard to get good results. I think the most likely problems are 1) boiling the dashi too hard, 2) leaving the konbu in too long, or 3) trying to store the dashi too long - it's not a product that keeps at all well even refrigerated. UNBOILED konbu soaking in water keeps better than dashi does in the refrigerator. John's method works wonderfully for fine dashi for clear soups etc. But for family use, it is fine to use the kind of dashi people make for noodle soups - same amounts of konbu, and you can either use the same amount of katsuobushi, or if you want it really strong (or you are using konbu and dashi that have already been used to make clear dashi once), double the katsuo, or add another 1% amount of some other type of fish shavings. Bring the water to the boil with the konbu in it, and either remove the konbu straight away, or keep it at a very low simmer while you add the fish shavings. Some people leave the konbu in until the end, but I prefer to take it out after 2-3 minutes. Continue to simmer for about 15 minutes, then strain. This type of dashi will not be clear but cloudy, but that is not an issue if you want it for miso soups and nimono etc.

At this time of year, cabbage udon is a favorite cheap and tasty dinner...the spring cabbages are sweet, with thick, meaty stems and leaves, and go incredibly well with fried tofu, bland udon, and a fairly mild udon soup. Lifting the udon noodles while still chewy and simmering them briefly with the other ingredients is the key. The only snag is the quality of the fried tofu (thin-sliced aburage is best, but even thick atsu-age is OK) - good quality aburage does a wonderful job of absorbing flavor. Pasta and cabbage go well together too...I believe there is a Jamie Oliver recipe which takes that old standby up a level too. Cheap summer entertaining - husband's expat friends often come to stay for days or weeks in the summer. When the piggy bank sounds hollow, I make a sashimi "namero" of fresh sardines, saury, or baby yellowtail. The flesh is minced up very finely with scallions　or Japanese dividing onions, green shiso leaves, ginger (occasionally myouga), and miso to season. Drizzle (saturate!) with vinegar or citrus juice and a sprinkling of shredded ginger to serve. If the fish is very strongly flavored (sardines, saury etc.), a touch of raw garlic in the mix doesn't hurt. I haven't tried it recently, but there is no reason why this shouldn't work with different herbs or spices for a Thai/S.E. Asian, Italian, or Middle Eastern flavor. Vegetarian chirashi sushi is a cheap and pretty thing on the table, if you want an alternative to the egg fried rice theme!

This concept pops up in the Japan forum too....is it just a hangover from the days when people couldn't regulate their cooking flame easily, or is it still relevant today? When the topic comes up, Hiroyuki says he's long since stopped adding cold water, and just turns the heat down to keep the pot at the required level of boil. I prefer to add the cold water - my reasoning is that I rarely have a really huge pot of water, and I want to ensure that water rapidly being lost by evaporation and absorption (especially with noodles) is being replaced, so that the amount of loose starch in the water is kept as low as possible. For me, the handy rules of thumb about time are just a convenient byproduct.

Purcell Mountain Farms have both red and rose matta rice listed...but both "out of stock". So you may still get lucky! I've never heard of Cargo rice - you are certainly finding some interesting rice varieties along your way.

Not a video game but a card game...Sushi Bar! In English, as far as I can tell.

Try "semi-polished" or "rice with germ". I believe that some types of Indian Red Rice are usually sold semi-polished (including parboiled types, but I've never seen those).

Jhatpat Fruit Chaat...winter fruit salad with black pepper, from Zaiqa, a Toronto-based foodblog devoted to Hyderabadi food. This extremely well-organized blog has been fascinating me for a while. I haven't made this dish, but it stuck in my memory as a promising proposal.

Goma-dofu in a Kansai Buddhist temple is the best! I've never eaten really good goma-dofu in Kanto, though I admit I haven't looked too hard. Looking back at your photos, I see that soba shop with little partitions between counter stools...I don't think I've EVER seen anything like that.

One possibility - what about growing some of your candidates at home for a season, before you introduce them to your workplace garden plot or pot? If your growing area is visible to guests, that will give you a better idea of how manageable plants are in your climate. I notice that a lot of small coffee-shops/"small menu" restaurants in urban areas here in Japan have a container or two of herbs near their street entrance...just two or three types, usually of small-leafed mediterranean herbs that always look presentable, and including rosemary because it is evergreen. Hot-climate herbs - shiso (perilla) doesn't care how hot it gets, as long as it gets enough water and nutrients. If you are using herbs ornamentally, keeping large leaves free of bugs may be a challenge. Mint leaves rarely get bug-eaten, but I find that it dies back in really intense heat (probably not a problem if you can keep it damp). I can only say that being assiduous in watering and feeding seems to help plants keep bugs at bay - if I forget to water them, bugs descend in droves. Netting would help, but is less picturesque.

Did you stay overnight on Mt. Koya? And can you tell us a little bit about where you went in Osaka? Looks like you had a good time, and I'm looking forward to hearing more!

Coriander...be careful where you plant this, if you have it in significant quantities! It can smell really nauseating as it grows, even to people who are happy to eat it in buckets with their food. If you want to get really green, you could consider composting some of your green waste, as leafy herbs love compost!