helenjp

Kushikatsu...definintely a big part of Osaka dining. Maybe Kobe too, though I associate Kobe more with tonkatsu, but kushikatsu is foreign food if you go as far afield as Kyoto. I've never eaten kushikatsu in Tokyo, so can't say, but certainly kushikatsu restaurants in Osaka serve practically anything that will fit in a frypan. My memory is a little hazy, but I seem to recall some things served with salt and maybe sansho, and others with sauce...much the way that some tempura items such as prawn are served with salt in Osaka. It's so long since I lived there that I've forgotten an awful lot...just odd things like the dowdy Printemps store in Shinsaibashi, which old Osaka families continued to visit for fruit ices "on the half shell". I do think that Kansai people eat more fish and chicken than pork or beef. When I lived there, "mizutaki" chicken-based nabe was the standard family nabe. I do remember my surprise on eating Kanto-style egg sushi for the first time though. In Osaka, egg sushi is a slice from a big datemaki roll with sushi rice in the middle. Nice and sweet, in true Osaka style!

No, not new. I've known of them and eaten them for...er...close on 30 years. First encountered them as a university student at the Chinese grocery where I worked. MOst of the food was Cantonese, so I'm vaguely surprised that they wouldn't be known in Shanghai. Certainly saw some in Singapore, which has (or had) a largely Cantonese culture (apart from the older local Chinese, that is). These are not olives as we know them though - they have a longer pit and a more fibrous flesh. I've had them sweetish and also with chilis.

I've been itching to get my fists on a copy of that David Burton book. Influences...I think that France is if anything, more isolated than the rest of Europe from direct influence. What influences do you see as arising from French Southeast Asia? And which influences do you think are more pan-European, or even pan-Western hemisphere trends in exotic influence?

Yeah I think that giri-choco is mostly a hang-over from the "bubble" period. My son2's violin teacher made his day when she gave him a little chocolate one year. Now I'm waiting to see if the girl who sent son1 a New Year's card will give him chocolate this year. Maybe not - he sent her a New Year's card which was about as warm and friendly as a notice from the tax department!

Thanks for your update, Toliver. Looks like an opportunity here for a community-based newspaper.

Husband doesn't get the office chocolates that he used to...his hair is grayer now! The past few years, I've made a box of Valentine cookies and goodies for him to take to work and share out, hoping to ease the tensions that run high as the end of the financial year approaches and deadlines get crazier and crazier. This year I've got a huge Valentine's Day deadline myself, so our sons may be making the cookies this weekend!

There's a few well-chosen illustrations and snippets from Hearn's newspaper days in the Creole Cookbook, but I'd be interested to read more...much more! The cookbook looks as if he knew more about eating than cooking, but the "verbatim from the cook's mouth" look makes them all the more interesting. I've made some of the recipes. Some of them are not Creole but generic 19th century, and I detect similarities with handwritten recipes from my grandmother's sisters, all born at the end of the 19th century, and recording recipes from their cook or their mother or aunts.

Yep, I'm sure I've inflicted pain on the victims of my hospitality in the past, and may live to regret meals that I have yet to cook... However, the worst meal yet has to go to my new-ish MIL. FIL married her in an unheroic attempt to provide himself with life-time live-in help, but she's further down the slippery slope than he is. I've banned the kids from eating anything at their house after a memorable meal of strangely chemically tasting semi-preserved vegetables and ROTTEN RICE. I ate mine because husband was eating his without comment, but it turned out that he was eating his because I was...and the resulting food poisoning was just too high a price to pay for politeness! I've tried to talk to her since about the unwisdom of leaving rice on "keep warm" for days on end, but there's always yellowish rice in the rice cooker when we call around. As for mental suffering, that prize goes to a friend's birthday party long ago when we were both about 6 or 7. Everybody fell upon the icecream, the cake, the jellies, and the cookies...and nobody touched the healthy lettuce salad with vinegary, sweet, condensed milk "mayonnaise" dressing. The mother who had brought the salad asked sadly if anybody wanted any, so I bravely volunteered. I sat and tried to choke the hated lettuce and teeth-stripping mayonnaise down, overhearing the mothers whisper about what a GREEDY kid I was to be still eating while everybody else had gone to play. I still have a vivid memory of tears running down my cheeks and onto the fork stuck in my mouth as I tried to sob and chew at the same time!

Lafcadio Hearn's Creole Cookbook ...just for Kristin. More of a curiosity than anything, because it is firmly rooted in its time, it's a "people's" cookbook written by Hearn before he left to spend the rest of his life in Japan, where he collected fairytales and never again, as far as I know, recipes.

It's a fine line...or rather the FINAL line that's the difference. Two different though indifferent items...very spur of the moment, sorry! My birthday gift wine - Keep that for somebody else, Pour me a cheap red! or then again... Familiar label And a cold beach remembered By nobody else.

Binkyboots, glad you tried your local fish-shop and butchery! No supermarket specials have ever beat the freebies my local fish-shop used to give me (when we lived near one, that is ). Ditto for veges...find the right shop, tell them happily about what was great and what you used/plan to use your purchases for, and they'll often come up with something special - my local vege vendor used to send her son round to my house with a tray of tomatoes etc that were getting squishy, because she knew I could and would cook them, and as she said, she just hated to waste things that would taste wonderful if somebody knew how to use them. What are yorkshires? My mother used to make stewed mince and dumplings when busy and poor, sounds utterly revolting, but I still make it with a lot more veg and seasonings added to the mince, and using a lighter dumpling recipe (if you can find a copy, International Jewish Cookbook has (or the old edition which I have does, anyway) a recipe for spring beef casserole which has a good dumpling recipe in it. You can add more egg and make them really light and fluffy too...Check a copy in a library if you can, because you already cook a lot and may well have similar recipes. My sister is not an adventurous cook, but she likes to cook well, and put me on to this cookbook because it has lots of good family eating with extremely reliable recipes. The author is certainly a good cook, as you can tell from her notes on methods of doing things, but she is not aiming for food to impress, and is not ashamed to mention "frozen peas" in a recipe.

Oyster sounds good. (Considers making some at home...hmmm). Aji is probably my top year-round favorite. Sardine is WONDERFUL fresh and with the right amount of negi or ginger with it. I like cheap stuff - I'd rather have fresh, fat, sardine than third-rate tuna!

Andisenji's advice is all goooood! I've also found that individually wrapped slices of cake sell well...marble cakes look good. Bake in a loaf or ring pan for easy slicing. Appearance - in a cake shop, you see the sliced cross-section. At a bake sale, you are looking from the top down, and in a hurry at that...that's one reason why the old familiar favorites sell well. I usually change one thing, for example making reverse choc-chop cookies instead of the regular kind. Cookie toppings are more important than the basic dough.... Non-sweet items can go well too...especially things that can be taken home and served up for lunch! Pizza squares or savory lattice-top pies if you can keep the topping/filling dry enough that it doesn't slide off or out of the base.

Toliver, that link brought up all sorts of other community cookbooks. I was fascinated! I have a few of the "Anglo women in furrin parts" productions too...latest is a binder of photocopied recipes called "Saitama's Secrets", put out about a decade ago by a group of foreign women living in Japan. Goes from Sloppy Joes to Bibim-bap and Mabo-dofu... So how is this tradition carried on today? Is it the private collection housed on a website? Or is it still the small booklet in spiral or staple-through binding? Who's been involved in producing such booklets? I've drawn pictures for 'em, typed 'em, contributed to 'em, bought 'em...how about the rest of you? What did you get out of it? Is the hotchpotch approach the life and soul of community cookbooks, or do you exercise some kind of quality or thematic control? Why don't people pay more attention to production and artwork?! Let's hear about it!

I make my coffee way too strong, and drink way too much of it, and notice that the instant stuff in particular upsets my stomach. And yes, slooowly is the way to decrease caffeine without getting headaches! Husband was drinking coffee at work (always drinks tea at home) but cut it out a few weeks back. His extremely sensitive stomach has been much better for it. (That's just a FYI since I know he's not the only skinny guy with an easily upset stomach out there!). What I need to get me off coffee is a substitute that's quick to make and not too expensive! I drink coffee mainly when I'm glued to the computer translating - don't want to break my concentration or take too much time to prepare a hot drink, yet I'm in the habit of sipping a hot cup of something as I work... Hints for palatable alternatives? And yes, green tea has plenty of caffeine. I do drink it, but find it makes my mouth dry.

Going with the "supersensitive to bitterness" idea, what about tearing your lettuce gently, and dropping it into iced water for a good lONG soak...at least an hour. I read this idea in an article on making lettuce-based salads with Japanese ingredients, where the bitterness of daikon combined with the slight bitterness of lettuce can be a problem. I've used this method, and it produces a very nice, crisp salad, mild and certainly not bitter. I don't cut lettuce if I'm going to soak it, and I am careful not to bruise it when tearing it, as the long soaking shows up any damage to the leaf.

origamicrane, I saw a Valentine's Day gift pack the other day for the exam-sitting boyfriend...a Kit Kat bar packed with a red pentagonal mug with a Kit Kat logo on it and a sachet of milk and coffee mix...big logo on the box saying "Do your best, exam candidate!" Actually the reason I remember it in such detail is that I bought one for my Kit Kat loving husband as a Valentine's Day present, and have it hidden in the cupboard next to my computer... The latest Kit Kat I've seen has been the passionfruit one!

OK, so what's the Grail of Pandan extracts? I walked the other way round the block from my usual route the other day, and found a small Philippine grocery, where I pounced on a bottle of Pandan extract. Unscrewed the lid as fast as decently possible and thought, gack, this stuff has been sitting too close to the Coco Jam. Nope. It's labeled Pandan Extract, but it contains both Pandan and Coconut extracts, and it smells exactly like Coco Jam... though maybe that's not a bad thing. I hear that Indian and SE Asian pandan extracts smell differently anyway, so please tell me what's available, people, and I'll either find some or daydream myself off into some sweet green cloud to neverland!

Leftovers? Well, I thought there was about enough for 3 people, so when son1 was home from school on one of those unpredictable holidays I phoned from work and told him to heat himself up some curry. Came home to an empty pot...

Hmm...I added my roux at the end too, and felt that it was one of the better "home-made roux" versions we've had! I see you like to add tomatoes too.

Curses, forgot all about curry day after less than 5 hours sleep and a long day at work...had to make the roux from scratch, because the nearest shop doesn't sell the "no beef-fat" roux that I like. SO. Chicken curry with meat and potatoes stirfried in spices, and aubergines deepfried. I do this to avoid the very bland texture and taste of chicken curry Japanese style. Green peppers added at last moment for color. Roux (flour, butter, curry powder) can of tomatoes plus 1 squeeze ketchup, salt and chicken bouillon, plus the garlic/ginger/cumin/coriander/turmeric/red pepper rub used when frying the chicken and potato, with paprika for brighter color. Served with plain white rice, taa-sai Chinese greens stirfried with green ginger and black pepper, dressed with a dash of yogurt. No batteries in digital camera.

Robinjw13, I did a little googling of the Japanese terms most commonly used for companion planting, but found nothing of interest to you. Apart from re-runs of English material on companion plants old roses, there doesn't seem to be a good understanding of what we know as companion planting. One Japanese term used is so close to the word "symbiosis" that readers think of it as just another word for environmentally friendly agriculture which doesn't damage natural earth structure or disturb local insects etc. Alternatively, the other word used is "mixed cropping", which only refers to planting crops with different growth heights/sunlight needs/growth periods. I googled the various terms for each of your proposed crops, with terms for germination etc., and found no mention of plants which actively protect or promote the growth of other nearby plants. As far as germination goes, I think the interest in natural agricultural circles here in Japan is focused more on microbe activity than on the effect of nearby plants.

Interesting site, Torakris! Robinjw13, I have never seen much about companion planting in Japanese (except for information which obviously came from western sources). I meant to ask my older students in class but forgot, sorry. Here's a very interesting book about a midwestern agriculture academic's visit to Japan and China close to a century ago: Farmers of Forty Centuries by F H King online version of the same book King has a lot to say about the use of green manure and returning non-harvested portions of crops to the soil as compost or ash, and also the use of river sludge and nightsoil, but I don't recall much about pest control.

I've made it in the past. It's nice either made with less sugar, and diluted as a slightly herbal tasting summer drink; or made with less water, and used as a kaki-gori syrup that is not as sickly as the shop-bought syrups.

Some mixes may need a little more water than the setting for plain white rice. I'm not quite so fond of the all-in-one mixes, as some of them seem to have quite different cooking requirements! However, I do use them to reduce my exposure to rice.