helenjp

Thanks for starting this thread Maggie! I love soup! When I moved away from home, my Dad used to drop by whenever he had a meeting in town. He would bring me a bunch of flowers from Mum and Dad's garden, but would never hand it over until I'd promised not to make soup out of it...

Koshougatsu (Little Shogatsu) on the 16th of January, also known as Onna-Shougatsu or Women's Shogatsu, seems to be associated with azuki-gayu. The date is closer to the original Shogatsu season, and maybe that's why the old-fashioned (rather than the gourmand) Shogatsu dishes are seen...azuki beans in the gruel, mixed simmered vegetable nishime, and maybe some small grilled fish. Maybe because it's such an old tradition, there seem to be a lot of regional variations. The day before, the 15th, is the day when the New Year mochi is officially broken up and eaten, usually in zenzai (sweet bean soup).

Kirizai! I never knew it under that name, but that's how I learned to eat natto when I first ventured out of kansai to the slimy plains of Kanto!

You're overlooking the central function of a toaster oven. It has a TIMER. It just turns off when small kids distract the toaster oven owner, instead of burning the house down! I have one, so that I can simultaneously cook breakfast toast, zap rice for lunchboxes in the microwave, and use the gas range to grill fish for ditto, and boil the lunch spinach and fry the breakfast eggs. Life would just be too lackadaisical entirely without an oven toaster. Another point in their favor is that they are so simple that they are practically indestructible. The bottom may rust out of it, but it will still toast your toast... It doesn't take up counter space. The toaster oven sits on top of the microwave, and I then balance saucepans full of boiling soup etc on top of the toaster, to free up gas rings...

Don't knock weird kid-friendly sushi! There was a time when son2 was extremely picky, and without corn-topped sushi, we would never have broken out of Wendy's! However, the really bad kaiten places tend to go broke after a few months/years, helpfully making it easier to select a decent place. I like sardine or aji (yellowtail) nigiri-zushi, cheap and excellent when fresh.

We didn't get to eat our toshikoshi soba until yesterday, though we boiled the water for it several times Two people had it cold with sauce, but it's definitely more usual to have it hot in soup. When I make it at home, we often have it with naruto-maki, negi, and some shungiku (chrysanthemum greens) tempura, and sometimes some shredded steamed chicken breast. Hiroyuki, there wasn't enough snow to make kamakura where we were in Hokkaido (it doesn't snow that much in eastern Hokkaido until late in the winter...). However, my husband and his siblings had many memories of eating in kamakura in winter - they said they even used to take a charcoal kotatsu out into the kamakura, and sit there eating mikan and eating noodles, with hot water bottles on their laps. It wasn't warm enough for the kamakura to melt, but it would gradually shrink as the moisture evaporated, until the opening was too small to crawl into!

I'm with Jensen...didn't realize that I liked porridge until I stopped putting milk on it. Cold milk on hot porridge...nooooo waaaaay! Three day old porridge? Not for me! I like that just-cooked flavor. I like the chewy texture and oaty flavor of steel-cut oats, but I also like thick-cut whole-grain rolled oats (when I can get 'em...) because they cook beautifully over night in a slow cooker, while steel-cut oats seem to get lumpy in a slow cooker. Kids have brown sugar or butter on their porridge; I have toasted sesame seeds on mine.

First time in 15 years that I haven't made osechi! We spent New Year in Hokkaido, gorging ourselves on crab, scallops, sukiyaki, yakiniku, and a big tray of hors d'oeuvres ordered from a local Chinese restaurant. Son1 celebrated his arrival with a big bowl of ikura-don, and that set the tone for our entire visit. However, no New Year's cooking of any kind took place, except for a very simple ozoni - a clear broth with shredded negi, shredded naruto-maki fish sausage, and grilled mochi. Zeitoun's ozoni looks like what we normally have, minus the taro and plus some greens. Impressive spread there, zeitoun! For our sons, the biggest feature of a Hokkaido New Year was hiding mikan in the snow for a few hours, then running outside to see who could dig up and eat the most frozen mikan in the shortest possible time...

Radishes...yes, I've eaten the greens, they tend to have tiny "prickles" on the leaves - daikon greens sometimes have them too. Rubbing with salt and then quickly blanching works well for that reason. Raw...hmmm...sounds nice

Definitely you can eat them! Turnip and daikon greens are among my favorites. Daikon greens can sometimes be weatherbeaten, so discard the outer ring or two of leaves if you so desire. I like 'em in okayu - chop them up finely, sprinkle with a little coarse salt, rub, leave a few minutes, squeeze out, and drop into the okayu - the heat will cook them adequately, and all bitterness will be gone. Ni-bitashi with age is also nice. You can go the other direction, and boil the living daylights out of them too - they're man (?) enough to take it! Try them simmered with pork belly.

I tried those Korova cookies mentioned upthread...about page 4, I think. Yes, the mixture crumbles like nobody's business, but they are goooood chocolatey cookies. As for chocolate chips, why fret over this type and that type...chopped chocolate is the way to go!

I'M cheating really...my birthday is in December so I got this "combined" birthday and Christmas present early -- Braun Multimix M880 350watt. Very happy...big improvement on the FUNERAL ALTAR flowers which he usually comes home with for my birthday, and while his mistakes in the flower department are less than welcome, he made a much more welcome mistake in buying the Braun...he spotted me trying to chop things with a sore wrist after a heavy translation typing session, and resolved to buy me a stick blender ...but he accidentally bought the more expensive model

Congratulations Hiroyuki! You and your family must have had a wonderful Christmas Eve. To my surprise, my kids said they didn't want a Japanese Christmas cake this year. They recalled that I mentioned that we sometimes have Christmas icecream in New Zealand so I am making something similar to this "cassata icecream" recipe

One of the most useful gadgets I have is definitely the huge, sharp bamboo grater known as an oni-oroshi or "devil's grater". It is so fast that I use it to "chop" cabbage for cabbage soup, or daikon for certain kinds of salads etc rather than using a food processor. Japanese ridged mortar (suribachi) and xanthyllum wood pestle...I'd show you a photo, but son's teacher asked kids to bring one to class to hull their harvested rice...and somebody dropped our one I used to have an earthenware pot with an opening in the top, used exclusively for toasting sesame seeds. That did a lovely job, but toasted sesame seeds these days are much better in quality than they used to be...I confess I rarely toast them at home. Mesh ladles, "ana-tama" ladles with holes in...very handy items indeed.. BUT! The prize goes to ordinary old sai-bashi...extra-large chopsticks used for cooking. I literally can't cook without them, when I'm in New Zealand I keep reaching out for them and they're NOT THERE!

I forget who put me up to this, but to the usual hot lemon grog, add a chili pod or two and a halved garlic clove. The theory is that if you survive the medicine, the illness itself will be a mere trifle to the body's defenses... NB. On no account swallow the garlic cloves whole, no matter what anybody tries to tell you. Doing so can lead to violent stomach cramps for up to 8 hours...

Definitely some rice cookers thermostats are more pernickety than others. I haven't tried cooking on the keep-warm setting only, but I've had success cooking fairly heavy foods such as potatoes. There was a fad for cooking cakes in rice cookers a while back, but modern rice cookers tend to turn off too soon, because the cake dough is too light...

Hmm, only the "chikuwa" type that have alternating layers of cheese and fish sausage get the thumbs up here...no, wait, there's the camembert sasa-kama too. Those are good.

daikon sticks and hakusai with a mild "yamabuki" miso and a sprinkling of yuzu peel, which really pulled it together.

There's just no room for discussion on this topic. The answer is: butter blended with tarako (soft salted cod's roe), and maybe a tad of chopped scallions.

I've decided that fudge recipes are nuthing, just nutttthhhing. Marshmallows and stuff I don't understand, I admit it. The whole confectionery thing is about precise proportions, dry weather, and in the case of fudge, allowing the cooked fudge to stand until lukewarm. I rarely make fudge now that I have discovered this, because I've found that the way I used to make fudge (stirring the hell out of it all through the process, then tossing the pot on the floor and using a jackhammer to chip the fudge out) produced fudge that was gritty, but undeniably set hard. The Correct Method produces exquisitely creamy fudge, but is much more susceptible to vagaries such as humidity, exact maximum temperature achieved etc etc. There's no winning. It is cloudy and damp here, and I expect it to remain so until after the last date when I could possibly make fudge for Christmas gifts. Cheat Code...make an Indian style burfee fudge using gram flour, or some other cereal flour or ground seed such as ground sesame.

Each to his own, I guess...it turns out that son2 thought a luxury breakfast in bed menu should start with STEAK.

Son1 is a big fan of fish sausage, and I'm happy to keep him supplied - a great food for a 12 year old boy! However, I don't care for them myself. For westerners, there are just too many barriers: the color, the texture, and definitely ajinomoto! Now if they'd called them "Sakana Skweekies" or something like that, I could have taken an unprejudiced bite. I prefer the chunkier texture of satsuma-age to the chikuwa-type texture that seems to have inspired fish sausage, anyway. Maybe if they left a few scales or something in, just for textural interest ? Today I bought some carbonara sausage photo second down from top a pork sausage from Nisshin Ham, so we can have them with mizuna salad, thin-sliced ham, and gruyere cheese on round white "Heidi", top center breads from Andersen Bakery. This is a Mum-and-kids dinner for days when husband is out, and we don't have to eat RICE! P.S. I've saved a sausage for my husband's lunchbox tomorrow, in case you feel a brotherly instinct to defend my husband's right to luxury sausage, Hiroyuki!!

A little off-topic...when son2 watched Home Alone 4 recently (and believe me, there's no faster way to find yourself Home Alone than to borrow one of those big-number sequels...), he perked up at the scene of child being pampered by a lavish breakfast in bed. Until he saw what it was - french toast with syrup. "Is that ALL?" he scoffed, and turned back to his oat porridge with brown sugar, his home-made yogurt with bananas and sesame seeds, his toast, and his fried tomatoes, scallions, and sausage...

I totally forgot about takikomi day, thanks to more soap-opera stuff with The Family, but we did have a sort-of Korean style beansprout rice last week. To roughly 3c rice, I added 1 packet of beansprouts, carefully rinsed, tailed, and chopped into small pieces. This got cooked up together with a very little salt, and when the rice/sprouts were done, in went about a 1/2tsp minced garlic, about 2 tab finely minced Japanese dividing onions, and a little sesame oil. In the past, I've over-seasoned, but I find this level combines best with other dishes! Still tasted good in the next day's lunchboxes too!

Burns...impossible to do this while working, but cold water works! I got the most painful scald on my hand I've ever had a week or so back, and after a short attempt to chill it in slightly iced water, I was just gritting my teeth against the pain, assuming that I'd done all I could. But then son1 arrived on the scene. Nope, Mum, you need to keep it in cold water UNTIL PAIN SUBSIDES, and he proceeded to enforce his advice for over an hour. The blisters went down, and by next day there was only some surface . Handwashing - any way you can switch to a pure soap for this? Liquid detergent-based handwashes make skin and nails so fragile. I've found animal fats such as lanolin (and in Japan, horse fat) the most effective for healing cracked skin, and the least likely to cause allergic reaction...flying in the face of the current popularity of vegetable oils, I know. Biggest improvement to skin so far: "allergic" skin reactions and winter cracked fingertips and chapped lips disappeared with a moderately low-carb (moderate amounts of whole-grain foods, no sugars) way of eating.