helenjp

Actually more than 2 kinds...in Japan, cut dried wakame or salted (but not dried) wakame are the most common, but plain dried wakame is often exported because it is so light and keeps much better than salted wakame. Salted wakame has a better texture though. I think cut dried wakame must be precooked, because you can just throw it into soups, tomato salads etc and it is ready to eat as soon as it has absorbed moisture. You can also crumble it up and enjoy it as a crunchy topping. Here's some photos... Plain dried wakame - has to be soaked briefly so you can cut it up, then briefly cooked. dried wakame Cut dried wakame - just grab a handful and go. ready cut dried wakame Salted seaweed - probably the main choice for cooking here in Japan. salted raw seaweed There are other types, but they are not common.

I just received my long-awaited copy of Helen Saberi's Afghan Food and Cookery. We just got out our kotatsu - low table with an electric heater on the underside, and a quilt sandwiched between frame and table top, so I settled in, and opened the book - to a picture of an Afghani couple in THEIR kotatsu, except that they called it a "sandali". We therefore decided to christen the arrival of kotatsu season in Japan by making ashak. I used a mixture of half nira (CHinese chives) and Japanese dividing onions (rather like leeks, but more tender) to fill the pasta, which was served bathed in drained yogurt, sprinkled with mint, and topped with a slightly tomato-ey meat sauce. It sounds good, but it tasted WONDERFUL! Just like sui-gyoza, but better. I suppose we have Genghis and friends to thank for this curious cross of cultures? THe recipe for "mantu" in this book insists that you should chop the fatty lamb by hand, rather than using ground lamb, which is inclined to be tough (this is also true of gyoza fillings, so I'm willing to believe her!). The filling includes lots of finely chopped onion, with salt, pepper, green chili, and cumin. The dough can be handmade, or wonton wrappers can be used - she only closes them at the top, allowing plenty of room for steam to contact the filling directly. The steamed mantu are served with a tomato sauce and cilantro, and a bowl of yogurt. Sounds good, next time I get my hands on some lamb... I took a long time to order this book, thinking that it might not be very applicable to the way we eat here in Japan, and have had many pleasant surprises!

Mmmm....I made Swisskaese's Apple Cake recipe above, and what a great success it was! Oil cakes are always a practial choice in Japan (I never use soybean oil for cooking cakes though, think it's too gluey). I did cut the sugar down to 1.5 cups, and if you were generous with the dates, you might want to cut it a little further. I was fairly generous with the apple, and the fruit neither sank nor glued the cake up. The kids were after third helpings and were only put off by a promise of apple cake for breakfast Thanks for the recipe!

Okay, how about those sticks of fu glazed with kurozato. My husband (born 1950) liked karinto (deep-fried strips of dough stirred around in a bubbling syrup glaze) but says that Hokkaido's cheaper dairy produce made cake quite popular there from early on, and he would never take karinto if cake was on offer... (This is the guy who left the Sunday School choir in a fit of pique because the cookies ran out just before they got to him!)

Hide holds his knife just the way my boys do! I can't get them to believe that there are places on this very same planet where people hold their knives and forks quite differently... Hope you enjoyed Kasai Rinkan park...we have some photos of two very small boys there too! Good luck with the undokai lunchbox tomorrow!

Two students assigned to each of the Burdock and Shiso topics, will add your queries to their topics. They're fascinated by the level of interest in traditional Japanese food plants! Susan, I'd like to use your garlic-in-containers query as a demo question for next week's class...do you want to grow garlic just for the mature cloves, or are you more interested in cropping the flower stems and buds?

Osaka is always a good place to eat, you can't go wrong! Kyoto...I haven't been there so long that I can't say too much. One thing to try in Osaka is "kushi-katsu" - Deep fried titbits of this and that served on skewers, usually lightly breaded in very fine crumbs. Hard to describe, but better than tempura in good hands. Think light and crunchy rather than doughy and greasy. Kobe used to be a great place for Japanese-style western food like croquettes and tonkatsu, but I don't know if that's still the case. One of my students told me today that the Umeda shopping area (in the northern end of central Osaka) is still lots of fun. The southern shopping area, centered on Namba, used to be much more down-market, though there is an excellent kitchen goods area nearby (you'd have to ask somebody whose been there more recently to give you accurate directions, though!9. Have a good trip!

Uncanny...on the way home in the train I decided that we were going to have Ma Po Tofu for dinner too - quick to make after swimming class! In our case it might be made with eggplant instead of tofu, depending on the results of Fridge Inspection. Hope you don't have to make Sports Day lunch TWICE this weekend... ...and what were you planning to do with the Yama-gobou pickles in the photo of your shopping back up the page a bit?!

...hmmm without checking, I'd say "hydrolized protein". Sound plausible?

None of yesterday's curry left? (I just fed my kids some oyaki that we got free at a bread shop that just opened up, hoping that will hold them long enough for me to meet a translation deadline before I grill some salted mackerel that I bought to make a quick dinner...just not quick ENOUGH on a day like this!). That tomato tart looks wonderful...

Yeah, I remember reading in the novel "Fushin no Toki" by..errhhmmm...Ariyoshi Sawako, that mirin or a very sweet sake is an excellent skin lotion! Women who work in tofu shops where they dip yuba out of soymilk are also reputed to have lovely skin on their hands and arms (just where it counts, right?).

Sounds verrrry promising!

Just for next time, you can buy those wretched protractor and triangle sets at convenience stores. Especially at convenience stores located near schools...heh heh. Also spotted in 100-yen shops. Liked the curry close-ups! What other veges do you serve with curry? My husband is rather narrow-minded about what vegetables go in curry (basically, none), but he does like shiitake. The kids and I eat our curry all razzle-dazzle early in the evening, and reserve the knock-kneed, buck-toothed ingenue version for Papa to come home to later in the evening.

No, I have the same feeling - I somehow feel those words are for the staff rather than the customers!

My parents used to ask me to send them katsuo-bushi flakes. It was a while before I discovered that my Dad liked it on his sandwiches!!

...so WHAT is a "New Zealand dinner"?! I'm curious! Not to mention New Zealand latte. Whenever I've been in NZ it's been yer average flat white. Maybe they used NZ milk??!

Tofu ...must be the dish of the season, that's what we had for breakfast too! I made scrambled tofu - fried some chopped wakame, chopped fresh tomato, and a little green veg (in this case cabbage), then added a small can of drained boiled soybeans, fried it some more, and added cubes of silken tofu. Season and stirfy, serve up. One large block of tofu and a small can of beans served four of us. Flavored with a good chicken stock powder and pepper (this is breakfast, after all!) but soy sauce or curry powder OK. (Bacon or cheese might be too salty with the wakame). Crumbled cotton tofu would have worked just as well. I used salted wakame, rinsed quickly under the tap and "strings" trimmed off, but a small handful of dried cut wakame added with the tofu would be OK too.

I posted this on General Food Topics, but here it is again... Do you have any questions about growing Japanese food plants - herbs, vegetables, fruits in containers or gardens? I'm doing a project on writing up information about Japanese plants in English with my local university horticulture department, eager to hear which plants people outside Japan are interested in growing. So ask away! You may see some of them responding directly on this forum, and I'll collate other responses and post them.

YOu're planning on using non-wheat flours, OK... There are yeasts other than bread yeast which produce gas as they grow, and some of them might be suitable...it's years and years since I experimented, but from memory you would get enough of a rise for pizza crust, or pancakes. I remember using a fizzy and very sour yogurt culture, you might like to try some brewing yeasts too, if you get a chance!

Looks like a busy week! I'm looking forward to seeing the inari-zushi - my son2 would never let a Sports Day go by without eating inari-zushi, either!

Yes, quite a few pick your own orchards around - mainly grapes and nashi in this area.

Chiba Bussan has all sorts of peanut products, including a very forgettable peanut-miso pickle (a sweet paste). They also sell Peanut Sable, a crumbly cookie made iwth ground peanuts. And FINALLY they have started stocking a very nice peanut butter, which includes kinako, and is not unbearably sweet or full of added shortening. Choshi is still a big fishing port, and sardines are probably their main catch, also sauries at this time of year. Chiba may have been where the first dairy cows were reintroduced into Japan last century (Japan's imperial family drank milk and milk sweets back in the Nara period, I believe). The Chiba cows were originally imported from India to provide milk for fine horses (the uplands east of Matsudo, where we live, were originally in imperial hunting ground where horses ran free most of the year too). Chiba dairy farming is now mostly concentrated in the south of the peninsula. The market for fresh milk in Tokyo takes most of the production, and I can't recall seeing even one Chiba cheese product, except for those produced for daytrippers at theme park-type farms such as Mother Bokujo. The northwestern part of Chiba where I live was originally marshy river floodplains spreading out from the Edo river, although flooding was controlled by massive dykes built during the Edo period. Green vegetables and some rice are still grown here, but the area was particularly known for shoyu and mirin - and as an offshoot of this, the area has a lot of shoyu and fermented rice pickles, in contrast to the salt and miso pickles which are more common in colder areas. Orchard fruits are grown on the uplands, and this area is the homeland of the Nijusseiki nashi. There are still numerous nashi orchards in the area, mostly growing Kosui (my favorite variety) and Hosui nashi. The "kitchen of Edo" reputation can still be seen in the location of one of Japan's few national university horticulture departments in Matsudo - although most of the students these days are city born and bred! The mudflats at Funabashi were well preseved for many years because the area was a landing place for imperial use, but it has now been filled in to the extent that Funabashi is well back from the coastline. People still go on clam-digging outings in spring and summer, though I think they are very brave to eat shellfish from Tokyo Bay!

You don't need sugar to get the yeast moving, but it does help to make an initial sponge instead of mixing everything in together. And it might be a bit slower to rise, but you don't want a huge rise in pizza dough, anyway, I assume? I agree with the "more energy on low-carbs" comment. If I feel weak or shaky though, it's time to drink more water, especially during the morning. Now that cooler weather is here, I'm experimenting with buckwheat grains - thinking of toasting them before cooking! Any comments?

Hachinoko...this preference is alive and well! I mentioned a few weeks ago to a client that we were having trouble with huge wasps (the size of a thumb sometimes!) which were safely ensconced in a nearby nature reserve. He rose through several levels of alertness and made me promise that if ( ) I were to smoke out the nest and kill the larvae, I'd send him a boxful. He did impress on me that he really didn't want a box of LIVE giant wasp larvae! As for Korean insect foods, I discovered that there is a species of caterpillar which attacks pine trees (notably, OUR pine tree)...while finding out how to get rid of it, I discovered how to eat them. You need to impale each caterpillar on a stick, then roast it evenly over a fire, and then carefully peel back the skin before eating, so that the poisonous hairs are removed along with the skin. They are poisonous enough to kill birds, apparently. The taste was described as "resinous". Stands to reason... I never did find out how to get rid of them though, so I assume that Koreans ate them in desperation, when the caterpillars had eaten everything else edible!

I feel that kissaten are dying out, when I first came to Japan, they weren't all shabby. I used to go to Kyoto often in those days, and they had a number of "jazz kissa" - a great combination, as imported records were incredibly expensive in those days. Art COffee, Renoir...even Cosy Corner, they were immaculate, the staff were proud to be working there, and some of the smaller chains were astonishing - I remember one shop which had a stream winding across the carpeted floor... The individually owned or Key Coffee level kissaten existed even then, and usually served only one type of coffee reliably....the flannel drip was the height of sophistication in those days. Food tended to range from pizza toast and doorstopper-size "morning sets" to sandwich sets and occasionally spaghetti. They always seem to be silent, dark, and smoky, though I'm not sure if that's the ideal or the fall from the ideal! I used to wonder if video invader games killed the kissaten...anybody remember those strange tables with a TV screen suspended under the table-top, leaving you with nowhere to put your legs, nowhere to put your coffee, and no way to hold a conversation without a personal PA system!