helenjp

pickled egg recipes I don't have the British cookbook I originally used...you could try asking on the UK forum? I remember that I used sometimes to add a jar of pickled onions to the pickled eggs - the basis is the same sort of spiced vinegar mix. Here is a recipe for Red Beet Eggs, which you could try with canned beets or red cabbage. Original recipe is from the out-of-print Time-Life Foods of the World series, "American Cooking: The Eastern Heartland" - the small spiralbound recipe book that went with the bigger coffeetable books. Had I realized what treasures these books were, I would have picked up more at the second hand bokshop I found this one at. Haven't tried this recipe, but many other recipes from this book are regulars on our table. 3 c water - cook peeled beets in this till tender, remove beets and retain liquid. Add 1 c sugar and 1/2 white vinegar to the beet liquid, stir to dissolve, return beets and cook a few minutes more. Now if you've used canned beets, start from here.... Set beets aside, add 6 hard-boiled, peeled, cooled eggs to the beet juice, turn to coat, put in jar, place beets on top of eggs, cover tightly, cool, and marinate in fridge for 12 hours or more before serving. Another favorite that I'd almost forgotten -- Chinese salt-pickled eggs. Place raw eggs (in the shell, of course) into a cool brine, and pickle for up to a fortnight (This makes them very salty, and also makes the white go a funny but not unpleasant texture - but from hazy memory, they do need about a week minimum in the brine). Then hardboil the eggs as usual, serve quartered as a beer snack. Maybe somebody on the Chinese forum can be more helpful?

Do you ever make your own sausage? Sausage is always one of the NZ foods that we miss, so we've been drooling over your photos. Would apple and pork sausages work in a hand-rolled sausage?

Yes! Then invite me over... You can do western ones in vinegar and stuff, or Japanese ones in a shoyu mix, or Chinese in tea and salt (tap the shells all over but don't remove them till after the egg has steeped in the tea a while and "marbled").

>>boorish and uncultured<< Yeah, but in NZ, we LIKE boorish and uncultured, you see... The only complaint I have about Australian wine these days is that there's too many types for me to sample in a month in NZ , despite stirling efforts There's bad wine from both countries (maybe a good sign of how entrenched the wine industry now is), but the good wine has become very diverse in styles, mostly because there are so many different regions with winemakers who understand how to create a regional style. My guess is that while plenty of wine gets exported =by volume= only a tiny fraction of the =variety= is known outside Australia. Even in NZ, parochialism stops people from discovering great wine from "New Zealand's America". In Japan, I buy Aussie wine because 1)I know (a little bit) more about it than European or American wine, and 2) at the price range I'm buying, I suspect that a $10.00 bottle of Australian wine will be better drinking than a $10.00 bottle of French wine...and apart from Italian wine, there is little at that price from other regions in Japanese supermarkets. Local bottle shops are even more risky - the owners mostly know nothing about wine, they just buy cheap case-lots of strange bottles with dodgy corks...I've learned my lesson regarding those!

http://www.aeb.org/eggcyclopedia/freezing-eggs.html My elder boy is getting to the age when I need to keep hard-boiled eggs in the fridge all the time...but for small kids, there's always the risk of arousing a dormant tendency to allergy if you suddenly bombard them with one foodstuff! Hard-boiled eggs actually make a nice bento or snack if you cut them in half, and dip the cut side in a mixture of red pepper, seasonings, sesame seeds or ground sesame, flour...and then fry them to seal the "crust", cut side down of course. Stops the yolk coming out, too. Didn't somebody post a nice egg and potato curry a few days back on our "other" meeting place?? She mentioned slitting the hardboiled egg here and there and rubbing spices in before simmering in the curry. Sounds much better than the usual egg curry. I actually like gratined hard-boiled eggs, but maybe that's deviant.

Maple syrup bread....was that a glaze, or did it have maple sugar in the bread, do you think? Sounds good! I was just thinking how the bread shops have changed since I first came to Japan. In 1979 (!) my then-father in law used to divert to Kobeya on his way home, to buy exactly one 6-slice bag of shokupan. He was always full of smiles if we were staying over, because it meant he could buy fresh bread every day! Out near my then-sister-in-law's place, in a new housing development, the only local shops were a bookshop, a tofu shop, a greengrocer, a fish shop, a toyshop...and a bread shop. The bread shop sold all those staples of Japanese bread shops that you can still see today - the jam-pan, the an-pan, the tsuna/mayo-pan, the animal breads, the yakisoba roll, etc. The mayo was always piped on with a rosette tube, and fooled me more often than I'd like to admit... Where I live now, there's a Kobeya...of course. A bread shop called Marsha, totally unchanged for the past 2 or 3 decades, has a loyal following for their sandwich and toasting breads, and makes only a small variety of specialty breads for children's snacks. A new "artisan" French bread shop specialized in breads made with soy milk...and sign language, judging by their mighty efforts to explain to me the price which was already clearly written on the product! They have a traditional cast iron oven door let into the wall, but I happen to know it's a hatch to the kitchen - a left over from the sushi conveyer belt system belonging to the previous tenant. Not far away is a sourdough-type shop which recently took over the local bicycle shop - they expanded from a prefab in the back of Dad's garden. Japanese sourdough is *not* very sour, I think the selling point is the natural image - it always goes hand in hand with domestic wheat...and as that has a low gluten content, Japanese sourdough tends to be chewy and low-risen, though with plenty of wheat flavor. I used to live close to a shop which sold only shokupan, they baked very early, and opened the shop at 6am to queues of diligent housewives who cycled there to buy fresh-baked bread for breakfast. By noon, they would be sold out. There's another rustic French bread shop not far away, whose sole selling point appears to be high prices...but the bread truck which stops hopefully outside our door every week is about the only exponent of the true, pure, pan-ya style bread shop!

Hmmm...when I were a young thing in New Zealand, the rule of thumb was Ocker reds and Godzone whites. Dessert wines though, now that's another country.

I remember that looooong ago, the greengrocer whose shop was two along from my parents' pharmacy taught me how to make a semolina-based sweet that I remember as "soji julwa", though I don't know the correct spelling. The greengrocer and his daughter said they made it for Diwali, by frying the semolina in butter with almonds and big raisins, and adding water and spices. A type of halwa??

First met these flavors in tomato ginger jam. A little lemon doesn't hurt, either.

Yeah, yeah, I check, I frown, I bargain... My kids have (mostly) got past the age of random poking and "stick em up" approaches to commercial transactions, now instead, they check EVERYTHING, and argue with me about produce from politically incorrect countries, additives, freshness, etc. When my younger son wants to get a little too physical, I remind him that if he pokes, his purse will be the one I'll be using at the checkout!

Yay! bread and apples! I'm anxiously awaiting the first of our monthly deliveries of apples over the winter...Jackal10's photos brought back memories of similar varieties in NZ. We have quite a different selection in Japan. Enjoyed seeing the Reinette, I've read about it but never seen it. Is the flesh more yellow or more white?

Zucchini noodles - sounds good! The nearest to noodles that I know of is beanthread vermicelli. Chicken wings - we had some today too...put them into a very hot pan and cooked both sides till they showed a little color, then added soy/vinegar mix - about 1 cup water, 1/2 cup vinegar, 1-2 tab soy sauce, and cooked fast until reduced and wings cooked. Other cuts of chicken do better cooked slowly in the mix, but wings can take anything! Served room temperature for lunch. You can add shreds of lemon peel or ginger, red pepper, garlic, etc., or add some funghi or leeks partway through cooking time. By the way....net carbs, effective carbs...this sounds to me like an alternative way to predict blood sugar impact, in the same way that the glycemic index shows results of blood sugar tests (there are some discrepancies in values reported by different sources, so I'm curious to find out whether net carb count and GI come up with the same foods as "good" or not!). Anybody know a detailed online source for net carb counts?

NulloModo, if it's crunchy, I don't think it's finished fermenting! Maybe people eat it half-pickled so that it's not so sour??

McDuff, I would carefully scoop off the film, remove the bags of brine (make more in advance to cool and use), and scoop off any more filmy stuff. Now, is the brine underneath clear or cloudy? As you say it smells like sauerkraut, you may be in luck. If it's clear, get some alcohol and kitchen towels, wipe around the plastic, maybe spray a little alcohol on the surface of the brine (just a little), and replace lid and weights (clean plate preferably boiled or doused in boiling water, clean new bags freshly filled with cool brine). Cover, and heave a sigh of relief, but keep a sharp eye on it, as mold will reappear easily. Woodburner, yes, I mash, tamp, bash that kraut as firmly as I can! Your method sounds the same as the way I make it. (Whew!). Except that I don't can it, just eat fast...

Yep, it's definitely getting to the okonomiyaki season! I lived in Osaka before I moved to Tokyo, so I like the soft or "fluffy" texture (depending on how well done the pancake is) you get from adding yama-imo (yam). My husband likes the floury Tokyo style, which I find a bit stodgy. So now I use flour AND yama-imo (you can also buy it dried and powdered) AND egg, but I only use a bare minimum of batter, with more cabbage than seems sane - it cooks down a lot. Like it with mayo and a dribble of sauce, topped with ao-nori and shaved katsuo, son1 likes mayo, sauce, and ketchup all blended together

North Dakota notes on making sauerkraut Don't recall if that was the site I used, but it has much the same info, with more exact temps in that weird Fahrenheit system . Plastic containers are good, but if you plan to re-use, a stoneware crock may be better. Food processor with shredding disk? Don't I wish I had any kind of food processor at all! Thanks for the sauerkraut blog, I did a sauerkraut search, but didn't find it That photo half covered with cabbage leaves is, I guess, the leaves rolled back to show the pickle in progress! I use outer leaves for that purpose too, saves the kraut, as any minor spoilage etc is likely to occur on the top anyway, and the very top usually is not as tasty as further down the barrel - a good reason to use reject leaves on the top. Make sure they're salted, though! So how does everybody like to eat sauerkraut? I like it heated with a little apple...

This is the time of year when I start to watch the temperature...another month and a bit more, when daytime temps are around 17degC, I'll start making sauerkraut. It's easily the most reliable fermented cabbage/Chinese cabbage pickle I know for areas which don't get really cold in the fall, and apart from tendonitis from chopping up all that cabbage and the smell it's a pleasurable experience. I found out how to do it from some midwestern university extension site (which I will look up when I'm on a faster computer). This year I'm ready for some variations. Anybody have any favorite flavors or methods?

My first husband wrote an entire thesis on the physical properties of agar gels Origamicrane, if you can't buy Japanese style kanten in shops (either in ultralight dried "blocks" or as a powder), you should be able to buy the Chinese version - it comes in thin sticks or ropes in a plastic bag, looks like very thick beanthread vermicelli if you're not looking closely. Used exactly the same way. I like kanten in mitsumame, but I don't like those strange salad-type things suspended in kanten...is it a Japanese version of US jellied salads, maybe?? Kanten will set and remain set at room temperature, but the gel will slowly lose water as time passes, making the jelly floppier and "weepy", so it's best to use it within a day, or two-three days at most.

I also like a combination of sake lees and miso - I think the higher alcoholic content makes the fish hard somehow, but maybe that was some other factor. As for the hard kasu-zuke sheets, in colder weather, you can buy it in softer form...or you can cheat and use the packs of amazake (not the ready to drink ones, which are too watery, but the pulpy amazake base which is ready to dissolve in hot water).

OK, I'll be back when I have more details. Rijstaffel is a good idea, that's what my sister's family almost always chooses for a celebratory dinner out.

What I meant to say was, extra costs are one reason why people are reluctant to try low/mod carb eating - if people who cook can figure out ways around that, so much the better! What are the cheapest protein foods for most of you? Any good lurks for penny pinchers? Soup must be #1 in really dire straits, I guess. Cheap protein foods here at this time of year (still a bit transitional) are fresh sardines, squid, mackerel, and usually some cuts of pork and chicken. Tofu often very cheap, if you don't mind watery tofu with a weird texture that is better cooked than fresh, eggs are moderately priced, milk often cheap...cheese is expensive! I live in a peanut growing area, so excellent quality long peanuts are only moderately priced (they don't sell the small cheap round ones at all!)

Do you have much time? I could e-mail my sister, who is married to a tall, blond Frieslander. Meatballs? Herring? Poffertjes impossible to make without an iron, but how about speculaas cookies, though they're more usual in winter.

Marked-down meats - yes, but I avoid them in the hottest part of summer. More than once the meat has been discolored and stinky when I got it home. The average flake tuna can here holds about 3 oz, costs about 70 cents per can?? I use it mostly with yogurt cheese, and also as a dressing for vegetables. Slices of thick-cut deepfried tofu are good added to meats in stirfried meat dishes. Those huge dried white beans (lima?) and chickpeas are both good at absorbing flavors in stews...but beans are not a really cheap food here, thanks to extreme protectionism. Freezer space is really small in Japan, so when buying meat on the cheapest day of the week, I freeze half and marinade half in miso or sake etc.

Darn it, somewhere on this thread, the words PICKLED GREEN CHILI PEPPER caught my eye, and now I can't find it. What kind of pickle? Pickled how? With what flavorings? Please tell! And Pan, that was entirely too much information - I remembered every single trip through Singapore and every single meal with every single Malaysian student or other friend I have ever met while reading through your list! When I think about it, Malaysian food was my first "foreign" food - my mother went on a major Malaysian exploration when she bought Rosemary Brissenden's "South East Asian Cooking" some long time ago, and insisted (despite my protests) on cooking an all-Malaysian menu for my 12th birthday party. I recall that we had a chicken minahasa-style...followed by lemon sorbet for those unfamiliar with chili. My friends must have been hardened to strange experiences at my home, because I remember they ate everything, nothing daunted!