eG Foodblog: Helenjp - Well, pickle me!

[helenjp]

Thanks for the responses, people, now to answer some questions

Shiso taste...red shiso does have a faintly herbal, medicinal taste to it...you barely notice it if you have it with strong flavors like umeboshi, but you will notice it in shiso drink (oops, now that I mentioned it, I better make some. It's a good drink, and a nice alternative to the poisonously colored syrups sold for pouring over shaved ice). The tiny red seedling leaves (benitade) served with sashimi are also red shiso.

Yes, I really do make my own miso. I don't have any to show you at present though, because I decided to skip making any in spring, and make it in December instead, to allow it to stabilize before the hot weather comes. It REALLY isn't hard to make. Also, with big projects like umeboshi and miso, my husband always helps.

As somebody said, pickles are not about skill, but about where you put them! In other words, avoid rapid fluctuations in temperature and direct sunlight, and you'll be fine. Another wise saying is that if you make miso once, you must make it for three years in a row before you give up. Of course, by then the whole process is automatic, and no problem to do!

"Grilled cheese for lunch"? I should be so lucky! I'd be delighted to read about people having grilled cheese for lunch! On Wednesday, just for a laugh, I looked for the biggest "block" of cheese in the supermarket. I was in luck! They had a 100g (about 4oz) chunk. We had a 1oz stick each, and that was the end of our bulk supply of cheese. Cost about $US3.00 for the chunk.

Is "plum wine" a misnomer, yes it is. It isn't wine, but a distilled rice liquor called shochu, and they aren't plums, but then again, they are not as fuzzy as an apricot (or as smooth as a plum). P. mume are sold in the west as sterile flowering peaches, but I have not seen any fruiting varieties outside Japan. The process of macerating fruit and sugar in alcohol is really the same as a western fruit brandy.

Have I been to Hondoji temple? We live about 15 minutes' walk from there, but on the other side of the station. I only go when they have "free entry for locals" day! They do have some nice veges and pickles there, and pretty "hydrangea" boiled sweets as souvenirs of the hydrangeas in the temple gardens.

One of the few restaurants my husband will agree to go to is near there - a "Lotus Lodge" (Biwa-tei) chain restaurant that offers Japanese food. It's a regular venue for family events - it has chairs for my elderly parents-in-law, and serves Japanese food, and it is not mainly a drinking place -- we never take father-in-law, an alcoholic, to a restaurant where he is going to be surrounded by people drinking.

Learning to cook Japanese...I would have taken lessons when I first came to Japan in 1979, but I was on a Japanese government scholarship, and felt sure that they didn't intend me to spend it on cooking classes (but maybe I was wrong...). So I bought the Big Sister of cookery magazines, the NHK "Kyou no Ryouri", and pored over it with my dictionary. I asked around to find out the big names, and was told that Masaru Doi was the biggie for Kansai (western Japan) style food. Here it is below, 25 years later...no guesswork in this one, it's all text, with a few drawings and occasional black and white photos. Nowadays most of the dishes in here turn up in magazines as "Nostalgic Dishes of the Showa Period", and in case you wonder, I'm 45 not 105!

The women of my mother-in-laws' generation were mostly girls during WWII, and never learned to cook traditional food until their 20s, if at all. My first mother in law (I was widowed a long time ago) belonged firmly to the "boil it and bang it on a plate" school. My current mother in law is a more recent addition to the family than I am, so she is not trying to initiate me into family traditions either. She grew up in Taiwan, and learned to cook the traditional dishes of her region while working at a daycare center. Government-run daycares tend to be big on traditions, and her co-workers belonged to a traditional cooking group.

I also learned a lot from Japanese friends in New Zealand, who had to do a lot of thinking about what really mattered in Japanese cooking, in order to make their work-arounds successful. They made rice-bran pickles using breadcrusts or chicken feed!

By the time my Japanese was fluent, I realized that my Japanese cooking was too orthodox -- like cooking from Julia Child every day! I started asking questions, and buying family magazines, checking newspaper columns. Shopping is a great way to learn to cook, too. The family-run fish shops or vegetable shops quickly figured out from what I bought that I liked to cook, and showered me with advice, and often freebies too -- as they said, they'd rather give away something that needed to be used quickly to somebody who knew how to use it than have to throw it out. Vegetable shops very often pickle what they don't sell fresh, and they are a good source of practical information and new ideas too.

Which brings me to western cooking. I bake bread most days, partly so that I can have whole wheat bread, and partly because I got sick of toting home so many tiny bags of bread each week. I make yogurt, and laban (yogurt cheese), and my husband lived nearly 10 years in NZ, so he is happy to eat a western breakfast too.

One reason I like "grilled cheese for lunch" blogs is that they keep me in touch! Otherwise, I am stimulated by the local foods and dishes I see around me, and forget all about cooking something western. When I asked my kids what western food I cooked, the only things they could name were steak and lamb chops (though that might have been in the hope that I was actually planning to cook whatever they mentioned!).

When I came to Japan, I found that most Japanese women expected me to be a great baker, especially of cookies. NZ has no great baking tradition - fruit cakes, shortbread, scones, and drop cookies are the usual items - so I bought a few American cookbooks and had a great time learning new things. I'd never heard of "white cake", for example. While the children were young enough to be having birthday parties, and mothers came with their children to play, I did a lot of baking, but much less nowadays. I guess our picnic lunches are still likely to have sandwiches AND sushi though!

Japanese cooking these days is pretty eclectic, so I suppose women who themselves like to make salt pork and roast chicken don't think twice about me making umeboshi and miso. Also, just as elsewhere, some people hate to cook ANY kind of food! I'm surprised though, that my young university students are more and more positive about cooking if it comes up in class. One young man accidentally said "No" when I asked if he had cooked his own dinner the night before, and came up to me after class, red-faced and anxious, to assure me that he HAD helped, and he COULD cook his own dinner. Both boys and girls seem to think that everybody should be able to cook some kind of meal for themselves, and my sons learn everything from cooking rice to miso soup, salad, and stirfry during 5th and 6th grade. Maybe not fine cuisine, but a good start to feeling confident in the kitchen!

Now I'm off to cook sushi rice and leave it cooling while the boys are at swimming class - a fatally familiar pattern to our evening meals recently. Friday night is "day off" for me, and we often buy a bento...but husband tends to leave his untouched while he has a FRiday night beer, so recently I've been trying to come up with things that 1) Are ready to eat SOON after the kids get in the house after swimming (hungry 12 year olds howl a lot louder than hungry babies...), 2)Tempt skinny husband to eat something with his beer, and 3)Allow me to teach an English class over the phone at 8:30 as a favor to my old calligraphy teacher's family!, and 4) Can be put together between getting home from work and leaving for pool.

[bleudauvergne]

It's a real pleasure to read about how you cooking has developed over the years and the things you do every year. It's interesting to note the key experiences in learning or taking up habits and how they intertwine with the experiences of others. On another note, imagining pickles from chicken feed puts a wonderful twist in my morning routine!

[helenjp]

bleudauvergne, it'll be interesting to see what your approach to French cooking is in 10 or 20 years time! Broader and deeper experience is one thing...middle age exhaustion is another! At present, my main aim with cooking is just to keep on keeping on, finding ways to save time and money without too much dishonor, and also to jog my memory about food-before-kids. If I'm not careful, my kids will develop more sophisticated tastes while I'm still stuck in the food-for-little-kids mindset, and I'll be legendary for slapdash, horrible food that always tastes the same! I try very hard to keep on learning...

Before pool, son2 ate these inari-zushi (sushi rice stuffed into a pocket of flavored thin-fried tofu) while he puzzled over Dad's "Balrog's Chinese Character Class" worksheet!

For dinner, the boys and I had a unagi chirashi-zushi. That's a salad-style sushi with grilled eel (kabayaki), slices of thick omelet, shredded green shiso, and shredded nori scattered over it. The base sushimeshi (sushi rice) had squeezed cucumber and pickled sansho seeds scattered through it, and the rice was cooked with konbu (kelp), a little ginger, and an umeboshi in it. I used ume brine to "wilt" the cucumber, and also a little in the sushi vinegar.

Boris, you were asking about fish sausage...

Here's chikuwa (I like it split open, with a dab of wasabi, then stuffed with shreds of cucumber wrapped in a green shiso leaf - as far as I'm concerned, that's speed with honor!).

and satsuma-age, one with octopus in it and one with green soybeans in it. Eaten with a good soy sauce and wasabi.

While son2 did his worksheet, I cleaned and sliced a bitter gourd (goya), and put it to soak in quick pickle mix.

Under the pool where the boys swim is a 5-storey supermarket complex, containing this specialist pickle shop. I asked if I could take photos, and at first he said the supermarket management wouldn't permit it, then he chased me down in the supermarket and said he figured that nobody could stop HIM taking photos using MY camera, so he kindly took these for me...

This is only the lower half of his pickle display. Most of these pickles he buys in, but he probably makes some of them. Each product area has the pickle, plus a lacquered tray with tiny samples on it, and a few bags of the pickle ready to sell (the white "O" shapes are the neatly twisted tops of the plastic bags!). Under the display are bins to toss your toothpick after eating samples. The pickle man is a great favorite with my hungry boys, and they always rush to tell him their latest news.

Here are his ricebran pickles ready to sell.

I'll post pictures of some of his other pickles later, when I've prepared some to go with husband's beer...when he finally gets home to drink it!

[Pumpkin Lover]

YUMMMMMMMMMMMMM! Oh god, I wish I could go back to Japan!

I had no idea about the extent of pickle culture over there--I only forayed into dried fish condiments when I was in Tokyo, and they were spectacular, but damn! All of this looks amazing.

I had posted in the Japan forum about a pickle I had tried in a Japanese restaurant. Helen, if you could shed any light on a pickle made with soba miso and takana, I'd be much appreciative.

One more question, off the food cuff but I can't help myself (and I guess this is both for Kristin and Helen): it's very interesting that two foodbloggers from Japan are not Japanese. One of my best friends grew up in Japan (she's Indian), and went to an international school in Yokohama. She doesn't plan to live in Japan, though--I think she thinks life is too difficult over there for her as a non-Japanese (I think she's experienced quite a bit of racism ). How do you two ladies see life in Japan as non-Japanese? Is it easy or difficult to be accepted into general society?

Sorry to the admins about this last question, but I couldn't help myself--I find this phenomenon to be very fascinating.

[torakris]

One more question, off the food cuff but I can't help myself (and I guess this is both for Kristin and Helen): it's very interesting that two foodbloggers from Japan are not Japanese. One of my best friends grew up in Japan (she's Indian), and went to an international school in Yokohama. She doesn't plan to live in Japan, though--I think she thinks life is too difficult over there for her as a non-Japanese (I think she's experienced quite a bit of racism ). How do you two ladies see life in Japan as non-Japanese? Is it easy or difficult to be accepted into general society?

pumpkin lover,

it is a good question, though not related to food! , but I will answer it anyway. The problem is though that this is a question you could ask a thousand foreigners in Japan and receive a thousand different answers, ask again in a couple years time and they may answer differently.

I am the kind of person who could call anywhere home, I could care less of what other people think of men and if someone was making fun of me as I was walking down the street I probably wouldn't notice. In 14 years in Japan I have never experienced any type of racism (that I can remember and I am pretty sure I would remember it), but then again I am white and American to boot and if aything I would say I get more of a white glove treatment. Racism does exist (but then again name a country wher it doesn't), it is also in how you percieve it though, if you feel like you stand out everywhere you go then you may feel like every little bad thing that happens to you happened because you are a foreigner. I know a couple people who are like this, they think that everyone is out to get them.

I am also respectful of the cultural differences and don't use my "foreign-ness" to try and get away with things. I have been in Japan since 1995 and I don't think that anyone that I have even semi-regular contact with even thinks of me as a foreigner any more. I am just Yamaguchi-san. Speaking Japanese can make the biggest difference, over the past 2 weeks I have dealt with about 10 different people in regards to an air-conditoner accident that ruined our 2 month old tv, from insurance people to service guys to real estate agents, no one even batted an eye as the foreigner opened the door and lead them to the mess in the living room, I am sure I was treated no different from any of their Japanese customers.

I love Japan and really couldn't image living anywhere else any more.

I do whatever I can to make myself a noticable presence at the schools my children attend and even in the community in general as I feel it is important for the kids to learn that we are all humans and that even though we make look different we are all the same. Even though it seems to be one of the biggest pet peeves among foreigners, I encourage question's from kids (and even adults) about various things like why do I have blue eyes, can I eat sushi or natto, can I speak English, do we have butterflies in America, etc, how are they going to learn if we don't teach them?

[tejon]

I am really enjoying this food blog, especially the wealth of information on Japanese pickling. I would love to see a installment of the eGCI on this topic, if there is interest.

[bleudauvergne]

While son2 did his worksheet, I cleaned and sliced a bitter gourd (goya), and put it to soak in quick pickle mix.

...

Here are his ricebran pickles ready to sell.

...

Hi Helen -

I too had absolutely no idea about the pickle culture there!

Two questions about the bitter gourd pickles and the ricebran pickles:

Do you blanche the bitter gourd before pickling or pickle it in it's bitter glory?

You rinse those ricebran pickles off, right? Any other uses for the paste?

A comment on Pumkin Lovers question about her friend not being able to stay in Japan - In any person who has been transplanted, culture shock is something that generally continues on in different stages for years, more or less evident depending on how quickly a person picks up the language. There's a difficult time that usually falls between the first and second year (for me), when progress in the language has progressed enough to bring on a whole slew of new misunderstandings. It's a trying time but I've found that it eventually gets much better. I would venture to guess too that a person's age and what else they've got going on in their lives may have a lot to do with how resilient a person is to this type of inevitable low level stress over periods of time. But once that's over, things generally smooth out and get a lot better.

Loving the blog.

[helenjp]

FIrst off, soba-miso and takana. From what I can guess, it could be either of the two soba-miso types that Torakris mentioned, mixed with takana-zuke...but there's always the possibility that takana-zuke (a salt pickle) is soaked in water to remove the salt, and then re-pickled in soba-miso, and served with a little of the pickling soba-miso still attached to it...just guessing, though.

Bitter gourd, no I didn't blanch it. We had some with breakfast this morning. Last night after 3 hours it was still way too tart (not just bitter, but mouth-drying). This morning, after a good 12 hours in the quick pickle (asa-zuke) solution, it was refreshingly bitter, but also flavoursome.

I do rinse the ricebran off, partly because it can be very sour, also it is gritty to eat. Miso, sake lees, or cultured rice pickles are usually wiped clean, but occasionally served with whatever was adhering to them when removed from the pickled bed.

This morning, as well as the bitter gourd pickles, we had a speedy breakfast of toast and a tomato omelet, and raced out to catch a morning session of the Harry Potter movie.

After that, we had lunch at a soba restaurant. Husband wanted ramen, but was voted down yet again...at one point, he used to cook most family lunches, and after serving ramen every time, the kids revolted, and now claim they can't stand the smell of it. They will eat it cold or with homemade stock and extras...occasionally. At the soba shop, husband (who dislikes soba, patient man) had udon with pickled sansai (various wild plants and funghi pickled in brine). Son1 had tempura soba, with a tempurad prawn whose length had been extended indefinitely by some magical means (we call that "prawn in court robes" - the batter is usually called "koromo" or robe, but court robes come in 12 layers...). Also eggplant and green pepper tempura. Son2 had plain soba (mori-soba), his favorite, and I had bukkake-soba - cold soba topped with grated daikon radish, finely chopped natto, and scallions, plus okra, nameko funghi (slippery), red bell pepper, cucumber, and pickled sansai - with a side dish of wasabi and sliced Japanese dividing onion (naga negi) to be mixed with the soy sauce-based sauce, and tipped over the noodles and vegetables. Delicious! On the way home, the kids talked us into a Yubari melon-flavored softfreeze icecream (these are orange-colored). Sorry, I forgot to take the camera...

Culture shock...there are ups and downs...it's sometimes a shock to find that you can't cook in your mother's kitchen because she has no chopsticks. Racism - rare these days - haven't been yelled or spat at by passers-by since 1980. People don't go into their Marcel Marceau mode every time I heave into sight these days, but yes, I have encountered some racism - from the major (can't rent an apartment, westerners are too anti-social to be trustworthy mothers or community group members etc) to the minor (street salesmen handing out packs of tissues suddenly whip their hands behind their backs as I come down the street, as if I'm about to grab them in my talons and snarlingly shake them down for their tissues...). My kids have had trouble at school, but usually the racism is not the prime cause, just extra fuel to the fire. When I asked if kids still called them names, they rolled about laughing and said they wouldn't be able to stir out of the house if they were to start worrying about *that* level.

Now to have a cool glass of mugicha, and get ready to make a fresh sardine "namerou" for dinner (a hash of sashimi-grade sardine, ginger, scallions, shiso, sometimes myouga, and either shoyu or miso and usually vinegar. I was going to use yellowtails, but the sardines looked much fresher.

Will post with pix in about 2 hours...

[Boris_A]

Thanks for all the pictures (and especially the fish-sausages). I think I dont' buy in the "boil and bang" story. I'd really love to make a journey across Japan, well equipped with a pair of chopsticks.

I always felt something like "airy" about japanese food. When I see those pictures, I think it's the only food I can imagine to pick here and there a bit even after an extended meal.

As for the "xenophobia" issue: showing real interest for language and culture, and especially eating and drinking of local products together with inhabitants has a strong symbolic function (like sharing bread and salt).

Looking forward to the second half of you blog.

[helenjp]

Boris, there's nothing airy about everyday Japanese food!!

I think the reason it looks that way is that restaurant food (in the average Japanese restaurant) is based on formal bento or kaiseki (formal tray settings) - and both of these are intended to be eaten with sake. In kaiseki, rice comes last, while at home, rice is right there on the table with everything else.

I think the "boil it and bang it on a dish" comment was aimed at my friend's mother-in-law - who belongs to that generation of women who grew up during WWII. She worked all her life as a cram-school teacher, and as cram-schools are open during afternoon and evening, I guess she never had time to even think about cooking anything more challenging.

My kids are now settled down watching their first ever showing of "The ROcky Horror Picture Show" with the remains of husband's beer snacks -- the ubiquitous kaki-pea - a kind of salty, very slightly hot beansize cracker, and salted peanuts

We had a lazy dinner...rice, miso soup with tofu and wakame (made by my husband while I nipped up to the shops to return a bottle of wine with a hole in the cork and a taste and effervescence to rival Pepsi), and iwashi namerou (fresh sardine chopped with fresh herbs. It's been a hot favorite at our home since I read that it tastes best with liberal dousings of vinegar.

When I fillet sardines these days, I often remove the tiny bones down the center of each fillet, creating 4 sardine "sticks" instead of 2 sardine fillets. These are very handy frozen, and often appear in lunchboxes. Picture's a bit gross, sorry...

The finished namerou was served in a lovely heavy cut-glass Edo kiriko bowl, which doesn't show clearly...

...and accompanied by my husband's beer, which he felt deserved a showing. The beer is a happoushu, a work-around which avoids the government's high tax on hopped beverages. When they first came out, they tasted dreadful, but now give beer a pretty close run for the money. Husband prefers Sapporo's Nama Shibori, but he gets Sapporo Ebisu Black when feeling rich!

Not to be outdone, I took a picture of the German pewter wine cup my husband bought for me in Germany - it contains a very safe Soave, which is what I swapped the would-be Pepsi for.

Next, I'm thinking of talking about some kitchen equipment!

[therese]

Fantastic blog all around, helenjp. Really enjoying the pictures and details of your family life. Thanks so much for doing this!

[SobaAddict70]

That chopstick rest looks cute.

Soba

[Hiroyuki]

Have I been to Hondoji temple? We live about 15 minutes' walk from there, but on the other side of the station. I only go when they have "free entry for locals" day! They do have some nice veges and pickles there, and pretty "hydrangea" boiled sweets as souvenirs of the hydrangeas in the temple gardens.

You are THAT close to the temple? I was living on the temple' side, at Koude 幸田.

[Jason Perlow]

Helen, why are hopped beers heavily taxed? Why not all beer and wine?

[helenjp]

Americans in Japan will be celebrating July 4 today...hope US gulleteers are looking forward to their July 4 "tomorrow".

We've had our breakfast -- fresh herbs, onion, chopped tomato and cheese grilled on French bread, plus yogurt with frozen mango (great use for marked-down overripe mangoes) -- and I've set the rice cooker to be ready for a quick post-church ochazuke (rice with green tea poured over it) with grilled salmon for lunch.

Hiroyuki, you wouldn't recognize Koude - the area between there and the station is now completely built up with new housing. Hardly any fields of naga-negi (dividing onion) left.

Chopstick rests...photos to come!

Pickling activities for today are turning the umeboshi over as they dry outside in the sun, and mixing pickles in progress, and cleaning containers so that no mold grows where the pickling bed has spattered the container.

And - off-topic, but in case anybody wondered - my kids got bored and wandered off to play Lego long before I concluded that most of The Rocky Horror Show wasn't perfect family viewing!

[Hiroyuki]

Hiroyuki, you wouldn't recognize Koude - the area between there and the station is now completely built up with new housing. Hardly any fields of naga-negi (dividing onion) left.

Sorry to hear that--I was hooked on wakegi, a type of naga-negi, for some time while I was living there.

[mags]

.

most of The Rocky Horror Show wasn't perfect family viewing!

I have to admit I did wonder about that

[helenjp]

I did wonder

..let's just say that after 20 years or so, memory fades!

Chopstick rests. My favorites are the birds that look rather like flatfish. They even have tiny feet on the undersides!

Hiroyuki, I wonder which restaurants you remember from your time in the area? Many have come and gone in the 8 years we have been here. One of my favorites is a soba restaurant which serves a very pale type of soba.

Here's our cold salmon chazuke ... komatsuna greens at the back, grilled salmon topped with a paste of wasabi and nori cooked in mirin and shoyu, cold green tea and ice-cubes added at the table. If I'd thought of it, I would have used the bitter gourd pickle instead of komatsuna, as the weather was heavy and sticky.

I made some red shiso drink - recipe link. We had some during the afternoon, and refrigerated the rest, mostly for pouring over shaved ice.

Another pickle where acidity causes the pickle to turn red ...young ginger shoots in sweet vinegar Actually, the ginger is much redder now than when I took the photo.

We ate this last night with the sardine sashimi as a refresher, but I forgot to post the photo. I also forgot to mention that husband ate EIGHT spring rolls intended for the whole family, and was in danger of life and limb when our sons discovered the crime!

Tonight's dinner was very similar to the eggplant and green bean dish we had earlier in the week. I added chikuwa (fish sausage) and atsu-age (thick fried tofu) this time, and also simmered slices of a small flounder in soy sauce, mirin (sweet sake) and ginger, and made a small dish of boiled spinach. We delivered dinner to my parents-in-law, which is why there were so many soft foods on the menu. We used to take dinner and eat with them, but when they are really tired, we just drop something off for them.

We had rice and natto with dinner, and also some typical Matsudo pickles - "Yoichi-zuke". These are tiny eggplants pickled in cultured rice, soy sauce, and a little mustard.

[helenjp]

I just realized that I forgot to answer Hillvalley's question, waaaay back.

Cucumbers were sitting in a plain salt brine.

How do I know if pickles are done. Hmm. To quite an extent, it' a matter of taste - some people like their ricebran pickles still green, shiny, and firm, with a flavor which is still reminiscent of the fresh vegetable...others like them with a strongly developed sourness, and completely limp. My husband falls in this camp, but I think my kids prefer their pickles less "mature".

For long storage, there are several points to check. One is whether the vegetable has exuded enough moisture - the "brine" of vegetable juices and salt" should amply cover the total volume of vegetables. The vegetables should be wrinkled, and dull in color. Once they have reached that stage, it is a matter of taste how long you leave them...and in many cases, this type of salt pickle will be "refreshed" by soaking in clean water, and then re-pickled in a more flavorsome way that doesn't keep so well, for more immediate use.

I am in fact planning to use those cucumbers and some other vegetables tomorrow to make fukujin-zuke, the pickle commonly eaten with curry. Fukujin-zuke itself would not keep more than about a month, I think.

Umeboshi will grow mold while they are still in brine, so they are prepared for long storage by drying for 3 days before being re-packed in clean containers. The few that I dried on Friday should be ready to store tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I had better do some actual work(translation)!

[helenjp]

why are hopped beers heavily taxed? Why not all beer and wine?

Japan is not the country to let a good tax opportunity go! All wines and beers *are* taxed, but the rates are different, and the criteria are different too.

I accidentally said hops, when I was thinking of malt. Sorry.

In the case of beer, it was decided that a beer-type beverage needed roughly 2/3 malt to be anything like a beer, and so malt-content was chosen as the criteria for tax on beer, and the scale was heavily weighted to beers with malt content of over 66.7%. Nothing was malt content under 66.7% was permitted to use the name "beer".

About 10 years ago, some enterprising brewers started making beer-like beverages with malt content half or less of the minimum legal content for beer, and called it "happou-shu", which basically means a bubbling alcoholic drink. The first ones tasted truly dreadful, but they were cheap...and luckily for the brewers, this was just at the point where Japan's economy was losing altitude and having a few attitude problems too.

Last year, revenues from beer tax dropped so far that the government decided that they had better go after happoushu too. However, there was a huge consumer protest, along the lines of "You stuff up the economy, ride roughshod over the constitution, then duck off to Korea when it's time to pay for your political joyriding, you can at least let us buy a bit of cheap booze to forget all your sins, since you obviously can't or won't do anything to mend them"...

I can't recall the exact outcome, but I think the projected tax hike was slenderized considerably. Currently, the price difference is about 1:2 or 3:4, depending on the quality.

[hillvalley]

Thanks Helen. One more question. Where does the term oshinko fall into all this pickling. Here in the states, if you order an appetizer of oshinko you usually get yellow pickled daikon and some pickled cucumbers, eggplant or minicarrots.

I love all the natto in your blog. It's giving me some great ideas. Have you ever made your own?

[helenjp]

"Oshinko" is just restaurant talk for pickles - the words display their Chinese origins, so it sounds more formal, and more polite. People do use the term at home, though, too. I checked further, because people do feel that there are some slight differences in meaning, although both are used fairly loosely, and found that while some people had one idea, others felt the exact opposite was true

Natto...I remember a miso maker telling me that nobody who worked in the plant was permitted to eat or have natto in their homes, because of the danger of cross-contamination. Since I normally make miso, and I'm also somewhat allergic to soybeans, natto has never been high on my list of pickles to make...

I don't think it's very hard to make. I'm pretty sure that a rice-cooker with a keep-warm temperature (or, in this weather, a pack of proto-natto wrapped in an insulating blanket of some kind) would do the job if innoculated with a pack of fresh natto.

I also remember reading that natto made in big pots in farmhouses would last about a month, whereas the small packs we buy at the supermarket last around a week, and many people won't eat supermarket natto more than 3 days old.

Natto makers normally use rather small varieties of soybean, to provide a greater surface area for the culture to spread over. Small beans also make it easier to eat the natto without having to chop it.

[helenjp]

natto-making site in weird English

This site says 1-2 days at 104deg F (I think - 40degC, in any case) is what you want to aim for. Another site said that using their rice-cooker "keep warm" setting was a bit too hot for making natto, which makes sense, as an ideal climate for bacterial growth while your rice awaits dinner time isn't a great sales point!

[Jinmyo]

Helen, this is a wonderful blog. Thank you for your work on it.

[Hiroyuki]

Hiroyuki, I wonder which restaurants you remember from your time in the area? Many have come and gone in the 8 years we have been here. One of my favorites is a soba restaurant which serves a very pale type of soba.

There was an udon (Japanese wheat noodle) shop on the approach to Hondoji temple. I can't recall that name (ichi...(市...)?). There was a coffee shop called Fukinotou (蕗) at Kogane Kiyoshigaoka, run by a wonderful woman. She served delicious handmade dishes. Sorry to say, I received a New Year's card from her several years ago, saying that she had closed down her shop.

About the buckwheat noodle: You mean sarashina 更科 soba, don't you? I prefer brown, wilder soba called inaka soba.