Just Hungry

Periodically, someone asks about Japanese pickles - those crunchy, salty, sweet-sour, even spicy bits of goodness that accompany a traditional meal, especially breakfast. There are a big variety of Japanese pickles, and sooner or later you might consider making them.

Some time ago I did a week-long series on making instant, or overnight pickles. These pickles can be made very quickly, usually with ingredients that are easy to get a hold of. If you want to try your hand at Japanese style pickles, I recommend starting there. There are also a couple of cookbooks in English dedicated to quick and easy pickles, both of which are quite good: Quick and Easy Tsukemono: Japanese Pickling Recipes by Ikuko Hisamatsu, and Easy Japanese Pickling in Five Minutes to One Day: 101 Full-Color Recipes for Authentic Tsukemono by Seiko Ogawa.

However, the type of pickles that you are likely to be served in a high class traditional inn in Japan, or even the type you can buy in vacuum sealed packs at a supermarket, are a bit more complicated to make, especially outside of Japan. Here are some examples. continue reading...

How to prepare that hairy looking beast, the taro root or satoimo. continue reading...

Fans of the original Japanese Iron Chef (ryouri no tetsujin 料理の鉄人) in the U.S. have cause for celebration, because the series is back on the air starting tonight at 11pm Eastern on the Fine Living channel. I think it’s been off the air on the Food Network for a while now. In my opinion, while the American version is fine, there’s nothing to match the sheer craziness and fun of the original. continue reading...

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an article about how to make yogurt (or as they spell it in the UK, yoghurt) in the Guardian. I did not want to go to the trouble of making yogurt from scratch, but I had a big pot of plain yogurt that needed to be used up so I made a sort of variation on the yogurt cheese balls further down on the page.

Yogurt cheese, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is just plain yogurt that has been drained of much of its liquid. To make it, just line a sieve with some porous cloth like cheesecloth, muslin, a coffee filter or even a couple of paper towels, spoon the yogurt in, and put the sieve with a bowl underneath in the refrigerator for at least a few hours. The more you let it sit, the drier it will become.

I strained about 2 1/2 cups of yogurt mixed with 1 teaspoon of sea salt from Friday evening to Sunday morning, by which time it had become the consistency of whipped cream cheese. I put this into a bowl, grated one garlic clove over it and drizzled on some extra virgin olive oil and mixed it up. It was the perfect spread for freshly baked hot savory scones.

I’ve never been a big fan of very sweet yogurt, so this savory yogurt spread may make more breakfast appearances.

The food prices poll has just concluded, and the results show that 43% of the people who votes are ‘very concerned’ and 45% are ‘a little concerned’ about rising food prices. That is quite a lot indeed.

I’ve been thinking of ways in which our household food budget can go on a diet. Given that we are rather passionate about good food around here, there are compromises we are not willing to make. But there are lots we can do without feeling like we are depriving ourselves too. continue reading...

I have so many things to do that I vowed to stay away from the computers this weekend, but someone alerted me to this entry on the Health.com blog which quotes me. (Health.com is a Time Inc. property.) I just wanted to set some things straight, because a couple of the statements there are just not right. continue reading...

Until fairly recently I had a blind spot when it came to the humble soybean. I regularly consume soy products like soy milk, tofu and okara, not to mention fermented soybean products like natto and tempeh. And green soybeans or edamame are always a great snack.

But for some reason, I didn’t really get into eating the whole dried (and cooked) soybean. It’s not that they are that much harder to cook than other dried beans either.

In any case, I’ve rectified that situation and now I cook up a batch of soybeans quite regularly and store them in the freezer. Plain boiled soybeans are amazingly delicious, and just packed with nutrition. The cooking liquid is so rich that it can be used as a very nutritious stock or dashi for making soups and such.

There are a couple of points to watch out for when cooking whole soybeans, which are noted below in copious detail. continue reading...

I spent the last couple of weeks surrounded by chocolate bars. Oh, the temptation. continue reading...

I’ve noticed that some people have been following makiwi on Twitter. Thanks for adding me, but I don’t really use that account for public twitters (I use it mainly for Sandy reminders and such). Publicly I twitter on bentotips. If you miss my daily links and such, which I stopped posting here because of clutter, follow me there, where I tend to post them nowadays in addition to other aimless things.

And incidentally, I am also on other social media sites but I never use them. I don’t have the time to use them. How do other people find the time? So if you happen to find me on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc…just pass by, it’s an empty void.

Nikujaga, stewed potatoes with meat, is a staple of Japanese home cooking. It’s filling and comforting, and appears quite frequently for dinner at our house. Recently though I’ve been making this vegan version more frequently, which is just as tasty as the meaty version. Thick fried tofu (atsuage) is the protein replacement, but it’s not just there for it’s nutritional benefits - I love the texture in a lot of dishes.

The recipe, plus some ideas on how to reform Japanese non-vegan recipes to make them vegan, after the jump. continue reading...