Just Hungry

It may surprise you to read this, but I do not actually miss living in Japan that much generally, except for my family and the food. My home territory there is the greater Tokyo area, and while Tokyo is a great metropolis, it’s also unbearably congested and you are living on top of other people all the time. To borrow a term used for another place in the world, generally speaking it’s a nice place to visit, but I’m not sure (given a choice) that I’d want to live there. But there are certain times of the year when I do wish I were there, and right now is one of them. It’s cherry blossom time. continue reading...

Because Maki went under the knife last week, an understudy (yours truly) was sent to London for an interesting event. Here’s part one of my trip report. continue reading...

(This is the web elf. This article is one of the articles Maki instructed to post while she’s on the disabled list.)

If there’s a kitchen appliance that needs a serious image makeover, it’s the pressure cooker. Old myths abound about how dangerous and scary it is to use. Horror tales linger from the olden days of exploding lids and contents getting stuck on the ceiling. I’m not even sure if those stories are acrophyal, but I do admit that I sort of believed them too.

But then I inherited a 20 plus year old pressure cooker a couple of years ago. It belonged to Martha, Max’s mom, and she used it all the time until she wasn’t able to cook any more. It seems that pressure cookers are as ubiquitous in Swiss kitchens as rice cookers are in Japanese ones. (Incidentally, pressure cookers are getting more and more popular in Japan too.) Martha used to use hers for everything from soups to cooking potatoes. After my initial fears, I’ve grown to absolutely love the cooker. continue reading...

More and more these days I’m getting requests for vegan and vegetarian recipes. While I’m not a vegetarian as I’ve stated here before, I like to eat a daily menu that’s light on meat, and am always interested in vegan and vegetarian protein options.

There are several what I’d call factory-manufactured vegan protein products out there, from TVP to quorn. I’m sure they are safe and wholesome to eat, but I’m more interested in traditional, or time-tested, vegan/vegetarian protein alternatives.

This is the list I’ve come up with so far. They are Japanese-centric, since that’s what I’m most familiar with. Do you have any others to add? continue reading...

Vegetarians are probably familiar with seitan as a meat substitute. Seitan is wheat gluten that has been kneaded in such a way that the gluten threads align themselves to resemble meat. It was invented by advocates of the macrobiotic food movement in Japan, specifically as a meat substitute, in the 1960s. (Wikipedia entry.)

But way before there was a macrobiotic movement, let alone seitan, people in Japan were already eating a wheat protein product called fu (麩). Like seitan, fu is made from the gluten that is extracted from wheat flour. Sometimes the gluten is mixed with other ingredients. There are two kinds of fu: raw (namafu 生麩), which is basically fresh fu; and grilled and dried (yakifu or yakibu 焼き麩). Here I’d like to focus on the dried kind which is much easier to get a hold of for people outside of Japan. It’s also a great pantry item, since it keeps for a long time. continue reading...

[Update:] There seems to be some confusion about how zakkokumai is cooked and looks like, so I’ve added some more photos and such.

Rice is such an integral part of a Japanese meal, that the word for ‘meal’ (gohan, ご飯) also means rice. White rice is the norm, both for taste and for various cultural reasons. But as you probably know, white rice (hakumai, 白米） is rice that has been stripped of most of its nutrients, leaving just the starch.

Brown rice (genmai) is the obvious healthier alternative. But brown rice can take some time to cook, what with the soaking and so on that’s needed, and some people simply don’t like the taste or texture.

In recent years, something called zakkoku-mai (雑穀米）has become increasingly popular in Japan. Zakkoku just means “mixed grains”, and mai is rice. Another name for essentially the same thing is kokumotsu gohan （穀物ご飯）. continue reading...

Thanks to you (yes, I’m looking at you!) Just Hungry and Just Bento have really grown in popularity recently. This has also meant that I’m getting more emails. I do very much appreciate getting your emails, but there’s a couple of disadvantages to email.

• It’s a one on one communication so your question will only benefit you. It might just benefit a lot of other readers. I do actually end up answering the same thing several times.
• I may not know the answer but someone else might!
• I’m really bad at email. Don’t ask me why. I try to answer things as fast as possible but sometimes emails languish in my inbox for days, or I forget about answering them. Then you get mad at me and think I’m ignoring you, etc.
• Answering lots of individual emails takes time away from me writing new posts, not to mention spending time with my family/friends, exploring new foods, and all that kind of thing.

Hence, this is Ask Maki (almost) Anything. comments here will remain always open, to ask me anything that doesn’t fit into the context of a particular post. Unless it’s something that must remain private, please post here before emailing. Thank you! continue reading...

A few readers have emailed me recently about rice cookers by coincidence. So I thought I would put my answers here for everyone’s benefit. continue reading...

A reader emailed me asking, how people celebrate Christmas in Japan.

My answer to that is … “Not very well.” But I get to pick and choose. continue reading...

First of all, thank you so much to all of you who shared your food memories for our 4th Anniversary event. You made us laugh out loud, you made us chuckle, and you brought tears to our eyes. If we could we would have given the prize to everyone! But we only have one book in our budget…so, after a weekend of arguing back and forth, we finally selected one jewel out of a whole boxful of treasures: Mitch’s entry, I Ate Love. continue reading...