Just Hungry

I'll be offline for a while (not sure how long), to take care of the health issues. There will be updates over on JustBento hopefully, as The Guy Does Bento series continues, but over here the lights will be dimmed until I get back. continue reading...

I know many people who follow this blog are interested in Japan. I’ve been translating Japanese news reports on my Twitter account for some hours now, and will try to do so for at least the rest of the day. If you’d like to follow along please follow @makiwi.

Update: I am still updating the news on my Twitter stream. If you want to do something, please consider donating to the Red Cross. In the U.S., you can text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 to the international relief fund for Japan. Elsewhere or if you want to donate another way, try the International Red Cross site at IRFC.ORG.

(All of my family/friends are ok. Thank you for asking.)

A new article and recipe for Hinamatsuri (Girl’s Festival) in the Japan Times. continue reading...

It’s been another rather hectic week around here. So I’d like to loosen up a bit by closing the week out with a fun giveaway, just for the heck of it. I’m giving away a $25 gift certificate from our friends over at J-list/JBox, where you can find all kinds of cool, cute, and wacky stuff from Japan. continue reading...

A new article in The Japan Times about toshikoshi soba. Plus, a little about my favorite food-eating model, Lena-chan, and her brother Lyoh. continue reading...

A new article in The Japan Times about winter fish, and how fish fits into a typical Japanese meal. continue reading...

I have a new article in today’s edition of The Japan Times, available online here, or in the print edition. continue reading...

A message to people who are subscribed to the "Recipes only" RSS feed. It's come to my attention that that feed has been broken since mid-March. I don't have the time to troubleshoot it properly at the moment, so you'll be getting the 'everything' feed (recipes and articles) for the time being. Sorry for the inconvenience! continue reading...

We pay for single craft patterns. Why don’t we do the same for single recipes? continue reading...

A new article and recipe by yours truly is now available on The Japan Times web site, as well as in its print edition if you’re in Japan. The subject this time is eggplants (aubergines). It also includes a recipe of course! The recipe combines delicious fall eggplants with a miso-meat sauce or sorts.

Incidentally, although the original recipe calls for thinly sliced beef, it works well with ground beef too. This is a shot of a version I made using ground beef.

This dish is great hot or cold, so make some for dinner and save a little for your bento the next day. Really yum!

This week, both JustHungry and JustBento will be making a long overdue move to another server, undergoing major background maintenance/repairs and other things, so you may see some disruptions in service. Please bear with me on these. Everything should be back to normal by the end of the week (fingers crossed). Thank you for your patience. I'll update this post when everything is back to normal. continue reading...

A mini-rant of sorts, about MasterChef, the show I used to love. continue reading...

Pointing to something non-food on my personal site. continue reading...

There’s a new recipe from me, on another site - take a look! And a bit about the, uh, photo shoot… continue reading...

Maki had to undergo emergency surgery yesterday, July 6. Everything went well, and she is recovering now, although she may well have to stay at the hospital for a week or so.

We keep the site up and running as good as possible, but it will take some time until new articles will be possible.

In the meantime "Get well soon, Maki!"

As if the excitement, or stress, depending on how you look at it, of the move to France and the new/old house wasn’t enough, on Monday I got word from my publisher that my bento cookbook was sent off to the printers finally! I have lots more news about it over on Just Bento, in case you don’t follow things over there. continue reading...

(Edit note, May 2010. I have revived this piece from the deep archives. I wrote this originally written back in 2007, and since then the popularity of instant ramen has continued to grow.

Incidentally, I’ve gotten a fair number of angry emails and comments to this post over the years, as though I’m attacking a fundamental right of people or something. I find this very interesting.) continue reading...

Happy Valentine’s Day to you from Japan!

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Just a quick note here: If you are the Kristina Johnson who won the Just Hungry Menu For Hope prize EU25 (check the winners' list) please get in touch via the contact form :)

I’m in Japan! I’ll be here for the next three months. I am here primarily for two reasons: My mother is in hospital; and the bento cookbook photoshoot will commence next month. But of course I’ll be filing plenty of reports on what I’ve done, not to mention eaten, here! I’ll be taking and uploading photos every day, which you can follow here on flickr.

The photo above is of dinner last night with family - a seafood nabe and a sashimi assortment. Delicious and so simple, and not at all easy (or inexpensive) to recreate properly outside of Japan!

How has the year been for you? 2009 has been a year of change and turmoil for me. It looks like 2010 is going to be just as exciting and turbulent as 2009 was. There’s a lot to look forward to though!

For New Year’s Eve, we are just going to have a quiet evening in, with some sparkling cider from our old home town. Tomorrow we’ll be having ozouni. We still don’t know where we are settling yet — it may be France, it may be Switzerland, or…somewhere else. I still have a lot of work to do, on the bento book and other things, and I am leaving for 3 month stay in Japan in 2 weeks. That will be the longest time I’ve spent there in ages, and I’ll have lots to report on from there.

In any case, thank you so much for your continued support of Just Hungry and Just Bento this year. :) Happy New Year!

Longtime readers of Just Hungry may know that I am a big fan of the UK cooking-competition show MasterChef. I’ve written about it here several times, and even did my own ingredient challenge for six weeks one year. I also watched most of the Australian version, and commented on it a bit too. Well now there is going to be a U.S. version of MasterChef. continue reading...

I’m in the New York area at the moment, doing some family things, required government-oriented paperwork and so on. Whenever I’m here I do like to treat myself to at least one interesting restaurant meal. So, this time around I thought of going to Per Se, the famed Thomas Keller establishment. I’ve never been to a Thomas Keller establishment.

I went to their pretty but so user-unfriendly Flash-only website (see my rant against this deplorable practice) and, after having to reload the site because it was coming up blank a few times, was dismayed to find that they require jackets (though not ties) and ‘no tennis shoes’ (I guess they mean sneakers…tennis shoes, how quaint) for lunch and dinner. I am travelling light and only have shoes of the ‘tennis’ variety, and my planned dining partner (who is a much more exacting and well-travelled gourmet than I am) is rather firmly anti-jacket, so it looks like Per Se is out for us. Bummer. continue reading...

Thank you for all of your comments about the new theme/event! I have been mulling over it, and I while I still haven’t decided on the name yet, I have more or less decided on what it will be: continue reading...

I know that I have sadly neglected this blog for some weeks now, as I struggle with completing the first draft of my book. (My main problem is I keep revising the recipes…but that’s another story.) I know that digging up things from the archives does not really constitute true updating! Anyway, I do have an idea for a regular theme or event of sorts, to commence probably in the new year (or when the book is further along in the birthing process).

The tentative title of the theme/event is Japanese Ingredient Focus Seminar (too formal?). I know that many Japanese ingredients are unfamiliar to non-Japanese readers. So the goal will be to become as familiar as possible with it, in a specific time period, say 2-3 weeks. I’ll announce the ingredient beforehand, so people have time to get a hold of it. Then we will try various recipes using that ingredient, from simple to not-so-simple.

How does this sound? Let me know if this sounds interesting to you. I’ll also accept suggestions for ingredients to tackle. continue reading...

My niece Rena tucks into teuchi udon (handmade udon).

I am occasionally asked via email or Twitter or even in person, to post a recipe that is Asian but not Japanese. In most cases, I have to say that I have no idea how to make it. Well that wouldn’t be exactly true: I could look it up online or in cookbooks and replicate a recipe here. But then, so could you. So could anyone. continue reading...

3 years ago, I mentioned a handy list of produce ranked by how much pesticide is used to grow them. The higher (=more pesticides) the ranking, the better it would be to stick to organically grown.

I recently got a new iPhone (yes…I’m the very opposite of an Early Adopter of tech gadgets) and discovered that the same list is available as a free iPhone app called DirtyProduce. Here’s a screenshot of the opening page:

It doesn’t do much beyond list the Dirty Dozen (the most heavily pesticide-treated fruits and vegetables), the Clean 15 (the last pesticide-used) and the full list of 47 produce items, but it’s handy to have around with you. Who knew for instance that peaches were the most pesticide-laden fruit or vegetable? I tend not to peel my peaches, and I ate, oh I don’t know, a few tons of them over the summer. I may start peeling them next season, or look for non-treated ones.

Anyway, if you do have an iPhone, take a look. And if you don’t, there is still the PDF list to print out and carry in your wallet.

• EWG Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides

iSnack 2.0? Really? Were they serious? continue reading...

The winner of the Izakaya Cookbook is… Mireia! Congratulations to Mireia, and thank you to everyone who entered. Look for more great giveaways on Just Hungry in the future!

A small update

I’m in the throes of frantic ‘must-meet-deadline’ mode for my own book. If I meet my first deadline (in less than 2 weeks!!!), I should at least be able to take a shower…I mean, pull my head above water for a bit and update here. Until then, please bear with me!

(Incidentally, doesn’t it bug you when people say ‘please bare with me’? No I don’t want to take my clothes off with you. Geez.

I’m going off on a tangent. Back to work.) continue reading...

So, I’m writing a book, and a deadline looms. continue reading...

One of my favorite food blogs is back! continue reading...

During a bout of procrastination, I came across this post on Serious Eats about making udon from an translated-to-English Japanese cookbook classic, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji. You know this is a classic, since the original forward for it was written by M.F.K. Fisher! Anyway, the author of the Serious Eats post gets quite excited about the instructions in the recipe (which apparently calls for egg yolks…more about this later) saying to knead the dough until it’s the texture of an earlobe.

Actually, the earlobe (mimitabu 耳たぶ) is used quite commonly in Japanese cooking. What? you say? Well…here’s how. continue reading...

The winner of The Enlightened Kitchen book is… emalie from Australia!

If you didn’t win this time, stay tuned, because I have a couple more books to give away in the next couple of weeks which I am sure will be of interest to Just Hungry readers. continue reading...

I was interviewed on WRS Geneva, an English-language radio station in Geneva (Genève), Switzerland, this past Tuesday, on their food programme called Stir It Up. The MP3 is up now for download (link now corrected!), so if you want to know how I sound, with a stuffed nose (from allergies...agh!) complete with my totally mixed up accent, my segment starts after the rhubarb at around 9:45. It might be of interest to people who want to know why I started blogging about Japanese food after moving to Switzerland of all places. (Cross-posted to Just Hungry and Just Bento.)

(The survey is now closed. Thank you for everyone who took the time to comment/answer!)

In connection with a project I’m working on at the moment, I’d like to take a short 5-question survey of Just Bento and Just Hungry readers.

I assume you are here because you have at least some interest in Japanese food and cooking. My questions are as follows. continue reading...

Scene from a market. continue reading...

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Where I ponder the question: Why do American cooks do things with cups, not weight? continue reading...

A bit too late already for many people I know...but I just wanted to share this bunny bread from my favorite patisserie in Zürich. :)

Asha, the reader who sent me the question that inspired me to write Japan: A Survival Guide for Vegans has sent in a great follow-up comment. I’ve posted it here so you won’t miss it. She found it a lot easier to follow her vegan regime in Tokyo than in Nagasaki, where she has been living. That makes sense I thin: any major metropolitan area these days is likely to have many people who are vegan or at least interested in a vegan way of eating, while the same might not hold true for more regional towns (Nagasaki has a long history of being a very international city, but is much smaller than Tokyo of course.)

What follows are Asha’s words. continue reading...

Let’s pretend that there are no tiresome restrictions like visas and such. If eating well were the only criteria, where in the world would you move to? continue reading...

I know that quite a lot of people who follow Just Bento and/or Just Hungry are interested in Japanese culture in general. So, this is a very-infrequent plug for my Japanese language mini-lesson blog and Twitter account. The Twitter account is separate from my main chatty Twitter (@bentotips, where I actually rarely tweet any bento tips…); it’s at @mainichinihongo. There is also a companion blog, Hungry For Words, which has longer lessons on occasion. The lessons are not very structured or anything - I just talk about words or phrases that pop into my mind.

So, if you are studying Japanese, or just interested in nihongo, take a look! It’s all part of my mission to spread Japanese culture over the world, like gomashio on rice ^_^.

(Cross-posted to Just Hungry and Just Bento.) continue reading...

Did you win prize EU01 of Menu For Hope V? If so, you still haven't gotten in touch! Please do so via here.

Because I have sooo much to do right now, I’ve started yet another small project. continue reading...

I really have no idea anymore how many people follow this site but don’t follow Just Bento, and vice versa, but in case that is you, I just wanted to let you know that the brand new forum is now open. I’ve made sections to discuss non-bento food, or anything else that strikes your fancy too. continue reading...

You may have noticed over on Just Bento that I've now made the user login form much more visible. I'll be doing the same on Just Hungry, but for now the login/register links are at the top left of every page. This is to encourage you to register on the site. I have stopped short of requiring registration in order to comment and so on for now, but I have turned back on comment moderation for any unregistered commenters. continue reading...

Mochitsuki photo by Ivva continue reading...

[Update:] Menu For Hope has been extended to December 31st!

I’ve been sick with a cold since Friday. You know the usual stuff - headache, feverish, coughing, and above all that overwhelming grumpiness and desire to make the lives of everyone in my immediate vicinity (or, ‘meatspace’ as the hip kids call it) as miserable as I feel. In this kind of mood, the last thing I want to do is to go out and do any last-minute holiday shopping.

Maybe you feel the same way (about the shopping, hopefully not the cold part). The last couple of days before Christmas should be spent in your cozy home, decorating your kids, hugging your presents, and wrapping your tree. Or do I have that confused… Anywho, to take care of those last, difficult-to-shop-for people on your list, how about giving them a raffle ticket or two for Menu For Hope? continue reading...

When I posted my recipe for poppy seed encrusted green pea mini-burgers over on Just Bento this week, I was a bit surprised that a few people had a problem with the inclusion of a small amount of chopped olives or olive paste. My first thought was, “How can anyone object to olives?” But then I remembered that I, too, used to have a problem with olives. continue reading...

A Christmas post from 5 years ago, during Just Hungry: The Early Years. continue reading...

[Update:] Menu For Hope has been extended to December 31st!

Menu For Hope is an annual fundraising event, now in its 5th year, contributed to by food bloggers around the world. Last year, nearly US $100,000.00 was raised for the United Nations World Food Programme, to benefit the school lunch programme in Lesotho, Africa.

Menu For Hope’s creator and head organizer is Pim of Chez Pim, and this year’s regional Europe host is Sara of Ms. Adventures In Italy.

I’m happy to announce that Just Hungry is once again offering raffle prizes for Menu For Hope V. This year, we have two! continue reading...

Some spun-sugar candy Christmas ornaments being sold at the Christmas market in Zürich.

Have a great weekend! I’ll be off exploring more Christmas markets over the weekend.

The winners are announced! continue reading...

I’m sitting here sorting through the giveaway entries, checking out the overnight Twitters, and doing laundry. Typical Sunday morning for me. @macratlove tweeted (twittered?) this, which is inspiring this question:

What’s the most memorable famous-person encounter you’ve ever had in a restaurant?

Here’s mine! continue reading...

This is the final day of the 5th Anniversay Giveaway week. I hope you’ve enjoyed it! continue reading...

For a few months in 2006, I changed the banner graphic of the site every month to reflect the season.

There are a couple of things that I wish I had done differently during the last five years as far as Just Hungry was concerned. If you are a newish food blogger, or any kind of blogger, perhaps this will help you avoid these mistakes.

(This giveaway is now closed. Thank you for participating! The winner will be announced next week!) continue reading...

The header graphic of the 2nd design of Just Hungry displayed one of these 4 illustrations at random.

As I wrote yesterday, when I started Just Hungry I had no plans at all about the theme of the site, other than it would be about food. I think that you could get away with that back then, when the number of actual food blogs was probably still in the low hundreds.

__( This giveaway is now closed. Thank you for participating! continue reading...

The image that I used in my first page design banner. I still love it.

During this giveaway week, I thought I’d indulge myself by sharing some reminiscences about the past five years of Just Hungry. Today: Why I started the site.

__ This giveaway is now closed. Thank you for participating! continue reading...

I’m giving away goodies all this week!

This giveaway is now closed. Thank you for participating! continue reading...

I am mostly a plan-ahead, cautious type of person. But once in a while I like to do something just on a whim. Usually these whims turn out to be wonderful. (Sometimes not.)

Anyway, a couple of days ago, near the end of a rather difficult business trip, with my wrist/hand/arm still feeling stiff and wonky and feeling rather sorry for myself, I logged onto my [insert frequent flier miles program name] account and saw that I had a whole bunch of miles nearly expiring. And I decided I needed to spend them. Now. continue reading...

I’ve managed to sprain my left hand and wrist, so it’s very hard for me to type long articles. So I’m afraid the continuation of the Japanese budgeting series and other planned articles are on hold for a bit.

If you want to know what I am doing, you can always follow me on Twitter. One-handed typing is easier when it’s limited to 140 characters.

(This item is only of interest if you live in Switzerland, specifically in the Zürich area. Everyone else, just move along.) continue reading...

Today, three ocean conservation groups in the United States - the Blue Ocean Institute, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium - will each be releasing sushi fish selection guides. They all seem to be printed guides that you have to order (small quibbles: Why not a downloadable PDF so people can start using it immediately? Also, why 3 separate guides?) but if you are a sushi afficionado and are concerned about the sustainability of safety of the fish used as sushi neta, you may want to give one of them a look. See the press release here. continue reading...

In the past few years, the popularity of Japanese food has exploded, with sushi leading the way. You might think that as the owner of a blog that is mainly dedicated to Japanese cooking, I’d be ecstatic about that.

I am happy, sure. It’s gratifying to gradually see the cuisine of my birthplace being recognized as something special. But on the other hand, I’m more than a bit skeptical. I wonder if, in a few years, hipster ‘foodies’ are going to turn their noses up at Japanese cuisine. “That was so naughties” they might be saying sometime in 2015, as they tuck into the latest craze for - I don’t know what. continue reading...

What are your basic everyday go-to recipes? continue reading...

The 100 Japanese foods list is done. Plus, you know, Swiss breast milk. continue reading...

Being pleasantly reminded of a classic piece of food writing. continue reading...

I know that a lot of readers come to Just Hungry because they are interested in Japanese culture. You may have even taken a look at my language blog. At the moment I don’t have the time to maintain the language blog, so I’ve just started a Japanese language Twitter account, @mainichinihongo (which means ‘Japanese every day’. My plan is to introduce one or more words per day-ish, around a theme. If you are on Twitter, and interested in Japanese, give it a try! (I still have my other Twitter account, @bentotips, where I tend to blather on about everything and anything.)

Some food TV news for you if you live in the UK or regions of Europe that get British TV. The Supersizers Go is being repeated, The Restaurant is back for another round, and more. continue reading...

If you follow me on Twitter you may know that today was not a good day (nor was it a particularly good week). So, this little distraction via @nandita comes at a great time. It is a meme, but is a good one! It is called…

The Omnivore’s Hundred

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions. 2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten. 3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating. 4) Optional extra: Post a comment at Very Good Taste linking to your results.

So, here I present… continue reading...

Here are a bunch of unrelated-to-each-other links and thoughts that have accumulated recently.

Product linkage, edible

For UK and Europe readers: Japan Centre has a sale on this week for Yamamotoyama Soy Rappu, colorful soy based wrappers that are an interesting substitute for nori seaweed when making sushi rolls. I haven’t really tried them myself yet, so I placed and order and will see how they work. continue reading...

Please forgive the lack of photos - in the middle of packing, I’ve somehow misplaced my camera. I’m sure it will come out soon, but in the meantime here is a handy tip for bring out the best flavor in wasabi powder. continue reading...

A month ago, I asked how I should get rid of cookbooks and craft books. There were lots of great suggestions in the comments - thank you! Here’s an update…plus some ruminations on cookbooks.

I posed that question a month ago, when I was just starting the packing-and-purging process. At that time I thought I’d just have say, one box of books to get rid of. But as we went through the zillion books that have accumulated, we realized that there were far, far more. continue reading...

I was interviewed recently for Shojo Beat Magazine, an English magazine published in the U.S. dedicated to shojo manga (manga for girls), and the results of whatever I said are in the most recent issue. Unfortunately the articles isn’t online, so I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the whole issue is dedicated to Japanese food and manga - sounds like fun!

Update: Here is the link to the article (an excerpt I think). (Thanks heatherbug!) continue reading...

Is there anything that can step in for a ripe, juicy tomato? continue reading...

The Summer 2008 issue of Alimentum is out. This quarterly journal of food writing which includes non-fiction, short stories and poetry, is one of my favorite magazines of any genre, let alone food. In my current purge-decluttering mood, it’s one of the few magazines that I am keeping all issues of. See my first review of it here. The summer issue is as wonderful as usual. Did I mention that the illustrations (proper illustrations, no photography) are as great as the writing?

If you’re in the New York area, they are having an issue launch party this Sunday, June 29th. There will be a reading, wine, cupcakes(!) and maybe even omelettes. Details here. (This kind of event makes me almost with I still lived in New York, except for the July weather…)

This is a mostly non-food related question. I have hinted around about this a bit, but I’m in the process of moving (not sure where yet, but that’s another story!) and I’m taking this as a good opportunity to seriously declutter. I have a bunch of cookbooks and craft books in Japanese and English that I want to part with.

Most of the books I want to find homes for are in new or very good condition. No splattered books with stuck-together pages! There are a few that are a bit worn, but are out of print so may have a rarity value. continue reading...

I am sort of the road this week, so it’s hard to cook much. When I get settled back at home, the first thing I want to make is cold noodles. What I’m craving most right now:

That is hiyashi chuuka, or Chinese style cold noodles. It’s a meal in one, as refreshing as a salad. I love the salty-tangy sauce. continue reading...

2 or 3 times a year, my mother sends me a big care package from Japan. She sends it by seamail, which takes forever, but that’s because she always includes a bag of rice. continue reading...

Asda, a UK supermarket chain (and a wholly owned division of Wal-Mart), spurred no doubt by recent news about scarily rising food prices, has launched an attention grabbing product: the 2 p sausage. You do have to buy it in packs of 8, but a pack is still just 16p. In US cents that’s about 4 cents a sausage.

The sausages have been reduced, from 56p per package of 8. Even at that price the thought of what might go into such a cheap sausage makes me shudder. At 2p per sausage, it makes my stomach take a queasy flop.

Surely there are better ways of eating frugally than stuffing yourself with lumps of dubious chopped up mystery meat? (I love a really good sausage, but bad sausages are a very different matter.) If you’re in the UK, have you tried the 2p sausages, or would you consider trying them?

Elsewhere in the world, you can have a $175 burger topped with gold leaf and foie gras, which may not even be that good. Something’s off kilter somewhere.

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...

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...

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...

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

Today is Green Day, and we’re being bombarded with Green Day Sales, reminders as to how Green this company or the other is, and so on. It’s a big topic nowadays.

I feel that the things that we can do as individuals is getting increasingly muddy. For a while it seemed like biofuels were a solution, but now the huge demand for plant-based fuels may be causing serious food shortages. Food miles and locavorism may not be as clear cut a solution either. Michael Pollan says we should start growing our own vegetables, but that’s not possible for a lot of people, for space or time reasons.

Is there something relatively easy we can do? Sort of. continue reading...

(Skip the rambling and go directly to the poll)

The news is quite disturbing these days. Soaring food prices, food riots in Haiti, rice hoarding by some exporters of rice. Do you worry about rising food prices?

We eat a lot of rice at our house as you might expect, so news like rice prices hitting an all-time high today are a bit disturbing. We’ve already seen bread getting more expensive. continue reading...

Oh no, two YouTube posts in a row! Well on Saturday we went to an Indian restaurant in town, and invariably our favorite restaurant related video was brought up. Goodness Gracious Me (Wikipedia entry) was a half hour comedy sketch show that ran on BBC One and Two from 1998 to 2001. In case you have never heard of it and you’re in the U.S., it was a little bit like the ’90s comedy show In Living Color, except that the cast in GGM was almost all Asian (as in South Asian, or Indian), who also wrote all the sketches. It poked fun at many British and British-Asian things. One of the best routines was one that made fun of a typical outing to an Indian restaurant. This sketch is called Going Out for an English. I don’t think you have to be Asian (as in South Asian) or British to find it funny…it’s how a lot of people still behave, at any ‘ethnic’ restaurant!

“What is the Blandest Thing you have on the menu?”

Browsing around YouTube instead of working, as you do, today I found this little gem. It’s a commercial for Ajinomoto Mayonnaise, by Juzo Itami, the late, great director of the best food movie ever, Tampopo:

The actor (not sure if it’s Itami himself) is talking on the phone to a friend, when he gets hungry. Still remaining on the phone (and inexplicably on his back), he scoots over to the kitchen to get white bread, mayo and chirimenjako, little semi-dried fish. He tops it off with a fresh shiso leaf, and is in heaven. The dialogue is just like the dense, obsessive dialogue in Tampopo. I’ll have to give that sandwich a try one day…it is odd enough that it has to appeal only to a really curious food person.

(The second commercial is cute yet odd, like many of the best Japanese commercials.) continue reading...

Incidentally, I plan to do a lot more vegetable-oriented/lighter cooking, so you’ll most likely see the results of that on Just Hungry and Just Bento. This means I’m going to give the yohshoku series a rest for awhile (breaded and deep fried hamburgers tend to stick to the waistline and all.) Besides, we’re finally starting to see reasonably locally grown vegetables that aren’t cabbage or broccoli! This kind of thing over on Just Bento is what I’ll be eating more of. I lost a bunch of weight when I couldn’t eat after my surgery, but almost all of it has come right back since my appetite returned! Must. Stem. Belly rebound.

Today, you will be encountering many lame (and perhaps a handful of not-lame) April Fools’ Day jokes. But there really is none better, than the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.

I know I keep bringing it up every year on this day, but it really is that good.

Here’s a fairly acceptable YouTube version:

continue reading...

While I was mostly lounging around for the past week, I did get to catch up on a lot of TV. One of the shows I’ve cleared from my DVR is the new one from Delia Smith on BBC Two. continue reading...

Hi everyone. I am alive and getting better. I actually had a tonsillectomy (hi Yoko I got it done finally); this winter I had two very bad bouts with tonsillitis and thought those things best be gone. At the moment I am feeling quite blah (probably the meds), and somehow quite depressed for some reason I can’t put a finger on. I’m not supposed to be doing anything too stressful for a while, and surfing the internets right now really gets me down even more - can’t explain that either. My throat is too uncomfortable yet to eat anything (even ice cream is sort of irritating, so I’m mainly drinking fluids…) - I don’t have much of an appetite, though I keep on thinking about the smell of butter melting in a hot pan. And bacon. But not bacon in butter. Weird.

Anyway, I’ll return to duty around here when I’m back to my own self. Thank you for all your good wishes! continue reading...

I love my Macs in a way that is hard to explain, unless you’re like me and have been using Macs since the ’80s. Well, my trusty 12 inch Powerbook suddenly decided to die. Thank god for backups. So the last 36 hours or so have been spent transferring, backing up and other things to a brand new Macbook Pro. It’s a bittersweet feeling; while a new Mac is always nice, that little Powerbook was a true workhorse, a perfect fit for me in so many ways. I’d resisted upgrading it for a while, but all good Macs must go to heaven some time.

At the same time that the Powerbook decided to die, it was decided that I would be going through with some elective surgery that I needed to get but was holding off on too. So, updates here and on Just Bento will be a bit slower. I have some things already written up which I hope will be postable by me or a helpful elf, but replying to comments and things will have to wait.

I didn’t know I had so much synergy with my Powerbook! I hope I can revive her as a media server or something, and I hope I can revive my body parts too.

I was just opening a new pack of umeboshi (pickled plums) today, when I noticed this warning on the lid in Japanese:

WARNING: Umeboshi have seeds, and sometimes the seeds can be pointed.
So please be careful.

Here’s the label, with two pointy seeds.

(Edit: I could understand the umeboshi warning if it was in English (or language of the country in which the pack was being sold), since people may be unfamiliar with umeboshi. But this was a pack imported from Japan, with Japanese writing, so they are warning Japanese people, who are, or should be, familiar with umeboshi and their pointy seeds. Ume are related to apricots, so maybe apricots should have pointy-seed labels too.)

WTF? So…has it come to this now? We have to have warning labels on natural foods?

I can understand warning labels on manufactured products, say a pesto sauce, to warn about the existence of finely ground nuts. A small percentage of the population is very allergic to nuts.

But, surely the nut-allergic shopper knows to stay away from whole peanuts for example. Or will we have to have labels on those too? “Warning: This bag contains peanuts.” ….

What about warning labels on bags of beans? “Warning: This bag contains beans, which may cause flatulence and socially awkward situations.” Meat? “Warning: This pack contains meat, which comes from an animal. Vegetarians are known to have an aversion to meat.” A bunch of bananas? “Warning: Bananas have slippery skins. If dropped on the ground, they may cause an accident, or a horde of circus clowns to show up.”

Is this labelling gone too far? (Japan is not as litigious as the U.S. for example, but it’s slowly getting there.) Are there any other nanny-state labels you’ve seen?

The three finalists of the BBC’s MasterChef 2008 wait anxiously for the winner to be proclaimed…

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Here are the results of the latest poll, which asked the question: Should there be more restaurant authenticity verifiers? The poll results with comments and nifty graphics are here. continue reading...

• Yes, I want to know if the food I’m eating is authentic. = 43% (80 votes)
• No, it’s a bad idea - 49% (91 votes)
• Other - 6% (12 votes)
• Don’t know - 2% (3 votes)

Look what came in the mail today! continue reading...

As I wrote about last year, Valentine’s Day in Japan is fraught with social stress. Somehow, the chocolate manufacturers have managed to convince the whole society that a girl or woman can’t just give chocolates to the ones they love. (And it’s only the women who give chocolates in Japan on the 14th, not men, unlike other countries.) She must also give giri choco, or ‘obligation chocolates’, to people she ‘owes’; bosses, teachers, and fathers-in-law.

Now you can see this kind of social giving in miniature! Re-ment, the maker of amazingly detailed diecast miniatures which I’ve also written about before, has this set of two types of chocolates: Honmei or giri?! (Your real target, or obligation?!) The caption says this: continue reading...

Just like it’s a good idea to take inventory of your pantry sometimes, I find it useful to take a look back at my sites occasionally and take stock of what I’m doing. continue reading...

Here’s a new poll to chew over this Monday. The Japanese government has been ruffling some feathers in the restaurant world with their attempts to set up a program to certify the authenticity of ‘Japanese’ restaurants around the world (read about it here). Should more countries start such schemes, government-sponsored or not? Should a Spanish group be going around the world verifying if a paella is properly Spanish? Should the Germans inspect the quality of wurst? Or, what about the Americans - should they go around the world inspecting bagels? (You can get some mighty unusual bagels in Japan for instance, I can tell you.)

What do you think? Have your say! continue reading...

• Go to the poll!

I’ve decided to be more selective about the links I post here, so instead of relying on del.icio.us auto-posting, I’ll be doing it manually and less frequently. This allows me to be more verbose in my comments than 255 characters, and you all to comment if you want too.

So, here we go for this snowy Saturday morning: continue reading...

Early last year, a movement to set up an authentification program for Japanese restaurant was proposed, to mixed reactions. Now it seems the people behind it are getting going: the inspectors are already in Bangkok, Shanghai and Taipei, and this year they’ll be invading, er researching London, Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Paris. continue reading...

Chocolate. It’s such a lovely, malleable substance. It can be shaped into anything really. Anything.

But, one wonders what kind of twisted mind came up with this idea…chocolate truffles shaped like kabutomushi (rhinocerous beetle) larvae!

Avert your eyes if you are squeamish. You may not want to read this while you’re eating.

(If you’re getting here from the front page, pause and breathe in deeply before clicking that ‘continue reading’. continue reading...

Tuna with a side of mercury, and all that. continue reading...

I should have done this a long time ago, but hey, better late than ever. I’m going to try to assemble a list of Japanese grocery stores worldwide, that people can refer to. Obviously I cannot do this without your help! I can list info for places I’ve lived, and there have been some great comment posts in the past here that have included such info, but I’ll try to put it all in one place.

So, please head on over to to this constantly updated page and add any information you have about in the comments!

I’ve added the categories Food related shopping places you shouldn’t miss in Japan and Places that ship Japanese food-related things worldwide.

[Update:] Of course this turned out to be a way bigger job than I thought :) But I’ll try to add as much as possible over the weekend. I’ve found that there are quite a lot of Japanese pages that list stores and so on, for expats obviously. I’m collecting those and adding them, together with your suggestions in the comments. continue reading...

• Japanese grocery store list top page

The UK government is instituting an interesting school policy. Starting in September, cooking courses will be compulsory at schools in England. (I guess it’s not for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland yet?) It’s part of their campaign against childhood obesity. (Read more about it on the Guardian Word Of Mouth blog.) It’s a very appealing idea, though I’m not sure if it will accomplish their goals, if they aren’t eating right elsewhere. But we shall see.

I had to take what were called kateika (domestic science) courses in Japan, in the 5th and 6th grades in elementary school and the first 2 years of junior high school. (In junior high it was for girls only; the boys got to do gijutsuka, which meant mostly building fun things. I wanted to do that more than the cooking and sewing!) I don’t think we did a whole lot of cooking (I remember doing more sewing for some reason) but I do remember some of the things we made.

• A basic vegetable soup - though bacon was used for the “dashi”.
• Rice with green peas (mame gohan)
• Sweet potato paste with chestnuts (kuri kinton), a standard osechi (New Year’s feast) item…except that the teacher couldn’t get a hold of chestnuts so we had to use apples instead…so that was actually ringo kinton…
• Some sort of freeform rock cakes or such
• Pork and ginger buta no sho-ga yaki
• For some reason, a fancy sole meunière
• Sandwiches, the Japanese way - with soft white bread, mustard butter, the crusts cut off neatly, and the whole thing kept nice and moist (shittori) with moist kitchen towels!

I’m not sure if any of that was very useful - we never learned fundamental skills like how to wash rice, how to make a dashi, and so on. The only one that was useful was the sandwich class, so if I want to hold a tea party I’m all set! There were time constraints of course, which prevented the teacher from doing anything too complicated. I do remember that the classes were always chaotic - and we’re talking about fairly well-behaved Japanese schoolkids! I wonder how the British teachers will fare.

Did you take cooking classes in school? If so, what did you learn? Do you think cooking classes are a good idea?

Thank you to everyone to participated in the cloned meat poll! Here are the somewhat surprising results. continue reading...

To my post about why Japanese people in Japan don’t get that fat, Kim left this terrific comment:

I’m not Japanese (I’m Korean). I was adopted and grew up in America. I didn’t have a weight problem growing up, my weight happened when I hit high school and beyond. When I was in college, I had a chance to go back to Korea for 3 months. I was just a little overweight, maybe around 10-15 pounds. While there, I ate everything in sight, but I also walked everywhere. I also ate more veggies, and more rice, and again, I walked everywhere…usually in atypical day I was walking close to 3-5 miles. When I came back to the states, my Mom automatically thought that I had been starving because I was so slim. Sure enough,1 month later I had gained back all my weight.

There was a big diet trend a little while back that spoke to that. It had people focusing on what their heritage is and then eating and being like the people from their heritage. Now whenever i feel the need to drop some weight, I heavily go back to my Korean roots and the weight just seems to come off. I usually have more energy and just feel more at peace. But it takes so much time, and that is a premium these days.

I must have missed that diet trend Kim mentioned somehow, but it resonates a lot with me. I do enjoy eating a wide variety of cuisines, but when I want to get back into balance and feel good physically and mentally, I always go back to Japanese cooking. I know that Japanese food is generally held to be quite healthy and things like that, but maybe there is more to that.

What do you think? Does going back to your own food heritage help you to feel better and healthier? continue reading...

You may have noticed that you can now comment here and on Just Bento without moderation. I’m seeing if it works out - so far the anti-spam measures seem to be holding up. (You do still have to pass at terribly difficult math test…) I hate comment spam - to me it’s the interweb equivalent of someone walking their dog on your lawn and leaving a poop. But on the other hand I know it can be a bit frustrating to see your comment not be displayed immediately. So, we’ll see how it goes…if problems arise I’ll turn moderation back on. continue reading...

The first poll about chickens (the original question, the actual poll, and the results summarized) was so interesting to me, that I’d like to make polls a semi-regular feature on Just Hungry. I think that polls and the answers to them on difficult issues can help qualify one’s thinking on the subject. So, here is another one for you about on the subject of the ethics of eating. The subject is cloned animals.

Yesterday the The U.S. government approved the sale of food from cloned animals. Here is the Food and Drug Administration’s report. The European Union issued a public call for consultation on the scientific issues regarding food derived from cloned animals. The draft opinion of the agency (link, PDF) is that such food is safe for human consumption.

How do you feel about this? Remember that food from cloned animals would include eggs, milk and milk products as well as meat. Please include your opinions in the comments to the poll too.

• Link to poll page

Here are some rambling thoughts on why, to paraphrase the title of a book, Japanese People Aren’t That Fat. continue reading...

Around this time last year I immersed myself in studying the subject of losing weight. I read a lot of related sites and blogs, bought a few books, and joined some online programs. Since you may be in that situation right now, still flushed with the determination to carry out your New Year’s resolutions, here are some of my thoughts about online diet programs. continue reading...

The results of the Chicken Poll posted earlier this week continue reading...

A couple of years ago, I wrote about our visit to a most unusual Zürich restaurant, the blindekuh, where sighted people can experience what it’s like to dine in total darkness. Yesterday it was announced that the founder of the chain Stefan Zappa, was honored as the Swiss Social Entrepreneur of the Year.

According to the story, “The “Blind-Liecht” charitable foundation was set up in December 1998 by Zappa, a partially sighted psychologist, with help from three other blind people.”

It’s still the most unusual restaurant experience I’ve ever had. If you have a chance to visit Zürich, I’d highly recommend a visit there if you want a dinner you’ll never forget. There is a blindekuh restaurant (it seems it’s officially spelled in lowercase) in Basel also.

The raffle results for Menu For Hope have been announced on Chez Pim. This year, $91,188.00 was raised. Wow. Thank you to everyone who bought raffle tickets, and to my fellow food bloggers who offered such a great variety of prizes - a collective pat on our well padded backs!

The winner of the Just Hungry prize of a box of 53 bars of Swiss chocolate is Sonja. Sonja please get in touch with me at maki at makikoitoh dot com so we can discuss the where, how and whats of your prize. (I will not, however, be responsible for Sonja’s dental bills at the end of the year :))

It may well be that 2008 is the year when questions of ethics and choice really come to the fore. In the UK, coincidentally or not three major TV programmes on the subject have been airing this week. As I mentioned earlier the BBC is airing a second season (series) of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, a program about the slaughtering of animals for human consumption. On Channel 4, two heavyweights of the TV cooking world, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, are tackling the issue of battery raised chickens. In the U.S. Michael Pollan, author of the seminal The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has a new book out, In Defense Of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (I haven’t read this yet). Here in Switzerland, the leading supermarket chain stopped selling traditionally raised fois gras, at least in the German speaking parts of the country.

I don’t really have hard-and-fast rules on food. I’m not a diehard locavore, I’m not a ethically-motivated vegan, I buy conventionally farmed produce as well as organic. One food I do have a firm line on is chicken. Ever since I found out in what conditions factory farmed chickens are raised, I have only bought organically raised ‘happy’ chickens and eggs, as I wrote about two years ago. I think that chicken is a sort of bottom line type of food. A lot of people nowadays may be avoiding red meat and pork (is pork a red or white meat? I’m never sure), but they do eat chicken. And even if you don’t eat chicken, you may eat eggs.

So, I’m curious. What are your personal policies when it comes to chicken? I’ ve put up a poll about it - please vote, and tell me your opinion in the comments there.

• Link to chicken poll

I just realised that Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, the BBC Three show that brings you into a real working abattoir, is also back for another series (season) starting tonight at 10:30PM BT/11:30PM CET (also repeated at 12:45AM/1:45AM). I mentioned it yesterday as one of my top food TV shows of last year. It will be shown every night for this week, and the lineup looks interesting, to say the least. They are going for the baby animals…

• Monday (today): Suckling Pig
• Tuesday: Kid Goat
• Wednesday: Veal
• Thursday: Milk Fed Lamb
• Friday: Omnibus (recap of the week I guess)

For more information, see the BBC Three site.

My favorite food tv show is back! Plus, a look back at the best and worst of food television in 2007. continue reading...

I have yet another cold, and am not in a food mood. So I’m writing elsewhere, about language and Wii. continue reading...

Thank you so much for your kind words of condolence. 2007 has certainly been a year of ups and downs, but I feel that 2008 will be a big year somehow, and I’m feeling quite excited about it.

We were in the habit of toasting the arrival of the new year every year with Martha with a little champagne or local sparkling apple wine (Blauacher Chlöpfmoscht, with a few nibbles (apero) to go along. We’ll be keeping up that tradition by ourselves now. continue reading...

A little about Martha Wyss-Gerber, who passed away in the early dawn of December 26th. continue reading...

Martha, Max’s mother, passed away quietly in her sleep last night.

We were prepared for it, I suppose, but you can’t really be fully prepared for the passing of a parent either.

There are a few articles that I’ve already written, which will be posted here and on Just Bento over the next few days but replying to emails and comments etc. will be slow. Thanks for your understanding.

This is the very last day you can donate to Menu For Hope! And a nice bonus - take a look at the beautiful poem about Lesotho here by Rethabile. (Yes, if you also read Just Bento you’re getting this in double…but it’s a poem worth visiting more than once!)

Just Bento and Just Hungry (which is mostly me anyway) are taking a few days off to take care of a ton of offline duties. (Thank you for your nice emails…we’re hanging in around here.)

We decided not to get a tree this year, so the only Christmas decoration of sorts we have up is this wallhanging/advent calendar, that I finally finished last week.

In this day and age when things I have made or worked on exist only in digital form, it’s really grounding and satisfying to create something that has a physical form and presence, that I can touch and hold. That includes food too. There’s nothing better than the warm feeling you get when your friends and family’s faces light up when you present them with delicious food that you made with your own hands. Especially around the holidays.

Happy Holidays everyone!

We received a PR release the other day from LeShop, Migros’ home food delivery web site, that they are no longer going to be selling traditionally raised (with the gavage method of force-feeding) foie gras to German speaking Switzerland. This didn’t come about because of government legislation, but apparently was a decision made by Migros, following the results of customer surveys which were overwhelmingly against gavage. continue reading...

The nuttiest TV food show I’ve ever seen aired last night. Despite the rather somber mood around here these days, we were laughing out loud several times as we watched it. If you missed it you’ll want to catch a rerun. continue reading...

Some time ago, I realized that I was often using food to deal with anxiety and stress. I can’t say I’ve gotten out of that habit totally, but I know the symptoms now and can deal with them a bit better. One way is to read about food instead. I’m sure I’m not the only one who takes cookbooks to read in bed. continue reading...

A look at preorder New Year’s feasts in Japan. continue reading...

I realize that compared to a lot of other food blogs, I don’t get that personal on this blog most of the time. I just wanted to mention though that posting may slow down a bit for a while. I know that I’ve promised some articles such as one on pressure cooking, and I had planned some festive Christmas-y recipes and such. However, yesterday we heard that Max’s mother Martha, who is in a nursing home, has suddenly taken a turn for the worse. So, it will be a rather somber Christmas around here.

My pressure cooker actually used to belong to Martha, until she went into the home a couple of years ago. Except for replacing the rubber gasket, it’s as good as the day she bought it more than 20 years ago. She used it all the time, mainly for steaming potatoes, but for a few other things too. I hope to put those recipes up here in due course.

In the meantime, here is her authentic Swiss cheese fondue recipe, which is the absolute best I’ve ever had. A cheese fondue with crusty bread was always one of our favorite meals to have together.

As I’ve mentioned her before several times, I’m not a diehard locavore. But I do try to keep an eye on how far my food has travelled to get to me. Admittedly, many of my seasonings and such have travelled a long way, because I need my Japanese food and I’m here in the middle of Europe. For fresh produce and meats and things like that I do try to buy things that haven’t travelled too far as much as I can. I think I’ve fairly typical in that respect these days. continue reading...

I’ve been following a certain story in the UK with interest. A rich old lady died recently there, and in her will, she left her £10 million estate to the owners of her favorite Chinese restaurant. The family (actually her nieces and nephews) contested the will, as you might expect. On Friday, the High Court upheld the will. continue reading...

Just Hungry is happy to announce that once again, we’re donating a prize for Menu For Hope, now in its 4th year. Menu for Hope is an annual charity event contributed to by food bloggers around the world. It was instigated by Pim of Chez Pim, and this year’s regional European host is Fanny of foodbeam.

Menu For Hope IV will benefit the United National World Food Programme; this year’s donations have been earmarked for the school lunch programme in Lesotho, Africa.

And what is Just Hungry donating? Just Think Chocolate… continue reading...

Here’s another bit of food related shopping news for my fellow Swiss residents, expat or not. I recently got an email about a new site called The Cheese Club. They are still in pre-launch mode - the official launch is scheduled for February. One thing that makes they quite interesting is that they are run by an English and Swiss couple and will be selling British cheeses, as well as Swiss and Spanish cheeses. As far as I know, British cheeses aren’t that widely available here in Switzerland (Jelmoli has a limited selection, at least in Zürich) so this could be good news for a lot of people. (There really is no substitute for a good Stilton, for example.)

Although they haven’t officially opened yet, they are already selling a cheese tasting pack, which includes wedges of blue Stilton and Wensleydale, for 69 CHF. They guarantee delivery by December 21st. Could be a great gift for your favorite homesick Brit!

• The Cheese Club

At the moment I am reading a book called The Kitchen. It’s been reissued with another book by the same author, Nicolas Freeling, as The Kitchen and The Cook, both of which were written in the post-World War II period. I’m reading it as slowly as I can, because it is a book to savor.

One of the early passages in The Kitchen caught my eye, where the author describes the hands of a cook. continue reading...

Just a poke to remind everyone that the 4th anniversary book giveaway / “Food Memories” mini-contest ends today, at 1 minute before midnight CET. That’s 11pm GMT, 6pm Eastern, 5pm Central, 3pm Pacific, 9am Saturday in Tokyo, etc. There are already many wonderful personal stories…add your own! The winner will be announced on Monday. Good luck!

A very special limited edition olive oil which comes from Siracusa, Sicily via Zürich, Switzerland. continue reading...

This hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for me health wise. First there was the ‘acute tonsilitis’ thing (that is much better, thanks for your nice notes!) Now I have a self-inflicted case of Whisk Elbow. That’s where you 1) forget to charge your cordless electric whisk, 2) have an uncontrollable urge to make some little almond cakes which use the classic French method of whipping the eggs with sugar over a hot-water bath until they become a foamy, lemony-yellow mass of heaven, and 3) do it by hand with a wonky whisk. Now I have shooting pains from my elbow running down my forearm.

The moral of this story: When you have a cake urge, and your electric equipment is kaput, don’t be a hero. Go to the store and buy one. Something to remember if you’ll be doing a lot of holiday baking and your muscles are not trained up for heavy-duty whipping. (eh…)

(And by the way, no I do not own a KitchenAid. Whenever I look at one, I see the price - they cost more than 650CHF (about US $580) here - and think: For that I could go away for a nice weekend in, say, Aix-en-Provence, or Florence, or Strasbourg, or even Paris. I’d rather do that anytime! And so I do. Whenever I feel the urge for a quick getaway, I go look at a KitchenAid mixer, and make do with my cheap electric whisk.)

On a much happier note, there are already some great responses to the book giveaway mini-contest. Come and share your own food memories too, for a chance at a great book!

A Swiss company that sells hundreds of squash and pumpkin seed varieties. continue reading...

I originally intended to tweak the innards of the site a bit to improve performance and readability - the front page was getting rather (very) unwieldly. That somehow escalated more and more, as they do if you are a web geek taking a busman’s holiday*, and now the site has had a complete makeover. (Yet again. It’s the 5th re-design in 4 years.) For good measure I have given it a Christmas look, to stay in place for the next month. Ho ho ho.

Things should work properly, but if they don’t, please let me know.

(And yes, that new Swiss chocolate sponsor on the right does ship internationally.) continue reading...

I’m still not officially back :) but a reader from Canada had a question in the comments here, which I cannot answer. So, I ask any Canadian residents out there. Do you know of any Canadian sources (or places that will ship food items to Canada) for Japanese food, specifically umeboshi?

I am going to try to compile a worldwide Japanese shopping source list soon, since this type of question does come up all the time.

(For umeboshi specifically, if you can’t find it locally at an Asian or Japanese grocery, I’d also try health stores since umeboshi is a highly revered food amongst the macrobiotic set.)

OK, let me shuffle back to the inert/letting the antibiotics do their job state now….

I just realized that the kuri squash and apple maple pudding recipe is actually the 200th recipe posted on Just Hungry. 200 spread out over almost 4 years may not seem like that much, but every one of them has been tried and tested, in most cases repeatedly, so…it actually is quite a lot for me! Judging from the comments and email I get, most of them seem to work fairly well for people, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

(I also realized that ‘pudding’ may not be the right name for it…it’s more like a pie, without the crust. Though if you chill it before eating, it does sort of become a squash-cream pudding. I’ll leave the name as is though - whatever it may be called, it’s really delicious!) continue reading...

Many people who are interested in cooking and food are probably interested in the whole ‘shelter’ area - home design, architecture, crafts, gardening, and all kinds of domestic subjects. At least, I am. So it was very sad news indeed to hear that House & Garden will cease publication as of the December 2007 issue - even though I haven’t picked up an issue for longer than I can remember. (I guess there were lots of people like me in that respect, which is a reason why they did fold.) The web site is still up, though there’s no indication of how long it will be there. For people interested in the past history of this venerable publication, The Online Books Page has a list of links to archived editions from 1911 to 1922. Browsing through those old pages makes for some fascinating reading. continue reading...

Please stop with the Flash-only sites. If you must have a Flash site, please provide a plain HTML alternative, for those of us who might want to visit your site in a hurry, or on our Plain Jane cell phones.

For goodness sake, please get rid of those annoying, meaningless, splash pages. That is so 1998.

You want a useful front page that your customers would really appreciate? Put your address, your reservation phone number, and hours of operation there.

Please take a little time to convert your menu to HTML. Stop with the PDF-only menus! If you must, provide a ‘typical’ menu in HTML and then a link to your current PDF menu. But PDF-only menus? I’m not even going to bother. And this is coming from someone who makes their living from PDF programming.

AND FOR CRYING OUT LOUD STOP WITH THE AUTOMATICALLY PLAYING MUSIC!

Thank you. Have a great day.

Coop seems to have OEM’ed the famous Dolfin spicy Masala chocolate bar! All evidence points to this…. continue reading...

We had a major spillage accident in our refrigerator today, which required removal of all shelves and drawers. So I took the opportunity to give everything a wipe and wash and re-organize.

The end result was rather enlightening. continue reading...

A little site news: I’ve added a new search function to the site that will search both Just Hungry and Just Bento for your convenience. It’s using Google Custom Search, which is a very easy way of setting up multi-site searches. (The results do show ads on occasion, but there’s not much you can do about that in Googleland.) continue reading...

My post about losing 30 pounds using bento lunches as a tool is featured as a guest article on CalorieLab, a great weight loss related news site.

For people who’ve clicked through here from there, welcome! If you take the time to look around, you might wonder why this woman is saying she’s on a weight loss plan (notice the avoidance of the word ‘diet’) while writing about things like braised pork belly and spaghetti Bolognese. Earlier this year, I wrote a series of articles about my plans and thoughts for losing weight, but the one that stuck to me the most these many months later is the one about reconciling my food obsession with trying to lose weight. continue reading...

For the longest time (like forever) RSS subscribers to Just Hungry have only gotten the excerpts. There was no deep reason for this…except that I was afraid that my often long-winded posts would annoy you if you wanted to skim, or something. Well, due to approximately 3.5 people mentioning they’d prefer full feeds…from now on all Just Hungry and Just Bento feeds will have the full shebang, so you’ll never have to visit the site again*! Banzai!

Not subscribed yet? Then here they are: the Just Hungry newsfeed and Just Bento newsfeed. (What is a newsfeed?)

*Though I hope you do, I like visitors. I’ll even put out the Chex mix.

In case you don’t follow Just Bento, but read Just Hungry for the Japanese stuff, be sure to check out my onigiri magnum opus. In case you are wondering, yes I made all those onigiri and shot them over the weekend. It took 8 cups of rice! Some are stored in the freezer, but regrettably, many were consumed on the spot by the photographer and me.

Shooting white rice against a white background, especially on a cloudy day, is not easy. But the other weekend project we managed to finish finally really came in handy - the shoestring ‘studio’ box. continue reading...

The sister site to Just Hungry got discovered by several sites overnight (while I was not at the computer, as always happens in such cases) and the traffic went up about 100 x, mainly thanks to it being on the del.icio.us popular page for a while. I haven’t even ‘officially’ launched it in my mind, since I am occasionally breaking it by fiddling with the engine (Drupal, for the technically inclined) in the background, but it’s very gratifying to know that people are interested in the subject. I think it must be timely. continue reading...

The beta project is progressing a lot faster now, and should be open for formal business (so to speak) very soon.

One thing I needed to iron out was the user registration process. Now you can register or log in to JustHungry.com and be registered/logged in to the sister site. Up until now I haven’t implemented much of an incentive for anyone to register. But now, if you do register you can skip the CAPTCHA check whem commenting, have your comment posted without moderation*, and (if you’re logged in) be able to go back and edit your comment.

And, that’s not all folks! Once you are logged in, you’ll be able to choose whether or not to skip seeing most of the ads! So…if you haven’t already go ahead and go ahead and join! It’s all free, as always and ever. continue reading...

• Of course, anyone who registers and then spams the comments will be un-registered.

Great news for fans of things Japanese who live in Europe, the UK in particular: Daiso, the 100 yen store chain, is opening a branch in London on November 17th. They are teaming up with Japan Centre, one of my favorite sources for Japanese food and other things. (Disclaimer: Japan Centre advertises on this site, but I’m also a happy customer.) It will be at 213 Piccadilly.

If you’re not familiar with the awesomeness of 100 yen shops, you owe yourself a visit if you go to London. I am hoping that they will carry plenty of cute goods for the fans of cute. I think I need to go to London soon! I’m rather curious as to how they’ll price things at the London store…will everything be a pound? We’ll see.

Daiso also has several stores in North America.
An excerpt from the press release follows after the jump. continue reading...

I am almost ready to give birth to a project that’s been incubating for ages. It’s still rather sparse (or, as they say in Web 2.0 speak, ‘beta’). If you take a look let me know what you think….

[Update:] Thank you for all of the positive comments! (If you have any criticism that’s welcome too.) As you can probably see already, the site will be quite tutorial-heavy, especially since there are already a growing number of bento blogs. As I’ve written in Bento Basics, the focus of most of the bentos (I’m sure there will be some exceptions) I’ll be writing about are 1) brown-rice based with a large portion of vegetables, 2) made in 20 minutes or under (with some prep work) and 2) 600 calories or under (a bit more for bigger guys). They won’t be that cute - at least inside the bento box. I don’t have a lot of patience for cute-fiddling in the morning. You can of course add cuteness with the bento box itself or the wrapper for the bento box.

The site is still ‘beta’ because I’m still ironing out some background kinks, but you can already subscribe to it and things.

Incidentally, I started to make a concerted effort to make bento earlier this year, as part of an overall ‘eat healthier, dammit’ thing. It’s been a really positive experience health-wise and taste-wise, and as one side effect I’ve lost about 30 lbs (15 kg or so) since the beginning of the year. Does that give you an incentive to start making bento too? :) continue reading...

The French-language blog sooshi has pictures of Uchitomi, a Japanese grocery with stores in Genève and Lausanne. The selection looks very nice!

I have also spotted real yuzu recently at the Bürkliplatz market in Zürich. In the summer I have seen live shiso plants there, both red and green too, Japanese-style sweet potatoes at Barkat, and satoimo (taro roots) at the Indian grocery store next the Hooter’s at Helvetiaplatz. It’s really great to see more ‘exotic’ Japanese and Asian produce more easily available here. When I first came to visit Switzerland back in the mid-’90s, you had to buy fresh ginger in the exotic food department at Globus! How times have changed. .

Yesterday, the Soil Association in Britain, a highly inflluential charitable organization, announced that in a year, they will only certify food that is air shipped into the country as organic if it also met fair trade standards. Since some thought that they should stop certifying any imported fresh food as organic, this looks like a compromise on their part. Even if on the surface organic and fair trade don’t have much to do with each other, in the realm of fuzzy good-feeling consumerism they are certainly related.

I don’t think that enough study has been done yet on just how greener locally produced food is though. As I’ve written about here before, food produced in cold to temperate climates with short growing seasons requires a lot of energy. It’s probably beyond the scope of organizations like the Soil Association at this point in time to try to address complicated issues like that though. Far easier to place restrictions and requirements on far-flung producers with little or no political power.

Buy organic, support fair trade. Avoid trans-fats and simple sugars. Avoid additives and chemicals and extraneous packaging. Hope there are no harmful bacteria. Oh yes, and worry about the rising cost of food too. I used to love going to the supermarket. I still do mostly, but these days that enjoyment is tinged with a lot of stress.

(See also: should the supermarkets pre-edit our choices? Personally, even with all the thinking and decision-making that’s required I’d rather make my own choices.)

Next year, the United Nations wants us to celebrate the humble potato for an entire year. I’m not certain how the UN makes its decisions about such things (why not the Year of the Tomato or the Year of the Turnip?), but I have no objections against the humble potato, one of my favorite foods. Unless you are an avowed anti-carb person, how could you not love the potato? continue reading...

Forgive me for neglecting Just Hungry a bit this week - I’ve been spending all of my free waking time in Knightsbridge. I did want to follow up on the thoughtful comments left on my post about eating local in winter, in areas without 4-season growing conditions. Perhaps because I’ve been immersed in the 14th century has helped, but I’m increasingly intrigued by the idea of trying to experience how it would have been like to survive the winter in an age when fresh foods were not shipped in from far parts.

So I am going to try it out for at least a week in a few weeks - I think the end of January/beginning of February would be a good time. I don’t think I will go back as far as the Middle Ages, but something prior to the 19th century anyway - prior to fast trading ships as well as the advent of refrigeration. (I’m not sure if I will aim for pre-canning days as well). I’m also a bit undecided as to if I’ll try to emulate how it would have been in Switzerland, or something more generic, as well as what class in society I’d put myself (since rich people would have eaten a lot better then poor people, of course). When I’ve done more research into this I’ll post what I’m going to do.

Celebrity chefs have been around for some time now, but they seem to have exploded all over the place in the last decade, mainly through food related TV shows.

The restaurant food world is becoming similar to the world of fashion. There are the actual restaurants, most of which are too expensive for the majority of the population - people without generous expense accounts or oodles of money - other than for a rare treat. These are the couture studios (as in real couture, not ‘couture’ as it’s used to describe anything that’s not a plain t-shirt these days) of the food world. Then you have all the merchandising, from cookbooks to dodgy cookware to frozen dinners bearing a chef’s name. Those are the perfumes and bags and H & M special-designer label lines of the food world. continue reading...

As long time readers of Just Hungry may know, I used to recap every single episode of the Bravo TV reality show Top Chef. The first season had me glued to my…er, computer screen. However for various reasons I did not do so for the third season that just concluded. I did watch it though, and have just a few thoughts. continue reading...

Fall (or autumn) is really a wonderful time for local produce in temperate climates. The grapes in our garden are crying out to be picked every day, we still have a couple of late zucchini, and the markets are overflowing with winter squash, heirloom apples, pears, and more. In a couple of months though most of that will be gone, and we’ll be very limited in what we can eat that’s grown locally. Unless it comes from greenhouses of course, and, while there may be exceptions commercial greenhouses aren’t usually that energy efficient.

I am a moderate in most things, including eating, so am not a dedicated locavore. If I were though, and I did not live in a four-season growing area like most of California, my winter choices would be severely limited.

If we truly ate like our ancestors, who were limited to locally grown foodstuffs, we’d be eating a lot of preserved foods in the winter months. A lot of those foods have disappeared from modern pantries, but a few do survive: jams, pickles, preserves; dried or salted meats like sausages and hams and corned beef; salt cod. (In Japan there are lots of salt-cured and dried foodstuffs ranging from fish to seaweed to vegetables.) Two of the best examples are both cabbage based: sauerkraut, and kimchee. The lactic-acid fermented cabbage retains quite a lot of its nutrition, and probably kept legions of people from dying of malnutrition.

I’d really like to see those dedicated, evangelical locavores to try living on a diet based on these traditional preserved foods in the winter months, because that would show a true dedication to the cause. No cheating on tropical imported fruits. I’m thinking of trying it out on a short term basis (like a week) myself, just to see if it’s possible.

I was hoping that I would avoid my usual bout with a cold/flu around this time of the year with healthier eating and regular exercise and all that, but no such luck. Once again I’m enduring the stuffed head, sore throat, and achy body. My favorite home remedy to combat a cold, besides Ricola tea, is lemon-honey water: the juice of one lemon in a big mug with hot water and a spoonful of honey. My grandmother’s favorite remedy was umeboshi, though I’m not sure why (she believed in umeboshi for a variety of ailments). What are your favorite homemade cold remedies?

I am a usually a big fan of the Italian design firm Alessi, who make, besides other things, all kinds of cool, funky and expensive kitchen gadgets. However, this Mr. Chin line of kitchen timers and other gadgets made me wonder, what were they thinking.

continue reading...

There’s quite a lot of slightly matted plush fur flying in Britain this week over the new Marmite TV ad, which features the lovable Paddington Bear, devotee of marmelade sandwiches, tucking into a Marmite sandwich. It made so much of a furor that it even made the evening news on the BBC yesterday. Paddington Bear creator Michael Bond has been accused of selling out and for supplying the script for the commercial (he has denied both). There have been dozens of news stories and editorials devoted to it (my favorite headline is What Next, Rupert Bear in Burberry?). continue reading...

Following up on my previous post, here are some more recipes that use wiener sausages on Cookpad: continue reading...

• Wiener caterpillars - oddly cute
• Chorizo style wieners…basically wieners sauteed with a bit of ground chili pepper. You might ask why…I guess because chorizo is much more expensive?

I often like to peruse the excellent Japanese cooking site Cookpad. Cookpad is a unique cooking community site. The bulk of it consists of cooking blogs, where people post recipes and pictures. People can post short responses to the recipes called tsukurepo, where they show a photo of their attempt making the recipe. A lot of recipes also note which other recipe on the site inspired the poster to come up with theirs. This is what makes the site unique - you can follow a complete genealogy of a recipe, and keep on discovering new variations on themes. continue reading...

I finally succumbed to the inevitable and went to the dentist yesterday, to have a back molar that has been twinging with pain for months looked at. And, as to be expected when you hold off that dreaded dentist visit for too long, my options weren’t good: root canal surgery, or get the tooth pulled. I pondered my choices for, oh, about 5 seconds before settling on the tooth extraction option. (I’ve had root canal surgery once before…never, ever again will I go through that agony).

While it was my lesser-pain option, and Herr Dentist was as efficient as can be, I was still in pain as I got back to Zürich. (Herr Dentist is in Winterthur.) But my spirits lifted when I saw that the Wednesday Speciality Market (Spezialitätenmarkt im Hauptbahnhof) was back after a monthlong summer vacation. I headed straight for my favorite cheese vendor, which sells cheeses made by farmers/cheesemakers in the Züri Oberland region - in other words, very local, all artisanally made and so on. continue reading...

A little non-food business. I have been getting tons of invites from people I don’t know (and a couple I actually do) for yet another social networking site called Quechup. It seems that sometime during the signup process, this site makes it possible for people to send invites to all the people in the GMail and other online mail service address books. It’s kind of interesting to see who has my address in their address books, but nevertheless…if you want to avoid this annoyance, just avoid Quechup. continue reading...

At the moment there are so many UK TV food shows that are compelling enough to watch that it’s hard to find time for them all. Thank goodness for DVRs and torrents. Here’s a rundown, in no particular order of preference - all of them are worth watching for different reasons, and most are far better than almost anything that U.S. TV has to offer at the moment. continue reading...

Happy Labor Day to everyone in the U.S.! Labor Day is sort of the unofficial end of summer, which makes me a little sad, but it’s also the start of the best season for foodies - fall/autumn. Fall is known as the season of the appetite in Japan - as the hot weather recedes and the fruits of the harvest start to come in, the tummy gets hungrier. In Switzerland we have the hunting season to look forward to, not to mention wild mushrooms in the markets. And the old grape vines in our garden are already yielding dark, small, sweet fruits.

I know things have been a little quiet around Just Hungry lately, but it will get busier as I get out of tomato-salad and cold cucumber soup mode…stay tuned!

This news item is probably of no interest to anyone who doesn’t live in Switzerland, but French supermarket giant Carrefour has apparently given up on the Swiss market and sold their stores to Coop (news in German).

Now I am not really surprised. I’ve only been to the Carrefour store near here a few times, but each time I’ve wondered why it was so popular. Okay, they did often have some loss-leader type sales on staple items, a wider variety of cuts of packaged meat, and so on. continue reading...

Periodically I like to step back a bit and take a look at why this site exists, and what it’s about. The current masthead says it’s about Japanese cooking (especially for people who do not live in Japan or a region with easy access to Japanese ingredients), expat food issues in general, and healthy cooking.

But what I’m really about when it comes to food is real food, and that’s what this site is about. I don’t claim to be a purist who never lets an artificial food pass my lips - I do live in the real world. But in general, fake food just does not taste right to me.

I like real fruits and vegetables. I like meat from animals or birds who lived a happy life when they were alive, and eggs that come from contented hens. I like cheese that has been produced in time tested, traditional ways rather than the kind that differs little from the plastic that’s wrapped around them. I prefer fish that swam around freely.

Not just because they are ‘good for me’ or ‘good for the environment’ or ‘better for trade’ or whatever, though these can be - and often are - side benefits. I like real food because it tastes better. I’m selfish that way.

Now I realize that ‘real food’ does not taste better to everyone. Our tastebuds are conditioned by habits and environment, and a lot of people eat tons of fake food all the time. I used to do that too, especially in my teens and 20s . As I’ve gotten older though, I’ve grown away from that. Given a choice between a fresh, ripe peach and peach flavored candy, I’ll take the real peach every time.

Real food takes a commitment in terms of priorities. Time is one thing you have to allocate in many cases. Money is too, unfortunately. To me and to my family, these commitments are worthwhile.

Welcome to Just Hungry, where we prefer real food. continue reading...

I was recently sent a book about Japanese cooking for review. I wasn’t too impressed by the book for a variety of reasons, but one thing that really bothered me was that it used dashi stock powder for practically every recipe. (What made it worse is that the book’s title proclaimed the recipes therein to be “Healthy”.)

Dashi stock powder is akin to soup stock cubes in Western cooking. Like soup stock cubes, they are a very convenient way to add a concentrated dose of umami to a dish. I do have a box of the stuff in my kitchen which I use on occasion.

But keep in mind that dashi stock powder contains quite a lot of MSG. The good or bad of MSG may be a debatable subject, but when it comes to food additives I always like to be on the cautious side. Besides, with the right ingredients making dashi stock from real ingredients, even a vegan version, doesn’t take that much time - and tastes a whole lot better too. This is different from the time and effort, not to mention the mess, needed to make a good chicken stock, for example. On my list of Japanese pantry essentials, I have put MSG or Ajinomoto as something that’s optional, and I regard dashi powder in the same light.

In Japan, more and more households are turning away from dashi stock powder for health reasons, especially in families with small children. I don’t see any reason for people new to Japanese cooking to start out on the wrong leg by relying on an iffy convenience product. continue reading...

I rarely get political on this blog, because…well this is a blog about food, and I hate all the strife that surrounds political discussions. However, this article about the new head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP link) made me pause - especially since this is the organization for which the Menu For Hope III event raised money.

I’m not saying that the WFP won’t continue to do good work under this new head - but, her background makes me want to pound my head on my desk. Hard.

After reading my instructions for tomato water yesterday, a reader in the UK told me that Jamie Oliver had also made tomato water on his new show, Jamie At Home. (We can see BBC and ITV here in Switzerland, but not Channel 4.) Through nefarious means I was able to get hold of a copy of the show - it was dedicated to tomato recipes, which all looked delicious. I guess they didn’t film it this year though, because this hasn’t been a good year for tomato growing at all, with lots of rain and cold temperatures. (Unless they cheated and took their ‘home grown tomatoes’ from a greenhouse…) In any case, Jamie made his tomato water by straining the tomato pulp with cheesecloth, which would work as well as my method of using a sieve and paper towels. He iced his water down by adding ice cubes (I don’t think I’d do that since it would dilute the intense flavor) and sprinkled it with basil, celery and extra virgin olive oil, and spiked it with vodka. I hope you do try making tomato water at least once this tomato season - it’s really something worth doing! Serve it to your friends without telling them what it is and watch their faces! continue reading...

Periodically I get emails and comments asking me to post a recipe for one thing or another, usually something Japanese. I try to do so (eventually) with most things, though it may take a while between request and actual writeup since I try to make sure that if I do write it up, it will actually work. One of the things I’ve been asked about a lot is ramen, probably because it’s so ubiquitous in Japan, and so tasty. Since it’s usually served as a sort of fast food, and because the instant and cup-noodle varieties are well, so instant, people may assume that it’s not hard to make. continue reading...

This seems to be the week of appearing on other great food blogs! I was asked, amongst other more illustrious food bloggers, what my last meal would be by Chew On That. Check out the great answers!

Liz Crain of Culinate interviewed me recently, and the result is now up on their site. I always feel funny reading interviews of me, but nevertheless Liz did a great job. (I didn’t realize I average 15 posts a month… is that too little or too much?) You get to find out about my dad’s infamous restaurant business card collection! Food obsession must be inherited. continue reading...

A Happy August 1st to everyone in Switzerland! Judging from what was on sale at Migros yesterday you all will be waving Swiss flags and gorging on wurst, wurst, grilled steaks and wurst. Not the worst way to spend a day :) continue reading...

Reading this post on Serious Eats about the different ways in which municipalities in the U.S. are trying to reduce shopping bag usage, I couldn’t help comparing it to the way Switzerland copes with the issue. Here there is no banning of plastic bags or anything aggressive like that. Instead, shoppers are given two choices of disposable containers for their groceries at the checkout counter: free but really flimsy and small plastic bags, which are barely big enough to hold a packet of sandwiches and a drink; or a sturdy paper bag - that costs 30 Rappen each, which is about 25 US cents. I think this is a really smart solution, because having to pay even that small amount for a shopping bag really discourages people from using them. (The supermarket shopping bags are so attractive it seems to Japanese people that they are even sold for more than 10 times what they cost as accessories!)

In Zürich, everyone carries cloth shopping bags, backpacks, and so on to do their shopping as a matter of course, and people with just a little to buy will stuff their purchases wherever they can - I’ve seen elegant women with vegetables peeking out of their expensive handbags, and businessmen putting groceries into their briefcases. That may be the key really: who says that we need to put groceries, most of which are packed in various forms of plastic anyway, into separate, special bags? (Granted, I would have never thought of this when I lived in the U.S.)

They do things similarly in France too, though there they have plastic disposable bags instead of paper ones. French supermarkets also carry canvas bags, which aren’t that widely seen in Switzerland, as well as sturdy plastic bags of Ikea bag quality. continue reading...

There were not one but two Op-Ed articles in the New York Times yesterday about sushi. Two! It always amazes me how fast sushi has become mainstream in the U.S. in particular and ‘the West’ in general, but I guess this is some sort of proof.

The two articles are Chicken of the Sea by Stephen Shaw (the author of a dining guide to restaurants in Asia) and Sushi for Two by Trevor Corson (author of a book about sushi). While I agree in the spirit of their arguments (Americans or eh, ‘Westerners’ should be more adventurous with their selection of fish at a sushi place, and that some people are overly scared of the raw fish used for sushi), I sort of wonder what planet they are living on. continue reading...

I may either have a short memory, or have been lucky, but I can count the number of bad experiences I’ve had at restaurants, and still remember, on one hand. Unless the offense has been quite obvious - say, a big green caterpillar in my salad (happened once!), or a hair in my soup - I’ve never felt like lodging a direct complaint. The most I do is to call it a ‘three-time experience’ (an in-house joke) - the first, last and only time I’ll go there.

I do wonder though if complaining would have done anything. I tend to shy away from confrontation, but eating out, especially at a high end restaurant, is a very special, not to mention expensive, occasion. When such an experience is screwed up, as it was for this commenter, it can be very frustrating to say the least.

What do you do when you have a bad restaurant experience? In this case I’m not talking about merely mediocre or bad food, but something really off-putting in some way, such as exceptionally bad service, or something amiss with the food, or anything that really makes you angry. Do you simply go away or complain about it, and if you have complained, has it made any difference? continue reading...

Following up to the potato chip post: the availability of any kind of packaged food around the world is iffy, with the exception of a handful of really global brands, and even they (e.g. Coke) change their formulas from place to place sometimes. But as Roanne’s comment reminded me, there is one kind of good potato chip that is available all around the world - Svenska Lantchips, aka Ikea chips. If you have an Ikea near you, next time you’re there pick up a bag of these - a trifle on the greasy side, but these are tasty, sturdy chips, the type I really like. When I was at Ikea Spreitenbach a few days ago they had plain salted and unsalted; previously I’ve seen sour cream flavored ones too. Don’t you just love Ikea?

If I had to pick just one snack food (to bring to me on that proverbial desert island) it would be potato chips. I love chips but I’m very picky about them too. The New York Times has a feature on chips in today’s Dining section, in which they list their top 10 chips (in the Multimedia feature). Sadly they don’t mention my favorite brand, Terra Chips.

I love Terra Chips so much that I used to carry home bags of them in an otherwise empty suitcase, every time I went to New York. (I haven’t found Terra Chips outside of the NYC area…though maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough.) But for the last 2 years or so I haven’t had to do this - because, joy of joys, Migros, the no. 1 supermarket chain in Switzerland, licensed the Terra Chip name and the technology. I danced for joy when this happened because the standard chip in Switzerland really, horribly, sucks. The Migros Terra Chips cost twice as much as the awful Zwiefel brand, but are worth every single rappen. continue reading...

Some time ago, when there were blog memes galore, I vowed never to do another meme again. Then I got tagged by Mei from mei eats, a really fun food blog from Taipei. So since this gives me a good excuse to link to Mei, here are some non-food facts about your humble author, other than what’s on my about page. continue reading...

As anyone who has been to Japan knows, Japanese convenience stores, aka konbini, are nothing like convenience stores elsewhere. Insted of being rather sad places with ersatz food and overpriced groceries, they are like small fun palaces for foodies with loads of interesting goodies, many services, and so on. It’s a very competitive area of retail.

Seven Eleven recently made a splash by making over 12 of its stores (11 in the U.S., one in Canada) to Kwik-E Marts a la The Simpsons. Here’s a list of all the U.S. remade stores; the Canadian one is in Vancouver. Judging from the photos of one of them, the attention to detail is terrific. As a matter of fact, it’s about as much as is lavished on a typical konbini in Japan. Seven Eleven Japan actually owns Seven Eleven U.S. (there was an NHK docudrama a while back that showed how this happened…it was quite dramatic in a payback kind of way, since originally Seven Eleven had rejected the Japanese request for franchise rights.) Anyway, they recently announced that they are planning to spend $2.4 billion in a big U.S. expansion. I can’t help but wonder if they’d make at least some of those new stores konbini-like in terms of selection, attention to detail, and just the ‘fun’ factor. I’m sure that Americans would love it.

In case you left a comment here in the past few days and wondered where why it wasn’t approved - I suddenly stopped getting comment notifications, which is why I didn’t even know they were there. My apologies as I try to figure out if Drupal, Gmail or another interweb gremlin is at fault.

If youre in the U.S. or anywhere in the world celebrating the 4th of July tomorrow, I hope you’re having better weather than we’re having here, where it’s cold and rainy! If you’re having a party, here are some useful recipes from the archives: Japanese potato salad, which in my opinion is the best kind of potato salad - rich tasting, not too vinegary. With homemade mayonnaise it’s heaven - though be careful to refrigerate it properly before serving, and to eat the leftovers (if there are any) as soon as possible. For a much lighter salad (no fat added!), Scandinavian cucumber salad goes very well with the rich flavors of grilled meats. It’s sort of like a fresh relish. By saving calories with the salad you can then splurge on the Red, white and blue mess for dessert, which looks quite spectacular and even feels sort of virtuously healthy because of all the fruit. Happy 4th! continue reading...

For the last two weeks I was in the Provence, I tried a short term experiment of cooking vegetarian dishes only. Here are some thoughts on that experiment.

As I’ve stated here before, I’m not a vegetarian though proportionately I don’t eat much meat. Therefore, I thought that the experiment should go quite easily. It was easy in some respects, due to the easy availability of an abundance of fresh produce. continue reading...

I am gradually catching up on the Daily Grind, which includes some recorded or downloaded TV shows (yay Lee won Joseph! OMG Katie really got her just desserts, the biatch! (only UK readers will know what I’m talking about)). I’ve watched the first two episodes of Top Chef 3 (aka Top Chef: Miami), plus the Season 1 vs. Season 2 smackdown. I enjoyed the smackdown episode a lot - it was fun to see old favorites again. Wasn’t Stephen’s new maturity impressive? Dave hasn’t changed at all! Tiffani looks sort of like a female version of Mario Batali. And god, Ilan was awful. Etc. etc.

It’s fun and all that still, and the season 3 contestants look varied and interesting, but I just can’t bring myself to recap and analyze each episode of this show any more as I did with seasons 1 and 2. (Judging from the email, I guess a few people will be disappointed…sorry!) It’s a bit of work to assemble screen shots and things, and analyzing TV cooking shows isn’t really a focus of this blog after all. And to be honest, Top Chef is nowhere near being the best or most interesting food-related TV show any more. Plus, the constant, in your face product placement that I complained about during last season is even worse now! It’s really hard to bear. (I also got an email from some PR person wanting to ‘work with me’ on ‘promoting Top Chef’, and well, I’m really not interested.)

When I started doing recaps and reviews of each episode back in season 1, I was one of the few doing it - I thought the show had a lot of potential, coming as it did from the producers of Project Runway. Now there are a zillion blogs and forums doing this - Bravo TV’s site alone has about a thousand of them. The best, by far, in my opinion is from Season 1 favorite Lee Anne Wong, who also cooks the winning recipe for each ep in The Wong Way To Cook, still a horrible title but the video itself is nice. So there are plenty of places to get your Top Chef fixes.

While I was away, the new Summer 2007 issue of Alimentum arrived in my mailbox. I’ve written about this little quarterly journal previously; it’s dedicated to “The Literature Of Food”, and it’s a pure delight for anyone who is interested in reading and food, especially when they go together. The web site has some samples from the current and past issues - be sure to check them out.

I’m back home from Provence, both in the physical sense and the interweb sense. I actually lost Net access for the past two weeks (we thought we had something more convenient but it turned out we needed to drive 30 minutes one way to get to a WiFi spot, and well…other things sort of took priority). What I need to get into my head is that in this day and age, being offline for so long is not a good thing. It’s sort of like being MIA, for a lot of people that know me. Yes, I confess I didn’t even check my email for two weeks. So…if this affected you in relation to your food related questions and so on, I apologize. Next time I go away I’ll make sure I can at least get online once a day.

I’ll have a lot, lot more to say about my trip later on, but in the meantime, here is a little mystery. Can you identify these? (Click on the image to get a bigger view. RSS readers will have to go to the site to do this.) I’d never seen them in this state before.

While the food in Provence is glorious - the freshest vegetables and fruit ever, tons of fresh garlic, and delicious cheeses, fragrant herbs - I really, really missed Japanese food. I did bring a (very small) bottle of soy sauce with me, but no rice or any other ingredients. (Curiously I found nori and soy sauce at the local hypermarché, but no Japonica rice, or most other needed ingredients. So I’m not sure what rice the people of Provence make sushi with.)

Last summer, I had to make an emergency stop at a small Japanese-Korean restaurant in Aix-en-Provence to take care of the withdrawal symptoms, but this year I toughed it out for three whole weeks. But anyway, the first thing I did when we got home last night? Make a potful of rice and have a bowlful with an umeboshi. I think the older I get, the more Japanese I’m getting. If my long term plans to Get A Place In Provence work out, I’m definitely going to have to sort out the Japanese food supply situation. continue reading...

The comments on the post about whether vegetarian restaurants should only be reviewed by vegetarians have been really interesting - if you haven’t read them yet, please take a look here. This has made me decide to do a small experiment. I’m here in Provence for three weeks, and I’ll be cooking most of our meals (that’s why we like to rent a place with a kitchen whenever we come here, as I wrote about last year). So, I’m going to make all of our meals in-house vegetarian. Lacto-vegetarian to be precise, since not having any of the delicious cheeses here would be too much of a sacrifice and the self-proclaimed ‘bovo-vegetarian’ in house will rebel before we’ve even started. We will be giving up eggs though (a hardship in itself since I love eggs), and meat and fish. (We might have a bouillabaise once at a restaurant.) I’ll also try to stick as much as possible to locally produced food, though I’m not going to be as strict there. (E.g. I will use spices and things like lemons from elsewhere.)

Admittedly, here with all of the glorious locally produced fresh produce it should be a breeze. I doubt it will change my palette much but it will help me concentrate on coming up with different and tasty vegetarian dishes. The better results will be posted here of course!

We drove all day on Saturday and arrived late at night to a place that is quite close to my idea of Paradise.

We’re in Cassis, a small jewel of a town on the Mediterranean coast of France. Quite close to Marseilles, but worlds away in all other ways. Chic yet a lot more laid back than the Cote d’Azur.

(warning: big photos below) continue reading...

The Guardian, one of Britain’s finest newspapers, recently installed several blogs to which their staff writers contribute, including a food blog. Last week one of their restaurant reviewers, Jay Rayner, wrote a negative review of a well known London vegetarian restaurant - which upset quite a lot of vegetarian readers. He defended his review, and several commenters bit back. One opinion expressed was that, since the critic is not a vegetarian himself, that he did not have the palate to judge vegetarian food, and that only committed vegetarian or vegans should be reviewing vegetarian restaurants.

That’s an interesting point of view. While I doubt that main stream media outlets instituting such food-specific critics and such, in the wide world of blogs it is theoretically possible - so someone might choose to only trust restaurant reviews from a vegetarian blogger. Is it plausible though? Is an omnivore disqualified from judging what’s good vegetarian food because his or her tastebuds are tainted by a fondness for meat? Should vegetarian food only appeal to non-meat eaters?

As someone who has gradually increased the percentage of vegetable based food in my diet in the last few years, but is not a vegetarian, I’m really curious about this. I do like the taste of meat. but I love the taste of fresh vegetables too. If I gave up meat products totally though, would my palate change that much, so that I enter a magical realm which is reserved only for vegetarians? Will meat become totally inedible? I’m a bit skeptical about this, since so many vegetarians seem to at least occasionally crave a ‘meaty’ taste.

Everyone knows in theory that the fresher the vegetables, the better they are. But I think that many of us fall into the habit of buying a bit too many vegetables, storing them in the fridge, and using them as long as they haven’t rotted away or become science experiments in some form. You know, things like carrots and celery, apples and other rather indestructible produce.

But once you see how produce does deteriorate, you start to wonder. Case in point I had some rhubarb stalks left over, and stored in the fridge for about a week after I bought them. (Normally I cook rhubarb right away, but it was cheap at the market so we’d bought more than we needed.) So, yesterday I took them out - they looked crisp and perfectly fine - and turned them into rhubarb crumble pie. continue reading...

While I’ve posted recipes for several different kinds of sushi on this site, I have never published a recipe for making nigiri zushi, the kind of sushi most people think of is the sushi, in spite of several requests to do so. There are a couple reasons for this, which you may want to consider before embarking on your own nigiri sushi making experiments. One reason, as I’ve written about before, is that it’s quite difficult to get the nigiri part (the forming of the rice ball and placing of the neta or topping) right. Of course you can practice this, or use a sushi former, or even - if you get fanatical about it - a sushi robot. But the more serious reason is that raw fish is something to be very, very wary of at all times. continue reading...

The disaster zone kitchen has been largely cleared up now. The kitchen table is still piled up with foodstuffs that need to be re-housed, but otherwise things are mostly back to normal. Except that is for my general will to do some serious cooking. There is something about throwing away bags of ruined flour, sugar, and formerly dry pasta that damages ones will to live, er, that is cook with a light heart.

What I did discover though is that I am a hoarder. With a small household, there’s no need at all to have so many things stockpiled. Why did we even have 6 bags of sugar and buy flour by the ten-pack anyway, when it’s not even cheaper to do so? I don’t bake that much, and I only need sugar in large amounts during jam and preserve making time, which is still weeks down the road. Likewise, we have still 10 cans of tuna when we barely eat the stuff at all. continue reading...

We’ve had a bit of a Plumbing Disaster in the kitchen, which has necessiated the removal of everything from shelves and such up onto higher ground (not to mention the disposal of many ruined food items). This has meant cooking activities have had to take a short pause. Hopefully the kitchen, my sanity, and cooking (and posting thereof on this blog) should be back shortly.

I’m a week late in reading this, but last week’s article in the NY Times by Mark Bittman about a low frills kitchen for $200 really reminded me how our cooking choices are influenced by our culinary heritage. In other words, I would not have made the choices he did in a lot of cases.

For instance he says that you need some expensive burner kit to ‘properly’ use a wok, so you might as well forget it. A decent wok was the first thing I bought for myself when I was starting out on my own was a decent wok from a local Chinese kitchen supply shop, and it worked fine on my regular issue gas range. Another thing I also got was an inexpensive rice cooker like this one (which you may note costs less than his totally extraneous vegetable cutter gadget). I may not have made rice ‘twice daily’, which he says is your criteria for purchasing a rice cooker, but I relied on it all the time, especially for making my own bento lunches which saved me tons of money in the long run.

Three steel bowls? One that’s big enough to handle most tasks is fine. If you need to lay out ingredients or something you can use your dinnerware (which I still do when I run out of bowls and such.) 3 different frying pans? I just had a small one, and the wok, which is much more useful than multiple frying pans. I still only own three frying pans and a large flat-bottomed wok, and the last gets much more use.

I think when you are equipping a kitchen, regardless of budget, you have to really ask yourself how you will use it.

Following up to my previous post about food stamp budget experiments:

Rebecca has left a comment, where she points out she is following the USDA Thrifty Meal Plan, on which food stamp benefits are based. This is where her budget figure of $74 per week for 2 people (not $74 per day as I erroneously typed…that’s sort of generous!) comes from, which comes out to $5.30 per day per person.

Actually another blogger did a month-long Thrifty Meal Plan experiment 2 years ago, though she did not stipulate organic/local as Rebecca is doing. Half Changed World ate on the Thrifty Food plan for a month (followup posts are here, here, here, here and the final wrapup.) She had the additional challenge of feeding her two small children, including one who was (is) a picky eater, as well as her husband.

(It seems quite illogical to me that the food budget or food stamp allocation is the same for all people, whether it’s a tiny baby or a growing hungry teenager. But I guess that’s government for you.) continue reading...

[The following has been edited to correct some things from the original posting and add a couple of links. Serious Eats lists some more congresspeople participating.]

Last year the most popular food plan experiment was “eating local”. This year so far it seems to be “eating on a food stamp budget”. The main reason for this is upcoming debate on the 2007 farm bill. Bush administration is proposing to make big cuts in food assistance for the poor, a large part of which would mean cuts to the food stamp program. [Edit: as an anonymous commenter pointed out, that was a link to an article about the 2005 farm bill cuts.] (A NY Times editorial about the subject [Edit: this actually is about the 2007 Farm Bill :)].) So a number of politicians are doing the Food Stamp Budget Experiment at least in part to protest against this.

Here are the ones I’ve found so far (Note, some of these links were already posted to my del.icio.us, so my apologies for the duplicates if you follow that also.) continue reading...

After writing my previous entry about The Sushi FAQ site, I received a very nice email from Warren, the site owner (which I especially appreciated since I wasn’t totally positive in my review). One question he raised which got me thinking is where he should go from here to get more information and knowledge about sushi. I think this question can be extended to all areas of life, but keeping it in the food realm: how far should you, and do you, go to gain knowledge and experience, especially about food and cuisines you didn’t grow up with?

Let’s say you fall in love with Thai food as it’s served at your local restaurant. You might search out for other Thai restaurants. You might buy some cookbooks. That far I think almost anyone remotely interested in food will do. The next step might be to take a class in Thai cooking. So far, so good. A trip to Thailand? Maybe, if budget allows.

What beyond that though? Would you move to Thailand for an extended period (more than a few months) to immerse yourself in the food, language and culture? Would you learn Tagalog? Would you apprentice with a Thai cook? How far would you go?

I’ve gotten to to the trying various restaurants and buying cookbooks stage on numerous cuisines, and the travel level on a few more. I’ve gone to the learning-language and living there level too. I didn’t do this just for the food, but my decision to take French for three years in college certainly had a lot to do with the fact that I fell absolutely in love with the food I ate at small, inexpensive restaurants around Paris the first time I went there by myself.

Years later I ended up living here in Switzerland, which wasn’t a food based decision, but there’s no denying that living here gives me great access to great cuisines around Europe. And there’s the great cheese and chocolate of course…two of my favorite foods in the world.

I have a feeling that I am much more obsessive than the average person in this way, but surely I’m not alone…

The place and cuisine I’m most interested in immersing myself in at the moment is Hawaii. Spam musubi, here I come! (One day, soon I hope.) continue reading...

Rebecca Blood, one of my favorite (non-food/general) bloggers, has started an interesting challenge: eating for a month organically on a U.S. Food Stamp budget. Naturally she is blogging the experience. Given the current ongoing discussions in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere about the cost of eating ethically, let alone organically, it’s a very timely experiment. Rebecca’s budget for 2 is “$74.00/week or 320.80/month, the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] ‘Thrifty’ standard for a family of 2 adults, aged 20-50 years.”

(My only very minor nitpick would be that Rebecca lives in the Bay Area, which has to be one of the easiest places in the world to conduct such an experiment. :) Now I’d like to see a similar one by a blogger in say, Iceland. Any takers? )

It only seems like yesterday (actually it was in January) that season 2 of Top Chef ended, leaving many of us baffled and rather disillusioned at the Ilan over Marcel decision. Nevertheless, season 3 is already looming on the horizon. It’s set to kick off on June 6, with a season 1 vs. season 2 All-Star Clash. It’ll be the final four of season 2 vs. the final four, minus LeeAnne Wong (who is presumably not included since she’s on the show’s staff, so to speak) but with everyone’s love-to-hate-him target Stephen Asprinio. Marcel vs. Stephen! I have to admit I am looking forward to that at least.

Some more highlights according to the press release after the fold: continue reading...

Update: Want to make okonomiyaki from scratch? Try this detailed recipe! continue reading...

Johanna of the passionate cook has been running a series called Culinary Snapshots, of cities around the world. The Culinary Snapshot of Zürich that I wrote is now up there. (The pictures there were taken in late March by the way, when it was warm enough for t-shirts!) Re-reading it now I think I may need some armor against proprietors of Asian-Fusion restaurants in town. :) continue reading...

A shoutout to all U.S. readers who have a Baskin Robbins store nearby: tonight (May 2nd) they are holding a 31 cent scoop promotion from 5 pm to 10 pm. It’s been a long time since I’ve had one of the 31 flavors, seduced as I’ve been by richer ice creams, but for 31 cents…why not? Spread the word!

Things may be just a bit slower on Just Hungry for the next couple of months, since I’ll be on the road a lot. I do have several articles piled up on the back burner though, so you shouldn’t miss much (hopefully) in the way of new stuff to read. What may be slower is my comment and new user registration approval rate, as well as replying to comments, but I’ll try to get to them when I can.

A number of people have created accounts here to avoid the necessary evil to reduce spammers that is the CAPTCHA thingy. But you may have noticed that there was no way to actually log in. Oops. Now there is - on every page you should now see a login / register link. I’m still trying to figure out what additional benefits I can bring to registered and logged in users…but for now, if you are logged in, you’ll no longer have to solve the math question.

Yesterday, I found out that one of the most talented sushi chefs I’ve ever known had died. He was still relatively young (in his 50s). He was at one time one of the itamae at the late, lamented Sushisay in New York.

The authorities are investigating the cause of his death. They have to do this, because his body was found in his bath, at least a month after he had died. continue reading...

Normally, all the junk mail we get goes straight to the trash. Not these things we got in our mailbox yesterday though.

These are two full-size bars of Cailler (Nestlé) milk chocolate. No messing about with tiny sample sizes here. continue reading...

Reader Nanette has posted a great question here, about hosting a fund-raising green tea tasting party for a large group (50 people). I had to think about this for a bit, and here are some of the ideas I have come up with. continue reading...

I’ve gotten a couple of emails from readers who had some trouble with the bunny bao. Just in case you plan to try these tomorrow or any time (why limit bunnies to just Easter?), here are a few key points to watch out for. continue reading...

I received a lovely email from Myriam of Once Upon A Tart, a beautiful food blog unknown to me up until now. I should have, since she is a food blogger in Zürich - just a few kilometers (or miles, whatever) away from where I sit now. This did get me thinking though about Swiss food bloggers - or to be strict about it, food bloggers who write from Switzerland. (The very popular 1x umrühen bitte is written from Andalusia, Spain I think.) continue reading...

I couldn’t let Sunday pass by without posting this: the New Jersey Spaghetti Harvest. Oh, the pathos, the corporate evil, the…. Just go watch. Now.

[via raincoaster]

This Sunday is April Fool’s Day. Too bad it’s on a weekend, since that reduces the opportunities for good old office fun. I am going to take the weekend off again from the online world, but in the meantime enjoy the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest from the archives. The weather’s been so nice, maybe I’ll go down to the Ticino to check out this year’s crop…

Don’t forget to tune in to Cheddarvision.tv (previously mentioned on Just Hungry here) today! They are going to turn the Big Cheese over, take a core sample, and see how it’s doing! If they haven’t already…I’m not sure. Was that label on the other end before? (thanks Mimi!) continue reading...

Yesterday, I had some takeout sushi that was so terrible that I still shudder, more than 24 hours later, thinking about it.

No it didn’t make me physically sick. I did not get food poisoning. But it was bloody awful. It was sold as ‘fresh’ sushi (and it certainly hadn’t been frozen), but it had been refrigerated for some time, for who knows how long. (It had a ‘sell-by date’ but not a ‘made-on date’. Sushi must, must, be eaten the same day it’s made.) The rice was mealy, the grains hard. The neta (the fish) on the nigiri, salmon and tuna, was mushy and utterly tasteless. The rolls, filled with cucumber and some sort of tuna mix, were no better. continue reading...

Speaking of travel…we’ve paid in our house-rental deposits now, so once again we are going to be spending the better part of a month of our summer in Provence. We’ve been there at least once a year for the last few years, and no matter where else we go I just have to go there or I don’t feel my year has been complete. Last year we even went twice, for a total of six weeks. (Thank goodness for broadband or our clients would just fire our asses. :) ) I’m not sure we can manage that again this year but at least I will have my Provence fix.

To see my way of experiencing Provence, start with A Food Lover’s Way of Exploring Provence. This year I plan to do a bit more around the coastal area to the east of Marseilles - I fell in love with the small resort town of Cassis in November, and want to see it in its summer glory. Otherwise it’s going to be markets, vineyards, and as many visits as we can squeeze in to my favorite bakery in the world. Ah, heaven.

Are you making your summer travel plans already? Where are you going? Do you let your tastebuds and stomach guide where you go as much as I do?

People email me about their food sites and blogs all the time. I don’t mention those that I don’t find interesting or think would interest any Just Hungry readers, but here are a couple that came in recently that did catch my eye.

• Foodtripper is a new site that reviews restaurants and food shops. What makes it stand out in this very crowded category is that they seem to have a European outlook on things, that aren’t limited to the usual places. I found several unusual and intriguing places listed, such as a restaurant in Pompeii that takes its inspiration from ancient Roman cuisine (though hopefully they don’t have authentic garum) and a chestnut factory in southwestern France.
• If you’re visiting a major food-obsessed city where you don’t know anyone, finding your way around can be a bit daunting. A culinary tour may be one way to get your bearings. Zerve.com offers walking and noshing tours of New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and New Orleans. If anyone’s gone on one of their tours I’d be interested to hear your impressions.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community (EEC), which lead to the formation of the European Union. Over the weekend they had a big party in Berlin, where among other things they sampled two traditional cakes from all EU member countries. Here is the official list of cakes. continue reading...

Swiss people love cutely formed bread, just as much if not more than Japanese people. Behold, this masterpiece of adorable yet modern design, in the form of an Easter Bunny bread. (click on the image from the web page to see it larger).

The almond slices scattered on top were a bit misleading. I was rather anticipating some kind of sugar-almondy filling, but it was just slightly sweetened white bread all the way through. Perhaps the cuteness is enough sugariness for one small bread.

For more Swiss Easter Bunny goodness, read about the chocolate Easter Bunny making class I took last year. continue reading...

My friends Alan and Mimi from Cornwall alerted me to this alarming article in the Independent. Could we be facing a global chocolate shortage? continue reading...

Natalia has the roundup for Food Destinations #5 up on her blog now - go and check it out!

Seamaiden, who has a lovely gluten-free blog called Book of Yum, asked in the comments here whether Ajinomoto is gluten-free. Since I know that a lot of people become interested in rice-centric Asian cuisines, including Japanese, because of the wide variety of wheat-free dishes, I thought I’d post some of my findings here about Ajinomoto and dashi stock granules rather than bury them in the comments.

Monosodium glutamate or MSG is a concentrated and manufactured form of umami. It is a flavor enhancer with a lot of controversy. I won’t get into that at the moment, since reactions to MSG really vary widely depending on the individual. The reality is that MSG is present in many manufactured food products. continue reading...

Some years ago, when silicon baking wares came out, I jumped on them with glee. No more scraping off baked on crud from the baking sheets! Muffins that popped right up with no greasing of the cups required! Easy washing up!

But these days I’ve definitely fallen out of love with silicon sheets and silicon muffin pans and the like.

About those muffin pans first: while muffins do brown on the outsides, they don’t get as crispy-brown as I’d like. They also seem to rise a bit less than I’d like.

Also, they are totallly useless for popovers and Yorkshire puddings. You can’t really heat them up, so you can’t make them piping hot and pour in hot batter. The alternative method for making popovers ‘pop’ is to start them in a cold oven, but that doesn’t work either. So I end up with flat, boring muffins of a sort, rather than high and airy pockets of trapped air and eggy, moist insides. Yes, I know I could just get separate pans for the popover and Yorkshire puddings, but I don’t have that much storage space in my not-too-large kitchen, and I like to avoid ‘single-use’ type equipment as much as possible.

As for silicon baking sheets, used to line heavy baking sheets, they do okay on the browning front. But what I dislike about them is that, after a few uses they take on an unpleasantly ‘greasy’ feel to them. No amount of washing or soaking in soapy water seems to cure that. I don’t know if I’m over-sensitive to this, but it drives me nuts. So I end up throwing them out over maybe 3 uses. This doesn’t seem too economicalor environmentally friendly to me. (Do those things disintegrate at all in landfills?)

So, I’m back to good old metal baking tins and lining my baking sheets with kitchen parchment paper. My old metal muffin pans tend to stick a bit on the bottoms, so for delicate cupcakes and such I just use paper cupcake liners. (Which means of course I avoid those individual silicon cupcake cups.) Paper, at least, does disintegrate after a while.

How do you feel about those silicon baking products? Do you love them or hate them?

I am going to take the weekend off from the computer because I have a Mountain Of Things to Do away from it. Next week, I’ll have a series of posts about quick Japanese pickles, or sokuseki zuke. Sokuseki zuke pickles are the busy cook’s alternative to ‘real’ pickles like nukazuke (rice brain pickles), of the kind that require nursing a pickling bed, long resting periods, and such complicated procedures. The word sokuseki means instant, and these pickles are usually ready to eat in a short period, anywhere from overnight to about an hour. continue reading...

If you are planning a St. Patrick’s Day feast but still haven’t decided what to make, European Cuisines has been posting a new real Irish recipe every day since the beginning of the month. There’s everything from colcannon to Irish Stew to boxty (potato pancakes) to crubeens, which are “crunchy Irish pig’s trotters”, and a whole lot more. They also have a rant about how corned beef is definitely not the Irish national dish. I wasn’t planning on anything Irish myself this weekend, but those, um, crunchy pig’s trotters sound interesting…. [via Diane].

[Update: Steven has a very gracious post about his win on his blog.]

The winner of Masterchef 2007 is Steven Wallis, a trend analyst from London. Here’s how he looked when he was proclaimed the victor.

As with previous seasons the final three-course original menu test was the one deciding factor for determining the winner. While both Ben and Hannah tripped up a bit on at least one of their courses, Steven really excelled with all three of his dishes.

Unlike last season, where the perceived failings of eventual winner Peter in tasks leading up to that final three-course test lead to some dissatisfaction about his being declared the winner over crowd favorite (and hottie) Dean, this season’s finalists were fairly even in the tasks during the final week. For me at least there was no clear favorite going into the final episode. continue reading...

A quick reminder to everyone within viewing range of BBC Two: the one hour finale of Masterchef Goes Large 2007 is on tonight at 21:00 CET / 20:00 BT! Will it be artistic but palate-deficient Ben, passionate but nervous Hannah, or the man with a fine palate who has a problem with time management, Steven? It’s too close to call…and besides last year we all thought Dean was going to win and Peter won instead, so who knows what will happen? Although I haven’t written much about this season, it’s been a great one, with some amazing challenges. I’m really looking forward to tonight!

A Taste Of My Life, currently airing daily at 19:30 CET / 18:30 BT on BBC Two and repeated the next afternoon, is a show that’s almost perfect. The show ran originally on BBC One last year, but I missed most of it since it aired on Saturday afternoons, not a good time slot for any TV program.

Hosted by well known food writer Nigel Slater, A Taste Of My Life is a warm, comforting show with lots of food porn, that traces the life of a featured celebrity through his or her relationship with food. continue reading...

If you will be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day this weekend, and are looking for a great dessert to serve, try this one out from the archives: Irish Stout Cake with Whiskey Sour Icing.

It’s a light yet very assertive chocolate cake with beer undertones, topped with whiskey flavored lemon icing. How can you go wrong with that? :)

I haven’t updated the expat food blogroll for a while, but I’ve just added three new ones: please check out the original expat food blogroll post, as well as the right sidebar on the front page.

Remember, if you are an expat food blogger and you want to be added to the blogroll please just leave a comment on that post or contact me.

It smells like spring, and it feels like spring. It was so warm today that we left the windows open all day, and the garden is covered with snowdrops and wild pansies. And, there were strawberries! on sale! at the supermarket. They looked so red and tempting, I bought two boxes. By the time they got home though, some were already bruised beyond repair. The rest? Hard and sour, or tasting moldy in an odd way.

I guess I have to wait a couple more months for the real thing.

On a brighter note though, this felt strawberry cake from etsy seller kenshop looks nearly good enough to eat:

I wonder if I am alone in finding comfort in imitation food when the real thing doesn’t satisfy… continue reading...

In the fourth and final episode of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, they reviewed and summarized the previous 3 episodes, visited a small poultry ‘processing’ plant, and showed how a pig is butchered in the traditional way - no stun guns - in Spain.

(Warning: potentially disturbing details follow) continue reading...

David Rosengarten, former Food Network host (his show Taste is still my all-time favorite Food Network show), former Gourmet writer, etc. sells a subscription service called the Rosengarten Report, but also has an interesting free newsletter called Tastings. In a recent issue, he steps into the recent restaurant vs. critic fur-flying incidents and proposes a certification program for restaurant critics. I guess certification fever is in the air at the moment. continue reading...

Last night I finally watched the third episode of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, as it aired instead of recording it for later viewing, fast-forward button at the ready. (My reviews of Part 1 and Part 2.) In this episode, it was the turn of pigs to be slaughtered. (Warning: some gory details follow…warning put here since a reader complained about a previous entry. When animals get slaughtered, it is gory.) continue reading...

On the New York Tiimes Diners Journal blog, which is no longer just written by Frank Bruni, Julia Moskin writes about a Japanese food symposium held at the Japan Society. She reports that “Iron Chef” Masaharu Morimoto called the Japanese government’s plans to certify “authentic” Japanese restaurants “nonsense”. Now, fans of the original (and best) Japanese version of Iron Chef may remember Chef Morimoto’s ongoing “battles” with chefs who cooked “authentic Japanese”; while a lot of it seemed like fake drama for the cameras, perhaps there was some truth in it after all. He did make some pretty outrageous, not to mention downright odd, things under the guise of “nouvelle Japanese” on occasion, which seemed to get some more “authentic” Japanese chefs rather upset. If we assume that the standards of ‘authenticity’ might be dictated by such chefs, people like Chef Morimoto, not to mention Nobu Matsuhisa, may not pass muster. Not to say they don’t produce good, even great, food. (Though I must admit I’m not a big Nobu fan. To be fair I’ve only been there once, years ago, and had a ‘server problem’ which clouded things. And I’ve never been to a Morimoto restaurant.)

I must admit that I rarely do much deep frying these days, since it tends to adversely affect the waistline. Still I do love crispy, light fried things on occasion. Deep-frying in batter is a rather tricky thing though, since it’s so easy to get it all wrong and turn out a soggy, heavy mess. The always interesting Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking and other must-have books, has a new article in the New York Times about two deep-frying techniques that yield crispy crusts. For one, you need a fish with its skin intact - not too practical for most of us who must buy fish from a supermarket or so. The other method is one I saw in last year’s Heston Blumenthal BBC series - making a beer batter for the fish part of fish and chips with half beer, half vodka. He also uses some rice flour, and (the don’t-dare-call-it-molecular-gastronomy part) a syphon to foam it up with carbon dioxide. continue reading...

I normally stay away from kaiten-zushi (kaiten sushi) or conveyor-belt sushi restaurants, since the quality can be iffy. But I could really go for this adorable miniature kaiten-zushi miniature set! (I’m not sure why the itamae-san (sushi chef) has Angelina Jolie lips though….) It’s a new themed set from Re-Ment (US site) (Japanese site), a Japanese company that makes amazingly detailed die-cast miniatures called Puchi Petites, mostly of food and related items like cooking equipment, but of other things too. The miniatures started out as omake, or free gifts that came with the purchase of candy, but the miniatures have become so popular that the candy, while it’s still included, is now a mere afterthought. continue reading...

I’ve just watched the second episode of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It. If anything it was more intense than the first. I just couldn’t watch it live, just in case I needed to fast-forward some spots, so I recorded it on my DVR and watched it a bit later. As it happens I didn’t fast forward anything, though I was very tempted to at times. I made myself sit still and watch. continue reading...

Last night the first episode of a TV series called Kill It, Cook It, Eat It aired on BBC Three. The premise of the program(me) is to show exactly how meat gets to our plates.

The first episode jumped right in, by showing, in an actual working abattoir, the slaughter and butchering of real live cows. This was witnessed by several members of the public through glass windows in a special observation area built around the abatoir. Later on, the same people ate meat cut from the cows they had just witnessed being slaughtered and prepared on the spot by a chef. continue reading...

Recently there was an article in the Washington Post about some attempts by the Japanese government to set up some kind of authenticity certification for Japanese cuisine served abroad. continue reading...

I often find blogs that are new to me via my referer logs. If I see an unfamiliar URL, I will usually go and check it out. (I’m much less likely to go check out a site that’s just emailed to me, so the best way to get my attention is just to link to this site somewhere.) I’ve discovered quite a lot of great food blogs that aren’t that well known yet that way.

One thing that isn’t always on some new blogs is an about page. I would really love to know even a little about who is behind the blog. It doesn’t have to be as long as the one on this site but - just a little bit. Like, where do you live? Where are you from? Who do you cook for, and why? What do you like to cook or eat? Why did you start a food blog? What’s the objective of your site? Just a couple from that list would really bring your blog to life for readers.

A question I get asked a lot is where to find the stainless steel tofu mold/press shown in action in my tofu making article. While I don’t have a ready online source for something like that yet, I have seen plastic molds, which should be just as handy.

For example here’s one sold as part of a tofu press kit on eBay. You can also search on “tofu kit” on eBay for other results.

Apparently, yesterday (March 1) was National Pig Day in the U.S. Who knew that such a day existed? In any case, Serious Eats outdid themselves with a whole slew of fun posts of a porcine nature. My favorite out of all the bacon homages and so on was actually the one about Paul Gauguin’s ham painting. continue reading...

If you visit this site using a browser (this won’t work if you’re using a newsreader), and click on an image, in most cases you’ll be able to see a larger version of the image in popup “window” (it won’t open a separate browser window, but pop up right in your current window.) For all recipe step-by-steps for example, you can click on the small image thumbnail to bring up a better view. Note, this only works for the more recent articles posted since early February , but I’ll be using this feature in all future posts. continue reading...

Hi there, intrepid PR person who wants to get in on this new “blog marketing” and “viral marketing” thing. I have some free advice for you, especially if you are trying to sell some kind of packaged, manufactured thing that only vaguely resembles real food.

Don’t try to get food bloggers to try your stuff. Or let’s put it this way: the owners of any food blog with a following, a reasonable backlog of articles, and enough traffic and Alexa ranking etc. to matter for you, is likely to be a Food Snob. That’s the kind that your clients dread: they use real food, worry about seasonality (tomatoes in February make them gag), and, worst of all, actually cook. Or if they don’t cook they eat out at places that serve real food. continue reading...

Frank Bruni gives the steakhouse at the Penthouse Executive Club a pretty entertaining one star review. “Hmm, where have I heard of this place before” I thought, and rummaged through my stacks of recorded food shows. Ah, celebrated don’t-call-it-molecular-gastronomy chef Heston Blumenthal paid it a special visit on his TV show last year, to show his drooling mostly British viewers er, great looking meat. I mean the aged sides of beef, of course. continue reading...

I don’t know how this escaped me until now, but there are actually two cookbooks available in English by one of the best teachers of traditional washoku or Japanese cooking, Tokiko Suzuki. Japanese Homestyle Cooking, published in 2000, is the more recent one, and The Essentials of Japanese Cooking is the other, published in 1995. continue reading...

Japanese people have a long standing tradition of adapting words from other languages when a Japanese word or term doesn’t exist for something. The language most often borrowed from is English, but other languages are freely raided too. Often, the original meaning of the word changes quite a bit (see this post on my personal blog about the use of one such word, “mansion”) which can be confusing for the non-Japanese speaker. continue reading...

Since there seems to be interest in Japanese cookbook reviews, I will be posting some here periodically!

The question is, where is the best place to shop for Japanese books, magazines, DVDs and such? If you have a Japanese bookstore near you, that’s the best place. One tip for buying magazines: the most recent issue of any magazine has been airmailed to the store, so the price you’ll be charged is for the cost of the magazine plus that airmail cost. However, if there are any issues left after a month, the stores may sell them for a discount. (Kinokuniya in New York and San Francisco both do this.) Since most food magazines are not that timely, this works out well.

If you don’t have a Japanese bookstore near you, the two biggest and most user-friendly online bookstores for Japanese language material are Yes Asia and Amazon Japan. I’ve bought stuff from both, and in terms of customer service and so on both are pretty good. continue reading...

Recently, I haven’t been reading a lot of English cookbooks - I haven’t really been inspired by any new ones for some reason. Instead, I have been reading a lot of Japanese cookbooks and food magazines. I’ve discovered a few that are new to me, and re-discovered some old favorites.

I’m not sure if it’s worthwhile to talk about them here since…well, they are Japanese. So I guess I will ask - would you like to read about cookbooks and magazines that aren’t in English? If there’s interest I’ll talk about some of my favorites from time to time.

February is not really a great month for local fresh produce around here, but there is one category of vegetables that is quite abundant around this time - greens. There’s endive, kale, spinach, Swiss chard, chicory, and some less common greens like puntarelle. One problem with many winter or early-spring greens is that they have a bitter flavor.

There are various ways of reducing or counteracting the bitterness; the method you use depends on the kind of greens you are using and how concerned you are about retaining nutrients and such. continue reading...

Wow, look at the gorgeous black and white special edition Guinness Marmite jar! Limited to a run of 300,000 jars, this special blend of Guinness and Marmite is on sale in the U.K. right now. I’m not too sure how different it would be in taste from regular Marmite, which is after all a yeast spread. I’m speculating it might taste like the slightly beer-y Cenovis. Now how to get my hands on one… (link via Coolest Gadgets and The Guinness Blog - yes, Guinness has a blog. The portal is a bugger…just say you are from England, and old enough.) continue reading...

Food Destinations is back for round 5! This time it’s hosted by Natalia of From Our Kitchen, and the theme is Where Everybody Knows Your Name. Details are here! The deadline is March 18th.

Recently I’ve been getting several P.R. type emails from new sites that feature videos that they think appeal to food lovers. I do take a look at them, and with very few exceptions I must say that most of them are not worth my time.

I think the people who run all-video sites need to really understand two things before anything else. First is the difference between passive video viewing, i.e. on TV the way many of us still watch TV, and voluntary video viewing. Voluntary viewing means stuff that I must make a conscious effort to choose to view. DVDs fall into this category, as does online video. When I go to YouTube for instance, I need to search, click and then wait a bit to download the video. If the video is crap then I will never view it again, and chances are I’ll try to avoid anything uploaded by that user if I remember to. continue reading...

Happy Valentine’s Day! February the 14th may mean flowers, a romantic dinner, or promises you don’t intend to keep for other people, but to me it will always the Day Of Chocolate.

Valentine’s Day is a very odd and overly commercialized day in Japan, where the giving and receiving of chocolate doesn’t have that much to do with romance. Females are made to feel obligated to hand out chocolates to people they don’t care about, such as teachers and bosses, while males anxiously wait to see if they get ‘enough’ chocolates to satisfy their egos. There are whole lines of inexpensive chocolate products suitable for giving, called giri choco (obligation chocolate). Unlike in the Western world, it’s not a day for men to give something to their female love interests. (March 14th, called “White Day”, has been sort of artificially designated as the males-give-back-to-females day.) continue reading...

According to a recently published study by ACNielsen called What’s Hot Around the World – Insights on Growth in Food & Beverage Products, yogurt (or yoghurt if you’re the Queen of England), especially the drinkable kind, was the fastest growing food product worldwide in 2006. “Spoonable” or regular yogurt didn’t do too bad either. (Coincidentally, we just bought a very cute R2-D2 shaped yogurt maker. I plan to make yogurt in it of course, but I did buy it for another reason…which shall be revealed later. (Hint: it’s very sticky.))

Other findings in the report include: in Europe people wanted more “cooking basics” like oils; North Americans wanted more fresh and/or ‘healthy’ products like pre-prepared salads (I guess at least before the spinach scare); the best selling alcoholic beverage is beer; and in China and some other countries in Asia, baby formula sales increased dramatically. Link to report (PDF). continue reading...

Not quite food related, but, uhm, it’s about toasters. And toast. This has been around for a few months but what the heck, I just found it today. Retro Toast is a free (Creative Commons) version of the classic early ’90s screensaver, Flying Toasters! Flying toasters, and other After Dark products like their awesome Star Trek themed desktops, were what converted young bratty “but everyone uses Peecees” spouting self permanently to the light (the world of Macs) forever. That was….7 Macs ago. I feel old now. Retro Toast is available for the dark..I mean, Windows, as well as OS X. continue reading...

Unless you live in the UK, you probably don’t know who Gillian McKeith is. I didn’t know much about her even though I do watch British television, since she has a show on Channel 4, which I don’t get here. Apparently she is famous as the host of a diet show called “You Are What You Eat”, bestselling author of diet books, and hawker of herbal pills. She puts a Doctor in front of her name, and she’s regarded as a Health Authority. Yet, she is not a medical doctor or even a properly trained and certified nutritionist. Her only health related degree may or may not come via a correspondence course from a non-accredited American college. continue reading...

Since I started my whole get fitter/lighter process last month, I haven’t ingested much sugar. I didn’t avoid it entirely, but was using quite small quantities - a spoonful of jam here, a bit of honey there, that sort of thing. (It’s also hard to avoid all sugar in Japanese cooking - a bit is often added to enhance the flavor.)

I never had a big sweet tooth to start with, so I didn’t really miss sugary snacks that much in a physical sense. But I did miss the whole idea and process of making something sweet, of the house filling up with those smells. Besides, Valentine’s Day is coming up this week and that means chocolate!

So an afternoon of experimentation followed, which resulted in the spiced chocolate cupcakes. The cupcakes were divine, and I overindulged and had three in a row. continue reading...