essays

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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!

Filed under:  essays site news philosophy

From the archives. I did this 3 years ago, and will likely never do it again. This is offered as a cautionary tale should you be contemplating creating a Turducken for your Thanksgiving or other holiday feast. Originally published on December 28, 2005, and edited slightly.

I am not sure what came over us. We were planning a quiet, simple Christmas dinner - maybe roast a goose, or a nice chicken or two, or something. But then someone blurted out the infamous words.

"Hey, why don't we try a Turducken?"

In case you are not familiar with turducken, it is basically a Tur(key) stuffed with a duck(en) stuffed with a (chick)en. It supposedly originated in Louisiana, and has been popularized by famed New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme.

Filed under:  essays party food offbeat christmas holidays thanksgiving
Keep reading OMG, Turducken →

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.

Filed under:  essays japanese sushi

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.

Filed under:  books and media essays

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.

Filed under:  essays japanese rice

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

Filed under:  essays spring japan

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.

Filed under:  essays site news

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.

Filed under:  essays japanese restaurants

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?

Filed under:  essays offbeat kids

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

Filed under:  essays weightloss japan

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