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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.

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.)

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. <a href="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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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.