Just Hungry

Just Hungry (alternatively known as I was just really very hungry) is a food blog established in 2003. It has received several mentions on main stream media sites including the Los Angeles Times, Epicurious, and Food and Wine. The main focuses of the site are:

• Japanese food and home cooking. It has been rated as the top food blog for this topic by several measures. The emphasis is on teaching people who do not live in Japan, and may not be familiar with Japanese cooking methods.
• The food life of an expatriate - living away from ones home country and dealing with sourcing food and food-homesickness
• Healthy eating and cooking
• Food-oriented travel, especially in Europe

Our new sister site is Just Bento, a site dedicated to the bento lunch box.

Contact

If you have a question that doesn’t need to be private, such as “What is this ingredient?”, or “Where do I get such-and-such?” etc., or you just want to say hi/thanks/you suck, please post it here. Thank you!

Otherwise, please go to the Contact page.

Advertising and promotion

For all advertising and promotional enquiries, including requests for link backs, please consult the advertising and promotion policies page.

Copyright and Terms Of Usage

All contents of Justhungry.com and Justbento.com are © Makiko Itoh, unless stated explicitly otherwise.

All images, text and other relevant material on this site, with the exception of those specifically noted as otherwise, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License, under the jurisdiction of Switzerland.

What this means: Please do not copy the recipes, photographs or any other contents without 1) linking back to the original recipe, and 2) giving the proper credit to Just Hungry. I know that recipes are always there to be used and adapted, but please have the basic courtesy to acknowledge the source.

Students: If you wish to use an image or other content on this site for your non-commercial classwork, you do not have to ask permission, but you must give credit to this site.

You may not use the contents of this site within a frameset housed on another site without the express written permission of Makiko Itoh.

Disclaimer Regarding Recipes

Unless specifically stated otherwise, all the recipes here have been tested by me. Unless a source is stated, the recipes are my creation, or else are traditional recipes with no traceable source. I try to give very clear instructions. However, since following a recipe can depend on many things I can’t guarantee that your results will be to your taste.

Technical information

Just Hungry runs on Drupal, an open source content management system. It’s hosted on dedicated servers at The Planet. Design, implementation and customization by PRODOK Engineering.

Privacy policy

Cookies: Cookies a small bits of data that are stored in your browser, and retrived by sites you visit online. Some cookies are set by Just Hungry and/or Just Bento in order to track site usage, logged in status, and so on. Cookies may also be set by scripts used by our advertisers. To the best of our knowledge, none of these cookies are of a malicious or invasive nature. If you have any problems or questions regarding cookies, please contact us.

Email addresses: We do require a valid email address when you leave a comment or register on the Just Hungry or Just Bento. We require this to 1) prevent spammers and 2) have a way to contact you (for password retrieval, etc.) We will never share your email address with any other party. We hate spam and unsolicited advertising more than you can imagine.

Comment policy

• Please keep your comments polite and on-topic.
• Do not use the comment area to spam our sites.
• It’s fine to disagree, but it’s not fine to be rude, insulting or aggressive. Don’t write anything that you wouldn’t say to someone in person, in someone’s house, just because you’re online and anonymous.

Any comments that violate these very simple policies will be deleted.

About the site owner

My name is Makiko Itoh, but my friends and family all call me Maki. I was born in Tokyo, from Japanese parents, but grew up all over the place - in various sections of Tokyo and Saitama Prefecture in Japan; in three different places in England; and around the New York City area. After spending my younger adult years in New York City, I somehow ended up getting married to a Swiss guy, and have lived on and off in Switzerland ever since. I still maintain strong ties to both New York and Tokyo though - I have family in both locations.

Because of my nomadic background, my food roots are spread quite widely, but the older I get the more I realize that my food heritage is rooted firmly in Japan. That’s not to say that I don’t love food anywhere it may come from! I am always getting bouts of nostalgia for the foods that I ate in the past, whether they are rice balls or New York style bagels or Cornish pasties. Quite a lot of my writings here reflect this.

Living in Switzerland, which is at the crossroads of western Europe, affords me a great opportunity to explore this continent in the culinary sense. My current obsession is with the food, climate, geography, history, and, well, everything, of Provence. Not too original perhaps…but can you blame me? I am also always exploring various corners of this pristinely beautiful nation of Switzerland, which may be small but is very rich in culinary traditions.

Where else to find me

Just Bento is our new sister site, all about bentos!

Hungry For Words is where I talk about language and communications, often with a snarky tone.

My personal blog is makikoitoh.com, where I write about anything else, sometimes.

Some questions answered

Are you a trained cook?

No I am not. Most of my cooking experience comes from observation - of my family, especially my mother and aunts, as well as my sister who is a professionally trained chef. It also is spurred on by a constant curiousity about how things are done. I also have more than 150 cookbooks and I’ve actually used a few of them.

I worked at one time at very busy New York City restaurant called Sushisay, the top rated Japanese restaurant in the city for many years. I think that having been on the “other side” gives me a good perspective on how restaurants, waiters/waitresses, and reservation systems work.

Who designed this site, and what do you use to run it?

The site is designed by me - I am a web designer and developer by profession. It was hosted on Typepad since its inception, but as of August 2006 it is hosted on an independent server. Until February 2007 it ran on Movable Type 3.3, when it was ported to Drupal.

If you are looking for an easy hosted blogging solution, you can’t do much better than Typepad. It gave a big boost to this site early on by making it a Featured Site. The site’s needs, or rather my goals for it, have simply outgrown it.

Who takes the photographs on your site? What about the illustrations?

I take 90% of the photos here. Max and other friends have taken the others. All the illustrations, icons, etc. on the site are by me.

What cameras do you use?

In the early years I used a Nikon Coolpix 880. I currently use a Nikon D70s, a Sony Ericsson W880i cellphone, and a Sony DSC-W50.

Why don’t you write in Japanese (or German since you live in Switzerland)?

I’ve lived outside of Japan for so long that I can think and write a lot better in English. As for writing in German…it would take a bit too much time, or be unintentionally funny with all the grammatical errors.

Are you really Japanese? I read somewhere that you’re not Japanese, or you’re half.

Both my parents are Japanese, so I think that makes me Japanese. 一応、日本人です。（何でこんな噂が流れるのかなー、ネットって不思議ですね。）

Can you design my site for me?

Unfortunately I do not have much free time to take on small projects these days, but if you would like to consult me please contact me. You will be hiring me via my company, PRODOK Engineering, of which I am a principal.

Can I link to your site? Can I copy articles, recipes, or photos/pictures?

Please feel free to link all you want to the site, but please do not copy any articles or recipes without my permission. All contents here are licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Why do you have advertising on your site?

In a perfect world I may not need to carry ads, but advertising helps to keep this site going. While Just Hungry is a labor of love, it does cost real money in terms of hosting and other needs. I am constantly experimenting with various ad options and placements, and try to make them as unobtrusive as possible.

Please note that some ads are contextual ads, in that I don’t have direct control over them. Google places ads there that they think are most appropriate to this site. (Most of the time they seem to be on target.) Other ads are ones that I have selected because I have used the products or services personally and can vouch for their quality.

Whenever I recommend or accept advertising for a specific product or company, it’s one that I own myself, have used, or have researched intensively and can feel comfortable recommending. Sometimes I am sent products or books for review purposes, but I only recommend that ones that I really like. (I find negative reviews to be tedious so I usually don’t bother to write them, unless something is particularly ad.)

Can you link to my site/blog?

Please feel free to link back to me or to email me about your site, but I can’t guarantee I will mention it, link to it, or put it in my blogroll. If I read and like your site I may link to it. Pestering me to do so will not really get you far. I also do not participate in link exchange programs.