essays

Update on the book situation and ruminating on cookbooks

maki — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 07:53:30 +0200

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…

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. (I don’t spend much money on stuff like clothing or shoes…well ok not much on shoes…but books are another story). So, the issue became one of speed and convenience above anything else. Just the idea of listing the piles and piles of books tome by tome became overwhelming.

So, we chose the easiest option and have been carting books every few days to the local charity shops, who happily take them off our hands. So far I think we have gotten rid of about 10 to 12 cartons of books, I kid you not. We’ve also been able to sell a few (mostly sci-fi stuff and the like). Many also went to recycling (computer books mostly, which no one wants, not even our local Bring-und-Hol (swap meet). I swear I am never buying another computer how-to book again if I can help it.)

Nevertheless, I still have about 2 cartons of books that are sort of too nice to just bring to the charity shop. Most are Japanese cookbooks and craft books, plus a few manga. I’m not sure if I will get around to listing them up before we have to leave (the house may be sold faster than anticipated) but they will be leaving my hands sooner or later, at which time you will mostly likely hear about it.

Thoughts on sorting cookbooks

I’ve still packed away about 4 cartons of cookbooks so far, and still have about 1 or 2 cartons worth to go. My cookbooks are part inspiration source, partly for research, and to be honest with myself, a security blanket too. Still, I’ve tried to get rid of as many as possible. Here’s how the sorting has gone:

Themed cookbooks (cookbooks for movie lovers, book-themed cookbooks, etc.) are the easiest to get rid of. They are mostly filled with fluff and I rarely cooked anything out of them - and when I have, I’ve found that many recipes just don’t work. (There’s one called the Nero Wolfe Cookbook that has a recipe for Chicken Fricasee with Dumplings, with dumplings that are just all wrong.) The only ones I kept of this genre: The Star Trek Cookbook (the Guy insisted) and a Walt Disney World cookbook which has a few nice recipes.
Regional cookbooks, from regions that are very different to where you live or how you cook, also get very little use in reality. I’m not talking about general cookbooks about a type of cuisine, but those ones you often pick up when you travel somewhere - From Massachusetts With Love, The Celtic Cookbook from Wales, New Orleans Home Cooking. etc etc. I’ve purged most of these, with a little regret.
As you might expect, people tend to give me cookbooks for Christmas and so on. At the risk of alienating most of my friends, it is rare that a cookbook received as a gift fits into my general library. I guess for me, choosing a cookbook is a very personal thing. Also, people do tend to gift big, glossy coffee table type cookbooks…which are mostly quite hard to actually use.
‘Diet’ cookbooks are on the whole, awful. I got rid of almost all that I had accumulated over the years, about 10 of them with no regrets! I’d much rather try ‘cooking lighter’ on my own, and I think I’m getting better at this as the years go by. (The only one of this genre I kept is Cook Yourself Thin, mentioned here previously.)
Celebrity cookbooks. These vary wildly in quality and usability, even from the same author. Jamie Oliver books for instance tend to be loaded with nice photographs, but for me at least score fairly low on the usability scale. Martha Stewart’s recipes and I just do not mesh. On the other hand Nigella Lawson’s books are on the whole quite useful. Other TV-personality or famous-chefs whose books are actually worthwhile in my collection include Madhur Jaffrey, Atul Kochhar, Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller and Rick Stein. This is a very personal bias of course. As for cookbooks written by non-chef ‘celebrities’…forget them.

What I’ve noticed is that I only repeatedly use a small handful of the cookbooks I own. Of the rest, I try maybe one or two recipes, but that’s about it. With so many recipes available in the interweb, I already see myself getting much, much pickier about what cookbooks I buy.

My most used English-language cookbooks

After all the purging, I realized that I only really use a handful of cookbooks. Here are the general purpose English-language ones that I really use regularly. (I’m excluding baking and confectionery books here.)

The Way To Cook, Julia Child. Also used quite a lot by the Guy. No. 1 in our house by far.
James Beard’s American Cookery, James Beard. This one has lots of good American basics, and is peppered with just enough history.
Simple Indian: The Fresh Tastes of India’s New Cuisine, Atul Kochbar. Atul Kochbar is the owner chef of a Michelin starred restaurant in London. I need cookbooks to cook Indian cuisine, and this one is my favorite.
New York Cookbook: From Pelham Bay to Park Avenue, Firehouses to Four-Star Restaurants, Molly O’Neill. I have the hardcover of this, which I bought when it first came out. It has so many and varied recipes and everything I have made out of it has been terrific. (Though I must admit I have avoided a few that that don’t sound too good.) One of my favorite ways to roast pork, my favorite blini recipe, my favorite butterscotch brownie recipe, and on and on…all come from this book.
The Frugal Gourmet series by Jeff Smith. Remember the Frug? He has disappeared from the media due to some shady business, but the books that accompanied the PBS television series are really pretty useful. The first one, simply titled The Frugal Gourmet, is the best, but the others are good too. They’re all out of print but are easily available used (and cheap too).

What are your most-used, most-splattered cookbooks?

Now I have to finish going through my Japanese cookbooks….

Rice defines me as a Japanese person

maki — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:22:16 +0200

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.

Whenever a bag of rice arrives from my mother, I carefully open the bag and make a small batch, washed and simply cooked in a rice cooker. Plain and unadorned. Just to confirm that yes, it was worth the hassle it causes to my mother, not to mention the debt I owe to her for it. And every time, I know, again, that it was.

The rice she sent is koshihikari from a small organic farm in Ishikawa prefecture. The bag is marked by hand with the date the rice was polished. The grains are clear white and translucent. When cooked, each grain is plump, separate yet clings delicately to its neighbors when scooped up onto chopsticks.

I’m often asked what ingredients and supplies one needs to get to cook Japanese dishes, and what are the keys to Japanese cooking and so on. I try to answer as well as I can. But I think I fail to get through this point: Rice is the key to Japanese food. It has to be the right kind of rice, and it has to be good rice.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that we are defined by the type of carbohydrate we fall back on. I like all kinds of starches - bread, pasta, dumplings, all kinds of grains, all kinds of rice - but the one I go back to, the one that makes me most comfortable, is Japonica rice. Give me a bowl of rice, and maybe some pickles or umeboshi, and I’m happy.

For the Guy, it’s bread, no question; a rough country-type of bread (halbwiess is a favorite, as is pain paillaisse, a twisted mixed grain sourdough bread). Give him a loaf of bread, some cheese and maybe a little dried cured meat, and he’s happy.

What’s your fall-back carb? Does it define you in any way?

Of cherry blossoms, ohanami and Japanese culture

maki — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:27:23 +0200

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.

Cherry blossom trees are so ubiquitous all throughout Japan, that they are used as an official measure of the changing of seasons. There is something called the sakura zensen (桜前線） or the cherry blossom front, which tracks the blossoming time of cherry trees throughout the country. (It’s so official that it even appears in elementary school geography books along with other weather maps.)

One thing that Japanese people repeat all the time is that Japan is unique because it has four distinct seasons. The implication is that no other place on earth does! This isn’t quite true of course, but I do think that the Japanese culture has a deep appreciation for the changes of the seasons. One of these appreciative rituals is o-hanami or hanami (お花見）. Groups of people congregate on mats under the most picturesque clumps of cherry blossom trees with bento lunches and have a good old party. A lot of sake is usually involved. Since certain places in Tokyo are so popular for o-hanami gatherings, it is traditionally the job of the lowliest grunt in the office to go out early in the morning to the place where his bosses want to party later on that evening with a mat and stake out a choice spot under the trees. He’d then have to sit there all day.

Families go out for o-hanami too, sans the sake usually, though there might be a small bottle or two (or beer) for Dad. Mom would wake up early to make lots and lots of onigiri, and the whole family sets off in their car or on the train to appreciate the blossoms.

(The illustration is by Melbourne artist and designer Andrea Innocent. Her web site is called Otoshimono and it’s filled with Japanophilia. See the original full size illustration on CalorieLab.)

Eating cherry blossoms and leaves

The trees that produce those beautiful pink flowers are different from the ones that produce cherries, but in Japan parts of the flowering tree are still eaten. The leaves are salted and wrapped around a mochi that is dyed a pale pink filled with an; this sweet is called sakuramochi. This is one of my favorite wagashi (traditional Japanese sweets) because the subtle salty-sourness of the pickled cherry leaves counteracts the sweetness of the an nicely. The flowers themselves are eaten too, salted and pickled in shiroume-su, the clear vinegar produced when making umeboshi that hasn’t been colored by red shiso leaves. Floating one or two of these preserved blossoms in a bowl of clear soup or tea is really nice, adding that little salty-sourness again.

Around here it’s still rather cold, but in a couple of weeks the apple trees in our village should be blooming. I wonder what the neighbors, human and bovine, will think if we had a o-hanami party in the fields…

The cherry blossom front lost in translation

Speaking of the cherry blossom front (sakura zensen) brought back memories of an odd experience I had many years ago.

In the late ’80s to early ’90s there was a revival boom of tanka, a traditional form of Japanese poetry that predates the haiku form by centuries. The instigator for this boom was an author and poet called Machi Sawara, whose book of modern tanka called Sarada Kinenbi (Salad Anniversary, サラダ記念日), became a runaway bestseller. (There’s a good analysis of her work and impact on her official English web site.)

One day, Ms. Sawara was engaged to speak at the Japan Club in New York, together with another author whose name I don’t remember anymore. My mother was a big fan of Sarada kinenbi, and so she dragged me there to hear this bestselling author who wrote such beautiful poems talk about her work. The audience there was almost all Japanese.

I don’t remember most of what Ms. Sawara talked about that day, except for one thing. She was describing how she had given a similar talk on Denmark, to a Danish audience. She said that she had described the sakura zensen, and how Japanese people tracked the arrival of spring with it as the front creeped up day by day from south to north. She said her Danish audience laughed at this, and said it sounded stupid, and that she realized that it was a very Japanese way of thinking that was not understandable by gaijin-san (foreigners).

Now I ask you, if you are a non-Japanese person reading this, do you have a hard time understanding the sakura-zensen? Does it sound stupid to you? I’m guessing it doesn’t at all. Every culture around the world appreciates the changing of the seasons, and have different traditions that mark them. I highly doubt that Danish people are any different. And I really doubt that that Danish audience said it was stupid. There must have been a severe breakdown in communication there somewhere - either a bad interpreter, or just that Ms. Sawara totally got it wrong. But the thing is she chose to interpret the situation the way she did.

I wasn’t a fan of hers when I heard this (I hadn’t read Sarada kinenbi yet), but my mother the big fan felt stunned at the shiya no semasa (the narrow view). It changed her opinion of the author so much that she stopped being a fan. Before that, she used to quote the tanka in Sarada kinenbi to anyone who would listen all the time. (A number of the New York-residing Japanese people who were there agreed with her, and the reviews in the local expat papers were pretty scathing, if I recall correctly.)

Anyway, the point of telling this story is that oddly enough, I think it was one of the defining moments in my life. It made me realize that one of the things I wanted to do was to give a real, living and informed (as much as possible) ‘translation’ of Japanese culture to people who weren’t Japanese, and vice versa. It’s one of the many motivations behind this blog and the others I run. For nihonjin (Japanese person), living solely in Japan (or in any single place) is like being in a protected, comfortable cocoon to a great extent, even in this internet age. Living outside of it is like being dunked in freezing cold water. It gives you a shock, but also opens your eyes to both sides of the divide.

Taking a little inventory

maki — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:51:31 +0100

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.

Re-doing

Since Just Hungry is more than 4 years old now, there are hundreds of back entries and more than 200 recipes. I refer back a lot to them in newer entries, both here and on Just Bento.

It’s become clear to me that most people come here for the Japanese recipes. I’ll continue to post non-Japanese recipes I like, because hey it’s my site, but I am going to concentrate most of my efforts on explaining both traditional and newer Japanese home recipes (yohshoku and chuuka, as well as washoku) for an English speaking audience.

Now, when I look back at some of my older entries, it’s pretty clear that some of them, especially those that were posted in the early days, aren’t that good. They have no photos, or really bad photos, or inadequate explanations. So I’ll be totally redoing some of them with clearer pictures and instructions.

Some of the candidates for revised versions include:

Usuyaki tamago (thin omelette)
Nikujaga
Chicken teriyaki (a lot of people ask me where my chicken teriyaki recipe is. I guess they can’t find this one!)
Inarizushi
Chicken karaage

Should be here but isn’t

There are also a number of recipes that are requested over and over. I can’t do every single recipe that you’ve ever had in Japan or a Japanese restaurant, obviously! But here are some favorites that have never appeared here, and probably will so eventually.

Japanese style hamburger steak. I make this a lot at home, and don’t know why I’ve never posted it here. I guess it’s too familiar or something. I will post it…soon.
Tempura. OMG why is there no tempura here?? Well…mainly because it’s deep-fried, and I don’t do much deep-frying these days. (The Just Hungry Test Kitchen production has to be consumed by the staff, not thrown away.) I may divide the subject of tempura into several spread out entries.
Korokke. See tempura re: deep-fried.
Nishime, or traditional stews. I’m partly hampered by the fact that not all traditioinal nishime ingredients are available to me (especially burdock).
I’d also like to explore and present a lot more vegetarian and vegan Japanese dishes. Japanese cooking in itself is not really vegetarian, but I think there are a lot of vegetarian-friendly dishes.

Are there any other Japanese recipes that you think should be here, or you want to see? I can’t promise to satisfy everyone, but I’m all ears.

The Japanese restaurant authentifiers start moving

maki — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:06:35 +0100

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.

Now according to this Times UK article they will be inspecting the ‘provenance of ingredients’. Based on this argument, the Times looked at the ingredients some UK chains use and found them to be fairly authentic. Now, I do hope that this provenance thing will not be a major factor in weighing the authenticity or worth of sushi restaurants. Just because a rice is grown in California or Arkansas does not make it bad. In fact, rice from Japan that is exported is prohibitively expensive, and not economically feasible for most establishments unless they are of the Nobu level of expense-account pricing. Similarly, soy sauce can be made outside of Japan to suit Japanese tastes too (as Kikkoman does).

I really hope they just do a lot of tasting. I don’t care if Yo! Sushi uses a lot of Japanese ingredients, they are still mediocre to bad. (Yep I gave them yet another try since that previous post and they still suck. I know that I should not expect much from a conveyor-belt-sushi place in the first place but it bugs me how so many people seem to think this place is somehow ‘authentic’. I want to slap these people around with a wet flounder. Grr.) Some cities will be disappointed by the results I’m sure…I’m rather thinking of Paris (not that I’ve tried every single sushi restaurant in Paris, but the ones I’ve tried have been…eh.) If they make it around to Zürich…hmm. But above all, it’s about taste, ladies and gentlemen, taste.

Incidentally, if you are a sushi fan and traveller, I hope you know about this oldie but goodie: The Sushi World Guide - A Guide to Japanese restaurants outside Japan. This site has been around for eons in interweb terms, as the old school styling of the site shows. It’s a treasure trove of restaurant listings, and the reviews are really pretty spot on.

Did you learn to cook in school?

maki — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:57:06 +0100

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?

My take on why Japanese people in Japan don't get that fat

maki — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:33:44 +0100

The majority of the comments posted for this Guardian Word Of Mouth blog entry about obesity rates and fast food places are about Japan, and how few people there are overweight. It seems that people latched on to this paragraph in particular:

There would appear to be more at play here than sheer wealth. Japan, which isn’t exactly poor, boasts over 3,000 McDonald’s restaurants, second in number only to the US, and is also home to many other fast food outlets to boot. Yet Japan has one of the lowest obesity rates in the world.

Eating and snacking in Japan is very convenient. In urban areas there are so many fast food places, food stalls, kombini or convenience stores stocked with all sorts of tempting and often fattening readymade food, and the world’s most advanced food and beverage vending machine industry. The snack food industry is fiercely competitive. And, unlike statements made by English press sources like this one which implies that the fast food/junk food trend is some recent phenomenon, this state of affairs has been there for decades.

So at least in Japan the premise of the survey cited doesn’t hold true.

That’s not to say that there aren’t overweight or even obese people in Japan. Japanese people, especially women, are as obsessed with diets as their counterparts in the U.S. or the U.K. Every day there’s a new ‘miracle diet’ popping up. Go to Japanese food sites and every other ad there is for some sort of weight loss scheme. There are increasing concerns about the unhealthiness of fast foods and convenience foods.

Still, I think that at least for a while, people in Japan will continue to stay relatively slim. Here are a couple of reasons:

Peer pressure. Japanese society is largely based on how one fits comfortably and unabrasively into society, way more so than most Western societies. There is a huge amount of peer pressure to conform, and the pressure on women in particular to stay slim is tremendous.
More unplanned movement. Usually people who live in Japan, especially the urban and suburban areas, just have to move a lot more. Cars aren’t practical at all except for longer trips, so almost everyone commutes by public transportation. That’s not to say there aren’t any gyms and such (there are, tons of them) but people just naturally get more exercise than in a typical American city.
Despite recent supersizing trends, generally portions are way smaller. There are Mega-Burgers and Extreme Meals and all of that, but the average portion sizes are still quite a bit smaller than in the U.S.

But once you move out of the country, things change

A common complaint amongst Japanese people who go to live in another country, especially the U.S., is that a pretty substantial weight gain is almost inevitable. I haven’t been able to find any formal studies of this, but time and again I hear about people gaining around 15 to 20 pounds within a year or so after moving away from Japan. It’s not the Freshman 15, it’s the kaigai seikatsu (overseas living) 15. The author of Japanese Women Don’t Get Old Or Fat (my review here) starts off with a personal anecdote about how she gained 25 pounds after moving to the U.S. One of the bestselling diet books in Japan, Tatakawanai daietto: waka musume wa kooshite yaseta! (The Fight-free (struggle-free) diet: My daughter lost weight this way!) is based around the theme of a food and health journalist helping his daughter who came back “with a fat body” after a year of study in Arizona. (She’d gained about 10 kg, or 22 lb.)

This weight gained happened to me too. I wasn’t overweight at all until my family moved back to the U.S. when I was 17. Within the span of a year or so I went from around 50 kg to about 70kg. (I’m not actually sure what my starting weight was, since weight was not even an issue for me until I started to not fit in my clothes anymore!) I did lose a lot of it, but have since gained it back and more, hence my current efforts to get rid of the excess weight again!

Why did I gain 20 kg so easily? It comes down to fairly simple reasons: lack of unplanned exercise, lack of peer pressure, and the huge portions. Whenever my new school stressed me out (I hated that high school to be honest) I’d comfort myself with a bag of potato chips - the family size. We usually ate out as a family at local diners, where the club sandwiches could be stacked up about 15 inches high, and we started expecting home meal portions to be as big.

Living large around the world

I think it is just tremendously hard to stay slim in the U.S. compared to other places I’ve lived, which is why the obesity rate is so high there. Public transportation is not that available except in a few cities, and people just don’t walk much anymore in the suburbs. So one has to make a special effort and set aside a specific time to get any exercise. Busy people aren’t always willing or able to do that. Portion sizes at restaurants and such are large, and I’m fairly sure many people will complain if they were drastically reduced.

And, despite the attention paid to ‘size zero’ celebrities and such, I just don’t believe there is that much peer or societal pressure to keep yourself slim. When the people around you are mostly neither slim nor fit, why bother?

I haven’t lived in the U.K. since I was a child, but whenever I’ve visited there in recent years I gotten the feeling that it was becoming more and more Americanized in lifestyle - more reliance on cars, bigger portions and so on. Add that to the fact that traditional British food can be quite high calorie (pies, fish and chips, and well, curries) it’s not too surprising to see obesity rates there soar.

As for Switzerland, it has some factors that help keep people slim, such as great public transportation, a natural tendency for people to get a little exercise, and reasonably sized portions. Also, people don’t really eat out as much here, or rely on takeaways/takeout and readymade meals.

The bottom line is that home cooking is really better for you all around, health and taste wise. And it’s the best way to take control of your own, and your family’s health. (And all the better if at some of that home cooking is Japanese…a reason to keep coming back here to Just Hungry. :))

[Update:] See the followup discussion, Does going back to your culinary roots make you healthier?

Martha

maki — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 18:18:48 +0100

Martha was from another generation.

For most of her life, she took care of other people - first her own parents, then her mother in law, and her sister-in-law besides. She brought up her son, then her husband became ill. After his death, she took care of her oldest brother, who had been single and childless and had nowhere to go after retirement.

When he, too passed away, she said quietly, “I finally have some time for myself”. That was only a scant decade ago, but hopefully she did enjoy those few, carefree years.

She had her only child quite late in life, who was her pride and joy. She relied on him a lot. I think she was more than surprised when he came home with a rather bossy Asian girl one day, but she never made me feel unwelcome in any way. We had a communication problem, which never really got resolved fully unfortunately, which is my fault.

Martha treated everything she owned with care. She ironed her kitchen towels, which were made of beautiful old linen that had been handed down to her by her mother in law. She gave me a few, and I promptly ruined a couple with incorrect washing. Wisely, she held on to the rest.

She only owned a few books. She read the newspaper from cover to cover every day. She had amaryllis bulbs that she had kept going for years, some of them decades old.

She could made vegetables grow in abundance seemingly effortlessly, and her front window was, is still, framed with an ancient climbing rose that is covered every summer with deep red blooms. When we used to have a garden nursery next door, she would take the rejected petunia and pansy plants with yellowing leaves, and bring them back to life, filling her window boxes with them and tucking extra plants in corners of the garden. Her peonies open their astonishingly large, beautiful pale pink and white blooms every spring, and the ancient grape vines she took care of yield masses of fruit in the fall. Even when bending became difficult she continued to weed and prune, moving slowly and deliberately.

I don’t think she was fond of cooking for cooking’s sake. She had to cook for others for so long, and for much of her life she had to be frugal. Even in later years, she stuck to her frugal ways. But she made the best buttery Zopf (braided bread, a Swiss tradition) I have ever had, every Sunday, until she was no longer able to. She used raw yeast, none of this new dry yeast for her. She would beat the bread repeatedly on her old kitchen table to form the long, stretchy strands that are characteristic of Zopf. When the beautiful braided bread came out of the oven, brown and shiny, she would beam with pride like a little girl.

In fair weather she would sit in this chair, sometimes for hours, in quiet contemplation. I wonder if she will come back sometimes to sit there again.

Thank you for sharing your wonderful food memories!

maki — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:08:09 +0100

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

My parents were divorced when I was 2 years old. My maternal grandparents were military and lived in Idaho, my paternal grandparents were Japanese and were born here, grandpa from the big island of Hawaii and my grandma from Maui. I was raised by them here in Honolulu.

As far as I can remember I joined my grandmother in the kitchen where she spent a lot of time. I hugged her lots and I remember her scent, which always included what was on the stove. She would show me how to cut the carrots in traditional Japanese shapes, how to tie the konbu for the nishime. “You must always cut them in this shape…” she would tell me. As a child, I didn’t really understand why. I recall her telling me that she never tasted celery until she was into her 20’s and married to my grandfather here in Honolulu. I dunno, I always remember that as I love celery in a local-style beef stew.

Whenever she would serve dinner at the table she would always dish-out for me the best part of the dish, the meatiest pieces, the tenderest slices, and she would watch me eat saying thing s like “eat plenty so you can grow up big and strong”. There were things however, that she would not allow me to eat. One of these items I simply adored when she wasn’t looking. It was a simple green stringy seaweed, seasoned with sesame chili and some soy sauce. It was heaven over rice.

It was only years later that I talked about this seaweed with her. She admitted to me that when she was a child she grew up without a lot of money and she ate that seaweed when there wasn’t much more to eat, she told me that she did not want to see me consume “poverty” and always saw that I was well-fed. I explained to her that we now eat those things because we want to, not because we have to. We cried together and I was that child hugging her again.

As I grew older I would always bring her gifts of food, exquisite things that I know she relished but never had the opportunity to eat when she was younger. She died many years ago but I remember her constantly, especially when I prepare those dishes she would lovingly make for me… especially the seaweed. When I eat these dishes, I consume her love, not poverty, the love that she dished-out for me all those years. It has taken me many hours to write this. I took breaks to recompose myself and wipe away the tears-happy tears of of food, of love, of grandma.

The Hungry Planet book is on its way to Mitch!

Your stories reminded us how food is not just about what we taste in our mouths and how it fills our bellies. It also fills our souls. Whether they are family, friends, or strangers who we meet during our travels, food connects us to people, and to memories.

Thank you again! If you haven’t already, be sure to read all the wonderful comments and memories shared.

A special welcome to CalorieLab visitors, about having my pork belly and eating it too

maki — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:59:43 +0100

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.

And about that pork belly - we had it on Sunday, but it was so very rich, that just a little bit was enough for me. And some days later the memory and taste still lingers in my mind and on my tastebuds. For me, good, rich foods were never the problem - it was mindless eating, stress eating, and junk food. Now instead of going through a whole bar of chocolate, I have one row and savor it slowly. If I want a piece of cake, I make or buy a really good one and enjoy it, instead of trying to sublimate the urge with a poor substitute.

So simple, but so far it’s worked!