site news

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.

This post is now closed to new comments. It's now replaced by the new forum section, Ask Maki Almost Anything.

Thanks to you (yes, I'm looking at you!) Just Hungry and Just Bento have really grown in popularity recently. This has also meant that I'm getting more emails. I do very much appreciate getting your emails, but there's a couple of disadvantages to email.

• It's a one on one communication so your question will only benefit you. It might just benefit a lot of other readers. I do actually end up answering the same thing several times.
• I may not know the answer but someone else might!
• I'm really bad at email. Don't ask me why. I try to answer things as fast as possible but sometimes emails languish in my inbox for days, or I forget about answering them. Then you get mad at me and think I'm ignoring you, etc.
• Answering lots of individual emails takes time away from me writing new posts, not to mention spending time with my family/friends, exploring new foods, and all that kind of thing.

Hence, this is Ask Maki (almost) Anything. comments here will remain always open, to ask me anything that doesn't fit into the context of a particular post. Unless it's something that must remain private, please post here before emailing. Thank you!

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.

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 <a href="http://sotho.blogsome.com/2007/02/08/my-country-my-home/'>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!

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.

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!

[Update: The winner is announced!]

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.)

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.