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Gateau Chocolat from Raku Raku So
Apologies for the long absence. I have been adjusting to a new, full-time job. A job closely related to tourism and thus to food, and maybe because our work is also related to the arts or maybe because we get so many high quality food gifts in the business, [...]
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Spicy tofu with ground pork
Americans may question this combination. Why put a meat-substitute with meat? Sadly, tofu gets a bad rap in the states as a health food. Yet high-quality tofu (or practically any tofu in Japan) can be absolutely delicious even raw with a dab of ginger and a little soy [...]
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Perhaps I should re-title this blog Cooking with Chopsticks: A guide to cooking for one occasionally homesick foreigner in Japan. With a strange array of ingredients available at the grocery stores and markets and familiar ingredients only sold at out-of-the-way and over-priced import stores, the old favorites can be hard to find and unaffordable [...]
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Any guesses what this is? I’m not asking the Asians or the world travelers now. Having only eaten this plant from a can or cooked into a stir fry in the states and Europe, always in unrecognizable rectangular-shaped, thin slices, I never imagined it looked like this in real life. It’s a [...]
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Although I had never even heard of taco rice before I had it in Japan, this dish can easily cure the I-want-food-from-home syndrome. It is a concoction created on the southern Japanese archipelago of Okinawa, where a large population of American military personnel still controls half of the main island. I can just [...]
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My apologies for not posting for so long. While I'm in the middle of a job transition and dedicating more time to my traditional arts studies, this blog has been set aside in the crunch. That is not to say that I haven't eaten delicious food recently or that I've not been cooking. [...]
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It seems that clams are in season right now. On Japanese television, clams feature in every cooking show right next to fresh bamboo shoots (I want to get one shoot to experiment, but they're so expensive!). Fresh spring potatoes and fresh onions are also appearing in super markets, but the weather is wet [...]
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The Museum of Kyoto's exhibit on Kyoto food culture
The poster looks tempting, or so I thought when I first saw it large outside the Museum of Kyoto, which is between my home and work, so I've seen the poster almost every day. What it says loudly in Japanese is nicely translated into English at the [...]
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Salmon Ochazuke
Perhaps the simplest, most homey Japanese food, Ochazuke is basically tea poured over rice. Traditionally, ochazuke comes at the end of an elaborate meal, maybe as a way to bring you back down to earth, but its often eaten by itself for lunch or a quick meal.
On the last day before I returned [...]
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Brocolli rabe in wine sauce
With the first huge load of vegetables from my former host mother's overabundant garden out in Kameoka came a bunch of na no hana (broccoli rabe), which I have never seen before coming to Japan. I guess I was stuck in a hole for years (aka college dining). The first [...]
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