Tag: Food & Cooking

A beginner bowl of Ramen

Pork ramen in serving bowl.

Long time readers will probably recall that I love food & cooking and am fascinated by Japanese cuisine…  I’ve been wanting to make ramen for a long time, but authentic ramen is so daunting!  Then, last week, an opportunity fell into my lap to make a basic bowl from scratch.

Grab your chopsticks, hit the jump, and let’s dig in!
Continue reading “A beginner bowl of Ramen”

Making Miso – Batch 1 finished.

The batch of miso I made back in November finally came out of the fermenter over the weekend!

Miso packed into storage jars.

Very tasty, though it tastes more like shoyu than miso.  (The two are closely related, so this isn’t a big surprise.)  To be honest, I didn’t expect any particular flavor as I didn’t target any actual style.  My usual method of learning to make new things is to just aim for the general vicinity…  and then refine as I master the skills and techniques.

I figure I’ll put the next batch down in late August/early September (my schedule is FULL until then), aiming at a fast fermenting lighter style.  This matches my miso soup recipe, which uses a blend of lighter and darker misos.  (A blend makes for a much better soup in my experience.)

Hopefully, this means that by November I’ll be able to make miso soup entirely with my home-made miso!

Worth Reading – 2/7/2018

I know, I know…  back in my anniversary/State of the Blog post I said that Worth Reading was temporarily suspended.  But the blogging community insists on publishing Really Cool Stuff, and I just can’t resist sharing.  So, I’m starting to collect links again but rather than publishing on a fixed schedule (which was a PITA anyhow) I’ll publish whenever I have “enough”.   Enough time to edit and write, enough material to make it worth your while to read.

All that being said, let’s take a look at what’s Worth Reading:

  • Recently I came across Jakitauji (Yes Kitauji?) by Jakiba, and a pair of interesting entries:
  • John Samuel of Pirates of the Burley Griffin took a major vacation trip last year, and visited a number of interesting place… including tank museums. He’s taken his photographs of tanks and produced a series: Meet the Cast: The Tanks of Girls und Panzer. Check them out: Ōarai, St. Gloriana & Saunders, Pravda, and Kuromorimine.
  • Stop Calling Everything a Madoka Rip-off! – a strong compare-and-contrast of Madoka Magica and YuYuYu by Zeria of Floating into Bliss.  I happen to agree with her, while the two have surface similarities because they’re in the same genre…  The similarities end there.

Living as I do in an area with a large number (and a long history, not all of it happy) of pan-Asian immigrants and first and second generation residents…  I take it for granted that Asian ingredients are easily available.  Within two miles (give or take) of my apartment there’s five pan-Asian grocers, one of which is a full size grocery store with Asian, Hispanic, and Western (American) departments.  (I’m a geek, I actually opened Google Earth, drew a circle, and counted.)  There’s easily another half dozen or so in the central and northern portion of the county.  (I’m not so familiar with the south end.)

  • So I found this account on NPR of how a Toyota factory in Lexington, KY spurred local demand for Japanese grocery products pretty interesting…  Especially since the demand isn’t just from immigrants and temporary residents.

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Yes, yes, I should be working on today’s post today…  But this happened yesterday, and for whatever reason my mind still refuses to focus this morning.  So I thought I’d use my morning blogging time somewhat productively and edit and publish this post.

So, it’s official, today’s normally scheduled weekly post will be delayed until tomorrow.

Now off to housework and errands, will get back to writing and editing this afternoon.  One of the errands is to the grocery store mentioned above as they carry some better-than-average instant ramen, and we’re getting low.  Time to stock up again.

Thanks for reading!  Drop a line in the comments and let me know what you think!

Making Miso – Batch 1, getting started

If you’ve read my About page, or followed my twitter, you know I’m into food and cooking and have been exploring pickling and preserving…  And you also know from here on the blog that my interests in Japanese culture extend beyond anime.

So, all that comes together in my latest project – making my own miso from scratch.

So, let’s hit the jump and take a look at the process!

Continue reading “Making Miso – Batch 1, getting started”

Worth Reading: Links, news, and views. 9/14-9/20

Welcome to this week’s Worth Reading!

Last week I linked to a review of Kiki’s Delivery Service and pondered on why Ghibli movies were so rarely reviewed. Reader Dawnstorm however provided the simplest and most likely explanation – the anime community concentrates mostly on streaming and current season stuff. That being said, reviews of and articles on older stuff aren’t exactly uncommon.

  • Truly Trash Media posts a look back at the classic Angel Beats – the second anime they saw.  (Though they don’t say when that was.)  It’s a fun read, because Angel Beats was also among the early shows I watched.  After watching it, I told my wife “there might be something to this anime stuff” and we sat down and watched it together.  There’s been few if any other shows that I’ve ever immediately re-watched.  To be fair, that may be for the reason Dawnstorm gave – as one season ends, it’s time for another without much of a break.
  • Frog-Kun at Fantastic Memes reposted an older column of his comparing the LN and anime versions of INVADERS of the ROKUJYOMA!?.  Though mostly forgettable, it was a fun little show.  There’s one scene in Ep3, a Crowning Moment of Awesome (Warning: TV Tropes link) for Yurika, that I do re-watch now and again.  I just love the look of determination she gets right before her henshin sequence… Wait a moment – I’m a Magical Girl! I’ve got this!
  • Frog-kun also authors a piece at Crunchyroll “Hanasaku Iroha” – The Good, The Bad, and the Kawaii.  Sakura Quest (whose finale aired today) was marketed as part of a thematic trilogy with 2011’s Hanasaku and 2014’s Shirobako, which makes this article particularly timely.  The article is worth reading, and the anime worth watching.  In some ways, Hanasaku illustrates what Sakura could have been and fell short of.

Speaking of older anime and adaptations (we were discussing the latter last week)…

  • Scott at Mechanical Anime Reviews discusses why he liked the original Kino’s Journey and his concerns over next season’s reboot.
  • Last week’s Worth Reading post had an interesting conversation on adaptations down in the comments (scroll down to read them), they’re worth checking out.  Feel free to add your thoughts.

Adaptations and their issues just keep coming up.  I should probably just create an ‘Adaptation’ tag and be done with it!

Irina at I Drink and Watch Anime posts an interesting piece – Why I keep watching bad anime.  C’mon, it’s something we’ve all done – watched a piece of complete trash coughLove&Liescough right through to the end credits.  I know I have.

Reasons I’ve kept watching a bad anime:  It started good, and I hoped it would return to being good…  (Dimension W)  It’s wasn’t that bad taken as individual episodes or arcs…  (Gangsta)  The pieces were there even though they failed to pull it together in the end…  (Celestial Method)  And of course the infamous “trainwreck you can’t take your eyes off of”…  (Big Order)

Yukinocake at ShinYuu posts on Japanese Breakfasts.  Very different from what I’m used to eating for certain!  (Usually cereal, unless there’s leftover pizza – then pizza.)  I keep meaning to talk more about food & cooking here, it’s one of my favorite topics.

As usual, hit the jump to see the ‘below-the-fold’ material.  Bonsai, my favorite villians/antagonists, and a dream about ani-blogging!

Continue reading “Worth Reading: Links, news, and views. 9/14-9/20”

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