Yes they did. it's President Obama's smiling face, rendered in loving detail in rice and fish bits, down to the oblong head shape. I'd love to tell you exactly what this is made from, but my Japanese skills are a bit, er...nonexistent, despite several years of working in various sushi restaurants. So Japanese-speaking Slashfoodies, please help me out by clicking through to the MSN Japan site and translating. Domo arigato! There's even a tutorial in case you want to make and eat the president's face at home.
At the San Antonio New World Wine & Food Festival last month, I ate lunch at Oro in the Emily Morgan Hotel, which is just across the street from the Alamo. We were sitting around chatting about up-and-coming food and drink trends when our hostess, Jeanne, asked, "Have you tried Shochu yet?" We hadn't, so she promptly ordered up a couple of small glasses for us to sip.
Shochu is a clear spirit made by distilling barley, rice, sweet potatoes, black sugar, or even more exotic ingredients like milk or pumpkin. It's served diluted with water, with fruit juice, or on the rocks, and typically has about 25 percent alcohol, making it stronger than sake but weaker than some spirits.
Oro has hosted several special events to introduce Shochu to the San Antonio area, where it's a new item. While Shochu has been a staple in Japan for centuries and has outsold Sake there since 2004, it's just beginning to make its way into the States. You can probably find it easily on the west and east coasts, but it will be harder to track down in middle America.
If you can't find it at your local wine and spirits store, ask if they'll order it. For one thing, it's fun and easy to mix into cocktails, like the recipes after the jump. For another, it's what our hostess calls "sake light"--a 2-ounce serving of Shochu only has about 35 calories, compared to 80 calories for a 2-ounce serving of Sake and 120 calories for the same amount of vodka. After the jump, some Shochu cocktail recipes.
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
Another highly artistic bento today, via Splutch. We've got a lovely redheaded girl (if this is some famous character I don't know about, please do tell) made of turkey, egg, fish cake and nori, along with a nori man, several tamago rollups, some turkey and cucumber rollups and a strawberry jelly.
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
This elegant, un-gimmicky bento from Just Bento looks good enough to serve at a dinner party. There's sesame beef, brown rice, sauteed greens with oyster sauce, bean sprouts, and cooked carrots with soy and sesame. There are recipes, and a calorie count (440, if you're interested).
They're slippery. They're slimy. And they're alive.
This coming week, Fine Living Network will be airing episodes of our favorite Iron Chef Japanin which creatures of the deep are battled every night at 11/10 Central. Watch as these chefs attack and cook living sea creatures in a way that makes you wonder if you're a bad person for watching. This is an excellent week for anyone who hasn't had enough Halloween, or likes Animal Planet and wishes Japanese chefs could be involved.
Not for the squeamish, these squirmy seafoods do get slaughtered right in front of your very eyes. Mother nature would be proud watching the food chain established so aggressively, but your mother might think you need therapy. You be the judge!
Cooking Japanese I think I'm cooking Japanese like Morimoto!
Sing it with me.
Cooking Japanese I think I'm cooking Japanese like Morimoto!
Fine Living Network is featuring Iron Chef Japan nightly at 11pm and grouping episodes into themed weeks. This week is Attack of the Vegetables Week! Definitely a must-see. Japan has some crazy-cool vegetables to begin with, and watching them get cooked up on Iron Chef is guaranteed to please.
Attack of the Vegetables Week starts Monday, October 20th, and my guess is that this song will still be in your head.
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. The boxes can range from austere lacquered trays to multi-tiered Hello Kitty confections of neon pink plastic. The meals themselves are anything from rice and leftovers to elaborate themed affairs of Pikachu-shaped dumplings with sesame seed eyes and carved radish trees. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
Today's bento, courtesy of Bhikku, breaks the long-held taboo on panda-eating. The smiley rice panda has nori (seaweed) details and wears what appears to be a carrot flower collar (any Japanese speakers wanna help me out?). He's surrounded by various yummy noshes - mini-sausages, a cutlet of some type, rolled omelet, a maraschino cherry and an unidentified pink object with a nori face.
Umeboshi are pickled ume, sour Japanese fruits somewhere between plums and apricots. Umeboshi are often eaten for breakfast, or as a pickle-like side-dish with boxed lunches. They're a common filling for onigiri (rice balls), a lunch staple. Umeboshi can be grated and mixed with soy sauce for dressing chicken or salad. They are considered highly medicinal, used for hangovers, digestive ailments and to "purify" the blood. Many older Japanese people eat one every morning, for energy, the same way samuris did hundreds of years ago.
You can pick up umeboshi, or umeboshi paste, at most Asian markets.
It's not as cool a it sounds. They won't be brewing the beer in space, or even using ingredients grown on space. Sapporo brewers are going to use barley grown (on earth) from seeds that spent time on the International Space Station.
The Japanese beer company said they expect to get about 100 bottles from this batch, but they won't sell it. I say, why even advertise that? Why get our hopes up in the first place? Even if it wasn't brewed in space, it's still pretty neat. Maybe this will lead to bigger batches, though, that Sapporo actually will sell. All I know is that I want space beer.
The shelves in Japanese supermarkets that normally hold butter are turning up bare these days. There is currently a shortage of milk in Japan, which has resulted in dearth of butter (since butter obviously comes from milk). Prices of imported butter are also rising, which means that the butter that does arrive in the country is very expensive.
There are a variety of factors that are playing a part in the butter scarcity in Japan. As shifts in global eating patterns occur, the demand for butter increases, so exports that used to arrive in Japan are now landing in Russia, China and India. Also, milk has gotten a bad rap in Japan over the past few years, leading to declining consumption and the slaughter of dairy herds.
To read more about the butter shortage, go here and here.
I first encountered kuro mitsu in San Francisco not long ago, at a creperie in the Japantown mall. I ordered a crepe with green tea ice cream, red bean paste, strawberries, whipped cream (sounds totally overkill but is truly amazing), which came drizzled in a mahogany-colored syrup that tasted like a light molassas, with a hint of malt. The mystery syrup really brought the crepe together, somehow cutting through the sweetness with its odd, bright bite.
Later, through research, I discovered that this was kuro mitsu (literally, "black honey"), a Japanese brown sugar syrup not at all dissimilar to molassas. Made from unrefined Okinawan brown sugar, it is a central ingredient in many sweet Japanese dishes.
A Taste of Zen provides a recipe for making your own kuro mitsu. Drizzle it over pancakes, fresh fruit or ice cream, add it to tea or stir a spoonful into plain yogurt.
Eating cheap in Manhattan by buying food exclusively from 99-cent stores. Doable? Yes. Advisable? Perhaps not.
The New York Times then brings chef Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin in on the skinflint action, challenging him to cook a meal entirely of products from Jack's 99-Cent Store. See what he does with a 99-cent frozen salmon fillet .
There is something about Japanese soft drinks, food, and candy treats that fascinates us here at Slashfood, and their chocolate bars are definitely no exception. Could you imagine biting into a Kit Kat stick, but rather than the regular chocolate and wafer flavor, you taste apple? If that isn't strange enough, how about Cherry Blossom or Melon?
The Japanese have certainly cornered the market on different varieties of the Kit Kat bar, with flavors ranging from Green Tea to Red Azuki Bean, to the premium "Exotic Tokyo" - a Japanese limited edition made with milk chocolate, passion fruit, raspberry, strawberry, cherry, blackcurrant and pepper. They even have an adult, Wine-flavored version, just in case the others are a little too tame for you.
In fact, as the folks over at InventorSpot have pointed out, Wikipedia now lists over 80 different varieties of the chocolate bar that have been in production at one point or another. Needless to say, I was a little disappointed this morning when I checked in at my local store and only found two different kinds available, but as we've said before, for some reason the flavored varieties just don't seem to do well over here or in the UK.
Peter Menzel, author and photographer of the book Hungry Planet, has a fascinating photo essay on Time.com featuring "What the World Eats" - a look at the types of food families around the world consume, the amount a typical family will spend on groceries each week, plus their favorite foods or recipes.
The difference between countries, of course, is staggering. For instance, one featured American family spends an average of $341.98 on food each week, whereas the family from Chad spends approximately $1.23. The Japanese family lists sashimi and potato chips among their favorite foods, while the Egyptians say Okra with Mutton is one of their typical family recipes.
You can view the entire slide show at Time.com, and if you are interested in reading more, Menzel's book covers 30 families over 24 countries and 600 meals.
Yes they did. it's President Obama's smiling face, rendered in loving detail in rice and fish bits, down to the oblong head shape. I'd love to tell you exactly what this is made from, but my Japanese skills are a bit, er...nonexistent, despite several years of working in various sushi restaurants. So Japanese-speaking Slashfoodies, please help me out by clicking through to the MSN Japan site and translating. Domo arigato! There's even a tutorial in case you want to make and eat the president's face at home.
It's not as cool a it sounds. They won't be brewing the beer in space, or even using ingredients grown on space. Sapporo brewers are going to use barley grown (on earth) from seeds that spent time on the International Space Station.
The shelves in Japanese supermarkets that normally hold butter are turning up bare these days. There is currently a shortage of milk in Japan, which has resulted in dearth of butter (since butter obviously comes from milk). Prices of imported butter are also rising, which means that the butter that does arrive in the country is very expensive. 
I first encountered kuro mitsu in San Francisco not long ago, at a creperie in the Japantown mall. I ordered a crepe with green tea ice cream, red bean paste, strawberries, whipped cream (sounds totally overkill but is truly amazing), which came drizzled in a mahogany-colored syrup that tasted like a light molassas, with a hint of malt. The mystery syrup really brought the crepe together, somehow cutting through the sweetness with its odd, bright bite. 
Eating cheap in Manhattan by buying food exclusively from 99-cent stores. Doable? Yes. Advisable? Perhaps not. 
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