Category — FLAVOUR

At Readercon two weekends ago, I was happily munching on my home-made O-nigiri  rice balls, but nobody believed that they I had made them myself.  In fact, it’s pretty easy to make the exact replicas of those tasty treats found in 7-11 stores all over Japan, ii kibun!  But you do need at least two items not usually found in your typical Asian grocery:  rice ball molds, and specialized nori seaweed wrappers with red pull strings.   You will see what these look like in the instructions below.   (Note: you can also mold the triangular rice balls with your hands if you don’t have a mold, and you can use regular nori sheets to wrap them, but they should be eaten immediately.)  These instructions will show you how to make the portable, plastic wrapped rice balls that keep the nori sheets fresh until you eat them…enjoy!

step one:  cook rice and let it cool.  typically I just cook extra rice and leave it tightly covered overnight, then use it the next morning to make rice balls.  you need about 1 to 1.5 cups of cooked rice for each rice ball.  stir about 1 tsp of sesame oil into the rice, fluffing it up a bit.  the oil keeps the rice from sticking to the sides of the mold.   optional:  stir into the rice a small amount of flavoring, like roasted sesame seeds with nori bits and bonito powder.  this just adds a little interest and zest to the rice.

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Took a little drive to Pickety Place in N.H., thanks to a gift certificate for lunch from Jesse and Angelica.  Thanks, guys!   This strange business is based on the illustrations of Grandma’s House in the 1948 edition of Little Red Riding Hood, drawn by Elizabeth Orton Jones.   Indeed, the illustrations look just like the actual building and the amazing old tree looming right alongside. [Read more →]

There is nothing like a platter of hot takoyaki octopus balls, one of the most beloved snack foods in Japan.  Something about the half-cooked, gooey, pancake-like sphere, slightly browned on the outside, with little rubbery bits of chewy octopus tentacles inside, that simply drives Japanese people crazy with delight!  These snacks are not always served in splendidly decked out shops like the Red Devil Takoyaki House of Namba, Osaka.  Typically they are vended from funky little hot dog carts found alongside bus stations, baseball stadiums, or tourist spots.  A little paper dish of those fresh grilled octopus balls, dribbled with sticky brown sauce (with a soya tang), is almost irresistible in the land of the Rising Sun…

How great to know that you can now enjoy this sensation anywhere — well almost anywhere — thanks to the Frito Lay corporation, who have packaged up a neat ersatz version.  The Frito Lay takoyaki tei (”grilled octopus stand”) boasts of a super thick, delicious “sauce,” depicted as flowing in an airborne swirl over the head of a prototypical uber-cute pink octopus cartoon.   For some reason that floating swirl of sauce — frozen in mid-air — recalls the image of the girl being launched into freeze time as she crashes her scooter in Kamikaze Girls.

The fact that the actual product is some kind of genetic half-breed of a Funyon and a Shrimp Chip, laced with sparkling flecks of MSG and aonori powder, and is completely dry seems not to bother the marketing folks one bit.  Indeed, they know perfectly well that anyone crunching a mouthful of these cheese-puff style octopus balls will succumb to an instant case of cottonmouth so intense that they will scramble wildly for the nearest bottle of beer or sparkling water.

Even so, it was a super special treat to try a pack of these, graciously given to us by our friend Kumi, who had them airlifted in all the way from Tokyo!   Thanks, Kumi, fun munchies!

Money saving tips are very useful these days, so take a word from the pros:  when your beard gets too weird know how to mow it! This and other great advice is currently available in a series of 50 scans of Basil Wolverton’s “Culture Corner,” which appeared in Whiz Comics between 1945 - 1952.

Thanks Dinosaur Gardens, for posting this incredible series!

Also thanks to Drawn! twitter feed.

Irina baked this amazing birthday cake for my brother, Sangpo, in the shape of the ubiquitous Domo-kun character from NHK Japan Satellite t.v.   According to the artist, the cake was coffee flavored (with some vanilla and grapefruit juice in the dough), and the icing was chocolate…not to mention the screaming pit of strawberries and marshmallow teeth!   Happy Birthday, Po!

Our first halloween in the new apartment passed quietly, with our household demon getting into the spirit of things by gritting a mini-Butterfinger bar in his pointy teeth. It sure is nice to be in Arlington, where we now walk to the station and see gorgeous foliage, like this tree near Alewife.

It is a great change from the increasingly noisy and idiotic event that has become halloween in Salem, where crowds numbering in the tens of thousands take over the downtown area and have a group “episode.” I knew that it was time to leave when the historic ambience of Salem, the classic architecture, the historic witchcraft trials, slowly morphed into a shlock horror carnival. How the hysteria surrounding false accusations got conflated with vampires, zombies, ghouls, slasher films, and black magic seems to be symptomatic of American culture. But it really goes too far when somebody felt compelled to open a Lizzie Borden Museum Store in Salem. Yes, at this fine emporium you can feed your prurient curiosity by purchasing framed portraits of the Borden family. Not your ordinary portraits, but ones that change from actual photographs to ghoulish skulls depending on the angle from which they are seen. Charming.   And what does the infamous axe murder case that took place in Fall River in 1892 have to do with Salem?  Hmm, gore, murder…and they are both in the same state, after all!   Well, adios Salem crowds…

Well, I didn’t fall off the face of the earth. But I did stray into moose country in recent weeks, driving up through Vermont, into Quebec and Montreal. We didn’t actually see any moose, but we could sort of feel them, the moose vibe… But I’m trying to keep my mind off Alaska and keep it fixed on Frostbite Falls. Anyway, it is still summer, and the cafes of Montreal are in their last wild frenzy of sun-drenched glory. We went to a cafe on Mount Royal street during the Sunday street fair, where Sophia had a fruit crepe that was out of this world. My Dad and I did some excellent loafing in the bistros on Prince Arthur Street, too.

It can now be revealed: in 1993 I returned to Yunnan in order to realize my childhood dream of becoming a tea baron. Yes, it all started in 1975 when I encountered the magnificent book by Robert Fortune, A Journey to the Tea Countries of China; Sung-lo and the Bohea Hills (1852), in which the intrepid Fortune manages to steal into the interior of China and abscond with the tea plants that subsequently helped to establish the British tea industry in colonial India. Disguised in wooden clogs, straw hat, and a wig with a long black queue hanging down his back, Fortune managed to punt along the waterways in the lowliest of riverboats. He dined on what he described as a miserable gruel, called congee, and reconnoitered the tea plantations and temple gardens along his route. Once, caught red-handed in a private garden while trying to steal a flower specimen, he was — instead of being turned over to the local yamen — given a nice cup of tea and a neatly potted living sample to take with him. Having yet to discover the reckless undertakings of Kingdon Ward and Joseph Rock, I was fascinated by the idea of botanist-explorer.

This of course led me to read various volumes on tea barons, tea manufacturing techniques, and to distinguish a broken orange pekoe from a souchong.  Many a pot of oolong was brewed for me that year by the sympathetic owner of the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant that once was located next to the Pyramid Adult theatre on Route 66.  Later on, when I founded the tea club at Albuquerque High School in 1977 (with Tim Crews, Erik Stout, and Lars Tomasen), I thought becoming a tea baron was a fait accompli!

Little did I know, that tea is produced in quantities on the order of 3 million tonnes per year, and at the time of my venture to the China National Native Produce and Animal By-products Import and Export Corporation Yunnan Tea Branch that there was a total glut of tea on the market and thousands of unsold tonnes laying about at every market in sight. Nonetheless, I was introduced to the delights of various pu-erh teas, which have since then become my personal favorite… not the dessicated bricks of tuo-cha that look like donkey shit laced with straw, but rather the delightful, freshly dried pu-erh, which tastes of the very soil of Yunnan, a rich, hearty, unforgettable flavor as thick as coffee and tangy with minerals, pineapple sweat, and snake venom. The manager of the Yunnan Tea Branch gave me a wonderful descriptive flyer, reproduced here, for your edification:

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