Chocolate Cherry Cake

Chocolate Cherry Cake or Cherry Chocolate Cake? To tell you the truth, I’ve already done some baking after I came back from the hospital. As far as I remember, I baked yogurt & blueberry muffins, yogurt & cherry muffins, cheese and ham muffins and yogurt pancakes. And as for cooking, I probably cooked more often compared to usual month-end weeks. In my recovery period, I wanted to eat at home feeling relaxed, rather than eating out. Then why didn’t I post about them? Well, for one thing, what I made did not turn out very photogenic. But the biggest reason was that I didn’t feel like taking the time to take photos before eating when I was not completely back to normal. However, today I felt a strong urge to bake something fancy AND post about it like I used to do. Yeah, it was about time. I chose something I had always wanted to try: the combination of dark cherries and chocolate cake. So I pitted these cherries and soaked them in sherry early this morning. I used the same chocolate cake recipe(Japanese) as the one I used for my birthday cake last March, and had a great success again. For a little twist, I saved the sherry after draining the cherries and added a small amount to the syrup I made. It turned out to be a wonderfully-flavored syrup to moisten the sliced chocolate cake. The sherry-soaked cherries were a little too many for this small (15 cm) cake. I started with a different decoration in mind, but ended up with this in order to use up all the cherries. Yeah, I’m not too proud of the way this looks, to be honest. Well, I’ll know better next time ;) Anyway, this was a celebration of my recovery and I had so much fun. But I would definitely enjoy making this type of cake much more if I could slice a cake evenly. Any tips? Hey, has anyone tried this dental floss trick? Categories: Sweets

Cream Soda

This is what we call "Kuriimu sooda (cream soda)" here. I took this photo to share with my friend who loved this drink so much when she was in Japan. (Photo taken at the small restaurant in the hospital where I had the surgery. ) Categories: Drinks

Sweet Seasons / May 2007 - Iwane Tsutsuji -

Iwane Tsutsuji Tsutsuji means azalea. "Iwane tsutsuji" is a popular wagashi motif for early summer, which meaning "wild azalea on rocks in mountains." Sorry, I don't have a pic of this flower to combine with the wagashi photo above. If you want to see what the flower looks like, click here. (I had taken this wagashi photo at the end of April ;) Sorry I forgot which wagashi shop it was from...) Categories: Wagashi

What I Craved for on the Second Day Back in My Apartment

My "staple dish" in the post-op recovery period at home On the 2nd day after coming home (I mean, apartment room), I had this sudden craving for broccoli-- more precisely, broccoli potage -- and cheese. I had no idea why, though. My sense of taste was still messed up and I couldn’t stand the taste of some food I usually love – like apple cake. I had baked bunch of apple cakes and froze them before being hospitalized. But when I tried it first time after coming back, the buttery flavor of the cake and the slight sourness from the apple chunks almost made me nauseate. (What a shame!! I spent so much time baking them when I was terribly busy getting so many things done before going to the hospital.) Instead, what I really wanted was broccoli & cheese… and some good bread which is not too buttery or sweet. So, the 2nd day back in my apartment room, I took a taxi to a nearby supermarket (because I wasn’t sure if I could ride a bicycle then) and bought broccoli and grated cheese. After that, I spent several hours in the kitchen making a big potful of broccoli potage and freezing them in several ziplock bags, feeling slightly dizzy from time to time. But it was worth it! :D For a few days after that, I enjoyed broccoli potage topped with grated cheese (I know this may sound strange, but I really wanted cheese flavor added) again and again, and each time all I had to do was just defrosting and heating up the frozen potage. With onion, potato, garlic and soy milk added, I think the liquid food was pretty nutritious. But I still don’t know why I craved specifically for broccoli so badly and why I had no problem with garlic while the smell of ginger bothered me so much, and also why black pepper and bay leaves were OK when the smell of cinnamon, clove and celery almost killed me. .... Strange. Categories: Miscellaneous

First Meal I Had After Coming Back from the Hospital

Unagi mabushi Yep, mom and I tried this kamameshi delivery for lunch in my apartment room on May 14th right after coming back from the hospital. It was sooooooooooooo wonderful! Soft and warm unagi (eel) on good rice! Mmmmmm!! There was nothing too salty or sour. I guess my taste buds were still messed up a little then and I couldn't taste sweetness as much as I usually do, but still I liked the dish. It was even better when I poured their light-tasting dashi broth (it came in a big pot) over this rice and eel topped with condiments, as they recommend on their website. This is the seafood version that mom ordered. After eating most of the seafood toppings, she also poured the dashi broth over her rice and loved it so much. I think this kamameshi delivery was a great idea when I was craving for a good meal but going to a restaurant seemed too tiring. I truly enjoyed this meal in my room where I could relax the most. :) FYI-- These containers are of course not disposable. You are supposed to leave them right outside the entrance of your house, and the delivery guy will come back hours later and pick them up. You don't really have to wash the containers before returning them, but I guess many people wash them. Categories: Miscellaneous, Japanese

Hospital Meals - Part 2 - After Surgery

Lunch (May 12th) This was the first food I ate after the surgery. It was served as lunch about 10 hours after I got out of the operation room. I was almost starving to death then, so I gobbled everything up right away. What's in the big white bowl was thin rice gruel, but I had no idea what that yellow pudding-like thing in the red bowl was. (It was a little sweet, but not as smooth as pudding...) The drink in the white mug was probably some kind of probiotic drink. Since I had a great appetite then, I thought I would enjoy all the meals for the rest of my stay there. Buy I was wrong -- definitely wrong. They gave me rice porridge with grilled fish, nikujaga (simmered meat and potatoes) and some vegetable for dinner on the 12th (no photo). Because I was afraid of starving in the middle of the night, I ate them all. My colleague was there then, and I had to make a great effort to force myself to eat and carry on conversation at the same time. But still, the meal didn’t taste too terrible. Later that night, I thought about having some of my oatmeal raisin cookies, but as soon as I opened the can, the smell of spices knocked me down! After that, I never opened the can until I came back to my apartment. Breakfast and lunch (May 13th) Now, these two photos still give me cold sweat when I see them. For the first time in my life, eating meals was a hardship for me. No, it's not that the quality of the meals got worse all the sudden. I guess it was that my sense of taste was a little messed up after the surgery. It was the 13th when I had a real hard time. I knew their miso soup was thick, but that morning it tasted unbelievably salty. And I felt that the bamboo shoots were challengingly stringy and the simmered short-necked clams tasted weird with an unpleasant (to me) smell of ginger. I felt cold sweat on my back during my breakfast. But the lunch was even more challenging. The smell of chicken and burdock – the combination I usually love – almost made me nauseate. And the vinegared dish tasted so super-sour that I thought it might make a hole in my stomach. It was strange… I was undoubtedly hungry. I had a very good appetite, because my intestines already started functioning normally early in the morning on the day after the surgery. But eating was such a hard work and again I was soaked in a cold sweat while eating. Stringy burdock, stringy bamboo shoots (again) and stringy asparagus with dressing which tasted unbelievably sour to me…! Seriously, I got traumatized. It’ll take some time for me to be able to enjoy this simmered dish (chikuzen-ni?) again. But you know what? I ate them all -- just to convince myself that I had a lot of guts. ;) Oh, BTW, you may not know this because my posts on this hospital experience haven't gotten to that part yet, but I already went back to work on the 21st (last Monday.) And I'm still alive (though a couple of problems were waiting for me with their arms wide open). :) Categories: Miscellaneous

Hospital Meals - Part 1 - Before Surgery

OK. It's time to share my food-related adventures(?!) at the hospital. ;) Above are the eating utensils I had bought at our famous Daiso 100-yen shop and brought to the hospital. Yeah, many Japanese hospitals (if not all) ask inpatients to bring their own chopsticks. I wonder if it’s the same in other Asian countries with chopstick culture. Lunch (May 9th) Tata～! This was my lunch on the first day at the hospital -- my very first hospital meal. I liked it. Breakfast (May 10th??) . What's behind the miso soup bowl is a small paper carton of milk. Calcium-rich meal, indeed, but what was the yuzu-miso in the plastic bag for??? Dinner (I forgot which day). I liked all the side dishes on this tray, but the canned orange tasted the best, to be perfectly honest. :P Oh, I forgot to tell you this: You see the partition in this pink tray? They put all warm dishes on the left side of the partition and cold dishes on the right. And I don't know exactly how, but the warm-dish side of the tray was kept warm and the cold side was kept cold. (The milk in the above breakfast photo was originally on the right side of the tray.) The meals didn't taste as bad as I had expected from what I had heard about "hospital meals" in general (though I found their thick miso soup with sweet potatoes and leek rather unorthodox and vinegared dish a bit too sour), and I thought I’d be perfectly OK with the food there. How innocent I was... And on the first night, I enjoyed my home-made oatmeal raisin cookies as I read the printout of your comments to this blog. It really helped. Thank you again for your support. :) Categories: Miscellaneous

I'm Back!!

Flower basket from my boss at my daytime job Yes, I came back to my room around noon today and found sooooo many comments from all over the world waiting for me on this blog! Thank you, everyone. There's a lot to tell you, but for now I just want to say that everything went fine. Thanks again for your support, dear readers! :D P.S. Here is a photo that shows one of the things I did on the day after the surgery. Categories: Miscellaneous

Temporary Hiatus...

Sorry, dear readers, This blog is on a temporary hiatus. As some of you already know, I’m going to have a surgery on May 11th. It is just a laparoscopic surgery to remove my dermoid cyst, and I should be back in my apartment as early as May 14th, if everything goes OK. The details are here, and if you are interested in the whole story and have nothing better to do, you might want to start from the - Part 1- here. I'm going to be busy with preparations until this coming Wednesday. No, I’m not scared at all... at the moment. But there is no doubt that I’ll need a lot of encouragement while I stay in bed alone in the hospital before/after the surgery. So dear readers, can you PLEASE leave your comments to this post? I’ll print them out the night before I go to the hospital and keep them right next to my pillow during my stay there. And I promise -- I'll come back with a bunch of photos of Japanese hospital food. ;) Wish me luck and see you again soon! Categories: Miscellaneous

Sweet Seasons / April 2007 - Young Maple Leaves -

Young Maple Leaves I know. I already posted about green maple in July 2006. But it was kanten jelly last year and this time it’s nerikiri, so please forgive me for repeating the similar theme. Maple leaf is my favorite wagashi motif and this one looked too nice to ignore -- I have seen the mold of a single maple leaf many times before, but not the one with two leaves combined together like this. * Wagashi by Nishigawaya Categories: Wagashi

Homemade Strawberry Jam on a Lazy Morning

Obachan's Homemade Strawberry Jam on Yogurt So it’s “Golden Week” here. I know almost everyone is traveling now, but I’m a lazy one, if not the laziest. :P And I wanted to post a pic that best describes how relaxing my Golden Week is. Yeah, traveling is great. Going abroad is even more exciting. But a lazy morning with homemade strawberry jam, homemade scones and yogurt (no, yogurt is not homemade) -- in the morning sunshine and gentle, soothing breeze coming through the lace curtain -- is not a bad idea, either. To be honest, I have never made strawberry jam before. The jam is too popular, thus has never tempted me. But when I saw some strawberries on sale at a nearby fruit shop yesterday, and remembered the recent comment by Ireney, I knew that I HAD TO make chunky strawberry jam and have it for breakfast in order to fully appreciate my days off in this beautiful time of the year. To my surprise, the jam turned out pretty good, with the perfect amount of tartness from lemon juice and the strawberries. And the berry chunks are just so… Mmmmm… What do I need to say? You already know how good they are, don't you? Oh, I have to try this with vanilla ice cream, too. It'll be the dessert after my lunch of takenoko gohan and miso soup today. Categories: Sweets

Takenoko (Bamboo Shoots) from My Boss

Takenoko Gohan Bento One good thing about working in a small office in a rural town is that you often get rewarded with fresh seafood, fruits or vegetables for your hard work. Well, actually the quality of your work does not really matter. It’s just a temporary food surplus. Almost everyone around you has at least a farmer or a fisherman in his/her relatives, and you often find yourself involved in an endless barter trading among kind-hearted grannies and aunties (and sometimes uncles, too). This time what I got was these two fresh bamboo shoots. I like bamboo shoots, but I have to admit that it’s a pain in the neck to cook fresh ones properly to get rid of the harshness. How to do it? You need to pre-boil them in hot water with a lot of rice bran added. And you need to hurry; the longer you leave them in the sheaths like this, the stronger the harshness will be. If rice bran is not available, you can use rice rinsing water instead. That’s what I did this time. And my mom told me to leave the bamboo shoots in the rice rinsing water overnight after boiling them in it. If it was only my mom who said that, I wouldn’t have believed it, but I found the same advice on the internet, too, so I followed it. But perhaps rice rinsing water is not as effective as rice bran… I didn’t recognize much harshness in takenoko gohan (Japanese pilaf with bamboo shoots), but after eating my takenoko no tosa-ni (bamboo shoots simmered in dashi and extra bonito flakes), I felt strange sensation on my tongue for a while. * Some say that if you boil bamboo shoots long enough and soak them in running water long enough, it is not really necessary to use rice bran or rice-rinsing water. I don't know how true it is, though... Takenoko no Tosa-ni But I really enjoyed the crunchiness of the fresh bamboo shoots. :) Thanks, boss. I guess I'm going to chop up the leftover tosa-ni and use them for another batch of takenoko gohan. Categories: Japanese

Kumquat Marmalade Crumble Muffins

Kumquat Marmalade Crumble Muffins I still have two small jars of kumquat marmalade sitting on the shelf in my kitchen. Since I don’t like it very much on buttered toast, the choices left are using it for drinks or sweets. Yeah, the financier was a great success. But this time I wanted to try something else. So this was the kumquat marmalade version of an “orange marmalade and crumble muffins” recipe that I found on the net. Actually the recipe called for cream cheese and crumbles for the topping. OK. I had some cream cheese left in the fridge. I was so curious about how the toppings would taste with the big kumquat chunks in the muffins. But unfortunately, I didn’t taste cream cheese almost at all. And though the muffins were not bad after all, I have to say that I liked the kumquat marmalade in financier better -- much better. Categories: Sweets

Grapefruit sauce...

I saw that on TV. I mean, the grapefruit sauce. Grapefruit juice, honey, white wine, veg. oil, salt and rosemary ... So I just mixed those ingredients (and even added mustard, too) and poured it over grilled fish. It was... interesting. Categories: Western-inspired

Sweet Seasons / March 2007 - Cherry Blossom -

Cherry Blossom Terribly, TERRIBLY sorry that I didn't post anything for such a long time. Has any of you wondered if I was taken to the hospital? No, no. I'm doing fine. It's just that my mind has been occupied with a big project for the past couple of weeks, and it's going to stay that way for another couple of weeks. Please forgive me. I know. I cheated about the date, but as you know, I need to have a wagashi entry on the last day of every month, so I insist that today is Mar. 31st. Hahaha... Categories: Wagashi

Spaghetti Meatballs

Spaghetti Meatballs It was this post by ting-aling that triggered my craving for this dish. Again, it happened pretty late at night. Maybe I should quit bloghopping at night... but when else? Categories: Western-inspired

Meet the B-day Girl Who Made This Cake

Obachan's home-made B-Day cake. Girl?... Mmmm... Well, never mind. :P No, no. My birthday dinner hasn't started yet. I'm (more precisely, my electric rice cooker is) cooking rice at the moment, and as soon as it's ready, I'm going to make my favorite temari-zushi for this special dinner tonight. Then I'll indulge in the hedonistic pleasure of sushi, sparkling wine and chocolate cake. And before I destroy the temporary beauty of my home-made birthday cake, I've got to share it with the whole world. Again, it's a home-made cake. I baked it myself. This is my very first chocolate cake with chocolate coating, and I even tried tempering! Even though I couldn't slice the cocoa sponge evenly, and tempering without using a cooking thermometer was a ridiculous attempt, and I forgot to remove the chocolate-coated cake from the wire rack before decorating it with all these toppings (the cake was glued to the wire rack with the chocolate), and one end of the ribbon scraped off some cocoa powder from the surface while I was trying to tie it -- I insist that this is a success, BECAUSE IT'S MY B-DAY AND I NEED TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT MY ACHIEVEMENT! And honestly, the cocoa sponge, or should I call it chocolate genoise? is E X C E L L E N T. This is the recipe & instruction (in Japanese) by a charisma(?) Japanese wife living in Chicago. Just as so many reviewers have mentioned, I'm so happy that I found this recipe! Yeah, this recipe IS a great B-day present for me, honestly. I'll post a photo of the cross-section of my cake, if I succeed in cutting out a piece gracefully. :) Maybe I am gifted -- not in cooking or baking, but in being able to feel happiness in little things. About US$9 sparkling wine, US$3 small bouquet and home-baked 15 cm chocolate cake with small candles from 1 dollar shop. And emails to me and comments on my blog from my friends all over the world ... These are what I have on my birthday, and they all make me so happy. (Oh, I just realized that I didn't mention the temari-zushi. That's because the sliced fish were leftovers from the previous meal, thus not included in the things I bought specifically for this B-day dinner.) :) But next time I'm going to make a cake with more cream and more fruits. I liked this simple design, but taste-wise, I would love a lot more fruits buried in a thick layer of cream. Oh, and the next time I'm NOT going to sprinkle cocoa powder on the chocolate coating of the birthday cake. When I blew out the candles... Imagine what happened. Categories: Sweets, Japanese, Miscellaneous

My Very First Home-baked Cinnamon Rolls

Cinnamon Rolls Quite honestly, I’m not good at baking bread. The biggest reason is that I’m not patient enough to wait until required “bench time” is over. Yes, I tend to put the dough in the oven too early. But that probably is not the only reason why my bread hardens so quickly. Tell me… can using soy milk in place of milk contribute to this hardening of the bread? This time I used this recipe but substituted milk with soy milk just because I ran out of milk and my craving for cinnamon rolls couldn’t wait until the next day. Yeah, do you know what time I baked these? Around midnight. My craving was that bad (for some reason). So these cinnamon rolls did not turn out as soft as I wanted them to be, and they turned rock hard on the next day. But I can still eat them after microwaving for about 1 – 1.5 minutes, so it wasn’t a total waste, after all. :P I wish I had more confectioner's sugar for a heavier frosting... Dear readers, If you have a recipe for very soft & moist, cinnabon-like cinnamon rolls, please share it with me! Oh, one more thing: If used crisco instead of butter, would it make the rolls softer or prispier? Categories: Sweets

Garden Report - March 2007 -

Gosh, I just found out that the last time I posted about my balcony garden was November 2006! :O Anyway, I remember that my blueberry bush started blooming at the end of March last year. Look how it is doing now. These photos were taken last week. Maybe the unusual warm weather contributed to this early full bloom this year? I wonder if they are going to fruit normally, though. I haven't seen any bees yet... The flowers are oh so lovely! :D He(?) has been in my balcony garden since late February. So this is his gorgeous winter vacation house, maybe? Categories: Garden

Sawachi Festival in Kochi

Gorgeous sawachi dishes on display. Yes, this is the same local event as this one, but more dishes this time. Enjoy! (Click photos to enlarge.) ----- OK, here’s some additional information I found on the net about this event. All these dishes are not fake – they are made with real ingredients. But they are not seasoned at all because they are made for display purpose only, not for eating. Also they are brushed (sprayed?) with some kind of chemical liquid to prevent drying out, so they are not edible. Yeah, in a sense, it’s a big waste. But I would feel sad if they would quit this festival for that reason… This extravagance does cheer us up and attract tourists. Categories: Kochi

Saba No Miso-ni

Saba no miso-ni （Mackerel simmered in miso-based soup?) Sorry. This is the kind of dish I can never post a recipe for. I repeated tasting and adding seasonings many times, and finally had to thin down the soup quite a bit :P Categories: Japanese

Sweet Seasons / February 2007 - Plum blossom -

Many people love plum blossoms here as a messenger that brings a sign of early spring. When we notice the sweet fragrance of the plum blossoms in the crisp and cold air, we know that the winter is almost over. It is a little different this year, though. When we enjoyed the fragrant flowers, it was unbelievably warm – almost as warm as late spring – and now the flowers are gone and it’s getting cold again. Strange weather, indeed. But still, the combination of snow and plum blossoms is a Japanese favorite, which I think is the theme of this wagashi, too. The white bottom probably represents snow. The bottom part looked like milk jelly to me, but to my surprise, it did not taste or smell like milk at all. I also love it that the pink flowers are at the bottom, not on the surface, of the top layer of the jelly.　What a lovely idea. :) Categories: Wagashi

"You Are What You Eat" Meme

Well,　Rosa of Rosa’s Yummy Yums tagged me for “You Are What You Eat” Meme. Gee, this meme must have been around for quite a while. I think I saw this meme on someone's site last year, or even the year before...?? Anyway, ok, here are my answers to the 10 food-related questions. They would probably show the hidden part of obachan's personality? Naw... there's nothing surprising, I guess. 1) If you were stuck on an island and could only eat one cuisine (e.g., French, Italian, etc.) for the rest of your life, what would it be? Why? Japanese. It’s an island, so I assume that I can get plenty of seafood there. Which means I can make sushi. Yeah, how can I live without sushi for the rest of my life??? No way. 2) What is the most unusual food you've eaten? Fish eyes. Well, more precisely, I ate the gelatin-like stuff around the eyeballs. 3) What is the most unusual food you've eaten and liked? The gelatin-like stuff around the fish eyes. I liked it. 4) What foods will you avoid eating (either because of a dietary choice or allergies or just plain don't like)? Insects and worms. Now, I might eat them if I were convinced that they would actually taste good. But right now, I can’t picture myself eating them. 5) Do you cook (and by that, I mean prepare a meal that you'd serve to friends)? No, I wouldn’t want to serve a meal to my friends. That would terminate our friendship. :P 6) If yes, what is your favorite dish to prepare to impress someone? N/A 7) When you go to a restaurant, what's your ordering strategy/preference? I tend to order a combo that allows me to try a little amount of many things for a reasonable price. Oh, BTW, when I eat out with my mom, we often order something different and share it. At a rather formal restaurant, we do that when the waiter/waitress is not around and no one is watching us. :P 8) Have you ever returned a dish or wine to the kitchen at a restaurant? Why? No, not yet. I have never had a bad experience like a fly in the soup or a hair in fried rice or a cockroach in ramen noodles. Lucky me. 9) How many cookbooks do you own? Five. Not many, ha? 10) What is one food that you wouldn't want to live without? Rice. Definitely, rice. I HAVE TO feel the texture of rice on my tongue at least twice or three times a week. (That’s what I found out when I lived in the U.S.) Categories: Miscellaneous