Silver Case

Ramen Comparison

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

I bought three packs of noodles that look like what I’d conventionally call ‘Ramen’. I have no idea what the differences are — they look identical and their ingredient list is identical:

Nishiyama Jukuseimen Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white
Nishiyama Komugi Men Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white
Nishiyama Tsuke Men Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white

Got home late tonight. And quarrelsome.

Fixed Ling some instant ramen shit.  I tried to dress it up for her a bit, so I put in some wakame (wow, the stuff I brought from hokkaido fair was explosively fragrant compared with the tired old confetti we had before), some chopped up bits of tofu, some fried garlic, and lastly some slices of what is called ‘szechuan preserved vegetable.’

I occasionally eat at a  very authentic Szechuan restaurant here in Singapore. It is monstrously hot. I’m told by my colleague, a native of Wuhan, that the heat, regardless, is still toned down from the heavy stuff in Szechuan, but it is still plenty hot. Anyway, one of the starters they serve is slices of some unknown preserved vegetable. Hard to describe the taste.  It’s almost like a pickle, but without the dill-ness or sourness or the sweetness. Some mysterious Other flavor.  Anyway, it’s tasty.  I bought a bag of it a few days ago.

For myself I took the rest of the tofu, cubed it up, got some sesame oil frying, tossed that in, along with several spoonfulls of my wicked szechuan-style chilli paste (a half cup of peanut oil brought to 400F, then toss in a half cup of diced up dried red szechuan chillis and several tablespoons of ground black pepper. It makes noxious tear gas, foams, and then falls down.  Will keep indefinitely I expect).   I also tossed in some of this mystery vegetable and cracked an egg over it.

Wow, that vegetable is way way way salty.  It was ok as a seasoning in my dish. Inedible as a food item.  Unfortunately it leeched way too much into Ling’s ramen broth.  Apparently you use it for soups, or else you soak it for day(s) to leech out so much of the salt, then it is edible as a snack.  So that is what the two remaining balls/bulbs/lumps of the mystery vegetable are doing now — de-brining in a few liters of water.

It keeps getting deeper. Now it’s obvious to me that I cannot get by in Japanese just knowing the kana.  I need to learn the kanji as well.  The baseload kanji corpus that all high-schoolers in Japan theoretically learn is called the jouyou kanji. It’s a set of 1,945 characters that they learn over the course of nine years.  Of course I am on a different schedule.

Went to Kinokuniya bookstore tonight to check out their books on learning Kanji.  I bought the most intriguing book I could find, ‘The Kanji Handbook‘ by ‘Vee David’ published by Tuttle Language Library. Sadly it is one of the few books with a really miserable Amazon product page.

The book seems to try to introduce a lot of innovative learning strategies for a non-japanese adult to learn kanji, as opposed to a Japanese child.  There is a total mismatch there, as I have complex thoughts with poor grammar/vocab, while a kid has simple thoughts to correspond with their simple grammar/vocab. Consequently they teach the words in a different grouping and order.

Some of the things they do are, frankly, weird or idiosyncratic, but I am willing to give them a shot.

The first thing he does is something called “KanjiHybrids” which is giving out words that are hybrids of kanji and english. For example, 四our, for the character for “four”.

Then he combines groupings of similar characters into a terrible little rhyming couplets formed with these KanjiHybrids, for example:

四our 匹nimals in the 西estern corrall.  (four animals in the western corrall)
There you have kanji that look quite alike. Practicing these sets of verses repeatedly is supposed to train me to recognize and remember their fine differences, as well as cement my knowledge of the characters’ meanings.
Anyway, that’s the idea and this is what I am working on.  In the meantime, chewing away with the vocab (I 95% mastered the set I was complaining about the other day). I bought a few more grammar books that seemed to have more exercises and explanations than the one I have.  At least can vary my practice a bit — they all have to cover the same stuff sooner than later.

The wife of a friend/colleague of mine in Tokyo has been in hospital for close to a week now, so today I wanted to send a bouquet of flowers on behalf of Ling, Luke, and I.

I asked the office administrator in Tokyo about this, as I figured I could easily stray into a “you sent a what to a who in a where!?” situation.

She said the two strong guidelines for sending flowers to someone sick in Japan are:

1. No ’strong smelling’ flowers like lillies. (Are lillies strong?)
2. No flowers in pots, because pots are things you’d grow a tree in, trees have roots, and thus you are implying the person is going to be in the hospital for a long time.

So I simplified the guidelines for her, “So I should order flowers that don’t smell good and die quickly” ?

The answer was, “mmmmm basically…. yes.”

Ling is going to a CNY party tonight. I am not. Before she left, she asked what I was making myself for dinner. Her party would be a lot of chinese barbeque (in other words, gross).  So I said I’d do something.

Figured it should be vegetable-centric, as I gave myself a CNY indulgence today and ran to Choupinette, the French Bakery, and bought two strawberry beignets that were, literally, still warm from the kitchen.  Unbelievably good.  Donut flesh as soft as a boob, but filled with strawberry jam, instead of watery milk.

Saw a few worthwhile ingredients, a box of fresh spinach, a bag of thin French beans.  I had a brick of feta and some ham from last week’s sandwiches.  Simple matter to make a plate of beans and a spinach salad.  Lightly sauted the lean ham and made a vinaigrette. Haha I’m quite smitten with this “handprocessor” and its massive whisking properties.  I have some learning to do, however.  I poured some 10 year old balsamic vinegar into a bowl and then drizzled in some nice olive oil, whisking it with my Braun.   I don’t have much emulsion experience, and the whisking action was exhilarating. Suddenly I found myself with a mayonnaise-like  vinaigrette jelly that was firmer and stronger than a meringue.  I could have held the bowl upside-down.  Oh well, it tasted good, so I knocked it down a bit with some blasts in the microwave, then it was pourable.
To cook the beans, I used the technique described in “Staff Meals” — put a thin layer of beans in a pan, fill with cold water to half-depth of the beans, lots of kosher salt, a knob of butter, and bring to high boil until tender. Then out they go, onto a plate, a blast of salt, and they’re ready.  They were nice. Good color, good smell, nice texture, and the touch of salt made them munchable.

Speaking of not-munchable, I tried to use some of the old peanut oil from our turkey and a couple russet potatos I picked up yesterday and make potato chips. Yuk. Burnt, inedible, grease-logged junk.  So I tried another potato into french fries. Practically as bad. I decided not to waste any calories on that slop and tossed them out.  The fundamental problem is that my stove is a fucking piece of shit.  I’m lucky in that it uses piped gas, not LPG canisters, otherwise it would be even weaker. But basically what I have is four shitty, tiny burners that are as controllable as a camper stove. They’re mostly just tiny-diameter point flames with little adjustability.  There is a snobbish taint to things like Viking stoves, but on the other hand, those are big, controllable burners.  There is no reason a stove shouldn’t be able to bring a pot of oil easily to 350F and fucking keep it there. Since I couldn’t keep the oil hot enough, the potatoes couldn’t generate enough steam to keep the oil at bay, thus the grease-logging.

To finish up tonight I took some soon-to-spoil packages of raspberries and blueberries from the refrigerator, some unsweetened yogurt Ling made ?when? and some confectioner sugar. Into her little ice cream maker and ran it till it was like a sorbet.  Her icecream maker is clever. The big mixing boil is basically a giant icepack that you keep in the freezer until you need it.  Then the mixing arm latches on top and stirs your ice cream till it’s done.  The mixing bowl is about a quart size but seems to have pretty strong cold ‘horsepower.’

That’s all.  Going to finish up my Japanese vocab now… nearly done with the list.

With Chinese New Year holiday upon us I’ve been free for the last couple days. Have Tuesday off, too. I had a bit of work to do this morning, so after sleeping till eight, I made myself a latte, and then jogged to work. It was nicer than normal. Traffic was light so there was less noxious road fumes to suck.

Afterward had lunch at a bakery in Robertson walk, Simply Bread. The bakery is good. In terms of running a cafe it needs some work. Anyway, it was breezy, with a rain moving in, and Luke was napping deeply, so we just relaxed and drank average espressos for an hour or so. I took home two fresh batards and a ciabatta. Walking around, I found a number of possibly-interesting Japanese restaurants, including an izakaya, a manga/ramen restaurant, and a restaurant that bills itself as serving ‘Taiwanese food in the Japanese Style.’ I have no idea what that would be, but I’m guessing dumplings.

What’s coming up? In early March the three of us are taking a week’s vacation to Sydney. Ling wants to visit Tien-Lee. I want to kayak, drink good coffee, play poker, and buy nice groceries.

One bit of bad news is that the Toby’s Estate coffee roasting class isn’t being held during the week I visit. I’ll see what i can manage on my own. At the very least I’ll buy an iRoast to play with as my first foray into roasting my own coffee beans. Of course I covet a real sampling roaster, but that can wait till I build my house.
Hopefully my kayak guide will be in town; I was planning on learning how to roll my Fujita canoe before the water got too cold. If he’s not around I’ll have to figure out something else to do outdoors beside grazing cafes.

Went grocery shopping late this afternoon. Made a special trip to Cold Storage in Jelita, which last time I was there, seemed to have a better selection of produce than elsewhere. It started out ok and I starting filling the cart with vegetables and fruits, but Luke was becoming more and more of a maniac, and eventually I just wrapped up whatever I had selected so far and fucked off home. Ling and I both had had a gutful.

I bought a huge heap of tomatoes and peppers, as I wanted to make a cauldron of the same roast peppers/tomato soup from yesterday. I used my food mill this time to do the initial separation of seed and skin from the soup, before I sieved it. Seemed to be pretty silky when I poured it into the container. I have a gallon of the stuff chilling in the refrigerator now.

For dinner I took a cheap piece of flank steak, smashed it with Pa’s old meat tenderizing hammer, and rubbed it down with salt, pepper, olive oil, and the rest of the garlic in the house. This garlic was starting to get too old. I’d crack them open and find green shoots starting to form. I tried to sear the meat in my electric grill but didn’t get the browning action I had hoped for. Either it cooked too fast or their was too much liquid on the meat. Regardless the steak was quite juicy and nicely seasoned. I did a bias cut across the grain and served it spilled on a big bed of mixed lettuces. I picked out very strong, leafy lettuces that hold up to the heat and sop up the steak juice.

I accompanied the salad/steak with a dressing made from a few teaspoons of fierce English mustard, red vinegar, and olive oil emulsified with the handprocessor I was boasting about yesterday. It was an interesting, strong dressing that bordered on nose-clearing at times.

With some toasted slices of batard I used up some old button mushrooms by grinding them into a tapanade with some old (notice a pattern here?) anchovies from the refrigerator. Was nice but I should have reserved some mushroom for texture rather than totally pureeing it.

Dessert seems to be the one disaster of the night. I had a bin full of oranges and grapefruits so I took inspiration from a Nigel Slater recipe and, essentially, tried to make citrus and cardamon jello out of it. Except I used a weird asian gelatin-like stuff called Agar-Agar. Among the problems? I didn’t use enough of it, if it would even work at all in the strong citrus base. And I didn’t appreciate that the agar-agar was preseasoned with some sort of fake, nasty chemical orange flavoring. A few times tonight I’ve checked on martini glasses full of runny orange juice. Once I tasted it and nearly gagged. Imagine orange juice where someone has also poured in some cheap orange-aid-style powder. I think this dessert is destined for the drain by noon tomorrow.

Brewed up the remains of a couple kilograms of beans Lee brought me from Toby’s Estate in Sydney two weeks ago. Oh well, was nice while it lasted. Back to my Spinelli’s fallback starting tomorrow. One thing I don’t like, though, is Toby’s drinking chocolate. It’s not nearly sweet enough for my taste. I prefer the more pedestrian Ghirardelli drinking chocolate for my mochas.

The empty lot across the street will begin piling work soon. The heavy machinery will entertain Luke but no one else. Contractors have already been through the neighborhood documenting cracks in foundations as defense against future complaints and the foreman has been taking scrupulous care to introduce himself to everyone on the street to avoid future problems as they spend a few weeks driving 10m long rods into the ground.

Have spent almost no time at all on projects recently, ham radio, art, or anything else. Life mostly monopolized by work, Luke, and Japanese. At least all three are going decently.

Ha, despite what all my articles on food might lead you to believe, I am still maintaining fewer calories these days. I just spend my calories smarter. Have nearly a month of weight telemetry stored so far. I fed it into Tableau, my favorite visual data analysis software, and hopefully will have an interesting Tufte chart sooner or later to show.

This started out as a post about my iPod. It had a lot of zombie podcasts I couldn’t get rid of regardless of how much sync’ing I tried to do.  A surgical strike via Windows Explorer solved the problem and now my 2GB iPod Nano has a nice balance of JapanesePod101 podcasts and music.

I continue to study Japanese.  My attendance at class has been fine except for one night I had to skip in order to collect a prescription for Luke’s …ummmm … foreskin infection (ouch!).  I learned katakana myself because I got annoyed having to refer to the teacher’s legend. For some reason the syllabus doesn’t require us to learn katakana, however lots of vocabulary is in katakana.  Anyway, that was comparatively trivial.   Where am I now?

I haven’t mastered all the vocabulary in the chapters we’ve covered.

Trying to memorize the words off the long lists we have doesn’t work well for me.  I transcribed the vocabulary onto blank business cards used as flashcards. That seems to be a lot more effective. I probably have a hundred cards right now.  Something I’ve just realized is that I master words much more quickly if I cover them in dosages of 10-15 cards at a time, preferably in clusters of words that have something to do with each other.  I was trying to chew through chunks of fifty words at a time and found it terribly inefficient.

Given the stack of non-mastered words I have left, I should be able to knock it off by tomorrow evening.

One note is that presently I am not learning the Kanji, only the kana for each word. Kanji will be a separate effort.

I need/want more practice writing and speaking sentences using the grammar we’ve been taught. 

The class offers little time for much practice speaking and the assignments we’re given are relatively brief and don’t punish me with enough of the rote practice I feel I need.  I’ve been trying to “run laps” myself and write lots of sentences using the vocabulary and sentence constructs I know, but it doesn’t feel as exhaustive, exhuasting, or as thorough as I desire.  I think the solution will be to get a personal/private tutor to come by and work me over once or twice a week.

I was annoyed by my inability to competently operate my Canon G90 Wordtank

But now I see that the key is to learn kanji stroke order, so that will be a little side-project for  when I get tired from the more important vocabularly memorization and grammar practice points.  There are so many japanese language resources on the web that it seems almost sinful to pay money for a book on writing kanji.

I haven’t done much with my alternative learning tools lately

I’ve been too busy to have the time for other textbooks like my Manga-based tutorial and I haven’t spent much time listening to JapanesePod101 lately.  I’ve been running to work a few times each week, but I find listening to Glenn Gould play Bach has been the most comfortable companion, moreso than rock or Japanese lessons at any rate.  But now that I have my ipod de-constipated, I will fill it with a better range of practice material and so should steal an extra 15-20 minutes per day for study.

I guess that’s it for now. I have a stack of green flashcards howling for my attention.

Wasn’t planning anything extravagant for dinner, in fact had nothing in mind at all, after having feasted on a king crab for lunch.  I remembered a recipe for a chilled tomato soup in Nigel Slater’s Food Diary, so I looked it up.  I approximately followed his directions.

• Prepared a tray of five red momotaro tomatoes, a box of yellow cherry tomatos,  a yellow capsicum pepper and a few Japanese sansho peppers.  Dressed them in kosher salt, ground black pepper, chopped garlic, and olive oil.
• Baked for about forty-five minutes at 220c till it was a simmering, bubbling puddle, the skin of the tomatoes and pepper’s lightly burnt.
• Picked a few handfuls of basil from my old basil plants outside (they’re still kicking) and tossed that in a pot with a few hundred ml of chicken stock
• Poured the tray of roasted vegetables in with the stock and briefly boiled it.

At this point I broke away from his recipe. He called for letting some fraction of the tomatoes undisturbed, so that each soup bowl would have some chunkiness in it.  I realized that I didn’t chop my basil up anywhere near as much as it would require, so there would be a lot of nasty leaf matter in the soup if I didn’t puree it.

Long ago Ling bought what Braun calls a ‘handprocessor’ — a blender on a stick, essentially. I always thought it was gimmicky and remained a food processor snob.  But just over the last two days I started using it and find it frightfully good.  It is seriously powerful. I disintegrated an entire orange into nothing but juice and the finest pulp with it.  Ling uses it to crush ice for smoothies.  I used it to liquify the tomato soup while it was still in the pot.  It’s a lot more convenient than a food processor.  It helps that Ling bought the 600w monster.  I’d recommend this before I’d recommend any traditional blender.  A food processor doesn’t blend as well, but it does slice and dice things, which this cannot.

Anyway, now I had a liquified soup that was seasoned about as well as I have ever managed to season something.  I guess I had enough salt in it, plus the black pepper and a bit of heat from the japanese pepper finished it nicely.

The soup was supposed to be chilled, but I didn’t have a half day to wait, so I distributed it into a few a small stainless steel milk frothing pitchers, stuck them into a ice water bath and waited a while. I found that the cooling was quickest when I stirred the soup itself inside the pitcher (as opposed to moving the pitchers around in the ice bath).  In 15 minutes they were ready to eat, and by then I had prepared tiny, thin ciabatta toasts to float on the chilled soup.

The last thing I did was pour the soup through a strainer to catch rogue bits of tomato seeds, skin, and connective tissue. Tomato seeds are bitter when bitten, and since it was a smooth cool soup, I saw no reason to have lumps. Glad I did.

It turned out to be a really nice soup. We finished up our broad bean/dill hummus, and that was our entire dinner.  Mmmm.

Today is the first day of Chinese New Year. Most everything is closed except indian restaurants and fast food. Ling and I were trying to figure out what to eat for lunch. Fastfood is off the list for sure, and Indian didn’t sound very good — heavy and oily. Ling had a smart idea of eating one of the hokkaido king crab tarabakani we had in the freezer.

It was a simple matter to steam that and prepare some clarified butter, but I did something additional that was a really nice side dish. In the latest Nigel Slater book he talks about a hummus-like dish made from broadbeans and dill. So I put that together

• 250g broad beans
• 10g (a package) of fresh dill
• half a lemon’s juice
• olive oil
• salt and pepper

I blended it together with a hand mixer then ate it with ciabatta bread I brushed with olive oil and toasted on the electric grill.
It was good in its own right, but the serendipitous twist was this: dill is a great herb for crab. They complement each other.   So the hummous side dish and crab were great accompaniments.

Now I have the crab remains and some old vegetables turning into stock under the pressure cooker.

This evening I made my first stab at cooking Dan Dan Mein.

My approximate recipe:

1. Made a soffrito of onion and garlic in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan. Wok-cooking doesn’t work for me. I’ve never seen how to do it properly and my stove burners are too anemic anyway. Plus, I don’t think that high temperature flash-searing is appropriate for what I was doing anyway.
2. Tossed in several handfuls 1/8″ thick slices (cut across the grain) of fresh boiled bamboo along with some more peanut oil, rice wine vingegar, and some sort of dark Chinese cooking wine.
3. Browned in a small packet of ground pork. Perhaps two cups’ worth max.
4. Added several teaspoons of ground szechuan pepper, a handful of szechuan red chillis, and a teaspoon or so of chilli oil.
5. Let cook a bit and then tossed in the ya cai preserved vegetables and poured in some hot water to make the whole mess more soupy
6. Kept tasting and periodically adding more spices… especially chilli oil and ground pepper. Also put in sugar, tamari sauce, and salt.
7. When there was enough water to make it soupy, I ladelled in several tablespoons of tahini as well as a generous handful of freshly-roasted, ground peanuts.
8. I couldn’t get the heat to the level I wanted, so I kept adding more chilli oil and dried chillis. I’m not sure how much difference it made.
9. Threw some packets of frozen udon into the boiling water. They cook nearly instantly are reasonably decent. Not too sticky or gelatinous.
10. Handful of udon in each bowl covered with a generous ladle or two of the dan-dan mixture.

Results? I’d give it a C and think I can get it to a B- or B with some changes:

1. Put the ya cai in last. In cannot withstand much simmering before it disintegrates.
2. Give it more liquid. It was too dry for my taste. I want a hot liquid to slurp that is spicy enough to curl my tongue.
3. Ling thought the heat level was fine, but I would have liked it several degrees hotter. I am not sure what I need to do to give it that kick. What is the appropriate spice to use? The ground pepper doesn’t seem to make the dish much hotter, only gives it a stronger black-pepper taste. The chilli oil also seemed to lose its efficacy at hight dosages. Perhaps the dried red chillis I used I should have been using either far more, or chopping them up finely, or letting them simmer for a long time to drive the heat out of them and into the food. I don’t care for basic chilli powder spice — it tends to be crude, hot, and uninteresting. Perhaps I just woefully underestimated how much chilli oil a good dan-dan mian requires? (for that matter, the chilli oil is little more than sesame oil with chilli powder, so maybe I shouldn’t be so cavalier in dismissing simple chilli powder as the answer).
4. Not sure if there are some other dimensional flavors I could add. I think I maxed out the sesame/peanut vector nicely. The heat fell short. Wonder if I should have pushed some other dimension harder, like sour or something.

Anyway, not a bad dinner. It was too much calories today though. That tahini and peanut and pork plus noodle adds up. I’ll have to write off the idea of eating anything else tonight.

1. For the chili oil: Heat the oil until it is just beginning to smoke.
2. Remove from heat, add the hot red pepper flakes, and stir.
3. The mixture will foam, and will smell very strong!
4. It can be kept for months under refrigeration.

I just tried this. I’ll put a photo essay on Flickr.

The thing I like most about this recipe is that it provides for all the guests to mix up their own sauce to their own tastes. It sounds like a very nice family time.

One of my long-term aspirations is to have a couple retreats spread around the world. I want a cabin in a remote, blasted corner of a mountainous desert, four hours’ drive from nowhere. I also want a cabin in forested mountains somewhere in Japan. I even have thought it would be nice to have a cabin tucked away somewhere in the Appalachians.

I read with interest an article in today’s ‘Escapes’ section of the New York times about companies selling tiny, pre-fabricated homes.

The two companies that looked most interesting at first were Alchemy Architects and Blue Sky Mod. Some of those other ones looked like clapboard shanties or ridiculous glass boxes. $100,000USD for a house construction is not cheap, and my guess is that actually getting a house delivered and installed to a nice remote site is an expensive operation. $10k? $15k?

I was very excited when I bought my Canon Wordtank G90. It has a stylus that lets you write kanji on the screen and then it deciphers it for you.

Theoretically.

I struggled to use it while I was in Japan. I had high hopes that when I returned to Singapore I would figure it out, write a nice little guide, and then translate away. It’s been much more of a slog than that. I have enormous difficulties writing kanji that it recognizes.

Tonight I was trying to practice with it, using some of the simpler kanji from lessons from JapanesePod101. I was trying to write, for instance,　せんのう　’Emperor of Japan’. (*) 　The first character I could write relatively easily, it’s simple. The second I struggled for fifteen minutes. In vain. I could never get it to work. I’d either run out of time or it would just misread whatever I was writing.

I know the wordtank kanji recognition is sensitive to stroke order. I looked at some quick stroke order primers and my brain had a buffer overload.

In distress, I called on Ling to come show me how she’d write it. She took one glance and dashed out a (I thought) shabby-looking copy of what I saw on the original kanji. I tried several time to replicate that order on my wordtank and failed. Ling grabbed the pen, scribbled her kanji scrawl, and the computer recognized it instantly and accurately. ugh.

So I guess I really will have learn how to write these stroke orders. Any good primers on this? Ugh.

(*) For some reason the Microsoft japanese keyboard system doesn’t know or recongize the kanjii for せんのう。 Dunno why. Maybe I’m using it wrong, but none of the options work, whether I try to browse the options individually on せん　and のう　　　or together as せんのう. I tried to cut-and-paste that kanji from adobe, but when I pasted it, all it showed was “??”.

Had a craving for really salty pretzels yesterday. Of course they sell pathetic little dried out, low-salt things here. Decided I should make my own.

Was wondering where I could find sufficiently large salt crystals for some real nice salty pretzel rods. Then when I reviewed the recipe in my Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft book I remember what stopped me the first time I thought of this.

It wasn’t the need for big salt crystals (I guess i could grow my own anyway). It was the fact that to get that beautiful, tough, thick brown coating on pretzels you have to seak the pretzel in bath of lye before you bake them.

Not sure where I’d get lye in the first place, and not really sure how motivated I am to play with it in the second place.

But boy, it could be nice if the recipe worked nicely. Make up a box of 36 giant pretzels with some yellow mustard. mmmmmmmmm

Maybe I’ll gather up the gumption to do it later. I don’t want to make the sissy lye-free recipes and produce some chewy, bready, blonde pretzels. Yuk.

“We are rich. You guys aren’t getting it. The $1 million/year that it will cost is like a rounding error in our business (enterprise software).”

- Philip Greenspun

I love the irony of this quote.  It turns out that, in fact, Arsdigta was the rounding error in enterprise software industry.

My colleagues in Tokyo generally eat as a pack that dashes out between trading hours for a no-nonsense thirty-minute meal somewhere. Each time I go there, at least once per week they go to various Chinese restaurants for something they call Tan Tan Mian.

Most restaurants cook the dish differently from each other, but my favorite manifestation of it is as a quite-spicy soup in a thick broth strongly tasting of peanuts and sesame. The noodles are fairly plump.

Looking around the web for decent recipes for it I find many that seem to be a much more meaty/less brothy recipe. It looks more like a bolognaise sauce than noodles in a hearty broth.

I’d like to make exactly what I eat at the best place I’ve tried in Tokyo, but I guess that is going to take some experimentation because I don’t see much consistency among the recipes.

Ingredients I am guessing I’ll need:

• Some of these recipes call for “Szechuan red peppercorns,” or “huajiao” (”flower pepper”) in Chinese. These give Szechuan food its distinctive taste. Cayenne or red chili peppers are NOT interchangeable with Szechuan peppercorns! Huajiao is inexpensive and can be found in many Chinese specialty groceries stores.
• My guess is the sesame/peanut taste principally comes from using tahini. Not sure if there is a Chinese variation to Tahini. Most tahini I’ve bought is more of a North African ingredient.
• Wheat noodles.  Not sure if buckwheat counts.  I guess I could try soba, but I remember the noodles being thicker, more substantial than soba. So perhaps udon is a better choice. I like udon more, anyway, and is also made from wheat.
• Ya Cai or some other preserved vegetable. I can always find something decent from a Japanese grocer.  They love preserved vegetables too.

I guess this will be a weekend experiment at some point. All the sesame paste and noodles doesn’t make for an especially low-calorie meal, so I shouldn’t hurry to do this.

Watched an Alton Brown episode on Cheese while I ate a Cuban sandwich. The bread, very fresh Batard, was the best thing about the sandwich. I’m afraid I overcooked the pork so it was dry and doesn’t have much flavor.  Oh well, will try again. I bought “I’m Just Here For the Food,” so I think I will learn more about the right way to cook succulent pork loin.

This cheese episode was pretty lame.  It was a terribly superficial coverage of all the major cheese families.  Superficial at a useless level really.  Cheese is so deep a subject that I think it would be better covered in a series in they style of Floyd Uncorked.

mds weightXtimeOriginally uploaded by karavshin.

I’ve been burning off about two hundred grams per day since I started trying. That’s about 3kg (6 pounds) in two weeks. Seems like decent progress to me.

I didn’t really know what I was doing when I first started by I laid three ground rules for myself and decided to figure out the rest as I went.

1. No weird fucking diet plans. I have zero interest in these weird plans like the Atkins diets where you eat only fat and protein, no carbohydrates, or stick to strange daily regimens (one kiwi fruit and a prawn cracker for breakfast) etc. etc. There are an infinite number of these crackpots schemes. They’re at best ludicrous and unsustainable (kiwi and prawn crackers) and at worst bad for your health (man is not designed to eat so much protein and fat alone).
2. I’m not David Blaine. I’m no more going to starve myself of food than I would freeze myself in a block of ice or live underwater for a week. Acts of absurd self-discipline always break down. All it takes is time.
3. Exercise will be part of the plan. Skinny weak and unfit is still weak and unfit. Gross.

So what did I do? I had already browsed Jeremy Zawodny’s series of articles about losing weight. And I had also read an online book, “The Hacker’s Diet.” My first move from that was to frequently weigh myself as well as track my calorie intake. Excel spreadsheet of course.

I soon found that counting exact calories is a shaky progress. Until someone designs a portable, tareable weighing scale, my estimates of how many calories I eat will be poor. I did work at it, but I found calculating the calories tedious. What was better, however, was just the act of recording what I was eating. The real trick to this was eating less, and moreover, eating less shit. I don’t need to note whether that Krispy Kreme donut was 275 or 350 calories. It’s irrelevant, it was shit and I didn’t need to eat it. So my spreadsheet counting calories has become more of a food confessional that is relatively easy to maintain. I like to highlight when I eat garbage and make scathing comments beside it. I feel brightest when I look and see a mostly-vegetable day.

So the confessional helps. It especially helps after reading the Hacker Diet, which emphasizes that you need to run a calorie deficit. The important point it makes is that exercise is a terribly inefficient way to generate that deficit — an hour of exercise might burn as little as three hundred calories. It’s far more efficient just to not eat the marginal piece of shit.I keep that nugget of wisdom in mind and it becomes very easy to decline things when I have the urge, or to select the less-sinful alternative. Just forgoing a few bits and pieces a day contributes in the same way an hour of running would.

So how have I changed my diet?

For lunch I’ve tried to totally dump snacking on garbage (junk foods, candy, etc.) I keep a relatively light lunch. No soft drinks, no potato chip side dishes, no soups, etc. If my mouth gets itchy later in the day I either eat fruit or drink water till I’m not hungry any more.

For dinner I’ve done two things: (a) reduce portion size and (b) massively increased the proportion of fruit and vegetables I eat. Here is where I discovered some diet folklore to be total bullshit. The common knowledge is eating for a diet is going to result in bland, boring, bad food. Rubbish. It’s only bland, boring, and bad because it’s prepared stupidly.
Food tastes good because it’s nicely cooked, nicely dressed, and is made from nice ingredients. What I discovered is that there is nothing magical about meat, pasta, and dairy as a dinner. It just turns out that it’s easiest to make something that tastes good out of meat, pasta, and dairy than from fruits and vegetables.
Vegetables and fruits taste worse because people buy garbage from the grocer and cook it without the same attention they’d cook meat, pasta, or dairy. So I told myself, “I’m going to buy the best vegetables and fruits available, I’m going to buy lots of them, in huge variety, and I’m going to cook them with the care they deserve.”

In practical terms, that means we get most of our fruit and vegetables from the various Japanese grocery stores and pay the consequent price. However, the stuff tastes really good. Instead of tired sacks of green grapes and red deicious apples we have bags of Japanese grapes that taste like candy and Momotaro tomatoes we just slice raw with a tiny bit of sea salt. When vegetabes taste good enough, they become a much easier substitute.

It also brings up another point. The other night, dinner was enoki mushrooms, zuchinni, onions, and asparagus. How’d I make it? I brushed it down with fruity olive oil and grilled it on my electric grill, then sprinkled it with some sea salt. Ewww olive oil and salt, right? Well, from my perspective eliminating these flavor force-multipliers (olive oil and salt, in particular) is idiotic. They’re not the pareto solution to losing weight. Most of the calories I ate came from the big ticket items, the meat, pasta, and dairy, not the drizzles of virgin olive oil. Thus I cook my vegetables lavishly and with a clean conscious.

Food is a big pleasure in life, so giving up pleasant meals is unimaginable. So I conscientiously decide to skimp on the unimportant meals (lunch being the best example) but then one important meals, not feel guilty.

For example, today we had an early Reunion Dinner since Tien-Lee is back for the weekend. We went to a very nice Chinese restaurant. I ate some really indulgent dishes: Teochew crab, wasabi prawn, a sweet steamed fish, and some rich fish maw soup. I didn’t hold back on that experience, but I didn’t make it a binge — I skipped their house speciality which involved some preperation of foie gras (pure cholesterol and fat), and I skipped the steamed rice (there was no need for it when the fish tasted so sweet and tender on its own).
And then again this evening… I had four quarts of crab stock I made from our King Crab weekend. So I prepared an ad-hoc recipe for risotto made from that crab stock, a chunk of nice parmesan, and topped with crab from a Hairy Crab we had in the freezer, and some beautiful scallops from Japan. So yeah, not a low-calorie dish, but the portion was much smaller than what I would have eaten in the past. When I was hungry later we tore through a bag of grapes from Korea (Koreans are getting really good with their fruits — it’s almost as good as Japanese, especially the grapes) and some fresh strawberries drizzled with balsamic vinegar. So I am, again, guilt-free.

My biggest failing last week was exercise. I did almost nothing. Between work, and oversleeping, and getting home late from Japanese lessons, I never had the vigor to run to work. I’ll be better about it next week because I will be more conscientious about earlier bedtime. As well, I leeched an access card to the hotel pool next door, so I’ll be able to swim during lunch on days that I have Japanese or otherwise didn’t feel like running to work. So that should help. After all 3500 calories burnt sheds a pound of fat. That is around an extra three pounds per month on top of whatever calorie deficit I’m running.

Not a bad episode. Did enough to make me hungry even though I had my dinner already.  Cooked several different sandwiches and also gave some sandwich wisdom:

1. Soft fillings are best served on soft bread  This is true for things like egg salad sandwiches, which merely squirt out of a hard roll.
2. When using wet ingredients apply a moisture barrier to the bread (mayonnaise,  butter, cream cheese, or oil)  [butter? yuk. only in Britain]  I do hate wet bread (do you hear me, Subway?!?!), but the only “moisture barrier” listed there I could tolerate would be mayo, and in only small proportions.
3. Avoid placing slippery ingredients next to each other
4. Never use bread you wouldn’t eat on its own. Yeah, I think 40% of the sandwich is getting nice hard rolls that are soft on the inside. Easy to come by in the USA, not so easy in Singapore.  There is a lot of bad bread here.

I did not like  the French sandwich he made, a Pan-Bagnat.  The best description of it would be a Salad Nicoise packed into a hollowed-out French loaf.  It seemed like way too much filling (especially tuna and, urk, green peppers) and not enough bread.  I did like the vinagrette (add the oil slowly as you whisk so that it emulsifies) idea — reminds me of hoagies from The Pizza Pub.
The sandwich I am most intrigued by is called a ‘Cuban’ and it hails from Miami.  It’s a mix of slow-roasted pork from a citrus marinade with a dill pickle slice, provolone or swiss, mustard, and ham.  They heat it up in a sandwich press till it’s something of an ingot.   I may make myself a pork roast this weekend and try out this recipe.   Maybe I’ll have some decent pack lunches the following week.

I know Aunt She-She is dying to read my next review of an Alton Brown episode, so tonight while I ate a big plate of grilled asparagus, onion, and enoki mushroom, I watched an early season one Alton Brown episode, “The Egg Files.”

Nothing special… how to cook an egg over-easy, scrambled eggs, and an egg “curd” (lemon and egg custard). Fair enough, I guess I like at least the first two things. I’m not a huge fan of the fried egg recipe though. It requires flipping the pan. That might work if I got to practice on fifty eggs one afternoon, but I’m not so much of an ovophile(?) to bother. Anyway, I like omelettes, and I used Mastering the Art of French Cooking to learn that already.

Think I might skip ahead to a later episode and watch the chilli episode. Check back soon, She-She!

Watched Alton Brown’s episode on coffee, True Brew. The only reason it didn’t do much for me was that I am quite fond of coffee and have spent lots of time studying it already, so there was nothing new to me. But he did break it down into a process for making dependably decent coffee that would benefit most people.

I suppose he chose a manual drip over a french press because a french press is a bit of a mess which leaves (charming heh) silt in the brew. Most master roasters will say that french press is the best method. However, his drip looked pretty good, and he emphasized a trick seldom discussed: get your freshly-brewed coffee into a thermos FAST. Then is stays warm and doesn’t spoil.

I agreed with his brew time (4 minutes) and his rough ratio of coffee:water, an emphasis on lots of coffee:water. It will be LESS bitter because each grain of coffee suffers less extraction. The good stuff in coffee comes out first, and the bitter nasty shit comes out later. Extract as little from each grain as you can get away with.

Of course he kept his beans in an airtight container. Speaking of airtight containers, my mom bought me a small coffee bean bin that seals up and, unbelievably, manages to run small vacuum pump from four AA batteries for around two to three weeks. It really does make a difference. I would estimate it adds 20%+ to the bean’s shelf life. This is not immaterial with the expensive beans I pull from Tokyo or Sydney. I like this gadget much more than I might have expected.

My kitchen shelf has all the Jamie Oliver cookbooks. They’re dog-eared, stained, and used.   Jamie Oliver makes me hungry.  Every recipe has an attractive photo and alluring descriptions of its clean, simple ingredients.   There are few Jamie Oliver recipes that require too much technical ability. The few things that do (making risotto, raw pasta, pastries) he manages to describe well enough and describe a just-dumb-enough recipe that generally works.  His real magic is demonstrating time after time that simple, high-quality, fresh ingredients in a simple recipe is just as fast and tastes better than regular fare. He also repeatedly shows how simple, quality ingredients (olive oil, fresh herbs, real parmesan, etc) turn a routine dish into a memorable dish.

Nigel Slater has a similar approach.  He makes up for fewer sexy food photos by writing great prose. I enjoy reading his long recipe descriptions that tend to be more like essays or journal entries than a conventional recipe.  He emphasizes simple, fast recipes made from fresh, simple, pure ingredients.

The Reference is undoubtedly Mastering The Art of French Cooking.  This is The Seminal. Have a question? It is answered in beyond-amazing detai.  Have any western European dish in mind?  It has that recipe plus six variations.  Does it make me hungry? Never. It’s like a textbook. There isn’t a photo to be found, it’s all hand-sketched diagrams of butchering spatchcock chicken or rolling poulet bread.  This is very much a reference book to consult when you know what you want to cook.  It’s absolutely essential, but not inspiring. For instance, reading its sections on meat gravies was critical to me finally making a decent turkey gravy.  Learning how to cook beautiful crepes also came from its recipes and techniques. No one else comes close in explaining these things.

The latest food writer I’ve discovered [hat tip to RogerWarez] is Alton Brown, who is principally a TV host.  I downloaded all eight seasons of his “Alton Brown’s Good Eats” tv show from the Food Network.  He created a very unique niche in food programming.  He generally takes one dish or cooking problem, breaks it down into the technical theory behind it,  and then explains a very well-tested and effective solution for it.  It’s wrapped in vaguely loopy, tacky entertainment, but the core of his show is really good.  I really appreciate the level of technical accuracy he introduces to the cooking concepts.  Some of my best technical successes have come from him recently, including a deep fried turkey, barbequeued ribs, and king crab.   His cooking is very US-centric. These are foods we’ve generally all eaten but maybe have never prepared (for example corn dogs).

I have all his episodes but have only watched a small fraction. I’ve used them more like reference works when I need something in particular and if I am free I’ll watch others for inspiriation. (The episode about chili is beckoning me next).

I am sure my mom is wondering why I haven’t mentioned our perennial Everyone’s Friendly Uncle, Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet.