Registration is OPEN!

Wanna learn how to make this?

Temaki Sushi - hand-rolled cones

Learn how in my course “Japanese Home-Cooking: An Introduction“, offered through UBC’s Continuing Studies. This course is my second at UBC, and will feature a new series of recipes to build your Japanese cooking skills and impress your friends. It runs 3 Mondays (May 30, June 6 & June 13) and I’ve just heard that registration is already open.

Fall term’s course was a success, with great (and delicious) results.

Fall 2010 Japanese Home-Cooking

Sign up now! Spaces are limited and the courses fill up quickly!

Thank You for Smoking our knives

Searching the web for a video illustrating Japanses omuraisu (rice omellette) technique, I happened upon this utterly incongruous promo for “Thank you for Smoking”, the movie starring Aaron Eckhart as cold-hearted, smooth talking, big tobacco spin doctor.

I would like to have been in the advertising meeting where someone pitched the idea for a “Big Tobacco Satire knife”. Perhaps they were convinced that people who love the sharp edge of satire also love sharp knives.

Oh, and the rice omellette? Still an impressive feat of omellettery:

Forking Full

Hurrah! My class at UBC is full! Thanks to those of you who shared the info with your friends and family.

Final groceries to be bought tomorrow, our menu is going to be:

• Rice
• Miso Soup with usuage tofu slices
• Chilled hiyayakko with shiso
• Sunomono salad
• Shioyaki salmon

Stay tuned for some pictures of the results.

Let’s forking!

Let’s Forking with Students

Want to learn how to make this at home?

Home-cooking: The basics

There are still a few spots left in the Japanese Home Cooking class I’ll be teaching at the University of British Columbia this October. Register soon, as spaces are limited!

Tempting Tarako

I have often been mocked for my extreme love of the ovum of the ocean – roe. Within only a handful of postings on this new site, I have already mentioned mentaiko (spiced tarako, or haddock roe) in 4 posts, including three recipes using the ingredient: Wafu (wahoo!) Mentaiko Pasta, Mentaiko on Rice and Mentaiko on Toast.   But I’m pleased to say that even my pleasure of the pelagic egg has been out-done by this ad, which celebrates tarako – haddock or cod roe.

Let’s enjoying vigorous song of pasta advertisement!

Let’s Porking

After 15 years of abstinence, I’ve decided it’s time to once again fork with pork. I swore off of meat at 16, after what seemed like an unnecessary (and unnecessarily time-consuming) dissection in Biology 11, but will now take the plunge and am looking for a good porking.

Since my hardcore days in teenage-hood, I’ve gone back to forking with fish (living in Japan for 3 years without eating fish or meat would have been equivalent to a hunger strike every time I left my house) but have abstained from other meats for the rest of those 15 years. Now that I do enjoy a good feast of moules I have begun to re-examine why I’ve not eaten meat, when clearly my blood-lust is enough to overcome dunking a live crab into a giant cauldron of boiling water in order to crack it’s skeleton, tear out its flesh and dunk it into a bowl of melted garlic butter before shoving it into my maw. If not for the animals, then why? The environment? My health? The ethical rearing of the animals? Yes, yes, and yes – but then a modest to rare consumption of organic and ethically raised meat should therefore (pardon the pun) make the cut.

It’s true that most meat just doesn’t appeal to me any longer. The blood-red of a medium rare steak, the neon pink glow of lunch meat, it all just looks like so many other unappealing foods that only lead to high cholesterol and the gout. But there has always been one thing that has been calling out to me these past 15 years, one thing that I have missed – sausage. And not just any sausage, but a good German weisswurst, flecked with herbs, served with sauerkraut, hot mustard, and a crusty roll. I can almost feel that splash of hot meat juice that flicks up into your face when you take that first bite, and hear that satisfying snap that only happens when a good sausage with a real casing is barbequed over an open grill.

Clearly, I need to satisfy my need for a good porking. Just once… to see if I like it.

As you can imagine, a gal who hasn’t touched meat in 15 years hasn’t the slightest clue on where to get a good quality, ethically raised weisswurst sausage in the Vancouver area. Please, please, please – I’m begging you for your help. Leave your comments on this posting or send your suggestions to letsforking@gmail.com before the August long weekend, when I lose my sausage virginity all over again.

Help this gal get the porking she deserves - turn this into REAL meat

Let’s porking!

Pound House

I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of Engrish, able to decipher the intention of most signs and Engrish-isms. After annual visits to Japan and three years of living here, however, one tends to get used to the funny and often unintentionally pun-y phrases emblazoned on T-shirts, mugs, and posters in Japan. So it was to my delight that I ran into this storefront:

Shall we Pound?

Forking Insanity: Jamiroquai’s Cup Noodle Commercial

Forking Bizarre. I have been wandering around Japan with this Jamiroquai song stuck in my head for days on end, not knowing why. Not usually a follower of “Japan is so weird!” tidbits, I can’t help but share this post I found on the blog http://tokyomango.com/ (full of “Japan is so weird” bits and bites). This commercial must have been playing on the television while I wasn’t paying attention.

It won’t seem strange unless you listen to the lyrics – part-way through, they change to the Japanese “hara hetta” (= “I’m hungry”) and “kappu nuudoru naiyo” (= “I don’t have any cup noodle”).

I don’t know about you, but using this song and video to promote cup noodle seems like a bit of forking insanity…

Let’s Forking for the first time!

Recently out of work and with two months to go before starting a Master’s program,  it’s time to get forking serious about a cookbook project that’s been hanging over my head for years now. With a stalled food blog and the outline and first chapter intro to this ever-present, yet never-presented cookbook, the next two months are all about “forking” and writing. And what better way to get started than with a culinary adventure to the motherland?

Welcome to Japan.

I arrived on July 1^st and will be here for three weeks, staying with my good friend M (with whom I wrote Two Girls Forking) and then later on with my grandma, eating, sweating, laughing, and hopefully forking up a storm (not with granny, thank you very much!) and busily writing recipes for the book and the cooking class I’ll be teaching in the fall.

Internet access is spotty, so please indulge the upcoming bundled updates of my daily forking adventures in Japan.

Let’s forking!