Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Sorry about the qualifiers... I just wanted you all to know what the best is! :)

I actually didn't mean for it be a meme... rather a sort of reference list (yes I know, I need to get up the descriptions faster)

@mochihead yep I mean Baby Star Ramen (but we always called it Baby Ramen growing up. It represents the category of dagashi. Yes, explanation coming soonish.)

@KirkK - this is a list of food I like, not 'omg can I hold my nose long enough to get this thing that smells like an unclean toilet in my mouth' !

@CandyAddictSera: 'Authentic' Italian restaurants do just fine in Japan, and live happily with restaurants serving yohshoku - just like Italian-American places that serve very unauthentic fare as far as the 'purists' go like spaghetti with meatballs and bright red sauce do in the U.S. (try finding that in Italy! But it's delcious anyway, no?)

Traditionally, mochi and azuki beans together are never eaten as a savory dish. The azuki are always sweetened. There is osekihan (red rice and beans) which uses mochi (sweet) rice, and is savory...but that doesn't help you since you have the mochi cakes I am assuming, not the rice. So...you can try making a savory version of zenzai/oshiruko I guess by omitting the sugar...or using minimal sugar and adding salt besides.

What i would do myself though is have the beans on their own (I am not overly fond of sweet oshiruko myself, and have no idea how omitting the sugar would affect things) and make yakimochi with cheese or something (just bake them in the oven until they start to puff up, put some slices of sharp cheese on top, and bake some more until melty.) Cheese + mochi = very good.

Toraya used to have a full tea room / restaurant in New York, on the UES. Unfortunately it didn't do as well as they expected, and it closed down a few years ago. My sister was a chef there...now she's basically out of the restaurant biz (not much demand for wagashi shokunin (chef) in the US...and she did not want to move to Japan.) The Toraya in the Kinokuniya bookstore just sells their readymade things, like yokan.

I have one wagashi recipe on my blog, for ohagi or botamochi...this is something that people do make quite often at home in Japan, or at least my mother and aunts do. (There's also a basic recipe for tsubuan, and also, though it's not wagashi, castella.)

Other than that I have to say it didn't occur to me to post wagashi recipes...I didn't think people would be much interested. I'll try to if there is the demand for it though... I'll ask my sister for tips!

To be fair, David was focusing on the French side on the Paris markets. He knows way more abou Paris than I do, but elsewhere in France (Provence, Burgundy, Languedoc) I've found an abundance of locally grown produce. No problem at all finding French grown tomatoes, in season, either. The hypermarchés are another issue...

Sliced thin and eaten like sashimi, dipped in soy sauce with a bit of wasabi.

Even though I make no-knead bread a lot, I would not recommend it as the starting point for a new bread baker, since it doesn't teach you much in the way of actual bread making skills.

There are two oldish books that I still rely on constantly. While neither has pretty pictures, they both have fantastic instructions to start you on the way to being a good bread maker. One is Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book Of Breads. It has a 'your first loaf' (I'm too lazy to walk down the the cookbook bookcase at the moment) which is a very good place to start. It also has hundreds of other recipes, including (once you are further along on the bread making road) very complete instructions for making your own croissants.

I like this book because it's not at all snobby in the way some books dedicated to Artisanal whatever can be. It even has a recipe for dog biscuits.

The other, which is good if you get interested in whole wheat/ alternative grain baking, is Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. It has tremendous instructions for making a real whole wheat, as in no added white flour to make things easier, loaf.

Do you need one? If you bake or intend to get into baking, especially pastries and cakes, yes. If you are on the kind of diet that requires you to do portion control yes. If you follow a lot of non-American recipes (American ones tend to go for the cups and spoons, just about the rest of the world does metric measurements) yes.

Any decent digital scale is fine, and most are way under $50. Just about every modern digital scale has these needed features:

- TARE (where you press a button to subtract the weight of the container you're putting the ingredients you want to measure in)
- very long lasting on one change of batteries
- big, easy to read numbers
- easy to clean off your floury/greasy fingerprints
- easy switching from metric to old skool

In terms of brands...I had a Soehnle, which was at least 12 years old, and finally broke when it was dropped from a high shelf onto the kitchen (tile) floor and was smashed to bits. So, I got another, rather fancier Soehnle. They are a bit expensive...but durable. And look really nice.They do have under $50 models. But I'm sure other manufacturers' models are fine too, if they have the above features. For what it's worth, Escali got a Consumer Reports best value or something award.

With a good set of measuring cups and measuring spoons to go with your scale, you'd be all set to measure anything you want to.

It's not the AP slamming Chinese food to be precise, but the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food nanny group that seems awfully adept at getting lots of publicity. There was an interesting article about them some time ago that i linked to last year. The title just about says it - The Anti-Pleasure Principle: The "food police" and the pseudoscience of self-denial.

I would second the recommendation for Kuhn Rikon. (I do tend to swear generally by Swiss Quality.) I have a 20+ year old one I recently inherited. Except for the printed timing instructions on the lid having rubbed off a bit, and replacing the rubber gasket, it still works flawlessly. I keep meaning to write up a love of pressure cookers post one day...I'll around to it eventually.

Besides for meat, a pressure cooker is fantastic for the vegetarian or mostly-veg eater, since it handles legumes and grains so well and so fast. Beans are cooked in 30 minutes, quinoa in 5, etc. Fantastic.