Last week I posted matcha cookies, today is a rice cake. Matcha is a very fine green tea powder that is used for Japanese tea ceremony. With a very distinctive fresh clean taste, today matcha is enjoyed in ice-cream, desserts, chocolate, lattes and many other delicacies. My favorite is the matcha ice cream. The other …
Matcha is a powdered Japanese green tea made from very young leaves. This gives it a very vivid green color and clean taste. When combined with butter, matcha makes a savory buttery cookie with a hint of bitterness yet very flavorful. The Japanese have a wonderful recipe exchange website called Cookpad, that my Japanese girlfriend turned me on …
Feeling a bit tired or need a protein boost? These little chocolate protein bites uses tofu as the vegetable protein. If you eat protein bars, you will have a good idea what this will taste like. It has that soy flavor, that is commonly used in those energy bars. Now, if you don’t like tofu, …
During the hot and humid summer months in Japan, a popular desert is coffee jelly, or coffee jello or coffee gelatin, or which ever way you wish to call it. The Japanese pronounce this as co hee zelly. I always wondered why they said zelly. There is a “j” in their alphabet, so it’s not …
Ovens in Asia are not as common as they are in the West. This is because homes in the East are generally much smaller and their kitchens are compact. Unlike the large ovens that we have in the United States, the most common oven is the toaster oven. This is due to the fact that it …
Doesn’t this look most appetizing? Fresh juicy grapefruit is thirst quenching and most refreshing, making it a wonderful dessert to a fish or seafood meal. This could also be used as a palette cleanser between courses and just a healthy snack too! This grapefruit jelly, taught to me by my girlfriend Fumiko, uses fresh grapefruit as …
Have you ever bit into fruit that was so dry and tasteless, that you ended up not eating it? Buying good fruit is not always easy but hope these three tips can help. I know only 3 sounds so little but I found that in this day and age of information overload, sometimes too many …
Cheese can add a little zing to your daily menu; a little feta in a salad, some cheddar to an omelet, Gruyere to a quiche, Parmesan on pasta and the list goes on. That’s why it’s always nice to have a variety of cheeses in the refrigerator. A good quality cheese can get quite …
Omiyage is the Japanese custom of gift giving. It is usually a souvenir from your travels or from your home town. For the office worker who goes on an out of town trip, usually a box of the local delicacy is the most common omiyage. I used to travel throughout Japan, and at the town’s …
