4 posts from 2008

From Just Hungry

A List of 100 Japanese Foods To Try At Least Once

1. Properly washed and cooked, top quality new harvest white rice (shinmai)
2. Freshly made tofu, as hiyayakko or yudofu
3. Properly made misoshiru and osumashi
4. Properly made homemade nukazuke
5. Very fresh sanma (saury), sizzling hot from the grill, eaten with a drizzle of soy sauce and a mound of grated daikon radish
6. Homemade umeboshi
7. Freshly made, piping hot crispy tempura. I prefer vegetable tempura like shiso leaves, eggplant and sweet potato.
8. A whole grilled wild matsutake
9. Freshly made sobagaki with sobayu
10. Mentaiko from Fukuoka, or tarako
11. Onigiri with the three classic fillings: umeboshi, okaka, shiozaki
12. Assorted fresh-as-possible sashimi
13. Saba oshizushi
14. Mugicha
15. Kakifurai
16. Morinaga High-Chew candy, grape flavor
17. Karasumi
18. A pot of oden, preferably with homemade components especially ganmodoki, boiled eggs and daikon radish
19. Ika no shiokara
20. Calpis
21. Ankou nabe
22. Unadon
23. Komochi kombu or kazunoko
24. Yamakake, grated yamaimo with maguro (red tuna) cubes (or just with a raw egg)
25. Properly made gyokuro shincha
26. Milky Candy
27. Wanko soba
28. Omuraisu with demi-glace sauce
29. Handmade katayaki senbei
30. Yohkan (yokan) from Toraya
31. Ishi yakiimo - sweet potatoes cooked in hot stones, available from street vendor carts
32. Natto
33. Fresh seaweed sunomono (can also have some tako in it)
34. Ikura or sujiko
35. Tonkatsu
36. Goma dofu
37. Chawan mushi or tamago dofu - the same dish either piping hot or ice cold
38. Freshly made mochi, with kinako and sugar, grated daikon and soy sauce or natto
39. Gindara no kasuzuke
40. Hoshigaki
41. Inarizushi
42. Chikuzen-ni
43. Surume
44. Yakinasu with grated ginger
45. Tamago kake gohan
46. Kabuki-age
47. Nikujaga
48. Spinach gomaae
49. Fuki no tou
50. Okonomiyaki
51. Yakitori
52. Ohagi
53. Japanese style curry, with rakkyo and fukujinzuke as condiments
54. Kenchinjiru
55. Yakult
56. Kakipea
57. Takoyaki
58. Sakura mochi
59. Buta no kakuni
60. Daigaku imo
61. Kappa Ebisen
62. Chicken tsukune
63. Hakusaizuke
64. Hayashi rice
65. Goya champuruu
66. Dorayaki
67. Ochazuke
68. Sakuma Drops
69. Stewed kiriboshi daikon
70. Takenoko gohan (or in fall, kuri gohan)
71. Cream or potato korokke
72. Fresh yuba
73. Real ramen
74. Monaka
75. Ekiben of all kinds
76. Edamame
77. Chicken karaage
78. Kuzumochi
79. Mitarashi dango
80. Konnyaku no dengaku
81. Yukimi Daifuku
82. Sukiyaki
83. Nama yatsuhashi
84. Panfried hanpen
85. Nozawanazuke or Takanazuke
86. Kiritanpo
87. Amanatto
88. Narazuke
89. Aji no himono
90. Baby Ramen
91. Kobucha
92. Kasutera
93. Tazukuri
94. Karintou
95. Sauce Yakisoba
96. Kamaboko
97. Oyako donburi
98. Atsuyaki tamago
99. Kuri kinton
100. Japanese potato salad

"Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food - but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results."

1. Venison

33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar

37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat (I've had a goat stew but not curried)
42. Whole insects (chocolate covered ants and grasshoppers)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin 
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (if you really mean one of the ingredients in Kaopectate, I have)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian

66. Frogs’ legs (First time was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Louisiana when I was about 8)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis

69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette (chit'lins)
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill 

76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (or something similar).
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam 
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Gee, I guess there's not much I won't try.  I sorta hate to say it but I'd even try dog if I was in a country where it was a common food. 

Okay, I hate memes but I love reading lists so when I saw this on another blog I decided to use it as a prod to add some new titles to my next library trip.  I read in such infrequent small bits of time anymore that it takes me forever to read a single book (although I just read a book in its entirety during lunch -- hmm, could this be why graphic novels are so popular?).  So. . .

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. [Note:  I'm going to asterisk the unread titles I own for my own info]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel *
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote *
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov *
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad *
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations

American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books *
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex *
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel *
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo *
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys *
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels *
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time *
Dune
The Prince *
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present

Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere *
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything *
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel *
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences *
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I'm surprised how few of these were read for a class.   And how many I've started and not finished.  Part of that could be the aforementioned slow reading combined with the fact that I exclusively get books from the library and end up returning things either before I've started them or after I've started but for whatever reason had to return and didn't re-check out.  That is true of Mailer's last book - The Castle in the Forest - I was enjoying it but didn't finish before it was due.  Okay, I'm going to the library tonight to pick up some holds -- I'll see if it is there and start where I left off.