ur_gothmom

I could have sworn I'd written this down in my cookbook or saved it in my gmail recipes folder, but apparently I didn't, so I'll put it here.

生姜湯 (shouga-yu) is a Japanese hot ginger drink that I love, especially during cold and flu season. I first had it when I was living in Japan, when I could buy pouches of just-add-boiling-water powder. Similar to the Chinese-style ginger honey drink mix my dad has bought from the Asian market for years, shouga-yu is sweet and gingery tasting, perfect for when you're sick or maybe coming down with something. Unlike the Chinese version, it's not as spicy and has a thick texture and throat-coating ability from the inclusion of 片栗粉 (katakuriko), potato starch. I would buy boxes of five or six sachets from the pharmacy; then I discovered the Osaka Costco stocked it in bulk and drank it all winter.

Much to my disappointment, after I came home I couldn't find those sachets in any of the Asian markets near me, but I figured I must be able to make it from scratch. It turns out to be fairly easy to put together as long as you have the components on hand. In theory you should grate the ginger fresh and use just the juice for the most canonical version, but I use jarred ginger paste since I resent any drink recipe that takes longer than putting things in a mug and don't mind chewing a few ginger bits.

This is barely a recipe and all the quantities are extremely customizable. Use any sweetener you like, adjusting the quantity to your taste. Use more or less ginger. You can even use more or less potato starch if you like it thinner or thicker. 

Ingredients: (makes 1 serving)

1 tsp katakuriko/potato starch
2 tsps COLD water
1 tsp ginger paste
2 tsps honey
about 1 cup hot or boiling water

1. In a mug, combine the potato starch and cold water, mix until dissolved. (Don't skip this step or you'll end up with hot ginger water over a thin layer of hard-set gel.)

2. Add the ginger and honey.

3. Add the hot water and stir well. Enjoy!

or, how an internet rabbit hole led me to actionable info for improving the Potato Experience

After a tumblr post talking about how etiquette guides can help with learning all those unspoken rules of behaviour that give the socially awkward so much trouble, I found my way to the delightfully named Were You Raised by Wolves? podcast. In this episode, among reader questions and other points of good or bad manners, one host asks the other about their baked potato eating (or, more specifically, cutting) technique, and informs her she's been Doing It Wrong. Specifically, according to such illustrious sources as Emily Post and Don't Eat Like a Boob (1917), vegetables including potatoes are never supposed to know the touch of a knife, and instead should be opened with the fork. The host sounded, frankly, disgusted by the idea and said she would not be changing her baked potato technique to conform to an outdated rule.

But I was curious.

Wondering how well forking a potato open would even work, I turned to youtube and found a video that... well... you should really just watch for yourself.


Now, this woman is more excited about a baked potato than I think I've ever been, but you can see why: instead of the potato flesh being sealed into smooth cut sides by the knife, using a fork to open the potato leaves the edges fluffy and almost corrugated, with a truly obscene amount of surface area for your butter and other toppings to melt into.

This past weekend, my dad did some boiled new potatoes so I was able to try the fork method, just adding some butter and salt. And... oh my god. It's so good. Not only is this my new go-to potato technique, I'll be trying it on sweet potatoes too, and any other vegetable it might feasibly work on.

So go forth and fork your potatoes! Rejoice in knowing that sometimes what's polite and what's delicious align perfectly.

This recipe was posted by Twitter user @maya_koikeda and is as of this writing still up.

I've translated it into English. It's a really good way to use up leftover KFC, and it's worth earmarking two pieces from the bucket for in advance. Koikeda-san mentions in her tweet that according to the friend who taught her to make this, this makes the best omurice, which I haven't tried yet but I definitely believe. I've never tried making it with non-KFC fried chicken but I don't see why you couldn't. A well-seasoned fried chicken will probably have the best results.

NB: This recipe is for a rice cooker where rice is measured with the included measuring cup and water is measured by the markings on the inside of the rice bowl. If you want to convert this recipe to another type of measurements, feel free; that is beyond my scope.

Ingredients:

1/2 - scant 1 tsp Chinese stock paste (I use whatever chicken stock granules or paste I have on hand)

Wash and drain the rice as usual and add it to the rice cooker bowl. Add water to come up to the 2 cup mark on the inside of the bowl.
Take out 1 tsp of water (so the soy sauce doesn't increase the amount of cooking liquid).
Add the soy sauce and stock paste or granules, and lightly mix. (You can add some black pepper at this stage if you like.)
Lay the chicken on top and cook on the rice cooker's regular setting.
When the rice is finished cooking, remove the chicken to a plate or bowl. Carefully remove the bones (don't burn yourself!). Shred the chicken and mix in to the rice.

Koikeda-san suggests serving with finely sliced green onions or topping with some butter while it's hot. Or just devour!

Public health are currently warning people in my city about measles exposures. We'll get back to this.

There's a popular tumblr post that circulates regularly by someone who stopped their years-long use of dandruff shampoo, only to have their dandruff come back, with an important addition from tumblr user thomranierskies, a transplant patient, which I will reproduce in full:


This is something that happens at a personal level and at a population level. People stop using their dandruff shampoo or stop taking their meds because they think the problem is gone. People stop following public health precautions because "nobody gets [problem] anymore" or even because they forget what problem the precautions are being used to prevent. Scurvy was cured in the 18th century and then the institutional knowledge was lost and only rediscovered in the early 20th.

If you ask the average person if they're concerned about scurvy, they'd probably say, "Nobody gets scurvy anymore." This is mostly true, but maybe not for the reasons they think. It's certainly not because scurvy has been "eradicated" (I'd pedantically say it's impossible to eradicate a nutrient deficiency) but because most people in the west in the 21st century have mostly decent access to fresh foods and lots of packaged foods fortified with vitamin C and any other number of ways to get that vitamin into their bodies. If you stop getting vitamin C, you 100% will get scurvy. A (very smart) friend of mine has in fact had scurvy twice* and the first time was lucky enough to be seen by a doctor who wasn't from a western country where "nobody gets scurvy anymore" who immediately recognized the symptoms from having seen it in their home country.

Scurvy has the advantages of being very treatable and not contagious. But I think a similar thought process (with much more dangerous outcome) is happening when people say "Nobody gets measles anymore" or "Nobody gets polio anymore" or, arguably even more concerning, "Nobody gets rabies anymore" and decides to stop vaccinating their children and/or pets.

We vaccinate the majority of the population against measles and polio, etc. We vaccinate the majority of our pets against rabies. Which means cases as a whole go down because the vaccines are working. Unfortunately, people are stupid. They no longer see the consequences of not vaccinating, and think "Nobody gets measles anymore, why should I subject my kid to this?" They stop vaccinating. Now we have measles cases again and public health has to frantically try to find everyone who was e.g. in an airport or on a subway on a particular day.

So what, we're supposed to just keep getting vaccinated forever? Well, maybe, and if so it's (partly) our stupid fault.

We actually know what happens when humanity successfully eradicates (not just massively decreases number of cases) a disease. We did it once, with smallpox. Most people reading this post probably have not been vaccinated against smallpox (shoutout to the Boomers, oldest Gen X, and gay men immunized during the mpox outbreak if you're here) because we for-real got rid of smallpox, all of it, and then we didn't need to routinely give that vaccine to everyone anymore. In theory we could maybe do this again one day for measles and polio (since cursory googling tells me these diseases exist only in humans) but we're not there yet, and as numbers of unvaccinated people go up we get farther and farther from that goal. We will probably never get there for rabies or other diseases with reservoirs in wild animal populations, which unfortunately includes covid now.

This post is long enough without going into, say, hygiene and all the diseases we're preventing with regular bathing, or all the "disruptor" types who want to "shake things up" and have spent literally 0 time thinking about why we do things the way we do them (safety regulations are written in blood, etc. etc.) but those connections very much are there to be made. When it comes to public health, this universal human tendency towards stupidity needs to be planned for and worked around.


*It turns out when you get very depressed and eat only tea and toast it takes a surprisingly short time to develop the first symptoms of scurvy. If you're in the throes of a depressive episode maybe take a multivitamin or something.

Do people who aren't writers/editors think about this kind of thing? I was talking with some friends at work today about it and made this for our chat, but I'm so proud of it I need somewhere else to keep it

( Naughty words after the cut )

Tofu dengaku is a recipe I've read about in my Japanese cookbook collection for years (I don't have a problem, I can quit anytime I want) but never actually tried, mostly because I am extremely lazy when it comes to pulling out the charcoal grill. But tonight I had a block of tofu that needed using and now that I have an air fryer this was feasible.

And GOD it's good. Extremely simple, extremely low-effort high-reward, great paired with rice and a veggie. The recipe is slightly adapted from Philips' Japanese-language air fryer cookbook.

1 block firm tofu
2 Tbsps miso
1 Tbsp mirin
1/2 Tbsp sugar
1/2 Tbsp sake

Note: I pressed my tofu for a couple hours but honestly next time I probably won't even do that, to get more contrast between the crispy outside and squidgy inside. If you don't like squidgy tofu, use extra-firm or press it longer.

Butcher the tofu into four equal slabs. Now let them dry for 5-10 minutes. Philips recommends putting them on a strainer but I just put some paper towel on the cutting board and let the pieces rest on that while I mixed the dengaku sauce (the recipe recommended adding four minced green onions but I didn't have any so went without).

Preheat the air fryer to 400°F. When it was hot I sprayed the basket with a little oil and added the tofu pieces, lying flat. If you can't fit all four slabs at once you'll have to do batches.

Cook the tofu for 5 minutes. Then pull the basket out and using a spoon, top each slab with the sauce. You basically want to put on as much as each slab will take without sauce running down the sides. Then slide the basket carefully back in and cook for five more minutes or until the sauce is caramelized but not burnt. (Or juuust starting to burn around the edges.)

It is honestly phenomenal, equally as good as my other favourite air fryer tofu recipe but way lower effort. One for the regular rotation.

I've been reading for as long as I can remember. Literally; I learned to read by the time I was about three, so I don't actually remember the process of learning, but my parents tell me I essentially taught myself. I don't remember much about how reading was taught in my elementary school, either, since I was already zipping through Nancy Drews while everyone else was learning the basics, except for my grade three teacher's USSR time (that's "uninterrupted, sustained silent reading") one morning a week. But I do have vague memories of being told to sound it out when I used to come to words that were long and unfamiliar.

Which is why the Sold a Story podcast series has been SO mind-blowing. Little did I know, over the past several decades, a theory of how people read that is completely wrong was adopted by tons of schools all over the English-speaking world. It was disproved by Harvard neuroscientists in the 1990s, but it's still being used in some schools to this day. Please go listen to it; it's one of the most shocking things I've heard this year.

It seems so obvious, so self-evident, that in order to read you have to... actually... read. You have to look at the letters and sound out the words. How could it be that thousands of teachers were convinced the opposite is true? The podcast doesn't go into the implications, but that's what I find really chilling: this has been out there in the wild for decades, meaning that a significant proportion of kids, teens, and adults have grown up functionally illiterate. What does this mean for our society? How do we collectively undo the harm from this? Is that even possible?

Just testing out posting from my phone, ignore me