At the end of the above video is the following message:

First, I would like to say thank you to all of our viewers for supporting our show.  Today I am afraid I have some very sad news. On January 15th, Chef sustained serious injuries while riding her bicycle in the suburbs of Tokyo. She was rushed to the ICU by helicopter. I certainly understand your worries and concerns. She is now in stable condition, but unfortunately I am unable to give any further information at this time. I would like to apologize in advance for not being able to respond to your messages during this tragic turn of events.

Cooking with Dog is my primary source of Japanese cooking education, as well as being a bi-monthly treat I look forward to with great enthusiasm; to say I am upset about Chef’s accident is an understatement.  I love her.  She is my secret Japanese mom. The careful and economical movements of her hands, the tidy and proficient way she navigates her micro-kitchen, her soft speech, all of it is a great joy to me.  I wish her the speediest of recoveries, and I invite you to do the same.

Perhaps the best part is that they encourage making hand rolls so that all of that frustrating sushi-rolling can be abandoned in favor of mashing food into your food-hole.  Honestly, it’s very clever: just fold sheets of seaweed into quarters and they break apart into perfect squares.  Smear some sushi rice on each square.  Fold/roll/taco into any shape you want and then eat.  They’re good for two or three bites, so by the time they start falling apart you’re already done and ready for the next one.

Also, each time Yuko’s dinnerware just slays me.  Everyone’s plates had different little Totoro images on them.

Eel.  Stop avoiding it.  It’s delicious and soft and not fishy.  And if you order it at a Japanese restaurant the chances are that it will be covered in a teriyaki-like sauce, which makes everything edible.

Sol’s famous spicy tuna is still a mystery to me, even though he’s told me how to make it half a dozen times.  Every time I make it, it just does not turn out the fucking same.  He’s lying to me, I’m sure of it.  The famous anecdote about the spicy tuna is that many years ago Mike the Viking and Sol ate an entire cereal bowl of this stuff with spoons because Sol “accidentally” made too much.  They just ate it like ice cream.

You poor bastards.  You wish you were at this table with us.

We discovered that everyone, including the two people who actually were raised in Japan, held their chopsticks a little differently.  I thought I held mine totally wrong for years, but it turned out that I was closer that some.

AND THIS STUFF.  I hesitate to tell you the ingredients because I fear you won’t believe me when I say: it was infuriatingly good.  So simple: coconut milk, soy milk, a little sugar, some soft baby tapioca pearls and some tiny cubes of soft sweet potato.  I KNOW HOW IT SOUNDS.  But it was like… something fairy royalty is served when they are in bed in their jim-jams and just want a little something sweet and comforting to eat.  It made me feel six years old and safe and happy.

Also:

I’m serious, this is important.  Because for some reason ribbon candy is this impossible, mythological item, something that Baba Yaga gifts to the wayward traveler who has won her good graces.  And I know in my mind it should be thin and opalescent like glass, and each color should be a different flavor.  However, what I’d been finding in real life was thick, clumsy candy covered in flaws and breaks.  THIS DOES NOT FIT IN WITH MY SLAVIC FANTASY CHRISTMAS.

So, I was skipping through the frosty deep winter forest when I came across a box of Russell Stover ribbon candy for something like $2.  I clapped my hands and gnomes danced around me and little snowbirds burst across the sky like a whorl of ice crystals.

The best part is when you try to break a piece off it explodes into a thousand tiny shards, some of which fall to the floor and later stick to your socks.

They’re beautiful like edible Christmas ornaments and I keep looking at them with satisfaction, but I’m not sure there is anything practical about them at all.  I mean, that’s a dumb thing to say.  There’s clearly nothing practical about candy spun into fancifully antagonistic shapes, but what I mean is that I can’t think of a scenario where you won’t be picking slivers of sticky, half-melted candy out of the carpet, your clothes and the dog’s fur.  The upside is that they are tasty, and the white ribbon was vanilla flavored, which briefly broke my brain.

Hey, as long as you’re here, I want you to see something.  See, I knit.  I don’t talk about it here because then it’ll be a cooking and knitting website, and that path leads to kitten videos and talking about feelings and I think we’d all rather just drink an irresponsible amount of peppermint schnapps and argue about House Hunters.

But look at these ladies:

Her sweater says “Hello” but her eyes say “I’m going to land a hatchet between your fucking eyes, peasant.”

Hay now!  Some of us are happy to be wearing a mint green acrylic sweater!

In the meantime, I’m desperately addicted to this:

The short version is: it’s spicy juice.  The longer version is that they are sweetened, lightly flavored beverages with a smidgen of capsaicin in them, so they have a little bit of a burn.  The weirdest part is that my Crohn’s disease is not bothered in the least by it, and in fact the opposite.  I’ve been feeling pretty good lately, and the niacin-like rush of the capsaicin is no joke.

My only grief about the product is that I feel it could do with a little less sugar – while they don’t taste overly sugary, 40g per bottle is pretty much the upper limit of what I am comfortable consuming in a beverage and are what’s keeping me to one or two a week as a treat.  I guess I’m that nutbag asking them to make a sugar-free version, but there it is: some of us can’t digest sugar well and have to divvy up our sugar intake between the things we really can’t live without, like marshmallow milkshakes and bowls of Franken Berry for dinner.

Still, birthday cupcakes a full ten days after my birthday means I finally got some cake:

Though my birthday flowers retired rather dramatically:

My dad and The Thing That Lurks are getting along like Sean Connery and a lightly drunken woman, which is to say spectacularly:

While walking around Venice beach, I came across these hand-carved wooden spoons and immediately fell in great lust:

They had a Japanese sticker on them and I otherwise know no way to tell you how to get one, other than to say I got it at The Tortoise General Store and if you telephone them they might be able to tell you where to get one – they aren’t on the website.

It is, I believe, intended to be a rice spatula, but the overall construction is just too perfect to be limited to rice.  It’s very difficult to find short-handled spoons and spatulas in the US, though that doesn’t justify why I was rubbing it all over my face while waiting for my dad to pay for it.  What can I say, it’s very satiny.

I’ve been eyeing them with increasing impatience over the last few weeks, since they ostensibly turn dark before falling off the vine and then have an additional ripening period after that.  I mean, I don’t want to tell them how to do it or anything, but I’m pretty sure they’re taking too long.

And then!  This morning!  This one was totally green about three or four days ago and slowly started to turn ruddy.

This morning it was laying on the ground, which is apparently normal: they fall, you pick them up.  Another reason to love passion fruit.  Laziest harvest ever.  Bitchin!  Now it sits in a windowsill and waits to turn wrinkled, at which point it is done and we will fall upon it with the torpid bloodlust of a morally obstinate vampire finally allowed to marry a teenage girl.

Speaking of predatory!

He’s really slow and we named him Time Warner!

• Christopher’s Big Cherry
• Twin Bing
• Chase’s Cherry Mash
• Cherry Blossom

So, a few weeks ago commenter David Farris Creations mentioned on Anger Burger’s Facebook profile that he saw this cherry-peanut confection and offered to buy me one.  I demurred and then regretted it but that is what it is like to be me.

So, near Cannon Beach is the psychotronic terror-zone of Seaside.  In Seaside are several massive candy stores that specialize in regional,  “vintage” and strange candies, where I looked for a Owyhee Cherry Cocktail and immediately found one.  I had my doubts since it’s made by the Idaho Candy Company, makers of the Idaho Spud a.k.a., what would it taste like if we chocolate-coated a latex camping pad?

The Cherry Cocktail falls into the category of “Obviously Formed with an Ice Cream Scoop” candy, which also doesn’t inspire confidence.

But guess what?  I think this is my dream candy.

The Cherry Cocktail is packed with peanuts and ONCE AGAIN I’m sure I taste coconut but it isn’t listed on the ingredients.  The center is actually maraschino-flavored instead of just being a glacé cherry, and the whole thing is in perfect proportion to itself.  My sister and mother both had a bite of the Cherry Cocktail and each agreed: not too sweet, decent chocolate and good fresh roasted peanut flavor.  There really was little to be improved about it, save making an actual homemade gourmet version with premium chocolate.

Now I can rest easy.  Minus the part where I can’t find them back in Los Angeles.

Since the fried rice was the more successful of the dishes, I will show it to you.

The jam is a little reluctant to incorporate into the rice, and in hindsight I wish I’d mixed it together with the fish sauce to encourage a more even application, but it didn’t really matter in the end.  Instead, I’d spooned big globs into an area on the griddle free of rice and let it warm through for a few seconds before mixing it into the rice, repeating the technique until there was enough flavor to melt my toenail polish off my toes.

It was magnificent.  It may be my new favorite fried rice, and I love me some fried rice I tell you what.  A little too late in the cooking process I thought of adding pineapple, and when I said so Mike the Viking frowned and shot me in the hip with a crossbow, which is how he says “No thank you.”  Odd, too, considering that he likes pineapple on pizza.  If it were just me, I would have added pineapple.

A fried egg on top and some terrible photography ends this lesson; when you’re starving and the food smells amazing, you may want to try and take a step back, reset your white balance and maybe break the egg open so that the golden, runny yolk dribbles alluringly into your rice, then take a photo.  Or!  Just eat your dinner and then tell everyone about how beautiful it was later.  THE END.

Chili Jam Fried Rice
if you don’t eat beef,  any other protein would be tasty, though I’d lean towards shrimp, personally.  if using shrimp, do not add them until near the end of the cooking time for the fried rice to avoid overcooking.  better yet, fry them first until just barely cooked through, set them aside to continue cooking rice as instructed, and then add the shrimp just when done to warm through again.  i’m a tremendous fan of using cooked and then cooled rice to make fried rice, though using warm rice is acceptable in a pinch – just be aware that it will be wetter and will break down a little more than usual during frying.  many stores now sell frozen, cooked rice that is perfect for last-minute fried rice cravings – don’t even thaw it, just dump the frozen rice into the pan and have at it.

1 cup jasmine rice, cooked and cooled (making approx. 3 cups cooked rice)
1 Tbsp. mild oil, such as peanut
8oz. thinly sliced beef
1/2 onion, sliced into narrow strips
3 Tbsp. nam prik pao
1 Tbsp. fish sauce
2 Tbsp. soy sauce
2 Tbsp. sugar
1/2 cup pineapple tidbits, drained (optional)
juice of 1 lime
1/2 cup chopped basil (Thai holy basil if you can get it)
1 – 2 green onions, sliced thin
fried eggs

• Using a big electric skillet or a really big nonstick saute pan over medium-high heat, add the oil, let it warm through for 1 minute, and then add the beef and onions.  They should really pop and sizzle.  Let them cook for 1 -2 minutes, or until the onions just start to get transparent and/or get a tiny bit of color on them.  Add the rice and using a sturdy spatula, make chopping motions through the rice to break it up a little and stir the beef and onions through it.

• While the rice, beef and onions are sizzling, in a small bowl mix together the nam prik pao, fish sauce and soy sauce.  Drizzle this mixture over the rice and again, use a chopping motion to incorporate the liquid throughout the rice.  Sprinkle the sugar over the rice and add the pineapple tidbits.  Stir again.

• Allow the rice to sit undisturbed for about 30 seconds and then start using a flipping motion to stir the rice, like you’d flip hash browns.  The goal is to get lovely browned, caramelized bits of rice away from the heat while rotating unbrowned rice down to the pan surface.  If the rice isn’t browning, increase the wait time to 60 seconds.  If it is browning too quickly, lower the heat.

• Take a moment to taste the rice for saltiness and sweetness.  If it is not salty enough, add a little more soy sauce or fish sauce.  If it has no detectable sweetness, add 1 more Tbsp. of sugar.  If it seems just entirely underseasoned to you, add 1 more Tbsp of nam prik pao.

• Continue cooking the rice in this manner until the rice is no longer very wet and sticky, and until there are small patches of lovely browned rice visible when everything is stirred together.  In my experience, this takes about 5 minutes of cooking time, though it really does change depending on all kinds of factors – it’s taken me as long as 10 minutes to fry my rice properly.

• When done, turn off the heat and add the lime juice, basil and green onions – stir through to distribute.

• In a separate nonstick frying pan, quickly fry an egg over easy for each serving.  Take a poorly composed photo of your creation and then eat it.

I grabbed this bottle at total random the other day, mostly just because I’d been wanting to try a sparkling red wine for years.  And this bottle was $5 at Trader Joe’s, which doesn’t hurt.  Five dollars!  Some Google-fu suggests it might be at World Market as well, for those of you without a Trader Joe’s nearby.

So: La Grotte Reggiano Lambrusco?  Tastes like I imagined wine would taste.  And it’s fizzy!  Michael Jackson would have been pleased to serve this to his underage friends.  It’s refreshing and light, it’s very fruity and just a little floral (violets?), and borderline dangerous.  It’s chuggable.  It is a delightful summertime tipple for the unadventurous and lazy.  The bottle even recommends it paired with pizza – pizza – and they are absolutely right to do so.  We ate it with pasta salad, s’mores and True Blood, and it was perfection.  I’m going back to buy a half dozen bottles just as soon as possible, for I intend to be a wino this summer.

I don’t know what I thought it was going to be, but I fell upon it like a caveman handed an iPhone.

What the hell is going on with it?!  It’s like they can’t even package a bar of chocolate right.  And there’s a stick with indeterminate function.  It wasn’t until I reached the protective plastic shell (!) that I started to suspect something magical was going to happen to my face.

Oh shit, yes.  This isn’t a bar of chocolate.  This is a goddamn orgy where everyone is beautiful and generous and you are their fetish.  The pieces are solid little blocks of ganache, or the interior of a particularly fine chocolate truffle.  They are impossibly smooth textured and even more unbelievably smooth in flavor – there is zero bitterness (despite this being “bitter” flavor), none of the sharp sour notes that put me off so many dark chocolates. As someone who enjoys only the pussy versions of dark chocolate (Lindt, I love you, but lets be serious here), this dark chocolate nugget made me swoon.  Full on Anger Burger mode, like, the most amazing thing ever instantly followed by a feeling of pure rage BECAUSE WHY IS THIS NOT AVAILABLE FOR MY MOUTH ALL OF THE TIME?

I frantically set to the internet to find more info on this stuff, and while there is plenty to read, it’s not what I wanted to hear.  There appears to be no way to get this stuff in the US, or at least reliably.  I mean, sure, Japan.  Singapore.  Hong Kong.  Those bastards get to eat it whenever they want.  The rest of us have to make jet-setting friends and making friends is hard.

In all honesty, if you know anyone going to the Asian Pacific Rim and you can put in a request, please, please ask for Royce Nama Chocolates.  They come in a variety of flavors and I’m certain they are all the most amazing thing ever.  And then, you know, send me the empty package afterward so I can sleep with it inside my pillow case and dream about a better life.

¹ Or people who travel a lot, but if we’re being honest I just don’t know anyone that rich.
² Though no longer! THANKS FOR NOTHING, RADIATION.  Stupidest.  Meltdown.  Ever.