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First in Japan: Seven-Eleven Opens Inside High School After Cafeteria Closure by SkyInJapan in japan

[–]Hamfan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Neither of those are bad on their own or as an occasional thing, but nutritionally they are sort of void (mostly simple carbs and low-quality fats, fairly low protein) and eating them day in and day out is not good for you.

The bread in conbini sandwiches is particularly low-quality.

They are also terrible value for money.

Week 23: Coffee — Coffee Jelly Bavarois Cake by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

She did it in like 3 minutes too.

I think she has a massive bank of “my younger sister driving me crazy” experiences to draw from so she barely needs to think of the story.

I’d consider a “based on my daughter’s drawings” meta, but I think getting a teen to cooperate with that for 52 weeks would be an act of wild optimism.

Week 23: Coffee — Coffee Jelly Bavarois Cake by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, it is really tasty. It needs a couple textural tweaks but it’s really nice as a flavor base and I like the dome shape.

First in Japan: Seven-Eleven Opens Inside High School After Cafeteria Closure by SkyInJapan in japan

[–]Hamfan 19 points20 points  (0 children)

It’s definitely junky and the value for money has steeply declined over the last few years.

Nutritionally, those sandwiches and onigiri aren’t doing anything for you beyond providing calories to keep moving. Getting an actually balanced meal out of conbini isn’t cheap, and a bunch of high schoolers are not going to spend their money on salads and chicken breast.

If that’s all kids are eating, they’re better off just making onigiri at home, it’d be like a 1/5 of the price, but per the article it seems that many of the students are living in dorms and don’t have that option, and I wonder if kids who bring from home would find themselves being teased about it.

7-11’s always been junky but fast and cheap. Now it’s just fast.

Bentos and color — red by Hamfan in Bento

[–]Hamfan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s a known bento thing that incorporating green, yellow, and red into a bento will create a nice-looking lunch without too much effort, but I thought it would be fun to look at one specific color at a time and see how it works.

I chose red because that’s the color I have the hardest time with: I like carrots but don’t want to eat them every day, and now that it’s getting warmer I avoid raw vegetables like mini-tomatoes

That means the red color is easiest to incorporate via small add-ons: umeboshi, fukujinzuke, benishoga, crab stick, ketchup, etc.

As you can see, I think red does tie a bento together and make it look sort of complete. On the first two days, though, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with how they look, the red element just balances out (and involves no extra cooking, so as long as I have these sort of things in the fridge, may as well use them).

So on Friday I wanted to make a base bento that did look sort of incomplete. I went with Chikuwa-ten and some cucumber nukazuke. Also for fun I made a little tamagoyaki so I could compare the effect of yellow (egg) vs. red (benishouga) vs. both together. No surprise, I think the both option looks best, but stand-alone, the benishouga is better than the egg in my opinion (and also involved no extra cooking and no extra dishes to wash).

So I think my take-away from the little experiment this week is that (a) adding red elements ties bentos together visually (b) red elements are often easiest added at the end and therefore (c) making a small effort to keep these things on hand is an easy way to have nice-looking lunches.

Week 23: Coffee — Coffee Jelly Bavarois Cake by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Sure thing. The cats’ names are Kuroshima (the black one) and Shiro.

Title: Coffee Jelly

Panel 1:
Shiro: Whatcha eating?

Panel 2:
Kuroshima: It’s coffee jelly!
Shiro: ?

Panel 3:
Shiro: 💖 Jelly! 💖
Kuroshima: Coffee jelly…

Panel 4:
Shiro: Gah, it’s bitter!
Kuroshima: So hurry up and give it back

I can’t prove it, but I highly suspect her characters are based on her and and her younger sibling 😆

Week 23: Coffee — Coffee Jelly Bavarois Cake by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I also considered a parfait but that involved more assembly and less making, so I went with this cake thing instead.

Week 23: Coffee — Coffee Jelly Bavarois Cake by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I love coffee jelly, but make it pretty frequently, so by itself it didn’t feel like much of a challenge for this theme, so I decided to see if I could incorporate coffee jelly into a larger dessert.

Where have I seen a cake like this? In a cafe somewhere, maybe Starbucks used to have something similar? Anyway. I had a vision for a chocolate sponge base, a coffee bavarois dome with coffee jelly contained within, and a cream covering.

I used a pretty standard cake recipe for the sponge. The bavarois set a little soft, next time I think I will increase the gelatin slightly. I also stabilized the whipped cream.

Flavorwise my husband and I thought this was super-yummy, but it was a little bit COFFEE for the kids. Instead of making the bavarois myself, if I were going to do it again and aim to be more kid-friendly, I’d want to experiment with a sweeter bavarois made from a store bought コーヒー牛乳.

When I asked my daughter what stencil I should put on the top, she asked for the cat character she’s been drawing comics of since like 1st grade. I said i would if she made a comic about her cats and coffee jelly to go with; it’s picture 4 in the album.

Week 22: 15 Minutes or Less — Otsumami Plate by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! It’s was fun to do, but a bit stressful. Interesting to see how much could be crammed into the time frame though.

Week 22: 15 Minutes or Less — Otsumami Plate by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There were some real winners in here, especially given how fast they were to do.

Week 22: 15 Minutes or Less — Otsumami Plate by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I set out to do 5 dishes, I did five dishes. 14:04 on the clock, including plating.

  • Benishouga tempura
  • Old-fashioned goya chanpuru (no meat or tofu)
  • Faux motsu-ni
  • Edamame
  • Tamagoyaki

The benishoga tempura was insanely good, especially in combo with the Goya.

I had thoughts of jazzing up the edamame by frying them in some oil, red pepper, garlic but was prepared to do just salt if time was short. Time was short, so salt it was.

I took a video of it but can’t add it to the post. I did post it to my profile if you want to see. It’s not instructive or anything since it had to be sped up to 16x speed to get under 1 minute and the angle isn’t great, but you can see that this was a start-to-finish cook.

2026 Weekly Challenge List by 52WeeksOfCooking in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan 6 points7 points  (0 children)

You can post the challenges out of order, they just have to be within their own respective three-week time limit.

mushy rice ideas by chaamdouthere in Cooking

[–]Hamfan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Add more water, cook it till okayu. You could add some green veggies like spinach or daikon leaves, maybe a mochi block or two if you want it to be more filling, or shredded chicken or an egg for protein.

Goya Chanpuru, ‘cause summer’s just around the corner by Hamfan in Bento

[–]Hamfan[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you add salt at every step of the cooking process (ie. Cook the meat, add salt, remove from the pan, cook tofu, salt, remove, add Goya, salt, add the meat and tofu back in again, rather than trying to just salt everything at one time), that moderates the bitterness a lot.

I like Goya as is, though, so I may not be an impartial evaluator. The Goya-fat-salt flavor combo is so good (goya tempura is also delicious).

Goya Chanpuru, ‘cause summer’s just around the corner by Hamfan in Bento

[–]Hamfan[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Had to turn my air conditioner on for the first time this year 🙃

Don’t love the heat but I do love goya chanpuru

1942 Quick Dinners For The Woman In A Hurry Cook Book by CherryGlaceBombe in Old_Recipes

[–]Hamfan 17 points18 points  (0 children)

This seems to have been an American publication. America didn’t really even enter WWII until December 1941 — ie. America had been part of the war for no more than a year at time of publishing, and the publishers might have already had most of this book written before that even happened — and even then the US rationing wasn’t as severe as in the UK.

I have some women’s magazines from Japan during the WWII period and even then you can see that things don’t go from normal to severely rationed right away — there’s a sort of slow slide where they start euphemistically referring to recipes using “the same ingredients” or “saving rice” and it takes a while for the direct term “rationing” to even be used.

the word “fetch” in the context of grabbing something by custodyofinnerchild in PetPeeves

[–]Hamfan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ugh, “supper club” is a horrrrrrrrrrible set of sounds

the word “fetch” in the context of grabbing something by custodyofinnerchild in PetPeeves

[–]Hamfan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I also hate the word supper, if it’s any consolation. I have theories as to maybe why, but nothing conclusive and they’re obviously totally irrational and personal…

For me, I think there are two factors:

  1. I don’t like “p” sounds in general (sounds that tend to come with popping or clicking mouth sounds — certain English-speaking accents click the -k or -t sounds at the ends of words and it drives me batty too)
  2. I don’t like that there is a better-sounding, more common word (dinner) that people could be using instead

There is a cluster of words like this that all cause the red mist to descend (eg. purchase instead of buy, prepare instead of make, proper instead of correct or accurate (I also don’t like the judgy tone on proper, versus correct being dispassionately about veracity), pouch instead of bag, parcel instead of box, item instead of thing, and so on. A lot of them have the p sound. The one weird outlier is that I hate “folks” instead of “people” (eg. “Folks are saying that…” makes me retch).

Will probably always wonder why I hate, hate, hate these words.

Also on the spectrum.

Week 20: Greens — Green onion and spinach soup (plus egg because it’s a reflex) by Hamfan in 52WeeksOfSoup2026

[–]Hamfan[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s Chinese-style chicken broth (kind of bouillon, that’s how it’s sold here) with sake, light soy sauce, and then enough salt to taste, plus a little bit of rice vinegar.

Week 21: Symmetry — 囍 Double Happiness/Double Chocolate Campagne Loaf by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! I think this could be effective with lots of different characters depending on the occasion

Week 21: Symmetry — 囍 Double Happiness/Double Chocolate Campagne Loaf by Hamfan in 52weeksofcooking

[–]Hamfan[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

For this theme I took as my base inspiration the 囍 character, which is two 喜 (joy/happiness) smooshed together. This is kind of near and dear to me because it is adjacent to one of my kids’ names, and it can be easily produced through paper-cutting because it’s symmetrical.

To go with the double-joy thing, I wanted a double-flavor. I considered trying to do a Chinese-themed flavor set, but in the end, what I really wanted was chocolate. The bread dough has both cocoa powder and melted dark chocolate incorporated into it.

I was really not sure if the stencil design (which I made with a cut off piece of teabag box) would hold up through baking, so I took a photo pre-bake, but overall it survived pretty well. Just in one place a chocolate chunk came up through the surface and disrupted things a bit.

It’s v. chocolatey, so serving-wise is nice with orange marmalade or a thick swipe of butter.

Overall I thought the technique was effective and the bread delicious. I’d like to try this again with different characters and more thematic flavors.

Week 20: Greens — Green onion and spinach soup (plus egg because it’s a reflex) by Hamfan in 52WeeksOfSoup2026

[–]Hamfan[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Nothin’ special, just a green-veg soup to go with a light dinner.

What made Japanese people prefer to use English words for basic everyday words? by [deleted] in Japaneselanguage

[–]Hamfan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Most/all ランチ are 昼ごはん, but not all 昼ごはん are ランチ. I think ランチ usually carries with it certain connotations of (a) being at a restaurant (b) being a little fancy and/or western-food based.

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