Mos Burger.

Not only is Mos Burger the best fast-food hamburger place around, not only does it have the best onion rings known to man, but they also have jalepenos!  If you order a Spicy Mos Burger, the “Spicy” you taste comes from chopped jalepenos that they stick in your burger sauce blap stuff.  Delicious! Even without the tilde.

If you like jalepenos, go to Mos Burger.

Do you have any fast food secrets?  Let me know in the comments!

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1. Other uses for old rice: fried rice and rice pudding

Yes, that’s right.  The apartment across the street!   Not very exciting.  But if you look a little to the left, you’ll see this:

Some more apartments, some cars, a pair of rice fields and… tsurushi-gaki!

So wait, what’s tsurushi-gaki?  I’ll tell you.

Japan has these fruits called “kaki“.  They have an English name too, persimmon, so some of you may know what they are.  I never saw one back in Texas so they were new to me.  Anyway, people around here grow them and so a lot of the time I’ll get them as gifts.  One problem though: I don’t like them!   The texture, the taste, the skin, the seeds.   Not my favorite fruit.  But there’s something magical you can do to them to make them taste awesome.  Turn them into tsurushi-gaki!

The word tsurushi-gaki comes from the verb 吊るす (tsurusu) which means “to hang, to suspend”, and the word 柿 (kaki) which is the fruit.  tsurushi-gakis are also called hoshi-gaki, from the verb 干す (hosu) “to hang outside”. (umeboshi gets its name from this too).

Anyway, tsurushi-gakis are just kakis left hanging outside for a while until they become dried kakis.  And they are delicious.  The perfect Christmas treat in Japan!  Here’s how to make them:

1. Get some kaki and get some string – sometimes they sell tsurushi-gaki kits like this one, but you can also just buy the individual fruits.

   

2. Peel the kaki, or get someone you love to do it for you while you take a picture.

   

3. Attach the kaki to your string. This can be tricky if you bought kaki that don’t have their stems intact. Be creative.

   

4. When you finish attaching all of your kakis, hold the string up and admire your work.

   

5. Hang your kakis outside.

   

6. Wait about one or two months. If it rains really hard, you might want to bring them in temporarily so they won’t get soaked and spoil. When they are done they should look something like this:

   

7. Enjoy your tsurushi-gakis. Eat it as is, add it to your cereal, whatever. Mmmmmm.. Delicious!  Even more delicious by the Christmas tree.

   

Kaki usually show up in stores around mid-fall and continue on into the winter. If you get them early enough, you can put them out and they will be ready just in time for Christmas (too late now, I know, sorry. But act now and you can have tsurushi-gakis for Setsubun!). We make these every year and for me it’s become one my images of Christmas in Japan (though Japanese people associate them more with New Years, but whatever).

Enjoy!

Do you have a tip for making cool Japanese food snacks?  Let me know!

Related posts:

1. How To Find A Christmas Tree In Japan
2. More Places To Find Christmas Trees In Japan
3. Find A Place To Stay In Japan With Gaijin House Japan

Thomas,

I enjoy your nihonhacks site and I wish it had been available to us when we lived in Tokyo from 1988 to 1991 and again from 1996 to 1999.

Another use for leftover rice that we enjoy is to make rice cakes for breakfast the next morning. Mix the rice with enough eggs to make a paste about the consistency of pancake batter. You can add a dash of vanilla extract but it’s not necessary. Then fry pancake size portions just like you would make pancakes: a few minutes on one side then turn it over and a few minutes on the other side. Don’t stir it up like you do for fried rice. Use a moderate to low heat to cook the rice mixture through without burning the surface. Then serve with butter and maple syrup, just like pancakes. A few rashers of bacon on the side is nice, too.

I learned this from my mother who used up leftover rice this way, but I’ve never seen this anywhere else. Hope you and your readers enjoy.

These sound so delicious that I’m going to cook some up this weekend, even if I have to use fresh rice. Thanks Bob!

Do you have any food saving tips? Send them in!

Related posts:

1. Other uses for old rice: fried rice and rice pudding
2. How to Never Waste Rice Again
3. Newly Harvested Rice – Shinmai

1. Fried Rice. A reader named Chesu explains:
   

   I fry my leftover rice. Cold, dry rice is perfect for fried rice, as it more readily absorbs the chicken stock, soy sauce, and whatever else you flavor it with. One cup of leftover rice becomes a very filling meal.

   Another reader, Stells, concurs:

   I always leftover rice to make bacon fried rice.

   Fry up some bacon and leftover veggies (cabbage, carrots, onion, etc), add the rice, and fry it all together. Mix in a dash of soy sauce, mirin, some spices (I like curry powder, pepper, and dried negi), and an egg (optional), and you have some bomb fried rice!

2. Rice Pudding. Reader Kirsten sends in this delicious idea:
   

   You could also make rice pudding with milk, egg, sugar, cinnamon, etc. A little taste of home.

   Prasanna from India also sends in a tip about rice pudding:

   Hi
   Ohiogozaimasu.
   I am from chennai , India. I am preparing for JLPT 3 exams. happened to see ur site.

   we eat rice 365 days in a year!!!. so always there is left over rice.

   one recipe for left over rice.

   to the soft unspoiled cooked rice add water and make it to soup consistency.Boil well. Add milk , sugar, raisins, roasted cashews and some essence.
   you have a nutritious dish . It is called “keer” in India. All the best

   I’m a sweet lover, so I’m going to try this rice pudding stuff out.

Thanks for the tips!

What do you guys do with your old rice? If you have any cool ideas, send them my way!

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1. Rice Pancakes For Breakfast
2. Zousui Revisited
3. How to Never Waste Rice Again

I decided to tempura batter and deep fry some ice cream with some of my Japanese friends. We had mixed results ;) But since it was one of my first times deep frying anything, I didn’t know what to do about the left over oil! My friends suggestion that I strain it and use the oil again but I didn’t want to have used oil lying around since I never plan to deep fry anything ever again! bleh.

My friend then suggested this stuff:
固めるテンプル (katameru tenpuru)
It’s very easy, you just add it to hot oil and let it sit for a while. It’ll solidify and then you can throw the whole thing out! (I’m sure you’ve heard of it before)

But, since I can’t read Japanese all too well, I went online looking for an easy explanation of what this stuff was and what I could expect from it. I ended up finding a number of websites showing how to make candles out of regular oil and this powder!

http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/people/sugicom/kazuo/neta/bake14.html

I haven’t tried it yet but it seems interesting. Have you ever seen something like that before?

The package might look something like this:

Thanks Nina!

NinaSama also sent in a tip request. Can anyone help?

Recently I went to Hiroshima for the Sake festival. I know that Sake can leave me with a horrible hang over the next day so I decided to check out some 飲み薬 at the conbini. I found this stuff called “gold” something-or-other ginger drink. I was told that if you drink it before drinking alcohol that you should be fine the next day. I had my doubts since the source was a bit unreliable. But I drank it and I was in fact fine. But I can’t tell if that’s just because I’m a morning person or I just drank less sake than I thought.

So, basically, I was wondering if you knew of any good Japanese drinks that help cure/prevent a hang over. Things other than just Pocari sweat and other sports drinks that my friends usually drink to try and cure themselves. They don’t really work for me :P

Thank you for reading all my long winded explanations! Thanks for writing such a great blog!!!

Anybody know any anti-hangover tips? I hardly drink at all anymore, so I have no idea! If you have any solutions, please leave a comment!

No related posts.

Why are wild fish better for you? BrainReady explains (the article mentions salmon, but whatever):

It’s also important to know that only WILD salmon has been shown to contain the highest levels of the good stuff that your brain & body crave…as wild-caught fish grow and evolve their muscles, tissues and fat levels the hard way, fighting for survival of the fittest in the oceans and rivers. By contrast, many or most farm-raised salmon exist in a locked-up, artificial and sometimes contaminated environment and thus have to be fed food (or worse, color added later just before going to market!) to make them LOOK orange and healthy instead of white and sickly. Ewww!

Ok, so we know that wild fish are better than farm-raised fish when it comes to nutrition. How do we know which one we are buying at the grocery store? Look no further than the label. For fish that are farmed, the word 養殖 (ようしょく [youshoku]) will appear on the package. This word means something like “bred”, “raised”, “cultivated”. Stores are required to indicate farm-raised fish this way.

For wild fish (ie. the good kind), there are a couple different ways stores do it.

1. They will write 天然 (てんねん [tennen]) on the label. This word means something like “natural”. Tennen fish are caught out in the water, not raised in a fish farm.
2. They won’t write anything at all. The simple lack of the 養殖 (farmed fish) label is evidence enough that the fish is wild.

That’s it. Here are two pictures of salmon I bought at the store. Can you tell which one is farmed and which one is wild?

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1. Save On Cleaning Products By Buying Refills.
2. New Year Equals Cheap Stuff: Fukubukuro

I’m taking a trip to the store tomorrow to get started on this little project. Head on over to the original article to learn more. It’s a great read!

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1. Homemade Tofu Soap Dish
2. Homemade Masks
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1. Grow your own herbs
2. Use your food trash for compost

In kk’s words:

I grow my own fresh herbs since the herb selection at most markets here is dismal and expensive for fresh. I also grow cherry tomatoes and zucchinis sometimes on my balcony.

Anyway, a perfect use for your old rice and scraps from your veggies and meals is compost! Much better for your plants than the fertilizer they sell in the store. I have two buckets I use for this purpose. You will initially have to put a little dirt in your first bucket. Then start adding the food. Shake up the bucket every time you add new food. Eventually you will start putting food in your second bucket so the first can fully compost. Then you have a constant rotating stock of compost.

If you have coworkers that garden at all, you can give them compost too. Most will love it because from my understanding homemade compost isn’t a common practice in Japan.

What a great way to use all your old akebi peels, hassaku pith and old rice. Thanks kk!

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1. Homemade Tofu Planting Pot
2. How To Find 300 Yen Steaks In Japan
3. Rice Pancakes For Breakfast

The hassaku fruit looks like a big orange, or maybe a grapefruit. It is harvested in December, so a good time to look for it in the stores is during winter. They are on the lower end of the Japanese fruit price spectrum, averaging somewhere about 100 yen a pop.

The hassaku has a much different flavor than an orange. The fruit is tart and sweet, almost sour. Biting into the hassaku fruit is a pleasure, because the juice “pops” into your mouth. The Japanese eat it like an orange, just peeling it and tearing sections off, but I find that the rind (or whatever you call that white stuff that sticks to the fruit after you take the skin off) is much too bitter for my tastes. It ruins the experience. I prefer to eat it like a grapefruit, cutting it in half and getting to the good parts with a spoon.

Whichever way you eat it, I recommend giving it a try. I love Hassaku and have eaten about 10 of them since the New Year.

Related posts:

1. Mystery Fruit – The Akebi Part 1
2. Mystery Fruit – The Akebi Part 2
3. Banks and other places close for New Years, plus other stuff

My grocery store sells this package of mugi-cha for 200 yen. It contains 54 tea bags, each of which make several liters of tea for my overzealous consumption. Instead of paying 200 yen a few times a week, now I pay it a few times a year. Big improvement!

Avoiding the refrigerated bottle tea aisle and going to the boxed tea aisle can save you lots of yen. Even if you are loyal to a specific kind of tea, like お～いお茶 (Oi Ocha), you might be able to find a powdered form for cheaper.

Or you could just drink water ;)

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1. How To Find 300 Yen Steaks In Japan
2. December Hacks from the Past roundup
3. Save On Cleaning Products By Buying Refills.