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cooking (Page 27)

Cooking pizza in a burning cardboard box, and other unconventional recipes

Cookpad is easily the largest community cooking website for getting new Japanese recipes to try out in the kitchen. Started in 1997, it grew to be so popular that two years ago it expanded its user base by launching an English version.

It goes without saying that you can find a dish for pretty much anything you have lying around in your kitchen, but because most of the recipes are posted by amateurs, you might have to weed some of the stranger ones out by taking a look at their reviews.

Fortunately there seems to be a whole crew of users willing and waiting to take a hit for the team and try out the latest recipe, including a recently posted recipe for making pizza that requires putting the uncooked crust and toppings inside a box and setting the box on fire. How  does it measure up? One net user decided to photograph and review the process.

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Japanese chef shows off amazing cooking skills with high-flying omelettes 【Video】

If any of you have ever tried your hand at making omurice– a Japanese rice omelette- then you’ll know it can get a bit tricky when trying to plate up. This chef, however, not only makes the process look super quick and easy, but he even turns the process into a mini performance as he shows off his skill!

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Awesome lunch boxes full of Disney’s Tsum Tsum characters are almost too cute to eat!【Photos】

As we expect you already know, character lunch boxes or “chara-ben,” short for “character bento,” are all the rage in Japan. And their creators are rarely shy about sharing their awesome work, so you can find hundreds of examples of how to make lunch time more adorable on social media networks like Instagram and Twitter.

One of the biggest themes for chara-ben right now is Disney’s Tsum Tsum, a line of stuffed toys that has been adapted into a smartphone game by Line. There were so many great photos, we had to compile our favorite Tsum Tsum chara-ben shots from Instagram for you to check out. But don’t forget to grab a snack, because you’re definitely going to get hungry!

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Are Japanese rice cookers really better than Chinese ones? We test it out and get some surprises

Whether rightfully or not, Chinese products are much maligned for their supposed lack of quality. Even the Chinese people themselves are often critical of their own country’s products, criticizing everything from Chinese news to rice cookers.

But are they really that bad? Our Japanese reporter Meg recently went on a trip to China and brought back a Chinese rice cooker to test it out. She had a couple of surprises along the way, involving everything from getting the rice cooker to even work, to the taste of the final product, so read on to see how it all turned out!

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Japan’s ideas for easy meals that rely on one wonder ingredient: cheese!

At RocketNews24, we understand the struggle of having to prepare meals that are both delicious and easy to make. It’s so difficult to find the time in the day to cook something yummy, especially when Chefs 7-Eleven and Lawson are always close by and ready to provide a variety of ready-to-eat meals. Unfortunately, time and time again it has been shown that home cooking is usually better for your health and also better for your wallet, so it’s time to roll up our sleeves and find our way into the kitchen.

However, just because it’s home cooking doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. There is a wonder ingredient that is fairly good for your health and pretty much compliments everything it is served with. So without further ado, we’d like to introduce Cheesy Meals with Cheese: A Japanese guide to home cooking with cheese that requires very little effort!

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Japanese Nickel Damascus knives look exquisite and a little like they’re slipping out of reality

Don’t you hate it when you get ready to do some cooking and Paul Hogan comes out of nowhere ridiculing your cookware with taunts of “Ya call that a knife?”

Me too.

That’s why next time I’ll be ready with my new Nickel Damascus Chef’s Knife forged by famous Echizen blacksmith Takeshi Saji using techniques that span the globe. Now that’s what I call a knife!

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Got a bunch of old rice lying around? Let us show you how to revive it!

Most of the food you find in supermarkets in Japan comes in small packages, and people tend to buy just enough for a few days. You won’t find many supersized, bulk discount items at the local grocery store, with one big exception: Rice! Many families eat bowls of rice with most of their meals, so it’s easy to go through a few pounds a week.

But what happens when you overestimate and end up with bags of rice that go untouched for years? While it won’t exactly “go bad,” it will end up pretty stale. You could throw it out, but what  a waste that would be. Instead, try our lifehack to get your old rice tasting fresh and yummy!

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How to make Japan’s coolest summer snack: Onigirazu! 【Recipe & Video】

Everyone knows and loves onigiri, or rice balls. They’re the perfect portable snack, available in every conbini with a wide range of different fillings. But some of us have grown tired of the same old snack. Thus, the “onigirazu” was born! We’ll show you how to make it right here!

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Japanese marshmallow omelette: A real thing you can (and should) make right away 【Rocket Kitchen】

Recipes with marshmallows instead of sugar have soared in popularity online in Japan recently. We love marshmallows, so we’re hardly about to complain — so soft! so sweet! — and the rise in popularity even got the attention of some our Japanese writers, who decided to try out a recipe using marshmallows.

And what is the recipe? Cooked eggs!

Wait, cooked eggs and marshmallows? This really can’t turn out well…can it?! Read on to find out!

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Beat the heat with Japanese somen noodles dipped in Starbucks noodle sauce?!

For many Japanese, somen is the go to food of choice for keeping the summer heat exhaustion blues away. These thin, white Japanese noodles that resemble vermicelli are traditionally made from wheat flour and served chilled.

But what do you do if a somen craving hits and you don’t have a full serving of mentsuyu, or noodle dipping sauce, on hand to eat them with? What if you’re tired or eating somen the traditional way?  Or what if you’re in need of a little caffeine kick with your meal?

If you answered mix your noodle sauce with Starbucks coffee, congratulations! We’re stumped as to how our Japanese staff arrived at this weird food combination, but apparently it tastes much better than it sounds.

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We substitute mirin for sugar in pudding and then taste it ourselves 【Rocket Kitchen】

If you’re in the mood to cook but running short on ingredients, there’s always the old tactic of asking your neighbor for a cup of sugar. If you are in Japan though, why don’t you ask your neighbor for a cup of mirin, or sweet sake used for cooking, instead?

The Sanshu Mikawa Mirin Distillery has recently been promoting sweets made with mirin. This notion is bound to turn some heads as there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between mirin and sweets in Japanese cooking, where it’s instead often used to add a flavorful touch to grilled fish or sushi. So how is it that this seemingly savory flavor can be substituted for the sweetness of sugar? The RocketKitchen is going to get to the bottom of this and eat some pudding too!

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We made Sailor Jupiter’s out-of-this-world bento, and you can too! 【RocketKitchen】

Recently we’ve been seeing a lot of ways for you to express your inner sailor scout. There’s Sailor Moon pajamas, Sailor Moon cellphones, and even Sailor Moon designer bags and, um, menstrual pads.

But what about when you want to eat like one of the sailor scouts? Well that’s something we at RocketNews24 have been wondering ourselves, so we decided to try making one of Sailor Jupiter’s legendary bento boxes. How did it turn out? Let’s just say we ran into some interesting characters along the way….

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RocketKitchen: A simple and delicious recipe for cooking tuna

Tuna. It’s definitely a fish most of us all grew up with. And if you’re anything like one of our RocketNews24 crew, P.K., then you may have grown up believing that tuna only comes from a can!

Though you may associate tuna with cans, that need not be the case. You can actually use fresh tuna in your meals, and today we’ll show you how with a simple recipe that’s sure to impress, even though it requires only five ingredients. Read on to learn how to make this delicious yet simple tuna recipe!

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Professional Chinese food chef teaches us how to make the perfect fried rice

If you’re anything like us, you love Chinese food. Ramen, dumplings, spicy ribs, the always delicious chahan (fried rice) – you name it, we’ll keep eating it so long as you keep bringing it! Chahan is, we have to admit, pretty easy to make, but even so we can never get it to taste as good as the stuff they serve in the restaurant.

But no more! A couple of writers from our Japanese sister site recently went to get some pointers on cooking great fried rice from a real Chinese-food chef. Here are his four tips for making killer chahan at home!

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How to make a mouth-watering Japanese beef bowl in just five minutes 【RocketKitchen】

The beef bowl is essentially Japan’s equivalent to the American hamburger. Offered by inexpensive restaurants across the nation, the beef bowl, or gyudon, as it’s called in Japanese, is a tasty, hot meal that’ll give you all the protein and carbs you’re craving without costing you much money or time.

But while you’re usually never far from a beef bowl joint in Japan, what if you live in a town or country that doesn’t have a Yoshinoya, Matsuya, or, most tragically of all, a mouth-watering Sukiya? No problem, because with this amazingly simple recipe, you can make your own Japanese-style beef bowl in just five minutes!

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These rad, super-rare cutting knives are (presumably) for cooking

If you’re gonna slay a dragon, you might as well do it in style. May we suggest these crazily cool-looking cutting knives that only need to be sharpened every 25 years?

You read that right: These knives will keep their edge for an astonishing 25 years – a quarter of your entire life, if you’re lucky, and five times as long as your passing interest in cooking that you took up to impress that one girl in college who was really into kale and organic, grass-fed wagyu beef.

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Got a great recipe that requires soy sauce? Enter this competition to win 100,000 yen!

If you fancy yourself as a bit of a soy sauce connoisseur or if you enjoy dabbling in Japanese fusion cooking, we’ve found a perfect way for you to earn some easy prize money.

The Japan Soy Sauce Association is currently accepting entries for two special contest categories: Washoku, for Japanese-style recipes and Your Country’s Cuisine, for food that incorporates the use of soy sauce into traditional dishes from your homeland.

With the top prize being 100,000 yen (US$834.87), if you’re a foreigner living in Japan, now’s the time to get that apron on and get cooking!

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Feasting with Fluffy! Learn how to cook for both you and your feline friend

“Cooking school for my cat and me”? Sounds like a dream come true for ailurophiles (cat lovers) the world over!

ABC Cooking Studio, a popular chain of cooking schools across Japan, has recently teamed up with MonPetit, a brand of gourmet cat food under the Purina label, to offer cooking lessons on how to craft the perfect meal which can be eaten by both you and your cat! With four special recipes to learn, this is the ultimate chance to pamper your adorable kitty and to partake of a top-quality meal together.

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  • Apr 20, 2015

We spend a morning with an expert wagashi chef creating no-bake traditional Japanese sweets!

If you’re someone who enjoys making treats like cakes and pastries, then perhaps you have first hand knowledge of how baking can sometimes be a tricky affair. Well, in Japan, we have a whole category of wagashi, or traditional Japanese sweets, that aren’t baked at all, called namagashi (literally, “raw confectionaries”). Namagashi are typically made from various colorful bean pastes and often crafted into delicate seasonal-themed shapes.

Earlier this month, we participated in a seminar to experience what namagashi-making is like. Join us as we see how a master chef creates beautiful flowers from bean paste, and then try our not-so-expert hand at creating our own confections!

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Do play with your food: “Dam curry rice” looks dam tasty to us!

Recently, we shared five tips for extra-yummy curry rice with our dear readers, because we believe that everyone should be able to enjoy the very best of this mildly spicy, sweet and hearty Japanese comfort food the right way. But one thing we forgot to mention is that presentation is an important part of the curry experience. You can’t just slop spoonfuls of the yummy brown stuff all over the rice and expect it to look appetising.

Luckily, we’ve now stumbled upon a new serving method that’s gaining popularity in Japan: “Dam curry”!

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