You’ve probably heard of a Bloody Mary, a popular cocktail with a base of vodka and tomato juice, plus a host of other weird and wonderful flavourings such as Worcestershire or Tabasco sauce, horseradish, celery, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and so on. It may not sound appetizing but it has plenty of devotees, although that may be more to do with its reputation as a ‘hair of the dog’ hangover cure rather than its taste. But if you’re feeling adventurous, why not try the even more exotic flavours of a spicy Korean kimchi version?
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Recipes are invaluable resources for daily life that with just the right focus can empower even the most kitchenphobic person to slap together semi-decent meal. However, recipe books can be unwieldy and weak to the heat and fluids flying around the cooking space. The advent of the internet has helped, but we’re still left nervously trying to swipe at a touch screen with flour-and-egg-caked fingers.
This is where DJ Misoshiru & MC Gohan (DJ Miso Soup & MC Rice) come in. Their unique brand of recipe rap takes up only the space in your ears and with their nostalgic old-school beats those instructions will be hard to get out of your head afterwards. Come, join us on this Japanese hip-hop gourmet journey.
At RocketNews24, we’re all about strange alcoholic drinks. But this next one isn’t exactly strange; we’d call it peculiar. The classic Japanese rice wine beverage, nihon-shu, otherwise known as “sake” in English, is given a fun and fruity twist. There are very few drink recipes with nihon-shu as a base, but this one is refreshing and totally easy to drink. Try out this super simple recipe for what we like to call “Japanese sangria” and enjoy a flavor infusion of a traditional Japanese alcohol.
The cutesy home-made lunches that lucky Japanese children take to school are famous worldwide. For the time-pushed or culinarily challenged among us, though, store-bought bento (boxed lunches) can offer great value for money. Convenience store bento, which are hugely popular all over Japan, contain all kinds of delicious goodies like fish, meat, stewed vegetables and pickles, along with rice. When one bento-loving Japanese university student threw caution to the wind and sunk her entire lunch into her miso soup, she discovered that the resulting soupy concoction was even more tasty than she could have imagined! Thus, convenience store bento soup was born!
Here at RocketNews24 we love to try out rice-augmenting recipes and other wacky food combinations, so when a writer from our Japanese sister site heard about this amazing invention, made by heating the entire contents of a convenience store lunchbox in a pot of miso soup, she just had to give it a try! Let’s see how she got on.
Tis the season for fried chicken, at least it is according to Japanese Christmas traditions. And if you find yourself with leftovers from your delicious dinner from KFC tomorrow, we have an incredibly easy and tasty recipe to keep that holiday spirit going as long as you have leftover fried chicken in your fridge and your trusty rice cooker. We’ve tried some dubious rice cooker recipes in the past, but this one looks like one of our tastiest yet, so click below to see the recipe for KFC rice!
Japan’s premier recipe website, Cookpad, is an excellent resource for those looking to make some clever home cooking along with seasonal treats and some more unorthodox creations like #c0ffee.
One little gem of a recipe that’s been getting some high praise is Setsunai… Daikon Oroshi Daruma (Wistful… Grated Daikon Daruma). Although named after the round and red lucky charms of Japan, these side dishes certainly resemble snowmen, or yuki daruma in Japanese.
The post-apocalyptic Japanese fantasy film Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind (Kaze no Tani no Naushika) came out in 1984. If you watched it as a kid, the odds are that your life was changed in some drastic way. Maybe you decided you wanted to be just like princess Nausicaä when you grew up, and learned how to fly. Or, you might have secretly decided to move to Japan, where those amazing creatures might live. Or, like one Niconico contributor, you were inspired to create an incredible replica of the king of the giant insects… the gigantic, trilobite-like Ohm… in the form of a rice omelette.
Omu-rice is an omelette made with fried rice—a popular Japanese dish, commonly served up with ketchup on top in a zigzag or smiley-face. This Ohm-rice tribute to Nausicaä looks a lot more ominous. If you’d like to try making Ohm-rice with squid ink sauce and spinach powder, you can have a go with the rough recipe provided below!
When it comes to fast food, most people may think of McDonald’s. But actually, if you happen to talk to someone from the Philippines, they might mention Jollibee.
More popular than the golden arches, more sought after than the Colonel’s secret recipe, Jollibee is the go-to joint for a quick bite in the Philippines, particularly if you’re craving some lip-smackingly good fried chicken. We here at RocketNews24 have obtained Jollibee’s secret fried chicken recipe and it tastes 90 percent like the real thing. But considering it’s homemade and doesn’t require you to order from a greasy-faced teenager, we’d say that’s a pretty good.
Developed in India and then passed down through the hands of the British, curry has found a happy home with the Japanese and their cuisine. So much so that it’s known as one of Japan’s top three universally adored foods! Curry is served in schools, in homes, and in restaurants nationwide. There’s likely not a dining table in all of Japan that has never seen a plate of spicy rue pass across its surface. Japanese curry, filled with bits of meat and vegetables in sweet and spicy sauce and ladled over piping hot rice, is just superb! It’s the perfect comfort food, loved by kids and adults alike.
Tell me, is your mouth watering yet? We hope so, because today we’re bringing you a recipe for making curry just like the stuff you find at Curry House Coco Ichibanya, the Guinness World Record holder for largest curry restaurant chain. Often called simply “Coco Ichi” by Japanese locals, this popular chain has more than 1,300 restaurants world-wide!
Curry may be known for its complex balance of flavors, but even using store-bought rue, it’s easy to recreate the flavor of a top-class curry restaurant in your own home! Keep reading for the full recipe. Read More
Foreigners who live in Japan quickly learn that sliced bread is not this country’s bread and butter. Being a country that relies on rice for daily meals it’s near impossible to find a reasonably priced full-length loaf of sliced bread.
Instead most supermarkets offer small packs containing four to eight slices each of which can be monstorously thick. For people like me who like to make sandwiches every day, this means constant trips to the store to refill on bread.
However, one recipe that made it big on Twitter by Japanese user Yu Tsukari handed down by her mother thankfully can reduce my bread shopping by half. It’s an extremely simple yet clever way to take advantage of Japan’s thicker-sliced bread. You too can give it a try by following our illustrated guide.
Inspired by a recent re-watching of the classic Studio Ghibli film Kiki’s Delivery Service, we decided to try our hand at making grandma’s signature dish, herring and pumpkin pot pie. Why? Because the movie made it look so tasty!
We don’t care what that the old woman’s granddaughter had to say, Kiki worked hard to help make that pie and deliver it in pouring rain, and… all right, so perhaps some of our desire to cook actually came from a need to understand how the young lady in the movie could possibly hate her sweet, sweet grandmother’s homemade birthday present. It took a bit of research, but we think we may have found the perfect recipe!
Yoshinoya has been serving “tasty, low-priced and quick” gyudon (beef bowls) in Japan for over a century. In recent years, the chain’s bright orange signs can also be found at around 600 locations throughout Southeast Asia and the United States. It seems the world has fallen in love with the original Japanese fast food.
Now anyone can enjoy the beefy goodness of gyudon from the comfort of their own home thanks to this easy recipe. It’s the closest you’ll get to an authentic Yoshinoya beef bowl without having to put on pants.
The world is full of countless foods and ways of eating them. It’s impossible to keep track of them all. I was surprised to discover salty watermelons, just as other people were surprised by my preference of putting peanut butter on waffles.
Such an incident happened on 19 January when a Japanese test maker unknowingly confused thousands of university entrance exam students with a recipe for a meat sauce calling for a “delicious kimchi base.”
Had enough turkey and chicken over the holidays? Or if you’re in Japan, maybe you’re tired of the traditional osechi food that you’ve had to eat the first few days of the New Year.
If so, here’s something a bit different you may want to try to spice things up a little — a curry recipe from the African island of Mauritius. Our reporter from our Japanese sister site Pouch gives us the following lesson in “curry à la Mauritius” (taught by a native Mauritian no less), and the resulting dish certainly looks good enough to feature in your next meal! Read More
This Christmas, Japanese retail conglomerate Aeon is conjuring an ancient evil from a centuries-long slumber— and bringing it to the dinner table for your family to enjoy!
One Piece fans the world over will have no doubt lost count of the number of times they’ve seen Monkey D. Luffy chomping on a big hunk of meat.
Keen food fans that the RocketNews24 writers are, we can’t help but feel a little peckish every time we see the wide-grinning captain tucking into his meals, and we always find the food he eats, dished up by chain-smoking pirate chef Sanji, absolutely tantalising.
But now, thanks to the equally food-loving team at sister site Pouch, we have just the thing to placate our growling stomachs while we watch our One Piece DVDs or flick through our ever-growing stack of comic books: from Chef Sanji’s very own cookbook, egg-stuffed chicken!
It’s simple, nutritious and boy is it tasty. Full ingredients and recipe all after the jump >
Dragon Quest fan? Hungry? Have a few spare minutes? You’re in luck, my friend!
Thanks to the culinary creatives over at Japanese website Bistro Animeshi, we’re about to bring you the first of what we hope will be many recipes for character and anime-themed food! That’s right, over the past few years we’ve tendered to your loins, tickled your funny-bones and now we’re aiming to tantalize your tonsils.
If it’s in the Ghibli movies, we’ll help you recreate it! If you once saw One Piece‘s Luffy shove it down his neck, we’re on it. From the tasty to the downright weird, we’re here to help you cook up your anime dreams.
Welcome… to Rocket Food!
What with the recent troubles and disputes in China concerning the Senkaku islands, and with many of the fervent anti-Japanese demonstrations often escalating into violence, Japanese both at home and abroad are understandably feeling a little delicate right now.
Japanese-owned stores and factories in China have borne the brunt of many nationalists’ anger, suffering considerable damage to property, and a number of Japanese businesses with locations in China are incurring significant losses.
With this in mind, we here at RocketNews24 are doing our bit to cheer Japan up and get back some of that lost pride.
As well as buying plenty of Japanese-produced goods to give the economy a helping-hand, we’ve decided to add a dash of patriotism to our plates and bring you a recipe for possibly the most patriotic, yet easy to make, dish ever: Land of the Rising Sun Omu-Raisu (omelette rice).
So grab a frying pan, put on your apron, and let’s cook up a little cheer for Japan! Read More
Some of you internet aficionados may have heard the story of the 22-year-old Japanese man who cooked his own genitals and served them at a dinner party back in May, giving new meaning to the term “self serve.”
It was reported that after the event, local police refused to launch an investigation as nothing had been done that was against the law. However, on September 18, it was revealed that the case had been sent to the Tokyo Public Prosecutors office on suspicion of “public display of offensive sexual materials.”
But they were displayed in private to a group of paying customers… Do we really live in a society where a man cannot freely cut off and saute his own genitals and feed them to the public without risking prosecution!?
For the sake of humanity: yes please.


















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