It’s not been my habit to overeat for the last few years… I tend to indulge in things that, if eaten in excess, are not terribly healthy, but tonight, in spite of not feeling terribly hungry, I managed to eat a little bit more than I would normally consider natural when dining at Bamiyan in Gilman Village. We stayed firmly in the Afghan side of their dual Afghan/Persian menu, and the food was mostly quite well executed and tasty, but the portions were unnaturally large and we ordered too much for three and a half diners.

I kept eating, even though I wasn’t really hungry.

It’s not really my style. I tend to like eating more modest portions of things… six bites or so and I start to become bored of a dish, generally speaking, and would like to move on to something else.

Maybe it’s just stress or nerves, but I just kept nibbling. The food was, after all, still in front of me.

The primary impetus for this adventure was to see Once On This Island, a beautifully staged contemporary musical at the Village Theatre on Front Street in Issaquah, for which a friend of mine was running audio.

I overspent. This isn’t a good time to be self-indulgent. I think my entertainment budget for the next 4 weeks has been busted with today’s and yesterday’s excitement.

Maybe I need to be doing some more sales work…

This afternoon I processed all of my internet orders without too much chaos or distraction, which was a bit surprising, since I often run around a bit. I noticed today that I missed delivery of a bunch of cardboard boxes and packing materials, which probably came yesterday when I was busy debugging SQL code.

Before noon and actually again in the evening, I met up with some other folks who participate in eGullet and Mouthfuls, which are food-focused community sites. It was nice to see some faces associated previously only with online personas. I also got to try Zigzag, is below the Pike Place Market near Procopio Gelato. They have a lot of interesting signature cocktails. I think Sambar remains my favorite drink spot in town, but the peach bitters-enhanced “Trident” was very nice.

This weekend my demo schedule is a little lighter, so I’m going to try to take advantage of that. I am dropping in to a matcha class at Blue Dog in U-District tomorrow, and Sunday I’ll be at Uwajimaya in Bellevue.

I remember when I could be fascinated by solving a computer problem, and I’d happily whittle away hours and hours, usually for the gain of just a few minutes of labor from time to time.

This is not so satisfying now that I am trying to build a business of my own not related to software. However, I let myself spend an insane amount of time debugging some quite simple database code and forms code, meant mostly to save some repetitive data entry work. Had I just done the tedious work, I would have spent far less time overall, but now I have a solution that should benefit me whenever I need to add a batch of similar products.

The good news, though, is that i now have all of the photographs Rob Tilley sent me online at YuzuMura.com, and I have some reusable code that will benefit me when I add other batches of products.

In the afternoon I indulged in eating most of a tremendously large apple given to me by a Nikkei-jin apple farmer on Sunday… it was so flavorful… crisp, lightly acidic, aromatic.

I sent Hiromi these photos from tonight’s dinner and she called it “obaachan no ryouri” or grandma food.

The results were nice, but not flawless..

I was experimenting with making nagaimo dango in soup, and I overruled my initial impulse of making the dango using only wheat flour, nagaimo and a pinch of salt. I thought the texture might be more interesting if I added some katakuriko. This seemed to make the dough very sticky and my experience making gnocchi didn’t provide useful sensory reference points to judge the consistency, so when I boiled the dango, they got a bit chewy.

On previous occasions, I’ve used katakuriko and blends of katakuriko and kuzuko in dango recipes, but I was generally following a recipe that wasn’t terribly temperamental. In this case, I added two unknowns: the nagaimo, and the katakuriko. I think it will take a few experiments to get the ideal texture.

I made one of my favorite variations of hiya-yakko, made with yuzu-kosho, which is a paste made from the ground rind of yuzu and ground chilies, and a splash of Japanese soy sauce. A few years ago I served a very potent yuzu-kosho with some godoufu or another similarly mild side dish, and a knife-tip portion of yuzu kosho. I guess my plating needed some work; in Japan, I have seen similar presentation, and I knew the flavor was quite powerful. But one my guests thought I had mistakenly dropped something on the plate. When I explained the flavoring, they realized that it was the perfect amount for the dish in question, but it was a bit surprising to them. This time, I used a fairly substantial amount; roughly a third to half a teaspon. Actually, my yuzu-kosho has lost a bit of its aroma over time and I only had small amount left. So this amount was just about right, and not overwhelming.

I also made some quickly fried Japanese eggplant, dressed with nothing more than grated ginger, some sesame seeds, and a little Japanese soy sauce. This is one of my absolute favorite ways to serve eggplant, because it is so incredibly simple and flavorful. For this preparation, I usually slice the eggplant for this quarter lengthwise, then halfed crosswise, but I thought this might be a bit too visually repetitive, since I planned to serve another eggplant dish sliced lengthwise. I chose instead to use a rolling cut (mawashi-giri).

I also made some dengaku-nasu, which I nearly lost to neglect. I roasted lengthwise-sliced halves of eggplant, then added a mirin-sugar-miso paste which is a classic topping for broiled tofu, called “dengaku-miso” or “neri-miso.” My dengaku-miso is usually smoother and thicker than it was tonight, so I was a little frustrated that it wanted to slide off of my eggplant. My broiler also cooked a little faster than I expected so I almost over-caramelized the topping.

This was dinner… I added some tsukemono after I set everything out.

I prepared a small delivery to the Women of Color luncheon organized every 3 months or so by Assunta Ng. When I can, I have been providing some promotional giveaways and coupons for a gift bag that they offer to attendees.

Part of the day I was also trying to debug some stored procedures intended to help me quickly add multiple similar items to my online store. Due to various quirky little bugs, it turned out to be more distracting than immediately productive, but I know I need to do this work to simplify my life. I am not quite finished, but I’ve done enough work that it speeds up adding the metadata for the photos I’m putting up right now. Actually, though, I’m kind of debugging the code one addition at a time, so this particular batch may not be finished very quickly.

I guess I didn’t get enough sleep the last few nights… I got up later than I should have, but I needed the sleep.

Today I was a little bit touchy, but managed to have enough charm to sell a moderate amount of matcha latte blend and a bit of dragon beard candy. I think I did better yesterday.

I had lofty ambitions for dinner today, but once I got home, I lost most of my energy, and settled for baked satsumaimo with butter, black and white sesame seeds, salt, and a bit of sliced mellow cheese from Bella Cosa in Wallingford. I think I’ll be sleeping a little early tonight.

I’m off in demoland this weekend, as usual. I can already see my Monday will be full based on incoming internet orders, but I’ll try to take care of them quickly.

I was hoping to make this nice matcha flan in time for Sugar High Friday, but alas, I didn’t get started on it until Friday night, and it didn’t have enough time to set before it was way past a reasonable hour to be serving sweets. So it turned out to be a very indulgent breakfast, and aside from a brief mention yesterday on my blog, mostly theoretical. But you can see the other participants on Simply Recipes. (Edited 19 September 2005: Note: Elise was kind enough to include my belated entry in the list in spite of my tardiness).

When I made the matcha flan, I used about a cup each of cream and milk, about 4 egg yolks, maybe 1/3 cup of sugar, a tiny bit of vanilla, and 2 slightly heaping teaspoons of matcha for cooking. I chose to oven-bake this flan, which may explain the slighly odd-looking texture, compared to a steamed one, but it did taste fairly creamy.

I served it with some tsubu-an, which is simply sweetened smashed red beans, and a little powdered sencha.

My morning didn’t end up as productive as I needed it to be; I was hoping to get some more paper for gift cards for online orders in the morning, do some order packing, and handle a wholesale order that I needed to deliver. One of my errands today required obtaining just-finished matcha-chocolate dipped fortune cookies and trekking them out to the Eastside, with the intent of getting  back in time to finish the internet and phone orders on my plate. This didn’t work out very well, since I had to do other things on this side. I am a bit frustrated, because I’ve been really behind schedule on a lot of things recently.

I got home fairly late, so I kept dinner simple… some grilled corn with Japanese mayonnaise, pico de gallo salt, and lime juice; simple quesadillas with a pepita salsa, and some sliced jicama with a heavy splash of lime juice and a little more pico de gallo salt.

Quinoa is a miraculous thing… not exactly a grain, but nothing like a bean, it has a fairly high protein content, and serves well as a vegetarian main dish. It also looks almost alive when it’s cooking, as the germ starts making its way out of the seed.

I once served quinoa to a bunch of Japanese friends who were kind of afraid of the dish, because they watched the germ squirming out of the quinoa in a wormlike fashion. But they took to it instantly, as it was richly satisfying served with some bitter greens and mushrooms.

Tonight I made a not very exciting dish with quinoa, broccoli, confettied bell peppers, tomato, and onions. I stirred in a bunch of basil pesto, sans cheese, and served it with a little more pesto and harissa. I usually cook this with a bit of  vegetable soup stock, and lacking this, the dish suffered a bit and required more aggressive seasoning. I might have been able to use a lighter hand with the pesto had I a bit more complex of a base note.

Tonight’s dish looks a little bit like a 1970s vegetarian creation, but it did actually taste fairly nice. It did benefit from the harissa, though.

I got to bed a little earlier last night, but it was only after I composed and sent a response to my latest source of irritation.

Late Friday, a Chinese company sent an email to me by way of YuzuMura.com claiming that my use of the phrase “dragon beard candy” runs afoul of a trademark they registered in 2001 in China. Somehow, the 2000 years of prior use as a common phrase (in Chinese) got past the Chinese trademark authorities; perhaps they considered it a novel usage since they registered the mark “Dragon Beard brand cotton candy” in English rather than Chinese.

Translations of common phrases are, to my knowledge, not well protected by trademark law, but the more amusing thing is that they are making a claim against a phrase that existed in English in the United States, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore for a fairly long time prior to their registration.

Also, their company, “Nutra-Swiss,” does not appear to have any trade presence in the United States. They don’t have much to protect; if a trade name is not in active use, it’s not protectable, and this should be doubly true for a weak mark. These days, their online presence appears confined to search engine spamming and domain name resale, although I do recall seeing some photos of some artificially-colored plastic tubs of cotton candy on some trade directory last year. I’m not selling cotton candy or even comparing my product to their artificially-colored goo anywhere on my commercial site, since it’s irrelevant to my market.

I expect there may be one or two more rounds of email, after which I’ll probably publish the entirety of the exchange here for popular amusement. They don’t show a very sophisticated understanding of trademark law.

Dinner

I needed to take advantage of leftover ingredients today. I still had a bit of ricotta in my refrigerator, which would not likely survive much longer than today; it was still in decent condition. I also had some tomatoes, onion and mushroom, in addition to a bit of parmesan. It turned out that Central Market, where I did my matcha latte demo today, had a little sale on manicotti shells, which is quite fortunate, since I had already thought of making manicotti on my way to search for pasta. I was lower on tomatoes than I remembered, so rather than incorporating the mushrooms into a filling, I made them part of the sauce, which was heavy on onions, deglazed with a little fume blanc, and seasoned with garlic and basil. I chopped the roasted peppers into confetti and included them in the ricotta-parmesan filling.

For a dish which was composed primarily as an excuse to use up ingredients, it turned out fairly well. The wine and mushroom sauce turned out more interesting than the tomato sauce I had planned. But I only have about 6 weeks left in Washington’s tomato season…

Technorati tags: China, trademarks, law 

I do a lot of demos of my products at grocery stores where my products are carried. If I’m the broker, my client usually pays for the cost of sampling materials. But for things I import, I pay for the samples I give out. The cost of sampling is by itself quite painful.

The theory of doing demos is not that you will sell a lot of product the day of the event. Demos are a way of introducing products, getting feedback, and hopefully, getting such products in the mind of the customer. A few people buy something right away, and some people buy on their next trip to the store, and some people will remember the item when just the right occasion comes up. And, of course, quite a lot of people won’t take any action at all, but this is true of any promotional method.

The advantage of conducting a demo is the immediate feedback, the rapport you can establish with at least a few customers, and the potential for building long-term repeat customers. It’s very hands-on, and very much a way of telling the story of a product.

Alas, thanks to the ever-increasing gas prices, my occasional trips to Portland are never very financially rewarding. I’ve averaged about two trips per month to the Beaverton Uwajimaya, at a cost of about $30–35 per trip in gas, without considering any additional impact on my car’s lifespan or maintenance needs. Yesterday, when I fueled up in anticipation of this trip, I spent almost exactly $45 for 16 gallons of gas. When I got home tonight, I had to fill it up again, and away went another $42 or so.

On the one hand, this is a very difficult way to build product recognition. On the other hand, if I don’t do these demos, my products may not move at all, because people don’t get to know anything about them.

Of late, I have substantially increased my portfolio of products that I sell at wholesale, so I believe that these challenges are really just a matter of scale. But it’s still very frustrating to look at money disappearing so rapidly.

Last night I made a late bit simple dinner for three. It included a vaguely greek salad (feta, kalamata olives, tomatoes, cucumber, atop lettuce) with a garlic-citrus dressing, some hummus which I adorned with some olive oil and mild chili powder, some grilled mushrooms with garlic, some roasted red peppers, and some decent pita I found that is made in Seattle without the use of any scary additives or unpronounceable ingredients, and still happens to be moderately pillowy for something obtained at a supermarket. I also did some nice roasted potatoes again.