For those of you with 1) a smoker that can run pretty cool and... 2) access to fresh shucked oysters you can smoke your own and they are really good. we buy burlap sacks of (what I call) the cracks; oysters discarded off the production lines for malformed shells, too small, cracked shells, etc. Brine them in whatever (teriyaki, cajun, citrus, apple juice...its all good.) and place on a tight rack so they don't drip through the openings at the very topmost, coolest place in your smoker and wait. They don't freeze well at all and aren't anywhere near as good jarred up after so we generally do it in one big mess of a weekend. But if you were willing to run your smoker I see no reason you couldn't do a small batch either. I wouldn't do it with other foods, they drip and generally make everything taste like oysters for a while.

Sherry, the kids didn't have much luck when they went hunting last night. But we just got back from doing a little dumpster diving behind the grocery store. It's Thursday and I find it's one of the best days to go snooping. Here's what we found to add to the Poopy Stew: ~2 rutabaga's, just have to cut the soft spots out and remove some leaves ~3 bunches of parsley, probably equals 1 bunch by the time we remove the black stems ~partial bottle of oyster sauce ~several heads of garlic, they are rather dried up but will add some flavor ~ a bag of rice, might have some soy sauce that seeped in but that won't hurt ~2 really nice zucchini, only the ends are damaged ~unsold rotisserie chicken, I'll throw in 2 and keep the other two for another meal. ~3 containers of raw oysters, they smell a little off but you won't notice once they are added. How long you going to let this stew cook? We may head over to the other side of town later and check the dumpsters there. Nancy of the North

Interesting. I don't know that I've ever seen that in the local markets. Random story time. My great-grandparents are buried under a rice paddy in a small town in rural southern China. They were the local village - I'm not sure how you'd say it - masters? gentry? landowners? Anyway, they must have been well liked all the same. They had a fancy family tomb. Then came the Cultural Revolution, and the Red Guards went through the country, digging up and scattering the bones of the evil gentry families. The villagers concealed my great-grandparents' tomb by flooding and planting rice over it. By then, my family had long since left China, migrating to Taiwan, and then to New York. When my grandparents returned to China in the mid-1970s, they went to pay their respects to their ancestors. They waded into the rice paddy and placed bundles of ceremonial money in little paper boats, lit them on fire and set the boats drifting. That's the custom. Last time I went to my grandfather's grave, it was pouring rain and we stood over the metal bowl and burned ''money'' (its not really) under an umbrella. Of course, it may simply be that the villagers wanted more space to grow rice. There are many sides to a story. Anyway, rice is important in Chinese culture. But I don't really care for the standard white steamed long grain rice that much. It is a bit like Wonder Bread. I like short grain vinegared sushi rice, fragrant Indian saffron rice, crusty Spanish paella rice, wild rice with and without oyster liquor, congee (rice soup), sticky black rice, etc. As we grow up, we forge our own tastes and leave the old things behind. But not forever. As my grandparents aged, they gradually reverted to their original habits, forgot their English, ate only Chinese food. I suppose that when I'm 90, if I live that long, my favorite kind of rice may again be the plain steamed white rice of my childhood. It's easy on the dentures, you know.

Ah. You learned your manners from this comic too. As the girl in the manga says: "Could you stop belittling me...? I can tell that much without eating it." If you respected this forum, you would know that if you want people to read things and watch videos you post them here. Sometimes we will go out of our way to follow links, but posters do not expect that all will. In ANY discussion forum, if you specifically want something to be read, you provide a link. I could Google, but why would I just to do your work for you, especially since one of us already had? The translation in the manga is very inaccurate. It's sufficient to kind of carry the meaning to an English speaker who can reinterpret it to make more sense. Your problem has been on insisting on using the language from this. The manga is right, though, where it said it in a sideways manner, that you can't make a "western" style dish with miso. :) It then says that beef belly is what is most commonly used for stew, but that's not true in North America, at least (I can't speak for the rest of the West), where, as you've seen, the go-to is chuck, which is from the shoulder. Then they compare the preparation of the stewed oxtail to soft shelled turtle burger! That is something we don't have, so I can't comment on the preparation. I'm pretty sure that our local turtles, where I live, are endangered and not allowed to be killed and eaten, though perhaps someone is farming them... And there are turtle pets. I suppose you could eat that kind if you wanted to... So, the last chapter you linked is where you got the ridiculous notion that boeuf bourguignon is "the origin of beef stew". That's another poor translation or misstatement. It might be the first one codified in a cookbook, or it might be considered by some to be the finest beef stew, but beef stew's "origin" is from about the time cavemen learned to cook meat in a vessel and had an animal of the family bos (beef) to eat. The manga proceeds to discuss "garniture" and "garnish" interchangeably, and use it to mean decoration, as we advised you from the beginning. They're talking about the vegetables, not the many cuts of beef. We do not normally put "croutons" in beef stew. Beef stew is also not strained. The juices/gravy and stew are served in the same dish. At the end, he brings out all these different cuts, does seem to be preparing each separately, as the young lady in the video did, because, as we said, it's the only sensible way to do it. His goal isn't a beef stew, it's to wow the judges of a fictional contest. I don't see a recipe. The whole thing is a fiction of a cooking contest. Like much fiction, it isn't completely realistic. That's fine for a story. Just as many manga hair styles cannot be achieved without glue, this all parts of the beef thing can't be achieved without a lot of pots, and the result isn't an actual Western beef stew, even though it seems to have won the contest. Which is what we've been telling you from the beginning without reading your book. Unfortunately, the lack of comprehension is on your side. The manga does not in any way controvert what we have said, though now I see where you got some of your misinformation. While it may be true that serious cookery is presented in manga form somewhere, in these chapters of this book it is not. It's a typical Young Adult story about winning a contest against a cheating, leering competitor, the cooking details are practically nil, and are hazy where they are presented. That is because they're there because the story is about a cooking contest, and serve the movement of the plot. They are not meant to be the presentation of a recipe. I see no reason to spend more of my time on this, so I will not bother with the anime, which one assumes are more of the same.