sleep, Japanese and cornmeal

[baratron]

Chronotherapy is continuing to prove challenging. After waking up 2 hours early yesterday, the same thing happened today - I woke up at 2am instead of 4am. In some ways, this is good, because I'm waking up after 10 hours sleep absolutely wide awake (& even despite it being pitch black at that time of day), but in other ways it's bad, because it's making me tired & grumpy for 6 hours in my "evening", rather than only 4. However, today I am going to bed at 8pm, which means I should wake up sometime around a getting-up time that is normal for people with functioning bodyclocks, and as long as I then get to bed around 11pm on Saturday, I should continue to wake up in the morning for at least a few days. That'll be nice.

In other news I am attempting to learn hiragana by the same brute force method I used to learn Braille. As the kana are much more complicated than Braille characters, so far I recognise unambiguously a mere 3 out of 46 (and don't even get me started on the combinations, like chuu). But this will improve, as my brute force approach does work surprisingly well for me. Still utterly aggravated that my plans to learn Japanese "properly" with a teacher & everything got screwed up by my gall bladder, but at least I can do SOMETHING by myself.

We won't mention the gall bladder. I woke up with it grumbling despite me having eaten no more than 5g of fat per day since Sunday, but I refused to give in and take painkillers, and it seems to have stopped. It had BETTER have stopped, or there'll be trouble.

Have also been to 2 of the 3 local health food shops and acquired more ingredients, including something which claims to be vegan dairy-free cheese-flavoured sauce with a mere 0.4% fat. Somehow I suspect that 1 of these 4 claims must be incorrect, but I will post a rebuttal if it turns out to be edible ;) Still boggling about cornmeal, though. I could find "cornflour", "maize flour" and "maize meal", but no "cornmeal". And cornflour and maize flour are very much not the same thing, because cornflour is off-white, cheap and easy to get in .uk (it's the main ingredient of custard, forgodsake), but maize flour is yellow, more expensive, and only in health food stores - it's quite a bright yellow, too. Unlike with oat flour and oatmeal, where the meal was very obviously coarser than the flour, there was no perceptible difference between maize flour and maize meal. I bought the one labelled "meal" just in case. But if any North Americans want to try to shed some light on this, I'd be grateful.

Comments

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

Cornmeal comes in different varieties- the most common in the US is sort of a sandy/granulated sugar texture. The maize meal I've seen over here tends to be a bit finer than that, but overall they should be pretty interchangeable. The difference will largely be in the texture of the finished product. (You generally want the finer stuff if you're doing things like making tortillas, because the coarser stuff doesn't stick together so well and would tend to poke holes in things.) It's basically ground up dried corn kernels, hence the bright yellow. :) (Though you can get it slaked with lime, where it's whiter.)

Cornflour is what we call in the US cornstarch, and is absolutely identical between the US and the UK. :)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

So cornflour is just the starch, whereas maize flour is the whole kernel? That'd explain the colour difference.

I want it for coating things. Cornmeal and/or gram flour can coat things and make them taste a bit different, which helps make the same old vegetables more interesting ;) I only found gram flour because I happen to know it's the same thing as chickpea flour, which is also the same thing as garbanzo bean flour, although no one in .uk would ever call a chickpea a garbanzo bean.

Bah. Zucchini. Eggplant. I still prefer "zucchini" to "courgette", although anything's better than marrow...

[quiet000001.livejournal.com]

I think so, yeah.

as far as coating things, any grind of cornmeal should work perfectly well, although the coarser stuff would have more crunch to it.

Another thing I've seen suggested for coating stuff is using crushed breakfast cereal flakes. (Obviously you'd have to choose your cereal carefully, but I'd imagine it'd work with any kind as long as it wasn't something sugary.)

[nmg.livejournal.com]

You could also try looking for polenta (not the pre-cooked variety) instead of corn meal. You'll also find limed cornmeal (with the mineral not the fruit) in places that sell Mexican food as masa harina. Sainsbury's sells masa harina from its brown shelves, though it's not cheap.

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

cornflour is just the starch, whereas maize flour is the whole kernel.

That's my understanding. More sensibly in US, corn starch is the starch.
The maize meal can be at various levels of courseness. Lots of Central and South American dishes use it.

Found some low fat vegetarian Jewish recipes for you.

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

oh oh cute photo of you and lexa together - I hope you two are having a good time!
oh I had better read teh rest of the piece now:)
hugs
kate

[taimatsu]

Hiragana! I haven't quite cracked it myself, but the method that works for me is to learn some vocabulary first - words that can be correctly written in hiragana, like eki (station), yuubin-kyoku (post office) etc. - and then make myself picture cards associating the image with the hiragana. That way the English lettering doesn't intrude at all and I can associate Japanese-word with Japanese-writing.

Must do some revision and sign up for new class! :)

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I have a bunch of flashcards that I bought from J-List. They're ones that actual Japanese children would use to learn their own language. They rock.

They were pretty cheap, too - only about £3 each iirc. I have 5 sets:
The Alphabet 1 & 2
Land animals
Sea animals
Daily interactions

The last one is the most boggling, as having shown the cards to several people, none of us could figure out what some of the actions were. I'll show them to you when you come up, and see if you can puzzle them out :)

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

No enlightenment on the meal thing.

What's your brute force learning technique?

[36.livejournal.com]

Maize Meal is staple food in South Africa, tends to have a granulated texture, I'm sure that'll be what it's refering to when it says meal rather than flour. Try a South African import shop to get some, Bokke Foods (http://www.bokkefoods.com/) online will sell it too.

Japanese

[johnckirk.livejournal.com]

I've started learning Japanese recently, and I'm going off to the SOAS open evening this coming Wednesday - even if you can't go to the regular classes, you might find it interesting.