Tsadan -- cooked longer

One hour egg on the right; eight hour egg on the left.

Tsadan -- cooked

They're done, and they look good.

But they're not as dark inside as I'd like, and the flavors haven't penetrated very far either. I'm returning one to the pot to see how it looks after a few more hours. (I gave the first two only one hour of simmering.)

Making tsadan

At moment I'm making tsadan, which is a Chinese dish, not a Japanese one. It's sometimes listed as a special dish for New Year's, but I saw it nearly every day when I was in China -- it's standard street food. I'll see how these taste.

Method:

1. Boil eggs for 3 minutes.
2. Cool
3. Gently but thoroughly crack the shells with a spoon.
4. Simmer the eggs another hour with (in this little pot) 1 T Chinese Five Spice, 1 T salt, and 1 (black) tea bag.

Cutting kuwai

The bowl has cold water with a couple of teaspoons of vinegar in it. unless you're putting your peeled kuwai directly into a pot of water on the stove, you need the slight acidity of the vinegar to keep them from discoloring (like a cut apple).

We're still working on her technique -- the fingers of her left hand spent a lot of time in the danger zone.

Kuwai (a.k.a. water chestnuts)

 

I'm going to cook these today. They're not the freshest I've seen, but the price is very low, so I can't expect them to be the best. (Some stores are more expensive than others, of course.) I got them at my favorite local supermarket, Mama no Mise (Mama's Store), which I'm trying hard to support. I've shopped there off and on for 10 years and they are in grave danger from The Big, which opened a couple of months ago and has better prices.

When I got to the checkout counter, the clerk looked at the package and asked me, "You eat these? You like these?" as if it were a miracle that a Westerner liked something that's unusual in Japan. I guess she doesn't know that you can (and I do) buy canned water chestnuts in any decent supermarket in the U.S. and they're a standard ingredient of Chinese cooking.

I forget the name kuwai every time I leave Japan for a year. Actually, it should be easy to remember. It's very similar to kowaii (scary) and kawaii (cute). But not so similar that I would mix them up. Not like hashi, hashi, and hashi.

Japanese has relatively few phonemes (the basic sounds of a language). Not as few as Hawaiian, which I think has about 12. But Japanese has only 16 consonant sounds and 5 vowels (which can be either long or short), making 26 sounds. English has about 40 or so phonemes. Korean, which has a grammatic structure very similar to Japanese, has well over 50 sounds. (I learned less Korean in my year there than any language I've been exposed to for a month).

Which leads me to the famous story about the famous priest Ikkyu, who had the reputation of being a really clever guy.

One day Ikkyu was walking through town and came to a bridge. A sign on the bridge said, "Do not walk on the bridge." Since relatively few Japanese of Ikkyu's time could read Chinese characters, bridge was written はし, which presumably most Japanese of Ikkyu's time could read or the story makes no sense at all.

Ikkyu walked across the bridge.

People stopped and stared and told him, "No! NO! NO! You'll be punished. You aren't allowed to walk across the hashi (bridge)."

He smiled and said, "It's okay. I didn't walk on the hashi (edge). I walked down the middle."

Hashi can also mean chopsticks. Maybe somebody can invent a story using all three meanings of hashi -- bridge, middle, and chopsticks.

Christmas cake

Normally, Christmas cake is white cake with white icing, to set off the red of the strawberries. However, we're a chocoholic family, so my wife got this little beauty. I should emphasize beauty since, like most Japanese cakes, I'd give it a 10 for looks but only a 5 for taste. When it comes to cakes and cookies, Japanese prefer about half as much butter and sugar as I think is appropriate.

We had this last night, the 28th. That brings to mind the other meaning of Christmas cake in Japan. When I came here to live, in the early 90s, I was told that Christmas cake referred to unmarried women over age 25. The idea was that, like Christmas cake after Christmas, nobody wanted them after 25. However, the expression is apparently dying out. I haven't heard it used for several years. That's probably because the average age for marriage for Japanese women continues to increase. It's now over 27 and climbing.

How much does your osechi cost?

This article, in Japan Today, talks about department stores that are selling some osechi for only 10,000 yen (US $109.30). They don't say how much food you get for this. I looked at the website for one of those department stores and couldn't find the osechi -- only VALENTINE'S DAY GIFTS! My wife thinks that's because most of the department sI'll ask my wife to help me search when she gets home.tores have stopped taking orders online for osechi -- it's too close to delivery day.

 On the other hand, I found this lovely set of osechi for only 25,000 yen (US $273) at Amazon Japan. Another website has a similar one, maybe even a little nicer, for twice the price.

Today at the farmers' market

Pictures now, explanations later.

Jubako

Ideally, osechi goes in jubako.


重箱

jubako -- or, if you prefer, juubako

Literally, heaped up boxes, like this:

Of course, this one isn't nearly elegant enough for osechi ryori. For important food, you need something more like this:
https://www.utsuwa.com/Image/imgJubako.jpg

or even this:
http://kyotofoodie.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/what-is-osecThi-ryori-japanese-new-years-old.jpg



Naturally, there are rules about what goes where in the jubako. The first rule is, if you're living in the 20th century or later, you should have a set of three, not four like my cute little How'Ya Doing stack.

• The top box, called ichi no ju (一の重), holds the appetizers, kuchi-tori (口取り).
• The middle box, ni no ju (二の重), holds sunomono (酢の物), vinegared dished (i.e. several of the hundreds of kinds of Japanese pickles).
• The bottom box, san no ju, of course (三の重), holds heavier, boiled food, nimono (煮物). Since I have four, I'll probably put the chocolate chip cookies there. (On second thought, no, I'll need a MUCH bigger box for that.)

Cooking for the honorable season

New year's food is called osechi ryori, 御節料理.
御節 -- honorable season
料理 -- cooking


This honorable season is the time of New Year's, one of the three times in the year when most Japanese can almost count on being able to stay home and sleep. (That's what most of my friends here tell me is their main wish for most holidays.) The others are the first week in May and the middle of August. But New Year's is the only one of these three which is chock-a-block with traditional activities, most of which involve food. (Many of the others involve alcohol.) At a minimum, most Japanese spend the first three days of the year eating as much traditional food as possible, even those who eat machine-made sushi and Big Macs the rest of the time.


The changes of the seasons used to be a big deal in many cultures. In Japan, they still are. The Vernal Equinox is actually a national holiday here. But there's a problem in placing New Year's in its proper position in the annual round of celebrations. The fact is, it moved when Japan switched from the lunar to the solar calendar on January 1st, 1873.

Because of that switch, the whole calendar thing is a mess in Japan when you want to talk about traditional festivals. After all, tradition demands that you have traditional festivals on their traditional days. But in Japan, most of these festivals (I'm tired of using the word traditional and having to italicize it every time) have been switched to follow the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian new year starts on the first day of the first month. Well, so does the traditional lunar new year. But the lunar calendar starts when the Sun enters Pisces, while the Gregorian (solar) calendar starts with the Sun way over in Capricorn, about 10 days after the winter solstice. (Don't you just love all this astronomy talk in a food blog?)


So in Japan, the traditional ancient Chinese holidays that fall on the third day of the third month, the fifth day of the fifth month, and the seventh day of the seventh month, fall on March 3rd, May 5th, and July 7th rather than roughly two months later. And, to bring this back to the subject of New Year's food, New Year's festivities in Japan are centered around January 1st even though most of them have to do with Toshigami-sama (歳神様), a god who isn't supposed to arrive until it's almost spring.


It's a problem particularly for something that's supposed to happen on the seventh day of the new year. On that day, according to a tradition that dates back who knows how far (meaning I certainly don't) you're supposed to eat nanakusagayu (七草粥), seven herb rice gruel. Obviously, you can only eat herbs that are in season (unless you live in the 21st century, where plastic greenhouses make all seasons the same, agriculturally speaking). Those seven herbs are NOT naturally found in the dead of winter. (I found the list of herbs, with a recipe and directions for nanakusagayu, at another blog, Create Eat Happy.)


Actually, some of the seven herbs are perennials, but their strongly green colored leaves aren't at their best on frosty mornings and seri ( セリ　water dropwart) isn't usually available in January, though I think I've seen it in the markets before the end of February. However, you can buy it on January 6th, presumably fresh from the greenhouse.

Introducing "Not Just Rice"

First, myself:

Don Weiss, American guy, sometimes a teacher, formerly a travel journalist and photographer, once upon a time coffee shop owner (American greasy spoon style), and longer ago once upon a time bureaucrat. I've lived in Japan off and on since 1990. I'm married to a Japanese woman. We have a cute daughter in 2nd grade. We live just outside Tokushima City, on the island of Shikoku -- which you can look up in Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Next, my location:

People who haven't lived in Japan have images of the country dominated by samurai, geisha, Kyoto, and Tokyo. Where we live is most emphatically none of the above, as you'll discover if you follow this blog. Japanese from the cities refer to areas like this as inaka, a word commonly translated as rural, though inaka can also refer to cities that lack the modernity (and overcrowding) of Tokyo. Tokushima City is, in Japanese terms, inaka, though it has a population of about 267,000.

Finally, the blog:

For the next 12 1/2 months, I plan to post nearly every day about what we're cooking, eating, and seeing in the fields and stores around us. Food is central to culture, and since food is one of my obsessions as well as a Japanese fetish (yes, I plan to document all of this), it stands to reason that a food blog can be a culture blog as well.

So for the next year, I'm going to document what we eat, at home, in restaurants, on picnics (including under the cherry blossoms), even at school. I'll take pictures of the food that grows around us in the fields since here, on the edge of a city, we're surrounded by rice, carrots, broccoli, and dozens of other crops. I'll take pictures and talk about what's in the local supermarkets (Mama's Store and The Big) and farmers' market. I'll show you what food ads look like (including the ubiquitous ads for Christmas cake and osechi ryori (for New Year's).

Bon appétit!