Fresh asparagus

A dollar a stalk, but at least it looks better than what I took a picture of in my local supermarket a few days ago.

Actually, I don't remember having seen fresh white asparagus in Japan before, and very, very rarely in California.

Fish head soup, anybody?

Aged broccoli

A very orange store

This reminds me, my wife sometimes uses the term "fruits tomato" to refer to especially sweet tomatoes. That's because tomatoes aren't usually sold at fruit stores in Japan. This is obviously a fruit store. Infact, it had little besides citrus and apples.

Local food

This was a pretty good little restaurant, a local chain, I think. The food was really cheap. I think my meal was about 800 yen and Yoshie's, the daily special, was about 600. The background music while we were there was a Brahms string quartet, which didn't go with the food in the usual sense but made a pleasant contrast and, after all, it was pleasant music.

Guessing game

What are these people lining up for? We waited 20 minutes to get to the front of the line. That was after taking a train up to the north side of Kyoto.

Sakura (cherry blossom) mochi. And other (very special) mochi.

Namako -- Sea cucumber

I've eaten sea cucumber both in Japan and in China. In China it was dried, then re-constituted in soup. I loved it. Here in Japan, where food almost always closely resembles the live state (not the fish heads for soup, above, of course), it was (how shall I put this?) disgusting both in texture (sort of a cross between slimy and crunchy) and flavor (like swallowing salt water while snorkling.

Imported rice!

This is the first time I've ever seen imported rice for sale in Japan, two from Thailand, one (the wild rice) from Canada. The rice market is severely protected here and I thought that rice could only be imported for industrial processes like making senbe (rice crackers). One year, when the rice harvest was poor, imported rice was sold for cooking, but I heard it was relatively low-quality Thai rice and not well received. This was on the shelf in one of the imported food stores that we seek out occasionally, when our local supermarket face palls.

Baby octopus

This is one of the very few foods I've ever tried to eat but couldn't. I put one in my mouth and chewed and chewed and chewed and tried to swallow. I got one or two little legs (or arms) down my throat, but literally couldn't swallow the body. Finally, I reached into my mouth and pulled it out, still essentially whole but a little chewed. I don't care to remember exactly what the rough suckers of the tentacles felt like as I pulled them out of my throat. It took a lot (more) beer to wash away the feeling.

Green tea flavored KitKats!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tsukemono in Nishiki koji, Kyoto

Kyoto is famous for many kinds of food, but certainly one of its greatest claims to culinary fame is it's bewildering variety of pickles. It seems like almost any soft of vegetable, and many kinds of animals, can be found pickled, one way or another. The best place to find all of these is Nishiki koji, one of my favorite markets in the world and one of my favorite places in Kyoto (where I west this past weekend).

$4.61 each for small tomatoes

Special (very very very special, I think) from Kochi-ken. I found these, and the strawberries below, in Nishiki koji, the most interesting food market in Kyoto.

$6 each

A little more, actually.

These were even more expensive, probably because it's a set of 20 REALLY nice ones, for 12,000 yen ($129.74).

Karakusa

The word karakusa (カラクサ) actually refers to this pattern, which is sometimes seen on traditional cloth. It's based on the peony flower (ボタン). Here it's used for overly-colorful mochi with anko, sweet bean filling. These were special for the Spring Festival.

Spring Festival as in The First Day of Spring which is a day off in Japan -- well, for schools, anyway, except it's a Monday holiday this year since the equinox fell on a Saturday night and so Sunday was the first day of spring. Don't get me started on the difference between the equinox (when the noon sun is over the Equator) and the equilux, the actual day of equal day and night, which varies a bit according to latitude (I think).

Mini-asparagus

Fish trap

Honor store

These little kiosks are fairly common around here. You pick you produce and drop your money in a can. These attendants, however, are unusual.

Rural garbage

A fair number of people use the roadsides for their personal garbage dumps.

Garbage protection

We have to protect our garbage from ravens, cats, and weasels.

The weasels always seem to get into one family's garbage, a family with a baby.

The cage style varies from place to place.

In the city, they just throw nets over the bags of garbage to discourage the ravens. I'll add a picture when I get the chance.

Composting -- straight to the rice paddy.

Some of those hasaku didn't make the grade.

Citrus -- Variations on a theme

That's not a grapefruit on the left and not an orange in the middle.

In addition to the justly famed Japanese tangerines, often called Mandarin Oranges in the U.S., Japanese farmers grow a wide variety of citrus, none of which is usually found in American supermarkets. The one of the left is a ponkan (ポンカン); the one in the middle, a hasaku (ハサク). As Douglas Adams would have put it, a ponkan is almost exactly totally not like a grapefruit. The hasaku is sort of an orange in taste. The difference is, in both cases, that both are less flavorful, less sweet, and far less easy to peel and eat than their (to me) more familiar citrus family cousins.

You can buy both oranges and grapefruit in local supermarkets. The grapefruit are usually about 100 yen (about a dollar) and range in quality from poor to excellent, regardless of price. I've even (once) found magnificent Indian River grapefruit for 100 yen. The oranges, normally California navels (food from California is extremely saleable here), cost about 70 to 100 yen each and usually aren't very good.

California Burgers at McD

High-magnesium beer

Well, why not?

http://www.japantoday.com/category/entertainment/view/kumiko-goto-becomes-kirin-beer-goddess

The ignorance of a BBC reporter

I have a feeling that the BBC reporter responsible for this article doesn't get out of Tokyo very much, and spends most of his time hanging around people who have too much disposable income. It's really a stretch to call whale meat a delicacy. You can find restaurants in Japan deifying any food. I've been to some where tofu is served for your choice of 12 to 21 courses, each one a different preparation. Once I went to a restaurant where the specialty was fu, dried wheat gluten. And don't get me started on the various kinds of dancing food, where the fish or shellfish you eat is alive until it hits your stomach acid.

The truth is, most Japanese sometimes consider any fatty meat a delicacy, partly because fatty meat didn't used to be in the Japanese diet at all. Consider toro, and especially o-toro, the fatty meat from the belly of the blue fin tuna. That used to be pet food. I'm not kidding. Whale meat, like some kinds of specially raised steers, is particularly fatty meat. It must go down well with excessive quantities of beer, as in, "Drink another couple of beers, then I dare you to eat this!" Have I mentioned pickled sea cucumber intestines before? That's considered a delicacy by some people.

Getting back to the whale meat, as I showed you a few weeks ago, judging by my almost daily trips to local stores, it's rarely consumed in this area, and what is sold in the supermarkets is very cheap meat. But I guess the right cut, from the right kind of whale, served in a restaurant where the beer flows freely . . .

March 14 vs. March 17

St. Patrick's Day where you are? I was just listening to KCBS (from San Francisco) and they were going on about stocking up on corned beef, cabbage, and beer for the festivities which apparently started this weekend and will continue at least until the 17th. Here in Japan, St. Patrick's Day is almost unrecognized, although my wife refers to it as Green Day and knows you're supposed to wear something green. She certainly didn't know about junior high school boys pounding on peers who forget to wear the required color, but then, there are still lots of things about American culture that surprise her.

March 14th, however, is a significant day here in Japan. It's called White Day and can be a fairly expensive day for men and the start of a week when women can binge on chocolate without spending a penny. (No jokes from my British friends, please.)

Wikipedia and other web sources date the tradition of Valentine's Day in Japan back to 1936, when Morozoff, a Kobe-based chocolatier, started advertising. Supposedly there was a typo, and only women were encouraged to buy chocolate for the men in their lives. (I think, more likely, the ad was composed by a man and he didn't want to spend the money.) In any case, since then, Japanese women have spent more and more money and gotten nothing but thanks in return, until 1978, when the chocolate sellers of Japan instituted White Day. That's a chance for men to give chocolate to the women who gave them chocolate a month before. The lingerie makers have tried to get in on the act, but that seems to have been largely unsuccessful.

Sorry, no picture. I guess my wife took her chocolates to the office.

Kuro-goma dofu

It looks sort of awful, but it tastes wonderful.

Dofu is a variant of tofu, but this tofu isn't made from soy beans, it's made from sesame seeds (usually white ones, but in this case, black) with a little starch. The glob on top that looks like a spoiled egg yolk is sweetened miso.

You can buy goma-dofu (胡麻豆腐 sesame tofu) in any supermarket here in Japan, but my first memory of it is the best. I was staying, for the first time of many, at a temple at Koyasan, the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism, not far from Kyoto. The temples of Koyasan are famous for their shojin ryori (temple cooking) and I certainly wasn't disappointed, except by the quantity. Everything was presented in very small servings and I was very glad that there was a mini-grocery story almost next door, where I could buy peanuts, and a bakery down the street where I could really fill up after meals.

The menu changed from day to day, but every other day, at dinner, one of the dishes was sure to be a sort of creamy, rich, incredibly delicious tofu I'd never seen before. It was, I learned, goma dofu, a specialty of Koyasan.

Years later, the national broadcaster served up a TV drama about a girl who learns proper behavior from her aunt, who was the abbess of a temple. The aunt taught her to make goma dofu, which was more an exercise in concentration and dedication to perfection than simply a recipe. It seemed, from watching the show, that the girl spent hours a day making a few small servings of goma dofu. Actually, I've read that it only takes an hour to grind the sesame seeds by hand and, of course, it you want to take a shortcut, you can use a grinder or, I suppose, buy tahini and save most of the time and effort. But then you're not getting your behavioral training.

Grandma's nishime

My wife stopped by her mother's house yesterday and, of course, came back with lots of homemade goodies, among them, nishime (にしめ), vegetables and chikuwa (I'll explain another time) boiled in dashi with soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. Nishime can have lots of different ingredients and the seasonings depend on the whim of the cook. It's definitely an as-you-like-it sort of dish. It's good for any meal. We had some for breakfast this morning (Sunday) and will probably finish it with dinner tonight.

Pancake breakfast

Yesterday (Saturday) we had pancakes for breakfast, and Lee did a great job at cooking them. She needed a bit of help mixing them, however, even though she did it from a package of pancake mix my wife had bought. It was an industrial pack, 1 kg. of dry mix, and the instructions were for using the whole pack -- 1 kg. of dry mix, 250 g. eggs . . . I did the division for Lee.

We have butter and jam on our pancakes here since maple syrup is about 1,000 yen ( US $10) for a very small bottle.

Calm cows from pickled plums

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100312f1.html

Whale sushi? In Santa Monica California?

The group that helped to make the Academy Award winning short documentary about Taiji, the town in Japan that has an annual dolphin hunt, helped to get a popular Santa Monica California restaurant in trouble. It seems that if you ask nicely, and have enough money ($85 per serving!), you can get whale sushi. At least, you could, until the restaurant got busted the other day.

I found a picture here, although this is from Japan, not the restaurant that got busted.

Full tree

Preparing for spring planting

Milk and meat

There are a few dozen small dairy farms in our area, most housing no more than 100 cows.(This one is the biggest I've seen.) There are also a few dozen of what look like small feed lots of about the same size. None of these animals is in danger of getting too much sun since there is never any associated corral or pasture.

Sumashi

Sumashi refers to any clear soup. You can make it by following a very detailed recipe, or you can do it the way I do.

Make a light broth by soaking a piece of konbu and a handful of katsuobushi (shaved dried bonito) in some boiling water for about 5 minutes. (Turn the heat off when you put in the konbu and katsuobushi.) Strain out the konbu and katsuobushi. Throw out the katsuobushi, cut the konbu into 1 cm. squares, and return them to the broth. Then add a few pieces of whatever and serve. For a real home-style feeling, add a lot of pieces. Depending on the konbu and your preferences, you might want to add a little salt or soy sauce. I don't, but most people like their food saltier than I do.

Eco-hashi

When I first came here to live, I bought a pair of souvenir chopsticks and a carrying case so that I could carry them with me and use them in restaurants. Some of the other foreign teachers did the same, and we all felt like we were cultural ambassadors or missionaries, trying to convert the locals to our environmentally conscious lifestyle. We obviously haven't had much effect, but maybe we helped a little since they've now appeared in at least one school that I know of, my daughter's elementary school, and one restaurant chain, as we see when we go to Ishii Shokudo, as we did last Saturday night before "The Lion King" which may or may not be based on (a rip-off of?) a Japanese animated film. In addition to waribashi, the usual throwaway chopsticks, they have Eco-hashi (エコ箸), re-usuable chopsticks made out of nicely painted wood.
In recent years, I've carried this well-worn pair of black chopsticks in a long-broken case that says LA Gear, but I've recently switched to a cheaper and better alternative. (How cheap? 100 yen!) They screw together so that, in their cloth carrying case, they can fit in a pants pocket or shirt pocket.

Nanchatte Cola???

Nanchatte Cola -- Toranco
Cheerio Japan
1966

I haven't dared try it yet. It was only 39 yen for this 350 ml bottle.

(Scary-looking, isn't it?)

Cow guts

As the sign says, Nakayama Meat, home of the North Pole dwelling steer, sells, among other cuts, cow innards (called hormon, ホルモン).

And this restaurant overdoes it.