I'm kind of back, I guess

Good evening, everyone.

...

Yeah, I know. "Who the heck are you?" Fair enough, I might have neglected this thing for a wee bit too long. But hey, I'll try to be better about it. To be perfectly honest, several months ago I wrote a blog post of monstrous proportions about pretty much everything interesting that's happened to me since coming here, but after figuring out how many pictures I'd have to resize and upload to make it happen I pretty much just set it aside and, of course, forgot about it. Until, of course, I headed back to America for summer vacation to catch up with everyone and received an earful from everyone about my lack of blog posts.

So let's just start over. I'll get around to telling you guys about my adventures here, but I'll do it in smaller increments so as not to overwhelm myself to the point of just lazily dropping it entirely.

So I got into a discussion this morning with my mom about strange (or what I used to think were strange) Japanese foods that I now thoroughly enjoy. At the top of the list are umeboshi, the incredibly salty, incredibly tart pickled plums that Japanese people love to pair with rice. You can find an umeboshi on top of the rice portion of pretty much every bento box (box lunch, often easily obtained in the convenience stores you see all over the place) you find in this country, and they're also a popular filling for onigiri (rice balls). Here you can see it on the top left (this is a sampler bento I got from one of the department stores here. So pretty!)



First time I had on it was like getting punched in the mouth, but I actually really enjoy them now and always put a couple of them in my genmai (Japanese brown rice, much tastier than regular brown rice) any time I have to make a lunch box for myself for work. It helps keep the food fresh too, which is an added bonus. That may be why pickles are so darn popular here, since it is quite a traditional food from long, long ago. And they pickle pretty much everything. Takuan, these bright yellow daikon radish pickles, are also pretty tasty. I didn't like them when I first got here either, but now I appreciate a good, crunchy takuan with my meals. I even buy bags of them at the store now to eat with my giant bowl of evening miso soup.

Good heavens, miso soup is good. I especially love it when it has potatoes in it. Seriously. It's the easiest thing in the world to make and it's so good. Go make yourself some.

Chikuwa is also pretty tasty. They're these little hollow tube looking things made from pureed fish that has been wrapped around bamboo and then grilled... or steamed... or... I don't know. Cooked somehow. It's a pretty cheap, healthy way to add protein to a meal, so I usually cut it into little rings and chuck it into my giant bowls of soup in the evening (but you can eat chikuwa as-is if you so desire). They get all puffy when they've been in the soup for awhile, so I use them as a way to tell me when my food is done. I owe kyuushoku (school lunch) for this, as my first real introduction to this food came from it's appearance in my school lunches. Plural. As in it usually takes a few appearances of a new food in my meals for me to actually remember the name of these foreign foods that I'm repeatedly eating.

My mom then asked if I still hate squid. Well... kind of, yeah. I'm still not a fan of the raw stuff, but it's fine when cooked. It often appears at yakiniku, which is where everyone sits around a grill and cooks little pieces of different meats and vegetables and everyone just kind of helps themselves (this is pretty much the prefectural pastime of Hokkaido, by the way. They LOVE their yakiniku here). I then stated again that I still prefer octopus to squid, which made my mom present me with a face as if to say "you're insane." Well, maybe so, but octopus is good. So good, in fact, that I got the stick of octopus in my oden for dinner tonight.

Now, this purchase of oden is kind of a special thing for me, so let me talk about this. Oden is a type of nabe cooking, which basically means a type of cooking where you have a big pot of some kind of broth which you then fill with random crap and let it simmer and cook until everything has absorbed the tastiness and you're left with a big pot of awesome. This is understandably a big thing in winter (and parties even in the summer, as a big pot of food easily feeds many), so now that we're heading into winter the convenience stores are all advertising their oden lineups. And if you go to the convenience store you can choose from quite an array of ingredients to compose your single serving of soup, so it really is... well... convenient. Especially since oden is best when the food has been simmering for a rather long time to absorb all the flavors, which isn't always fun to replicate at home. Here are some examples from our friends at google image search:





The most popular ingredients are hard boiled eggs, daikon radish, konnyaku (a jelly-type block made from yams. It absorbs flavors really well and is pretty much calorie free, so the ladies love it), tofu (as-is or fried, sometimes mixed with chopped vegetables), and a variety of fish cakes (such as the aforementioned chikuwa). You can eat it along with a variety of condiments, but perhaps the most popular is spicy mustard. It really is good and perfect for cold weather (or nasty rainy nights, like tonight).

And, of course, since it's awesome and I apparently hate myself, I hardly ever treat myself to a bowl of this heavenly food. It kind of shows up in our school lunches from time to time, but there it's more like a bunch of oden ingredients on a plate topped with a sweet miso-ish sauce and less like a big hot bowl of delicious slow-cooked soup (don't get me wrong, it's still good, but the real stuff is better than the school stuff). Obviously we're just now coming out of summer so oden hasn't really been on anyone's mind for months, but I think I've bought convenience store oden maybe... once since I've been here? It was last year some time. It's a shame, really, so I finally got off my lazy butt and went to my local 7-11 to get a styrofoam bowl of tasty tasty oden this evening. (Which I paired with a big salad topped with umeboshi dressing. Those plums really have grown on me.)

So I went and picked 6 different things for my oden dinner tonight: egg (of course), daikon radish, konnyaku, roll cabbage (its got ground meat wrapped up inside of it, kind of like a Japanese gawumpki for those of you that know what I'm talking about), fuki (some kind of rhubarb-like vegetable), and, to bring me back to my original point, an octopus tentacle on a bamboo stick.



The octopus was by far the most expensive one of the bunch (over twice as much as the others, which are usually around a buck a piece), but I wanted to splurge and get something really Japanese. So, after my talk with my mom this morning I decided I needed a little octopus in my day. I mean, it's good stuff! Why doesn't anyone give it a chance?

And then a lone suction cup fell into my mustard as I was dining, and I remembered that, "Oh yeah, this looks pretty darn disgusting." Well, if you ignore that part of it, octopus is pretty darn good, and I'll tell you right now that I didn't let even that lone mustard-covered suction cup go to waste.

It was quite the treat, but I'll probably try making it at home next time, just to see if I can do it and to save some cash. You can buy oden kits in all the supermarkets here... or, if you've become a health nut like I apparently have, you can skip all the fried vegetables and tofu balls and just make it at home with the eggs, daikon, carrots, and konyakku you've got in the fridge (which is more practical if you're cooking for one and don't need a family-size bag of stuff). Can't be that hard... can it? At least I know where to go if I want some pseudo-gawumpki and suction cups if my at-home version goes bad.

All right, I'm off to finish off my meal with some of that applesauce I made last night. Since it's fall, apples are cheap, and I bought half a dozen of them last night and decided to make a boatload of applesauce with them at 11 pm. Since this country apparently doesn't know what applesauce is. In fact cinnamon really isn't a big thing here in the fall. Pumpkin cakes and puddings and cookies are all over the place, but they have no spices. It's really quite depressing... so I've been making a lot of my own fall pumpkin and apple foods to satisfy my craving for cinnamon-packed American-style fall goodies.

I think I've had a bout of homesickness lately, and I've been battling it by reminding myself how awesome this country is by enjoying its delicious cuisine. The oden just happened to be on my mind tonight, but there will probably be more food blogs in the future... just as a heads up. And I'll apologize right now. Sort of. This place has awesome food you all need to know about.

Speaking of battling homesickness with food, I've got a big Japanese proficiency exam coming up in a couple months, so I get to pretend I'm still a college student by finding cafe-like places to hide out on weekend evenings so I can study and drink lots and lots (and lots) of coffee (mmm). There aren't many places in Japan that let you do this, but good ol' Mister Donut, the donut chain here in Japan, is open late, has tasty and interesting donuts, is currently running a campaign with Snoopy related items that warms my beagle-loving heart, and, to top it all off, gives you FREE refills on coffee if you dine in.

Awwww yeah. This is what my weekends will look like for the next few months... textbooks and donuts:



They even have some interesting donuts. Not too long ago they introduced a line of baked donuts with such flavors at chocolate burdock and sweet potato spinach (you could totally taste the spinach... it was kinf of odd). Here we have a rice flour mitarashi donut (mitarashi meaning that thick, sweet soy sauce they put on the top of it). The dough is really chewy and dense like the mochi dumplings you get here, and it's really interesting and GOOD. Seriously, I do limit my Mister Donut visits to the weekend, and only one donut at a time... because I could easily eat a dozen of these. In about a minute.



It's still passably warm enough for me to go bike riding or jogging in the mornings on the weekend, so bring on more crazy donuts, Mister Donut!

OK, enough food, I promise I'll write about something else next time. And I swear there will be a next time. Not sure when, but I'll try to keep this up, even if it's just unimportant little tidbits about my life like this one was.

(And speaking of food, for those of you following me on facebook you might see more photo albums pop up on my facebook account with more Japan pictures, since posting pictures there is easier I think. I'll try to keep that up to, so stay tuned.)