Just Hungry - Japanese food! Authentic, mostly healthy Japanese recipes for everyone

House renovation and kitchen planning, an ongoing saga

maki — Wed, 09 May 2012 09:42:42 +0000

My cancer treatments are over for now, and since my body is no longer being bombarded by gamma rays and such, I am feeling quite a bit better. So now it’s time to get back to the huge task of renovating the old house we got more than two years ago. Renovations have been stalled for months due to all the other crap going on in my life.

One of the first things we are tackling is the kitchen. Folks, I am supposed to be a food blogger/writer. I’ve written a cookbook and everything. And right now, I have no kitchen. This is seriously cramping my style, to put it mildly, and accounts almost as much as my illness for the paucity of posts on my two food blogs. (I tried to keep up a positive outlook on things and had plans for recipes that didn’t need a cooktop, etc. but I’m afraid all that enthusiasm went out the window when the burglars took most of our kitchen appliances.) Due to yet another unwanted dramatic episode I don’t even have a microwave or a decent hotplate. We are getting by on one lousy cheap hotplate that was deemed too worthless to take by the burglars, and the old rice cooker. Oh, we don’t have a sink in the kitchen area either, and the beautiful new sink in the bathroom already looks banged up because we’re using it in ways it was never intended to be used, like scrubbing pots.

Sigh.

So anyway, we are finally back tackling the renovation. When we started this process early last year (!), we decided that we would be our own contractors/designers to save some money. We figured, I’m sort of creative/artsy (or I like to think I am) and The Guy is an engineer, so we can do this, no problem. Big Mistake. We should have hired a contractor for sure (managing the workers and trying to get them to come on time or even on the day they promise to show up, etc.) is a huge headache. Managing the ordering and delivery of materials, likewise. And as far as the design stuff goes - well, I know now why people hire designers. More than anything, it probably halts the confusion over too much choice and the procrastination.

Right now, the kitchen still looks more or less like this:

Except that the floor has been tiled with the new tile, and the blocks have been skimmed with builder’s plaster or whatever it’s called. The plaster has to be sanded down, covered with white plaster, then an undercoat, then painted or tiled. Ugh.

I did finally order the kitchen cabinets and countertops though.

The cabinets: I did lust for a while after some made to order painted wooden cabinets from a local (well, Marseille) company, like these:

But for all the cabs we needed, it would have cost like, way too much. Besides, sometime during the last year my taste in design seems to have shifted. Before I was all gung-ho for a sort of a 1900s-traditional French style industriel look. I still like that look, but now I’m also strongly drawn to a more modern, streamlined aesthetic too. (You can see some of my kitchen design procrastinations on my Kitchen and Pantry Pinterest board.

So, after much waffling and visiting countless kitchen showrooms, I went with IKEA cabinets. Seriously, I believe they are the cabinets with the best price/performance ratio. I looked at cabinets costing 2-4 times as much that weren’t any better in terms of quality. Plus, they have all those neat things to organize the insides of the cabinets. Besides, the IKEA Kitchen Planner thing is addictive. This is how one wall looks, more or less.

Since this is supposed to be my ‘dream kitchen’ (I’ve never planned a kitchen from scratch before), and because we are in an old house with odd-angled walls and floors and ceilings at different heights and such, I’ve been spending hours and hours and hours on the layout. I wanted to ensure I had plenty of storage space for pantry items, cooking equipment and such. It’s really not easy at all.

Countertops: Initially I really wanted stainless steel countertops. I love the look of a professional kitchen, and how easy stainless steel is to keep clean. We briefly rented an apartment in Zürich that had a tiny kitchen with an old ‘system kitchen’ unit, that had a stainless steel top, and I loved it. However…here at least, stainless steel is prohibitively expensive. It’s the most expensive countertop surface you can get. The countertops alone would have eaten up my entire kitchen budget. (One reason could be that they don’t seem to be that popular here. We had the hardest time finding suppliers who made stainless steel plan de travail for home kitchens.)

I like the look of wood, but having had wooden countertops in my old kitchen in Switzerland, and knowing how it could get stained and damaged and warped a bit around the sink and things, I did not want wood again. The budget option would have been what’s called stratifié here - Formica-type laminated countertops. But…but…I just didn’t want to do that. I know they are serviceable and all, but I did not want.

Another option I looked at for a while was marble. I love the look of real marble. However, every dealer we talked to and every other website out there warned against using marble for kitchens.

So in the end, I went for a white colored quartz with a subtle faux-marble look (Compac® Carrara). This is pretty expensive and took up about 60% of our total kitchen budget, but still cheaper than stainless steel. It’s said to be very durable, and it’s a ‘cool’ surface, which is what I wanted for my future pastry making sessions. (I have a suspicion that in reality I’ll be rolling out pastry 2-3 times a year at most, but it’s the dream that counts, right?) Luckily the countertop place we ordered from had a sale going on sinks and taps, so we got those there too. (Stainless steel for those.)

(Other surface materials that I also considered and rejected: resin aka Corian (looks like bathroom material to me, not kitchen); granite (I just don’t like the look of most granite - I feel like you can never tell if it’s totally clean); glass (I know it’s very durable but we have someone in the house who is capable of breaking just about anything that can be broken…); ceramic tile (this is the traditional Provençal look, but I don’t like it and the thought of cleaning the grout all the time is too depressing); cement (is cement supposed to be good for you…?) and other natural stone like slate (just did not want a dark surface.))

So, the cabinets are supposed to arrive this Friday. They need to get installed by the 3rd week of May when they come to measure for the countertops. Maybe soon, I’ll have a kitchen again. Right now I’m still a bit pessimistic.

So, if you have any kitchen remodelling war stories to share, please do!

Sashimi, raw eggs and more in The Japan Times, plus raw proteins elsewhere

maki — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:43:12 +0000

My Japan Times Food article this month is about all the raw proteins Japanese people like to eat. You probably know that Japanese people like raw fish (in the form of sashimi, and as a topping for sushi), and raw eggs (on rice or noodles) - but did you know that we also eat raw horsemeat, beef liver, and even chicken? Read more about it here. The accompanying recipe is a how-to for making a great plate of sashimi.

A couple of photos that didn’t make it into the article: Here is a plate of katsuo or bonito sashimi. Lean katsuo is in season in Japan right now, and it’s one of my favorite types of fish to enjoy as sashimi. Instead of wasabi, grated ginger, garlic and/or finely chopped green onions are the preferred condiments. Raw garlic on raw fish, you say? It’s really good. Just don’t have it before a job interview or a first date. (Incidentally, since someone asked, all the photos that accompany my Japan Times articles with just a couple of exceptions were taken by me, The Guy or my mom.)

This is a sashimi bocho, a knife for slicing sashimi. It has a long blade, narrow blade (this one is about 30 cm / 12 inches long, but there are even longer ones) which has a minimal surface area to come into contact with the fish. It’s nice to have one of these but not totally necessary unless you eat a lot of sashimi. A santoku type knife (with the little indentations all along the blade, like this one) does a good job too. Any knife you use has to be very sharp for clean slices.

A few words about raw proteins elsewhere

Since English speakers who live in Japan are the primary readership of The Japan Times, the articles I write for them are aimed at people who are in Japan. All the buying recomenndations and so on are for Japan.

However, the primary audience for this site, Just Hungry (and JustBento too) is people who have an interest in Japanese food and cooking who don’t live in Japan. If you look through the archives here, you wll notice that there are very few recipes that feature raw proteins. Most of my sushi recipes on both of my food sites use cooked or smoked fish, other cooked food like aburaage (fried tofu skins) or vegetables. (Sushi does not mean ‘raw fish’ after all; it refers to the vinegar, salt and suguar flavored rice used.)

This is because I want my readers to be able to make my recipes without having to worry about food safety. I believe that the basic rule of thumb is: Unless you are really experienced in sussing out how fresh a particular food is, if your country or community’s food supply chain is not used to supplying a particular food to be consumed raw, don’t risk it. And if you’ve seen ‘cook thoroughly or else’ type warnings issued by the government or industry associations, be really wary.

Take raw eggs or undercooked for example. Raw eggs are eaten on a daily basis in Japan, even for breakfast. And in France, a properly cooked omelette is baveuse, soft on the inside. In both countries I do not hesitate to eat eggs in all their runny glory as long as they are fresh, because if people got sick from eating eggs in the way they are used to there would be a huge uproar. On the other hand, in the U.S. the American Egg Board recommends that “Eggs should be cooked until the whites are set (completely coagulated and firm) and the yolks begin to thicken (no longer runny, but not hard). Scrambled eggs and omelets should be cooked until firm throughout with no visible liquid egg remaining.” Not to get too political on you but this smacks of “covering our asses against lawsuits and our substandard ways of manufacturing eggs” to me (can warning labels on egg cartons be far behind?) - but in any case, if you do choose to eat raw eggs in the U.S. you may want to stick to pasteurized eggs or eggs you know for sure have been laid in good conditions.

In regards to sashimi, again in Japan everyone eats sashimi at home, and most home cooks know how to sniff out (sorry for the pun) good fish. It’s just part of the culture. If you’re attempting to make sashimi at home, make sure you get your fish from a reputable seller: one that really knows what ‘sashimi grade fish’ is. Most Japanese grocery stores are fine, as are good fishmongers such as Citarella in New York. See also: Making your own sushi? Proceed with caution, which I wrote back in 2007. Not much as changed since then. Personally, I do occasionally make sashimi or sushi at home because we have a really good local fishmonger, but I’ve learned how to discern what’s sashimi-suitable from my mom and the chefs at the New York sushi restaurant she used to manage, where I hung out a lot. Teaching this kind of thing over the internets is pretty hard unfortunately, as much as I’d like to.

As I mentioned in the article, last year Japan was rocked by an e.coli scare caused by raw beef, served as yukke or yukhoe (a Korean dish) served at cut-rate yakiniku (‘grilled beef’) restaurants. It turns out that the beef in question was not sold to the restaurants as being fit for consumption, and furthermore had not been handled properly. Raw beef was not widely consumed in Japan except at speciality restaurants until fairly recently, when Korean food exploded in popularity and discount yakiniku restaurants proliferated all over the country. I don’t know about you but eating raw beef at a discount eatery does not sound like a good idea.

As the weather gets warmer in the northern hemisphere, food safety becomes more of an issue. Exercise caution and let’s all stay (or in my case, get) healthy this summer.

What to eat when you can’t stand the heat in The Japan Times
All of my Japan Times articles

My sister Meg's amazing pastry skills

maki — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:08:31 +0000

It’s been a bit too serious around here, so here’s some fun. I think I’m pretty good at savory cooking, but when it comes to pastry I definitely need more practice. However, my little sister Meg is an amazing pastry chef. She graduated from the French Culinary Institute and used to work at Toraya in New York, and has also done a stint as a speciality cookie designer. She decided some years ago to stop being a fulltime chef, but she still does some catering. She recently catered the wedding of her friends Bennie and Tyneia in Florida. These are the party favors - all beautifully packaged by her…

…and this is the amazing Gothic themed wedding cake, complete with ghoulish skeleton bride and groom. Meg says it took her 3 days to make this cake.

Here’s what Meg says about the sweets and the cake:

The party favors were 2 sweets, cut into bite sized squares. One was called Rocky Road squares. A Chocolate-marshmallow-peanut combo. So easy to make, and usually do so for kids I babysit for. They’re a hit with kids and they can certainly participate in the preparation. I tossed the squares in some unsweetened cocoa powder to offset the sweetness for a more sophisticated taste, and also I thought it would help with the hot humid climate here in Florida. The second set of squares were what I call Coconut Crunchies. It consists of a thin graham cracker bottom, topped with coconut flakes, chocolate chips and chopped walnuts. Any time I make these, they never stay around for long. Everyone I know say they are addicting and I’m asked by many of my friends to make them their own tray.

Both these recipes were originally from my friend’s mom, which I’ve been putting my own personal twists to.

The cake was all made from scratch. It was a marble cake with 3 layers of Chocolate-almond butter frosting, which then was also covered in a vanilla butter frosting, before it was completely covered in a chocolate quick pour fondant, which I dyed black for the gothic look. I matched the grey from the skeleton bride with the left over vanilla frosting.

I’m so proud of her. I’ve been trying to nudge her back into the cooking world…who knows, maybe someday. ^_^

Sketch diary: Cancer, the ladyparts version

maki — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:58:31 +0000

Today I started a 3-week course of brachytherapy. Unlike the 6-week course of external beam radiation therapy that ended on Friday, which definitely made me feel pretty horrible, brachytherapy is not supposed to cause any adverse side effects. We shall see.

I know that many of you want me to get back the regular programming of recipes, food fun and Japanese things, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to describe the treatments I’ve been getting, and how they’ve affected me. I see a lot of information about what breast cancer treatment involves, but very little about Other Lady Parts cancer, which is what I have. So, if you are squeamish or not interested, you may want to skip the rest of this page.

……

I have what is called endometrial cancer, or cancer of the uterus. It’s at stage IIIB - my cancer had spread a bit past my uterus down to my cervix and vagina. I do want to emphasize that this type of cancer is supposed to be very treatable, and most patients that are diagnosed early enough as I was survive and lead healthy lives afterwards.

My treatment has been in three stages. The first stage was a full hysterectomy - the surgeons took out my uterus and cervix. A long incision was made in my lower abdomen to perform this surgery, and months later I still have a small opening there (about 5 cm / 2.5 inches long) that is leaking strange body fluids, itches, and prevents me from putting any strain on my belly. The side effect of this is that my back hurts pretty much constantly, especially when I’m standing. (Walking is a bit better.)

The second stage was a six week course (5 days a week) of external beam radiation therapy, where a beam of strong radiation was aimed at what remains of my lower lady parts. This stage made me pretty sick, as I described previously.

And now I’m in the final stage, brachytherapy. Once a week for 3 weeks, I’ll go to the radiology center where the oncologist puts a stick that’s about the size and length of a corn dog into me, leaves the room, and lets the stick thing zap me from the inside with radioactive waves for eight minutes. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just a bit uncomfortable and you know, slightly embarassing in the way a gynecological exam is.

I’m still feeling some of the after effects of the radiation therapy like diarrhea and fatigue, but I do think it’s getting slowly better. I no longer feel nauseous. I’m still very moody though. I tend to go from one extreme:

Cranky as hell

to the other:

Pathetic

I try to distract myself as much as possible with things like music, podcasts, audiobooks and marathon sessions of past and present seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s a bit hard to do much reading, because my eyes are really tired much of the time, and for some reason I don’t have enough patience to make it through a full 2-hour movie - I either get a headache or fall asleep. Oh yes, and I make little doodles like the ones you see here.

Some other annoying side effects: small itchy welts appearing all over my body (though they disappear quickly), a couple of larger and painful blisters, and developing hemorrhoids because of the constant diarrhea.

And, there’s no other way to say it but -

My recent tests have been good though, so everyone is optimistic about me making a full recovery (or as full as one can get - I’ll have to watch out for a relapse in some years). If you take anything away from this though: ladies, please get regular tests, especially if cancer runs in your family. I had neglected to do so, until it was almost too late. (As I’ve said on these pages before, my mother got cervical cancer when she was the same age that I was last year.) Cancer really sucks, no way around it. Bah, cancer. Bah.

Sketch diary: At a low point

maki — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:29:13 +0000

Following up on the last entry from my sketch diary:

Just one more week to go with the radiation therapy, and it’s really tough. I was in a lot more physical pain just after surgery (or before surgery last year when I had a bad infection), but mentally, I am struggling.

I do have a lot of pain. From the constant diarrhea mainly, and its side effects. And other things. And then there is the debilitating fatigue, which makes me incredibly cranky and hard to live with.

I love food, probably way more than most people. Why else would I write about food? At the moment though, my relationship with food is not a love affair, it’s adversarial. The food that is the healthiest - most fruits, and just about all fresh vegetables - trigger the diarrhea. The food that I can eat without making my intestines feel so tortured are the ones that are high in carbohydrates - which make my blood sugar rise. (I should note that I had my blood sugar comfortably under control before all this with a combination of healthy eating, moderate exercise and medication.) Because I don’t know what I can eat right now anymore, I haven’t been eating much at all.

Mainly, this is how I feel. Mainly about cancer.

One more week of radiation therapy to go. Hopefully things will get better after that, and I can feel better about writing about food again. (If you’re interested though, I have been answering a lot of questions on Quora recently, some about food. I think this indicates I need to finally start the Japanese-things blog that I have been threatening for so long, but right now I dont have the energy to set up a new blog, so Quora has to do.)

Thank you for your patience.

Eating sakura (cherry blossoms and leaves) article in the Japan Times

maki — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:24:17 +0000

My latest article in The Japan Times is about edible cherry blossoms and leaves. Japanese people love the cherry tree so much that not only do they eagerly look forward to their all too short flowering season each spring, they use the whole plant. They eat the berries of course later on (cherries are called sakuranbo and are in season in June and July) but they also eat the blossoms and the leaves, pickling them in salt and umeboshi vinegar (a by-product of making umeboshi). The wood is used for various things too, as well as the bark. See how sakura bark strips are used in the making of magewappa (bent wood) bento boxes here on JustBento. The bark is also boiled and used as a medicinal tea.

Some photos that didn’t get into the article below.

This is how salted/pickled sakura leaves and flowers are typically sold. The flat package contains leaves, and the jar has flowers. You can find them in well stocked supermarkets or in department store food halls in Japan around this time of the year.

Closeup of some cherry blossoms straight out of the jar. As you can see they are quite salty, so for most uses you need to soak them in water for a bit. But for sakurayu or sakura tea, just put a blossom or two in a cup of hot water. The ‘tea’ is salty and sour with a subtle fragrance.

The easiest way to enjoy the taste of sakura in Japan is via wagashi (traditional Japanese sweets). This is a sakuramochi - an an (sweet bean paste) filled mochi cake wrapped in a sakura leaf. The salty-sour taste of the leaf is a perfect foil to the sweetness of the cake inside.

Here’s another kind of sakuramochi; the mochi cake is made of Doumyouji rice, which is medium grain instead of short grain.

How the sakuramochi looks inside. It’s a nice couple of bites.

This is a sakura manjuu. The filling is an again, but the dough is different from mochi (but still made with rice). The top is decorated with sakura flavored salt. You can also find sakura manjuu with a salted cherry blossom on top.

Finally here is a sakura-flower shaped nerikiri, a delicate confection made just from smooth an. Beautiful, isn’t it? It doesn’t actually taste like sakura, unlike the more rustic sakura mochi and sakura manjuu, but it’s meant to enjoy the season via the eyes. This one is from Kagizen Yoshifuka, a famous old tea room in Kyoto that I have written about previously a couple of times.

You can also buy seasonal sakura flavored candies, chocolates and the like but to be honest, most of these are pretty but just taste like sugar.

I have noticed that a lot of people (at least in my circles) are travelling to Japan this spring. This is a good thing. If you’re in Japan or planning to go there soon, enjoy the sakura season!

Cherry Blossom Captures the Flavor of Spring in The Japan Times

Sketch diary: it's harder than I thought

maki — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 07:33:29 +0000

I am two and a half weeks into a six week course of radiation therapy, to zap the remaining cancer cells in my body. The course I am doing now is the type where a highly localized beam is aimed at my abdomen from all sides of my body. Every weekday, an ambulance-taxi, or The Guy, drives me to the radiotherapy clinic in Avignon, which is about an hour away from where we live, and back. Each session lasts about 10 minutes, and is completely painless. It’s the side effects that are the problem.

I know that radiation therapy is much, much kinder to the body than chemotherapy is. Still, it’s harder than I thought it would be. The biggest problem is the chronic diarrhea. It usually comes in the evening or at night, and sometimes it keeps me up until 3 or 4 AM. This doesn’t help the other big problem, the constant fatigue. I usually wake up feeling more or less ok, but by the time I’ve done the normal morning things like brushing my teeth and taking a shower, I am totally wiped out. I usually sleep in the car all the way to the clinic and back. Then in the afternoon I may have about 2, 3 hours of alertness before I’m lying down again. My concentration, any ability to focus on a complex task, is almost completely gone. I also have very little appetite - which is a problem when you write about food.

(Update: on Friday, I asked the oncologist how much radiation I am being exposed to during the course of therapy. The answer: 45 Gy or 45 Sv (sieverts). Take a look at the the xkcd radiation graphic for a general idea of that what is. That’s about 1.5 Sv per day, or one and a half yellow squares. It is pinpointed at a specific location on my body of course. But wow, it’s a lot. No wonder I’m not feeling too good.)

I have been keeping a sort of sketch journal about the way I’m feeling. Here are a couple of excerpts. These are just quick scribbles done in a few minutes so they kind of suck as drawings, but they convey more than I can do with words at the moment. I also didn’t scan them (well the burglars took our scanner so I don’t have one at the moment), I just took pictures of them. Anyway.

This page has a very inaccurate sketch of how the radiation machine thingy looks like on top. I lie on a stainless steel table, on a styrofoam mold of my body that keeps me in position. The round thing rotates around my body into 4 positions. The middle sketch is of me when I’m healthy, always curious, usually with a camera or notebook in my hand. (Yep that’s a camera.) The bottom pic is me now. It’s pathetic.

This is how I spend most of my day now, either whimpering and lying down or napping, or wondering if my hair is getting thinner because of the radiation or just general bad health. (It’s probably the latter. Plus I need a new haircut.)

And this is me, at the bottom, wondering when I will be able to go to an onsen (hot springs) in Japan again. Hopefully soon.

Drawing these has been strangely cathartic, in a different way from writing.

One year hence: My furusato, myself

maki — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 14:44:31 +0000

Furusato is a Japanese word for which there really is no direct equivalent in English. Most times it is translated as ‘home town’, and the sentiment is similar. It means the place where you grew up, the place where you come from. The place where a part of you, however small, yearns to return to,

I have mostly lived outside of Japan for the last couple of decades - for most of my adult life in fact. And I spent quite a bit of my childhood in other places too. But still, Japan is my furusato. I may take up permanent residency in other countries, and spend most of my days communicating in other languages, but my heart remains Japanese. This was brought home to be in full, blinding force one year ago, March 11, 2011.

As I sat numbly, the TV news footage bringing endless pictures of the devastation, and the internet buzzing with the horror of the disaster, I felt such overwhelming grief that everything else ceased to exist.

For the next couple of weeks, I managed to live with the pain the feeling of helplessness by immersing myself in the role of an impromptu gatherer and dispenser of news. In between bouts of tweeting news and outrage, I spent my time huddled virtually around the live streams provided by NHK News and other Japanese sources with my fellow expatriates. We called ourselves the kaigaigumi (海外組), the overseas team. We exchanged notes on how long we’d been living outside of Japan, why we left, when we were going back. For some of us, we knew that we were never really going back permanently. But we were still all Japanese.

I flew to Japan as soon as I could (or as soon as the airlines would let me) to be with my family there. And for the next three months, I again immersed myself in a different way in gathering news, writing about it, letting people know that life in Japan outside of the disaster-struck areas was back to normal for the most part.

At the time, I felt that my role in life going forward was being defined. I have been writing about Japanese food and cooking, and the culture behind it, for a few years now on this site, on JustBento and elsewhere. As someone with one foot in Japanese culture and the other in a mishmash of European and American cultures, with an equal understanding of both Japanese and English, I felt that I could perhaps help to bridge the yawning gap of understanding that I saw between the two.

But then, a couple of weeks before I was due to leave Japan to go back to France, I started bleeding heavily. (Truth be told I hadn’t been feeling well even before that, since about late 2010. I felt so weak during my U.S. book trip last January that I was barely able to remain standing. Peeps who met me in Seattle and New York, if I looked pasty to you that’s why!) Soon after returning I was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery, and found out I had cancer.

Besides the cancer, it’s really been a full year of incidents. My father passed away in New York in late November - the news of which reached me via my cousin Masato literally 10 minutes after I got home from the hospital after having a hysterectomy. My mother fell down and hurt her leg badly, and was unable to walk for weeks. Our house is still undergoing major renovation, which had to stop for a while due to my illness and so on, and we’re still living in just two rooms with no kitchen. And just a couple of weeks ago, after returning from my father’s memorial service, we found out our house had been robbed in our absence.

And that cancer thing, it’s a bear to live with. I started my first week of a six-week course of radiation therapy (a small dose every day from Monday to Friday) last Monday, and I am already feeling the side effects. I feel okay most of the time, but I never know when I’m going to be felled by debilitating fatigue, for which the only temporary cure is a long nap. And there’s that pesky thing called diarrhea too, which may or may not be caused by the radiation. My surgery wound hasn’t closed up yet either, which is a pain in the, well, abdomen, literally.

Still, I actually do feel a lot better than I did just a few months ago. And the end does seem to be in sight somehow.

In any case, it has been quite a year. This spring, I won’t be able to be in Japan due to my radiation therapy, so I’ll miss out on the ohanami (cherry blossom viewing) season. I hope to make it there for a couple of months at least in the fall.

I see the eastern part of the Tohoku region continuing to slowly recover, continuing to struggle. I see the lingering uncertainty and worries about the residual radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant accidents. (Although I would really like to remind people, especially the overseas news media, that Fukushima is not the only ‘story of note’ one year hence.) And there is the other, bigger worry of another major earthquake hitting Japan, this one perhaps closer to Tokyo.

I know that one person’s struggle is so unimportant compared to the struggles of thousands, but somehow I can’t help selfishly equating the efforts in Japan to get back to normal, and to move ahead and look forward to the future, with my own.

I think we will both be okay. And soon, I hope I can continue on my mission, to bridge the cultural gap in some small way between my furusato and the world.

Furusato, the song

There is a song called Furusato that is taught in all Japanese schools and such. Many people regard it as Japan’s second national anthem, and perhaps a better one than the official anthem, much in the way some Americans regard America The Beautiful as a better alternative national anthem than the warrlike Star Spangled Banner. (Japan’s official national anthem, Kimi Ga Yo, is a dreary dirge that sends wishes to the emperor that he may live a long, long life.) The first verse of Furusato goes something like this:

The mountain where I chased rabbits
The stream where I fished
I still dream
Of the place I cannot forget, my furusato

I was born and grew up in Tokyo. I never chased rabbits in the mountains, and only went fishing once - and hated it. But that song still tugs at my heart, and makes me want to take the first flight available back to Japan.

Here is the great Placido Domingo singing Furusato at a concert last April.

And here is a mass concert coordinated by an NPO called Kizuna Japan. They came up with a project to have people donate musical instruments to schoolchildren in the Tohoku area who had lost their instruments in the earthquake and tsunami. The concert was arranged as a way for the children to say thank you to the donators. They are singing Furusato. (The video is sponsored by Charity White, a charity set up by Softbank.)

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune—without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickenson

Shio-kōji (salt kōji) article in The Japan Times

maki — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:15:14 +0000

On Just Hungry and its sister site, Just Bento, I usually stick to ingredients that are fairly easy to get anywhere, especially if you have access to a decent Japanese grocery store. But since the target audience for my monthly Japan Times articles are English speakers who live in Japan, I sometimes write about foodstuffs that you can only get in Japan.

This month’s subject is shio-kōji (塩麹), a traditional ingredient that is quite trendy in Japan right now. As I explain in the article, shio-kōji is just rice, kōji-kin fungus and salt that has been fermented or matured for about a week. (Before you get all squeamish about ‘fungus’, remember that beneficial bacteria, molds and fungi are used to make foods such as cheese and yogurt too, not to mention miso, soy sauce, and beer!) Shio-kōji is rather like a mild miso without the soy flavor - it has plenty of umami, and is salty but not overwhelmingly so.

In Japan, it’s quite easy to get ready-made shio-kōji these days. If your local supermarket doesn’t have it, try a department store food hall. Or, look on Rakuten or Amazon Japan for mailorder sources.

This is a jar of a shio-kōji made by an old traditional miso maker. It’s pricey but delicious, with a nice balance of salt and umami.

It looks just like a rice porridge (okayu in Japan or congee in China), or even rice pudding.

Making your own shio-kōji

So you’re not in Japan, but you want to try shio-kōji. At the moment it doesn’t seem to be available at Japanese grocery stores outside of Japan yet (as of February 2012). (I checked a at Mitsuwa in Edgewater, NJ and Nara Foods in Port Washington, NY both of which are pretty well stocked stores, and neither had it.) So the only option is to make your own.

If you can find kome-kōji, or rice-kōji, steamed rice that has already been innoculated with the kōji-kin fungus, the process is quite easy. Dried kome-kōji is very handy since it keeps indefinitely until it’s needed. This is what I use. Turning dried kome-kōji to ready-to-use shio-kōji takes a week or so. I store excess shio-kōji in the freezer, and that works out great. I brought a few bags back with me from Japan, but if I run out before I’m back there again I will probably order more from Amazon Japan or Rakuten and either have my mom send it to me or use a shipping service. (See overseas shipping services).

You can also try doing an online search for ‘rice koji’, which turns up some mailorder sources. Usually they list ‘organic brown rice koji’, which should work fine for making shio-kōji (though the organic and brown rice bits are fairly meaningless nutrition-wise, since you use so little of it per serving). Your local Japanese grocery store may have premade, non-dried (fresh) kome-kōji available, especially around this time of year since it’s used to make amazake, a traditional Girl’s Day (March 3rd) beverage. It usually comes in tubs, and can be found in the refrigerated section.

Just follow the instructions in the Japan Times article, and in a week you’ll have a batch of shio-kōji. You’ll need to add more water if you’re using dried kome-kōji (about 1.5 times the weight of the dried kome-kōji).

If you can’t find kome-kōji or you are feeling adventurous, you can buy kōji-kin spores by mailorder and make your own kome-kōji, using the rice of your choice. This is a bit tricky but can be done. See the bottom of this article for some sources for kōji-kin spores.

I am still in the early stages of experimenting with shio-kōji, but so far I think my favorite way to use it is as a marinade for chicken or fish. Here is a piece of chicken (the thigh, boned) which was just marinated in shio-kōji by spreading both sides with a thin layer of shio-koji (a tablespoon or so total), wrapped tightly in plastic and left in the refrigerator for about 40 minutes. No other seasonings were used, though a dash of pepper wouldn’t hurt it at all. It was juicy and delicious. And look at that color! That comes from the naturally occuring sugar in the shio-kōji caramelizing.

I would really like to see shio-kōji become popular around the world, and I don’t see why it can’t be. It’s especially good for people who have trouble with wheat gluten or soy, either or both of which are in miso and soy sauce. Shio-kōji is packed with umami, but only uses rice and salt.

Links

Kōji - Japan’s hidden ingredient - the Japan Times article

Mailorder sources for kōji-kin spores - all merchants here will ship the spores worldwide (though maybe not other items in their catalogs):

Gem Cultures - get the Light Rice Starter for amazake, white miso, etc. Also a source for natto-kin to make your own natto!
Northern Brewer - order their ‘sake kit’
Vision Brewing

Personal note

We are gradually recovering from the shock of the burglary, though they left such a horrendous mess behind that it’s going to take a while to clean it up. But I am feeling a bit better - we already signed up to get a security system installed, and our contractor will block up that vulnerable side door as soon as the insurance inspector comes to take a look at it. Both The Guy and I would like to thank every one of you who sent words of encouragement and sympathy - they really, really helped! A big hug to you all.

They even took the freaking toilet paper!

maki — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:13:20 +0000

I am back home from New York now, after my father’s memorial service last Sunday and an all-too-short Itoh sisters’ reunion. We got home late last afternoon, glad to be back, very tired after a long flight followed by a short one and a 2 plus hour drive.

And then…disaster. During our absence, our house had been broken into. They entered through an old side door that we were going to replace or just block up soon, and seem to have done a snatch and grab job. They took, among other things, the food processor, KitchenAid mixer, Bamix stick blender, and one of our hotplates (the more valuable one). They took the microwave/convection oven too. They left the rice cooker, probably because they didn’t know what it was. So now we have even less of a kitchen than before. Besides kitchen stuff they took the TV, my Cinema Display monitor, my computer speakers, the Wii and the few Wii games we had (but they stupidly left the Wii balance board behind), a bunch of DVDs, my Wacom tablet, the camera tripod (but they left behind our studio lighting setup) and our old and broken Nikon D70s camera. What hurts the most is that they took all of my hard disks except the portable ones that I had with me. All of my backups, all my media data including my music and ripped TV and movie collection that took me years and years to build, all gone. (It looks like I can re-download my previous iTunes music and TV purchases ~~but not my movie purchases (bummer, and curse you MPAA))~~ - and now with the most recent iTunes update I can re-download my movie purchases too!

Thank goodness most of my photo files are on my portable disks. And we’re an all-laptop household so we had our computers with us.

Do I feel angry, upset, violated? You bet. One of the worst things, besides them knocking down a whole bunch of stuff, overturning boxes and drawers and dumping things on the floor, was the footprints. They stepped all over my clothes, the towels, and on my bed. There was a clear footprint on a white towel I had on my office chair, and one of my desk legs is wobbly, probably because they were on the desk too.

The footprints are small. The police think the perpetrators are kids, maybe trained kids from an organized, probably Romany (or gypsy to use the non-PC-these-days term), burglary gang. It seems they are a known problem in this area.

What made me both laugh (and thus gain back a bit of sanity) and really shake my head was that the burglars also took an almost-full but opened bottle of Omo, a clothes detergent, and a full pack of toilet paper. Toilet paper! Maybe they took that and the Omo back to Mom. Heh. And I’ve just discovered that they screwed off, and apparently took (we can’t see them anywhere) two knobs off an IKEA glass cabinet I have in my room. Who in their right mind steals pretty much worthless IKEA knobs? And just 2? (They left 1 behind.)

Last night, I was so upset that I was seriously thinking of just selling up here and moving back to Switzerland, or even back to the U.S. Or spending a very long time in Japan, even if it means barging into my mother and stepfather’s place. This morning I’m a bit more clearheaded. Burglaries occur anywhere after all. It’s not like it’s any safer in the U.S. Switzerland and Japan may be safer, but they are not crime-free either. What really helped a lot was experiencing some immediate kindness, one from a stranger. The building diagonally opposite from ours is also being renovated, into a three-story apartment. The Guy has said hello to the owner-builders, a father and son (the son is going to move in to the top floor apartment when they are done) but didn’t know them beyond that. Last night the son, without us even asking, came over and put up a big, thick board with an iron support beam holding it in place against the broken door. Later on our contractor came over to reinforce the blockage, at 8:30 on a Sunday evening. And another elderly neighbor offered to shoot any intruders if he ever saw them. (I don’t think we’ll take him up on that offer but the sentiment is appreciated.)

Anyway, we have insurance, which should cover the monetary value of the items lost, though probably not the value of the data. And we have to block up that entrance and secure the house better. I guess we’ve gotten a big wakeup call. Even in such an idyllic area, there is crime and we have to protect ourselves appropriately. We have to finish up the construction work and secure the house, and probably put in a security system.

And this week, my radiation therapy starts, to zap the remaining cancer cells in my body.

You know that old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”? Well, my times right now are sure interesting.

Hoping to return to normal programming soon…as you can understand I’m still quite a bit jumpy.

ETA: It’s now Tuesday and I’m still finding things that are gone, or broken. It’s so disheartening.

ETA no. 2: I really, really appreciate all your words of sympathy. Two things I wanted to address though:

First, let us not get into racial epithets and insults. Let’s just not stoop to that level.

Also: Several people have offered to or suggested a collection or a wish list or something. I really appreciate the sentiment but I have to say no to that. I am fine, except for the general shock and anger and having to try to clear up the mess and figure out what is missing, and all of that fun stuff. (This morning I found out that they’ve taken our mop and mop heads, cleaning bucket, some other cleaning supplies, the vacuum cleaner parts (but not the vacuum cleaner, which is a rather unusual model for this area and probably deemed too spottable), an electric drill and some hand tools. Petty theft, indeed.) We have insurance. We can afford to fix things so our house is more secure. My lost data hurts…but much of it is just irreplaceable, like some home videos and documentaries and things that were DVR’ed a long time ago. I’m sure that with time, I’ll be able to replace the movies that were on those stolen disks, that I really miss. I had my laptop with me, as did The Guy, and we did not lose our important work data. There are people that are in really dire straits, who really need help. I would feel terrible if I received monetary assistance for my relatively trivial losses. Again, I thank you so much for the sentiment. It is really helping me to cope. ^_^