When I was calling Japan the other night, it occurred to me that there someone could take on a cheap and modern version of this quixotic pursuit by attempting to call every country in the world, or reach someone there by IM.

Feel free to take this idea and run with it. I’m too busy. I need to catch a flight to Lampedusa.

Okay, we’re not actually in Japan yet, but Iris and I are spending spring break in Tokyo, and I’d like to tell you all about what we’re doing to get ready for the trip, and also solicit your ideas and requests, whether you’ve been there or not.

Let’s kick it off with a brief story.

Last night I was trying to book a one-day side trip from Tokyo to Kyoto through a Japan-based travel agency, and I kept getting an error message. “I think I’m going to have to call Japan,” I said. Laurie and Iris looked interested. I dialed the number on the site and used the most useful Japanese phrase I’ve learned thus far: Anata wa eigo hanashimasu ka? Do you speak English? A very helpful woman explained that my credit card had been declined.

I smelled fraud prevention, so I called Chase. A very unhelpful woman explained that they couldn’t pull up my account because of a computer problem. “Let me take your number and call you back,” she said. I gave her my number. “When may I expect to hear from you?” I asked.

“Any time after this conversation,” she said.

“No, I mean, will you call back tonight? Tomorrow? Next week?”

“Any time after this conversation.”

“Uhhh, OK.” Then she hung up.

“It’s easier to call Tokyo than the credit card company,” said Iris.

“Five bucks says they never call back,” I said. But I was wrong. They called Laurie this morning. At work.

Anyway, problem solved, and we’re going to ride the shinkansen, baby! I can taste the ekiben already.

Update: I was wrong: they called Laurie at work LAST NIGHT at 8:30pm.

You know, after the first four times I was selected for Best Food Writing, I thought it might be a fluke, but now I’m convinced that I’m pretty good.

This year’s collection also features many of my friends, who are really good, including Francis Lam, Kim Severson, Molly Wizenberg, Bethany Jean Clement, and Steven Shaw.

My friend Abra Bennett lives in Uzès, France, in the Languedoc, and keeps me jealous with frequent online updates about her mouthwatering meals—often the heartiest of French classics like cassoulet, veal ragout, insane runny cheeses. But she managed to surprise me recently when she wrote, “Made petits farcis, little Provençal pork-stuffed vegetables, for dinner and ate them with…nam prik pow. I can’t help myself, I’d eat nam prik pow with anything some days.”

“Nam prik pow” is not an Occitan phrase. It’s Thai. It means “roasted chile paste,” and it’s one of those intense seasonings that can do it all: it has the earthy, slightly bitter flavor of dried chiles and the salty umami undertone of shrimp paste. It’s related to but a member of the family of Thai dipping pastes call nam prik. For nam prik pow, the chiles are fried in oil, which really brings them to life, and then ground into a thick, oily mixture which in turn, as Bennett says, brings almost anything to life.

You can make nam prik pow yourself, but the commercial variety is really quite good. The most popular brand is Pantainorasingh, but you don’t have to kneel down and squint to find this name in tiny print among the dozens of jarred Asian seasonings. Just look for the bright yellow cap with the word “Pantai” in red script. The label will say “chilli paste with soya bean oil.” (Pantai makes a ton of other products, but if you end up with a different one by mistake, hey, it’ll probably be good too.)

For lunch this week, I stir-fried a bunch of baby bok choy from my CSA box and added nam prik pow thinned with a little fish sauce. Because I believe in gilding the lily (or in this case, the brassica), I threw in some Nueske’s bacon.

I ate this over rice, and it deserved my highest praise: it would have been just as good without the bacon. The bok choy stalks added a welcome succulent dimension to the chile paste. Yep, I’d eat nam prik pow with anything some days.

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Have you ever had to listen to a cook hold forth on the importance of homemade stock, simmered for hours? The foundation of cuisine, and so on? Well, if you run into that guy, tell him I made a richly flavored soup the other night; the stock consisted of three ingredients and took one minute to make.

The soup, Pork Miso Hot Pot, was from Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat’s new book Japanese Hot Pots. The stock contains red miso, kombu, and water. If they made commercials for recipes, this one would feature a woman explaining with a wink that it only tastes like it took you all day to make it. Shh! Your guests will never know that the whole soup, loaded with meat, tofu, vegetables, mushrooms, and noodles, is done in half an hour. (I used presliced pork from a Japanese supermarket, but if I’d had to slice the pork myself, that would have taken, what, five more minutes?)

It’s a one-pot dinner that requires no side dish other than a little plain rice or noodles to soak up any remaining broth, and the cooking instructions basically go like this: put the stuff in a pot. Boil it. Serve.

“Hot pots cook very fast,” explain the authors. “Western stews must slowly tease the essence out of raw ingredients. Hot pots rely on fermented and dried ingredients such as miso, soy sauce, and the elements that make up dashi.” Beneficial microbes have already teased the essence out of these ingredients.

To be fair, some of the fifty recipes in the book—say, the Hakata Chicken Hot Pot—call for homemade chicken stock. Traditional Japanese chicken stock? That’s got to be a project. Let’s see…Ono and Salat’s recipe calls for chicken bones and water. It simmers for thirty whole minutes. I’ll let them explain again: “The concept is to create pure chicken flavor that can be layered with other ingredients simmering in it.”

And Japanese food has a reputation for being hard to make?

Pork Miso Hot Pot (Buta Nabe)
Adapted from Japanese Hot Pots, by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat
Ten Speed Press, 2009
Serves 4

4 cups water
1/2 cup red miso
2 (6-inch) pieces kombu
1/2 pound napa cabbage, sliced
1 negi (Japanese leek), sliced on an angle into 2-inch pieces
7 ounces (200-gram package) enoki mushrooms, trimmed and pulled apart
6 ounces oyster mushrooms, trimmed and pulled apart
1 (7-ounce) package shirataki noodles, well rinsed, strained, and quartered
1/2 package (about 1/2 pound) firm tofu, cut into 4 pieces
1 pound boneless pork shoulder, sliced 1/8 inch thick
Shichimi togarashi, for accent

1. Prepare the broth by combining the water with the miso, whisking to blend well; reserve.

2. Place the kombu on the bottom of a hot pot, and add the cabbage over it. Add the negi, enoki mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, shirataki, and tofu on top of the cabbage, arranging each ingredient in a separate, neat bunch. Pour in the reserved broth.

3. Cover the pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Uncover the pot and add the pork. Cover the pot again and bring to a boil over high heat once more. Decrease the heat to medium and simmer until the pork cooks through, about 5 minutes.

4. Transfer the hot pot to the dining table. Serve the ingredients together with the broth in small bowls. Accent with the shichimi togarashi.

When I was in high school in Portland, OR, the standard lunch was “bento,” which in Portland meant a big container of rice topped with a grilled chicken skewer, teriyaki sauce, and optional sriracha. It was filling and cheap and pretty good.

More recently, bento has come to mean a highly artistic Japanese-inspired lunch box, perhaps something with anime characters constructed from egg and sliced vegetables. If this is a child’s lunch, you slave over it all morning and your kid doesn’t eat it because (a) they don’t want to mess up the design, and (b) it doesn’t actually look appetizing, just artistic. This is fine, because your goal was to get it into a bento Flickr pool anyway.

The New York Times has taken note of the artsy bento phenomenon, which is evidence that the trend peaked a year ago:

“I have to make her food look like something she recognizes,” said Ms. Chen, 42, a stay-at-home mother in San Leandro, Calif. “If her boiled egg is shaped like a bunny and it is holding a baby carrot, she’ll eat it.

Fun. And good riddance, because the kind of bento I want to talk about today is an ingenious solution to a very specific problem for a particular type of person.

Here’s the problem: you work in a profession where you must bring lunch from home, and there is no microwave to reheat food. I say “you,” because I don’t have this problem and don’t expect to anytime soon.

Obviously there’s more than one solution to this problem. There are sandwiches. But bento is the only solution that specifically appeals to me, the one where I can imagine myself actually looking forward to lunch under such lunch-hostile conditions.

I realized this while reading Kentaro Kobayashi’s book Bento Love. These lunches are cold and they are fabulous. They’re intensely flavored but take pains to avoid congealed sauce or fat. There is always plenty of rice. I love rice.

There’s sesame beef with a salad of greens and young sardines, plus rice and shredded kelp. Cashew chicken with umeboshi-dressed asparagus. Lots of grilled shishito peppers. As I read through the book, I started fantasizing about working in an office. Better yet, a job site. I don’t know what kind of job, but definitely one with a site.

I showed Iris the photo of Chicken Sukiyaki Bento. It looks simple, but there is a lot of wisdom in this lunchbox. First, Kobayashi reckons that you will have a little of the beefy, reduced sauce left after sukiyaki night, but no meat. This is precisely my experience. So he cooks some dark-meat chicken in the leftover broth, some blanched shirataki noodles, some chrysanthemum greens and shimeji mushrooms. Garnish with pickled ginger, and you’re all set. I asked Iris if she’d like this in her lunch. “Sure! Just leave out the seaweed and the pickled ginger.” (I didn’t bother to explain that it was greens rather than seaweed, because to a five-year-old, same difference.)

I foresee a trip to Daiso for a bento box this week. Maybe two boxes.

The site isn’t going anywhere, but I doubt I’ll be updating often. I do have a couple of new projects in mind, and I’ll tell you about them soon. In the meantime, here’s where you can find me:

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But chowder without crackers? Impossible. So I sent Laurie to QFC for a replacement. She returned with Sailor Boy Pilot Bread.

Pilot and common crackers are both descendants of hardtack. Iris found this fascinating, because she loves pirates. The pilot crackers are the beefiest cracker you’ll ever meet. They’re round, about three inches in diameter, and thick. They’re made to be eaten in soup, but Iris just dove in and started crunching. “I love hardtack!” she explained.

Later we did a kitty-and-pirate story where someone was eating K. Rool’s hardtack and Keelhaulin’ Katie got stuck in the hardtack box. The story got confusing, however, because Iris kept eating the props.

I really liked the pilot crackers too, at least in chowder. Hopefully we can finish them off before they go rancid.

• Mongolian Grill-style restaurants don’t serve authentic Mongolian food. But there is real Mongolian barbecue, called Khorkhog:

To make khorkhog, Mongolians take lamb (goat meat can be substituted) and cut it into pieces of convenient size, leaving the bone. Then the cook puts ten to twenty fist-sized rocks in a fire. When the rocks are hot enough, the rocks and the meat are placed in the chosen cooking container. Metal milk jugs are a traditional choice, although any container sturdy enough to hold the hot rocks will serve.

• There is, in fact, a BD’s Mongolian Barbecue restaurant in Ulan Bataar:

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It’s halfway between the California Restaurant and the Rockmon Building, if you’re in the neighborhood.