Foodstuffs

Lots of Japanese women have blogs on which they mainly write about to post photos of what they've been eating or making. Am I turning into a Japanese woman?

Last night, our usual bar Nanaimo hosted a takoyaki party. Takoyaki is another dish most famous for being Osaka fare, but like okonomiyaki it's popular throughout the country. In this case, there's a similar batter base and the same put-in-what-you-like process for ingredients.

The main difference is the shape -- in this case little balls. The tako in takoyaki means octopus, as this is the most prevalent filler. But you could really add anything. Last night we used quail egg, cheese, pork, kimchee in addition to the octopus.

The picture above shows me helping prepare the takoyaki. I was perched there for a couple hours straight trying my hardest not to screw up the food that paying customers would attempt to enjoy.

The key is a fast spinning motion around the outside of the forging ball. Attacking too soon can mess things up. Or being a silly a foreigner. I had moments of glory, but there were those other moments too.

And also, I had beer.

Today I opted for a lighter dinner, leading to a salad. I had only tomato, cucumber and some bacon to work with. I got the bacon to ultra-crispy mode and chopped it up into bits, then threw this in with the chopped veggies and added an onion-flavored dressing. It was pretty good.


But a couple hours later I was hungry again. So I made up some pasta with a spicy meat sauce to serve as a second course for dinner and also as tomorrow's lunch at work.

To spice up the regular store-bought tomato pasta sauce, I added a mixture of sirracha chili sauce and the aforementioned onion dressing. Very tasty. Perfect amount of spice. In fact I might have to break into the fridge and have a litttttle bit more.

Okonomiyaki

The previous post mentioned the pancake-like dish called okonomiyaki.

A little background. Okonomi means "what you like" and "yaki" means to cook or grill. So the idea is you add whatever ingredients you like to a basic pancake-like batter, top it with a sauce, mayonaise and more and then eat. This is one of the signature dishes of Osaka, but it's available and popular all over Japan. (Wikipedia for the hard facts.)

In Osaka city, there are many okonomiyaki shops around. In Ise, there's a nice little shop just down the road from my place. At this shop, like at many, you can have the staff do the prep and cooking or you can do it yourself at your table/grill.

In the past, eating with fellow foreigners who often forge a collective aversion to culture, I have opted to let the professionals do the dirty work. But on this occasion, with a Japanese friend, it was a chance to try for myself.

Here is where it all begins for the customer. The big bowl has the batter and some toppings, including the pork. My kimchee is off to the side.

The Mom (appears to be a Mom and Pop operation) told us to mix up the contents of the big bowl, pour half onto the grill, add the main ingredient(s), pour on the rest of the mix, and then begin the grilling.

Here is mine in the early stages of grilling. It may be hard to gauge how big it is, but picture it as a two-spatula situation.

After a few minutes, when the underside begins to solidify, it's time to flip. First I watched Mai handle hers with the grace expected of a local. She slid in the two metal spatulas and sent the unit up and over itself, landing it perfectly in the same right-center spot it had been before.

My turn. What I lack in grace I make up for instincts, so when my flip went awry, sending the disc of goodness onto the rear quadrant of the grill, I tried to use the spatulas to pull it back to the center. Oops. Some of the ingredients came out, but the disc stayed put. The result -- the salvage, really -- was the birth of what I call the okonomi-baby.

But all in all my cooking experience was good. The final product looked decent, though not as good as its natively-engineered counterpart.

If you want to try this at home, which could be fun, try an online recipie. Here's one from About.com, although I of course cannot personally vouch for it. You can probably subsitute or omit a lot of the topping ideas (fish flakses, for example). One could have of fun trying different fillings and toppings (sirracha!).

Ise, toured

On Saturday, a friend from Nagoya came down to Ise to visit. Ise's a small town but a big tourist draw because of the Ise Grand Shrines, which are very important to the Shinto faith. Near the main shrine there's a traditional shopping district called Okage-yokocho. There you can buy gifts both cheap and not, eat a variety of foods and snacks, and mainly, you can enjoy a bustling atmosphere that Ise cannot offer anywhere else.

My friend, Mai, had been to the shrine once as a child but she didn't remember at all. So that meant I got to play host and show her around. The first stop was lunch. The Okage-yokocho area has a wealth of restaurants. We opted for one with reasonable prices and a short wait. Many shops in the area offer "Ise-udon" as a local specialty. This video explains, roughly, what makes Ise udon different from regular udon.

This picture shows my dish, curry-Ise-udon. The challenge is not getting curry-colored stains on your shirt.


And here's me posing for a photo in the restaurant.


And now that The Hair is on display here, let's take a closer look.


After lunch we went to walk through the shrine area. The idea is to go up to the shrine and pray, but the payoff at this shrine is the surroundings. Namely, trees. Big ones. And some other stuff. Take a look.


There's also a river flowing through the shrine grounds. As the Oregon Trail computer game might inform you, it's looking rather tranquil.


And here is the visitor herself.


And some more scenery.



After heading up to the alter at the shrine (photos forbidden) and praying, we headed back out to Okage-yokocho for a bit more looking around.

The first thing to catch our eyes was a cat who was zonked out. We think maybe the beer is to blame.


Then we decided to join the throngs of people all seeking to enjoy the soothing refreshment of Akafuku company shave ice with sweet bean paste inside. Right.

Akafuku is a local company founded in 1707 that is famous for its mochi (rice cake) snack. In the summer, they have a green-tea flavored shave ice with a sweet-bean-paste filling. It's ... pretty good. But you have to re-wire your conception of shave ice a little bit to enjoy the tea flavor. It's wildly popular. We had to wait about 10 minutes to get ours, and they were cycling through the customer number cards at top speed.


When showing a new person around Ise, the next stop after the shrine and Okage-yokocho is the Futami Wedded Rocks, known in Japanese as Meotoiwa. From the shrine, it's about 15 to 20 minutes away by bus. The rocks, said to be husband and wife, sit just off the shore in the Ise Bay. It really isn't much to see, and the rocks themselves aren't that impressive. I'm way more impressed by the variety of frog statues.

Here's a couple shots from there.


We then lucked out and caught a bus back to town with a minute to spare (they only head out once an hour). For dinner we went for okonomi-yaki. The Japanese like to call this "Japanese pizza" but it's really more comparable to a pancake into which you put in all kinds of delicious fillings. I had kimichee and pork while Mai had mochi-cheese. Hers was way better.

(photos to come ... technical difficulties)

And that's the story. It can be fun to be a tourist in your own town. Perhaps you can relate. Back in Pendleton I always though I should try that Underground Tours thing, but I never did. What home town touristy thing do you like? And which ones suck?

Have beer will jog

I was decent, as a basketball player, on that freshman team at Mac-Hi. Voted most improved player. Best defensive player. Averaged 2 points a game. Never mind that last part.

But in those days I was kinda quick and athletic.

This was before I met beer.

I turned 17 one day, and beer has been with me ever since. It stays with me, in the form of a belly, which I keep under wraps at all times, hidden behind the concealing powers of collared shirts.

Four -- OK, five -- years of college later, and it's evident that I spent more time in the pub than the gym. After two years in Japan, where people like me love pointing out that drinking is "part of the culture," I haven't done much to change my ways.

To be fair, the amount of physical activity in my daily routine has increased significantly in Japan, where I get around on a used bicycle instead of behind of the wheel of a used car. And now that I no longer live out of Snell Hall and the nearby fast food eateries, my food habits have mostly improved.

I have lost some weight -- you can see it in the lines of my face, but I don't actually measure -- since coming to Japan. But nothing substantial.

And it goes back and forth here. I don't have to weigh myself, I just encounter Japanese friends. Here it's routine for friends and acquaintances to casually comment on another person's weight status. This isn't considered rude or a taboo subject, but almost like a greeting.

"Oh, hey Steve, it's been a while, have you lost weight?" Maybe we can relate, but only when we're buttering people up (Steve, to be fair, has been laying off the butter). In Japan, they're serious. They say that if they think you've lost weight. Or if things look like they've been going the other way, they're equally blunt: "Steve, did you gain weight?" Their tone is sometimes grave, as in, "Steve, whoa buddy, you've put on some pounds there, don't you realize we're all paying for your health care collectively? Lay off the bear claws or the appropriate cultural substitute in this context."

This week has been a high point, though, in my physical activity lifespan. Yesterday I hit the gym and did some moderate lifting and 30 minutes of cardio. Today, along with the two other Yamasho ALTs, I went for a run along the river, about 6 miles in all, perhaps twice as long as my most recent attempts at running.

And it felt good, aside from the sudden seize-up of my right calf muscle as soon as walked in the door to my apartment. More stretching, check.

So now the goal is to keep up a routine. Yeah, I've said it all before. But I might have the edge this time. The new ALTs, Conrad and Annette, are both avid runners. I can join the team as the rusty, out-of-shape guy with significant experience in the gut area.

Now, all I've gotta do is find Steve, and find out where he keeps the bear claws.

Hawaii Part One: The Only Part

I can picture it. Friends, family, random Web surfers, strewn across the globe, waiting, impatient, furious. Where is the promised follow-up Hawaii blog post? You know, the one with the pictures?

It is here, finally.

...

From my window seat toward the back of the plane, I scanned Oahu for anything familiar. Vaguely I knew that the urban center of Honolulu was on the southeast side of the island. On the north, there was North Shore. Somewhere down there was the Nakahara home. Also, plausibly, a runway.

After the airport pickup, I showered and dressed down. No more socks. Just flip-flops for the week. (Also shorts and a shirt. They aren't that casual.) After a day or two, I realized I was the only person on the island wearing an undershirt.

No worries. My first meal was the Big City Diner in Waipahu. After a detailed appraisal of the menu I went with the turkey club (Kyle had the kimchee fried rice, which came in a quantity fit for a family of five). And while our waitress forgot our drinks, the food was good enough to make up for it.

After lunch we headed toward the North Shore, making a stop in historic Haleiwa town for some Matumoto Shave Ice. You can tell it's good because people are waiting in line for it. That's all you need to have a successful business.

Mixed in among mainland and Japanese tourists, we considered what flavor(s) we fancied as we waited in line. Behind me, a young man asked his mom whether the guidebook said what kind to get. Ha! I laughed to myself, and then to Kyle, he needs a guidebook to decide the flavor! Then the panic set it. Ahh! What should I get? I broke down and ordered the combo at the top of the menu.

We followed this with a drive around the North Shore area, which in winter features famous waves and is host to various surfing events. We stopped at a viewpoint for photos (I only had my phone at this point).

I slept late on Day 2, Friday, hoping to be ready to Be Active for the remainder of the trip. On the slate was a hike followed by a dip in the ocean to cool down.

We headed toward Lanikai, home to what's said to be the most beautiful beach around. First, we did what the Internet tells me is the Lanikai Pali hike, a quick, only sometimes strenuous venture up a hillside offering nice views. To give you an idea of the level, you can do the whole thing in flip-flops. Shoes with traction would make certain parts easier, such as the opening stanza, which is a bit steep and littered with loose rock and dirt.

Here is a view part-way up the hike:


There are two little huts along the trail, one at a false summit and the other a the top. The Internet informs me that these are World War II bunkers. For this reason, the hike itself is often called Pillboxes.

On the way down, we assured a group of struggling, rotund mainlanders that it does get easier. May they rest in peace.

A couple more photos:

From near the top.

Toward the start of the trail

After our descent, we took a quick dip and a short walk along what was indeed a beautiful beach. My aversion to the sun meant we didn't lay out, so we quickly made for a shower at a nearby park to de-sand and return home.

That's the end of part one. Part two may not ever materialize. In brief, we saw a movie and went shopping and had a lot of good food.

Now, here at the office with nothing to do, I must eat my convenience store sandwich for lunch. But I'll be picturing that turkey club as I do.

You'd have eaten a can too

At this hour, the tropical depression formerly known as Hurricane Felicia is still a couple hundred miles East of Honolulu, and she's only packing sustained winds of just over 30 miles an hour.

My Korean Air plane (do not try to get up when the fasten seat belt light is on -- they will chase you) was safely in the air as Felicia's weakened outer edges moved along the island chain. And tonight I've landed in a calm and clear Japan, one day shy of twin typhoon threats and a major metropolitan earthquake.

My six pack of fun-size cans of Mauna Loa brand Maui Onion & Garlic Macadamias has been reduced to five. Souvenirs, sure, but I get some too.

Dirty clothes, peppered with unworn socks and jeans, rest in piles near the bed. The little bag from Korean Air has a toothbrush in there. And socks. Really.

Down to my boxers. It's bed time.

Back on Oahu, Kyle and her mom and dad and brother and dog are probably sleeping in their soon-to-be-renovated house. Although the dog, Coal, may well be patrolling the house to keep the family safe from ever-present threat of neighborhood cats.

Although the five-day trip had lots of down time (Law & Order, CSI: New York and other dramas that TV offers late at night), it went by in a flash. Now, yes, I've been to Hawaii. There was a hike, a dip in the ocean, nice views, more than one serving of shaved ice, and food. A lot of food.

After some sleep, sometime tomorrow, I'll get some pictures ready and post a more detailed account of the touristy things I did around Oahu.

For now, just take it easy. That's how they do it in Hawaii. Mainly because Coal is patrolling for cats.