Merry Christmas! 

Our first Christmas in Japan is over, save for the sort of "second Christmas" we get by virtue of having family in the U.S. We can call people pretty much any time between the morning of the 25th and the morning of the 26th, and it's Christmas for someone. It's really rather nice.

Christmas isn't really a big deal in Japan. It's not a national holiday, so we got mail delivery today, and most people worked. Also, turkey is essentially nonexistent here, so many families celebrate with KFC. We couldn't make ourselves get KFC, opting for an all-American dinner of steak, mashed potatoes, and grilled asparagus. Matthew hasn't had mashed potatoes in at least nine months, so he was pretty excited about them.

We did, however, follow tradition and get a Christmas cake.



As we've mentioned before, the Japanese Christmas cake is traditionally sponge cake with whipped cream and strawberries. We ordered one with chocolate whipped cream, which turned out to have bits of pineapple and peaches in the middle. It came with a box of strawberries for garnish.



It was pretty tasty, too.

Merry Christmas, everyone!
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The Shortest Day 

On Toji, the winter solstice, the Japanese greet the end of darkening days with traditions aimed at improving health. Grocery stores are filled with yuzu, a small yellow citrus fruit with a taste and aroma similar to grapefruit. It is traditional to toss a few yuzu into the ofuro, allowing you to relax in a hot bath surrounded by the fragrant oils. Similarly, eating kabocha (Japanese pumpkin) on the solstice is believed to prevent colds in the coming year.

We celebrated Toji by mixing traditions ― and cocktails. An acquaintance had gifted us with a kabocha some time ago, so we simmered it for dinner with some fresh ginger (given our track record, we're all about combining as many cold-prevention ingredients and traditions as possible). We filled our ofuro with sliced yuzu for a refreshing end to a difficult week. And, we shook yuzu juice with gin and Cointreau in a celebratory cocktail, raising our glasses to the return of light and the prospect of good health in the coming year.
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Retreat from Complacency 

We've both been here long enough to have unusual experiences and eat unusual things. On the eating front, they've almost always been things we've chosen to eat ― nobody really springs freaky stuff on the unsuspecting gaijin. For example, one night at Hige-oyaji's place, he started showing us some more adventurous Japanese foods, including hizunamasu, a Hokkaido regional specialty. Hizunamasu is thin slices of pickled salmon head, cartilage and all. I rather liked it; it makes a nice accompaniment to a mug of beer. He also showed us his big jar of shiokara, which Wikipedia defines as "small pieces of the [sea] animal's meat in a brown viscous paste of the animal's heavily salted, fermented viscera." It's frequently served with shots of sake, perhaps to no one's surprise after that description. We'd gone there a number of times before that night, so we assumed that he'd only busted out the potentially yak-inducing fish preparations because he knew us well enough to know that we wouldn't gag or otherwise freak out.

So it was with little or no trepidation that we visited a new-to-us fish restaurant earlier this week. The owner/chef had a pretty standard set of dishes on his menu: nabe teishoku (hotpot served with rice, pickles, and another side of some type); grilled fish teishoku (same thing, but with grilled fish in place of the hotpot and with miso soup); fried fish, maybe an oyster stew. Matthew ordered the seafood nabe teishoku, I went with grilled fish. Things were proceeding as they usually do until we were served. Then the following conversation took place:

MAD: I don't know how to eat a whole fish head.
SKD: Oh, farm. Is that shiokara?

Indeed, on our trays sat little bowls of shiokara, apparently a standard teishoku dish at this restaurant. We ate our other things, glancing at the ruddy brown dish every now and again. Finally, we each bit the bullet and tried it without the benefit of sake because we still had work to do. And. . . it wasn't half bad ― it was quite salty, and tasted rather like fishy miso with bits of squid in it. Mostly, it was a good reminder of what should be the motto for our lives here: expect the unexpected.
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The Real Deal 

At dinner the other night, a local friend brought a small piece of wasabi and a grater along. The grater surface is sharkskin.



He showed us how to grate the wasabi by gently rubbing the root in circles on the grater, then let the rest of us try. We ate it on sashimi of octopus, squid, and salmon. Oishikatta desu!
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Christmas Cake 

Sponge cakes with strawberries, whipped cream, and placards
Cheesecakes with gold dust for holiday snackers
Chocolate yule logs with Santas and sleighs
These are a few of the cakey displays . . .


Here in Japan, no Christmas is complete without a Christmas cake. Christmas cake is traditionally sponge cake with whipped cream and strawberries. It has morphed into far more extravagant things, like cheesecakes or chocolate cakes covered in ganache (melted chocolate mixed with cream, and sometimes liqueur). You can also get them decorated with white chocolate Mickey-head plaques or holiday wishes from Kitty-chan.

Grocery stores, conbini, and patisseries have had these glossy brochures out for about three weeks now, advertising their scrumptious holiday wares.


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Fish-Butchering Prowess 

Fish ― the most intimidating staple of the Japanese diet. We didn't cook fish much in America, but it's so easy to get cheap, high-quality fish here that it seems ridiculous not to. Not only can it be hard to cook well, it can be hard to know how to eat. Presented with a bite-sized cross-section of river fish last year, I ate the entire thing, including the spoo (read: innards), and felt wretched immediately. About two weeks later, I learned that some Japanese don't even eat the spoo because they don't like the taste. It's apparently like nattou in that respect.

Back to fish. Cooking fish in Japan frequently means butchering it yourself. Grocery stores sell river and smaller ocean fish whole. So if you're salt-grilling, you have the option of grilling the whole thing intact and eating around the spoo and bones. Or, you can de-gill and gut it; you would also have to do this if you're making sashimi or one of the simmered dishes. I've been practicing fish butchery intermittently over the past few months, and I think I've finally got it.

The first time I butchered a mackerel, the metallic smell that accompanies bloodletting kind of freaked me out (did I have a bad mackerel?). Also, I didn't do a particularly good job of filleting it; Matthew spent the better part of dinner working his way around bones. Now, decapitating, gutting, and filleting the fish all happen cleanly with just a few careful cuts and tugs on the appropriate fish parts. (I did get a bit careless in carrying the intestines over to the sink by one end, causing a large glop of spoo to drip out and land on the floor. It is worth noting that the dogs wouldn't go anywhere near the spoo either.) Last night's miso-simmered mackerel was a predominantly bone-free delight, and the dogs scored a bit of mackerel sashimi.

We haven't tried making sashimi at home yet, but hopefully, that day will come.
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Gift Daikon 

Our neighbor across the street gave us a daikon (Japanese radish) from her garden tonight.



Guess I need to get pickling equipment sooner rather than later.
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Gratuitous Autumn Food Photo 

We had a beautiful, cold autumn day today, perfect for cooking. It was also the first day I've felt up to doing anything really involved. Matthew seems to be recuperating quickly, so I decided to shake up the cooking from just soup or spicy things. We can't quite get away from the desire for spice right now, and I've added a tofu craving to the mix (Japan life = tofu cravings ― who knew?). Thus, mabo doufu was in order.

Mabo doufu originates in Szechuan cuisine, according to the internets. The Japanese have adapted it by adding sake and miso to the sauce, which also includes tobanjan, a spicy Chinese bean paste. I made a Japanese interpretation, and it totally hit the spot.



I plated it with some grilled satsumaimo ― Japanese sweet potatoes. I wanted the potatoes unadulterated because the mabo doufu and the third dish (more in a minute) both had very strong flavors, so I didn't oil them (bad call) or anything prior to grilling. Unfortunately, they were a) totally fugly; and b) good, but not complementary to the other dishes. Which was too bad, because I love satsumaimo. They're autumn produce, so there's plenty of time to make more.

I rounded out our dinner with a simple dish of hourenso no goma-ae, spinach dressed with sesame. My cookbook tells me this is technically a winter dish, but I figured I was in the clear because October in Tohoku might as well be winter. It was lovely and tasty, but as with the satsumoimo, it didn't harmonize so well with the other dishes. Clearly, I've still got a lot to learn about arranging menus here.
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Alternative Remedies 

After a week of cold-induced sloth, I'm finally returning to life and the world. Judging from the number of people around town sporting medical masks today, it's not just me. And Matthew seems to be getting the cold now, which is a bummer because we have a Sunday road trip planned. Also because the cold blows, even if you're able to find some measure of relief.

Early in the cold, I started thinking like a New Mexican in search of a remedy. When we had colds in the States, we'd rely on green chile to help clear out our heads. A bowl of green chile stew is like a sauna: partaking leaves you all sweaty and drained, but you're certainly breathing easier. It is superior to a sauna, however, because it comes with tortillas.

Without ready access to green chile, we had to look elsewhere for our capsaicin fix. Fortunately, we are very close to Korea, which has its own frequently incendiary delight — kimchi. Kimchi, or fermented cabbage that is often mixed with a red chile paste, is widely available in local restaurants and stores. I did not feel like cooking much (that should tell you something), so the delivery udon joint was getting a lot of love from us last weekend. A bowl or two of pirikara (spicy-hot) udon and an order of kimchi chahan (Japanese fried rice) later, and I felt less like I had a particularly efficient marshmallow factory operating in my head. Unfortunately, kimchi doesn't do anything for the insomnia and fatigue accompanying the cold, but between being able to sleep and able to breathe, I'd rather be able to breathe.

So, while I'm feeling much better, the course of treatment has had a lingering effect: mad kimchi cravings. And the opportunity to eat more kimchi may be the one silver lining if Matthew does, in fact, develop the cold.
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Rice Harvest 



Farmers have started harvesting their rice. It gets cut and bundled, then the bundles are hung on poles. Most, like these, use vertical poles with the rice stacked in columns. Others use horizontal poles, with the rice bundles hanging over them rather like a clothesline.

Incidentally, the guy in the blue jacket is not a rice farmer. In fact, he's not even a guy — he's a scarecrow! The rice farmer's the one in the white shirt.
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