teamEggers

Tuna – Avocado Don

I’m having a lot of fun playing with the different flavours here. At home, I nearly always start dinner with three things: wine, butter, and garlic. It’s different here. Their staple flavours are: soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar, & sake, although miso and sesame oil often play into that.

I wanted to share dinner from last night with you. Jon always gives me funny looks for taking pictures in the kitchen, so I thought I should put them to good use.

We’ll call this Tuna – Avocado Don, and it was adapted from a cookbook I was reading in the bookstore. (don just means “rice bowl”)

Shopping list (serves 2):

• ~10oz of the best-looking tuna you can find. (I used a brick of blue fin (maguro).)
• 1 large, firm avocado
• 1/2 T lemon juice
• 1 T spicy something (I used house seasoning, but chili oil, tabasco, or sliced jalapeños would also work well.)
• 1 t extra virgin olive oil
• 1 t soy sauce (Japanese brands, like Kikoman, seem to be milder than the Chinese versions, like La Choy.)
• 3/4 t wasabi (if it was easier to find, you could also use horseradish for the same kick)
• 1 c rice (Italian risotto rice (arborio) works well in place of sushi rice because it’s also small and starchy)
• Nori (the toasted seaweed that goes around sushi), cut up into teeny-tiny strips
• sesame seeds

I had a lot of this on hand, but splurged on the tuna ($10). Dinner ended up being around $15 for both of us.

Once you’ve got all your ingredients, cooking rice and chopping into squares is about as complicated as it gets. As soon as you even think about starting dinner, get your rice maker going. Rice is the most time-consuming part of dinner. You should also pour yourself a glass of sake about now. White wine will do in a pinch, but let’s get authentic here, people!

1. Whisk the following in a large bowl: lemon juice, spicy, evoo, soy, wasabi
2. Chop your tuna and your avocado into equal sized squares, about a 1/2 inch big. Take caution not to shred your tuna – you spent a lot on that! Use a sharp chef’s knife and run it under water to clean it off before each new slice.

1. Gently toss the tuna & avocado with the wet ingredients, until they’re well coated.
2. Equally divide the mixture over two bowls of rice.
3. Top with nori (salty flavour) and sesame seeds (happy toasty flavour)

I love this dish because it’s flavourful, but really delicate. Japanese cooking doesn’t use a lot of big, bold flavours but instead relies on the tastes of a few high quality ingredients to really shine.

Produce & Mango Kitkats

One of the things you may find strange about Japan is the value the place on perfection. Specifically, perfection in produce. Check out the prices of some of these (really common) things below:

$47 for nine [perfect] strawberries:

$42 for 1 [perfect] cantaloupe. You’d be surprised at how ubiquitous this is – even the corner market has a perfect melon. In fact, this is so popular that I stopped calling it “cantaloupe” and started calling it “perfect melon”.

What’s that? One ear of corn for $6.50? That one doesn’t even look perfect! It’s got lumps in the kernels!

Now I don’t want you to get the wrong idea – dinner is not a million dollars. It’s just that it seems very possible that you could very easily spend $300 on a fruit salad.

Personally, I’d rather spend my $2 on a Mango Soup flavoured kitkat. It was tasty!

Jon had a point the other day; they seem to decide a society what the best of something is, and then only sell that. Bakeries? French. Wine? French. Ethnic food? “Italian”. Dogs? Pocket-sized. (Although that last one may have more to do with the size of their apartments than actual preference!). It’s interesting, though not surprising from an area that also values excellence in school and morals.

Are you ready for some SUMO?!

It’s nice to know what’s going on, when you’re watching a sport. Also, it’s nice when that sport has cute mascots that you can take your picture with.

Also, it’s nice to have goods seats. (Even better when you had not-so-nice seats the first time you came, so you can really appreciate the awesomeness of your über-expensive floor mat.)

These, by the way, were the chairs:

Did I mention yet that our seats were the traditional masu, or box seats, that fit 4 Japanese-sized people really well? We were cozy. It’s a really good thing that we were all friends…

…and that you’re allowed to drink your body weight in beer that you bought at the 7-11. Although in retrospect, Will is probably right. Chu-Hai Strong Zero might not be the best beverage choice for me. An 8% beverage that tastes like fizzy grapefruit juice is toxic to my judgment. (Seriously, was this stuff made for high schoolers? it doesn’t taste like alcohol at all!)

I’m sure I’m not alone in the camp of girls who tagged along for the ride, but somewhere along the way became genuinely interested in the sport they were pretending to like. Before the maku-uchi (upper division) bouts begins, the younger rikishi (sumo wrestlers) have their moment of starshine. Because not many people get there to see these young wrestlers, we were able to sneak down and steal a few shots!

Here you can see the wrestlers, lined up and waiting for their turn. In front, you can see the ceremonial salt. The salt is thrown by upper division wrestlers before the bout, to both purify the ring and to protect them from injury.

You’ll remember that the sumo dohyō where the bouts happen, is held under the roof of a Shinto Shrine, dating back to Sumo’s history of taking place in sacred places. Kind of neat. I love how traditions and history are carried through and modernized.

Before the big bouts of the day, the four of us headed out to have a traditional Sumo feast – Chanka Nabe. In traditional style, we sat on the floor of a little cubicle. As lunch started, the boys began to get used to the idea of sitting on the floor cross-legged for multiple hours. Hah.

I love how many menus have pictures here. It makes ordering super easy.

This is lunch:

Ready for more restaurant pictures? Thought so. Last year, we tried to go to a place called Popeyes, known for it’s 70 beers on tap.

…but, it was closed on sundays. We made a point to come back on a Saturday this year. Among other things, I had an imperial coffee stout aged in bourbon barrels. They only gave you about 8oz, which is less than awesome. I thought it was really neat to see how many of their 70 beers were from the northwest. We live in good a good part of the world for beer, wine, and food.

Red bean. The un-chocolate.

Thomas, Andreas… this one’s for you and your crazy hawaiiannesses.

Red bean kitkat is better than red bean soup kitkat. It at least tastes really true to what it’s supposed to be.
If anything was going to be the national dessert flavour, it might just be azuki.

Meh. I mean, it’s fine. I kind of like it, but I’d still rather have my brown-desserts be chocolate. Why can’t I move to a place where the national dessert is caramel? Like Argentina!! Yes – Okay. It’s settled. We will build a naval base in Argentina, station an aircraft carrier there, jon will get transferred, and then i will eat dulce de leche candy until i puke.

Bread Guy

Technoratti claim token:
M9QAPXG8MP56

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I’m totally elated.  Why, you ask?

Bread guy remembered me! I was walking up to the bread truck that parks on the side of my street, and Bread guy hopped out and said “pan, deska?” (you want some bread?).  Then a moment passed where I thought I saw a glimmer of recognition (but no, not possible – that was nine months ago!), and then he said (in broken English) “you’re back! good to see you long time. you cut your hair, it look good.”

This is a picture of the bread truck that I took, stalker-style, from our balcony.

I’m so excited that I get fresh bread out of a truck again.

Bread guy recommended a curry bun, which is a really common snack here. I was just reading about it, and found out that filled sweet breads of all sorts are really popular, kind of like the russian piroshki. What they forget to tell you is how bad they must be for you!

I also got this weird hot-dog bun with peanut butter frosting in it:

What’s odd is that i think i accidentally bought this peanut butter frosting by itself the other day, thinking that it was regular peanut butter.  You understand my confusion, as there’s a peanut on the cover and it was sitting in the jelly aisle at the market. It tastes a little like… when you make peanut butter cookies and you whip a lot of sugar, butter, and peanut butter and you stick your finger in the batter, just before you add the eggs.  yeah, that.  that’s what i have inside of a hot dog bun.

I thought it would be interesting to show you the bread here, because it’s so different from what we’re used to at home. This loaf is average in every way except that it’s way more “whole grainy” than they usually are. Nearly all the bread is stark-white and fluffy, sliced thick, and served 6-slices to the loaf. This pretty little number was about $4: