Thursday, October 28, 2010

Churros



Completely unrelated to Japan is the super tasty Mexican dessert known as the churro. Thanks to a little wiki-chain (Mister Donuts -> Fast Food restaurants Japan -> FF Restaurants USA -> Taco John’s -> Churros) I now know that churros, despite us calling them Mexican desserts, actually comes from Spain (according to wiki anyways, but the articles cites no sources). Normally, without sources I would be in a considerable amount of doubt, but I would actually guess that they came over to Latin America and the “New World” with Spanish explorers. Supposedly, churros themselves came with Portuguese explorers from China originally, stemming from the Chinese donut (aka, youtiao). Because they did not know the proper technique for making the Chinese donut, they used their own, creating the five pointed star shaped churro we all know and love. According to someone on wiki, anyways.

Another website actually says that it was invented by shepherds as a food that could be easily cooked in a pan or even over a plain fire. From there it spread to Latin America. This website supports that idea as well, since they say that frying the bread was the only way to prepare their bread since “the microwave had not been invented yet.” Um, what happened to baking bread as a method of preparation?

Actually, this would be super interesting to figure out where it really came from, mostly because I love learning about where things originated (must be the Japanese side of me) and I love food.

Interesting food for thought though, even if it doesn’t actually cite any sources.

Oh, and through a google search, churro is also, apparently, a type of sheep. And supposedly the people who make the churro are called churreros.

They actually have churros here in Japan, though I haven’t been able to find a decent one like the ones back at home. The ones here… aren’t crunchy at all. They’re this kind of soft, donut like thing that, while tasty, doesn’t have the juxtaposition of crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside like churros do. And they had a glaze; no sprinklings of sugar waiting to drop nicely onto your pants. Those were just the churros at Mister Donuts though. I have the suspicion that if I go to Disneyland, I’ll be able to find a nice proper churro.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Badger badger badger badger

MUSHROOMS MUSHROOMS

So I'm at my agricultural school in Niimi today. It's FREEZING here! I think the weather said it was like... 12-8 C. ._. I mean, that's how cold it got in San Diego at its COLDEST. I'm going to freeze, hahaha...

But I did a little bit of exploring today around the school. Guess what I found?

A PONY.

AND DUCKS. AND CHICKENS. Though these were the fluffiest chickens I've ever seen haha. I don't know if they were being raised for food or for their eggs.

But they also come around to the teachers room and sell things that they grow at our school. So far, they've come around with GIGANTIC grapes, GIGANTIC mushrooms, and today, regular sized mushrooms but for insanely low prices.

It's a shame I don't like mushrooms more.

They had a bunch of different varieties too. There were shiitake mushrooms, but also hiratake mushrooms that were this gorgeous steel blue/grey color. I wanted to buy them just for the color, but what was I going to do with a whole tray full of mushrooms?

Maybe I'll end up liking mushrooms by the time I leave here.

There are like, a billion different mushrooms they sell at the grocery store. Some of them are really really really expensive. Matsutake are generally the most expensive; some can get up to 10,000 yen (about $100). Craziness.

The kids also came around with nametake mushrooms, which were this beautiful caramel color. And, they had shiitake. Seriously, grand shame I don't like mushrooms.

Thankfully, this fascination with mushrooms has been enough to dispel this feeling of homesickness for thanksgiving holiday food. Some people would argue that it's these foods - turkey, ham, pumpkin pie, cranberry stuff - that makes up the core of what is considered 'American food'.

I'm probably one of them. Yeah, burgers are American I suppose, and garlic fries, but turkey... oh man. I miss turkey. And delis. And ham. And pumpkin pie.

I also miss driers. I think if I had to chose one thing I could have brought from home, I would have brought a drier with me. I hate having to hang dry my clothes. :< They end up all stiff, and they don't always dry super fast. Plus, I don't want to hang my clothes outside for all my students to see... so I hang them inside, where they dry more slowly. I miss warm, just out of the drier clothes. Sigh.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Dearest Sensei

Dearest sensei,

What gives? Last week you were on board with this idea of having a dialogue for Halloween. You even asked me to make a sheet and stuff, and were excited when I showed you it. But today, you came up and asked for the other worksheet I had prepared earlier, photocopied that, and then informed me that for today's lesson, we were doing the normal listening warm up and then the numbers worksheet.

Uhhh, that's not what we talked about last week.

So forgive me if I'm mildly annoyed that you did not tell me about this last week, and that you decided to switch plans last minute rather than tell me no. I don't really care that you told me last minute and decided to change plans (okay, well maybe I care a little). But the biggest reason is that you told me to do more work and prepare things, and I DID, and THEN you changed it AFTER I did all of that. Not cool dude. At least don't tell me to do things if you're planning on changing the plan last minute to something way not as fun.

Love, Jess

------------------------------------------------------------

I don't even get to give the kids candy. :< That hella sucks for them, cause my other two classes are totally getting candy. Man, I wonder if he's pissed at the kids or something to change like this.

At least I get to give the kids Halloween stickers. Lord knows I have a billion of those to get rid of.

But! I won't let this ruin my week since it's a Monday and all. I mean, I still have all week. Halloween is this weekend. Then NaNoWriMo, aka, the descent into insanity, starts.

EDIT::

Well. I am properly mortified. So it turns out, that this whole rant... was untrue. He DID want to do the Halloween thing. There was a miscommunication, where I thought he had said that we were doing the numbers worksheet first. So I didn't think we were going to talk about Halloween, so I didn't bring any of the pictures or anything. Imagine how embarrassed I felt after he said we were going to do that and I didn't have pictures. I forgot to bring the candy up with me the second time too, so I had to run down to the teachers room TWICE in one lesson. That was embarrassing.

Sooo yeah. The lesson was pretty fun, even if for half of it, I listened to a tape recorder and my sensei speak English phrases from the book.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Vending Machines



You might see these around Japan's big cities but generally the smaller city ones are more... normal? They do have a battery vending machine and beer vending machines out here. Cigarette machines are quite common. A couple of my favorites are the ice cream vending machines, and the hot riceball/french fry vending machine (somewhere near tokyo).

For the record, that last machine in the video clip is NOT a vending machine. It's an arcade game, and thus, does not count. You shouldn't have to pay money and walk away with nothing at a vending machine, called "jihanki" by the Japanese people in my area.

China, however, has a vending machine for LIVE CRAB. Buwhuuuu? What's this craziness?

There's also something I don't understand about vending machines. As you can see from above, sodas, water, and the like are somewhere around 110 yen, which is roughly a dollar by my standards. Other, more awesome drinks like tea or juice or coffee are going to run anywhere from 130 yen to 150 yen, roughly $1.30-$1.50.

Now, in the states, I would never ever pay that much money unless i was desperate. $1.50? That's a lot for a soda. Even more if it's just a mere CAN. Canned drinks should cost like... 50 cents or maybe 75. Any can that's $1.00 is a pure ripoff.

Yet here I am, in Japan, throwing down way too much money on vending machine drinks. Why? Is it the mere presence of the constant onslaught of vending machines? Is it because I'm in Japan? I have no qualms about spending 130/140 yen to get that tasty looking tea. At 150, I'm slightly hesitant, but nowhere near as hesitant as when I was in the states. I mean, even for awesome drinks like Frutopia, $1.50 made me squirm. I usually didn't buy them. Now I'm grabbing milk tea, apple tea, milk coffee at this actually quite high price, and barely thinking twice about it. When I buy a drink in the morning, it usually costs around 137-150 yen a go. That's kind of expensive.

What is with this strange spending habit of mine? o_O WHY CAN'T I CONTROL IT?! WHY MUST APPLE TEA BE SO DAMN TASTY?

Magical Stickers



Eventually, there will be pictures of not food. But today, the actual object I'm going to talk about *isn't* the meat itself, but rahter, those magical stickers that sometimes adorn the surface of the meat packages at the grocery store. Those magical stickers that look kind of like hand thingies, in case you can't read kanji, means "half." Combined with the kanji on the right, you get the magical combination known to super market shoppers as the half price off stickers. What does this mean?

See that 580 yen meat? Ignoring the yen's really strong stance against the dollar and just taking things 100 yen to 1 dollar, it's roughly $5.80 for that nice chunk of low quality meat. I don't know what kind of meat it is, and I'm not really at the point where I care right now. It's meat. I have seasoning to make it awesome. So with those stickers, I can buy not one, but TWO of these magical meats and cook one up to eat right that night. The only downside to these meats is unless you freeze them (which isn't that hard, I just hate having to plan well enough to have the meat defrost in time) they go bad relatively quickly because the *actual* reason those stickers are on there is because they're about to expire.

But hey. 2 Steak things for 580 yen? Two giant hunks of meat? Yes please.

This is why Japanese grocery stores are awesome. Half price off stickers. They also have these stickers for premade foods (generally, towards 6pm every day since those foods are perishable). Generally though, I avoid anything that has mayo. I had a very uh... unpleasant encounter. I'm pretty sure it was due to mayo being left out. Lesson learned. No mayo that has been left out for a while or unrefrigerated. No thank you.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Cheesu



I am well aware of the fact that feta cheese is not Japanese. In fact, the little package I bought it in was kind enough to proclaim in capital bold letters that this cheese came from Greece. But oh man. Oh man oh man. Feta cheese, I can say with confidence, belongs in the privileged circle of "my favorite foods." Good feta, anyways, with that nice salty sharpness. Mmm. It immediately makes the day a thousand times better.

Feta cheese, in fact, has already made its debut in my Japan life several times. Once, I bought it from the store and it was a sad sad feta. They only sell them in blocks here; I thought that was super weird. I guess I was spoiled from living in California where most of the feta I bought was already crumbled, ready to go on salads in pieces that made you want to mop the plate up with your finger.

The second time was at our fantastic cheese party. Everyone brought either an article of cheese, or something to go with cheese. It was grand. One dude brought feta cheese, and I ate them with raw tomato. Raw tomato! I used to hate that stuff. Now tonight, I just sliced up the tomato and ate it with a thin slice of feta and a little bit of salt to take away the tomato-y flavor. I've come a long way since high school, I suppose.

The third time, was an exclusive trip into the import store at the station, just to pick up a block of feta. Expensive feta. I had no idea how much it cost until I bought it yesterday. It's definitely one of those more... special things, clocking in around 950 yen (which I count as practically ten dollars). Ten bucks for a block of cheese! Damn tasty cheese, granted. But ten! Holy crap! It's probably for the better, otherwise I'd be eating this stuff every single day. I used it in my pasta salad, which has become something of a comfort food to me. It's super easy to make since they sell italian dressing, cucumbers, red onions, and pasta here, which is basically what I use for mine. Maybe some garlic. Oh, and jalepenos! They make it FANTASTIC. And feta cheese when I have it.

I also discovered in my grocery store that they in fact, have a somewhat small selection of cheeses. Most of them are that kind of gross cheese that reminds me a lot of American, or the white Japanese baking/cooking cheese that they use in dishes like gratin or doria (which is wow, amazing). But they also had parmesan. And, strangely, gouda. That was weird. And they had Philadelphia cream cheese! It made me miss home a little. And even though the Giants are playing the Phillies, I gotta hand it to Philadelphia for making kick ass cream cheese. That's about it though haha.

I also discovered that my big grocery store, Polka, stocks hershey's kisses. HELL YES BABY. They also stock an amazing amount of other foods that I thought would have been impossible to get. Like Jelly Belly jellybeans. Now THAT made me feel nostalgic. It's funny how little things like that can make your day just a little bit brighter. Finally buying chinese soupspoons also made my day much more awesome. So awesome I might even sleep in my cockroach infested room. Maybe. The more I look, the less Takahashi feels like a podunk town in the middle of nowhere. They even had things like... oreos and nice chocolate like Lindt's. I'm saving those for emergencies.

But back to cheese. However unhealthy cheese is though... it's still one of the only ways I'm still getting dairy here in Japan. I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to find non-fat or skim milk. I can't drink the regular milk here since it's like... super whole. I get a little sick and nauseous, despite how it's probably all in my head. Cheese, ice cream, and yogurt. Hooray.

It's kind of amazing how many different types of cheese we've managed to develop. I think it's interesting though, that cheese isn't that popular over here in Japan, but dishes like gratin and doria are. I mean, they might not be as popular as something like omurice, but I've been seeing it all over. And that thing is practically covered in cheese. Gratin, the ones I've had here, are made with pasta. Kind of like a macaroni and cheese, pretty much. I still think of potatoes when I hear Gratin.

But doria. How to explain this. It's like someone took mac and cheese and went "hm, how can we make this better?"

Their solution?


This, my friends, is doria. Take mac and cheese made with kinda crappy Japanese white cooking cheese. Add super tasty flavored rice. Layer mac and cheese on top of it. Sprinkle more cheese on top. Bake until the cheese is all brown and tasty looking. Not only do you have a kickass awesome (super unhealthy) dish, it stays warm the entire time you eat it! The only downside to this is that it stays hot for the first like... fifteen minutes you're eating. It's like eating Korean hot pot. You go to take a bite and then realize OH SHIT IT'S HELLA HOT. OW OW OW. Worse, doria has cheese. Cheese sticks to the roof of your mouth. Hot cheese burns. I do not want to think about how many times I've burned the skin off the roof of my mouth. Too many to count.

But man, doria is pretty tasty stuff. It would be even tastier if one were to use Kraft's mac and cheese. Or home baked. Mmm... I'm going to stop thinking about that now and focus on cooking.

Monday, October 18, 2010

A Thousand Words to Explain a Picture

A master at work

I think I'm going to try something different with this blog. Maybe. Hopefully, it will make me more diligent about actually posting, and hopefully, less whiny and more interesting!

The plan: Post a picture. Explain picture in ~1000 words. Or something like that. :) It provides an elaboration on a picture that I've probably either put on facebook or in the newsletter, but has a longer version of the story to go with it. Or more complete. Or untold parts. Or something. I'm trying to make everything as... independent? from each other as possible, so hopefully, this accomplishes that and turns this blog from "jessica's wine-fest" into "hey awesome." Hopefully, it will also help me remember the smaller things that happened that day.

And now, the story.

Hiroshima, 18 September 2010
We were sitting on the curb not because our feet were tired, but rather, because it was in the shade and relatively out of the way. Our group was waiting in Hiroshima's famous peace park (which is, in fact, very peaceful), just outside the museum, for people to regroup so that everyone could go to lunch. Since we had all split up to cover the park in our own time, people were trickling back in small groups; we were waiting for two more people. Girls. British. They had chosen to do the peace museum after touring the park area.

Me? I did it first so that I could get it over and then walk around the park and contemplate. Originally, I wasn't going to go to the museum since a) I had done it already 5 and 6 years ago b) I didn't want to go a third time and c) It's really really really depressing. Somehow I managed to convince myself that this was a good idea because I was older and theoretically wiser now.

Anyways, we were waiting for these two girls, one of whom gets rather emotional over things like this so... we weren't entirely sure when she'd get out of the museum. Others were getting impatient, since it had been a while since any of us had eaten.

Finally, the majority of the people waiting decided that food was really important and split. Three of us from that group chose to wait for the other two. I mean, we're adults and everything (gasp) so it wasn't like we had to eat together for everything. Just that waiting seemed a little more polite than just up and leaving the poor girls after they walked through that depressing place.

So instead of having omurice (which is super tasty), our group went on an adventure to find this okonomiyaki area in Hiroshima that was particularly famous. We actually walked by the building without being able to find it haha. It was weird, because this was the same place I had eaten 5 or 6 years ago. I remembered it... kind of. It looked so familiar. Not in the dejavu sense, but in the "oh shit, I know I've been here before and I can remember doing these things.." sense. It was weird.

We almost didn't go to this place either, since I was in charge of picking where to eat since I had made the mistake of uttering "oh this looks familiar." I chose the place with the giant okonomiyaki sign outside of it. Or rather, building. We were so confused. No idea of what to do. There were stairs, and an elevator. The other girls took the elevator up, while Will and I actually took the stairs. Unfortunately... we kind of didn't talk to the others about where they were getting off at, so we wandered up the stairs in search of food, not knowing where they were getting off. Yeah. Poor planning on my part. BUT. We discovered that every single floor pretty much, was a cluster of okonomiyaki grills with bar seats. Freaking amazing I tell you. There had to have been at least 20 different places total in the building. We made our choice by who answered "can you do vegetarian?" since one person's a herbivore.

Our choice was a good one though. That okonomiyaki was so freaking good. It had a layer of crepe, cabbage, noodles, bacon-like pork, garlic, and mochi in it. Mmmmmmmmmmmm tastiness.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Interwebs

Soooo. It has finally come to my supervisor's attention that a) I don't have virus protection software on my personal computer any more. b) I used to have it. and c) I took it off.

I don't know why I so vehemently dislike virus protection programs on my machine. I understand why they need them for the computers at work - I mean, they're really really old, running outdated versions of IE, and they're all windows machines. Virus protection is like, the first thing you install on them.

But nobody here knows anything about my mac, and I think they treat it as some really really foreign windows machine. Which is completely reasonable and stuff. But like, yeah. Now that I have my internet set up at home... I don't need to rely on the interenet at school to accomplish the things I want to do. That actually might be more productive really. So I might actually just hold off on putting it on my personal computer, and just use it to make all the handouts and blah blah. I mean. It would be really nice if I could just use the internet (maybe I can find a way to extend my network at home... I think it ALMOST reaches the teacher's room at school). Sigh.

I wouldn't be against using the school computer if it like... you know... wasn't ages and ages old and had a good working copy of things like Word and stuff on it. Or if I could use firefox. Mmm... firefox.

On a more random note, the tshirt/vest combo I wore today happened to pretty much match another teacher's (who's a dude). I am slightly mortified.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Work as Play: Club Sports

I think I might have just extended every day that I work by another good... two hours maybe. Hooray for me! But this is the fun part of work, the part that I don't really mind asides from the getting back late and not feeling like I want to cook something because it means I'd have to wait another hour or so. Seriously, why does it take an hour to cook most things that I like to make? Sigh. Freezers are your friend...

But I think I just signed myself up to do basketbal practice at Jounan, which means that I'll be joining the basketball club on Mondays at Jounan, going down to Kyuudo at Niimi South on Tuesdays when I'm working at Niimi North, cooking club on wednesdays at T Senior high, English club and then basketball on Thursdays at Takahashi Senior high, and then on fridays, every other time when I'm at Niimi South I'm going to kyuudo when I can after English club. The other fridays, I'm stuck at kenmori until around that time ANYWAYS so I'm still getting back to Takahashi around 7pm. Helloooo restaurant meals by myself!

But yeah, good bye afternoons, hello getting home late in the evenings, all in the name of building relationships at my different schools with kids outside of class. Okay, and a little bit of personal interest as well. I think I'm going to try to get to the other clubs when I can or when I'm too tired, but yeah, we'll see how that goes. Seriously, I wish I was at some of these schools more foten just so that I could try out all the different clubs.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Spice up your life

"It makes me realize that the world is divided not between rich and poor, or male and female, or East and West, but between those who like spicy food and those who do not."
(from http://www.saveur.com/article/Kitchen/Fire-in-the-Belly)

Never a truer sentence has been spoken.

I finally got the wireless up in my house! I'M SO EXCITED AND HAPPY. Finally, I get to put this time capsule of mine to work. It's doing quite well, too. Internet is still roughly the same speed. Now I can actually lay in my bed/futon and use the internet, which is nice. I'm not bound by cables any more, unless I want to plug in my external that hosts all my pictures. I'd plug it into my time capsule, except I'd need to get another power strip then for the TV area since apparently, I'm all out of plugs. Sigh.

Oh yeah, I've put up a few pictures on facebook so far. They should be public. I'm planning on putting some up on mobileme eventually, but I've been trying to prioritize things around here. Like vacuuming. I still need to do that. I still need to put out my newsletter too; I've been bad and haven't sent the fourth one out yet, nor have I finished writing it. It's about halfway done. There's just been so much to do right now, and I haven't felt like staying at home.

One Piece is back up though! YAY. I'm so happy.

Today we went to eat parfait in Takahashi, my town. Oh my god. Holy crap. it wwas gigantic. I think it's one of the biggest foods I've seen ever in my life. Holy wow. Thirteen of us failed to finish it. I think I've had enough sweet desserts for a while, after eating that. I had 2.5 bowls, I think. Maybe 3. No more than that, I remember. Someone had 4. Holy sweet jesus.

It's funny, because I don't actually like sweet things like, that that much. I'm a savory/spicy kind of girl. I don't have that much of a sweet tooth, and I can't really eat a lot of sweet things. Savory? Sign me up please. I can pack that away. But I could never ever finish a pint of ice cream in one go, nor can I understand how people can. I like to finish things on a salty note rather than a sweet, though the sweet might taste fantastic. I don't know why. But sweet foods are really, for me, enjoyed within reason. Unlike savory, there's no sense really in stuffing yourself silly (I think anyways) (and unless said dessert is from extraordinary desserts). I'm getting to the point in my life where, when I eat sweet desserts and foods, I want something to balance it out. Tea with no sugar, just straight and black.

Oh, they gave me free tea today at Chateau. It was kinda funny, because I eat there a lot (though usually on my own) since it's the closest restaurant to me and they make a really tasty hambagu and omurice. And their curry isn't bad. But they recognized me. I think that might be why the tea was free. Plus it was not the kind of tea I was used to. It was kobocha, a type of seaweed tea. It had a very interesting taste to it, one I would have pegged as a soup rather than a tea. It was savory, with a kind of sweet taste to it. Very very... interesting. Unfortunately, it lacked the bite good ol' regular tea has to cut through all the sweetness from the ice cream and desserts.

I need to get myself a good tin of English Breakfast tea. I love that stuff. I've found that I really miss black tea, just plain black tea over here. I can only ever find it as sweetened tea, which, don't get me wrong, I love, but it's not quite the same. I can find nearly any other tea, but regular black ones like English Breakfast and earl grey are a tad harder to find. Interestingly enough, jasmine is a little more on the rare side. No awesome 1 L bottles for me. Guess that just means I have to make my own. :3