Blue Lotus

はん亭

This is Hantei, a famed restaurant in Nezu, a shitamachi (low town) neighborhood near Ueno. It serves kushi-age (deep-fried skewered food) but is known as much for the building it is housed in as for its food. The original building is a three-story wooden structure built around a kura (mud-walled storehouse), with the restaurant now extended across the block through adjoining buildings. The exterior was built in 1909 (the kura is older, but by how much I don't know) and has survived the Great Kanto Earthquake, the devastating WWII fire bombings of Tokyo, and the purge of old buildings that occurred during Japan's economic bubble era. Old buildings are rare enough in Tokyo, but buildings that have seen the Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei periods and are still in fine shape are something to be celebrated.

Seating inside the kura is reserved for groups, but the rest of the place has plenty of old-fashioned charm. Especially the second floor, all tatami mats and low tables and paper shoji screens that block the views of electric wires and let in a soft, muted light. Perfect for retaining that traditional Japanese atmosphere, but no so great for taking pictures-- apologies for the fuzzy photos that follow.

When ordering sake you are brought a basket of tiny sake cups, each one different, and allowed to choose which one you'd like to drink from. A tough choice as they are all beautiful.

The standard course starts off with a few bites of karei (flounder) sashimi with a soft mentaiko (spicy cod roe) coating, and a garnish of soy-simmered nanohana (rapini). At this time the accompaniments to the kushi-age are brought: vegetable sticks (carrot, cucumber and daikon), fresh cabbage, and three dips: akamiso (red miso), salt and sosu (a Worcestershire-like sauce) with mustard. The akamiso is mostly for the vegetables and the latter two are for the kushi-age. A lemon wedge is usually served along with the kushi-age as well.

The first two skewers arrive: shrimp wrapped in a shiso (perilla) leaf, and hajikami (ginger shoot) wrapped with thinly sliced pork. As with all kushi-age, they've been dipped in a batter, then panko breadcrumbs, and deep-fried until crisp. They are fried with such skill that they don't taste greasy at all (although the splotches left on the serving paper is evidence that they were fairly oily).

Next up was taranome (the young shoot of the taranoki tree) and nanohana wrapped with hirame (sole). These were followed by a lovely dish of crab-stuffed ganmodoki (deep-fried tofu) simmered in dashi stock and garnished with yuzu citrus, but I ate it up before I remembered to take a picture.

The next two were beef and gobou (burdock root), and squares of kyoninjin (a red type of carrot from Kyoto) and yuba (soy mild skin) topped with yomogi (mugwart) sauce.

The last two skewers were renkon no karashi niku-tsume (lotus root stuffed with a mixture of pork and mustard) and and a large plump hotate (scallop).

When the skewers were finished the shokuji (literally meal, it's the rice, pickles and soup that signal the end of the meal) was brought. I opted for ochazuke (rice with hot tea) and it came topped with iwanori seaweed, with kombu no tsukudani (kelp braised in soy sauce) and asasuke (salt-pickled cucumbers, eggplant and kabu turnip) on the side. The meal was finished with a tiny scoop of ume (Japanese apricot) sherbet.

Hantei
3828-1440
2-12-15 Nezu, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo
Closed Mondays

A taste of Jamaica

Every year around this time I get a craving for Jamaican food, and it's a hard one to satisfy. Although Tokyo is a great city for eating and has nearly every type of cuisine out there, there are a few that are either really hard to find, or missing entirely. And Jamaican food is definitely one of those cuisines, so if I want to eat it, I've got to make it.

Fortunately many Jamaican dishes are not hard to recreate here in Japan. And although a few substitutions and missing ingredients are necessary the results are pretty good.

Red pea soup is probably the easiest, at least in part because there are so many versions. It can be vegetarian or be full of beef and salt pork. Spinners (long dumplings) and coconut milk are optional, you can choose either potatoes or yams or both, and you can load it with vegetables or keep it plain. The four constants seem to be red peas (aka kidney beans), thyme, scotch bonnet peppers and a member of the onion family (scallions, onions or both). In the soup above I went with kidney beans, bacon, potatoes onions, fresh thyme, fresh aotogarashi (Japanese hot peppers), and spinners. And it tasted wonderful, although I made the spinners too big and they were closer to suiton (Japanese dumplings).

After the soup was jerk pork, rice and peas, and a spinach salad (not really Jamaican but the plate needed some colour). The pork was marinated with a bottled jerk paste and cooked in the oven, so it wasn't terribly authentic. But it turned out better than I thought and it's nice to know the bottled jerk, which I can buy here, is not bad. It made a good sauce too, with the addition of soy sauce, ginger and a little honey. The rice and peas were a bit mushy because Japanese rice is just too sticky. Which I already knew but am willing to live with considering the price of imported rice here. All in all a very good meal, and I'd even call it fantastic if I'd never tasted the real thing back home (where we have a large Jamaican community) or in Jamaica.

I ended up with huge amounts of rice and soup, even though I'd halved the recipes-- something that always seems to happen when I make non-Japanese food. So it was a great excuse to have another Jamaican meal today. This time I thinned out the soup with a bit of leftover coconut milk and served steamed spinach (no way can I find callaloo here). And I tried the jerk paste on a boneless chicken thigh and boy was it ever good. Somehow barbecue recipes with chicken suffer less than with other meats when cooked in the oven. Especially the thigh-- it's so hard to screw up and it certainly came out nicely tonight.

So why do I feel like Jamaican food this time of year? My parents go to Negril every February, and I've gone with them a few times. While they're gone I get nostalgic and wish I was there, and naturally I feel like eating the food. I also like to pull out the pictures, and have just uploaded some photos from my last visit (a whole four years ago). Here a few below, the rest are here.

Pancakes and oysters

How to satisfy an unrequited craving (see last post) for deep-fried seafood? Start with a healthy breakfast:

Yes, this is a healthy breakfast. The pancakes are made with oatmeal, and oatmeal is good for you. So is fruit, thus the strawberry sauce. And with the health food out of the way (recipe for both here by the way), it's time to bring on the grease.

Kaki furai (deep-fried oysters) are one of the most popular ways to eat oysters in Japan (interestingly raw oysters are not as well loved here as in North America). They are dipped in batter and then panko (Japanese breadcrumbs), fried, and served with a lemon wedge, tartar sauce, or sosu (a thick Worcestershire-type sauce).

There are few things more satisfying than biting into an oyster that is crisp on the outside and plump and juicy inside. It's not something I experience often, and it didn't quite happen tonight, either: I am a deep-frying novice and have no intention of ruining a batch of perfectly good oysters. Instead I get my fix pre-fried at the supermarket and thus sacrifice a little crunchiness and juiciness. But if I can manage to buy them just after they're made (at Japanese supermarkets take-out food is labeled with the time it was made) and carefully reheat them as soon as I get home (a minute in the microwave to heat them up, a few more in the toaster oven to crisp them), they are not bad at all. Certainly good enough to satisfy a craving.

McDisappointment

A few times a year, against my better judgement, I find myself lining up at a McDonalds counter in an attempt to satisfy a craving. I say attempt because it is just that: a mere attempt, usually futile, to recapture the delight I felt as a kid on those rare and special visits to McDonalds. I haven't actually liked the place since I worked there in high school, but I continue to have a fondness for the breakfast menu and the fries. Which will never be as good as when they were fried in tallow, but are still the best fast food chain fries out there (or so I thought, but more on that in a bit). And once in a while I am seduced by a special burger, like the teriyaki burger or the tsukumi (moon viewing) burger which is only available once a year at the harvest moon and features bacon, cheese and an egg. They sound so good but I am always disappointed-- they taste neither as good as they look in the ads or as good as I remember from when I was little.

And then I came upon this thread on eGullet (my favourite food site) about the Fillet-O-Fish, which I haven't had in years. The thread features an interesting history of the sandwich, and lots of comments by people who loved it when they were kids-- just like me! It was nice to see I wasn't the only kid who preferred it to their regular burgers (although, like a few posters, I didn't like the tartar sauce very much). Anyway, apparently the Fillet-O-Fish was developed to feed those people whose faiths dictated that they eat no meat on Fridays and during Lent, and is still advertised during Lent in certain parts of the world.

Here in Japan there is no Lent and every day can be a fish day, but I happen to be extremely open to suggestion and soon developed a powerful craving for a Fillet-O-Fish and french fries. I'm pretty sure I haven't had one since my early teens, when I was surpised to discover ("But fish is healthy!") that a Fillet-O-Fish contained more calories than a cheeseburger. So I wasn't sure if I'd still like it and was preparing myself for the usual disappointment. But at least I'd get to eat those delicious McDonald's fries, right?

Boy was I in for a shock. Not only was the sandwich disappointing, but the fries sucked. Half of them were actually soggy, something I've never ever experienced at McDonalds. Whether they weren't cooked right to begin with or had been sitting around too long or what, I don't know (I was a burger girl during my teenage McD's stint, not a fry girl). We forgot to try the trick of ordering the fries without salt in order to ensure a fresh batch, but I'm not sure if that would have worked: my husband, a picky eater, asked for no mustard or ketchup on his burger and he got it right away rather than having to wait as usual for a special order. And he said it was only lukewarm, like the fries. Which leads me to believe that the rumours are true: that the food is all pre-cooked and is merely assembled and quickly reheated for each order.

So back to the Fillet-O-Fish. The breading was slightly crunchy in a few places and soggy in the rest, the fish barely warm, and the cheese unneccessary. On the bright side, it still was an actual solid piece of fish and although it was just as mild (read: tasteless) as I remember it did flake nicely and have a good texture. The sauce wasn't as overwhelming as it used to be and I actually kind of liked it. It was definitely better than a McDonald's burger but still not great and including the fries and ambience the whole meal sucked.

Oh yeah, the ambience. My husband is a smoker so we had to climb up to the smoking section on the third floor. I knew I was in trouble when I could already smell the smoke on the stairs to the second floor. The place was packed, half with lone diners furiously smoking while they studied, read or thumbed messages on their cell phones (nobody seemed to be doing any actual eating). The other half were children. I'm not kidding: boys in their school uniforms, probably middle school, being loud and boy-like. They weren't smoking but I'm sure just breathing in the air gave them as much a nicotine high as it did me. Interestingly, my husband had a clear view of the garbage area and reported that not a single person threw away their garbage correctly (most fast food joints and coffee shops have seperate bins for paper and plastic garbage, as well as disposals for ashes from cigarretes and leftover ice and liquids from drinks, and usually people can be trusted to get it right). So I guess McDonalds customers are as lousy as the food.

With my craving for deep-fried fast-food fish still unsatisfied there is just one thing to do: head to Tenya, a tempura chain, for their tendon (assorted tempura atop rice). It includes kisu, a tiny fish with mild, lean and flaky white flesh that when deep-fried, doused in sweet tendon sauce and placed on a bowl of rice is Japan's answer to fish & chips.

おでん

Oden, a stew-like dish of vegetables and various fish and tofu-related goods simmered in a salty broth, is the perfect winter comfort food: delicious, warming, filling and healthy. Oden is usually cooked on the stove, often for hours, with the pot brought to the table and kept warm over a konro (table-top gas grill) for communal eating, allowing diners to enjoy each bite piping-hot.

Oden begins with a simple broth made of dashi (kelp and dried bonito stock) flavoured with sake, salt and soy sauce. Although the broth is simple, it can be difficult to get just right, but get just right you must: the success of the final dish depends on the quality of the broth. And the broth only gets better when the oden ingredients are simmered in it for hours (or days, or even years: some oden restaurants boast of using the same stock for generations).

There are a huge number of ingredients that can be simmered in this stock and called oden, but the most essential is daikon, which should become soft and tender but keep its shape, and soak up the delicious broth while still retaining its essential daikon flavour. Boiled eggs, strips of kombu (kelp) tied in bows, chikuwa-bu (chewy tubes of wheat gluten), chunks of octopus, gyusuji (beef tendon, usually pre-simmered to soften) and vegetables like carrot and takenoko (bamboo shoot) are often included. Konnyaku (devil's root jelly) is usually in there as well, either in blocks or in the form of shirataki (konnyaku noodles). Fish paste products are essential: deep-fried as satsuma-age, formed into hollow tubes and steamed or grilled as chikuwa, and steamed into big puffy cakes as hampen. Tofu always makes as appearance too, usually in deep fried form: thick cakes are called atsu-age, ganmo-doki are mixed with sesame and vegetables and formed into balls. And then there's kinchaku, which literally means "draw-string bag": a little pouch of abura-age (deep-fried tofu) filled with mochi (rice cake) and tied with a strip of kampyou gourd.

That may seem like a long list, but there's lots I haven't mentioned and you can really put almost anything in there you want. I always have a hard time choosing what to use and end up making way too much, which brings me to the best thing about oden (at least for me, the cook): it makes so many leftovers that cooking a single batch can keep us fed for half a week.

These are some of my favourite oden ingredients, which I almost alway include in my oden. Clockwise from left: ganmodoki, hampen, kombu, satsuma-age, kinchaku, chikuwa, daikon, shirataki and chikuwa-bu.

Served with chameshi (tea-flavoured rice), unohana (tofu lees simmered with vegetables), and spinach salad. Chameshi, a classic match for oden, is often just flavoured with a bit of soy sauce or dashi rather than made with tea, but traditionally it is made with either green tea or houjicha (roasted green tea). Here I've cooked the rice with sencha (regular green tea) and katsuobushi (flakes of dried bonito), both powdered, along with soy sauce and salt. The rice is good by itself but even better at the end of the meal when leftover oden broth is poured over it. It is so good that my husband will happily eat leftover oden for days as long as he can finish with chameshi. And by the third day the broth is so rich and tasty that I am tempted to just keep adding to the broth and serving oden forever. Maybe if we had a fridge big enough I would.

Valentine's Day goodies

No romantic dinner for Valentine's Day yesterday, as I had a late class. Instead, dessert:

On the right are the double-chocolate walnut cookies I made for my husband for Valentine's Day (there is just no way an amateur photographer like me can make them look good in a picture, but trust me they taste far better than they look). On the left is a little something my husband brought home.

They aren't for me though. Valentine's Day in Japan is a bit different than in other parts of the world: women give gifts to men, and the gifts are almost always chocolates or chocolate-related sweets. Giftees are not limited to romantic partners or beloved male family members but are can also be male classmates and colleagues. These coworker gifts have become so common that they are pretty much expected and are now jokingly referred to as giri choco, literally "obligation chocolates". Many women resent being pressured into forking out money on treats for all the guys at the office knowing that when White Day (March 14th, the day when men are supposed to give something sweet back to the ladies) comes around few of the men will bother to return the favour.

With my husband working from home until recently, he hasn't received these giri choco in years so I've kind of forgotten about them. So when I came home from work Thursday night and saw a cute little box of chocolates on the kitchen table, my first reaction naturally was "Wow! My very first ever Valentine's Day present from Hideaki!"

Luckily I realized what they were before I said anything, sparing the poor dear any embarrassment. It turns out the chocolates are from a boss and very delicious (he graciously allowed me to try some). And then he heaped praise on my cookies, having scarfed down five of them in place of a proper dinner. I certainly am lucky to have such a generous and appreciative husband.

Maybe next month from now I'll get my very first ever White Day present...

鍋焼きうどん

It's been a while since I made nabeyaki udon, a favourite winter noodle dish, but the recent cold weather made me crave it. Nabeyaki udon, also called nikomi udon, consists of udon (fat wheat noodles) cooked in broth with chicken and vegetables and is usually topped with a partly cooked egg and a large piece of shrimp tempura, but when made at home can be one of those "add whatever you have" kind of meals.

I made a miso broth and used shiitake, carrot, spinach, negi (long onions) and atsu-age (deep-fried tofu) and skipped the eggs since we'd had them for breakfast. I also skipped the shrimp tempura as it's a bit expensive (and forget making it from scratch) and I can't stand soggy tempura. So I used (store-bought) kabocha squash tempura and instead of simmering it with the noodles I added it to my bowl so it stayed nice and crispy. Yum! Pure comfort food, and healthy too.

Ikea

Ikea has been in Japan for almost two years now, and we finally made it out to the Minami Funabashi store for a second visit. On our first visit we had foolishly dropped by just before closing, and without enough time to find everything we left disappointed. This time we arrived in the morning and had ample time to find everything, and although we had fun and bought some great stuff we still managed a few disappointments.

The shipping fees are outrageously expensive, which means that people who come by train, like we did, are limited to buying what they can carry home themselves. I was ready to buy a kitchen table and file cabinet because I'd just assumed that they'd have the same reasonably priced shipping options as any other store in Japan, but I'll have to wait until we go back with a rental car.

The other disappointments were the crowds, which made it impossible to get a good look at kitchenware (the part I was most excited about). Serves us right for going on a long weekend though, and the next time I go it will be alone, on a weekday. And then there were the Swedish meatballs that Hideaki had for his lunch. They suffered from being cold by the time we sat down, and were nowhere near as good as I remember them-- we would have been happy with just the potatoes and sauce. Either they've changed the meatballs or my tastes have changed since I was a kid! I also seem to remember the Ikea cafeteria as a really good deal, but our lunch was far from cheap.

On the other hand, I loved my lunch. Hard to go wrong with gravad lax (cured salmon) and beer (in this case a very nice one from Sweden called Old Gold) and the "salmon pudding" was a delicious surprise. I don't know if it's a real Swedish dish and if that's the real name, but it was kind of like a rich fritatta with a layer each of salmon and potatoes, flavoured with dill and drenched in what I am pretty sure was pure melted butter. The amount of butter was a bit scary and although it was tasty (it was butter, after all) I think the salmon pudding would have been just fine without it.

Another nice treat was Hideaki's dessert dessert plate, which included a semla (Swedish lent bun) filled with blueberry cream. Apparently, just as Canadians celebrate Shrove Tuesday (the day before Lent begins, which this year was last week) with pancakes, Swedes eat buns filled with whipped cream. Something about using up all the sugar, butter, cream and other rich foods before the forty-day Lenten fast. I completely forgot to do pancakes last week, as I've done every year since coming to Japan, so I'm glad Hideaki was able to celebrate. Not that we're doing Lent or anything, but any holiday that involves food is a holiday I try to celebrate.

牡蠣ご飯

It's been oyster season for a few months now and I just realized I've only cooked them twice so far. I love oysters, but prefer them cooked to raw and tend to shun them in my kitchen-- maybe because they are a bit intimidating to work with, or maybe because my husband doesn't like them very much, or maybe because they are a bit pricey. But if I really think about it they are not very different in price here than back home, (as an example, the sixteen big fat oysters shown above cost me about 800 yen), and as they are commonly sold already shucked they are very easy to work with. And as for my picky husband, while he's not crazy about the oysters themselves he does like the flavour they impart to whatever they are cooked with, and is happy just to eat around them. So I really have no excuse and I've decided to cook them as much as possible before their season ends.

Those sixteen oysters were used to make kakigohan (oyster rice), something I've never cooked before. For extra deliciousness it was cooked in my donabe (clay pot), and it turned out so nicely that this is what I'm going to make whenever I find oysters on sale.

Served with tsubo-zuke (crunchy pickled daikon), burikama no shioyaki (salt-grilled yellowtail collar), homemade oboro-dofu (a soft and custardy free-form tofu), spinach dressed with soy sauce and katsuobushi (bonito flakes) and miso soup with shiroshimeji (white shimeji mushrooms), abura-age (deep-fried tofu) and negi (long onion).

I'd like to share the recipe, but first a note on the quantity of oysters. Fresh shucked oysters are sold in standard sized packs here, so those of you in Japan will have no problem buying the right amount. For those outside of Japan I can just give a rough guess: the packs vary widely in the amount of oysters (from 6 very large oysters to 20 small ones); also the amount of water they are packed in varies so it is difficult to give a weight. Luckily this is a simple and adaptable recipe and there isn't really a "right" number of oysters to use, so as a wild guess I suggest using 15 to 20 largish oysters to 3 go (Japanese rice cups) of rice.

Another note: the reduction of the oyster liquor is done to intensify the oyster flavour and remove any strong briny notes, but this step can be skipped if it seems like too much fuss.

牡蠣ご飯 (Kaki gohan)

• 3 go (540 ml or 2.3 cups) Japanese rice
• 2 go (360 ml or 1.5 cups) water
• 1 10cm (4 inch) piece of kombu (kelp)
• 2 packs (about 15 to 20 large) shucked oysters and their liquor
• 100 ml (0.4 cups or 3.4 oz) sake
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp soy sauce
• 1 knob thinly sliced fresh ginger, optional
• chopped mitsuba (trefoil) or sliced nori seaweed (optional)

Wash rice in several rinses until water drains almost clear, add to pot (preferably a clay pot) along with the water and kombu. Let soak at least 30 minutes.

Drain oysters, reserving liquor. Clean oysters in cold water and drain again, and add to a separate pot. Strain reserved oyster liquor and add to the oyster pot along with the sake. Bring to boil over high heat and remove oysters to the rice pot when they become plump. Keeping heat on high, reduce the liquor by about half, skimming off any foam that develops.

Add the reduced liquor to a measuring cup along with enough water to make 320 ml (11 oz or 1.3 cups). Add to the rice pot along with the salt, soy sauce, and ginger, if using. Stir lightly.

Cover pot and bring to the boil over high heat, keeping lid on tightly (you can test for boiling by feeling the lid with a wooden spoon). Reduce heat to low and simmer 15 minutes, turn off heat and let rest for 10 minutes. Remove lid and stir rice carefully, making sure not to break oysters. Spoon into bowls and top with mitsuba or nori.

Snowy night

Another weekend, another snowfall. The news reports said Tokyo got three centimetres, but in our part of town we had at least ten, and in some areas we measured twenty. This time we skipped the shovelling (by the time we realized the snow was here to stay it was too late at night to ask the landlord for a shovel) and headed to the park.

It may not look like a lot of snow to some of you, but this is the most I've seen in Tokyo in years. Most of the snow was undisturbed and looked just lovely, reminding me that, despite my dislike of cold weather, I really miss the snow back in Canada. There are few things as beautiful as a tree blanketed in snow, or the sparkle of freshly fallen snow in the streetlights.

鰤しゃぶ

This is kan-buri (mature yellowtail caught in winter), a delicious fish available for just a short time each year. The name requires a bit of explanation (the Japanese love to give very specific classifications to fish, which is something that the sushi lovers among you have probably noticed already): buri is the name given to mature yellowtail or Japanese amberjack, with hamachi referring to the younger fish. Kan-buri, literally "winter yellowtail", is caught in mid-winter and is a special treat due to its high fat content. It is also wild and compared to regular buri, which is usually farmed, is quite expensive.

It is best eaten as sashimi or quickly cooked as shabu shabu (a kind of hot pot usually made with beef). Or both, which is what we did.

The rest of the shabu shabu ingredients were and shungiku (chrysanthemum greens), abura-age (deep-fried tofu), negi (long onion) and chairo enoki (golden enoki mushrooms) with tofu (not shown). Thinly sliced negi, shichimi (seven spice mix) and ponzu were for dipping the cooked shabu shabu ingredients.

The vegetables and tofu are left in hot kombu dashi (kelp broth) to cook, while the kan-buri is cooked for just a few seconds. It was very good and I was only sorry there wasn't more kan-buri as it was gone in no time.

Le Bistrot d'a Cote

No, the picture above is not from a romantic meal with my husband-- just the beginning of a great lunch with a friend last Saturday. We ate at Le Bistrot d'a Cote, a wonderful little place near Shinjuku Gyoen, and each started off with a kir.

The course has several choices for each of three courses and, especially for the first course, it was hard to make a decision. I finally decided on risotto with beef cheeks for the appetizer, and Emi had a smoked salmon salad. The risotto was very nice, but not really a risotto: the rice had a firm, chewy texture that was nice but closer to hatsuga genmai (germinated brown rice) than al dente arborio, and it wasn't properly creamy. Still, perhaps it was misnamed but it was tasty.

And the beef cheeks were rich and tender and just lovely, and worked well with the rice.

For a main course I had sea bass with beurre noisette over napa cabbage. Perfectly done but compared to Emi's huge plate of steak frites it was tiny and left me wanting more.

I'm not huge on desserts and none of the selections were particularly tempting. It would have been nice just to choose some cheese or fruit (or another order of the sea bass) but considering that the customers were 99% women, and that Japanese women live for dessert, it's understandable the dessert choices were all cakes and tarts and the like. I did enjoy the apple tart that I eventually decided on though, as well as the small cup of coffee that finished the meal.

At 1500 yen (kirs not included!) the lunch course is a very good deal. I've been here four or five times and never been disappointed-- except the times I was turned away, as reservations are a must.

Le Bistrot d'a Cote
1-6-11 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo
03-3359-3066
Closed Sundays

Gyoza

Those of you outside of Japan might not know about the latest food scare here, but the news this week has been dominated by gyoza-- specifically, frozen, made-in-China gyoza contaminated with pesticides.

Gyoza are Japan's version of jiaozi (Chinese dumplings) and were extremely popular in Japan until the story broke last week. Now mass hysteria has taken over and people have been avoiding gyoza, and Chinese food in general, like the plague. Doesn't matter that the poison gyoza were traced to a single factory in China, or that a Japanese fact-finding mission failed to find any traces of the pesticide at the factory, or that Chinese farmers' overuse of pesticides, many of which are banned in Japan, has long been common knowledge. Suddenly all gyoza and Chinese food, no matter where it is made and with what ingredients, are bad. Gyoza sales at supermarkets and restaurants are way down, and Chinese restaurants are suffering.

Partly as a show of support, and partly because seeing all the gyoza in the news has induced a major gyoza craving, Hideaki and I ate at our favourite local Chinese restaurant on the weekend. On the way there we passed a gyoza restaurant which was completely empty and we were tempted to eat there instead out of pity, but as it's a chain shop and the Chinese restaurant is a mom-and-pop place we stuck with our plan. The normally packed little place had just one customer and one cook on duty-- the emptiest I've ever seen it. We started with a double order was gyoza, and boy were they good (so good we'd already eaten a couple before I remembered to take a picture). I wish I could eat here, and all the other empty Chinese restaurants, every day.

Don't get me wrong-- I have no intention of defending China. In fact I actively avoid buying many Chinese products due to concerns I have of the safety of the products themselves and as a kind of boycott against the country's lax safety controls. But I don't like how this issue, just one of many food scandals in recent years, has taken on an ugly anti-China tone.

On a positive note, people seem to be starting to question Japan's reliance on imported food, which is a really important issue that desperately needs to be addressed. But sadly there doesn't seem to be any discussion on the growing reliance on convenience foods. I've always admired the respect Japanese people have for food, with shopping for fresh food still a daily activity for many people and appreciation for seasonal food instilled from an early age. This is changing though, as evidenced by the increasing size of supermarket frozen food and prepared food sections, packed with ready-made food of all kinds. Most of the frozen food is okazu (side dishes) rather than the complete meals sold in the West, as no self-respecting Japanese home cook would serve a meal entirely consisting of frozen convenience food. More typically a single frozen okazu will round out an otherwise home-cooked meal; many working moms and busy housewives are apparently rely on this ready-made food.

I think something is very wrong here. As lifestyles are changing and more women joining the work force, it is understandable that fewer people are able to cook traditional home-cooked meals. But I find it sad that frozen prepared food, chock full of additives and made from who knows what, is seen as the solution. Why not work towards abandoning outdated concepts of what a woman's role is or what a proper meal should consist of?

As it is, women are still overwhelmingly responsible for all of a family's housework, including cooking, regardless or whether they work or not. Help from husbands and children quite rare, and serving take-out or delivery food is frowned upon. Yet there are countless rules for meal preparation which require a huge investment of time in the kitchen. Bento (boxed lunches) need to include a certain amount of food and a certain number of colours and cooking styles. The typical "simple" home-cooked meal is called ichiju-sansai, which means "one soup and three side dishes" (aside from rice and pickles). The meal should also reflect the season and contain a wide variety of ingredients, with each side dish incorporating a different cooking style (one steamed, one sauteed and one grilled, for example). Everything is served in separate tiny dishes, and the majority of homes have no dishwasher (other than the lady of the house, of course). No wonder people turn to frozen food to help shorten the time in the kitchen.

Serving simpler meals or demanding that their families help out would require guts, something that, I'm sorry to say, modern Japanese seem to lack. Frozen okazu are a far more attractive alternative, and it saddens me that this latest food scandal will do little to change that.

Immigration

I wasn't looking forward last week to the trip to immigration to renew my visa. It is a pain in the ass to get to, being in the middle of nowhere on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay. The usual way to get there is to take a bus from Shinagawa but this time I thought I'd try walking, and that turned out to be a good choice.

Despite the cold it was a good walk, and with a clear blue sky the canals and buildings looked rather nice, and the monorail and shinkansen (bullet train) that occasionally whizzed by were pretty cool.

The walk took less than 15 minutes each way, and it made me happy to save on bus fare and see a part of the city that I don't usually see. Plus I don't have to worry about my visa for another three years (and it was nice not to get arrested this time).

Jerks, nuts

In my previous post I mentioned spending yesterday morning shoveling the sidewalk in front of our apartment building. Well, yesterday's snow lasted all day and caused all sorts of chaos in the city, with injuries and delayed trains and canceled flights. Snow is relatively rare in this part of Japan, and Tokyoites don't seem to know how to deal with it.

As a small example, very few people bothered to shovel their walks, except for the odd shop and restaurant. Most people seemed to stay home, and the passersby that did venture out on the path in front of our apartment building pretty much ignored me as I was shoveling. I found that odd as back in Canada the snow brings out a certain camaraderie in people, and even people who normally don't greet strangers become a bit friendlier. But here people walked right on by without comment, some even looking annoyed by my presence.

Among the ignorers was an upstairs neighbor who didn't bother returning my "ohayo gozaimasu" as she scampered out of the building wearing this season's uniform: over sized sunglasses worn round the clock, a fitted parka with a fur-trimmed hood, ultra-short dress shorts, bare thighs, thigh-high stockings, knee high spike heel boots. It's a look that I despise, as logic dictates that if it's warm enough for shorts you don't need boots, and I prayed that she'd slip in the snow, but alas I'd already carved a path for her and she did just fine.

She was a sweetheart compared to the next guy who came by though. He was on a bike and passed by Hideaki first, who was busy shoveling. As the guy rode along the cleared section of the sidewalk he had to slow down to wait for my husband. And as he passed he gave my husband a look so dirty I thought I was seeing things-- surely nobody is that rude.