Blue Lotus

Okayu

This is the classic sick food in Japan: okayu (rice porridge). The Japanese don't follow the western idea of "feed a cold, starve a fever", where cold sufferers fill up on comfort food like chicken soup and use strong flavours like chili, garlic, ginger and lemon to soothe the throat and clear the sinuses. Instead, people in Japan suffering from any kind of illness, including colds, tend to eat as little as possible. The food should be light, bland and easy to digest, and okayu fits the bill perfectly.

The truly sick take their okayu plain, with just a bit of salt for flavour, but those who still have an appetite will add toppings like umeboshi (pickled plum, shown in the picture above), salted salmon flakes, or egg.

As you might have guessed, I am down with a cold at the moment. I still have an appetite, which is normal for me as even at my sickest I seldom lose my hunger. Which is always a bit of a disappointment to to my female Japanese acquaintances, whose standard question to cold survivors is how much weight they've lost: in a most impressive case of positive thinking, colds are regarded by the Japanese as a great chance to lose weight. Still, despite wanting to eat I have little energy for cooking, so for the past few days I've been living on okayu with umeboshi, lightly sweetened oatmeal, and yogurt. And of course the Haagen Dazs my husband brings home each night.

Now that it's the weekend I'm hoping he'll be able to make me nabeyaki udon (udon noodles cooked with chicken and vegetables), which is my second favourite cold food (what's the first? see the Haagen Dazs comment above).

Spring is here

In Tokyo there's some kind of flower in bloom all year long, and that's one of the things I love about this city. Early bloomers like roubai (winter sweet) and ume (Japanese apricot) are often thought of as harbingers of spring, but to me the true herald of spring is jinchouge (sweet daphne).

As the pictures of snow-covered ume blossoms I took a few months ago attest, the early blooming spring flowers can stand cold temperatures, but the jinchouge burst open in March with a promise that the cold weather is over.

The blossoms themselves are pretty, especially up close, but what jinchouge is really celebrated for is its fragrance. My old apartment had a large jinchouge bush in the back yard and I used to leave the back windows open all day, braving the chill (the flowers may signal the end of winter but Tokyo in March is hardly balmy) in order to fill the house with the lovely sweet scent. One of the hardest things about moving was leaving that bush behind, so imagine my delight last year when the landlady planted several jinchouge bushes by our buildings entrance last year! This was in late March and the blossoms were pretty much finished, so this is the first time to enjoy a full jinchouge season here.

Jinchouge aren't the only flowers in bloom around here: the sakura (cherry blossoms) started late last week and the ground is covered in sumire (violets), hana nira (spring starflower) and other wildflowers. And these bell-shaped blossoms, called asebi (Japanese andromeda) are putting on a very showy display at the local park.

This feral rose-ringed parakeet is hardly a sign of spring, as the flock stays in Tokyo year-round, but it sure made me happy to see it. I first encountered a whole tree of these birds last month but didn't have my camera with me, so on a recent walk with my camera we made sure to pass the tree again. This time there were only four of them, which makes us wonder where the others were. Is this tree their home base or do they move around? Is this part of the same famed group that lives at the Okayama campus of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, or are there different groups scattered throughout the city? I'd love to learn more about them.

Pho

In my last post I mentioned making beef stock, and this is what it was for:

Pho bo (Vietnamese noodle soup with beef). Soaked rice noodles are added to a bowl, topped with thinly sliced raw beef, and piping hot beef broth is poured over both, cooking the beef and billing the bowl with fragrant, delicious, spicy beefiness.

This is it at the table, the beef still cooking. The toppings are basil, thinly sliced green chili, bean sprouts, cilantro and lime. Extra fish sauce and sriracha were also on hand.

I'll admit that this homemade version is not as good as the pho we can get back home (or presumably in Vietnam). The broth ended up too dark and cloudy and the toppings weren't quite right. I'd never even bother making it if I still lived in Canada. But this stuff was loads better than anything I've tried in Japan, where pho tends to be made with a simple unspiced chicken or beef broth and few toppings.

I've heard rumors of a decent pho place in Fujisawa, so next time I'm down that way (it's not far from Kamakura or Enoshima) I'll be checking it out. Maybe my pho making days are numbered.

Braiseworthy

I've been on a nimono (braised food) kick recently, perhaps because the spring weather has reminded me that the season for braising is almost at an end.

Today I made stock with gyukotsu and gyusuji (beef bones and beef tendon). After hours of simmering, the gyusuji was soft and tender and still had lots of flavour left to give, so I added it to a pot with tofu and peeled hard-boiled eggs and braised it with sake, soy sauce, sugar, ginger and red chili peppers.

This resulted in a dish called gyusuji tofu. Served with sesame seed dressed spinach and onigiri (rice balls) stuffed with mentaiko (spicy cod roe), it made a simple and extremely satisfying meal: Japanese comfort food at its best.

This was the first time I'd cooked with tendon, which is rarely eaten in Canada. The only time I've had it back home was atop pho (Vietnamese rice noodle soup) and I remember it as tough and unpleasant. But gyusuji is well loved in Asia, and in Japan gyusuji tofu is a favourite way to eat it. I will certainly be cooking with it again, as beef tendon is incredibly cheap and packs a huge flavour punch.

Another first for me was making tako no yawarakani (soft braised octopus) last week. I've long wanted to cook it but most recipes say to start with fresh raw octopus, and believe it or not raw octopus is hard to find in Tokyo: it tends to go bad quickly when fresh so is commonly sold pre-boiled. But recently I found a recipe that started with cooked octopus, so I gave it a go.

Zenmai (royal fern shoots) with chikuwa (steamed and grilled fish paste), shiitake and enoki mushrooms; tako no yawarakani; hakusai (napa cabbage) dressed with ponzu and katsuobushi (citrus soy sauce and bonito flakes); miso soup with onions, new potatoes, asparagus and butter; and mugigohan (rice with barley); with salmon flakes, umeboshi (pickled plum) and mekabu seaweed as rice toppings.

Here is a better look at the tako no yawarakani. It was simmered in water for about an hour, then slices of daikon were added along with sake, soy sauce and sugar, and it braised for another hour. Well-made octopus retains its shape a little better than this but for a first attempt I'm pretty happy with it. What's important is the flavour, and this tasted wonderful.

More pysanky

A few weeks back I blogged about my first pysanky (Ukrainian Easter egg) attempt in years. It had turned out to be harder than I remembered and the first two eggs didn't come out as I'd wanted, but I assumed after the first few practice eggs I'd get the hang of it. Well, it seems that all my eggs this year were practice eggs, and I think it'll be a few more years until I'm happy with my pysanky.

One of the problems was the new-style kistka (stylus) I ordered had too fine a tip. It was too late to order a coarser one so I set about trying to make a traditional kistka myself, figuring thicker lines would be easier than very thin ones.

This is what I came up with (and this, first picture from top, is what an old-fashioned of kistka is supposed to look like). I whittled a hole in a dowel, inserted a small steel funnel, and fastened it with copper wire. I was going to buy a small piece of copper sheeting and roll it into a funnel shape but at Yuzawaya, a large craft supply store, I found a small leather punch that looked like it would do the job. It did, kind of: the opening at the bottom make a nice thick line, but it let so much wax through that it was a little hard to control. Still, not bad for a complete improvisation.

The coarse kistka allowed me to try a very simple traditional pysanky design, using just yellow, red and black dye. Pysanky uses a resist wax dying process similar to batik: drawing on a white egg with melted wax and soaking the egg in a dye bath will keep the covered sections of the egg white, and the process is repeated through several different colours of dye, with each new colour being covered up with more wax. When the design is complete, the wax is gently melted and wiped off the egg to reveal the colours that were trapped under the wax.

Realizing traditional pysanky might be a bit too difficult I tried some non-traditional designs, like the pink ume (Japanese apricot) above.

This very simple design of red ume on a black background was my favourite.

I also like this fish egg, and it was the most fun to do. On the front is a big scaly fish, and on the back:

The big fish is chasing (or is being chased by?) a school of tiny fish.

A close-up of the scales.

Almost all of the eggs, which had been boiled before I started, cracked in the oven while I was trying to melt off the wax, so they will be thrown away soon (before they start to stink). I'll be kind of sad to part with the ume and fish eggs, but it's a good thing the others were duds or I'd be pretty bummed.

Oh well, I have a whole year to practice. Hopefully by next Easter I will have gotten the hang of it!

Easter

This morning I grabbed my trusty glue gun and put together a quick present for my niece Marya: a basket of chicks.

I had originally planned to give her some pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs) but it's been so long since I've done them that all the eggs I made ended up being practice eggs, either cracked or not good enough to give away. Maybe I'll have better luck next year.

Hideaki and I met his sister and her family for brunch at Roti, a restaurant in Roppongi. I ordered eggs benedict, because someone had to-- it wouldn't be a proper brunch without them. The other grown-ups ordered steak and eggs, a burger and fries, and a spinach and feta omelet.

Marya had the fluffiest pancakes ever, of which she took two bites before moving on to her dad's fries and four bananas from the breakfast bar. We were all happy to help finish off her pancakes, not that our own food wasn't excellent: it turns out Roti does a very nice brunch, and since Tokyo is sadly lacking in brunch places we'll definitely be back.

They also do desserts well too, and this blackberry crumble was good enough to keep us away from the nearby Stone Cold Creamery which we'd originally planned to visit for dessert.

Then it was back to Marya's place where we spent a few hours decorating eggs. We were all concentrating on our eggs so hard that there are no pictures of us at work, just the finished eggs.

Then it was time to play. Which of course means watch Marya play, but unlike last time she deigned to let us help put together the train tracks, and Hideaki was even allowed to touch the train a few times. Progress is definitely being made, and in a few years we may actually get to push the train around for a lap or two. It's such a cool train track set that we joked about buying a separate one for the adults so we could play too, but I'm guessing Marya wouldn't stand for that.

Then we all went out for a dinner of soba, a nice way to soothe our tummies after such rich food for brunch. I had tsuke-toro soba, which were cold buckwheat noodles with a dip made of soy-based sauce, grated yam, raw egg and and nori seaweed.

We were then given a bag of Easter goodies and sent on our way, and when we got home we had some of them for dessert:

Hot crossed buns! I didn't think it was possible to find them, but apparently the bakery Andersen carried them for a few weeks before Easter, or at least they did at the Aoyama branch. Thank you sister-in-law!

Three recent dinners

OK, back to food:

A recent dinner consisted of, from bottom left: onsen tamago (egg poached in its shell); okara to kyuuri sarada (tofu lees and cucumber dressed with shiso, ponzu and olive oil); daikon no happa to kawa no itame (sauted daikon leaves and peel with soy sauce and sesame seeds); haru-kyabetsu no katsuobushi-ae (spring cabbage dressed with bonito flakes); komatsuna no nibitashi (komatsuna greens simmered in dashi and soy sauce); daikon to tebamoto no nimono (chicken drumettes and daikon braised with shiitake); mame to shirasu gohan (rice with green peas and baby sardines).

The chicken and daikon dish is delicious and economical, and I was about to share the recipe when I found a very similar one in English on the Kikkoman website. Either wings or drumettes can be used, and the kombu is optional (good additions would be whole shiitake and peeled boiled eggs).

A sale at the meat aisle inspired this man-pleasing dish: double meat curry with butter rice. The rice (Thai in this case, as long grain rice is hard to come by in Japan) is flavoured with butter and turmeric, and the curry uses both ground pork and chunks of stewing beef. It is a hybrid curry, half-way between Japanese style and western style: I start off cooking it western style, with the spices added at the beginning, and then finish it with a butter and flour roux to get the properly gloopy texture of a Japanese curry.

Curry is one of those foods that gets better with age, and this stuff kept my husband (and me) happy for half the week.

Here I tried Mark Bittman's recipe for spaghetti with fried eggs-- a fast, cheap and easy cousin of spaghetti carbonara. With a salad of spinach, cherry tomatoes, sauteed mixed mushrooms and toasted pine nuts. This was the first time I've spent longer on making salad than making pasta, but both were very good.

Take me out to the (practice) ball game

Today I went to the Tokyo Dome with my husband and a friend to see a pre-season practice game between the Tokyo Giants and the Hanshin Tigers. I know very little about baseball and its nomenclature, so am not sure what these pretend games are called in English or if they even exist outside of Japan. I mean, would North American baseball fans pay 30 bucks for the privilege of cramming themselves into a crowded stadium to watch two teams try out their players in a game that doesn't even count for anything?

My husband was miffed that we arrived merely on time, as he'd hoped to watch the players warming up (as in, he actually wanted to see the practice for the practice game). I cheered him up by buying donning my complete range of Tigers accessories, because the next best thing to being a sports fan is to look like one:

Or look like a dork. It's all the same to me.

Anyway, check out all that enthusiasm! It's not that I didn't try though, it's just that my husband was far too busy watching the pretend game to take any pictures. So by the time we got home and took this picture the magic had kind of worn off.

So back to the game. This was our first time at the Tokyo Dome, and it kind of sucked because it was actually a beautiful day and it would have been great to be sitting outside. But it must be a treat on rainy days, especially for people who've come far out of their way to see a game. The Giants are the default favourite team of country bumpkins all over Japan, whose little villages don't have teams of their own. Which means a lot of those people over on the Giants side in the picture above are out-of-towners, and it would suck to come all the way to Tokyo to see your favourite team only to have the game canceled by rain. What with Japan's love of over-priced construction projects I don't know why they just didn't build a retractable roof, but maybe coming from the land of the SkyDome I'm a bit spoiled.

Now, compare the dark drab crowds in the home seats above to the away crowds below:

Fully half of the stadium was filled with Tigers fans, virtually all of them (I mean us) sporting the Tigers colours, yellow and white. The Tokyo Giants might have the most fans but Hanshin Tigers supporters make up for their smaller numbers with enthusiasm and loyalty.

As a faux fan though, I was free to mostly ignore the game. I'm not uninterested, but experience has shown me that authentic fans like my husband don't like to be pestered with an endless stream of "What's that guy doing over there?", "Who's that?", "What just happened?" and so on. Apparently it makes it hard to concentrate or something. So I had to find other things to occupy myself, like beer, fried chicken and yakisoba (shown above). Japanese baseball food is a little different than the stuff we eat back home and I was hoping to show you more, but the game was over too fast to get into any serious eating.

Drinking wasn't a problem though, thanks to the hordes of beer girls on patrol. I've seen beer hawkers of both sexes in other stadiums but at the Tokyo Dome they're all female, all young (I doubt most of them were old enough to legally consume the product they were selling), and all extremely happy to be there. They are also all very cute, with their attractiveness seemingly determining their wares: the plainer girls sell snacks, the cuter girls peddle coffee and soda and the real beauties dispense the alcohol. They carry little kegs of beer on their backs, in half a dozen varieties, with a stack of plastic cups holstered at their hips. They bow at the bottom of each aisle before making their ascent, flashing smiles in all directions, and if you beckon one over she will cheerfully charge you 800 yen for a little cup. I think the men don't mind this system at all though, and I didn't think it was so bad either: hard to complain about freshly poured ice-cold beer.

I never knew baseball could have cheerleaders, but here in Japan the more cute girls you can cram into an event the better, so there they were. Note the rapt attention they are receiving.

The game was over before we knew it: the pitchers all played well but the hitters really were practicing, and none of them managed to score. This being a practice game there were no extra innings so we were out of there in record time. A nice treat for me but kind of a bummer for Hideaki. I cheered him up by buying him a Tigers wristband emblazoned with 31, the number of his favourite player. So with his new gear he's already looking forward to the next game. I'm dreading it: with the amount of money we spent on today's practice game and accompanying refreshments/accessories, I hate to think how much a real one costs.

Pysanky

It's been a long time since I've made pysanky-- nearly two decades, I think. I've been wanting to get back into for a few years but as the supplies aren't available in Japan and I never remember to pick some up on my visits home, I haven't been able to.

Pysanky are Ukrainian Easter eggs, and I learned how to do them at a class at the local museum/art gallery/archives where my mother worked. My mom had the coolest job in the world, at least in the eyes of a teenage girl with a fetish for old fashions and artifacts (corsets, crinolines and parasols would have figured prominently in my wardrobe if only I'd been able to find them). Through various exhibitions, events and classes I got to see and learn some very neat stuff, with my favourite probably being these wonderful eggs. I don't really remember the classes themselves, except for the time a Ukrainian Orthodox priest, in his long black robes, subtly tried to recruit me to his faith: he started off by pointing out our similar tastes in fashion.

But I do remember the eggs. The teacher's eggs were beautiful and perfect, and my first tries were so awful, but somehow I kept at it and was eventually able (at least according to my own memory, admittedly not the most reliable authority) to create some pretty good designs. I continued it for a few years but eventually my crafty tendencies turned elsewhere for gratification, and I pretty much forgot about pysanky.

Until last week, when I gave in and paid an outrageous shipping fee to have the materials sent over. I bought a couple of kystka (styluses), some beeswax and dyes, and with a candle, a hastily made egg stand a couple of practice eggs I was in business.

It's much harder than I remember. I don't seem to be able to make a straight line and have forgotten all the designs I used to do. That is to be expected, but making it harder is the fact that the materials are a bit different: I'm am having trouble getting used to the fancy new-style kistka, with its super-fine tip that tends to clog up produce an uneven wax flow. The stylus I used to use was a tiny cone made of copper sheeting wrapped to a wooden dowel with wire, almost primitive in its simplicity. And aesthetically the coloured sheets of beeswax, actually meant for making those rolled beeswax candles, is not nearly as nice as big chunk of pure golden beeswax I used to use (come to think about it the colouring in the wax might be what's causing the uneven flow in the kistka).

Still, despite the years of absence and these unfamiliar, new-fangled tools, I don't think these test eggs came out all that badly. And I've just noticed that there is a wealth of information online, so if I can find some good designs for beginners I think I can back into this.

Do any of you do pysanky? I would love to hear any tips, especially from those of you in Japan or other places where materials are hard to come by. Anybody ever made their own kistka?

お花見

On the weekend we took advantage of some lovely weather to have our first hanami (flower viewing) picnic of the year. We didn't eat under the sakura (cherry blossoms), which are the usual choice for hanami, as they won't b blooming for another three weeks or so. Rather it was ume (Japanese apricot blossoms) that decorated our outdoor dining room. Ume are less celebrated than their cherry blossom cousins in part because of the weather: it's still usually too cold to properly enjoy them. But really it's not exactly balmy when the cherry blossoms are out so on a sunny day ume are just as easy to enjoy.

This is what I made for lunch. In the box on the left is dessert: strawberries, apples (including my first ever usagi ringo, a standard bento item made of apple slices cut to look like rabbits) and segments of dekopon, a tangerine-like citrus. Next box: udo (a spring vegetable) dressed with katsuobushi (bonito flakes); cherry tomatoes; soramame (fresh fava beans); tsukune yaki (sauteed chicken patties wrapped in nori and shiso); buta no negimaki (long onion wrapped with pork); broccoli. Next box: fuki (butterbur) simmered with carrots; the same cherry tomatoes, soramame, broccoli and negimaki as the other box; and teriyaki scallops. And in the box on the right are onigiri (rice balls), two stuffed with mentaiko (spicy cod roe) and three mixed with salmon flakes.

To drink we had amazake (a hot drink made of sake less flavoured with sugar and ginger) in the thermos, sake and water. And of course we used real chopsticks, oshibori (wet hand towels) and cups instead of the disposables commonly used. Even if we didn't care about the environment this would be a good thing to do as this park, like many others, has no garbage cans.

This was our view as we ate.

After lunch we took pictures and did some goofy posing. I'll spare you the shot of me with ume buds up my nose.

This is mansaku (witch hazel), which blooms around the same time as ume. It has odd looking flowers but a lovely smell.

Ume also have a fragrance, with an intensity that varies with the type. These ones had almost no smell at all.

Another flower just coming in to bloom is sanshuu (Japanese cornel).

But of course it was the ume was the star attraction. Ume blossoms are fairly long-lived, staying around for longer than sakura do, but I love the flower best when it's a brand-new bud. These will all be open and fully bloomed by the time I make it to the park next, so I'm glad I saw some cute little buds when I had the chance.

黄砂

I woke up to a strange sight this morning: a distant dull orange orb in a grey sky rather than the usual fiery sunrise, which often so bright that it's hard to tell where the sun ends and the sky begins.

This means that the kousa has arrived. Kousa literally means "yellow sand" in Japanese and is called "Asian dust", among other names, in English. It is sand that blows all the way from the deserts of Mongolia each spring, passing over China, Korean and finally Japan. The sand itself is a hazard to people with asthma and other respiratory disorders, especially those who are already suffering from kafunshou (hay fever, at its peak now). But the kousa packs a double whammy, as it picks up all sorts of nasty pollutants on its journey across Asia. You'll see a higher number of people wearing face masks around new, and a lower number of futons and laundry hung to dry on people's balconies.

I hope it doesn't last long this year and my beautiful sunrises return.

eGullet foodblog highlights

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was busy with an intensive foodblog last over at eGullet last week. I hope you went and had a look, but just in case I didn't here are some of the highlights:

I was lucky enough to find whole scallops on Monday and broiled them on the half-shell with wakame seaweed, ponzu (citrus soy sauce) and butter.

The scallops were served with homemade tofu; miso soup; bamboo shoot rice; rapini dressed with soy sauce and katsuobushi (bonito flakes); and kimpira of lotus root, young burdock root and carrot.

The next dinner was rice with ume-shiso-shirasu (pickled plum, perilla leaf and baby sardines); clams steamed in wine; tamago-yaki (thick rolled omelet); broccoli and new potatoes dressed with ponzu; and cabbage with katsuobushi.

Here is leftover kimpira; cabbage, wakame and cherry tomato salad; tara no kasuzuke (cod marinated in sake lees and white miso); spinach simmered with fried tofu; tonjiru (miso soup with pork and vegetables); white rice; with shirasu and mentaiko (spicy cod roe) for rice toppings.

On Friday night we went all out and bought two kinds of wagyu (Japanese beef) and some kurobuta (Berkshire pork) to use for shabushabu.

Here is a close up of the most expensive beef, to show you the lovely marbling.

This is udo, a kind of sansai (mountain vegetable). Like most wild spring vegetables it is pretty and has a fresh, delicate flavour.

These wagashi (Japanese sweets) tasted as good as they looked.

On Saturday we had lunch at Kantarouzushi, our favourite sushi restaurant. I took this picture when I was halfway done the appetizer of maguro (lean tuna) and toro (tuna belly) to show the marbling.

Our lunch was omakase (chef's choice): ikura (salmon roe), tobiko (flying fish roe, not really visible), tamagoyaki (thick omelete), tekkamaki (cucumber and tuna roll). Front: o-toro (the fattiest and best grade of toro), hirame (flounder), ama-ebi (sweet shrimp, raw), chuu-toro (medium grade toro), unagi no shirayaki (salt-grilled eel), kani (crab, cooked).

A close-up of the beautiful chuutoro. I'm not a hug toro fan because it's so rich but at this place they do something (no idea what) that makes it not only tolerable but completely delicious.

We picked up dessert from Planetes, a local cake shop, on the way home. I don't have to tell you that it was delicious.

I bought a pack of perfect strawberries. They are beautiful and as sweet as sugar, but I do wish they actually tasted like strawberries.

On Sunday I put together this bento (lunch box) for lunch in the park. I don't often spend hours making a picnic but it was a lovely sunny spring day and the ume (Japanese apricots) were in bloom. That kind of day just begs for a picnic.

No bento is complete without rice, so I made onigiri (rice balls). One kind stuffed with mentaiko and the other mixed with salmon flakes.

That night we brought out the teppanyaki (tabletop grill) and cooked up some oysters with butter and soy sauce. Boy were they good, and as a bonus my husband, not a huge oyster fan, said one was enough for him. All the more for me!

Then my husband cooked his specialty, okonomiyaki (savory pancake). Above is a variation called modanyaki, which has noodles in the middle.

And that was it for the foodblog. It was a lot of work but I enjoyed it and actually learned a lot: just as on this blog, the comments were interesting and helpful. And all that intensive cooking and thinking about food seems to have gotten me out of a cooking rut. Let's hope it lasts!

Away this week

You may have noticed I'm posting even less than usual recently. One reason is because I am doing a week-long food blog at eGullet, a wonderful website devoted to food. With the eGullet food blog I go into quite a bit more detail than I usually do here on this blog, listing everything I eat and showing what life is like here in Japan. If you're interested, go have a look.

And to (hopefully) keep you occupied here for a while, I'm doing a round-up of stuff from the past month or so.

A few weeks back my husband and I had sushi at a local kaitenzushi (conveyor belt sushi) place. Most of the phone camera pictures didn't turn out, but here are the ones that did (kind of). Above is tai (sea bream) and tororo okura (grated yam and chopped okra).

Miso soup with crab and shirako (cod milt). The crab was just used to flavour the broth, it didn't have enough meat to eat (although I tried my hardest).

Aburisamon (seared salmon) topped with sliced negi (green onion), pepper and sea salt. We ate 9 plates each, plus the soup: the most we've had in years.

On the way home we discovered the fabled flock of parrots. I've heard of it, and know that many other big cities have parrots, but I didn't quite believe it till I saw these guys. Dozens of them were in someone's yard, sharing the trees peacefully (but noisily) with sparrows, all the same size and colour. Amazing.

A student brought back sanuki udon (a specialty wheat noodle from Kanagawa prefecture) so I made bukkake udon: the noodles are topped with cold broth along with katsuobushi (bonito flakes), negi, tenkasu (tempura batter) and umeboshi (pickled plum). It was good, but not the reason I'm sharing this picture. Check out the plate in the back: that's dashimaki tamago (thick omelet). I finally made it, and it didn't turn out half bad! It was far easier than I thought, and although this one wasn't very pretty it seemed to have the right taste and texture. I can't wait to try this again.

Lunch at an Indian place in Hibarigaoka. It took over the space where a really good Thai restaurant used to be, and we were pretty sad at first. But this place is pretty good. My chicken curry and daal were OK, but the naan was really good (despite the burnt tip on this one) and Hideaki's keema curry and egg curry were fantastic. Will go again.

Sauteed chijimi horensou (winter spinach), scallops with soy sauce and butter, penne with roasted tomato sauce. My sister introduced me to sauce made from roasted tomatoes last year, but this sauce uses canned tomatoes rather than fresh. The idea comes from last week's Mark Bittman column in the New York Times (the recipe given is for tomato soup but the idea works equally well for pasta sauce). Bittman now has a blog, by the way, and it's full of good ideas.

A quick lunch last week: instant miso soup and futomaki (thick rolled sushi) with a thick omelet, negitoro (chopped tuna belly), cucumber, shake no naka-ochi (chopped salmon), shake (salmon), maguro (tuna) and thin omelete.