Tonight's dinner

Yoshie is working late tonight. Here's what she'll have when she gets back:

Cold soba noodles, dipping sauce, eggplant (Lee's class grew it) parmesan, chopped cabbage , grated daikon, and cucumber.

A white jelly made from beans

Isabella Bird mentioned "a white jelly made from beans" in her book, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. She meant, of course, tofu. Right now we have only two kinds of tofu in the house. At least, I think we have only two kinds. Every now and then another container shows up, pushed back into a corner of the refrigerator and forgotten when more tofu blocks the view. When we came back from a brief stop by Yoshie's parents' house on Saturday, we had five containers with three kinds of tofu in the car. We already had two kinds at home, but that didn't stop Yoshie from getting more from her favorite store.

There are several good reasons for having lots of different kinds of tofu around all the time, at least in our house. First, Lee is awfully picky about food, but she'll always go for plain, cold tofu, especially kinugoshi dofu, the soft kind ("silken"). She's even more fond of zaru dofu, the really soft kind that forms in a circular basket (a zaru) so it isn't pressed. Next, we all like tofu, and especially in summer it really good to have some food, especially a high protein food, that doesn't need cooking and, because it has little flavor of its own, goes with almost everything. Finally, it usually has a very short list of ingredients. Even in the U.S., where I can at least read all the names of ingredients, I don't like to buy foods with long list of things I may or may not know by name. Here in Japan, potato chips often include konbu (a sea weed) as a flavoring ingredient and wasabi is usually mostly (western) horseradish with a little actual wasabi mixed in, mostly for color. So it's good to buy simple food.

Tofu can be extremely simple. You take soybeans (usually, though there are other kinds), soak them, grind them, boil them, and strain the liquid to get soy milk, add a coagulent and wait a bit. Then usually you press the tofu into a mold, which makes it harder and gives it a shape. (Unless you just put it in a basket for zaru dofu.) The traditional coagulent in Japan, for most kinds of tofu, was nigari, magnesium chloride extracted from sea water, which is now often replaced by calcium chloride. Nigari, since it's traditional, if often credited with making a better tasting tofu. Calcium chloride, on the other hand, makes a tofu that's higher in calcium, which isn't a bad idea.

The Soy Info Center has an interesting story about how calcium sulfate replaced magnesium chloride in tofu production in Japan during World War II because the government wanted to use the magnesium to build planes. The tofu in my refrigerator right now says it's made from soy beans and nigari. It's the real thing.

• Yoshie's favorite way to have tofu is in miso soup.
• Lee's favorite way is totally plain, though she used to put ketchup on until a few months ago.
• My favorite way is cold, with grated ginger and soy sauce.

But my real favorite is goma dofu, made from sesame seeds instead of soy beans, but more on that another time since it's an off-white jelly not made from beans..

Gokuro Matsuri

Saba no miso ni

Dinner tonight was a really common dish, saba no miso ni. Saba is mackeral. Miso is one of the main flavoring ingredients in Japanese cooking (think "miso soup"). The no and ni are grammatical bits meaning, in this case, "(cooked) in."

I bought three saba fillets (for 280 yen, in case you're interested). As always, or just about always, this meant I had to bring them home on a large styrofoam tray, which will be recycled as I described before. I simmered two of the fillets (cut in half) for 10 minutes in:

1/2 c. water

3 Tablespoons of white sugar

6 Tablespoons of miso

1 Tablespoon minced fresh ginger

I steamed the third fillet with no seasonings in the microwave for Lee. She ate some of it dipped lightly in the extra miso sauce. It wasn't her favorite fish. I thought the sauce was a little sweeter than I prefer. Yoshie thought the degree of sweetness was just right.

The larder in the floor

We have a larder in the floor of our kitchen.

This is the second Japanese house I've lived in that's had one, and they've been two of the three new houses. I don't know why I haven't seen them in the older houses -- I guess that's a subject for future research.

Maybe it's simply because Japanese didn't used to neeed any place to store wine.

Too hot!

It's not that hot, really, but since it's the first really hot and humid week of the year, it seems hotter. It was officially 28 today, but I saw 28 posted on one of the bridges at 11 this morning, and the air over the river, which flows down out of the mountains, must be the coolest air in the city. I spent the whole afternoon in our one air conditioned room, the bedroom, and ate left-over mahi mahi for dinner with some rice. Yoshie and Lee poured packaged curry sauce over their rice. We all had some fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. Lee wouldn't eat tomatoes all winter or spring, but now that we can get tomatoes that taste like they're supposed to taste, she's eating them again. There's a song that goes, "There's just two things, money can't buy, and that's love and home grown tomatoes." These aren't homegrown, but they're local and taste like summer.

What do my neighbors' gardens grow?

How much is that?????

At today's exchange rate, 1 yen equals almost exactly one U.S. cent, .0074 Euro, 1.29 cents Australian, and 1.17 cents Canadian according to my usual currency conversion website.

Kiwi: 98 yen each for the golden kind, 88 for the regular.




Sweet corn: 128 yen each, 190 for two.




Small bananas: 70 yen each.





Asparagus: 5 long, very skinny stalks for 128 yen.
Celery: 2 or 3 tall, leafy, extremely fresh stalks (see the water at the bottom?) for 98 yen.
Broccoli: small heads for 98 yen. (I bought one.)


How do these compare with prices where you are today?

Recycling

Part of buying food is deciding what you are going to do with the packaging material when you've consumed what you've bought. In Japan, this has become a major issue, since the Japanese often opt for what seems to me to be the most complicated solution to most problems.

A case in point: The ETC system for electron toll collection here requires that you pay around US $250 to buy some sort of machine that you mount in your car, and then put an approved credit card in the machine so that when you drive through the appropriate lane, the toll will be charged to that credit card.

Another case in point: Japanese normally back into parking spaces. The official reason as attested to by the driving test is that it's safer to pull out of a space going forward. That's true, of course, but it's also obviously safer to park pulling forward into a space. I also find it Much easier to pull forward into a narrow (parking) space rather than backing into the space.

Back to recycling.

As we go through the day comsuming food here in the house, we separate our "trash" into the following categories:

Burnable

Plastic

Styrofoam trays

Milk and juice cartons

Newspaper/cardboard/particle board

Glass

Aluminum cans

Steel cans

Burnable

This includes food and paper, of course; also saran wrap, aluminum foil, and even the plastic caps of PET bottles AND the plastic ring that's left around the neck of a PET bottle after you take the cap off. They sell special tools for taking these rings off. "Burnable" trash goes in a pink bag with the town name printed on it. I write our name on the bag with a marking pen. This is so we'll know whose bag it is in case the garbage collectors decide they won't pick it up because there is something inappropriate in the bag.

Plastic

Almost all plastic bags, trays, containers, etc. In theory, all recyclable plastic should have a recycling symbol on it, with the katakana プラ "pura" which means plastic. Many containers, of course, are of mixed materials. These will typically say somewhere on the label which part is pura and which part is paper. This goes into an orange plastic bag printed with the town name on it. I buy the bags at the supermarket. I write our name with a marking pen in the space provided. All of this at least gets a good rinse because it sits in our kitchen up to two weeks until collection day. (Yoshie would wash it all thoroughly even if we were about to take it out for collection.)

Styrofoam Trays

These can go in プラ but I can avoid filling up that bag by taking them to one of the nearby supermarkets which have recycling bins in front.

Milk Cartons

These have to be rinsed well, then cut so they open out flat. then they get stacked. They can be put out on the days designated for プラ -- the first, secoond, fourth and fifth Wednesdays of each month. They can also be taken to the supermarkets and put in the appropriate recycling bins.

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PET bottles

As I said, these need to have the caps and neck rings removed. Instead, I've been taking one a day on my morning walk and slipping it into a recycling bin next to one of the ubiquitous drink vending machines. I pass at least a dozen on my walk even though I normally take country roads most of the time.

Cans, bottles, etc.

As you can imagine, these have their own rules and complications. It all reminds me of the early days of recycling. I was living in Capitola, in Santa Cruz County, California. A couple times a month I would take all our bottles to the Grey Bears Recycling Center next to the drive in theater.

EACH COLOR OF GLASS BOTTLE HAD TO BE PUT IN A DIFFERENT BIN!

I thought we'd gotten away from that sort of intensive consumer-sorting, but not here in Japan.

Wakame

Today, Tuesday, I finally separated the wakame we collected at the beach on Saturday into three bags and put them in the freezer.

Wakame is one of the three most popular kinds of seaweed in Japan (the others are nori and konbu). You can read some of the technicalities of wakame at Wikipedia, of course. It's standard in several common kinds of soup and in a popular cucumber salad with a white miso dressing, my favorite wakame preparation, actually.

It was even more fun gathering it than it will be eating it. My daughter and I waded out into the surf and grabbed floating fronds, a few with the holdfast still attached.

Washing it was less fun. I've read that you can wash it for just a minute. That must refer to the kind that the sea has already washed very thoroughly. Ours took about 10 minutes to get more or less free of sand and my wife was still rather umimpressed with how clean it was. When I use it, I'd better make sure there isn't a speck of sand left or there'll be hell to pay.

Starting with rice

What else could we start with? I had rice for breakfast today, like most peoplle in Japan. Unlike most Japanese, however, mine was genmai, brown rice. I also made it in a thoroughly unconventional way, in a pressure cooker.

When we got married, my wife, who is thoroughly Japanese as you'll see from these posts, found genmai an odd taste. She had had it exclusively as a flavoring addition to tea, the genmai cha drunk especially in summer. But gradually, over the years, she's accepted a higher and higher proportion of genmai mixed in with shirogohan, ordinary white rice. When we stayed at her parents' house for some months earlier this year, my wife did most of the cooking and usually mixed white and brown rice 50/50. Since we've been in our own house again, these past two weeks, I've done the cooking and that means 100% genmai.

Rice is planted starting in late April in this part of Japan. It's now mid-June and there are only a few unplanted paddies. I've heard from a friend that the main reason the planting season is spread out so long is that most farmers don't own their own rice plannters, they borrow or rent them from the local farmers' co-op.

Our house is basically surrounded by paddies, which makes for lovely evenings of a raucous frog chorus. It also means we're treated to swallows during the day and bats at dusk, grabbing the insects the frogs miss.