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.
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