Udon for dinner

We had udon for dinner.



Lee followed proper etiquette, drawing the noodles across from the late and into the bowl of tare (dipping sauce),



and the slurping them up.

Vending machines

At Tokushima Station.

I'll have to take some more vending machine pictures. They are ubiquitous and in wide vlariety: bouquets of flowers,



beer, eggs, cigarettes, and, in front of drug stores, condoms for when the drug store is closed. The ones selling cigarettes require a special ID card so minors (which always means under 20 in Japan) can't buy any. I'm not sure about the beer machines. Some of the machines used to sell sake and whiskey, even Merlot,



but I haven't seen any of those lately. Maybe the only alcohol you can get out of a vending machine now is beer. I don't know.

For miso soup this morning

I also put in tofu and, in mine, leftover spinach. Lee, the ultimate kid, wouldn't think of putting spinach in her soup and my wife wouldn't eat it again after she felt a grain of sand in it last night.

Harvesting rencon

It's time to harvest the rencon (lotus roots).










Here's what this same field looked like in early July.

Tommy Lee Jones is the Boss

In "Lost in Translation" Bill Murray's character spends many hours getting the right friendly look on his face for a Suntory whiskey ad. I wonder how long this serious look took to capture.

Halloween Candy

Yes, here too. Japan loves many American holidays, and Halloween is the latest imported holiday to grow into a national institution, though not yet a craze.

Soft cream

Chocolate is best, even when you're only two years old!

Pocky -- theme and variations

Whole squid

Ayu for dinner

Ayu and salmon

My wife stopped by her parents' house and came back with 10 ayu, small trout-like fish in the smelt family. I cleaned them yesterday. We'll eat them tonight since she also came back with about 750 g. of sashimi-grade salmon and that's not something I was going to leave in the fridge unnecessarily.

Our daughter LOVED watching me clean the fish, especially looking at each one before I slit it open and guessing if it was male or female. My wife wanted to make sure I understood (1) how to clean fish (I've cleaned THOUSANDS) and (2) that the egg sacs should stay in for cooking and eating. It reminded me that, when I first came to Japan, people continually asked me if I "could eat" fish. They seemed surprised when I told them that I had fish most days as a kid, though some of that was tuna in sandwiches.

The salmon was farmed in Chile. The ayu may have been directly from a farm (local), though they may also have been caught in one of the local rivers. I haven't gotten the details yet. Even though the ayu may have been caught in a river, they were probably farmed and then released for fishing. There are way too many fishermen for what I suspect to be the reproductive capabilities of our local rivers.

Home-style miso soup

My wife made miso soup for breakfast this morning. As you can see, it's a meal in itself!

Baking bread

It's really hard getting decent bread here. We can get good baguettes in the bakery in the basement of Sogo Department Store and okay white loaves at several bakeries scattered around the area, but I haven't found anything for sale with more than about 10% rye or 20% whole wheat flour, though they are called "rye bread" and "whole wheat bread." For years I've had bread machines, but my wife made such wonderful bread by hand when we lived in the U.S. that I decided as soon as the weather cooled off, I'd learn to make my own. I've started this past week, first Irish soada bread, now regular bread. The one today, my second yeast bread, had 40% whole wheat flour, 55% bread flour, and 5% all-purpose flour because I ran out of bread flour.

Lee helped.

"A little sushi"

Yoshie stopped by her parents' house today and came back with what she described as "a little sushi" for dinner.




Top left: aji (horse mackeral)
Bottom left: saba (horse mackeral)
[Yes, I know. These look and taste like two completely different fish and they have different names. I suppose aji are simply really young saba. If anyone out there knows more, please leave a comment.]
Bottom right: boze (butterfish)
Top right: inari

Burning waste in the rice paddy

Milk festival

Free Milk!

Rice harvest

Kaki (Persimmons)

Rice harvester

Katsuo no tataki -- again

Today was my wife's birthday and she happened to have the day off, so we went out to lunch together. She chose a seafood restaurant a few kilometers from our house. I ordered katsuo no tataki, which turned out to be a mistake. The fish was very high quality, but it was done in a real Tokushima style, quite different from the Kochi style I had been hoping for. The fish was extremely lighty cooked, as it shoud be, but not at all charred on the outside and it was smothered in sliced mild onion with just a few, very thin shreds of very mild garlic. My wife's Manpuku Sushi Lunch (manpuku means full stomach) seemed to be much better, though it might not fill up my stomach.

When we went to pay, I looked at the woman behind the cash register. She looked quite familiar, though I couldn't place her. I looked at her name tag, but didn't regocnize it as a name I'd ever seen before. I looked at her. She looked at me. Then she said, "Don-san" and told us she had been my student at Beginners' Club. It was Hitomi Somthing-or-other -- I can't remember her maiden name. She's the fourth former student I've run into, including the woman who cut my hair a few weeks ago.

Bird notes

Cold and flu season is approaching and I've decided to be pro-active. I'm going to make some chicken soup and freeze it so it will be ready instantly. One problem is that I can't buy whole chickens here. They grow them, slaughter them, cut them up and sell all the pieces, but you can't buy a whole dead chicken in Tokushima. You have to order one a week in advance. You can't buy turkeys here at all, though you can mail order them from Kobe. Usually, for Thanksgiving, I've simply made chicken pieces, but maybe I'll mail order a small turkey this year since we have an oven. On second thought, I guess that will have to be a whole chicken -- this oven is too small for any turkey I'd care to eat.

A very simple breakfast (for Lee)