Modified Otsu

About two weeks ago, I decided to try making something with soba noodles, but didn't want to just go for some cold soba. So I searched around I came across this recipe for Otsu, which I made in a slightly modified form and thought was delicious. I'm not sure if the original recipe is especially traditional, but the more extensively modified version I made it today is certainly not. As daid described it, "it's about as Japanese as curry hamburger onigiri".

It's not that I don't use any Japanese ingredients at all, it's just that there are a few very definitely non-Japanese ingredients involved as well. In all, the result was pretty tasty so I thought it was worth sharing.

Ingredients 

The ingredients. Not pictured: ginger, olive oil, salt.

Dressing
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, grated (approx 3 cm long)
1 lemon, zested
5 mL salt
2.5 mL habanero pepper powder
Juice from 0.5 lemon
60 mL unseasoned rice vinegar
80 mL soy sauce
30 mL olive oil
30 mL sesame seed oil

Salad
180 g dried soba (or two servings, if your soba is portioned out like that)
15 mL canola oil
1 block tofu, chopped into 1 cm x 1 cm x 2 cm blocks (approx)
1 head broccoli, cut into bite-sized pieces
4 bunches mizuna, roughly chopped (approx 500 mL after being chopped)
0.5 long onion, finely diced
1 avocado, roughly chopped
Toasted sesame seeds for garnish

Instructions

Make dressing by first combining the grated ginger, lemon zest, salt and pepper in a jar (use a jar with a tight-fitting lid, if possible). Mix together well.
Add the lemon juice, rice vinegar and soy sauce. Give the jar a swirl to combine.
Add the oils. Put the lid on the jar and shake thoroughly. Set aside.

Put a pot of water with a bit of salt on the stove and bring it to a boil for the soba.
When the water starts to boil, add the noodles and prepare according to package instructions (or until the noodles seem soft) then drain.
Put cooked soba in a serving bowl and toss in about 2/3rds of the dressing.

While the water is coming to a boil, heat a frying pan. When the pan is hot, add a bit of canola oil and start to fry the tofu.
When the tofu is mostly browned (after about 5 mins), add the broccoli and when the broccoli turns bright green (after about 2 mins) add the mizuna and onion for another minute or two, then turn off the heat.
Put vegetables in a different serving bowl and toss with the remaining dressing.

Put avocado in a third bowl.

Serve by putting some soba into a bowl (or plate, if you really want), adding some vegetables, then some avocado (or really, you can do it in whatever order you prefer) and garnishing with some sesame seeds.

Enjoy!

Nom nom nom.

Notes

Makes about four servings.

I use a Japanese vegetable called mizuna (literally "water greens"), it's basically a leafy green that looks a bit like dandelion leaves, except not quite. Any other leafy green would probably work just as well as long as it doesn't have an especially strong taste (unlike dandelion leaves).

Similarly, I use half of a long onion, which you might note is pretty giant from the first photo (it's the thing that's longer than the width of my refrigerator). If you want to make this, but don't live somewhere that such giant onions exist, you can try about three green onions instead. 

In addition, I use habanero pepper powder because the grocery store nearby doesn't see it fit to carry cayenne pepper so my options were jalepeno, habenero, korean pepper and paprika. If you use something less spicy than habanero powder, you can probably add more (the original recipe calls for 0.75 tsp cayenne).

Finally, I note that if I had thought about it a bit more in advance, I would have picked up some additional veggies for more colour. I suspect that some red bell pepper would go wonderfully here.

Sorry for the neglect!

Apparently when I have issues with one post (my phone didn't save it) and the discover a book series I can't put down (observe the evidence in my Books of 2014 list), I neglect my blog.

Fortunately for my blog, the bookstore doesn't have the rest of the series and I have yet to place my order on Amazon (btw, Amazon in Japan seems to do free shipping on books without a minimum order price) so I won't occupy all of my time reading and will definitely make it up to you, my dear readers.

Thus, for the next couple weeks, I'll post three times a week (likely MWF) to make up for lost time. For now, here's a picture of an interesting food combination I noticed in a flier we received yesterday.

Grilled cheese curry paella: so many things wrong here.

Excessive packaging is excessive

If I bought a bottle of ketchup in Canada, I would expect just that: a bottle. It would have a little seal under the cap, but that's about all the extra packaging it would have.

Not so in Japan. Here, when you buy a bottle of ketchup, it comes in a bag.

Worst egg cartons, ever.

While I generally like Japan and don't have too many complaints, there is one thing that is really terrible here: the design of the egg cartons.

Now, you may be asking "But Sarah, how can an egg carton be terrible?" this is perhaps because you're used to the egg cartons in North America¹ that are made out of fairly rigid, easily recycled or composted cardboard that maintain their shape. The kind of egg cartons that can be easily opened and closed again and again. The kind of egg cartons that are unlikely to spill all of your eggs out all over the place if you aren't careful. These are not those kinds of egg cartons.

Going to the local farmer's market

On Saturdays and Wednesdays around the corner from our house, there's a nice farmer's market that starts in the afternoon and continues into the evening. This makes it much more convenient than farmer's markets we've seen in North America which tend to start at terribly early times and close early in the afternoon, so we end up going there a lot.

Five Japanese ingredients that go well in pasta sauce

You may not know this, but Italian food is reasonably popular in Japan. You can find Italian restaurants at various price ranges, you can find pasta in every super market (although you may have a limited selection of noodles) and Japan even has its own Italian-inspired pasta dishes. However, while people here will substitute button mushrooms for other local varieties and do interesting things with pasta like add tobasco sauce to pasta, it doesn't seem like people mix ingredients that are traditional to Japanese cooking into their pasta sauces very often.

This is something that daid and I have been doing at home though and we've had largely positive results. For the most part, we've just been using diced tomatoes as the base for our sauces because it's generally easier to find and cheaper than pasta sauce, but lately we've also tried making some Alfredo sauce (which is surprisingly easy). So I present you with a list of five ingredients that go in pasta sauces reasonably well.

Odd suggestions from cracker companies

Since we've been having a fair bit of hummus lately, daid and I have been buying a bunch of crackers. These are not native to Japan and the cracker companies seem to include some "interesting" marketing strategies on their boxes.

For the most part, these involve strange suggestions for what to pair with the crackers. I mean, who over the age of five wouldn't love to eat some Ritz crackers plain with some milk or juice?

The box on the left also suggests topping crackers with cream cheese and
coloured sprinkles or marshmallows. The box on the right suggests potato
salad as a possible cracker topping.

More stuff for the apartment.

For a while, we only had a microwave and rice cooker for cooking things at home because apartments in Japan do not come with stove tops or ovens or anything like this. This lead to discoveries like how to make hot cakes in rice cookers and how to hydrate chick peas in these devices (yeah, it actually works), but it was somewhat limited for day-to-day cooking.

In late December, we got an induction burner, which was a good start, but it meant that we could only cook one thing at a time so last week, we finally got around to getting a new burner (we went with gas for the second one) and now we have a proper kitchen set up.

You never fully realize the joys of having two
burners until you try to make spaghetti.

We also finally got some more bowls and plates as well as a few forks (so we don't have to eat spaghetti out of bowls using chopsticks), some glasses (so we don't have to drink beer out of ceramic mugs) and some assorted things for the house.

Many of these recent acquisitions were spurred by our discovery of a 100 yen store in town which is apparently part of a giant chain of 100 yen stores in Japan. The 100 yen store here seems to be better than dollar stores back in Canada because it has much more variety (e.g. they had curtains) and the quality seems to be better.

While we were definitely getting by with what we had before and it's good to know that we don't really need much around the house to make it feel like a home, having a few more things has been quite nice. 

Adventures in air travel

Last time, I mentioned that we were unable to fly out as expected last Tuesday because of the weather which gave us an extra few days in Canada. We almost didn't make our rescheduled flight either due to massive computer glitches at Pearson airport. We arrived at the airport early and found that all the self check-in kiosks were down and that there were massive line ups for all the desks. The Delta desk did not seem to have enough people, which is somewhat annoying because these glitches started hours before we got to the airport so that should have given them enough time to call in extra staff.

I got out my laptop and checked us in for our flight online while we waited in line, but we still had to get boarding passes and check our bags so we had to continue waiting. Eventually, they pulled the people for our flight out of the main line and into a secondary one because it was getting close to our boarding time. The guy dealing with this secondary line promptly disappeared for 20 minutes so we asked one of the other agents to help us. We then got our hand written boarding passes and headed for US customs and security.

We got through security at the time our flight was supposed to leave, but lucky for us they were still boarding our flight because they had to check all the boarding passes and documents by hand at the gate and everyone else was late too. Then when everyone was on the plane, they announced that the flight was overweight and they got some people to get off the plane, causing another delay.

In the end, we left for Detroit about 45 or 50 minutes after our expected departure time. This was concerning for us since our connection in Detroit was relatively tight (about an hour and 20 minutes), but we did make it to the next plane in time for the last call for boarding by running from one gate to the next. 

Initially, on the flight to Japan daid and I were seated separately. However, an entire row was empty when we got on (I assume others had their own troubles with connecting flights) and one of the flight attendants suggested that daid could move there for additional leg room. So I moved there too.

Unfortunately, our new seats had screaming children on three sides of them. One kid is usually not too bad because one kid can only scream for so long. Three young children, however, is pretty awful because they can all take turns screaming. This is exactly what they did. Also, one of the sets of parents thought that their special little snowflake deserved to have an iPad playing without earphones at top volume, which was delightful. 

The airline somehow forgot to transfer our meal preferences onto the new flight when they rescheduled us, which was pretty terrible. Not only did we have to pick around a really gross piece of chicken in one meal, but I'm pretty sure the vegetarian meals (and maybe all the specialty meals) are just better than the regular meals on airplanes. So instead of reasonably okay meals, we had the stereotypically bad airplane food. The only upside is that one of the meal options for the second meal on the flight was vegetarian anyway.

When we landed at Narita, we were told that our luggage had been left in Detroit. Luckily, Narita is an excellent airport so they're supposed to deliver our luggage to our apartment instead of having us go pick it up (they're also supposed to call us with status updates every day until it arrives). This makes up for our luggage missing the plane, since we basically crammed as much stuff in there as possible and now we don't have to take it on the train and carry it to our apartment from the station.

In the end, I think we might have had as much bad luck as we possibly could getting back here, but we finally made it.

Sick day

We're still visiting my parents and will be flying back tomorrow morning. It looks like the weather should hold out and if it does, we'll have dodged storms by one day each way (we flew out of Toyko the day after the ice storm hit over here). Our connection in Minneapolis also looks like it should be fine too so we should be able to get back to Tokyo for Wednesday.

As much as I generally do like the snow and the winter, the temperature here has been pretty ridiculous, dropping to -20 C at some points (and it will drop again tomorrow as we're preparing to leave). During the cold snap, the furnace in my parents' house also broke which wasn't especially pleasant (though possibly the house was still warmer than our apartment gets in Tokyo) and I got sick as soon as the temperature started to hover around freezing so we haven't really gone anywhere.

We meant to make a trip to Toronto while we were here since daid hasn't been to the CN tower before and we have this trend of visiting tall buildings/things together. We also wanted to go to Snakes and Lattes to pick up some expansions for Cards Against Humanity, but that didn't really happen. This is perhaps the disadvantage of being in town for only a week.

We haven't quite managed to get all the foods we were planning on bringing back with us either. So far we have 9 kg of dried legumes (4.5 kg each of lentils and chickpeas), but we still have to go find some tahini before we leave so we can make hummus when we get back to Japan. It's always fun to explain what chickpeas and lentils are to the customs officials in Japan. Last time I think I explained that lentils are things that you cook like rice and that seemed to be an acceptable explanation.

Anyway, sorry about the somewhat boring blog today, not much has happened this week and I'm feeling a bit crummy still (but better than a few days ago). Next week should be more interesting.

Five foods I miss from Canada

Today we're flying back to North America for the holidays. Even though I've been here a little less than two months, it's still the longest I've been to Japan and possibly the longest I've been outside of Canada all at once.

While the most difficult issues when it comes to getting around in Japan are language-related like how I can't talk to store clerks, understand bar conversations or read all the signs, this isn't what I miss most about being in Canada. It's possible that without daid to talk to, I might miss this a lot too, but luckily we get to hear lots of English from each other.

Instead, what I miss most are various foods. I like the food that I've been eating here and many of the foods I miss are things that I would have maybe once a month while living in Canada (sometimes less). However, I think that the absence of all these foods at once just makes me miss them all so much more. Thus, without further ado, I present my list of five foods I love which are not available in Japan (or are at least not widely available and affordable here):

Pizza

I'll start by pointing out that pizza exists in Japan. I've even had pizza since I've been here (last time was when we made some pizza in Tsukuba), but pizza is kind of expensive here. For instance, at Pizza-La (the largest pizza chain in Japan and the only one I know of in town), a medium plain cheese pizza (プレーンチーズピザ) is 1050 yen (just shy of $11 CDN). In comparison, a medium plain cheese pizza in Canada can be had for as little as $5 and it will be considerably larger.

Cheese

Like pizza, cheese is something that exists in Japan and it can be pretty tasty. However, the cheese that's available here is mostly processed and there's not much of a variety. The stuff that isn't processed is pretty expensive (even by Canadian standards) and I think the only kind of non-processed cheese I've seen is Camembert. Maybe there are specialty shops where a nice blue or some cheddar is available, but I haven't seen it.

There was some time in undergrad where I couldn't afford to buy cheese and I was pretty unhappy about that. This is similar, but worse because I'm not finding free pizza every week either.

As a result of my cheese deprivation, I recently had a dream where all I did was eat various cheeses. It can't be good when one is dreaming about nothing other than eating dairy products.

Burritos

Before I moved out of London, a Burrito Boyz opened up downtown near my apartment. As a result of this development, I rapidly developed an addiction to delicious, tasty burritos. When I moved out, getting someone else to make me burritos became more challenging, but at least I had easy access to all the proper ingredients to make my own.

In principle, the ingredients for burritos exist in Japan, but some (like the wrap) are specialty items and others (the refried beans, possibly the salsa too) have to be home made. Also, sour cream in Japan is not the same as sour cream in North America. It tastes about the same, but it's a lot thicker and really expensive (a 100 mL container can be had for about 400 yen). Finally, there's the "no real cheese" issue again.

Falafel

Long predating my addiction to burrito is my addiction to falafel. These wonderful balls of chickpeas and/or fava beans and spices with tahini and garlic sauces, pickled radishes and assorted deliciousness all wrapped in a warm pita do not seem to exist at all in Japan. We've found places that sell chicken shawarma, but they do not sell falafel sandwiches, which makes me very sad.

Salt and Vinegar Chips

Edamame chips. Possibly
delicious, but no substitute.

There are chips here and there are a variety of flavours some of which I've never seen in North America, such as pizza or edamame flavoured chips. I wouldn't want to eat all of the chips that are around either: I'll pass on the shrimp and octopus flavoured chips.

My favourite kind of chips is missing though. It's not clear why salt and vinegar chips don't seem to exist here, since salt and vinegar are two flavours that seem to be appreciated in Japanese cuisine, but apparently not in chip form.

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Soon, I will have access to these foods and I'm so excited about this prospect (which is probably kinda sad). Unfortunately, I won't be able to bring all of these with me when I come back (maybe I can bring some chips, but those aren't going to last long). However, since these foods are not necessarily good for me, I'm probably better off without them on a regular basis anyway.


On another note, I found the followers gadget (as the things off on the side are called) so if you would like to follow my blog, please do so. :)

Second Thanksgiving and the really long fall

On Saturday, we went to a Thanksgiving party hosted by one of daid's friends. It was a potluck, which is normally fine since neither of us mind preparing food. Unfortunately, we still don't have a burner at our apartment (and we're never going to get an actual oven) so our cooking abilities are somewhat limited.

Luckily, we do have a rice cooker and there are surprisingly large number of things you can cook in a rice cooker, like this recipe I found a recipe for a vegetable hot cake. So we tried to make that, though we swapped out all the veggies for different ones, added some spices, sprinkled some cheese on it and doubled the batter. That last decision was probably not the best idea since we ended up cooking it twice in the rice cooker and then putting it in the microwave (which has a bake function that we still haven't really figured out) before it finished cooking on the inside.

In the end, we got something that reasonably resembled a hot cake and was pretty tasty. It also disappeared almost immediately at the party which is always a good sign. We made it again yesterday for breakfast using a single serving of the batter and it turned out much better. Clearly, this calls for more experimenting with the rice cooker. Perhaps the next step is to make some actual cake!

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One thing that has been really nice about living near Tokyo is the weather (though I will probably not say the same thing in the summer). Unlike back home, where the weather will shift from summer to winter in a week or two (and vice versa in the spring), it's still fall here. The leaves are still changing and the air is nice and crisp. It's getting a bit cold at night (though still above freezing), but during the day it's warm enough that one can almost do without a jacket.

Granted, I'm not sure that Tokyo has what I'd consider a proper winter at all since the temperature doesn't seem to drop much below 0°C and it doesn't snow very much. It's still nice to have a long fall since this is a relatively new experience for me.

Soba making, JAXA visit and more!

The conference I attended last week was fun, interesting and a little tiring (basically, how conferences are generally).  Since we had to eat out all week, we had some issues ordering food that wasn't full of meat (or with secret hidden meats), but we managed to do it. We also had a chance to impart some advice about vegetarian foods found at combinis (convenience stores) to another vegetarian we met at the conference who recently moved to Japan.*

On Friday, we went on the conference excursion which consisted of going to a cooking school where we learned to make soba noodles which was a lot of work, but not too difficult (just a little tricky at times). While we made noodles, others in our group made pizza dough then we had to go roll out our dough (which the instructors insisted on getting us to use rolling pins for), add sauce, toppings (corn was included among them because this is Japan) and cheese. I tried to add cheese before the toppings and was told this was incorrect. I acknowledged my "error" and was going to wait until the instructor went away to do it that way anyway, but he stood there until I'd put my toppings on and had nothing to add after the cheese. daid simply dumped all of his cheese onto his pizza before anyone could "correct" him.

Either way, the pizza was good, then we got to have some cold soba. For cold soba, the noodles are cooked, then chilled and served with a dipping sauce that contains dashi, soy sauce and mirin called tsuyu. You can add wasabi and scallions to this sauce if you like it that way and when you're out of noodles, you can also add some of the water the noodles were cooked in (sobayu) to make a hot drink.

After lunch, we went to JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center where we got to look at rockets and walk around inside a life-sized model of Japan's contribution to the International Space Station (ISS) which is a laboratory called Kibo which means hope. As well, there were some models of Kounotori which is being used to resupply the ISS and we got to hear all about it, as well as the rockets being used to carry it up. 

After the planned activities were done for the day, daid and I wandered up to the University of Tsukuba where we admired the leaves that were turning colours as well as the campus. The campus is pretty hilly and there is sort of a floating sidewalk that runs through much of the campus connecting some of the hills (so you don't have to walk up and down a lot) and cars can drive underneath (so you also don't have to mix your cars with your pedestrians).

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On Saturday, we met up with one of daid's friends and drove out to the Ushiku Daibutsu (where dai = big and butsu = Buddha) which is the tallest statue in the world (according to Guinness). We went inside the daibutsu and looked around, then went to part of the petting zoo and pet some rabbits and guinea pigs, then we went off to a football (soccer) game.

We went to see the Kashima Antlers play, but we arrived at the stadium a bit late. This meant that as we were walking up to the stadium, we got a taste of how loud the fans were. We could hear them from at least 500 m down the street and when we got into the stadium, we found that most of the noise was coming from just the fans behind one of the goals.

It was something I've never seen before. I've been to see professional sports and I've seen some coordinated cheering, but this was a whole new level. First of all, it was coordinated cheering that went on for the entire game. Secondly, there were people who brought drums with them (which probably helped keep it so coordinated really) and there were other fans who brought really large flags to distract the other team when they took penalty kicks and the like. People at that end of the field seemed to spend the entire game on their feet jumping up and down and singing.

Unfortunately, they lost, but it was still a good match.

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*For reference, the mainstays of vegetarian food available in combinis consists of ume (pickled plum) onigiri (rice balls, sometimes wrapped in nori), kombu (seaweed cooked in some sauce) onigiri, wakame (a different seaweed) onigiri, shiso (a leaf related to basil used to flavour ume during the pickling process) and red bean onigiri and egg salad sandwiches. Sometimes there is also kimpira and inari sushi or some pastas (which the clerks will heat up for you) and the usual things like chips (minus the shrimp or whatever seafood flavoured ones).