TekiTokyo

[ 6 / 52 ]

2012-02-12T22:57:00.001+09:00

Week Six : A.P.C.

A.P.C. is the brand of jeans I've been wearing for the past few years. Tucked away just off the main strip in Daikanyama, I've always thought the store's design is super cool. The tree-lined entrance way is a particular favorite of mine.

I was there this weekend to pick up my older pair of jeans, which I'd sent in to get a hole fixed up, and thought it would be a nice change from the pictures of things that I've posted for the project thus far. One of these days I'm going to have a go at shooting people...

Camera Info: Canon 7D | 18mm | f/ 4.5 | ISO 800 | 1/5 s

[ 5 / 52 ]

2012-02-05T21:28:00.001+09:00

Week Five : Tied Up

Getting ready for a couple of MBA interviews coming up this week kept me distracted from taking my weekly picture until the last minute. Fortunately, a macro lens is very handy for making things more interesting.

The middle tie is just a plain old tie I bought before moving to Japan. I like simple ties. They make me feel sharp.

The tie on the right was a gift from my grandma. Unless you look at it from really close, you can't tell that it's covered with pelicans. Something about that always makes me smile. Like it's my own little not-so-secret secret.

The tie on the left belonged to my grandpa. It's a little bit short and a bit rough around the edges, so I don't wear it all that often. I have a few ties from my grandpa and I always feel a bit more powerful whenever I have one on. Maybe I'll wear one for the interviews. I could certainly use a little help.

Camera Info: Canon 7D | 100mm | f/ 6.3 | ISO 1250 | 1/6 s

[ 4 / 52 ]

2012-01-29T23:10:00.002+09:00

Week Four : Who is Drinking Who?

Last night, Peter T. and I decided to have a Double Peter Party at 元気 (Genki) in Akihabara. Genki is a great little yakiton (grilled pork) place tucked away on the backstreets of the quieter side of Akihabara. I will try to put together a full post about the awesomeness of Genki in the near future.

This was our second time having a Double Peter Party there and last time we were introduced to what they call the "Mega". Perhaps the most massive beer you will ever come across, it's probably closer to a pitcher than a mug. As you can see, it's hard to tell whether Peter is drinking the beer or the mug is drinking his face...

Camera Info: Canon 7D | 35mm | f/ 2.8 | ISO 800 | 1/25 s

[ 3 / 52 ]

2012-01-21T15:35:00.002+09:00

Week Three : Before & After

In a world full of "distressed" denim, where jeans are broken in and ripped up to look like they've been worn for years, raw denim is beautifully simple. The whole idea is that the denim is never washed during the manufacturing process and the color fades naturally as you wear them. I bought my first pair of raw denim jeans back in November 2009, petit new standards from APC (I'm a skinny guy), and they are pretty much the only jeans I have worn since.

There was an interview in a GQ many years ago with eccentric designer, who mentioned that he only ever washed his jeans by wearing them into the ocean. I remember reading that interview with my sister and agreeing that that was super badass. I decided I wanted to do the same with these jeans, so brought them along with me on my trip to Vietnam last year and gave them their first wash in the Gulf of Thailand off the coast of Phu Quoc island. Did it make a difference? I have no idea, but whatever. I think it's super awesome.

I've washed them another two times since then and the color has faded quite a bit. There are clear lines on the back pockets where my wallet goes and where I always put my cell phone in my front pocket.

Sadly, all the wear and tear of the past two years has taken it's toll and a little whole is opening up. I'm taking them in to get it fixed up tomorrow and hopefully they'll be alright. I decided I'd start on a new pair too and thought it would be interesting to compare them side-by-side. It's hard to believe how different they are!

Camera Info: Canon 7D | 35mm | f/ 3.2 | ISO 1250 | 1/30 s

[ 2 / 52 ]

2012-01-10T23:25:00.003+09:00

Week Two : And Now, We Wait

How do you get through the stress of applying to six of the top MBA programs? That's right: ice cream. Lots of it. But before anyone gets on my case about eating healthier, I would like to point out that I also consumed 17.5 kg of mikan during the month of December. That's worth at least a little forgiveness, right?

Now that the applications are in, all I can do now is wait. With any luck, happy emails inviting me to interview will start rolling in over the next month or two!

Camera Info: Canon 7D | 35mm | f/ 8.0 | ISO 800 | 1/4 s

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2012-01-03T20:42:00.005+09:00

** I'm starting up the 52 Weeks Project, which means posting one picture every week for the next year. Hopefully this will help me improve my photography skills and try shooting new subjects. All of the pictures will show up in my flickr photostream, but I'm going to post them here as well. I'll try to keep blogging as well whenever I feel there is a bigger story worth telling as well! **

Week One : Wrapped Up in the Past

Every Christmas since coming to Japan, I've tried to get Zach and Justin presents that are "Japan Exclusive". This year, I thought it would be cool to wrap the presents in a Japanese newspaper so it would be covered in kanji.

Down to the building recycling center, I found a stack of old newspapers and noticed that the top one was from May. Completely on a hunch, I dug deeper and found all the copies from back around the 3.11 earthquake!

I wanted to get the dates and the big headlines on the front of the packages, which made for a pretty ugly wrapping job, but I think it's so cool to see some of the major topics from those days jumping out. I feel like this wrapping paper is not only uniquely Japanese, it shares a bit of my life experience with them, which I think is really awesome.

I actually found the weekend edition from the day after as well, but selfishly decided to keep it for myself. I want to do display it somehow, maybe frame the front page or something, sort of a momento of a big event that I was around for. Maybe then I'll finally put my story from those days down in words somewhere...

Camera Info: Canon 7D | 35mm | f/4.5 | ISO 400 | 1/40 s

2012 - Live Beautifully

2012-01-01T21:42:00.013+09:00

Simply put, 2010 was a challenging year.
Spring was marked by the 3.11 Earthquake and nuclear crisis in Fukushima.
Summer saw two of the anchors of my Japan life leave, with Mike heading back to Michigan and Kato-san moving to Hong Kong.
Fall and Winter brought life consuming MBA info sessions, applications, and essays.

Facebook launched their “Timeline”, which essentially visualizes your life. Looking back through my timeline, 2010 was full of happiness and some really great times. 2011 was a much lonely year, especially the past 4 or 5 months. I recently heard the quote “Happiness is only real when shared” and I think that really gets at the heart of it. I pretty much dropped off the map in the second half of the year. Trying to recall highlights, I end up asking myself what exactly did I even do? Have I even been alive?

Something clearly has to change.

To that end, I’ve come up with some goals for 2012.

Professionally, I want to finish what I’ve started. Over the next few months, and the next couple of weeks in particular, I need to knuckle down, take care of business, and get my life pointed in the right direction. In many ways, I feel like my potential is limitless and there’s nothing that I can’t do. It’s just a matter of making the effort and taking the necessary steps to turn that potential into reality. So that’s step one. I also desperately need to learn how to network. To not be cynical and to be genuinely interested in getting to know new people, to make the effort to stay in touch with them. To make not just small talk, but interesting conversation. If I can do those two things, the sky is the limit.

But more importantly, I need to change the way I live life. Recently, I’ve gotten this idea stuck in my head, this concept: to live a beautiful life. It’s hard to put into words what exactly that means to me, but I’ve put together a few ideas that should get me started.

-Get Healthy-

I’ve been absolutely neglecting my body for far too long. I’ve lost almost all of my muscle mass and gotten soft in the middle. I haven’t been sleeping enough or eating healthy and it shows. My body is literally a wreck. Some days my entire upper body hurts and my eyesight is deteriorating fast. I don’t sleep enough and I’m too stressed. I’ve had minor anxiety attacks periodically for the past 18 months. In 2012, I want to start exercising again and get back in shape. I want to get my priorities in order and stop sacrificing so much of myself for a job that barely rewards me for it.

-Cook Properly-

Not just more healthy food, but food with thought and effort put into it. I think I’ve shown on this blog that I can create beautiful meals when I put the effort into it. 2012 needs to be a year that doesn’t forgive PB&J sandwiches or pasta with canned tomato sauce as acceptable alternatives to a real meal. I want to cook food that is so good I feel compelled to share it on this blog.

-Take More Pictures-

Photos never stop amazing me with their ability to capture memories and emotions. One look at the pictures Mike and I took over the past 3 years remind me of all the good times the Michigan kids have had. My pictures of Tange put a tear in my eye. I want to be more diligent about capturing the places I go, the things I see, the people who surround me. I would love to try the 365 Day Project, but I honestly don’t think that’s realistic. Maybe the 52 Week Project? You know what, I’m gonna do it. One picture every week for the next year, uploaded to Flickr.

-Travel-

Now that it seems like my time in Asia will be limited, I suddenly like I’ve done a poor job of getting around to the various countries over here. I’d like to at least see China and Thailand before heading back. Maybe Singapore and Indonesia too if I can work it. Hell, there are plenty of places in Japan I still haven’t seen. There is so much of the world left to explore and no reason to put off doing it.

-Reconnect With People-

I’ve done a shitty job socially recently and I have so much making up to do to so many people. I haven’t seen nearly enough of the Michigan kids lately. Once I’m back state-side, there are a ton of people I’ve practically fallen out of touch with since moving to Japan. I need to spend time with family. I need to make myself happy again and share that with the people who matter to me.

I think if I can do those five things, I could have something I would be willing to call a “beautiful life” in 2012. It’s certainly no small order, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to take a real shot at them all.

The first step, once I’m finished getting my professional life in order, is to make the most of my time left in Japan. If all goes according to plan, I have less than 6 months left. That's not a lot. There’s still so much I haven't seen and done, and I don’t want to waste that time.

There’s no time like the present. Let’s make 2012 a beautiful year.

All Good Things...

2011-12-24T01:15:00.004+09:00

Its been almost exactly three months since I last posted and I'm sorry to say that it's not good news that has broken that slide. I just found out that today my cat, Tangerine, has passed away. God that was hard to type...

Tange has been part of the family since I was in 3rd grade, more than 15 years. She was always a shy cat, though became much more outgoing these past few years. Sometimes she was a pretty wonky little cat, but she was my cat and I loved her very much.

She wan't just a good cat, she was the best cat.

I wish I could have seen her one last time.

I'm going to miss her like crazy...

Lovers Again?

2011-09-23T20:14:00.003+09:00

Those of you who regularly read my posts may have noticed that food has been showing up less and less frequently around here. In fact, I think there has only been one post about something I'd cooked myself since last October, almost a full year ago. The truth is, food and I have had something of a falling out.

That's not to say that I stopped eating or anything like that, it's just that somewhere along the way food stopped being special to me. It's hard to put a finger on when or why it happened, but I just lost the will to put effort into it anymore. I stopped cooking for others and I stopped doing any more than scrape together dinner for myself, even on weekends. I was hardly even went exploring new restaurants, even on the occasions I did go out to eat. I was in a real food slump.

Generally speaking, things haven't been going so great lately and I found myself staring down a three day weekend with absolutely no plans. Feeling a little desperate, I decided something had to be done about this. And so, on that Monday, I tried to kick start my love affair with food again.

It started with breakfast. I tend to neglect breakfast as a proper meal and just throw together a bowl of cereal or yogurt, so I decided to go a bit further and settled on making pancakes. Pancakes are one of those things that seem really easy to make, but tend not to be. For me, the problem always has been ending up with thin floppy pancakes. The obvious answer is to make thicker batter, but no matter what I try they always end up like sad little frisbees. A quick review of my last attempt will illustrate my problem.

To be honest, my mission almost failed before it even started. Despite having made sure I had enough flour and eggs, I neglected to buy milk and almost abandoned the project on the spot. However, I happened to have some yogurt chilling in my fridge and a few minutes on google confirmed that this was indeed an acceptable substitute! Into the mix went the yogurt and I was back in the game. I'm not big on being exact with measurements, so I took rough amounts for everything in true tekito fashion and hoped for the best.

Success! From the minute I poured the first batch into the pan, I know these bad boys were going to rock and sure enough: fatty thick, fluffy pancakes! I had lunch plans (more on that later) but I snarfed down my wonderful mountain of breakfast goodness anyways. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

The pancakes were a step in the right direction, but it was going to take more than just a good breakfast to get me and food back together again. So on to lunch, where I had plans to eat at Cicada, which I visited waaaaaay back in September '09. I have to say, it probably would have been good to look back on original post in advance as I reminder what I had or hadn't eaten, but oh well. This time I made sure to have my camera!

Last time, the the star of the show was the little stuffed squid appetizer (there was no forgetting that one!), so that was a must have. I have to say, it was every bit as delicious as I remembered and it completely blew me away once again. That's the kind of food I want to learn how to make.

For the second appetizer, we got roast piquillo peppers stuffed with tuna, beans, and some other goodies. Though not on the same level as the squid, this was definitely another success.

The main dishes is where the reminder of last time would have been most helpful. Once again, the other side of the table went with the grilled snapper and, though delightfully tender and skillfully prepared, it was nothing stunning.

I opted to try the swordfish steak, which was nice and meaty and tasted good enough but, again, was not a dish that will live long in memory. The couscous(?) salad that came with it was kind of weird...

For dessert I went with a "Marsala" creme brulee, expecting some sort of cool twist on your standard creme brulee. It ended up tasting more or less like plain creme brulee with maybe a little bit of a whiskey flavor. I'd say it was just ok.

On the other side of the table was the tiramisu. A lot of places in Tokyo offer up little tiny servings of dessert with course lunches, but not Cicada. This was a freakin slab and it was delicious. Tiramisu isn't the most difficult dessert to make, but a lot of people manage to screw it up anyways, so it was nice to taste a really quality one for a change.

So was it all enough for me to fall back in love with food again? To be honest, it's hard to say just yet, but it certainly made me want to give it a second shot. Hopefully the coming weeks will see at least a couple of interesting dishes come out of my kitchen!

Taipei

2011-09-17T10:41:00.014+09:00

It's been almost a month now and I'm only just now getting around to writing about it, but I spent a few days in Taiwan at the end of August. I'm going to keep this short and just let pictures do the talking, starting with a pair of photos that pretty much summarize my time there.

This is what happens to you in Taiwan:

Before -----> After

To be fair, there several choices made along the way that led to this outcome, such as the "every time you see shaved ice you have to eat it" rule. These delicious beasts will put that little Snoopy snow cone machine you had as a kid to shame.

But shaved ice alone isn't enough to make you look like you're second trimester. To go that far, you need some help from dim sum, fresh out of the steamer. When in doubt, always order an extra item. It'll taste so awesome you'll forget the concept of "feeling stuffed" and gobble it down anyways, plus it would cost 3x as much in Tokyo and still not be as good, so you've got to take your chances. Din Tai Fung is awesome but there's another place one block behind it that was nearly as good and had way shorter lines, making for a good Plan B.

But there's so much more to Taiwanese food than just dim sum, so you've got to expand beyond that. It's all so delicious and you've got to eat your veggies some time. (A quick note to any Japanese people reading this: if you're using the 地球の歩き方 guide book, skip the restaurant 青葉. The food is good, but ridiculously overpriced. You can definitely do better)

But what about later in the day you ask? (Ok, you probably didn't ask, but just run with me here) Night markets! Full of street vendors hawking little bits of deliciousness for just a couple dollars a pop, it's easy to just wander around stuffing your face. The best of the night markets was definitely Shilin, which absolutely blew the other ones away.

All that food will leave you pretty thirsty. Fortunately, Taiwan is also the land of pearl milk tea and doles it out in huge glasses. After drinking this stuff, I want to walk into the Bubble Island in Ann Arbor and kick the manager in the shins for pawning off that rubbish on us unknowing Americans for all those years, when the real stuff tastes this good.

Just to be clear, I didn't spend 5 days and 4 nights doing nothing but eating. I wandered around the city a lot (gotta walk off the calories and make room for the next meal!) and Taipei isn't a very big city, so I managed to get around a lot of it. A typhoon was heading our way at the time, so I decided not to take any day trips out of town on the chance that I'd get caught out, but Taipei has a lot of cool parks and temples which kept me busy.

Visually, Taipei has a lot in common with most of the other big Asian cities I've seen. The boatloads of scooters and backstreet eateries with cheap metal stools are just some of the visual cues that remind you that those these places are on the cusp of joining the "developed countries" list, they still have a little ways to go.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of this movie poster. They were promoting this movie super hard (though it wasn't out yet) and it was everywhere, but all I could think every time I saw was "this guy is so badass he draws rainbows with his sword!" Turns out the movie was "Seediq Bale" which was apparently highly anticipated internationally and was all over the news ahead of the Venice Film Festival. Who would have guessed?

I'm also a big sucker for skylines and love going up high buildings, so Taipei 101 was a must-see for me. It's far and away the biggest building in Taiwan and offers a great view down on the city.

All that eating and walking is enough to tire a guy out and Taipei offers some pretty awesome places to stay on the cheap. The first three nights were spent at the sharp and modern-looking Ambiance Hotel. The location isn't the most convenient for using the subway system but it gets you out and walking around the city, which I actually think is a plus, and at ~$60/night it's an absolute steal.

As good as that place was, splurging on a room for the last night was definitely the way to go. Enter the Studio Suite at the San Want Residences. This place was PHENOMENAL. The bed pretty much swallows you whole in big fluffy goodness .See the TV in the middle of the room? That bad boy rotates 180° so you can watch from bed. The bathtub was like a small pool. They even got the room number as my birthday! So much sexiness. I might not be able to stay at a Motel 6 ever again...

So that's my Taiwan adventure in a nutshell. Check another country off my list of places in Asia to visit. Many many more to see before I head back stateside!

GMAT

2011-08-20T17:55:00.006+09:00

The GMAT is one of those nasty little tests that nobody really wants to take, but it's one of the big items on the requirements list for MBA programs around the world. As that is the direction in which my life is headed these days, it was a not-so-little hurdle sitting in my way that needed to be overcome. I'm planning on aiming for some top-class schools, so rocking the exam was pretty much a must.

I'll let you know how it turned out, but I just wanted to give my account of taking on the GMAT as a reference for anyone else who is thinking about taking it too. There's a lot of material on the internet relating to the GMAT that I looked through and it was interesting to see what approaches other people had taken to prepare for the test, so I just want to add my experience into the mix.

The test is done entirely on a computer and you can't go back to review questions later; once you submit your answer that's that. It's a computer adaptive test, where the computer selects questions for based on how well you are doing. What that really means is that if you get a question right the computer gives you an even harder one. You could view it as the computer just trying to push you in order to accurately gauge your skill level, but the way I see it is that the test just wants to break you; it wants to throw you a question that you can't answer. It's also timed and gives you about 2 minutes per question, so it's pretty much go-go-go all the time and you really can't afford to play around with a problem you aren't sure about to see if you can sort it out.

There are two sections: Quantitative and Verbal. None of the actual subject matter is all that difficult and everything in it is part of a standard high school education. The Quantitative section is mostly algebra and geometry, the Verbal section mostly grammar and critical thinking. On a basic level, it's not particularly challenging stuff. But they've got some very smart people writing up these questions and they are very good at writing rather tricky questions.

I started preparing for the test about a month and a half ago, studying mainly on weekends as work tends to run quite late on weekdays. I'd picked up a couple of study guides when I was back in Ann Arbor in March, but I was a little nervous if that would be enough. As I looked around online for study information, I was amazed by the lengths that people go to in order to prepare for the GMAT. There were stories all over the place of people completely discarding their social lives and spending half a year or more studying, $1,000+ prep courses, and $200/hr private tutors. Many people take the test multiple times (and it's $250 a pop!) in hopes of getting a score on par with those of students at their dream schools. Some refer to the GMAT as "The Beast" and there are plenty of accounts of the heart break following a disappointing attempt. Was I really studying hard enough for this??

To be clear, here is a list of the exact resources that I used:

-GMAT Review Official Guide

-GMAT Verbal Review Official Guide

-GMAT Quantitative Review Official Guide

-Cracking the GMAT by Princeton Review

-Free flashcards from Manhattan GMAT

-Manhattan GMAT CAT practice tests (x6)

-GMAT Prep practice tests (x2)

I started with the Princeton Review book, which I think gives some great insights into how to approach the test and how to work your way through the answers. It won't do much for you in terms of really knowing the content of the subjects covered by the GMAT, but it was very good in terms of test taking techniques.

From there, I moved on to the Official Guide, which is pretty much just a big collection of practice problems. The book has sections briefly covering the core topics, but not nearly thoroughly enough to be of real value if you are aiming for a high score. Fortunately it has a ton of problems to work through, each of which becomes a little lesson in itself for understanding what the GMAT wants from you. Most important, every answer also has an explanation, so you can see exactly how to tackle each type of problem. Most of the early questions are quite easy and I flew through them, but they definitely started getting trickier later on.

Once I had finished the main Official Guide, I started taking practice tests and working my way through the two subject-specific official guides. The subject guides are pretty much just additional practice questions and don't teach anything more about the respective subjects, but I think one of the most important things is just seeing a ton of questions and getting comfortable with the sorts of problems that will come at you come test day. This is also where the practice tests come in handy. The first practice test I took was provided free by Manhattan GMAT and I liked it so much that I happily shelled out the $30 or so to get access to their five other tests. Like the Official Guides, the Manhattan GMAT tests offer explanations for all the problems so you can look at what you should have been doing or, in some cases, how you could have been more efficient about solving the problem. Though they let you set the time limit for each section of the test, I took them all under the same time limits as the real test to get used to the time crunch. I also used the GMAT Prep practice tests that the company which runs the GMAT provides, but found the questions less challenging than Manhattan GMAT's and was disappointed to find out they only tell you what the correct answer was, but not how to solve it.

All in all, I took eight practice tests and got the following results: (Overall (Quantitative, Verbal))

660(Q42,V38)

710(Q46,V42)

720(Q48,V40)

690(Q45,V38)

730(Q45,V44)

740(Q47,V44)

720(Q45,V42)

750(Q50,V42)

700+ is generally the target range for Top 10 schools, almost all of which have an average of 710-720, so I was feeling pretty good going into the test. The Verbal score definitely has a larger impact on your overall percentile, which many think is on account to the increasing number of people taking the test who are from Asian countries that have very math/science-focused education systems. They kill the Quant section and get super high scores, but struggle more on the Verbal part which is quite grammar heavy. As such, my Quant score was actually a significantly lower percentile than my Verbal for all but the last test.

There is one other section of the GMAT, two 30 minute analytical essays you write at the beginning of the test, but they're scored separately and getting a satisfactory score on them shouldn't be a big deal. They're put in there just as a language evaluation for schools to reference, so I should be fine and I didn't bother doing anything to prep for them other than looking over some suggestions for organization structures.

Finally, this past Friday, it was time to take my first shot at the real deal. I'd taken both Thursday and Friday off from work to make sure I was well rested and relaxed. I made my way to the test center a good 45 minutes early just to be safe. A lot rides on this test and people invest a lot of time and money to get their target scores, so I suppose there's a lot of incentive to try to cheat and as such security is super tight. They take a scan of the veins in your palm (which apparently are unique for each person like fingerprints) and you have to have your palm scanned as well as show picture ID every time you enter and exit the test room for the breaks between sections. Intense!!

The Quant section of the test went much like many of the practice tests I'd taken, with time being the biggest issue. A few problems took more time than I'd have wanted, but there were a couple that I knew right away and just blew through as well as some where I could tell I wouldn't be able to solve quickly enough, so I could cut my loses, guess, and move on. The craziest part by far though was that about half way through the section a magnitude 6.8 earthquake started shaking the building. The tremors lasted for a good while and kept going stronger, but time was already tight and I've rode out enough quakes over the last 5 months that there was no way I was going to let it slow me down, so I just kept pounding away at problems. In the end, I finished with just 30 seconds left, but didn't have to guess purely for the sake of completing the test on time as had been the case on some of the early practice tests, so I was feeling pretty good about my performance.

The Verbal section was also not particularly different from the practice tests. I got a couple really difficult reading comprehension problems, but all in all it was pretty reasonable. I finished with 10 minutes left, which was how the practice tests had gone as well.

When you're done with the test, a page comes up giving you two options: Submit your score or have it cancelled. Obviously cancelling the score wasn't an option for me, but knowing that as soon as you press the button to submit your score will pop up on the screen builds up the anxiety for that brief moment. I literally just sat there for a good 30 seconds just trying to prepare myself for whatever might happen. I pushed the button aaaaaand....

Overall: 740 (97th percentile)

Quantitative: 49 (85th percentile)

Verbal: 42 (95th percentile)

!!!!!!!

One and done baby! That's a score that will hold it's own on an application to any school in the world. It isn't so high that everyone is going to think I'm some sort of genius, but it will clear all the necessary hurdles. Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, you name a b-school and that score won't be out of place. I couldn't be more thrilled. The Verbal was a little lower than I had hoped and who knows what another couple of points there would have done for my overall score, but it will certainly do just fine.

The GMAT is just one step on the long hard road to an MBA. From here, there are schools to research, essays to write, a resume to polish, recommendation letters to have written, interviews, and more. But it's very much a step in the right direction. Though I have to admit that I did sort of enjoy working through the practice problems, I am more than happy to put my prep books away and move on to the more meaty parts of the application process. First Round deadlines in early October are probably too soon, so I'll be spending the next several months trying to get everything together by the end of the year in time for the Second Round cutoff.

I'm confident that I have what it takes to not just hold my own but really contribute at the top top schools out there and that's what I'm going to aim for. They're super selective, taking 10-15% of applicants, but you'd better believe I'm going to give it my best shot and make something happen. Watch this space, because I'm only just getting started!

End of an Era

2011-07-25T00:18:00.005+09:00

After three awesome years of totally dominating Japan, Mike left this afternoon to go back to Michigan and start med school. To show our thanks for all the good times we've shared, we threw Mike one last Michigan party last Monday and, as expected, he went out with a bang.

Like countless Michigan parties before, we ate, we drank, we laughed like crazy. While part of me felt like we should have done something all-out and over the top for Mike's last party with us, somehow having a party just like the ones that have brought us so many great memories up until now felt right. When I look back at my best memories since coming to Japan, these parties are one of the first things that come to mind. I like to think that Mike feels the same way.

Later in the evening, we had a toast to Mike and all the good times we'd shared together. Mike went, one by one, and told the story of how he'd met and gotten to know each of us. It was one of the classiest ways to go out that I can think of and was really moving.

We closed out the night with one of our great Michigan-traditions: drunken arm wrestling. I have absolutely no idea why we do it, but it started back at a joint party for me and Mike back in '08 and we've done it on a number of occasions since. I usually get completely dominated by Mike (and just about anyone else for that matter), but this time I got my first win when we went at it left-handed! Of course, that prompted Mike to call for a right-handed rematch, where I was absolutely obliterated... Our arms ravaged, our bellies full, and our hearts contented, we called it a night and went our separate ways home.

There aren't words to sufficiently thank Mike for the past three years. We've become really great friends and it's going to be tough not being able to hang out with him anymore. The other Michigan kids are great, but it just won't be the same without Mike. I know going back home is the right thing for him, but I can't help but wish he would have stayed for a little longer.

Mike, I've said this over and over, but I'm so glad to have had the chance to get to know you. We've had some great times and made some amazing memories that will stay with me forever. It's been a great ride buddy. Take care of yourself and I wish you all the best luck with the next stage of your life!

A Little Light

2011-06-19T23:32:00.003+09:00

It's been a pretty rough start to summer, with bad news seeming to come nearly every other week in one form or another. One of the hardest things is having a number of the people who I'm closest with in Japan essentially disappear from my life here one by one. It's trying times and I'm having a hard time looking forward to the future. It's hard to see where things turn around.

One of the few truly good things to happen to me recently, however, was the chance to meet up with my host family in Fukuoka. I first got to know them when I studied abroad for six weeks back in the summer of 2011 and did a homestay with them. It was an amazing time and they treated me incredibly well. On both occasions that I came back to Japan after that, I made a point to head back down to Fukuoka and see them again, but hadn't had a chance to meet them since actually moving over here after graduation.

This past Wednesday, I was sent to southern Japan to meet with a client for a deal I was working on. It was just a day trip, so I could only meet with them for a little over an hour before racing to catch my flight back to Tokyo, but it was still great. My little host sister has gotten bigger (she was only 7yrs old when we first met!), but their personalities are all exactly the same. We grabbed a quick bite to eat and spent the time catching up on what was new in our lives. It felt just like the old days. They said they would try to make it up to Tokyo within the next year (none of them have ever been!!), so hopefully I'll get to see them sooner rather than later.

More than anything, it was a good reminder that, even when things just won't seem to go your way, good things do happen. I just have to keep hanging in there and try to find the turning point.

Getting Out of Town - Kinugawa Onsen

2011-05-06T14:30:00.006+09:00

As I mentioned in my last post, it's Golden Week in Japan, so a bunch of the Michigan kids decided to get together and take a quick two day trip. We headed to a place near Nikko called Kinugawa Onsen, 75 miles north of Tokyo and reachable in about 2hrs by express train. If you look at a map, you can see that it's just past where the massive sprawl surrounding Tokyo ends. We've been talking about taking a trip together for years, but this is the first time we actually managed to make it happen. I took way to many pictures to put them all in this post, so check out my flickr to see more.

There were seven of us in total: Mamiyu, Mikuni, Yuki, Emily, Mike, Peter T., and myself. It was the first time we've ever had more native English speakers than Japanese at a Michigan event in Japan, which was pretty interesting. Ignore the random Japanese people behind us.

Our first stop was at Tobu World Square, a good size park of 1/25-scale replicas of famous building from around the world. The level of detail was really incredible and it was a lot of fun getting in close to take pictures.

Later in the afternoon, we went for a walk just outside of town. Kinugawa Onsen is tucked in between to small mountain ranges and is beautifully green. It was really nice just to get out of the city, breath the fresh air, and be surrounded by nature.

In the evening, we spent a solid hour and a half just lounging around in an onsen, soaking in the hot water and relaxing. Onsen are definitely one of Japan's best luxuries and is travel-worthy on it's own. Once we had had our fill of onsen action, we swung by a convenience store to pick up party supplies for that night, then headed over to our hotel to check in.

Our hotel was picked on one merit alone: it was the cheapest hotel in the area. As such we weren't expecting much to begin with, but were pleasantly surprised to find that dinner was included in the cost. We arrived at the hotel kind of late, so we were the last group to eat and had the place all to ourselves. The hotel manager had told us the food there was really good and he wasn't kidding! He kept bringing out huge plates of amazing chinese food, much if it not normally included in the normal meal, and even gave us a bottle of chinese rice wine for free! It was a gigantic feast and we all ended the meal absolutely stuffed. The rooms were standard Japanese ryokan rooms, nothing special, but more than acceptable for our needs.

After dinner, we moved the party back to our room and proceeded to spend four solid hours having a great time. I honestly cannot remember the last time I laughed that hard. It will go down as one of my favorite memories for our Michigan group.

Day two started with a boat ride. Mike and I had been excited about the idea of grabbing some pictures from the boat, but became more than a little worried for our gear when we saw plastic splash guards on the sides of the boats. In the end, it turned out not to be that bad at all and we both managed to take some great shots along the way. The guide at the front of the boat provided absolutely hilarious commentary throughout the trip.

After the boat ride, we set out to find some lunch and settled on a place specializing in "Japanese slow food" that we were recommended by some locals. The atmosphere was laid back, everyone enjoyed their food and the view was great. Little did we know there were much better views yet to come.

We spent the rest of the afternoon hiking along the mountains and river nearby. It was breathtakingly beautiful, and not even just in a "I live in the city and it's awesome to see a tree" sense. Mountains and rivers, waterfalls and rock formations, mind-blowingly green leaves, it was an honestly stunning display of nature. I really need to get out to the country more often...

Tired but satisfied, we finally made our way back to Tokyo after two packed days of awesomeness. Perhaps the best way to describe it are in Mike's words: "These past couple of days were so full of win". Seriously though, everything went right, everything was amazing. If Golden Week was suddenly reduced to just two days, I still would have been perfectly content. High fives all around!

Lessons Learned

2011-05-03T21:18:00.004+09:00

It's Golden Week here in Japan, the deceptively named part of spring where everyone in Japan gets MOST of a week off. This year I've managed to swing it so that I only have to go to work one day this week (though I ended up working until 2am on that day) and am now liberated from all need to act responsibility for six straight days. Pretty sweet deal especially considering it was just a three day weekend!

All this time off has given me a chance to do some reflecting and thinking about how I've changed over the past few years. One thing that I am painfully aware of is the fact that I am a terrible procrastinator. If there isn't a deadline (and sometimes even if there is), I just can't seem to motivate myself to be productive. My two month absence from this blog (and the two months before that) is a perfect example. If I was content with life, with the way things are going, this wouldn't really be an issue. But I'm not, so I've got to figure out how to fix this problem or I'll be stuck in this rut forever and that's just not acceptable.

I've also noticed that there are still several things I still haven't learned.
-Lesson #1: Don't drink so freakin much-
In Exhibit A below, you will note a massive bruise about 1/3 the size of my calf. Brutal. This was accompanied by a pretty nasty gash on one of my toes, both acquired on a night of hardcore stress-relief drinking. How did this happen? Well, I'm afraid I simply don't know. Absolutely no recollection (though personally I suspect it was a vicious one-legged duel with a world champion kick-boxer or some such). Moral of the story: keep the booze under control.

-Lesson #2: Very few people look cool with facial hair-
Coming into Golden Week, I thought it would be cool to try growing out a beard, just to see how it looks. I didn't have anything planned until Wednesday, so if I just rode out one day in the office, I could let it grow for nearly an entire week with almost no damage to my social life. Wrongo pongo. I should have known from a start that I'm obviously not the type of person who can pull off a beard. Come Monday morning, three days in, I was getting ready to suit up for work. I took one look in the mirror and knew it just wasn't happening. Exhibit B illustrates how notably unimpressive the scruff was at that point. Clearly I have no future as a lumberjack (it's cool, I don't like flannel anyway).

I might have just sucked it up and let it be, except that that same weekend I had picked up a lean mean German face shaving machine. Look at Exhibit C. That thing is a beast. I can't believe I'm supposed to put that monster on my face. But man, did it show that scruff the business. Silky smooth domination.

But it's not all doom and gloom here. While thinking about my procrastination problem and this blog, I looked back at my first entry, written nearly two years ago. The recipe for Korean-inspired fajitas and I had coincidentally just picked up a pack of tortillas at National Azabu while in Hiroo for lunch on the weekend, so I thought I'd try recreating the meal. I've cooked dinner for myself 6-7 days a week for the past two and a half years I've been living in Japan, so I've learned a thing or two about cooking and have a pretty decent idea what I'm doing in the kitchen. This time around, I looked at the sauce ingredients from last time, ignored the measurements all together, and whipped together a kick ass sauce that was a million times better. I know it was that much better because I would definitely remember if I'd made anything even close to as good as this. It was that good. Also, if you look at the pictures from the post they are absolutely awful. Honestly, trash like that would never even get uploaded onto my computer these days. I've taken thousands of pictures since then and know how to take waaaaay better pictures now. Those original pictures barely look like food, but the I think the ones I took this time look every bit as delicious as the food actually was.

So, yes, I clearly still have plenty of growing up to do. I'm still just 25 years old and have lots to learn. But I take comfort in knowing that I have made progress in some areas these few years. If I can make sure that I keep myself moving forward, I think that's something to be pleased with.

Cambodia

2011-02-06T13:32:00.004+09:00

Nearly two months have passed since my trip to Vietnam and Cambodia and I still haven't written about the majority of it. Part of the problem is the sheer number of pictures I took makes the idea of sorting and processing them pretty intimidating. I have so many pictures I want to share and a million stories to tell, but I'll try to keep it simple.

Just getting from Saigon to Siem Reap, the main city outside of the Angkor temples, was a crazy adventure (if anyone happens to run into Tony from Me Mates youth hostel in Phnom Penh, kick him in the balls for me. I'll explain later.) We had the better part of three days to explore the temples, but in truth two days is probably enough. If you have a guide with you it might take longer, but I thought three days was a bit long.

Step one for anyone checking out the temples is to hire a driver. We used a guy who hung out near our hotel named Sam Art and paid something like $20/day. He wasn't a guide or anything, just a guy with a tuk tuk. What's a tuk tuk you ask? Only the single most awesome means of transportation ever. Seriously, I freakin loved it. A tuk tuk is pretty much just a buggy strapped on to the back of a scooter, but you get the whole open air wind-in-your-face action as you cruise around. On a hot afternoon, it's awesome.

Banteay Srey is the farthest of the temples and is a bit of a haul to get to (not that you mind when you're riding in a tuk tuk!), but it's also the best preserved. I'm not sure if it's made of a harder type of stone, but the detail of the carvings are still in amazing condition.

Pre Rup is not one of the better known temples, but it was my favorite. Tall enough to be impressive, battered enough to remind just how old these temples are.

Ankor Thom is famous mostly for being huge. Personally, I wasn't that impressed, but maybe I had just seen too many temples at that point.

Ta Prohm is the temple that's known for having trees growing on top of it. Large parts of the structures have been supported with steel columns to keep them from collapsing and many parts are already in ruins. I would bet there won't be much left of the place ten years from now.

We went to see sunrise at Angkor Wat, which meant heading out at 5:00am, and managed to get one of the last spots in the front row. The actual sunrise itself wasn't very pretty, especially as it revealed all the ugly green netting where they are doing renovation work, but the view as it first started getting light out was great.

Around the back of Angkor Wat was a group of monkeys just hanging out and playing around. A few locals were selling bananas you could feed to them and one of them managed to get a lollipop from somewhere. The older monkeys could unpeel the bananas super fast, while the younger ones just kind of tore away at them. The last picture is a zoom-in of the picture before it and you can see the reflection of Angkor Wat in the monkey's eyes, which I thought is pretty cool.

Naturally I took a bunch of sunset pictures as well. We didn't have the greatest of sunsets the days we were there and often the sky was best in the opposite direction after the sun was already down.

While I can't speak for the rest of Cambodia, the Temples of Angkor were very cool and are definitely worth a stop for anyone making their way around SE Asia.

I've still got a few more destinations from our trip that need to be written about and hopefully I can have those up in the next few weeks.

Saigon

2010-12-23T12:43:00.000+09:00

At long last, I was finally able to take my much awaited summer vacation last week. That's right, summer vacation in the middle of December. I'd originally planned to take it in late September but, for a number of reasons (mostly involving anticipated work that never even actually materialized), it kept getting pushed back.

Yuki and I ended up spending the week traveling around Vietnam and Cambodia. I had originally planned to write all about everything we saw and did, but a week is a long time and I don't really feel like writing an epic post. The easiest way to do this is probably for me to split the trip up into chunks for each place we visited and just write a little bit about it. Also, I took over 700 pictures over the course of the week, so I'm only going to post the one's that I like best or are most illustrative. The rest will likely show up on flickr once I manage to work my way through them.

Right, so onto the story. We used Saigon as our central base of operations during the trip. I was told by a number of people before I went that "there's not much to do there, but the food is good". I was pretty skeptical about this at first, but now I have to say that it's not an entirely unfair assessment of the city.

Having been born a generation too late to have witnessed the Vietnam War unfold, the most interesting place for me was the War Remnants Museum, which had some old equipment around the building and a huuuuuge photo gallery inside. War is ugly business to begin with and the Vietnam War was certainly no exception. We also visited the Reunification Palace (formerly know as the Presidential Palace), where the war came to an end when North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates and seized power from the South Vietnamese government, but beyond being a historically significant site it wasn't particularly interesting. The half-day side trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels was worthwhile, if only to get an idea of how terrifying jungle warfare must have been.

Aside from that, there is a good bit of beautiful architecture from the country's time as a French colony, but not much else that really stands out. We checked out most of the places listed in our guidebook but weren't terribly impressed.

While I can't really rave about the sightseeing, I can't say enough about the food. From pho to banh xeo to street stalls, there is very little that we tried that wasn't delicious and dirt cheap. Most of our meals cost less than $5 for the two of us, including drinks. Though I found Vietnamese beer to be largely unenjoyable, we drank countless shakes made with fresh fruit and Vietnamese iced coffee will blow your mind. My only regret is not reading up more about Vietnamese food beforehand, as I think it would have made it much easier for us to try an even wider variety of food from street vendors.

One thing that you can't avoid in Saigon is the absolute flood of motor bikes. Forget looking at traffic lights, crossing the street is like a real life game of Frogger. Think you'll play it safe and stick to the sidewalk? Wrongo-pongo! Impatient drivers at the back of the line will often just hop out of the street and zoom up to the front of the line. I'm sure there are traffic laws in Vietnam, it's just that nobody really pays any attention to them.

Saigon was decent enough but it probably wouldn't make it onto my "Favorite Destinations" list. It's worth a couple of days if you're doing the backpack-around-SE Asia thing, but I'm not convinced it alone is a destination. Fortunately for us, we had plenty more on our agenda...

Getting Out of Town - Mt. Takao

2010-11-27T09:55:00.005+09:00

Last autumn, Mike, Yuki, and I went down to Kyoto on a long weekend to check out the beautiful fall colors, but the holiday was on a Tuesday instead of a Monday this year, denying us that extra bit of time to really get out of town. However, Mike set up plans for the Michigan kids to get together on that Tuesday and take a day trip to Mt. Takao, a relatively small mountain about an hour away from Tokyo that he had been to in past falls.

As the date approached, however, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to join. I had played soccer on the previous Sunday, the first real exercise I’d had in something like four months, and my body was an absolute wreck. I honestly can’t remember the time I was that sore and even just walking was painful, so the idea of hiking up a mountain didn’t sound too appealing, so I decided I’d see how I felt that morning and make a judgment call.

When I woke up, I felt only slightly better than I had the day before and at first I was planning on sitting it out. But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I would regret not going. I usually work too late Monday through Friday to do anything outside of work and it seemed like a shame to waste a rare day off bumming around indoors, so I decided to suck it up and give it a go.

We all met up outside the train station at the base of the mountain. The morning drizzle had cleared up, leaving a cool but sunny late morning that was strongly reminiscent of Michigan falls. Most people take a cable car part way up, then hike the rest of the way to top, but we took a path less traveled that went all the way up. To be honest, it was a pretty gentle slope and not particularly strenuous until near the very end.

The fall colors weren’t the best, but it was nice just to be out of the city for a bit. The air in Tokyo never strikes me as particularly bad, but the fresh air at Mt. Takao was wonderfully refreshing. It just felt good to breath. The path we took was quiet and not at all crowded (a minor miracle anywhere near Tokyo on a holiday), allowing us to keep a slow pace, enjoying the nature and company.

It’s been getting colder around here lately and probably won’t be long before the idea of spending a day outdoors loses its appeal, so I’m glad we had a chance to get out. The scenery may not have held up to Kyoto’s last year, but it was a great day trip and it’s always a good time when the Michigan kids get together.

Dive In

2010-11-25T22:56:00.005+09:00

After we spent a weekend in Hachijojima last March, I wrote about how Yuki and I had a chance to try scuba diving and really enjoyed ourselves. We sat on the idea of getting proper diving certification for a while but never really did anything about it until Yuki happened to find a place with good reviews that was offering licensing courses for a fairly inexpensive price (more on that in a minute…). Figuring that it would be a fun option to have when we travel, we decided to check it out.

The advertised price at the place was $150, but there were A LOT of strings attached. They really pushed people to buy their own gear (wetsuit, mask, snorkel, etc.), the idea being that owning your own gear would encourage you to stick with the hobby. Honestly, I think it was largely them taking advantage of a common tendency for Japanese people to have a hard time saying no when put on the spot (I had no such issues). If, however, you don’t shell out the $500+ for one of their gear packages, you’d have to pay something like $70 per dive session to rent it (x3 session = +$210). There was also a number of little administrative costs and knick-knicks that they make you buy which add up to another $70-80 or so. All-in-all, the total bill comes out to around $400, which is pretty much what it would cost at most other places in Tokyo anyway, so we figured we’d give it a shot. I wasn’t really thrilled about the way they kept trying to get us to buy things or sign up for stuff (if we’d said “yes” to all the add-ons, we probably would have blown through another $200-300), but they were excellent teachers and took good care of us throughout the process, so if you’ve got the will power to say no to all the selling, it’s not a bad shop to go with.

There are three components to getting your diving license:
(1) A paper test on basic diving technique and safety
(2) Diving practice session in a pool
(3) Diving practice session in open water

The test is easy: if you just read the little book they give you, there’s nothing difficult on it. I used a Japanese book and took the test itself in Japanese and still got something like 95%. To be honest, you could probably pass if you just read the first half of the book and use a little common sense during the test. The pool section is mostly focused on learning how to prepare your equipment and actually trying out the techniques you read about in the book. It’s pretty dry, but it makes everything easier to understand.

The open water diving is about learning to apply the basic techniques in a real life situation and involves four dives split over two days, with an option to split it over two weekends or stay overnight and do it all in one. We opted to stay over and make a weekend out if it.

Most diving tours I’ve read about go out early in the morning (though I don’t really know why), and this was no exception. We were on train before 6am in order to make it to the dive shop by 7am, with an hour and a half car ride from their to the diving spot.

Being early November, we were worried that it was going to be pretty cold, but we lucked out and had great weather. After our first two dives Saturday morning, we spent the afternoon lounging around in an onsen up in the mountains, perfect after a morning in the cold Pacific waters. We bummed around in our hotel, a cozy little place literally overlooking the coast, before heading out for dinner.

The coastal area is full of windy roads that snake through the mountains, giving us a great view of the sunset. For dinner, we ate sashimi at a little family run place way up in the mountains. Top class fish at a price you would never see in Tokyo, it was a joy to eat.

The weather wasn’t quite as good the second day, but still decent enough. Two more dives and that was it: licensed scuba divers! Now we can go diving anywhere in the world, something we’ll be taking advantage of on our upcoming trip in a couple of weeks. Can’t wait!

Before You Even Know It....

2010-10-31T23:28:00.005+09:00

Last Thursday was exactly two years from the day I moved to Tokyo. Honestly, when I try to compare now and then, it makes my head spin. So much has changed in that time that it's difficult to put into words. In some ways, my life has become much more complicated than it was in those first few months, when everything was shiny and new. In other ways, it has gotten much simpler in that there's a certain repetition and most weeks end up looking more or less the same.

I'd vaguely been aware that the date was approaching, but it just sort of slipped my mind, something that is happening more frequently as of late. I struggle a bit to keep other things in my head and the days have started to just sort of blend together lately. It all just sort of flies by before I even notice. I feel like I've reached the finish line every time I make it to the weekend, only to realize that I haven't planned a damn thing and am left scrambling to come up with something. Needless to say, a number of them end up feeling wasted. My team leader at work has told me I should take more days off, but the company's vacation policies make it hard to take any meaningful time off, so I just keep grinding it out.

But that's just a bunch of excuses and whining, which I'm sure nobody really wants to hear about. I've got a number of adventures I want to go on in the next twelve months, so I'm just going to focus on making that happen. I need to mix things up a bit and explore. I think it would be good for me.

I'll throw a little food into this post, just so it doesn't end a total rant. The potato wedges were lightly coated with vegetable oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder and cooked in the same try as the chicken legs, allowing them to turn golden brown as they half baked, half fried in the runoff chicken fat and juices. Freakin delicious. The chicken just got a little salt and pepper, then got baked until the skin was super crispy. The corn soup in the back there is Campbell's from a can. Don't judge me; we all get to cheat every now and then. A bottle of chardonnay to accompany it all made for a satisfying Saturday night dinner. Not a bad way to celebrate a second year.

It's Never Too Late To Learn

2010-10-28T09:37:00.004+09:00

Chili isn't something I ate often growing up and I'm not even sure if my mom ever made it (to be fair, back then I probably would have refused to eat it anyway). As such, I really had no idea what was supposed to go into it or how to make it, but Yuki wanted to have it for dinner, so I decided to see what I could do. I looked at a few recipes online and found that there was pretty much no "standard" basic recipe, so I pretty much just winged it. At first I thought I'd measure the spices I was putting in, but I ended up tinkering with it so much that I just gave up on keeping track. For spices, there was a bunch of chili powder, a health dose of cumin, a fair bit of garlic powder and cayenne pepper, plus dashes of salt, black pepper, and oregano. To give it some mass, I included a pound of ground beef, a diced medium-sized onion and carrot, 1/3 each of yellow and red bell peppers, a can of kidney beans, and two cans of diced tomatoes. Hefty stuff. Mixed together, it was allowed to bubble away gently on the stove for a little over an hour.

Obviously that is far too much chili for two people to eat in one sitting, but we were in luck. Peter Traylor and his girlfriend Mari were passing buy and called to ask if we wanted to meet up. As they hadn't had a proper dinner yet, we invited them over to Yuki's for a light dinner and drinks. I grabbed some Coronas, which went really well with the chili, Yuki picked up some tortilla chips (also not easy to find in Japan) and the four of us spent the evening hanging out together.

Before we new it, it was time for them to catch their last train home, a long long ride out to Moriya. I've gotta give props to Peter for making the haul into to Tokyo to hang out with us as often as he does. It's time consuming as hell and certainly not cheap, but he's always a good sport about it and it's always a better time for having him there.

Lunch Out - A Nu

2010-10-17T09:40:00.002+09:00

Yuki and I like to indulge in a fancy lunch every now and then, as weekend lunch specials offer one of the few bargains to be had in Tokyo. Last weekend, we went to A Nu, a French restaurant in the Hiroo district, to (belatedly) celebrate a year of dating. Their dinner courses start at more than $80/person and go as high as nearly $200, but there lunch course costs less than half of that at $35. Obviously $35 is hardly a cheap lunch and the portions are smaller than at dinner, but the quality is still top notch.

The appetizer (I had a tuna tartar topped with diced apples and celery) was decent enough, but nothing spectacular. I thought the celery overpowered the apple a little and there was a bit too much of both to really let the flavor of the fish come through. Far better was the fact that they provided a constant supply of probably the best baguettes I've tasted in Tokyo. The crust was crackly, the center warm and soft, and there were slices of delicious butter with big flakes of salt on top. I think I ate a loafs worth...

The fish dish was grilled onagadai, a firm white fish, served with an eggplant basil sauce, which looked eerily like baby food but tasted ok, and a really cool foam of basil-infused milk. To be honest, the fish was good enough that I'd been happy to eat it as-is, but the foam made things interesting.

The meat dish, roast duck with a beet sauce was a real winner. The skin was crispy, the meat tender, and the sauce matched it deliciously. Bonus points for presentation, with super thin circles of bright red beets dotting the plate. There was also an onion "sauce" that looked and tasted like they'd just minced up an onion and given it a couple of whirls in a cuisinart: after trying a couple bites, I ignored it and the dish was a billion times better for it.

The desserts were fairly common desserts served in a creative way. In their tiramisu, the mascarpone cheese was solidified like a meringue and floated with little coffee tapioca pearls in a creamy soup that tasted like cream and lady's fingers.

For the Mont Blanc, the cream was also solidified like a meringue and sat on top of a chestnut mousse.

Since we were celebrating (and it was only an extra $5), we decided to get an extra dessert, picking caramel cheesecake with a cognac-orange sorbet. I was surprised by how strong the cognac flavor in the sorbet was, but it balanced the creamy cheese cake, which was excellent on its own as well.

Fancy restaurants rarely serve large portions, but if I just wanted to stuff myself I'd just go grab an $8 bowl of ramen. I go for food made of top quality ingredients combined and prepared in ways I would never have though of myself. In fact, I rarely walk away from one such meal without thinking just how big of a difference good ingredients make. I couldn't care less about eating organic, going local, or whatever other trend is popular at the moment, but knowing how important it is to get the good stuff makes me understand the nuts blowing through half their paycheck at whole foods and farmers markets a little bit more.

Where The Gaijin Roam

2010-10-11T10:51:00.004+09:00

In Tokyo, the triangle of Roppongi, Azabu, and Hiroo is home to the vast majority of the Western expat community. Many foreign companies have their offices have their offices in the area and most employees brought in from overseas prefer to live nearby. Most of them speak little to no Japanese at best, but are generally very well paid by their employers, so restaurants and stores are more than willing to accommodate them.

Yuki and I were having lunch in the area this past weekend (more on that in a later post), so we thought we'd walk around and check out the area a bit. There was a mom helping her daughter learn to ride a bike, a cafe with twice as many foreigners as Japanese, and a park full of American and British dads playing sports with their kids.

But the real gaijin jackpot is the National Azabu Supermarket, the single most American place I have ever been in Japan. Many Japanese stores will offer versions of foreign products produced domestically by Japanese brands, but not here. Everything was labeled in English and they had a number of brands you'd find in the US: Tide laundry detergent, SunChips, Tyson chicken. It was a bit nostalgic and I picked up a few things that you rarely see in Japan: hamburger buns (damn do I want a proper burger...), a pie crust (will definitely be making pumpkin pie this fall), and cherry coke (and will probably shell out the ridiculous prices they charge for a pizza around here so I can enjoy the ultimate junk food combination). Honestly, I find myself missing things from back home more and more often these days. It's nice to know that there is a way to get my hands on some of those things.

That night, I cooked up some freakin delicious chili and planned to tie it in with this story. But I got home late tonight after having picked up some beautiful ground Australian beef on the way back from work and I cooked myself a hamburger, using the buns I mentioned earlier.

I won't pretend it was perfect.
It was cooked in a frying pan, not on a grill.
It wasn't medium rare, bordering closer to well done.
It wasn't even that big.

But it tasted like beef should, it was juicy, and it was homemade. I ate it with just ketchup, the way I have for just about every burger I've eaten since I was little. It was magnificent and it made the world seem a little bit more right...

Facing Up

2010-10-09T22:34:00.004+09:00

I woke up 20 minutes ahead of my alarm on Friday, which is a bit weird considering I worked late Thursday and didn't end up getting to bed until 2am. My room faces East and the sun had just risen enough that it sent a gentle golden light bursting into my room. There were just enough clouds out to make for a good skyline, so I took a few quick pictures and went back to sleep.

I'd love to share more pictures, but today was a gross and rainy day, so I'll tell you a story instead.

I have recently finally started facing up to some of my fears that come from living abroad. When you move to a foreign country, that baseline upon which you go through life shifts. Many things you just assumed to be one way are now completely different. Others are stuff you do when you finish college and set out on your own, difficult enough in your own country and even more so in a foreign one. You have to adapt and learn as you go, and it can be a scary and difficult process.

My biggest step thus far was my trip to the dentist's office today. Despite having lived here for just short of two years, up to this point I had avoided medical services all together. There's just so many things I don't know about. Not understanding what is typical and what to expect is incredibly intimidating for me. But even scarier, especially in regards to health care, is the language gap. My health related vocabulary is so incredibly basic that I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't understand half of what I was told, even more so if anything was out of the ordinary. I've been fortunate enough to have been in at least fair health since moving over and thus not needed to see a doctor. Until today, I had put off visiting a dentist as long as I could, but one of my wisdom teeth starting coming in and, though not at all painful, I figured I should probably have someone take a look at it just in case.

In the end, I went with Nishieifuku Dental Clinic, a dentist on the complete opposite side of Tokyo that is well regard in the expat community. It took me nearly an hour and a half to get there, but it was worth it. The bulk of the communication was done in Japanese (mostly because I kept speaking to them in Japanese), but the peace of mind from knowing that English was always option made life so much easier for me.

I was advised to let the wisdom tooth come in a little more to make it easier to take out, which seems sensible enough to me. I would also like to note that I was complimented by the assistant on the condition of my teeth and that she was surprised to hear that I hadn't been to the dentist for a cleaning in more than two years. It cost me about $35, which doesn't seem unreasonable, though I have absolutely no clue as to how that number was calculated.

Little by little, I'm trying to get past the fear of not knowing. What I'm beginning to realize is that there will always be things I won't fully comprehend, little black boxes that produce results I don't really understand. All I can do is prepare responsibly, give it my best go, and hope for the best. There will probably be times I get burned, but I'm confident that I will be able to get it right most of the time.

A Little Change of Direction

2010-10-03T23:24:00.007+09:00

When I started this blog, I intended for it to purely be a food blog. I was cooking every day, trying new things and putting out some really good stuff, and I just wanted to share it. It also coincided with my growing interest in photography, so it gave me a great way to practice that as well. I enjoyed it a lot and was putting up a post nearly every week.

Fast-foward fifteen months and a lot has changed. At the beginning of April, I moved to a new department and am now work a lot more than before, to the point where I've recently been doing nearly twice as many hours of overtime every month. I'm still stubborn about cooking pretty much every day, but you really don't put too much time and effort into it when you're throwing together dinner at 11pm. As such, you could probably count on one hand the number of meals I cook in a month that I feel are even worth sharing. Late work hours also means I don't have much time to write posts or process pictures to put up, so what few meals I think are blog-worthy rarely actually get written about.

At the same time, I have often let myself get sidetracked away from food and written about trips I've taken. In fact, I would say they are usually some of my better posts. I don't travel often enough to have a travel blog, but I think it makes for good reading and interesting pictures all the same.

I don't want to try to force this blog to be something it's not, so what I've decided is this: I'm not going to limit this blog to food related content. I'm not even going to try to define a theme for this blog. I'm just going to write about interesting things I've seen or done. Sometimes I'm not even going to write at all and just share pictures I've taken that I think are interesting. I won't be trying to chronicle my life, just share a glimpse of the things I enjoy.

So here is a post that has absolutely no food in it all. In fact, the only thing that is only even kind of food related is that one of the pictures was taken at a barbecue (which I don't intend to write about). They're just a few pictures of skylines that I like, plus a first attempt at using a new processing technique.

Beautiful blue skies for a barbecue with the Michigan kids this past weekend

NTT DOCOMO Tower, viewed at sunset from Shinjuku Gyoen

Colorful clouds at sunset, looking East from my room

Ginza at dusk

The new technique I mentioned earlier that I'm trying for the first time is HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing. The idea is that you take the same picture multiple times but at different exposures each time. Shots taken at high exposure will pick up details that would normally get lost in shadows, while low exposure shots will catch details in highlights that would get blown out in a normally picture. You then use some crazy voodoo magic software that takes the best parts from each picture and then combines them into one awesome picture. This time, I only combined two pictures (which aren't even perfectly aligned, but worked out anyways) of the sunrise taken from my room.

The first shot, overexposed sky means the clouds are pretty badly blown out

The second shot, underexposed, gets good detail in the sky, but loses most of the city below in shadows

The combined picture, which has eliminated a lot of the shortcomings from the original shots.

I've only just dipped my toes into the world of HDR, but I'll write about it again once I've tried my hand at it little more and have a few shots worth showing.

Weekend Getaway - Kujukurihama

2010-09-11T13:52:00.005+09:00

Yuki's birthday was a couple of weeks ago and I had absolutely no idea what to give her as a present. You see, she doesn't really want anything.

So I started by taking her out for lunch. A really really nice lunch. We went to Pierre Gangaire, which opened earlier this year. Pierre Gangaire is a famous french-fusion chef with a total of 7 Michelin stars between his restaurants. He actually had a restaurant in Tokyo previously that had 2 Michelin stars before closing down in 2008 as a result of problems with its backers. The new restaurant opened this March and is on the 36th floor of the ANA InterContinental Hotel in Roppongi.

The restaurants website recommends jackets for gentlemen anyways, so we decided to go all out and dress to the nines . We were given a table near a window, which gave us a gorgeous view over the surrounding area. The service was excellent, both in English and Japanese. The food was a.m.a.z.i.n.g. Delicious, complicated, original, it was unlike anything I've ever eaten before. Each bite had layers of flavors that slowly opened up as you chewed. To be honest, it's hard to find the right words to describe it, but it really illustrated to me just why world famous chefs are so highly rated. It also confirmed to me something I was once told: if you go to a top class restaurant and there is the seafood on the menu, get it. In the hands of someone who really knows what they are doing, seafood will blow away chicken, pork, and even beef. Yuki got the fish and I got the meat. Mine was excellent; hers was phenomenal.

Unfortunately for you, I didn't take any pictures. In fact, I didn't even bring my camera to the restaurant. I figured that, as much as I would love to capture such beautiful food, the meal was, first and foremost, about Yuki and it just wouldn't be right to be snapping away the whole time instead of paying attention to her, so I just left the camera at home. And, to be honest, it was absolutely the right choice and I'm glad I made it. Lunch was many times more special for it.

As fancy and fabulous as the lunch was, it was still just a lunch, which doesn't count as a present in my books, so I needed something else. Though there wasn't any particular thing that she wanted, one thing Yuki loves is to travel. A serious trip for two is still a good ways above my pay grade, I managed to come up with an idea for a quick escape the following weekend.

Anyone flying into Tokyo from the US passes over a stretch of the Japanese coastline that is covered in beaches. It's a 60km stretch of beach along Japan's Pacific coast called Kujukurihama and is only about an hour and a half out from Tokyo by train. Apparently the area is very popular with surfers, but the official "summer" season ends in August, so it was pretty empty. The weather was still in the 90s though, so we were more than happy to escape the humidity of the city and spend some time on the beach.

If you went straight out, the first piece of land you would reach is California. I think that's pretty awesome.

I booked us for a night at New Taiyo, a hotel a couple hundred yards from the beach. The area is so out in the middle of nowhere that they don't even have a ticket gate at the train station, just a little old man to check your ticket before you leave the platform. The hotel was gorgeous, with a clean modern take on classical Japanese design. The rooms were huge (you can sleep up to six in each) and had tatami mat floors, which I love walking on so much. There was a small balconies overlooking a neat courtyard where they hold barbecues in the summer.

It's very common in Japan for hotels outside of the major cities to come in a room-and-board set and New Taiyo's top choice was a "seafood gourmet course".

Yuki loves seafood, so she was pretty happy

The course included tons of different kinds of seafood, from sashimi to shellfish

All in all, there was more than a half dozen seafood related dishes and could easily have fed three or four people. It was probably about as much seafood as I usually eat in an entire year. We were stuffed.

Being right on the Eastern coast, we decided that we should catch the sunrise, so we woke up at 5am and headed out the beach. We'd timed things perfectly and didn't have to wait more than 10 minutes before the sun began to peek out.

And with the sun came the surfers, looking to catch the high waves on the low tide.

There were some low lying clouds that helped intensify the colors and made for a beautiful sunrise.

Both afternoons were perfect beach weather, low 90s and clear blue skies. The sand was soft but hot, the waves big and cold. Yuki would ride on my shoulders out to the sandbar, where the waves were bigger and we spent hours just getting tossed about, crashing around in the waves like little kids. It was a great time and left us totally exhausted.

At one point, we were bumming around on the beach, recovering from yet another session out in the waves, when we heard the roar of motors. Looking up, we saw a couple of people parasailing along the coastline. We followed them as they passed over head, only to see another couple riding horses towards us from the other direction! Definitely not a common thing to see at the beach, but it made for a cool picture.

Watching people surf, we decided it looked like a lot of fun. Though there wasn't enough time for us to have a go this time, we decided that it was definitely something we should try next summer. I've only ever tried surfing once before, but thought it was a blast and am really looking forward to doing it again.

Thoroughly exhausted and a little sunburned (or a lot in my case), we headed back to Tokyo. All in all, I think Yuki enjoyed everything, which was the main objective, and I know I certainly had a great time.

Not The Way I Like To Roll

2010-08-11T21:59:00.002+09:00

If you don’t include the countless boxes of Duncan Hines brownies I pumped out, I spent very little time in the kitchen when I lived at home. To be honest, there was no reason to. My mom is an awesome cook (I know everyone with a food blog says that, but it really is true) and it was much easier to just leave things up to her.

Having been cooking for myself for roughly 5 years now, I’m well aware of how long it can take to get food on the table and how dishes that seem simple can actually be fairly difficult. But it’s easy to forget, as illustrated by my latest cooking adventure this past weekend.

During my last couple of years in Michigan, my mom got a pasta roller and would occasionally make fresh pasta. Let me tell you, fresh pasta is freaking amazing. So good, in fact, that it makes it hard to go back to the dried stuff. Rolling pasta is much easier when done as a pair, so I would help her from time to time. In the grand scheme of pasta making, rolling it out is the simplest part (assuming you’re using a machine, not a rolling pin) and I was never really exposed to the rest of the process.

I recently found a store in Tokyo that carried pasta rollers exactly like my moms and picked one up, thinking it would be easy-peasy to make my own super delicious pasta. It’s not. For sure, there are much more difficult things to make, but pasta isn’t something you can just throw together.

The ingredients are dead simple: all you need is flour and eggs. And yet it’s getting those two ingredients together that is the tough part. The general concept is to make volcano of flour with the eggs in the middle and slowly mix the flour into the eggs. Once it’s kind of turned into a ball you knead in the rest of the flour and leave it to rest for a while.

Unfortunately, having never watched my mom put it together, I didn’t really have a sense of what the dough should feel like when it’s done. Recipes use silly and useless adjectives like “silky” and “elastic”, which are pretty much no help at all. So I kneaded for a bit, decided that was good enough, and got ready to give it a spin through the roller. Epic mistake. The dough was still far too sticky and refused to play nice.

Not really knowing how to fix it, we decided to dust it with enough flour to get it through the roller and settled for super fatty noodles (having done some reading, the solution – kneading in extra flour – is embarrassingly simple). As a result, they took longer to boil (fresh pasta normally only takes 2-3 minutes), causing the second batch to start to stick together and dry out a bit. In the end, it still tasted quite good (way better than dried pasta), but certainly not as good as it should have been.

Obviously it’s way cooler to write about smashing successes, talk about how awesome it was, and have everyone go oooh and aaah, but I think it’s good to occasionally include the failures (of which I have plenty) as well. It helps remind me that there is still much to learn.

So what’s the game plan going forward? Clearly step one is talk to mom and learn all her clever little secrets. From there, it’s just a matter of getting in enough practice and becoming comfortable with making the basic dough. Once you you’re able to make dough well, there are a billion options for dishes to make. Personally, I’m most excited to have a shot at making some stuffed pastas and getting creative with the filling. It might take a while before I’m satisfied with the quality of what I’m producing, but I’m sure that, with time, the deliciousness will come!

Fireworks and Fancy Toys

2010-08-07T15:29:00.005+09:00

I'd hoped to this post done much much sooner, but had a crazy week at work and couldn't make it happen. Only once this week did I get out of work early enough to take a train home and got home after 2am on the other four days, which meant I only got to work on this in 15-20min chunks before heading to work each morning. Understandably, it took a while to finish...

Though not necessarily to the same extent as last week, I do spend quite a lot of time at work these days. While this means that I pretty much have to write off the idea of having a social life Monday through Friday, it is not completely without benefits. In Japan, the standard pay system for full time employment is a (rather small) base salary plus overtime. As such, the busier I am at work the bigger my paycheck at the end of the month. Not a bad deal. Anybody who knows me knows that I am careful with my money. Some would call me stingy, I would just say that I'm really good at saving. And here's the proof:

Back in November, I officially became a millionaire (albeit in yen) and have since tripled that amount, not even including the million or so I took back to deposit in the US in the form of traveller's cheques last Christmas. I won't say what that works out to in US dollars, but if you do the math I think you'll agree it's an impressive amount. It will probably be a long long time until I make four million, but only because the dollar has tanked again and I'm switching my yen to dollars at the moment, but you get my point.

Since moving to Japan, I've made it one of my goals to not let the cost of things keep me from doing anything that I would otherwise enjoy, and I can honestly say I think I've done a good job of sticking to that. For the past two years, I've been shooting with a Sony a200 DSLR camera that my dad gave me as an early birthday present before I moved to Japan. Along the way, I'd upgraded my lens to a super fast 50m f/1.4 and generally enjoyed using the camera. But 50mm is a bit of an awkward length on a cropped body camera and I started looking for other lenses that would give me a little more versatility.

I read tons of reviews for a number of lenses and they all pointed to one conclusion: if you want a good lens for a Sony camera, it's gonna cost you a ton. In fact, unless you drop ~$2,000 on a pro-level lens, there just aren't many good options. Personally, I'm not willing to shell out $500 on a lens that is just alright. If you're gonna spend stupid money, you should get a product that is at least worth it.

Before switching over to DSLR, I'd been using a Canon point-and-shoot, which was a great little camera that could kick out some really good pictures. Mike has also been using Canon's and always raves about them, so I thought I'd take a look in that direction. The thought process was that if I were going to invest in a whole new camera body (you can't mix and match camera bodies and lenses), it would have to be a significant step up from my Sony and something that would be good enough to hold on to for many years to come. I did a lot of reading up on a couple different Canon bodies and, to keep things simple, reached the following conclusion:

The Sony EOS 7D and the 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 lens kit. It cost me close to a month's base salary, but it really is awesome. I'm still getting used to it and it's a bit awkward being on a slower lens again, but I can already tell that there will be some great pictures coming out of this bad boy.

Since I worked so late this week, I only actually cooked dinner once, and that was pasta throw together at midnight, so I haven't had much of a chance to shoot any food with the new camera yet, but I did whip together some banana bread last weekend at Yuki's. I find that I almost always put in too much banana when making banana bread it ends up being very dense. It keeps the bread from rising much when you bake it and you end up with a squat, but moist, loaf like this little bastard. Ugly, I know, but it tastes so good that I can forgive it. I at half the loaf the same day I baked it. Delicious.

For more visually pleasing pictures, I've got a few shots of fireworks from last weekend. There was a big fireworks show being held in Yokohama, where Mike lives, so he set up plans to get all the Michigan kids together to check it out. In Japan, it is common for people to wear yukata, a lightweight cotton version of the kimono and my mom's favorite discovery from her visit to Japan, when they go to see fireworks and festivals in the summer, so decided that everyone who owned a yukata should wear theirs. It's kind of like decided to get dressed up in fancy clothes and go out for a nice dinner, only old school Japanese style. Mine was a gift from my host family when I studied abroad in Fukuoka back in '07 that I think is particularly awesome. Most guys stick to monochromatic designs, which I think are a bit boring. I didn't have a tripod to work with when shooting the fireworks, so it was a little tough, but I managed to get a few decent shots. Enjoy!

Blog Birthday

2010-07-25T22:07:00.002+09:00

Today marks exactly one year since I started this blog. Though I still don't think of it as a particularly impressive blog by any means, it has been viewed over 2,000 times by people from 39 countries during that time. Kind of crazy...

Looking back at my first post, it's obvious a lot has changed since I started. For one, the picture I used is so poor it borders on offensive. These days, a shot like that would be deleted before it even got uploaded onto my computer. At the time, I routinely got off work by 7 or 8-ish most days, so I had plenty of time to spend putting together dinner. Obviously work has gotten busier and now getting out of the office before 8pm is a fairly rare event, which has contributed to the significant decline in the number of posts here. I also spend most of my weekends out and about with Yuki, meaning less time gets dedicated to putting together Saturday and Sunday night dinners.

But, if I'm really honest, those are mostly just excuses. I reread that first post and realized the root of the problem is not all that far from what I described as cause of failure for my first blogging attempt: the feeling that every post has to be something epic. I have put together a few posts that I think are outstanding (usually travel related), but it really is unreasonable to expect every entry to be of that caliber. Not every meal is a classic and not every weekend is full of some fabulous adventure. Sometimes you just have to work with what you've got. Jake and Mike's friend Brian, who I met when we all climbed Mt. Fuji together, recently started trying to post a single picture every day on his blog. While I obviously am not about to try to do the same thing with my food, I really like the idea that not everything you do will be a masterpiece, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth sharing.

To be honest, it's been a while since anything particularly impressive has come out of my kitchen. It's ridiculously hot in Japan this summer and I'm still looking for good summertime recipes to help get through it. With a lack of ideas at the moment, I cooked two very ordinary dinners this weekend. The first, General Tso's Chicken, is a dish I've tried on numerous occasions but have never been able to get quite right. To me, it should be sweet and spicy, with a strong kick from the vinegar as well. In Ann Arbor, I loved to get it from Panda House in their lunch special. I know it's hardly authentic Chinese food, but's it's just so freaking good. My rendition once again fell short, I think mostly due to an overuse of soy sauce and a fear of using too much vinegar.

The second dinner was Kung Pao Shrimp, which also failed to impress. Normally, when I want my food to be good and spicy (which is most of the time), I use a generous dose of red chili sauce. This recipe called for 10 dried chilies to provide the heat instead, and for some reason I decided to do as told. I don't know why I thought it would work: cooking dried chilies in oil is essential a very basic way of making chili oil, which I never find to be particularly spicy anyways. The failure of the chilies to make things interesting meant that the sauce was essentially a poorly constructed teriyaki sauce. That's not to say it was bad, but nobody is gonna get patted on the back over this one...

I've got a couple of other recent meals that need writing about in the pipeline, so hopefully it won't be too long until my next post. Thanks to all who have followed this blog for the past year and I hope you continue to enjoy it in the coming year as well!

Rising to the Top

2010-07-12T16:12:00.003+09:00

No food again this time, but still an event I feel is definitely worth mentioning. This past weekend, a bunch of Michigan kids from the Tokyo area met up with Jake, another friend from Michigan who has been teaching English in central Japan, and a bunch of his buddies to take on one of Japan's greatest challenges: climbing Mt. Fuji.

The timing for the trip, being right at the heart of the Japanese rainy season, left a lot up to fate but we lucked out and were greeted with beautiful skies when we arrived. The Tokyo crew got to the meeting point a bit early, so we spent some time goofing around.

The girls were cute as usual, while us guys attempted to demonstrate the sexiest way to take oxygen.

My two usual partners in crime along with their key equipment for the climb: Yuki with the oxygen bottle and Mike with his camera!

Absolutely lucked out on the weather. Views from our starting point at the 5th Station, around 2,300 meters above sea-level

We set out around 6pm, our spirits high. The path we were taking went up the south-east side of the mountain, meaning we only caught bits of the sun setting around the side of the mountain. We still got some great shots, but it must have been amazing on the west side!

It's a 9-10hr climb to the top including breaks and we planned to do it without stopping to sleep. Most of the climb isn't terribly difficult terrain, though there are stretches where you do need to use your hands to help climb up the rocks. In fact, it wasn't until around the 8th station, at an altitude of 3,100 meters, that things got tough. And by tough I don't mean "difficult to climb"; the path was not that much different. What was really challenging was the cold. And the crowds. The temperature had dropped down to near freezing-levels and the wind was pretty ferocious. We hadn't counted on it getting that cold and most of us were somewhat under-dressed. To make things worse, the tour groups started coming out. Unlike us, the more common way to climb Mt. Fuji is to go 2/3 of the way up, sleep for a couple of hours in one of the lodges, and the finish off the climb in time for sunrise. As such, the path was almost empty as we made our way up, but in the earliest, coldest hours of the morning began getting bogged down by countless groups of climbers to the point where sometimes all you could do was stand and wait for the line to start moving. On top of that, Yuki was struggling with the altitude and we would occasionally pull over for breaks to try to help her acclimate, but there wasn't much shelter from the wind, so all we could do was bundle up and hunker down as best possible. All in all, it made for a very long and very cold night.

I'm not sure I've ever felt such a base instinctive drive to just survive, which was a bit scary. In many ways, I think it was more demanding emotionally than physically. Nonetheless, our whole group made it to the top and were greeted by a pretty spectacular sunrise.

Personally, the hardest part of the whole thing was getting back down. Make no mistake, it is not an easy climb to the top, but going down takes everything you've done to that point and compounds it. There is a separate path to the bottom which is pretty much a continuous zigzag of loose dirt and stones. I suppose if you were on your own and took more time to rest at the top, you could slalom down it pretty quickly, but after an exhausting all-nighter, it was slow going and absolutely devastating on the knees. To make things worse, every time you get to a ledge with a good vantage down the slope, the zigzag just appears to go on forever. When you get to the point where you had previously thought it was going to end and look down, it just keeps going. Despite the cold and the wind, I never once felt like giving up during the climb, but on the way back down I couldn't stop wishing there was some sort of white flag I could wave and bring it all to an end. It was awful.

We finally reached the bottom around 10am. We were battered and exhaust, but we had conquered Mt. Fuji. I was especially proud of Yuki, who really had a hard time dealing with the high altitude, but fought all the way to the end.

There is a saying that "One who never climbs Mt. Fuji is a fool. One who climbs it twice is twice the fool". I couldn't agree more. By the time we were done it was like going to hell and back, but we also witnessed some amazing views that you simply cannot find anywhere else in Japan. Anyone spending a significant amount of time in Japan owes it to themselves to do it, but once is plenty enough.

It's Been A While...

2010-06-26T13:35:00.005+09:00

It's been nearly two months since I wrote anything here and it would be completely understandable if everyone had thought I'd abandoned blogging. But I've got some very good excuses (which I'll get to in just a moment) and have no intentions of making a habit of this. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and set the very modest goal of 2 posts a month over the summer. That's doable, right? I'll try to keep the focus on food, particularly things I cook rather than places I eat, but there will be some exceptions. Starting off with one such exception hardly sets a good precedent, but this is a post that has to be written.

May was a busy month at work and I rarely left the office before 10pm, so there was not a ton of great cooking going on in my kitchen, much less photographing and writing about it. Then came June, and with it the World Cup. Oh how I love the World Cup! Soccer games every day! Broadcast live on TV! The fact that you have to wait four years for it only makes it that much more awesome. And, for once, the crazy time difference has worked out great. The first match of the day starts at 8:30pm Tokyo time and the second at 11pm. Work calmed down a bit, which meant I could usually get out of the office somewhere around 8-9pm. It takes me a little less than an hour to get home from the office, but kickass Japanese technology means I was able to watch the first half on my phone while I rode the train. Cook dinner between games, shower at half time, go to bed at 1am. Pretty awesome way to spend your evenings...

So clearly soccer has been cutting into my food time, but that's not the real reason I haven't written anything. In fact, most of my best cooking happens on the weekends anyways. What really has kept me from writing is these hooligans:

Almost half a year after I last saw them back in Michigan, my oh-so-awesome family made their way thousands of miles to come hang out with me in Japan for a bit. Dad had two conferences in Kyoto he was attending, so they spent the weekdays down there checking out temples and old Japanese-y stuff, then came to Tokyo to spend the weekends with me. The first weekend was just the parents, then the whole family the next weekend, finished off by just Ali for the third.

We cruised all over Tokyo, seeing the sights, taking in the atmosphere and, of course, eating lots of good food. They were real troopers about it, especially considering how much more walking is involved in day-to-day life here compared to in the US, and were game for anything I suggested. If it looked interesting, we tried it. If it looked tasty, we ate it. We blew through a ton of money (I won't say how much, but when I looked at my bank statement afterwords, I couldn't tell that my paycheck had been deposited). But you know what: I wouldn't hesitate to do it all over again tomorrow if I could. In fact, I'd jump at the chance. They traveled half way around the world just to see me. How cool is that. It's an amazing feeling to know you are that loved.

Originally, I'd planned to write about everywhere we went and all the things we did, but it this post would just be ridiculously long. Instead, I'll stick to some of my favorite pictures with brief captions. If you want the details, you'll just have to ask them!

Touristy stuff: 43rd floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building and the Imperial Palace

Up unnaturally early to go see the Tsukiji fish market in action

Left: Getting used to the efficient madness that is Tokyo's public transportation
Right: There are much better temples and shrines in Kyoto than in Tokyo, so we kept them to a minimum, but Meiji Shrine is worth a look

Left: Some things in Japan are just weird. Like claw machines with bloody human-devouring teddy bears.
Right: My coworkers seemed to think that it was weird that I would take my family anywhere but the fancy shiny parts of town, but to me back alley dives are as much a part of Tokyo as the neon lights of Shinjuku or the posh streets of Ginza

I hauled them all the way out to the neighborhood I live in, Kameari, which is famous as the setting of the popular Japanese comic book "Kochira Kameari".

Yuki illustrates the difference between "Japan-size" and "America-size"

Lunch at a 100+ yr old soba restaurant. My mom's has a new favorite Japanese food. My dad still can't remember the word "soba" and just makes up his own version every time

Top: Ali, in front of the most ridiculous intersection in Tokyo, the Shibuya Scramble
Bottom: Watching the organized chaos

And finally, a few pictures to show what a cute couple my parents are

Seoul - Not Business As Usual

2010-05-02T12:52:00.006+09:00

I've been meaning to go to Korea for a while now. It's just a two hour flight from Tokyo and tickets can sometimes be found for just a few hundred dollars, so it's doable even as just a long weekend. I'd been talking about going since late last summer but, for one reason or another, it just never seemed to happen.

Then, a couple weeks ago, the team at my company's Seoul office got asked to show some Japanese ideas to the biggest electronics company in Korea, so they asked my team in Tokyo to help. We had some great materials ready that would be perfect for them, but they were in Japanese, so I spent about a week and a half studying up on the subjects and translating them into English. It was ridiculously in depth stuff, covering technologies that are quite new and full of technical and scientific terms that even most of the Japanese guys didn't understand. There really was no way to translate it without honestly understanding the technology, so I spent hours and hours reading up on it. It got to the point where the only sources I had to check for proper wording often patents and research papers. During that time, the earliest I went home was 11pm, with several nights going until almost 2am. I missed a lot of meals. My eyes were shot from staring at the computer screen so long. But in the end, I got my reward.

The Seoul guys said they didn't know enough about the topic to give the presentation themselves, so they asked for the Tokyo team to handle it. We have a guy who has been an analyst for the electronics sector for over 20 years, many of them spent working in Western banks. He had prepared the bulk of the original Japanese-language presentations and understood the subject better than anybody. Moreover, he was confident in his English abilities and volunteered to do the presentation. Since, on top of being able to speak English, I'd spent so much time with the materials, it was decided that the two of us would go to Seoul together, with him doing the presentation and me providing support as needed. Unfortunately, things didn't go well at all in the end, which was a pretty disappointing result considering the amount of time and effort I'd put into it. Some of the ideas will still work well for other companies too so it isn't a total loss and we'll know what needs to be changed for next time.

The silver lining is that we lucked out like crazy on the timing, with the clients wanting us to come this past Friday. For a business trip to Seoul, you can usually make it a day trip. However, this time the appointment time was early enough that we'd be cutting it too close to fly in on the morning flight, so we got to fly in the day before. Thursday was a holiday in Japan, which meant I was able to take the morning flight and spend the afternoon exploring by myself. Normally, we would have caught the evening flight back to Tokyo but, being a Friday night, it was booked full, so we got to stay on until Saturday. Since it was the weekend anyways, I got to take the evening flight, giving me another half day of exploring. Actually, I'd pushed for more time there, but the company was stupid about it. See, this coming week is Golden Week in Japan, which means Monday-Wednesday are holidays. Logically, since the company was buying me a ticket back anyways, if I picked up my own expenses outside of the time needed for the business trip, there was no reason why I shouldn't be able to stay on longer. But, being a stupidly inflexible Japanese company, rules are rules and I had to come back once the work was done. They would not budge on this. Ridiculous.

That being said, I did get some free time in Seoul, so I won't complain too much. The trip was good and I got to check out a little bit of the city, though there is still much left to see some other time.

My first though upon arriving was "shit, I can't read a freakin thing here...". My second thought was "shit, I can't understand a damn thing these people are saying". Though the Koreans seem to generally have far better English skills than the Japanese, it was still a struggle to communicate. Next time I will try to find someone to show me around...

I don't have many pictures of the food I ate, as I was taken out by colleagues for most of my meals, but I got to eat some great Korean food. The first night, there was Korean barbecue with the top quality and super expensive black pork from Jeju Island. Apparently a few years ago there was a big crackdown on supposed black pork and genetics tests were actually used to confirm which restaurants were offering the genuine product and the restaurant we ate at was one of the few that were actually proven to have the good stuff. The second day, I had bulgogi for lunch at one of the most famous places in Seoul. I also ate other Korean staples like kimchi jjigae and sundubu jjigae, bright spicy Korean stews, as well as odds and ends at various street stalls.

I made a point of avoiding landmarks and tourist spots, focusing instead on a couple of the more lively markets and shopping districts. Both nights were spent with people from work and involved drinking countless bottles of soju. I saw several different night scenes, including ending the second night in what I can easily say is by far the shadiest place I have ever been in my life. All in all, I think I got to experience a pretty good variety of aspects of the city and will definitely back to see more.

As I said, I only got to see a small part of the city, so I'm in no position to pass judgment on it. But I will say this: they make some big promises. Whether they can keep them may be a different story...

Giving A Little Cheek

2010-04-13T00:37:00.001+09:00

I'll get to food later, but there's other things I'd like to write about first.

What I am about to say is not easy to put into words but it has been very much on my mind recently, so I’m just going to toss it out there. I think Japan is starting to lose a bit of its magic to me.

Before I came here, and even for a good while after arriving, I felt like this was the place for me; that this was were I needed to be in the world. Recently, and especially in the last few weeks, however, I have started to feel that I could be perfectly ok living somewhere else. That maybe I would be better off somewhere else. (My mom will probably do a little dance when she reads those words)

I’ve tried to write out an explanation several times, but my thoughts just come out in a jumble. It’s not just work (though it certainly doesn’t help), there’s much more to it than that. I’ve thought about this a lot recently and obviously still have much more thinking left to do in order to get sort this out.

On a lighter note, the cherry blossoms were in bloom in Tokyo for the past few weeks and I managed to get out and enjoy them a bit. This past weekend aside, the weather has been really cold and overcast, which is hardly ideal weather for enjoying the flowers, but warm clothes and good company go a long way to overcome that. Here are some of my favorite pictures:

And finally, the food. Japanese grocery stores pretty much all carry the exact same cuts of meat and it can be quite difficult to find anything other than the standards. So when I decided I wanted to have a go at cooking pork cheek, I had my work cut out for me. To be fair, it's hardly a typical cut of meat, but I looked all over the place with no luck. Finally, I tried a small South East Asian market in Ueno that I go to from time to time where you can buy all sorts of crazy stuff. In one of the corners is a butcher who sells just about any part of chickens, pigs and cows anyone would ever want to eat (and more that you'd probably prefer to avoid), from basics like chicken breasts and pork tenderloin to the more rare such as cow intestines and blocks of blood. I asked for two cheeks at about $1.25 per 100g, thinking one per person would be a reasonable amount. It came out to a little less than a pound, so less than $5 and the guy toss in a few extra chunks for free. Not bad at all.

I'd read that the best way to cook them was a low, slow braise but couldn't find many recipes, so I just tossed them in a pot with chicken broth, soy sauce, chinese rice wine, a splash of vinegar, a few pinches of brown sugar, a couple of dried chilis and smashed garlic cloves, and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Normally when I do a braise at my place I'll let it go for at least 3 hrs, but that's because I don't pay my utilities bill and don't mind eating dinner at 10pm. This time, however, we were hoping to eat by 8pm plus Yuki has to pay the gas bill for her stove, so I only left it for an hour and a half this time. As it turns out, that was plenty of time and it was soft enough to cut with chopsticks. Freaking awesome. In Japan, the braising meat of choice is usually pork belly, but the amount of fat there is just ridiculous. It just seems wrong to make your main course out of anything that is 2/3 fat... I'm not trying to say pork cheeks are super lean or anything, but they're certainly miles better and, in my opinion taste twice as good anyway. The braising liquid was too delicious to waste and meat + rice hardly constitutes a balanced meal, so I stir fried up some veggies on the side as well, thickening the braising liquid to make the sauce.

Melt-in-your-mouth pork, a little salty, a little sweet. Good stuff. I just wish I had time to cook like this more often...

Weekend Getaway - Hachijojima

2010-04-03T08:41:00.008+09:00

A couple weeks back we had a 3 day weekend, so Yuki and I decided to get out of town for a couple days. We'd actually hoped to go overseas, but tickets to just about everywhere were significantly more expensive than usual. As a compromise, we stayed domestic but went to Hachijojima, an island roughly 200 miles off the coast of Japan.

There are two ways on and off the island: by boat or by plane (actually, helicopter is a third choice, though not particularly realistic). The boat ride takes around 10 hrs, with just one boat in and one boat out each day. The one from Tokyo to Hachijojima departs at midnight and arrives a little before 10am the following morning, so we left on Friday night so that we could get started first thing Saturday morning. For the return leg, we took the plane, which is just a 45 min flight.

Hachijojima is essentially two volcanos that popped up close enough to merge together. The city itself is nestled into the valley between them. By no means should it be mistaken for a resort town; it is mostly residential and definitely not the second-home-on-a-semitropical-island type. In fact, it has no sandy beaches and much of the island is fairly run down. But the nature is pretty good, so we can put that aside.

Just using google earth, it was pretty hard to get a sense of what the terrain was like. Roads ring the two mountains, so we thought at the least we could cruise along those and enjoy the coast line. As it turns out, pretty much everyone rents a car when they visit, which makes sense since a car costs $40/day there and we paid $35 to rent two bikes for a day (not that there was much choice: neither of us has a Japanese driver's license). Let me make this very clear: this island is not bike friendly. AT ALL.

Our first goal was to make our way up one of the mountains. In hindsight (and probably common sense too), trying to go up a mountain on a bike is borderline stupid. We probably ended up walking more than riding. Cars flew by us, with at least a grin on their faces, if not open laughter. I'm sure they were thinking "Those poor stupid bastards", and I can hardly blame them. Still, we stuck with it and, little by little, the town in the valley got smaller and smaller below us.

Most of the way up the mountain, there is a field where they raise cows. What idiot thought it was a good idea to raise cows on a mountain, I don't know. But Yuki really wanted to see them, so we went. These weren't the kind of cows that produce Kobe beef; no beer or massages for these guys. They were just regular old cows that happened to be on a mountain. Their milk is supposed to be really good but I tried it and can assure you it tastes like milk, nothing special. Maybe I missed something...

I had wanted to go up to the caldera at the top of the mountain, but we were pretty much dead already and there was no way we were going to make it the rest of the way. I guess it's something to save for next time. This map gives a pretty good idea of just how far we had gone (we were with the cows).

Making our way up the mountain had be torturous, but going back down was absolutely incredible. The hills were so steep we had to ride the brakes just to keep under control. The sun was out, the weather was warm, and we were flying. I'd rank it in my top 5 best things since coming to Japan, no joke.

Once we finally reached the bottom, we cruised along the coast for a couple of miles. There was almost nobody else around and the scenery was beautiful. There wasn't anything particularly stunning about it, it was just all very calming.

After a long and tiring day out, we finally made it back to our hotel. Actually, hotel probably isn't the right word to describe it, but it wasn't really a resort either. It was sort of like a really large house, with several private rooms, a shared bathroom, and a big dining room. On Hachijojima, almost anywhere you stay provides breakfast and dinner (probably because there aren't many restaurants to go to otherwise). The place we stayed was run by a middle aged man who cooked up a pretty respectable dinner as well. He was also a diver and pictures he had taken while out diving were placed all over the dining room.

A crazy storm hit on the morning of the second day, which would have been awful except that we had reservations for a diving course, one of the few things that you could do given the weather. Though the storm whipped up the sand a bit and limited our visibility a little, it was really quite cool. I enjoyed it enough that I'm actually considering going out and getting the full diving certification some time...

The weather cleared up shortly after we finished diving and it was pretty clear for the rest of the day. We hopped on a bus (there is one route, with one bus per hour, and costs as much as a trip all the way across Tokyo) and headed to the other side of the island to soak in the hot springs a bit. Afterwords, we were checking out some of the local landmarks, one of which is by far the coolest hot spring I have ever seen. It's owned by the local government and is coed, so you wear a swimsuit in it (unfortunately Yuki had forgot hers at the hotel, so we just looked). The awesome thing about it was the location; it's pretty much on the side of a cliff, with waterfalls falling to either side of it. Mind you, they aren't big huge roaring waterfalls, just little gentle ones, but the sound of falling water adds a whole new level of relaxation to the hot spring experience.

Not far from the hot spring was a waterfall that showed up on several of the guide booklets, so we thought we'd check that out too. To get to it, we had to hike on a winding trail a good ways off the road, but again were greated by more great nature. Again, nothing jaw dropping or anything like that, just natural, beautiful, and calming.

To keep things interesting, we'd booked a different place to stay for the second night and arrived just before dusk. Because of the storm, the morning flights and the boat line to the island for the day had been cancelled. Our room was supposed to be on the inland side of the hotel facing the mountain, but we suspect that they had some better rooms that were no longer filled since their occupants couldn't make it to the island. Which would explain how instead we ended up with a corner room with a view of the ocean. 50 ft from our window. Score.

We were on the morning flight back to Tokyo, but we woke up to catch the sunrise (our room faced East) and walk around a bit. One of the coolest things about the hotel was a path that lead right down to the water. There was a little bench there to sit and just take it all in.

I managed to catch a couple more pictures of the island from the plane as we were taking off as well.

Our two days on Hachijojima involved a lot of walking/hiking/biking and were pretty tiring physically, but it was nice to get out of Tokyo and enjoy a little nature. It helps calm me down, reflect, and put things in perspective.

White Day

2010-03-19T00:38:00.002+09:00

Whereas in the US, Valentines Day is usually all about guys buying chocolates and flowers for girls, but they do things a little different here. In Japan, without exception, Valentines Day is a day for girls to give chocolate (often homemade) to guys they like and guys are expected to do absolutely nothing. Instead, exactly one month later, on March 14th, they have White Day, which is the exact opposite of Valentines Day, i.e. guys give chocolate to girls they like.

On Valentines Day this year, Yuki took me out for a really nice of creative Italian food, made me chocolates, and cooked me a multi-course dinner. All very good stuff. So the bar was set pretty high for White Day.

I started things off with breakfast. First came french toast, soaked in whole milk, eggs, sugar and amaretto (Yuki is a fan), then sprinkled liberally with brown sugar and cinnamon before being fried in butter. You can buy bread cut super thick here and I used a loaf with nearly inch thick slices. Douse it with maple syrup and it's hard to tell whether you've made breakfast or dessert. To blur the lines even further, I followed it up with chocolate covered strawberries (fruit is an important part of a balanced diet!)

We lounged around for a couple of hours to give our stomachs a chance to catch up. There was still plenty of eating yet to come.

For lunch, we headed to Naka Meguro, in the South-West corner of Tokyo. Yuki had recently expressed interest in North African food, so I'd found a place that specialized in Moroccan cooking. Bistro Khamsa is located right next to the Meguro River in a very beautiful (and hip) part of town. All those trees lining the river are sakura (cherry blossoms) and will be blooming in the next couple of weeks. Even without the flowers, it was a pretty scenic spot.

The restaurant is a small place on the 5th floor of a building overlooking the river. There are table seats for 12 plus counter seats for 4 more, but that's it. From what we saw, the staff consisted of two waiters and two cooks. It is full of ceramics and small items that, as far as I could tell, seemed to be from Morocco. By far the coolest part was the lights hanging from a big mirror on the ceiling. The general feel of the place was pretty bistro-like (or at least, what I would imagine bistros should be like).

Normally when we get a lunch like this we'll have a cocktail or glass of wine to go with it but, far more appealing, they had mint tea. Yuki is a HUGE tea drinker so it was a must have. Mint can be a strong and overpowering flavor but, after dissolving a sugar cube in each glass, it was an awesome combination of sweet and refreshing.

On weekends, they offer a 3 course lunch which consists of an appetizer, a main dish, and dessert. When we go out for lunch, we always make sure to order different things so that we can share and try as many dishes as possible. For my appetizer, I went with a Toulouse-style sausage and Yuki got a vegetable soup. The sausage was handmade and delicious, served with a sweet vegetable puree (I think it might have had apple in it too) and a light salad. Yuki's soup was, unfortunately, rather uninspired. That's not to say it wasn't good, but it tasted like a simple soup that you can get at any of a million places. It wasn't on the same level as the rest of the food we got there.

For the main dish, I went with chicken confit, served with green beans and scalloped potatoes. A confit is basically a piece of meat braised in its own fat (kind of like a half way point between regular braising and deep frying). Once the meat is fall-off-the-bone tender (and this was), it is seared in a hot pan or oven to make the outside golden and crispy. I'm sure it's terribly unhealthy, but damn was it good. Healthy eating is important and all, but sometimes exceptions need to be made. An added surprise was the scalloped potatoes, which were also phenomenal. They were so good I could have sworn I was eating my mom's. If I closed my eyes, it was like being at home again. Big thumbs up. Yuki got a lamb stew with couscous which was quality stuff as well. The stew was full of chunks of lamb, carrots, celery, and some kind of bean, cooked in a broth with coriander seed, anise, and cumin, which I have read are common spices in North African cooking. The broth was delicious and the lamb practically fell apart in your mouth. It was so good I've decided to start looking up some recipes to see if I can't recreate something similar myself.

Finally, for dessert, I ordered a pudding, which was cute and tasty, but nothing to write home about. Simple but good. Yuki got "fromage blanc" with a fig compote. I don't know what I was expecting "fromage blanc" to be (it means "white cheese" in French), but what came out was somewhere between a cream cheese a yogurt. It was a little richer and thicker than most yogurt, but still had that slight sour tang that yogurt has. Interesting, but again good not great.

Our stomachs full (again), we wrapped up the meal with a cup of coffee, served in really cool little mugs. It came with real cream, not milk or little imitation-cream packets, which was a really nice touch.

It was a beautiful sunny day, so we took a walk around Naka Meguro and Daikanyama, the district next to it, to enjoy the good weather and work off some of the many calories we had just consumed. Somewhat counterproductively, we stopped in Dix Neuf Cent Quatre, a little bakery that has a pretty good reputation. One of the coolest things about the store is that they had an open workshop in the back where they prepared their cakes and desserts that you could see into. We were still pretty full, so we just picked up a couple little small goodies to go. We took them to a park at the top of a hill in Daikanyama with a pretty good view and enjoyed them while soaking up some sun.

After wandering around a bit more, we headed back to Yuki's place to relax a bit before dinner. Oh yes, there was still more food on the agenda.

First, a made a red shrimp chowder with corn that I'd seen on a blog I follow. The author had raved about how good it was (though bloggers are prone to that regardless) and it looked like it would go well with the rest of the meal I had planned. You know what: it was every bit as good as she said it would be. It was one of the best things I've cooked in recent memory and I only regret that I waited this long to try it. I had shelled 40 shrimp for this dish and another (1/3 of the shrimp went into the chowder) and had the shell left from a crab I'd cooked the other night (a story for another day), so I simmered those to make a seafood broth while I chopped up potatoes, carrots, celery, and onions. It's a fairly simple recipe with all sorts of little tricks that make it so great. Things like smashing some of the potatoes to thicken the soup, red pepper flakes to give it a little kick, and fresh basil at the end to liven it up a little more. Really the only downside was that I made far too much of it. It could easily have fed 4 and would have been enough for 6 as an appetizer. Unfortunately, it was so good we ended up eating most of it anyways. I suppose there are worse problems one could have...

Yuki is a big fan of Spain, having studied Spanish for several years including a study abroad there, so for the main course I decided to make paella. One of my mom's former clients had moved to Spain and sent her two containers of saffron, one of which she let me have. I had the rest of the shrimp, plus I'd picked up some chorizo and small-neck clams (I'd wanted mussels, but they sold out before I got there two days in a row...) This was my first time making paella and I had high hopes. I have only actually eaten it on a couple of occasions, so am by no means an expert, but can assure you that this was an epic failure. I probably needed to cook the rice longer because it ended up being pretty soggy, bordering on a risotto-abomination. Not cool.

But just when all seemed lost, I pulled out my ace and saved the day. Creme brulee suckas. One of Yuki's favorite desserts. Complete with the freakin blowtorch and everything.

Despite a couple hiccups here and there, it was a great day and I think she was pleased with it too. I didn't buy her a box of fancy chocolates or Pierre Hermes macaroons like most of the 20-something guys in Tokyo do, but I think this was more personal and showed her that I cared in my own sort of way.

Low and Slow - Braising

2010-03-12T00:23:00.000+09:00

Most nights, I'm in a hurry to throw a meal together and opt to whip together a random sauce and stir fry whatever meat and veggies I happen to have in the fridge. Once the ingredients are all cut up it, it rarely takes more than 10 minutes to get food on the table. But when I have the time, I like to slow things down and cook something a little more time consuming, something that feels a bit more significant.

Since, for the first time in a long time, I didn't have any plans on a Saturday night, this past weekend I decided I was going to stay in and braise a big hunk of meat. Thrilling right? I know, I live a life of high adventure. It's totally ok if you're jealous.

I've been reading up on braising a little bit recently so I've got a basic idea of how to go about doing it, but still don't have enough experience to know the little tips and tricks to make it turn out particularly special. With no specific idea of how best to start, I picked up a 1lb pork loin and a bottle of white wine, I patted down the pork with paper towel, then heated a couple tbs of oil in my pan and browned the bejesus out if it. People have a terrible tendency to constantly mess around with food in the pan, when really they should just let it be. I am as guilty of this as any and have found my only way to resist the urge is to walk away from the stove all together. It's tough, it really is, but when you see the color you get when you leave the meat alone, you realize how important it is.

Once I'd browned each side of the pork, I temporarily removed the meat and swirled in a couple glugs of wine to deglaze the pan and free up all those delicious crispy brown bits at the bottom. I then poured that liquid into a pot, added the pork, more wine (I used 1/3 bottle total), 3 smashed garlic cloves, a sprinkle of salt, a dash of pepper, and enough chicken broth to half cover the meat. Normally, you could (and should) do everything in one pot, by my pot is a little on the small side and my pork was a bit on the large side, so this seemed like the best option. Once the liquid was simmering gently, I dropped the heat to low, put the lid on the pot, and left it. After an hour, I tossed in some roughly chopped carrots. An hour after that, I added some chopped onions. Finally, half an hour after that, I took the meat and veggies out, added about 1/2 tbs of butter and let the liquid reduce down into a sauce. Unfortunately, I got a little distracted talking to my dad on skype and let it reduce a bit more than I'd intended, but it was still ok and I drizzled it over the food before digging in. The carrots and onion were soft but not squishy and the pork was tender enough that you could pull it apart with a fork. Normally I'd try to avoid eating a pound of meat for dinner, but this was too good to even pretend like I wasn't going to finish it all, so I just dug in.

Start to finish, the process took nearly 3 hours, but it only required my attention for about 30 minutes of that, making it a fairly undemanding meal. It may not be an option on weekdays, but dinners like this are one of my favorite parts of the weekend.

Something Savory, Something Sweet

2010-03-07T16:29:00.004+09:00

Tokyo has a lot of excellent restaurants, but it’s not uncommon for dinner to run $70+ at them. However, those same places offer lunch for a fraction of the cost, with most of the same foods in only slightly smaller portions. There's also a large number of European/cafe style places that are really good and reasonably priced, but not really the kind of place you'd go for dinner.

Yuki and I try to go out for a nice lunch on the weekends whenever we can, but had been pretty inconsistent about it during the colder months. We recently decided to try to get back in the habit of it and started off by going to Au Temps Jadis, a small restaurant that specializes in crepes and galettes that I'd read a very good review of. We'd actually tried to eat there last summer, after having seeing Cirque Du Soleil with Mike, Satomi, and Mamiyu, but the place was packed and everyone was hungry, so we ended up going to TGIFridays (I kid you not. Worst. Choice. Ever. This is why I usually do the planning myself.) After that, I'd kind of forgotten about the place and we hadn't tried again since.

Tucked away below street level on an alley off a side street almost exactly halfway between two stations, it's neither convenient or easy to find. In fact, I'm pretty sure you would never just stumble on this place, and even if you're actively looking for it you've got your work cut out for you. The place was packed all the same and we were lucky enough to grab the last open table. It's a small place that's cute in a rustic French countryside sort of way, to the point where Yuki asked "Do you think France is actually this cute?". There's seating for about 20 on the inside and for a dozen more outdoors (with a huge space heater to keep warm). A team of 6 women who look like they're in their early 30s run the place, working out of an open kitchen that practically spills over into the dining area. It's a fairly small place with a lot crammed in it, but ultimately comes off as feeling close and cozy rather than cramped and uncomfortable.

They have a fairly extensive drink menu with a large variety of coffees, teas, and juices, but I opted for a thick and rich mug of hot chocolate. The food menu is more or less split evenly between savory galettes and sweet crepes, so we decided to do one from each. We started off by splitting a gallete provencal, filled with cheese and stewed chicken and tomatoes then sprinkled with paprika. Simple, warming, delicious. We had a much harder time picking the crepe, but ultimately went with our waitress' suggestion and got a chestnut and cream filled one, as chestnuts won't be readily available once the weather warms up soon. There was nothing terribly fancy about either the crepe or the galette, but they were so good that they really don't need anything more. Sometimes simple is best. Our total bill came out just short of $35 for the two of us, a steal really.

I'm constantly impressed by the quality level with which restaurants in Tokyo create European food. Their representations of other Asian food tends to underwhelm and I often think that there aren't enough truly quality Japanese places around, but I keep finding great French, Italian, and Spanish restaurants all over. This is the kind of place you want nearby your home to be a regular at, where you can pop in every weekend and enjoy a nice slow brunch. Eating here gives you a feeling similar to wrapping yourself up in a blanket and eating breakfast on the couch on a cold morning, something basic and calming. If there is time, I think I might bring my family here when the come to Tokyo this summer.

Close and Comfy

2010-03-01T21:58:00.005+09:00

This past weekend a few of us got together at Yuki's place for dinner in drinks, the first time we'd had a get-together at her place even though she moved there more than 8 months ago. I hadn't done a very good job of planning and invitations had been a bit late, so half of the regular crew couldn't make it. Fortunately we had a couple of guest appearances to help boost attendance in the form of our friend Jake, who is teaching English in Mie-ken but was visiting Tokyo for a conference, and Yayoi, Mike's girlfriend who has recently started to coming to more and more of our events. Shunji is good about making it to just about everything we do, so there was 6 of us in total, just enough to keep conversation interesting but still small enough to feel close and intimate.

When I cook for other people, I like to go big. Monday-Friday, cooking for myself at home after a long day at work, it's ok for my meal to be a simple stir-fry, but not on the weekends. Weekends give me the time to put real effort into making something special. Not only was this the first time getting together at Yuki's, it was the first time Yayoi had come from Yokohama, where she and Mike live, so I wanted to make something memorable. For that, I called on Thomas Keller, whose book is full of mouthwatering recipes design for 6. I opted to go with Pan Roasted Chicken with Sweet Sausages and Peppers.

Admittedly, I cheated on the recipe a bit. I didn't break down a whole chicken (for some absurd reason a whole chicken is more expensive than the sum of the parts in Japan), nor did I brine it (though I def want to try it some time!), but I did make a soffritto, which I thought was pretty badass. How do you make a soffritto? You take a healthy dose of olive oil and a bunch of diced onions and you cook them over low heat for a looooong time (I went with 2 hrs), then you add a bunch of tomatoes and let them cook for even longer (another 2 1/2 hrs) until it all melds together into a smooth, sweet, delicious sauce. Living in dorms sucks a lot, but free utilities helps a lot.

I loaded up on ingredients in Kameari, where they're cheaper, before heading over to Yuki's later in the afternoon to start pulling everything together. First, I cut a half dozen bell peppers in half and roasted them until they were pretty soft, then peeled the skin off once they had cooled　and tore them into strips. I seasoned a small mountains worth of chicken thighs, drumsticks, and wings with salt and pepper and seared them until the skin was gold and crispy then gave 3 chopped up sausages a whirl in the pan as well. The meat got set aside and into the pan went the soffritto, some chicken broth, and the peppers. The sauce thickened up a bit, to peppers softened, and deliciousness was born. The meat got tossed back in and mixed together to make beautiful sweet meat-meets-vegetable slow cooked goodness and all was right in the world.

I know it isn't the sexiest looking dish you've ever seen　and the peppers look a bit like bright colored slugs, but damn was it good... I like to think I'm usually pretty modest, but this stuff rocked. It is now officially on my go-to list for kickass meals.

Yuki and I also have a tendency to indulge ourselves in dessert as well and it is rare for us to not have something sweet after a weekend meal. One thing we've tried a couple of times now and are getting pretty good is making our own chocolate sauce. While it doesn't hold a candle to my Grandma Brock's homemade hot fudge sauce, it's definitely good stuff and makes any bowl of ice cream waaaaaaaay better.

A small gathering with good food, good friends, and a good time. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday night if you ask me...

Cooking Like Mom

2010-02-20T18:30:00.005+09:00

I've been on a bit of a roll cooking American food recently. Not really sure whats gotten into me, but they seem like things that I ought to know how to make. Yuki had been having a rough spell at work, so last weekend I decided to cook her some comfort food and turned to a couple of my mom's staples.

Her baked mac & cheese will put you in one of the warmest fuzziest food comas of your life, it's that good. Unfortunately, I don't have access to her secret ingredient in Japan (don't worry mom, I won't tell them what it is!) and needed Yuki's sorry little oven/microwave (they often combine the two here in Japan. CRAZY!) for baking dessert anyway, so I went with a recipe from one of my favorite blogs that makes it in a pan and calls for minimal butter to boot. I toasted some panko and sprinkled it on top to add a little texture. It turned out pretty well, though it didn't have the awesome crusty bits you get when you bake it, which everyone knows is the best part. Still good stuff for a cold winter night.

My mom also makes a mean apple crisp that people always devour. I'm not sure if there have ever been leftovers when she makes it... I will admit, for a long time I steered clear of cooked fruit. I looooove cold crispy juicy refreshing fruit, so I never really saw the point in taking all that away by baking them. But I've been more open to new foods recently and every now and then there will be a dish that forces me to give credit to the cooked stuff too. The only problem I had was that I ignored my mom's recommendation to use tart apples, opting instead for red ones that were on sale. Red apples are, in general, juicier than green ones and as a result it took way longer for all the liquid to evaporate and for the apples to start breaking down than it should have. After about twice as much time in the oven as the recipe called for, it was finally at an acceptable point, though to be completely honest it would have been better with even more time. That being said, I made had made a ton and expected at least half of it to be leftover, but we served it up with some vanilla ice cream and ended up killing the whole freaking thing. We have a problem with making too much of something and eating til it's gone. We're getting better about it, but leftovers are quite rare.

It was all a bit indulgent, but it hit the spot and left us feeling full and content.

House Cleaning

2010-02-14T20:17:00.001+09:00

I've been really bad about updating this blog, with nothing really food related in December and just one post in all of January. My last post was almost exactly a month ago. It's not that I haven't been cooking, I've whipped up some really good stuff in that time, but I haven't set aside the time to organize any of it into a post. The more dishes I put off writing about, the more difficult the task becomes. I have a hard time bringing myself to let past recipes remain unwritten, but at the same time it's tough to be excited enough about something I made several weeks ago to feel motivated to write about it here. It's a vicious circle really.

So in order to break the cycle I've decided to do a little house cleaning. With this post, I'm going to clear out the backlog and start fresh. Just a picture or two and a few words about some of the best stuff I've made recently. Some of these really do deserve a post of their own, but I'm just going to have to move on. Without further adieu, some of my favorites from recent months:

I only cooked once during the entire week and I half I was home. When your mom is as good a cook as mine is, you're probably best of leaving it up to her anyways. The one time I did cook, my sister and I made tempura. A lot of it. Probably too much of it. We had shrimp, eggplant, zucchini, carrots, sweet potatoes, and onions. I'll be the first to admit that it probably wasn't the best tempura I've ever had, but it was pretty solid and eating it with the family compensated for a lot.

Not long after coming back, I made Chili Shrimp, one of the more prominent examples of Japanese bastardization of a Chinese recipe. Almost every recipe for it in Japanese cookbooks calls for ketchup in the sauce, an ingredient I'm pretty sure has never figured very heavily in authentic Chinese cooking. My theory is that the red color came entirely from chili-derived ingredients but, being complete wusses about anything even kind of spicy, was swapped out for ketchup by the Japanese. I'm not cool with that so I just kinda made it up as I went and used more chili sauce. Unfortunately Yuki isn't as down with the hot and spicy stuff as I am, so I had to compromise and give it a pretty good dose of sugar too. It was still way better than any I've tried here in Tokyo. +10 points.

My last post was about cooking like an American. A key part of the American diet is big chunks of meat and I was on a bit of a roll, so the week after cooking that chicken, I decided to have a go at roast beef (or Roast Beast, as it's affectionately know as in my family). There's a grocery store in my neighborhood that is aimed towards restaurants, so I went there and picked up a nice 2 lb slab of cow. Back at Yuki's place, it got a generous coat of oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder before being stabbed full of garlic cloves. After a good spell in the oven it came out looking pretty damn good, but it turned out that it was a bit over done and not nearly as tender as it should have been. Still, it was good enough that the two of us ate the whole thing (a little embarrassing), depriving us of leftovers to make awesome sandwiches. Oh well, there's always next time.

The best meal from January was a Coq au Vin recipe that really turned out so well that it really and, in all honesty, probably deserves it's own post. The sauce was loaded up with diced bacon, onions, celery, and carrots and probably got reduced a bit too much, but it was so loaded with delicious goodness that I don't even care. Yet another meal made with the expectation of leftovers that proved to be too good not to finish off. This probably ranks up there among the best dishes I've ever cooked.

This past Thursday was a national holiday in Japan, so I showed Yuki around Kameari, the neighborhood where I live. Despite being a rather random out-of-the-way sort of place, there really is a very good selection of places to buy groceries. One of my favorites is a little fishmonger right buy the train station that has fresh fish and reasonable prices. We decided to pick up a pair of small rockfish to steam up for dinner. The fishmonger had scaled the fish and removed it's guts for us, so there really wasn't much left to do. It steamed for about 8 min (probably a little too long) and I used a sweet soy sauce, scallions, and ginger to finish it off. I've been meaning to include more fish in my diet for a while and this was a good reminder of how easy it can be.

So there you have it, the culinary highlights December and January cleared out and off my shoulders. I'm hoping this will free me up to do better about writing here regularly. Last night's dinner is already in the pipeline, so lets see if I can't pump that one out within the next week or so!

Cooking Like An American

2010-01-16T17:36:00.009+09:00

It's been a month and a half since I last posted about food. If I believed in New Years Resolutions, not sucking at blogging would be one of mine. I'd expected to do a bunch of cooking while I was back home and write all about it, but that work out so well. That's not to say I didn't eat much: the 10 lbs gained in 10 days is evidence enough. But forgetting the charger for my laptop pretty much ruled out the writing part and the option to step out of the kitchen and leave it to my Mom to whip up delicious favorites (beef stroganoff, oatmeal cinnamon-chip cookies, ribssssss) was the nail in the coffin.

Being home was also a reminder of just how much I like some white people foods. When I cook, it's almost always Asian-inspired dishes, usually Chinese or Japanese with the occasional bit of Thai or Korean. As good as that stuff is, there is something to be said for a big chunk of meat. Ribs. Roast beef. Roasted chicken. That's quality stuff right there.

For Christmas, I got a copy of Ad Hoc, a cookbook about Thomas Keller's restaurant of the same name. He is probably one of the most famous chefs in America at the moment and the central theme to this restaurant is essentially traditional home cooking, particularly American. You wouldn't believe the number of times here in Japan that I have been asked "What is American food anyways? Hamburgers??" It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer, but this book has helped me get a better grasp on it.

Besides being a beautiful book that I would gladly put on my coffee table (if I had one), the recipes in at are not unreasonable for a home cook. That's not to say they're easy or quick, but they are much more doable than most restaurant cookbooks and that's pretty much exactly what I look for when cooking on the weekends.

Most grocery stores in Japan sell meat cut down to fairly small sizes. Probably the largest you'll find in a standard store is a 1.5 lb pork tenderloin. If you want anything bigger, you probably will have to go to a wholesaler that supplies restaurants. I was lucky enough to find a place that had whole chickens at a decent price (though $4/lb for a roasting chicken is many times more than what it would run you in the US), so I grabbed a 2.5 lb bird to cook for me and Yuki.

Roasting a chicken is often cited as one of those key cooking basics that everyone should be able to do. It's quite simple really and doesn't involve much more than sticking the sucker in the oven and pulling it out when the time rings. But I've never actually tried doing it before, so it seemed like something I should have a go at.

I roughly used the recipe in Ad Hoc as a guideline, but since it called for a 4 lb chicken I had to ad lib things a bit. I put a half dozen cloves of smashed up garlic inside the chicken along with several sprigs of thyme and a sprig of rosemary and trussed up the legs to seal them in, then rubbed the outside of the bird with oil before giving it a healthy sprinkling of salt and pepper. From there I set it on a bad of potatoes, carrots, onions and leeks, which absorbed all of the delicious chicken juices that leaked out as it cooked. A few pads of butter were put on top for the purpose of, I would assume, crisping up the skin.

Ovens are quite rare in Japan, especially as most kitchens are quite small. Instead, many microwaves have an oven function as well. The chicken just barely fit into Yuki's and had to be covered with foil to keep the skin from burning. Unfortunately, this also prevented the skin from getting particularly crispy either. Though the skin was nothing to brag about, the meat itself was ridiculously juicy. I let the chicken rest for half an hour after taking out of the oven, but it was still overflowing with clear juicy chicken goodness when I cut it up.

Roasting just about anything is a time consuming process. This being my first time dealing with a whole chicken before, it was even more time consuming. Instead of the ~1.5 hrs it was expected to take, it was probably more like 2.5 hrs from the time I started chopping up veggies to the time dinner was on the table. Still, it was quite a good dinner and something I think I could get down pat with just a couple more tries, so it will probably showing up on the menu again in the not-so-distant future.

Christmas

2009-12-26T14:05:00.003+09:00

Last year was, without a doubt, the worst Christmas ever. For every single one of the previous 22 years, Christmas morning was spent in the living room with my family. We woke up early (usually thanks to the encouragement of my sister), nibbled on some food for breakfast, and took turns opening presents together.

But last year I spent Christmas in Japan and, for the first time in my life, I woke up, put on my suit, and went into the office on Christmas Day. It wasn't particularly different from any other work day, but knowing what a special day for family I was missing out on was really tough. In fact, I would have no problem saying it was hands down the single worst day in my first year in Japan.

There was no way I was going to let that happen again, so by early January I was already starting to make plans to come home this year. I first mentioned it to my boss sometime in April, to which he just laughed. I reminded him in July, then again in August after he had just got back from visiting his own family in California. Every time I was told it was ok - as long as I didn't have any work. I bought my tickets in the fall and made sure that for every project I was involved in, there was someone who would be able to cover for me while I was gone. Nothing was going to stop me.

After more than 12 hrs on a plane, covering more than 7,000 miles, I was finally home and, as planned, Christmas morning went exactly the way it always had. I couldn't have asked for more. There is just something calming and heart warming about spending Christmas with family and I don't know that anything can ever replace that. I know I won't be able to spend every Christmas like this, especially while I'm living in Japan, but it's certainly something I would like to do as much as possible.

More than birthdays or holidays or really any other day of the year, Christmas is a truly special day to be with those you love. I hope that everyone was able to spend today with friends and family, and that you appreciate how truly blessed you are to have those people in your life. Merry Christmas everyone!

Home

2009-12-24T10:50:00.003+09:00

Last night, for the first time in nearly 14 months, I came home.

It was a long plane flight and United didn't manage to get my baggage onto my connecting flight (it got delivered this morning). But I'm home, the family is all here, and it's pretty much Christmas, so it's all good.

Unfortunately, I forgot the charger for my laptop, so I won't be able to upload any pictures until I get back to Tokyo. I'd also planned to work through a ton of pics from fall that need processing, but that'll have to wait too.

One of my first orders of business upon arriving was to introduce my family to the Tim Tam Slam, probably the best thing to come out of Australia ever. Seriously, that shit will blow your mind. Tim Tams are available at a lot of the major import shops in Tokyo (I brought back a package each of classic, dark chocolate, double coated, and caramel), but apparently they're a bit harder to find in the US and they only offer the classic and caramel varieties. Still, if you can get your hands on a box DO IT. All you need is hot chocolate/milk/coffee and Tim Tams. Once I get a chance, I'll post a photo tutorial on the proper technique for consuming them (not that it's even a little bit difficult), but in the meantime Youtube provides plenty of videos .

I've proclaimed that I fully expect to gain a solid 5-10lbs during my 10 days here and, considering the amount of cookies I've been eating already, I'm probably on track. In any case, the starting point is 156.5 lbs, so we'll see how it turns out in the end.

Slow Weekend Cooking

2009-11-30T23:02:00.003+09:00

Pay for newly graduated employees in Japanese companies is shit. The starting salary is pretty much the same no matter where you go and, quite frankly, it is awful. That is not an opinion, it's just the way it is. Case in point: one of my best friends is a public school teacher back in the States; he makes nearly twice as much as I do. WTF...

But that's not to say there is no justice in the world. To offset our offensively low salaries, companies own dorms which employees can live in for next to nothing. I pay ~$90 a month for my own one bedroom with its own mini kitchen and bathroom. But one of the most crucial parts is that I don't have to pay utilities...

No utilities bill means I have no reservations about running my stove for a loooong time. This past weekend, I was stuck at my place pretty much all day studying for the upcoming Japanese Language Proficiency Test which I'm taking next weekend. Since I wasn't going anywhere, I thought I'd put the stove to work and whip up some slow cooked dinners. Pork loin was on sale, so I picked up a 1.5 lb roast and started scheming.

I had a bunch of vegetables that were in need of eating soon, so the Saturday night I decided to make a ragu.

I have to be honest here. I don't have any Italian in me, I've never been to Italy, I haven't eaten at that many Italian restaurants, and I haven't even ever really tried to cook that much Italian food before. To me, ragu is a brand of tomato sauce that comes in a jar. So I make no claims to be an expert in these things, or even really know what I'm doing. Fortunately I based my recipe off of Mario Batali, a guy who does know a thing or two about Italian food.

I didn't have sage leaves (and am not even sure where I'd find fresh ones in Japan), so those got skipped. Hand crushing a whole tomato sounded messy and unnecessary, so a can of diced tomatoes filled in. Two cloves of garlic seemed boring, so I made it six. And because I'm going through a phase where something bright red and spicy needs to go in just about anything I cook, I through in a red chili for good measure. The rest was more or less the same.

After a lot of chopping, I had all my veggies ready to roll (good practice for your knife skills btw). The recipe called for the meat to be in "chunks", though didn't mention how big those chunks should be, so I just kind of guesstimated. These look like chunks, right?

I set the heat as high as I could (did I mention I don't pay utilities?) and gave the meat a good browning. The hardest thing about browning meat is fighting the urge to move it around, flip it, stir it, do anything but just let it sit. My solution? Walk away. If you aren't looking directly at it, everything gets much easier. Look how well that worked! Next I took the meat out for a bit, dropped the heat a little, and let all those chopped up veggies soften up. Back in went the pork, plus wine and tomatoes, and I left the whole thing to simmer for a little over 2 hours while I studied (again, no utilities bill for me).

The result: a sauce that really could have been a meal on its own. I actually considered skipping the pasta all together at one point and just eating the sauce straight. In the end, it got paired up with some spaghetti and loaded up my belly. The taste was great and the chili left a pleasant little tingle in my mouth afterward.

Sunday night came around I had still had 3/4 lb of pork that needed cooking, so I decided to braise it. I didn't really use a recipe for this one, it was mostly just a combination of common ingredients in Chinese braised dishes assembled in what seemed like reasonable ratios. For liquids, it was largely chicken broth, soy sauce, shao xiang rice wine, and mirin. I tossed in a couple cloves of coarsely chopped garlic, a few quarter-sized slices of ginger, 2 star anise pods, and 3 dried red chilies (I can't help myself, I swear) to give it some character. Whenever the liquid started getting low I added more broth, soy sauce, and mirin top it off again.

The pork braised by itself for a little over an hour before being joined by some large chunks of carrot and potato, half an onion, and a pair of hard boiled eggs for almost an hour more. Once everything was pretty much falling apart, I removed the solids and reduced the braising liquid down to a thick gravy. Eaten with a bowl of white rice, it was such winter comfort food that I almost wished it were colder outside so that I could enjoy its heart-warming goodness that much more.

I'm hoping to get a small le creuset cast iron pot in the near future which will open up a whole world of slow cooked foods to make the most of my situation. Even if my company refuses to pay me real money, I'll get what I've earned one way or another.

Kansai Long Weekend

2009-11-28T11:26:00.011+09:00

Last Monday was a national holiday in Japan, giving us a three day weekend. It also happened to be right at the peak of the fall colors in the Kansai region. I had tried to round up all the Michigan kids to take a trip to Kyoto together but pretty much all of them were bums and opted out, so in the end it was just Mike, Yuki, and myself who went.

The goal from the start had been to do the trip on the cheap, so we planned to travel by overnight bus and stay in a youth hostel. However, because it was both the peak of fall and a three day weekend, a TON of people were heading to Kyoto as well. In the end, we only just barely managed to get bus tickets and ended up having to stay at a youth hostel in Osaka, which is about 30 minutes away by train. We'd all been to Kyoto before and, to be honest, the bulk of what you can do there revolves around wandering around temples, which is cool if you don't live in Japan but not the most exciting thing for those of us here full time. It's cool for a day, but you get tired of it pretty quickly, so it was actually kind of nice to have an excuse to head over to Osaka.

The main source of color in the fall here is from the Japanese maples, which turn an absolutely stunning bright red. Like cherry blossom season in the spring, however, the fall colors don't last very long here; a couple of weeks at the most. In that sense, you really have to time your travels right or you'll miss out. We lucked out and really couldn't have asked for a much better time to have been in Kyoto.

One nice thing about traveling by overnight bus to Kyoto is that it arrives early in the morning (7ish in our case). That pretty much forces you to get going about your day early, so you don't waste too much time. We left late Friday night and arrived on Saturday morning, then headed straight for Kiyomizudera and Tofukuji, two of the most popular temples, in hopes of beating the rush. Despite the fact that it was still quite early in the morning, there was a healthy crowd at both, which makes the idea of visiting in the afternoon absolutely frightening.

Along the way, there was a little street vendor selling dorayaki. Dorayaki is essentially two small pancakes with a layer of anko (red bean paste) between them. I love pancakes. I REALLY love anko. Win-win. They had two types, one with maple flavored pancakes and one with matcha (green tea) flavored pancakes, both of which they kept warm in huge steamer boxes. I'm not a huge matcha fan so I went with the maple and was quite pleased with it.

After wandering around all morning we were ready for some lunch. We were in the Gion area at the time, which has a lot to offer in the higher price ranges, but we were doing this trip on the cheap, so our options were kind of limited. We finally found a Thai restaurant that looked good, so we went with that. But once we sat down and looked at the menu, the best looking thing on the menu was beef curry udon. Not at all what we had in mind when we headed in, but it was a pretty cold day and thick chewy udon noodles in hot curry sounded exactly like what we needed. All three of us ordered it and it definitely hit the spot.

We hit up more temples in the afternoon, but made sure to grab some good eats along the way. While we were still in Gion, Mike told us about a place that had what he described as the best choux cream he had ever eaten. I love choux cream and the place was nearby so we hit it up, trying their black sesame choux cream. I'm not gonna lie: it was damn good, probably one of the best I've tried. My only issue with it was that the black sesame flavor was pretty subtle, so it didn't do much for me. But the pastry was fluffy and the cream creamy, so you won't hear any complaints from me. We also grabbed some deep fried satsuma-imo (Japanese sweet potatoe) that had been given a healthy sprinkling of sugar from a street vendor near one of the temples. Deep fried AND sugar coated? Yes please!

We headed over to Osaka that evening and checked into our youth hostel, the Guest Hostel UK Osaka. I have to admit, it was unlike any other hostel I'd ever stayed in, but it was absolutely perfect for us. It really was just a regular three bedroom apartment with a pair of bunk beds in each room, with the living room serving as the lobby. At just $25 per person per night it was perfect for our budget and the three of us had a room all to ourselves, something that pretty much never happens in hostels. Even better, it was just a couple minutes walk from the heart of Osaka's nightlife.

We had made plans to meet up with Sarah, a UM friend of ours teaching English in the area, for dinner but the owner of the hostel had told about a place nearby that had what he claimed to be the best takoyaki in Osaka. Takoyaki are a bit tough to explain, but they're basically little balls of dough with octopus in them (it's better than it sounds, I swear) and if there's one food that Osaka is famous for it's takoyaki. We could hardly pass up the opportunity, so we made a pit stop at the shop to grab a pre-dinner snack. I am by no means a takoyaki connoisseur, but these were wonderfully light and fluffy and far too easy to eat. We all agreed that we could probably eat 4 or 5 packs each and not be sick of them. But alas, we had dinner plans, so we called it quits at one pack and headed off to meet Sarah for an okonomiyaki dinner.

Okonomiyaki is right up there with takoyaki as an iconic Osaka dish so it seemed like a good choice. People often try to describe okonomiyaki by comparing it to pizza or a pancake, but the truth is that it is neither of those things; it's simply okonomiyaki. Ours was good, but it wasn't particularly superior to any okonomiyaki that I've had at other places.

After parting ways with Mike in Osaka in the morning, Yuki and I were back in Kyoto on Sunday night to check out some of the temples which lit up the maples after dark before catching the bus back to Tokyo. Our bus didn't leave until nearly midnight so we had some time to kill and decided to grab dessert. Yuki loves matcha, so she got some matcha flavored chiffon cake with some matcha flavored goo (seriously, I have no idea what that stuff was. nama yatsuhashi maybe? I'm just gonna stick with green mystery goo), which she enjoyed. Personally, I'm not that into matcha. It's bitter. Who wants bitter when you could have sweet? Not me, that's for sure. I opted for a parfait which had just a small scoop of matcha ice cream, chestnuts, chiffon cake cubes, whipped cream, and a big generous serving of anko. Much better.

"But Peter, what about the rest of Sunday?" you ask. Indeed what about Sunday. I will tell you. Sunday, my dear friends, was a day of culinary indulgence the likes of which I'm not sure I'd ever experienced before.

It started off with breakfast. The forecast called for rain, so Yuki and I decided to hop over to Kobe instead of going straight back to Kyoto. Temples aren't very fun in the rain and Kobe was just another half hour train ride away. Upon arriving in Kobe, we set off in search of a bakery that Yuki had heard about. She had a rough map, so we followed that and eventually found the Honest Cafe and Boulangerie Comme Chinois. Tucked under an office building, it was a jackpot of baked goodness. I'm pretty sure you could buy anything here and it would be amazing...

When it comes to breakfast, I tend to prefer the sweet to savory, so these babies were a great way to start the day. The first has a super flaky pastry shell and is filled with apples cooked to the point where they melt in your mouth. It was so good that Yuki had one bite of mine and decided she needed to buy one for herself to eat on the road. Next to that is a rusk, which was like boozy french bread baked until the crust is crispy then coated liberally in cinnamon sugar. I had planned to stop there, but they brought out fresh bagels and I'd be a fool to turn down fresh bagels. This one is blueberry lavender and honestly tasted like lavender. What does lavender taste like? Just like it smells. A little mind boggling, but absolutely delicious.

A few years back, I'd tried stopping in Kobe in hopes of eating Kobe beef in Kobe. How cool would that be, right? Unfortunately, things didn't work out that time and I left unsuccessful. But this time I was not to be denied.

Kobe beef is crazy expensive, to the point where having it for dinner is not really in my price range. Lunch is still pricey, but doable. We were scoping out places to eat with mixed success. We were looking at the menu outside one restaurant when a waiter came out and started talking to us, so we asked if the course on the menu with wagyu was kobe beef. He told us that there was nowhere in Kobe where you could get Kobe beef for that price and warned us that recently many restaurants have started calling regular wagyu Kobe beef to attract customers. If we were really interested in getting Kobe beef, he said, we should go to Tor Road Steak Aoyama a few doors down, where the chef displayed the certificate verifying that his beef was honestly Kobe beef.

We'd actually noted the restaurant before and put it on our list of potential candidates, but that sealed the deal.

Tor Road Steak Aoyama is a small restaurant that couldn't sit more than 10 people max. The center of the action is a huge metal griddle with counter seating, behind which the chef cooks your meal in front of you. Like Benihana with class. And none of the stupid tricks.

Things start off with a salad accompanied by a few little braised dishes. The salad is light and fresh and goes well with surprisingly clean and bright flavors from the braises. Next comes a simple bowl of potato soup. The flavor is so simple and hearty that it could only be homemade.

The appetizers are good, but that's not why we're here. We're here for the meat and damn is it beautiful...

There are some veggies that get grilled along side it as well. The carrot and asparagus are braised separately.

The beef is seasoned generously with salt and pepper. Part way through the cooking, it gets a quick splash of red wine. That's it. No need to mess around with meat this good, just let it be.

When people talk about food melting in your mouth, this is what they are referring to you. Cooked perfectly medium-rare, the purest beef flavor I have ever tasted.

I'm a bit worried that I'll never be able to eat regular steak again...

Start the Day Right

2009-11-15T12:40:00.005+09:00

Ryan Bouchard's nickname is "Mr. President" for a large number of reasons. He's smart, has leadership and charisma in spades, and is one of the genuinely nicest human beings I've ever met (I don't think there's anyone who has ever met him and NOT liked him). He also happens to be incredibly insightful. If he ever does actually end up running for president, I will vote for him regardless of which party he represents. Because even if I disagree with him, he probably knows better than me anyways.

Just one (albeit trivial) example of this comes from back when we were in high school. Ryan would wake up early before school a couple of times a week and make a real breakfast. Pancakes, waffles, things like that. With classes starting at 7:40am, the rest of us sleep-loving teens thought he was crazy. If only we knew what we were missing...

There are very few self-admitted "morning people" out there. Most people prefer the warmth of their sheets to being up and about. Maybe if they started off the day with a breakfast like these pancakes they would see things differently.

The recipe comes from Baking Bites, one of my favorite sources for dessert and breakfast recipes, and should by no means be mistaken for a healthy breakfast. There's A LOT of sugar in these bad boys. Then there's the maple syrup poured on top... But you know what: indulging yourself like this once or twice a week shouldn't be a big deal. Just think of it as having dessert at the beginning of the day rather than the end.

p.s. Whenever I make pancakes, they come out kind of thin, not thick and fluffy (coincidentally, I am really good at making crepes). My guess is probably just that my batter has too much liquid in it, but I'm not sure. Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Nothing in Moderation

2009-11-13T07:04:00.002+09:00

My name is Peter and I am a negligent blogger.

Seriously though, I always mean to put together a post but never seem to get around to it. Honestly, as of late I haven't even been able to find the time to process the pictures I've been taking. Work has been quite busy (I did over 90 hrs of overtime last month) resulting in me often getting home from work after 10pm and I usually spend the weekends wandering about Tokyo with Yuki, so I really have very little free time to sit in front of the computer and manage it all.

A perfect example of my bloggin procrastination is this recipe. The truth is that I made this recipe over a month ago and the pictures have been ready to go ever since, but I simply haven't found the time to get to putting together a post about it.

Simply put, this dish is freakin delicious. In many ways it's all about excess: a ton of garlic, lots of olive oil, a generous dose of lemon, and loads of freshly ground pepper. But I love bold, powerful flavors, so that's totally ok with me. Is it healthy? No, not particularly, but it's not awful and it tastes so damn good that it's not hard to forgive yourself the generous dose of olive oil.

The recipe is based off of The Angry Chef's Garlicky Lemon-Pepper Chicken recipe by The Hungry Mouse, who always does a great job of not only verbally explaining how to make a dish, but also providing a photographic explanation (super helpful for visual learners like myself). I didn't have any of the herbs (that stuff is expensive here in Japan), so I just stuck with the core ingredients of garlic, lemon, olive oil, and pepper (which I was particularly generous with). I also stuffed the gaps between the chicken breasts with potatoes and onions to both minimize the amount of olive oil I needed and turn it into a one dish meal all in one go. It still used a generous amount of olive oil, something like 8 cloves of garlic, the juice and zest of half a lemon, and more cranks of the pepper mill than even a Food Network chef uses. No point in holding back: the flavors just won't be as interesting, so indulge a little bit and go all. This recipe was absolutely awesome and I'll definitely be busting it out again when cooking for others in the near future.

Nikko in the Fall

2009-11-01T09:46:00.003+09:00

Fall is my favorite season of the year, with the summer’s sticky humidity giving way to cool breezes, Michigan football taking over Ann Arbor, and the leaves starting to change colors. While Tokyo benefits from the change in the weather, it is distinctly lacking in terms of both football teams and trees.

Yuki and I headed to Nikko last weekend to get away from the city for a while (I always wanted to be able to say something like that) and see the fall colors. With the scarcity of nature in Tokyo, heading out of town is the only real option for properly enjoying the season. Nikko, about a two hour train ride north, is one of the more popular destinations as it offers both World Heritage sites and a healthy dose of forestry.

The second half of October is generally thought to be peak season for fall colors in that part of the country and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Though I’m partial to the bright red color that the maple leaves turn in Michigan, the variety of shades of red, orange, and yellow leaves was quite impressive too. Unfortunately, Sunday was cold (down in the low 50s), windy, and rainy. We had set out for a walk along the coast of Lake Chuzenji, the largest lake in the area, before the rain started and, having expected the weather to be more towards the mid- to high-60s, only had a single sweater each. The rain was quite light, but combined with the air temperature and the breeze made things rather chilly.

After a couple of hours, we were getting hungry, but more than anything just wanted to get out of the cold. Looking around for a restaurant, the pickings were pretty slim and we were starting to look desperate. Then we stumbled on a little European restaurant called Cafe de Savoie that had the following sign out front:

Is roughly says: “Because each dish is made by hand, it will take time for your food to arrive. Please do not come if you are in a hurry“. Eating a slow, leisurely lunch of quality homemade food was pretty much exactly what we were looking for and, looking at the menu, the lunch prices were perfectly reasonable.

Inside, it had exactly the kind of atmosphere I would want if I were to open a restaurant. It felt very much like someone’s home, with all of the items along the walls looking like something collected rather than something bought. The restaurant had just 5 tables plus a small counter in front of the open kitchen and a staff of two: the chef and a waitress.

We arrived around 11:30ish, a little before the lunch rush, so we had the whole place to ourselves. There was a little space heater, so we stood near that after ordering in hopes of getting some feeling back in our hands and feet.

There were a couple of options for lunch, but for me there was only ever going to be one choice: oyako-don francais. Oyako-don is a standard Japanese dish made up of a layer of chicken and egg on top of rice. My mom calls it Japanese soul food. Oyako-don francais, the chef’s own creation, was a bowl of rice covered with a layer of chicken in tomato sauce, a layer of egg, and a layer of demi-glace sauce. Freakin good stuff. Warm, comforting and delicious, it captured all the traits that make oyako-don so good and put a European twist on it.

Yuki opted for the Hayashi Rice, a demi-glace like stew with beef and mushrooms. It was good too, heart warming and a little sweet, but nowhere near as good as mine.

Lunch was so good that we thought it would be a shame not to get dessert as well, especially as nothing on the dessert menu cost more than 600 yen (about $6). Yuki got a slice of chocolate cake with cassis (black currant) sauce that was absolutely incredible, practically melting in your mouth without being to rich or overly sweet. I got a slice of an apple tarte tatin with apples cooked so soft that they put up pretty much no resistance to my fork. It was gently sweet and had visible flecks of vanilla all over it. It tasted like fall.

We eventually headed back out into the cold, but the cozy restaurant and hot food helped take a lot of the edge off of it.

One Year Later

2009-10-27T23:56:00.012+09:00

Today marks exactly one year from the day I moved to Tokyo. Looking back, I can honestly say I had no idea what I was getting myself into. It was my first time truly being away from my friends and family, my first time living anywhere other than Ann Arbor. It was one of the hardest choices I’ve ever had to make, turning down a pretty sweet deal out in California to follow my dream and take a shot at living in Japan.

Ultimately, I think it was the right choice to make at that point in my life.
I’d be lying if I said that there hasn’t been times where I’ve second guessed myself and wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off going to California instead. It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows and it often has hardly gone the way I imagined.

But I’ve been lucky enough to have an amazing group of friends around me who have helped me get through it. Almost everything that has gone well to this point has been thanks to them and, to be honest, I would be completely lost without their friendship and support. So this post is dedicated to them, for always being there for me. There aren't words to express how incredible these people are, so I'll leave it to pictures instead.

Dinner for Two

2009-09-24T15:36:00.014+09:00

This past weekend was “Silver Week” in Japan, the fall counterpart of spring’s Golden Week, with Monday through Wednesday being national holidays. It’s difficult to take time off work at Japanese companies, so people are pretty dependent on holidays to get away from work and I was pleased with the way I managed to squeeze in quite bit. There was a night of drinking with coworkers (complete with late night booze in a park), the arrival of my new 50mm 1.4f lens (it takes gorgeous pictures), a dinner party with the Michigan kids at Mike’s place in Yokohama (always a good time), a day trip to Hakone (obscenely crowded, but the hour spent in the hot springs made up for it), and a night cruise of Tokyo Harbor. It was certainly busy, but that’s fine by me as everything turned out so well.

With 5 straight days off, you’d expect that I’d also have been cooking up a storm but I barely spent any time in the kitchen. In fact, I didn’t cook anything particularly significant until the very last night of the break. Yuki and I decided to make dinner together and she happened to have pasta, bacon, and eggs on hand (quite fortunate considering how empty her kitchen is!), so we decided to take a shot at Pasta Carbonara. I picked up some parmesan cheese on the way over and we were pretty much set to give it a go.

The recipes I’d seen called for using the entire egg, but she insisted that one should exclude the white, so we went with that. Personally, I think it would have benefited from having the white in there as it ended up being pretty thick but it was my first time making it, so what would I know. The alternative would be to add some milk or cream, which is the standard here in Japan, but I wanted to try to keep it authentic and wasn’t down for that.

The past couple of times I’ve tried new recipes have been at friends’ houses, all of whom happen to have gas stove tops. Having been cooking on my stupid little IH surface for the past 6 months now, I’d forgotten how much power gas puts out. It just heats up so much faster. Sadly, this lead to significantly over-cooked (read: borderline burned) bacon for the carbonara, as you can clearly see in the pictures, though it still tasted decent enough I suppose. Yuki also threw together a salmon and onion marinade (salmon and onions marinated in rice vinegar and lemon juice) and a quick salad (I played like a champion, eating the tomatoes and giving the olives a shot) to make it a real meal. Dinner was followed by super creamy banana milkshakes. I added a little soy milk to them and, though I can’t say for sure if it would have been any different with regular milk, they turned out absolutely delicious. God, I love milkshakes…

All in all, it was a pretty solid meal. The carbonara wasn’t bad but it certainly wasn’t going to win any awards either, so I’ll have to work on that. It’s a very straight forward dish to make and has potential to be delicious, so I think it’s worthwhile to try it out a few more times to see if I can’t figure out how to make it better.

As this is first and foremost a food blog, I try to keep things focused on food. That being said, I think there is room for exceptions, so I’m going to make one now. You may have noticed a cute Japanese girl showing up a few times on this blog as my primary accomplice in my eating and traveling adventures. Without going into details, I’ll just go ahead and introduce my girlfriend, Yuki.

Bringing Sexy Back

2009-09-15T17:21:00.006+09:00

I was looking at my past entries and noticed that all my large pictures in recent posts were super pixelated and ugly. This was particularly strange considering that, though they are relatively large for this blog, the original images are more than 5x as big.

After digging around a bit, I found the root of the problem. I'd been linking to the picture that showed up in my photostream on flickr, which I thought was the full size image. As it turns out, those images have actually already been compressed to a size smaller than what I was using for the blog. As a result, when they were expanded for posts, they ended up looking a bit like someone went to town on them with an ugly-stick.

As it turns out, in flickr, when viewing an individual picture, there is an option to view all sizes. From there, if you pick the largest size and link to that your pictures will come out in all their original sexy glory.

Now to celebrate the new found sexiness, a picture from Victoria Beach, which just might have the best sunsets on earth.

You know you want some of that...

ミシガン会＠三品んち (Michigan Party @ the Mishina's)

2009-09-13T22:40:00.011+09:00

One thing I miss the most about American social life is house parties. No, not the cheap-bear-guzzling-packed-wall-to-wall bits of organize chaos that are the standard for college students, I'm talking more along the lines of a dinner party like proper adults (don't laugh too hard at that one). One of the problems with living in Tokyo is that most people (at least, from the early 20s demographic) don't have a home large enough to host more than 4 or 5 people at a time and, as a result, if you want to get a decent sized group together, you pretty much have to resort to going out.

Lucky for us, our friends Mamiyu and Ayumi are from the Tokyo suburbs and open their house to us on occasion. It's quite a haul to get there (it's actually in a suburb of Yokohama, which is like a suburb of Tokyo) and the last train back is quite early, so they let us crash in their living room. It's amazingly refreshing to kick back and relax with friends without having to worry about how when you have to leave in order to make it home.

Saturday night, Mamiyu, Ayumi, Yuki, Mike, Shunji, and I got together for one such party, with the game plan being that everybody would pitch in something to eat or drink potluck style. Satomi was also supposed, but it turned out that she would be coming later, once her choir practice ended. Satomi is the super cook of our group and we were all pretty much counting on her to make something awesome as the main dish, so it was a bit of a shock when she found out that she probably wouldn't be able to come until 9ish.

Faced with this monster setback to our dinner plans, we threw together a mishmash of dishes that would combine to constitute a meal. Mamiyu had already planned on making a gratin, Shunji pitched in his オムライス (pretty good stuff for a guy who pretty much never cooks!), and they also threw together a quick yakisoba. It was actually quite a solid amount of food...

Somewhere along the way it was decided that, in Satomi's absence, my dish was to be the main one. Considering I was planning on trying a dish I'd never made before, that was a good bit of pressure, but I'd put some serious thought into planning it. I'd originally wanted to do mussels (especially as I expected I would just be making an appetizer for Satomi's food), but Mamiyu had checked in advanced and said that none of the nearby stores had any. So instead I went with a recipe for Greek shrimp that had popped up a few months ago on one of the blogs I follow. It didn't look terribly difficult from a technical standpoint, though it did call for a couple ingredients that aren't so easy to find in Japan. Basil is hard to find but not impossible, mint is quite rare, and feta cheese is almost non-existant. Fortunately for me, the grocery store in the basement of the Kita Senju Marui came to the rescue again, with both types of herbs at reasonable prices and a special cheese shop that just happened to have feta (though you had to ask as it wasn't in the displays). The feta was a rather ridiculous $20/lb, but I only needed 1/4 lbs. and sometimes sacrifices must be made in the name of good food.

Garides Tourkolimano (Greek shrimp)
3/4 lbs. shrimp
3 tbs olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 red chilis (one deseeded), minced
3 medium tomatoes, diced
1.5 cups white wine (I used a Cabernet Sauvignon and didn't actually measure)
4 green onions (green part only), sliced
2 cups basil, ripped up
1 cup mint, roughly chopped
115 g feta cheese, chopped into small blocks
1/2 cup parsley, chopped

First, I gave the shrimp a quick shot in the pan, just until they started to turn pink, then set them aside. I added a couple solid slugs of olive oil the the pan and let the garlic and chilis get all aromatic and delicious. Next went in the tomatoes and wine, which I brought to a simmer and let be for a few minutes until the tomatoes started breaking down. Back in went the shrimp, along with the green onions, for another minute or two. The whole boatload of basil (seriously, it was a ton) and mint got dumped in next and stirred into the sauce. I tossed in the feta and gave all a good mix, though I left it for a little long and the feta melted a bit. A quick sprinkle of parsley and it was off to the table, along with some slices of crusty bread for wiping up extra sauce.

The dish was pretty straight forward to put together and got great feedback, so I'll definitely add it on my list of reliable recipes. I bought pretty good quality ingredients and it still only ran me about 2500 yen (~$25) to feed the 6 of us, which is quite reasonable. If I'd doubled the amount of shrimp it probably could have stood on it's own as a main course and would only just barely have broke 3000 yen. I'd worried that ~100g of feta wouldn't be enough, but I think it ended up being just the right amount. The only thing I think I would change next time is I'd go with just one chili or deseed both, as it was a little spicier than it needed to be.

It felt really good to turn out something that everyone liked, especially under pressure. It was also nice trying a recipe that wasn't Asian, as that's pretty much all I ever make and it's probably a good idea to round out my personal recipe list a bit. All in all, a top drawer party, so pats on the back all around!

Something Different (Thai Curry)

2009-09-11T22:22:00.006+09:00

Today I'm going to try something different: I'm going to try to keep this brief. A lot of my entries have been far too long and, as I was reading through the updates of the food blogs I follow, I realized that I don't really like reading epically long entries. Most of the ones I enjoy most tell a quick story, get to the point, and call it a day. I'm not so good at that (this introduction is already getting long), but I'll give it a shot anyways.

I took the day off from work today, only my second day off in my more than 10 months of employment. I had no plans for how to spend the day and, to be completely honest, I didn't really do anything of significance, but it was nice to not have to go into the office all the same.

Usually when I have a good bit of time on a weekend evening, I like to try to cook something more difficult and demanding, since I can spare the time required. I was planning on making Red Curry Mussels, a dish I fell in love with at Ray's Boat House in Seattle, but the mussels weren't looking so awesome at my usual stores today, so I skipped out on that idea and settled for regular Thai red curry.

One thing I quite like about soupy-brothy type dishes like curries, mabo tofu, and the likes is that you can put pretty much whatever you want into them and it will be totally fine. Today, I loaded up my curry with onions, carrots, bell peppers, eggplant, and tofu. I've got a bunch of meat in my freezer that needs eating, but wasn't on top of my game enough to actually have any of it defrosted in time for dinner, hence the vegetarian-ness.

The recipe is based off of a basic red curry recipe from Rasa Malaysia, though as usual I didn't particularly stick to it beyond the rough ratios for the broth. I pan fried the tofu until it was golden brown (ok, that's a lie: I made one side a beautiful golden brown and thoroughly burned the other), then made sure the carrots and eggplant were cooked long enough to properly soften up. My mom will probably feint upon hearing that I voluntarily ate eggplant, but I've come to realize that it doesn't taste like much on it's own and absorbs other flavors quite well (making it great for a curry) and getting some extra veggies in my diet certainly doesn't hurt.

I love spicy foods, with much of what I cook lately coming out bright red from all the chili-based ingredients, and I tried to be generous with the red curry paste this time, but it didn't have much affect. I don't know if the base recipe is just quite mild, if it's the curry paste I'm using, or a combination of both, but this definitely could have done with more heat.

Lunch for Two

2009-09-05T22:16:00.015+09:00

I've been wanting to write this entry all week but work kept making me come home so late that it just wasn't possible. Monday was Yuki's birthday, so I took her out for lunch on Sunday at Cicada in Hiro. I'd actually wanted to take her to La Table du Joel Robuchon in Ebisu, but it was completely booked, so I went with Plan B. I'd read several good reviews of Cicada and their menu looked good, so I decided to give it a shot.

Best. Decision. Ever.

I'm absolutely comfortable saying it's the best meal I've had in Tokyo to date. I cannot say enough about how good this place was. The bill was a bit higher than I'd expected (more on that later) but it was so good I wasn't going to complain.

As a brief aside, one of my shortcomings as a food blogger is that I'm just not comfortable whipping out my camera in a restaurant and snapping away. To me, it just destroys the atmosphere, which is pretty important in my books. It's a different story when you're traveling because you've got that tourist mentality and anything is fair game for photography for the sake of preserving those memories after you go back home. But when you're in your own backyard, it's a different story. As such, I apologize for not having any pictures of the food. You'll just have to trust me that it was all absolutely amazing.

The food follows a general Mediterranean theme, with influences from Morroco, Tunisia, Greece, and Spain. Our waitress was very informative, explaining the origins of almost everything we ate, though she was a bit sales person-ish in making recommendations. Nevermind, the whole experience was good enough to overlook that. Since we were celebrating, we got drinks, Yuki getting the sangria (dangerously easy to drink) while I had a strawberry bellini (pureed strawberries + sparkling wine? yes please!).

They start you off with a cumin and fennel flat bread which, besides being delicious, had a really pleasant chewy texture. You could actually taste the cumin and fennel, which I found nice as many places are so light on the spices that the flavor doesn't stand out. There was also a small bowl of sea salt to sprinkle on it, which boosted the flavors even more. They also have several kinds of olive oils to go with the bread and we went with a Spanish one (we don't know enough about olive oils to make any kind of proper decision and Yuki has a soft spot for Spain, having spent some time there during college). Our waitress informed us that it was a special early harvest one (I honestly have no idea what that changes about the oil itself, but whatever) and that there was a very limited number of bottles produced every year. Lots of fancy schmancy explanations and such, but the bottom line is that it was some of the best damn olive oil I've ever had. It's hard to put into words what was different about it, but it really was top drawer stuff.

Weekend lunch is a course meal at Cicada, which includes an appetizer, a main course, dessert, and coffee/espresso. The waitress told us that the appetizers are quite large (they were) and the best way to go was to order different things and share, so that's what we did. We started off with a feta and olive Greek salad (yes, I eat salad now. I know...) I left the olives to Yuki since she loves them and I'm not a huge fan (I did try them though, just to give them a chance). The salad was quite good and enjoyable, with generous slabs of feta being the key part for me. It was large, even for two, and probably could have been enough to just move on to the main courses. Fortunately for us though, there was one more appetizer to come.

The second appetizer was roasted baby squid stuffed with prosciutto, bread crumbs, and spices. Wow. Probably the single most inspirational dish I can remember eating. There really aren't words to describe the awesomeness. The squid was tender, the stuffing juicy and flavorful, with just a little kick to it. Eyes-roll-back-in-your-head kind of delicious. It was a fairly simple dish, but made with quality ingredients and so freakin good to eat. When I try to imagine what people in those picturesque, warm, sunny parts of Europe eat, dishes like this come to mind. Honestly, if lunch had ended there and we'd just walked out, I would have been perfectly content.

The first main course was grilled snapper with potatoes, olives, and rosemary. It was good, made with nice fresh ingredients, but it takes a lot for white fish to really wow me and this wasn't going to be it. Yuki said the olives pretty good, but the ones in the salad were better. The rosemary potatoes were good, but you places serving up potatoes like that are all over the place. All in all, tasty but completely forgettable, especially following the squid.

The second main dish was a tangine that came in a super cool dish with a crazy cone-shaped lid (I don't know what the deal with it was, but I'm sure it had some sort of cool purpose). There were 3 choices for the tangine: seafood, lamb, or chicken. Considering we're already had 2 seafood dishes and chicken is relatively boring and plain, we went with the lamb. The tangine was basically a spiced stew with lamb, tomatoes, eggplant, onions, and bell peppers. We also got a bowl of couscous to go with it, though I tend to think that couscous doesn't really offer much to a dish besides a kind of weird texture. The tangine was good, particularly the lamb, which was unbelievably tender to the point where you wonder how many hours they must have let it cook. It pretty much just fell apart in your mouth. I thought the tangine itself was pretty good, but it jumped up to an entire new level with the addition of a little chili paste that was provided on the side. It added both gentle spiciness and an irresistible sweetness that made me wish I'd added it from the start. Really, they should just mix the two of them for you, cuz it was average without it and amaaaazing with it.

Next up was dessert. Yuki is a huge creme brulee fan, so she couldn't help but go with the pistachio creme brulee. Normally creme brulee comes in a little ramekin and is a little bit less than you'd really want, but not this one. This came in a rectangular dish about the size of a salad plate and was a solid size for the both of us. The pistachio flavor was very subtle, kicking in more as an aftertaste than anything, which is probably for the best, since a dessert that tasted too strongly of pistachios probably wouldn't be all that appealing anyway. There were several desserts on the menu that sounded good, including a marsala tirimisu and a chocolate cake made with Valhrona chocolate, but I'm of the opinion that when you go to a quality restaurant it's a bit of a waste to not order the more creative stuff on the menu. It was that thought process that lead me to the fennel and apple cake with mascarpone. Normally, I am not a huge fan of warm fruits, but I'd never seen apple and fennel combined together, much less in a dessert, so I thought it'd be worth a shot. The cake was warm, moist, and soft, with the juicy chunks of apple adding both flavor and texture and combining quite well with the fennel flavor. I have to say, outside of Indian curries, I have almost no experience with food that includes fennel, but it was a very interesting flavor. I really liked the cake and think it was probably one of the best desserts I've had in Tokyo.

The bottom line is that the food was fantastic. Having personally picked the squid, tangine, and apple fennel cake, I believe I win the award for good choices (not to brag, of course). Though the lunch we had at Calm Terrace a few weeks back was probably more creative, I think this one wins out slightly in the taste department. The lunch course by itself is only 2900 yen (~$29), which I would say is a bargain for the quality and quantity of the food, especially considering how little that will get you at dinner in Tokyo.

Unfortunately, it can't all be sunshine and puppy dogs. The one knock I have against Cicada is that they kill you with the extras. I'm not sure if I was just distracted and not listening carefully enough, if my Japanese wasn't quite good enough to catch it, or if the waitress just straight up didn't mention it, but most of her recommendations throughout the meal came with their own separate little price tag. The olive oil was about $4, though I would still call that money well spent considering how delicious it was. But the water. Oh the water... At the beginning of the meal, we were told they had sparkling and mineral water, so we went with mineral water. The waitress opened a bottle and filled our glasses. I always drink a lot of of water when I eat out (I would say I usually go through at least 6 or 7 glasses in meal), so I was just drinking away as I always do. A few glasses in, the waitress asks me if I'd like to drink some more, so I said sure. She opened up another bottle and loaded me back up from there. It wasn't until I saw the bill that I realized that those bottles of water ran me 800 yen (~$8) a piece. Say what you will about restaurant mark ups, but $8 a bottle for water is a bit ridiculous if you ask me. For that kind of money, there had better be some virgin in Greece who lives out in the middle of nowhere and whose sole task in life is to collect rain (only in the spring) for the sole purpose of bottling in glass bottles blown by hand by her elderly craftsman father whose family has been making glass bottles for water for generations. Something like that. Ok, maybe that's a bit much, but you get the point. $16 for water is stupid. Fortunately for them it was a birthday celebration and the food had been damn good, so I just took it as being like a service charge and didn't say anything. So, while I highly highly highly recommend Cicada for a weekend lunch, say no to the water. You're probably better off washing your food down with cocktails and it will certainly be more enjoyable.

After all that, it pretty much felt like fate when my local fishmonger had baby squid for sale Saturday morning. Getting the big full size squid is super easy, but I had never seen (or at least noticed) the smaller ones before, so I took it as a sign. 498 yen (~5) for a tray of them seemed reasonable enough, so I snatched them up in preparation for my attempt to recreate that oh-so-amazing appetizer at Cicada.

Unfortunately, I had almost finished making them when I realized that my camera's ISO was set at 1600 (I'd been taking night shots when I last used it), so a lot of my pictures are completely usesless, to the point where even digitally processing the RAW files can't save them. For some reason they look pretty good when I look at them in Picasa, but when I open them in Adobe Lightroom to convert to JPEGs, they are no good. In any case, apologies upfront for a lack of good pictures for this one.

I had expecting the package to have 5, maybe 6, of the little suckers in it, so it was a bit of a surprise to a full dozen 3-4 inch squid. I guess I'll be looking for other ways to use a couple of them for dinner tonight. Squid are not particularly hard to clean, especially these little ones, but it is a little time consuming at first. Once you get into the swing of it, you can fly through them pretty quickly.

I looked up several recipes for stuffed squid to get an idea for what was commonly used and came up with the following list: onions, chorizo, bread crumbs, basil, garlic, and chilis. Several recipes also called for you to dice up the squids tentacles and use them so, not wanting to be wasteful I decided to give that a shot as well. I've recently discovered a surprisingly well stocked (and affordable!) grocery store in the basement of the Marui department store in Kita Senju, which falls on my commuter rail pass for work, letting me go to and from for free. I already had onions, garlic, and panko, so headed over there to pick up some red chilis, basil, and chorizo to use for the stuffing.

I gave the onions a good run in the frying pan to get them soft and sweet and tossed the squid tentacles with them for a split second to make sure they got cooked properly as well. After letting that cool down a bit, I mixed all the stuffing together and started loading up the squid. I had forgotten the garlic when I took the pictures, so I chopped up a couple cloves and tossed them in as well. I completely forgot to season with salt and pepper (the whole process up to this point had taken longer than I'd expected and I was rushing things a bit). In hopes of avoiding having it turn out too boring, I was pretty conservative with the panko, but half way through the first squid I realized that there wasn't going to be nearly enough filling for the 8 squid I'd planned on cooking, so I doubled the amount of panko.

One thing about the dish at Cicada's version that I wasn't able to try to copy was that they roasted their squid, which put a nice browning on the outside. Not having an oven, that wasn't really an option for me. Most recipes I read called for simmering the squid in a tomato sauce and, since I just so happened to have some chunky tomato sauce in my fridge, I went that route. I also happened to have a bottle of red wine that I was drinking that night, so I alternated between adding slugs of that between the pan and my mouth. One for the food, one for the cook and all that. Since the stuffing will expand and the squid will shrink when you cook them, you need to seal the opening or else your stuffing will just gush out. I gave the squid about 15 minutes to each side and ate them with some of the tomato sauce. Since there was still a good bit of sauce left over, I cooked up some pasta and ate that as well. I will be the first to admit that they're not the most delicious looking dish ever. In fact, they kind of look like slugs. But if you can get past that they're good eats. My squid turned out quite well, though still just a shadow of the dish I ate at Cicada, but nothing to be ashamed of, that's for sure. I think next time I will try searing the outside first before adding in the sauce, to get that browning goodness.

Mediterranean Stuffed Squid
8 baby squid, cleaned and tentacles diced

1 3-inch chorizo sausage, diced
1/8 onion, diced
1 tbs basil, minced
2 red chilis, seeded and diced
~1/2 cup panko

Enough tomato sauce tomato sauce and red wine to cover squid half way
Salt and pepper to taste

How to Make People Think You Are Awesome (aka Gyoza)

2009-08-29T18:44:00.017+09:00

Though I'm glad that I've finally got some time to write another entry, the feeling is tempered a bit by the fact that it's only due to a complete lack of plans on a Saturday night. I'll take comfort in knowing that I've got lunch and dinner plans with friends on Sunday, so it's not like I'm a total loser.

Right, on to the food. Gyoza is one of my favorite things to take to parties and the like. Everyone is always amazed by the fact that you made them yourself, rather buy them (sad commentary on the current state of people's dietary habits, but that's another story), like you had moved a mountain or something. You will be praised to know end and people will tell their friends about it, but the truth is not only are they so easy to make it's stupid, they're pretty much impossible to mess up. If you have the core ingredients and don't use crazy ratios, they are almost guaranteed to turn out well.

I will admit that I sort of cheat on one thing: I buy the wrappers. It's not that they're terrible difficult to make, just a combination of flour and water, but buying them guarantees that they are the same thickness, so you don't have any that are too thick and end up undercookeded or too thin and break while cooking. Since they're just flour and water anyway, there's no worry about crazy artificial ingredients in the store-bought ones, so that's worth points in my book. If I had a pasta machine, I would probably use that and make my own, but I don't own one so that's that.

Anyhow, things you pretty much have to include in your filling: ground meat (what kind is completely at your discretion, though I imagine chicken would end up a bit dry), green onions or nira (chinese chives), ginger, and garlic. To be honest, you could get by without the last two, but gyoza are way better with them. My personal opinion is that you should use more green onions/nira than you think you should, at least close to 1:1 with the meat, if not more. It will keep your gyoza from being just a hunk of meat in a wonton. This time, I opted to throw in some minced onions as well, just because. Tekito? Yes, but delicious too.

So what do you do? mince up everything you're going to use in the filling. Add some salt and pepper as you see fit. Give it a little shot of soy sauce if you're in the mood, or whatever kind of seasoning sounds like a good idea at the time. Mix it all together really well and drop roughly a heaping teaspoon or so in the middle of a wrapper. Dip your finger in some water and paint the edge of the wrapper with the water (this is what makes it stick together). Fold the wrapper in half, pressing out any air, and add some crimps to the round side. I used to be too gentler when pressing the crimps in, but the real secret to getting sexy looking gyoza is to give it some tough love to make sure it really keeps its shape.

For cooking options, there are 4 ways you can go. The most common is to pan fry them, which gives you a somewhat crispy wrapper with a juicy inside. The second is to steam them, which will highlight the filling over the wrapper. You can also boil them for a more velvety wrapper or deep fry them for a crispy one. Since I usually pan fry them, I decided to steam this bunch, giving them 6-7 minutes per batch in the steamer, though I pan fried a few just because they taste so damn good that way too. Be careful not to overcrowd the steamer or they'll stick together and you'll have to risk ripping the wrapper to separate them

That's all there is to it. Chop some stuff up, mix it together, fold a wrapper in half and cook. Yet somehow that's enough to have people singing your culinary praise. Just smile and soak it in.

p.s. I hope everybody notices the fact that I am indeed holding that gyoza with chopsticks LEFT HANDED. Since you can't really work an SLR with your left hand and I don't have a tripod, I had to bust out my supreme skills to bring you that picture. Enjoy it and bask in the deliciousness of the food.

A Day at the Beach + Mabo Tofu

2009-08-16T21:32:00.013+09:00

Today I met up with the Michigan crew and spent the day at the beach. The weather was absolutely perfect, in the low 30s and sunny, and it was a great way to relax after a long week at the office. We met up down near Kamakura late in the morning and staked out a spot on the beach. We'd picked up some juice and tea on the way and I'd brought pineapple and grapefruit, so we started off with some of that. The beach is lined with little shacks and bars selling food and drink, so everybody grabbed a bit from there throughout the day as well. I tried to be fairly diligent with the use of sunscreen but alas, as always, ended up burning. I take some comfort in knowing that even the asian kids I was with, who are far less prone to sunburn than I am, ending up looking pretty red. The sun really is a different beast here and it will rock you if you aren't careful...

As I mentioned, this past work week was a long one and not a good week in food for me. Work was crazy busy, with the earliest day ending a little after 10pm and racking up almost a months worth of overtime, so I didn't cook a single proper dinner the whole week. I often packed a lunch to eat as dinner while I was at the office and often had a granola loaded smoothie as a meal substitute. I wasn't particularly ever in the mood for eating (it happens to me sometimes) so I didn't eat very much over the course of the week and I'm pretty sure I lost some weight. Sadly, most of the muscle mass I'd built up during the earlier part of the summer has fallen off during the past few weeks and I'm pretty much just skinny now. Hopefully I can get myself back into the habit of regular exercise again and get back in shape.

After such an unimpressive eats, I felt the need to make up for it this weekend. I had some tofu in the fridge that was in need of eating soon, so I went for one of my staple dishes that's not terribly difficult to make but tastes so damn good: mabo tofu. Really the only problem I ever have with the dish is that it's so easy to make too much and so hard to not eat it all. Fortunately the ingredients are all cheap and for what honestly couldn't cost me more than 5 dollars tops I made enough to comfortably serve 2-3 people. I always am generous with the chili sauce because I like it spicy, but this time I also tried added some garlic and black bean sauce which I thought worked out really well. The meal comes together fairly quickly and honestly doesn't require much attention. To be honest, if you put in most of the main ingredients in reasonable proportions, you're pretty much guaranteed to end up with a delicious dish.

Mabo Tofu
~15og ground pork
200g firm tofu
1.5 tbs toubanjan (chili sauce)
1 tbs garlic and black bean sauce
2 tsp ginger, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
4-5 stems of green onions, minced (save about a tbs of the green part for garnishing)
1 Japanese long onion, cut on the bias (it's a lot like a leek)
1 tbs tenmenjan (sweet black bean sauce)
1 tbs soy sauce
1 tbs shao xing rice wine
salt, pepper, and sichaun peppercorns to taste
1.5 tbs cornstarch disolved in 3 tbs water

Saute the pork, toubanjan, and garlic & black bean sauce until the pork is mostly cooked. I don't use any oil since there tends to be enough fat in the ground meat already. Add the ginger, garlic, long onion, and most of the green onion and saute for another 30 seconds or so. Add the tenmenjan, soy sauce, and shao xing then stir everything until well combined. Stir in the salt, pepper and sichaun peppercorns, then add the cornstarch and mix thoroughly. I usually drop the heat a bit before adding the cornstarch to help buy some time to mix it in evenly before it thickens too much. Otherwise, you might end up with some kinda goopy bits and that's just not fun. Let it all simmer for a bit until it's close to the desired consistency (I like it fairly thick) then gentley stir in the tofu. Give it another minute after that to make sure the tofu gets completely heated (a bite of cold tofu in this dish would just be weird), sprinkle with the saved green onion and a bit more sichaun peppercorn, then serve.

A Mixed Week in Food

2009-08-08T07:43:00.004+09:00

No pictures today as I've barely had a chance to bust out my camera recently. My food consumption this past week was like a rollercoaster, with some amazing highs and pretty unspectacular lows. Work has been super busy, keeping me at the office until 11:30pm on Monday (dinner = small salad) and Wednesday (no dinner) and until 2am last night (dinner = food I'd made for lunch but skipped eating in favor of going out with a coworker). To be honest, I wouldn't really say I had dinner on any of those three days, or at least not a proper one. I went out for lunch a few times during the week and had some pretty decent lunch specials, the best being my initiation to dosa and Indian curry. All in all, a lot of highly forgetable eating. Fortunately that was all offset by two spectacular meals to break up the mediocracy.

Last Sunday, I met up with Yuki in Ebisu to grab lunch and check out a photo exhibit that was going on. Our original plan had been to go to a highly rated Italian place that was supposed to serve up some good pizza, but we couldn't find the place. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise as we stumbled upon Calm Terrace. Yuki and I have are both big fans of the crazy deals you can get for weekend lunches in Tokyo (especially compared to a standard night at an izakaya) and had been talking for a while about doing less cheap eats + booze in favor of high quality lunches. I had actually found Calm Terrace, which does California-esque fusion food, online a couple of months ago but was unable to convince the college crowd back on summer break that, at the same price as a night out drinking cheap beer, it was in fact not too expensive. But as Yuki and I found ourselves wandering Ebisu unable to locate the Italian place, when Calm Terrace popped up there was no need to think about it.

It was by no means a cheap lunch and my mom will probably put her hands on her hips and frown when she finds out what it cost, but ohhhh was it good. To me, going out to eat is only worthwile if you either are comparing the dish to your homemade version to improve or if it is something you simply wouldn't be able to put together on your own. This meal definitely fell in the later category with beautifuly fresh ingredients, creative combinations, clean flavors, and elegant presentation all in a uber-chic setting. The restaurant itself is absolutely gorgeous, with clean modern lines and lots of open space. The restaurant is all one room, with a high ceiling and a small balcony (or perhaps... TERRACE...) elevated 7 or 8 feet above the maining dining area. In the back is the kitchen, which you can see into from the counter seats and is so small it probably couldn't handle a third chef, and a small bar (they seem to have a pretty good sized wine list). This is going to sound really cheezy, but it honestly was a calming place to be. Quiet, laid back, it just feels completely removed from the Tokyo hustle and bustle.

We opted for the pre-fixed course, which was made up of an appetizer, the pasta of the day, an entree, and dessert. Yuki started off with chili con carne and avacado - pizza style, which was a crispy fried tortilla topped with the best chili I have ever tasted. The sauce was a sweet cajun honey sauce that I would probably kill to get the recipe for. I went with steamed clams in white wine, a dish that I can make myself but was curious to see how they did it. The biggest difference is that they were clearly pretty generous with the olive oil for the sauce, which made mopping it up with bread at the end all the more satisfying. The pasta of the day was a thin spaghetti in meat sauce, but with the sauce using shredded white fish rather than ground beef as the meat. It was an interesting twist that made it much lighter than your standard meat sauce and kept a very basic dish from being boring. For our entrees, Yuki went with what they call Spicy Asian sauted scallops and prawns, but was really more like a light Japanese curry with scallops and prawns. The curry was absolutely amazing and the seafood cooked perfectly. Again, not a very standard combination but the execution was phenominal. I had a rare tuna steak with white sesame seeds and a sweet vinagrette sauce. Though the fish was good, it certainly wasn't the highlight of the meal. But I will forgive it, because beside the fish were two pieces of tempura, baby corn and avocado, that won me over. To me, the brilliance of using those two ingredients is all about the texture. Standard tempura is almost always the tempura shell with something moderately soft inside, but not these little bits of goodness. With the baby corn you get a crispy tempura crust wrapping even crunchy baby corn. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the avocado has the crunchy outside with a melt-in-your creamy avocado center. Simple yet brilliant and avocado is now on my list of things I will be tempura-ing for my sister when I go home this Christmas! The meal concluded with a refreshing but not terribly memorable combination of coconut ice cream and mango parfait. Though the portions at Calm Terrace are admittedly fairly small, the pacing of the meal and the number of dishes makes it feel like a huge meal and I had no complaints picking up the $70 tab. I think it took us nearly two hours to get through the whole thing, but it was a beautiful way to pace an early Sunday afternoon.

Despite the gloriousness of Sunday's lunch, terribly dull meals from Monday to Wednesday had put me in a bit of a food slump, so Thursday's dinner came at just the right time. I managed to leave the office around 6pm, the first time in quite a bit that I've gotten out while it was still light outside. The plan had been to meet up with Yuki in Gaienmae over near her office since they were having a big fireworks show at Meiji Jingu, which is really close by, then grab a bite to eat afterwords, but I was able to get out so early that we decided to get dinner first before the firework-watching masses decended on the area for post show eats. I've gotta say I would looooove to work in that part of Tokyo; it's so much more stylish and sexy than the Tokyo Station area I'm currently at, which is pretty much just a big depressing mass of Japanese salarymen. While Tokyo Station is surrounded by izakaya and the like that cater to salarymen on their way home from work, the Gaienmae/Aoyama area is loaded up with trendy little cafes and the like. Yuki lead me to one such place, Nos, a super cool place tucked just a little ways down a side street in Aoyama. We arrived at about 6:45 without reservations, but they told us they could give us a spot until 8pm. Since we planned on catching some of the fireworks action afterwards anyway, we were totally cool with that. As they showed us to our seats, it was like a progression of trendy-ness. Each floor is quite small, but different from the others and very cool. The first floor is a simple bar that only has 5 or 6 seats and standing room for 20 people max. The second floor is four small private rooms that looked like they were probably big enough for 6-8 max. The third floor was a more traditional dining room with a number of tables for 2-4 people and a huge 20 foot glass window view. But we were taken to the real money spot: the 3.5 floor loft, a private party space. Oh my was it cool. Low lit, lots of dark wood and soft lighting, I will almost certainly throw a part there at some point. And we had it all to ourselves. Niiiiiice.

The food at Nos is what generally falls into the category of 創作料理 (sousaku ryouri), or creative cooking. I guess it's sort of like fusion, with no real national identity and a focus on interesting or uncommon combinations. Yuki had a 20% off coupon, so we just ripped through the menu and ordered a bunch of stuff. We started off with Nos original cocktails, Yuki getting "Darjeeling Squash" (I think it was Darjeeling Tea and vodka) while I went with "L'azool Moni", a mysterious blue drink that I honestly could not tell you what was in but tasted good all the same. We started off with blow-your-mind good spring rolls. They were at least a full inch in diameter with huge shrimp, sweet crunch lettuce, and a few other shredded veggies wrapped up in the thinnest rice paper I've ever had. Delicious on their own, they were taken to a whole new level by the accompanying sauce. I tried so hard to identify what was in it, but in the end the only thing I could really put my finger on was ginger and something that tasted a lot like oh-so-fantastic tonkatsu sauce. Whatever it was, I would buy bottles of it if it were available in stores. That was followed by a tuna (raw of course; this is Japan) and avacado salad that was very refreshing, though the light swirl of Japanese mayo on top kinda took it down a few notches in my book. Would have been fabulous without it. From the "hot dish" part of the menu, we couldn't make up our minds, so we asked for the waitress' recommendation. She pointed us in the direction of the satsuma-age (a type of fried Japanese fish cake) which, to me, spoke volumes about the restaurant. Satsuma-age is one of the cheapest items on the menu, but she told us that it was unlike satsuma-age anywhere else and even people who usually aren't fans of satsuma-age love it. The fact that she would give us an honest opinion about what she thought was best, with no regard to how much it cost, pretty much won me over on the spot (not that the food wasn't already doing that already). Just like she said, the shrimp and basil satsuma-age was logic defyingly light and fluffy for something fried and each bite was a little bit of happiness. +100 points for creative awesomeness. Next up was crab and asparagus risotto, with crisp fresh asparagus and big chunks of crab mixed into a creamy risotto. Two things about this dish stood out to me: (1) they were generous with the crab and you could taste it. It wasn't just an ingredient in the name, it was a well represented part of the food, without overpowering the other flavors; (2) the risotto tasted like it was made with real milk. This may not sound particularly amazing to anyone in the US, but here in Japan pure milk is not all that common. Of the dozen or so brands of milk available at the grocery store, I would venture to say all but two or three of them are made of milk and 牛乳製品, or "milk products". In any case, attention was once again paid to the quality of the ingredients used and it showed. We had originally planned to end the meal there, but felt like we could go for a bit more, so we went with the boiled pork and daikon with grated daikon and ponzu citrus sauce, which Yuki had tried on a previous visit and said was really good. The dish was served cold after having been boiled until super tender. It was a pretty simple dish with a very Japanese taste to it that was light and refreshing; just the thing for a hot summer night. Thanks to the coupon, the bill came out to just over $50, which is a steal for such a big dinner and a drink.

After dinner we wandered around the area, checking out the fireworks from several different vantage points before settling down just in time to watch the big finale. To avoid the post-show crush on the subway, we decided to walk over to Akasaka and grabbed dessert at Haagen Dazs. By the end of the evening it felt like I'd done an unbelievable amount of stuff after work despite having been at the office until 6pm, which made me feel a bit of jealous towards those with more balanced work schedules and a little pang of regret for turning down exactly such a lifestyle in California. Even though I think I made the right choice coming to Tokyo, I think I will always feel a little mix of doubt and regret about what I gave up to be here. Regardless, it's the life I've chosen so all I can do is make the most of it! This coming week should be even busier than the past one, but if I can stick in a couple more of these amazing meals there will be no complaints from me!

Dinner For One

2009-08-02T23:15:00.015+09:00

Summer means fireworks in Japan and for the last month or so there have been fireworks shows somewhere in the Tokyo area almost every weekend. I tried to organize all the Michigan kids to go see this week's big one, but pretty much everyone either already had plans or wasn't interested. As that group pretty much constitutes my entire social life in Japan, I was left with a completely open calender for Saturday night.

There had been some construction going on near my place all day, so I didn't think too much of it when I first started hearing loud banging noises around 7pm. I finally figured out what was really going on and, having nothing better to do, thought I'd check it out a little. I had been able to see the fireworks from the train on my way home last weekend and since this week's were also supposed to be going on a little South of here, I thought I might be able to see something if I headed to the river near my place since it runs North-South. When I got there, I discovered that not only were they being launched to the South (which I could only just barely see off in the distance), they were also going on much closer to the east. I watched for a little while, taking some pictures, then headed back to my place. Unfortunately, it took me a while to realize that not only could I see the fireworks from my balcony (my room faces east) but that the view was far better from up there. Still, I managed to catch the last hurrah, so that was nice.

I have to say, fireworks really are not meant to be watched by oneself. It was a nice cool summer evening that would have been perfect for having a picnic and watching the show, which only made the loneliness all the more poignant.

To make matters worse, when grocery shopping that morning, I had bought ingredients to cook the kind of dish for dinner that would be far better for a dinner date than dinner for one. For some reason, scallops scream date food to me. They certainly aren't something often served for dinner for a large number of people and something just seems strange about the idea of eating them by oneself. But, most weekends, my local grocery store has a local fishmonger set up shop in a part of the store and the scallops had been catching my eye for quite some time. I honestly haven't had scallops that many times in my life, so I'd hardly call myself a big fan, but something about the idea of the fishmonger picking out the shell, cutting the scallop out, tossing it into a bag, and handing it over to me suggested a kinda of freshness that I wanted to try. I picked up 3 of the little suckers at ~$1 a pop, which seemed pretty reasonable to me.

I'd looked at a few recipes to try to find inspiration and though I didn't find anything that sounded quite like what I was in the mood for, I did find some good tips on how to sear the scallops. I think particularly important is making sure to dry them off really well and having a really hot non-stick pan. Having the heat up high is also key, as the inside will continue cooking even after you remove the scallops from the pan, so you want to sear the outside as quickly as possible to avoid overcooking the whole thing. Though I'm not a fan at all of my IH stovetop, I will at least acknowledge that it will get crazy hot if you jack the temperature up and it did the trick well enough for the scallops.

I'm a big fan of light and sweet sake-soy sauce based sauces with seafood, so I threw together a mix of roughly 2 tbs sake, 1/2 tbs soy sauce, 1/2 tbs mirin, 1/2 tsp sesame oil. It's a pretty basic set of flavors that seem to match well without overpowering the fish. I sauted some sliced up bell peppers as well to keep things from being too boring and to add a little nutritional balance to the meal.

In the end, the whole process went like this:
(1) Clean scallops, drying thoroughly. Lightly season with salt and pepper
(2) Quickly saute bell peppers until about half done. Remove from pan.
(3) Add a glug of olive oil to the pan and turn the heat up high.
(4) Place scallops in pan and leave undisturbed for 1.5~2 min
(5) Flip scallops and cook for another minute
(6) Remove scallops and deglaze pan with sake. Scrape up any bits of scallop stuck to pan
(7) Add remaining sauce ingredients and reduce for 3~4min (the time is a total guess on this one, but that's about what it felt like). About 2/3 of way through add the bell peppers back to the pan and finish cooking
(8) Plate bell peppers. Place scallops on top, then drizzle with sauce

The scallops seared up beautifully, with that sexy brown crust on the outside but the tender, just barely cooked middle. But, to be totally honest, I just don't think I'm a big scallop fan. Before you go telling me that I just didn't cook them right, I'll point out that I've had them in restaurants before as well and they just don't really do it for me. I had been hoping it would be different this time because I was using good fresh ones, but it really wasn't. That's not to say they were bad, it's just that there are a lot of other kinds of seafood or meat that I think I would have liked more. In any case, it's one more thing I can say I've tried cooking and I think the things I found out about searing them will hold true for other types of seafood as well. Oh well, live and learn.

Weekend Breakfasts

2009-08-01T16:14:00.005+09:00

My whole life, I have been a skinny. On occasion, I've been teased about it or told I should probably gain some weight. But, to be completely honest, I love being skinny. To me, skinny is beautiful and getting fat ranks up pretty high on my list of fears. Growing up, I could eat however much of whatever I wanted and wouldn't gain a pound. Unfortunately, those days are over, with the sedentary life of a desk job only making things worse.

In order to avoid picking up extra pounds, I've changed up my diet quite a bit recently. Meat consumption is waaaay down, often swapped out for seafood or excluded all together. Veggies play a huge role and I've even taking to eating salads on occasion (I think I just heard my mom gasp on the other side of the Pacific). Snacks and desserts are rare, bordering on non-existent. Portions are generally just large enough to get me through to the next meal (which, to be honest, is probably the appropriate amount, but certainly not what I, or most people for that matter, am used to). And you know what, it absolutely works. The calorie count is probably too low, but I don't feel like I lack energy and I'm confident that I'm getting the necessary nutrition.

There are times, however, where I worry that I'll do a Michael Jackson: develop an ideal image and go too far pursuing it. Michael Jackson was a cool guy way back in the day. But he decided he wanted paler skin and a thinner nose. At first, he lightened up a bit and trimmed the nose down a little, and that was ok. But then he kept going; paler and paler, thinner and thinner. When all was said and done, he'd gone too far and it just didn't look right anymore.

I don't want to be like Michael Jackson's nose, ending up so thin that it's not cool anymore. So, in the midst of all my dietary control, I allow myself some indulgences, one of which is weekend breakfasts. I do most of my grocery shopping for the week on either Saturday or Sunday morning, but since nothing is open before 10am and I wake up at 7am, I've got some time to kill so I try to make something a bit more luxurious than my weekday granola-and-banana breakfast.

My latest undertaking in weekend morning indulgence was based off of a recipe discovered on one of the food blogs I regularly follow. French toast is one of my favorite breakfast foods and snickerdoodles also happen to be delicious, so how it sounded like win-win to me. Plus, I'd recently bought a bunch of cinnamon sticks, so I was able to use fresh ground cinnamon to make the cinammon sugar (yes, I do indeed have too much free time on weekends). I mixed together an egg and some milk (I think I used about 100ml, but really wasn't paying too much attention to the details) and tossed in some bread for a little bath. For those who are into sticking to a recipe, the original can be found here.

From there, I melted a bit of butter in a pan over medium heat, added two slices of bread, and gave it a healthy dusting of cinnamon sugar. After a minute or two, I flipped the bread and gave it another dose of the sweet stuff. I used up most of the amount in the picture above, probably about a tablespoon and a half (again, didn't really measure) between four slices of bread. Was it a lot? Yeah, but damn was it delicious. If I'm going to indulge, I like to get the most out of it.

After the bread was good and coated, I left it to brown on both sides, then repeated the whole process with the other two pieces. Since clearly this wasn't enough sugar for one day, I finished it off with a healthy sprinkle of powdered sugar and the remaining cinnamon sugar. It probably would have been good with some syrup on there too, but that stuff is stupid expensive in Japan and my heart might have exploded with that extra sugar anyway. It doesn't really matter as it was freakin awesome just as it was. I figure I can get away with letting go like this once every week or two and it's an absolutely wonderful way to celebrate not having to be in the office!

Hong Kong

2009-07-26T19:16:00.004+09:00

As I wrote in the previous post, I spent last weekend in Hong Kong and I've gotta say it was one damn good trip. The weather was not so awesome, between the disgustingly hot and humid afternoons, the rainy evenings, and the year's first typhoon which we got caught in on our first night. But you know what, even all that wasn't enough to put a damper on the weekend. First class stuff.

We stayed in the Intercontinental Hong Kong, which I am convinced has the best view of any hotel in the city. Don't believe me?

The view from our room in the morning and at night. That's the heart of Hong Kong you're looking at. Too sexy... Everything about the hotel was beautiful too. Hands down the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in. It made for a great place to start and end each day.

We saw some really cool things and I took a bunch of good pictures, but food was a major part of the trip and this is supposed to be a food blog, so I'm going to focus on some of the eats. I didn't take a picture of everything we ate (though I certainly wanted to!) as I'm still not total comfortable whipping out my big DSLR in the middle of a restaurant and snapping away just yet. I also didn't get great pictures of several dishes as I tended to rush things so as to be able to put the camera away as quickly as possible. That being said, some of them turned out quite well and make my stomach happy just looking at them.

Food is ridiculously inexpensive in HK. We were hard pressed to break $60~70 on a meal for the two of us and often found that $30, the bare minimum price for an evening at an izakaya in Tokyo, was enough to stuff us both with quality food. It's probably a good thing that I don't have access to food like that here or I'd cook way less and almost certainly gain a good bit of weight.

I made a point to eat things that the area is known for. I can get Japanese food easily enough around here and it would probably be better, but there are a lot of Chinese dishes that are hard to find in Tokyo.

Char Siu Bao: Chinese BBQ pork buns. I could eat these every day for the rest of my life and never get tired of them

Shao Lung Bao: Soup dumpling. The filling is made with a type of gelatin (I think that's right). Anyway, the way it works is that the filling is solid when the dumplings are put together, then melts when they are steamed, giving it a soupy filling. I'm thinking of learning how to make these, so I suppose I'd better figure out how they actually do the filling...

Noodle soup with Black Pepper Beef Balls. The number of jokes that can be made about beef balls is pretty much endless, but that doesn't change the fact that they're delicious. One of the staple foods of eateries in HK is noodle soup, usually made up of a light broth, rice noodles, and whatever else you want put in there. Filling, delicious, light, and at ~US$4-5 a bowl super affordable.

Kiwi juice. One of the hands down worst things about Japan is how stupid expensive fruit is. It is borderline offensive what they charge for some things. But not in Hong Kong. Oh no, HK throws fruit at you left and right. This bottle of kiwi juice is just an example of the tons of kinds of 100% fruit juices available for US$1-2 at just about every convenience store. On top of that, there are tons of fresh juice shops scattered about Kowloon where they will cut the fruit in front of you, toss it in a juicer, and hand you the glass. That's about as pure as it gets and the perfect remedy for the oppressively hot summer days. Just some of the kinds we tried: Kiwi, Mango, Guava, and Dragonfruit. We were looking watermelon juice, but couldn't seem to find it anywhere.

African Chicken @ Henri's Galley. A Macau specialty, I'm still not sure what relationship it has to Africa or why it's in Macau, but it is freakin good and cost less than US$30 for half a chicken's worth!

Curry Crab @ Henri's Galley, another Macau specialty. When we ordered it they brought out a bucket with a live crab in it for our inspection and quoted a price. Less than US$40 for the whole crab! Crab is messy business as it is and even more so when it's coated in curry sauce, but man was it good. It had one of the biggest pincers I have ever seen on a crab, which made for one giant chunk of crab meat.

Egg Tart @ Cafe e Nata, the place that supposedly invented the Macanese style egg tart. Buttery crust, silky filling. Simple and pleasing, I ate two and that was probably my limit for one sitting. I imagine these would probably go really well with milk tea.

It had been almost a year since I had last been on a trip and this one was a great way to get back in the groove. It was such a good time that we have already settled on our next destination: Korea! I think the game plan will be to hit it up sometime in the fall, possibly over the long September break (unless the prices are ridiculous). I've got lots of countries left to visit in Asia and not nearly as many holidays, so I'll be trying to take my chances from here on out!