It's Never Too Late To Learn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!