Spring it on!

In Japanese, they are called nama haru maki, or raw spring rolls. In the US, I have eaten them at Thai restaurants. They are made with greens, rice noodles and shrimp wrapped in soft rice paper, then dipped in sweet chili sauce. We found a kit containing the rice paper, noodles, dipping sauce and instructions at Muji and decided to give it a try.

The hardest part was preparing the rice paper...dipping the thin, clear disks into warm water without breaking them. Also we did all the prep before we were ready to assemble them, which turned out fine in the end, but next time we know to moisten the rice paper right before assembly. Below are the ingredients, lined up and ready to be rolled (plus some edamame for snacking on.)

First step was to put cucumbers, green onions, shiso leaves and rice noodles together at the bottom of the rice paper...

Next, roll up the bottom and the sides like you are making a burrito and stack the shrimp on top...

Finish rolling and assemble together on a plate.

Arrange dipping sauces; sesame dressing on the bottom and sweet chili sauce on the top.

Eat! The kit made about a dozen spring rolls, which while fairly filling didn't quite make a whole meal, so we also threw together a large pan of yakisoba or grilled noodles with vegetables and pork.

The spring rolls were fun to make and easy enough that I won't have to go to a restaurant the next time I want to eat them.

Homemade Tomato Sauce

Despite my love of pasta, I have never made my own tomato sauce before. I have always relied on the ones that come in jars and packets with varying degrees of success (I tend to like the chunky Ragu ones, and dislike anything thin and reminiscent of Spaghetti-0's.)

Technically, I didn't make last week's sauce either, but I did make the salad and garlic toast while Keizo chopped, boiled, stirred and seasoned. Since wine goes so well with pasta and is a bit fancy, I decided to go all out and set the table with a candle for fun.

The salad was spinach with chopped apples, raisins and slivered almonds with a creamy dressing.

The main dish was spiral pasta with homemade sauce, chicken meat balls and the last of our

Costco cheese mixed in and baked until crispy on the top with a side of garlic toast. Keizo's tomato sauce was not too sweet and had a bit of an unusual flavor from the oyster sauce he added to the recipe he found on cookpad.com Tasty, and will definitely make it again, maybe even instead of relying on a jar!

Mother knows best

Scary but true--moms often know what they are talking about. In addition to shiny little nuggets of wisdom such as "beauty must suffer" and "evaporation is a cooling process," one of my mother's most frequent "mom-isms" is "you'll feel better after you eat."

After yet another failed attempt at starting the day before the clock hit double digits, I was lying in bed feeling a bit guilty for sleeping away my relative youth and dreading the moment when my feet would inevitably have to touch the cold floor on the way to the bathroom when these familiar words crept into the front of my mind. Being that it was almost lunchtime, and I can only eat so many pieces of toast and eggs, I decided to bump tonight's dinner recipe up to lunch. Keizo is out of town for a rugby game, so the recipe I had chosen was "Spicy Chickpeas and Tomatoes" from an old issue of Vegetarian Times.

The first step was to roast the cumin and mustard I had successfully found at the grocery store yesterday in a fry pan before adding the olive oil and chopped onions.

While the onion cooked, I chopped up some spinach and drained the chickpeas.

After adding all of the ingredients to the fry pan, letting it simmer for about 10 minutes and re-heating some leftover rice, I was ready to eat. And since it was my first meal of the day, there was coffee to go with it.

The recipe is supposed to feed four, but I think Keizo will be very lucky if there is any left for him to try when he gets back after dinner tonight.

Thanks Mom, I do feel better now that I have eaten.

Hot-n-spicy

On Wednesday, Keizo's day off, we spent the afternoon in the Kurume tax office, trying to get my pension refund straightened out. An hour of paper work, one follow up phone call and some copies of my passport later, it should be on its way. Anyway, after dealing with all the bureaucracy, it was an especially nice treat to head to Naoko-sensei's house for a delicious dinner and some calligraphy practice. It was also very nice of her to send us home with some left over curry and pickled cabbage, which we put to good use for dinner the next day.

Real curry, made with a mix of spices rather than the cubes of roux that I always use. Mmmmm!

On the side, pan-fried eggplant and renkon with minced chicken. Keizo picked these up pre-assembled at the farm stand/travel stop near his practice ground. They were good, but needed some sort of dipping sauce to make the flavors really stand out.

Side #2 was some of Naoko-sensei's pickled hakusai and some store bought kimchi to zest it up a bit. Not as quite good as the authentic Korean kimchi she served us, but still yummy mixed with the pickled cabbage.

Even with the food all gone, it made for a colorful meal!

Balance

Even though I am just a spectator, I find Keizo's rugby games exhausting. The game itself is 80 minutes long, plus a 10-15 minute half time. Getting to the ground isn't hard, but requires a walk to the station, a train ride, transferring to the subway and then taking a bus, which takes about an hour and a half each way.

Last week, it was particularly cold with intermittent snow flurries (See giant thermometer!) Keizo's team won though, and my friend Hannah I spent an hour in Starbucks afterwards to regain feeling in our fingers and toes, making 90 minutes on the freezing cold bleachers much less painful.

When I finally made my way back to the apartment, neither Keizo nor I really felt like leaving again to pick up dinner supplies. So we called "Pizza California" and had them deliver two medium (American small) pizzas and some nice, hot and greasy tater tots on the side and plopped ourselves in front of the TV for the evening.

Teriyaki chicken pizza on the top, and Italian sausage on the bottom.

After spending Sunday night in all out couch potato mode, Monday's dinner needed to be something a bit more nutritious. We focused on vegetables and made eggplant champuru when we couldn't find goya (bitter melon) and put some sweet potatoes in the tajine cooker with a little bit of butter. The eggplant turned the rest of the champuru ingredients (tofu, pork and scrambled eggs) a bluish tint, but it still tasted good was a complete 180 from the night before.

Lucky Girl

I am a very lucky girl to have a fantastic boyfriend, who despite my mood swings and large clumps of hair in the shower drain, still wants to be with me and often goes above and beyond to prove that to me. Recently, this has involved a midnight trip to the ER and some extra cooking and dish washing duties. Since this is a food blog and the wound stings as it is, I won't go into all the gory details. Let's just say that I tripped while jogging, and now there is significantly less skin on my left palm than there used to be.

In addition to my rather gruesome injury, my application for the University of Washington was due over the weekend, so while I was madly typing away on the last bit of it, Keizo made us dinner. I provided the recipe for "Peanut Noodle Salad," but he did everything else. I love this recipe because it's easy to prepare and makes enough dressing for at least two meals. The dressing is little more than peanut butter, sesame oil and chili powder thinned with some hot water then poured over soba noodles, tofu and steamed vegetables. It's good served either warm or cold, and I think it makes the perfect vegetarian meal.

Another favorite vegetable recipe of late is "Vinegared Carrot and Daikon Salad," which I found on the website of the Boston Globe of all places. While it requires a bit of advance planning, the short ingredient list and tasty results are well worth it. After cutting the carrots and daikon (Japanese radish) into thin strips, toss the vegetables with salt and let sit. Make the vinegar and sugar dressing; rinse off the salt and toss together. Serve with white sesame seeds. Sweet and crunchy!

Thanks Keizo for taking care of me, not only while my left hand is a bit out of commission, but all of the times before that, and those yet to come too.

More cheese, please!

I apologize for the cliche, but if you are looking for a gift that keeps on giving, consider the gift of Costco membership for all the hungry people in your life. I bought one for Keizo's birthday last summer, and it was probably the best thing I could have gotten him. In fact, trying to think of something to top it in terms of novelty and usefulness is pretty much impossible, which is why he only got some chocolate for Christmas.

Anyway, Costco is great for many things. Keizo likes to buy dried seaweed and instant ramen in bulk; I like to stockpile pasta and eat American bagels for breakfast. But the best thing Costco in Japan has to offer is large quantities of real cheese at reasonable prices, relatively speaking. On our last visit, not wanting to commit to five pounds of cheddar, we picked up a "party" tray with four varieties of sliced cheese.

And "party" it up we have! All by ourselves, with a myriad of cheesy recipes. First up, tuna casserole from Kay Kellog's Creative Cookery, copyright 1971! I snatched up this book when my mom was cleaning out her cookbook collection. While it's not quite as entertaining to read as the Betty Crocker home entertaining book from the same era (What? You don't have a tea trolley to serve dessert from?) the 7 cent coupons still stuck inside give it some historical flair.

The recipe said it served 6, so I cut it in half when preparing the sauce, but then doubled the amount of canned tuna and added some extra pasta when the two seemed dwarfed by the bucket of sauce. If I had followed the original recipe the result would have been a lot more like cheese soup! After 15 minutes in the oven, we were ready to eat.

Mmmmm cheesy!

Another acquisition from our last Costco adventure was an 8-can pack of diced tomatoes, since we seem to be buying them fairly regularly at the grocery store. When combined with a can of refried beans (another Costco acquistion from a previous trip) and some chicken broth, they make a deliciously simple "tortilla soup." The soup is edible on its own, but is greatly enhanced and turns into a full meal by adding a generous topping of tortilla chips with melted cheese, avocado slices and tiny dollop of sour cream.

Just for fun, let me wrap up with another cliche. Just as every cloud has a silver lining, hot cheesy casserole and steamy soup with a bit of spice wouldn't taste nearly as good without the frigid temperatures outside (or in the hallway, which as become like a second refrigerator for storing beer and root vegetables.)

Insomnia

Since New Year's, I have had a hard time getting back to a regular sleep schedule. Catching a cold from Keizo and sleeping until 1 PM on Friday didn't help things either. What's a girl to do after she reads until 1 AM and still can't fall asleep for another hour or so? My solution so far is to wake up around 10 or 11, which really isn't solving anything and makes me feel like I am already a few hours behind on my day before I even can find my slippers and make it to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Super.

One small consolation however has been a few delicious brunches over the past week. 11 is too late for breakfast, and I am too hungry to wait an hour to eat lunch. So in addition to my routine breakfast of coffee, toast and yogurt, I've been adding eggs, meat and smoothies.

That's a pinapple-orange-banana smoothie on the left with toast and a sunny side up egg. Not too shabby, but hardly worth comparing to the highlight of the week:

French Toast and Sausage Skillet adapted from a tajine cookbook recently borrowed from the library. In a word, hearty.

Maybe to help me get to sleep earlier I should be spending my evenings immersed in hot water like this adorable monkey tea bag, courtesy of Keizo's sister. Now there's a thought...

Mochi Madness Pumpkin Party

If your freezer looks like this...

...and there's a darling kabocha hibernating in the spare room...

...what in the world should you make for dinner?

I am so glad you asked. The frozen mochi (pounded rice cakes) is but a fraction of the total amount we have received from Keizo's generous parents. I like mochi; but not having grown up eating it, I really don't know what to do with it. We had some toasted with soy sauce the other night for dinner instead of rice and it was okay, but we really needed a recipe that would help us use up a chunk of it. And thanks to the Internet, we found one!

Mochi pizza! While Keizo sliced up some potatoes to mix with the softened mochi to form the "crust" I got started cutting up the kabocha for a side of pumpkin soup. After "roasting" it in the microwave, I scraped the flesh from the skin into the blender and blended it with chicken stock, poured the mixture into a pot, added fresh cream, nutmeg and some rosemary and voila!

Keizo assembles the pizza in the fry pan--much faster than waiting for the oven to heat up!

Soup and pizza just before we get ready to demolish them.

The pizza up close. I insisted on canned pineapple and ham as the toppings of the evening.

The pumpkin soup recipe made a whole pot full, so I got to enjoy it for several meals, including lunch with a side of cheesy garlic toast.

I think we will definitely be making both of these again as they were warm, delicious and there is still a bunch of mochi in the freezer.

"Hoppy" New Year

While Keizo was at work cleaning his clubhouse with his teammates on December 31st, I was sitting at the kitchen table grumpily making a list of all things I thought we needed to do to get the apartment sparkling clean for the new year and starting on the giant pile of laundry that had accumulated. New Year's in Japan means a clean start, literally scrubbing your house from top to bottom, especially those places that get overlooked during regular clean sweeps (i.e. the inside of the microwave, drains and behind the washing machine)

There's really no need to go into all the details here on a food blog, so I will just say it took about 8 hours to clean the apartment, during which my mood went from grumpy to overwhelmed to angry about the gunk that wouldn't come out of the microwave to exhausted. We wrapped up the cleaning about 7 PM; Keizo took a bunch of damp laundry to the laundromat to dry and a I had a much needed hot shower and got ready to go out for dinner.

We headed to a local izakaya that Keizo knew about and enjoyed lots of small dishes with our celebratory drinks over the next two hours. Some of the highlights included the octopus carpaccio and grilled shitake below. In addition to some excellent food, this place had the most amazing ceramic dishes. They are lucky I was only carrying a small purse and none of them ended up back in our kitchen.

Sufficiently stuffed, we thought we were ready to make the 15 minute walk to Miyajidake Shrine for New Year's prayer and fortune telling. Little did we know that it had started snowing, and the wind had picked up while we were inside enjoying our meal. But that wasn't going to stop us, so we walked along the long line of cars waiting their turn to park the shrine. Walking definitely got us there faster, but the people in their cars looked a lot more comfortable.

We stood in the mob of people waiting to throw their coins and pray, got our paper fortunes and tried our luck at the raffle table. We both ended up with consolation prizes; a box of animal crackers for me and a bag full of sweet bread for Keizo and the shrine got 2000 yen richer.

Loot in hand we turned around to head home, but not before stopping for some tea and manju to fortify us for the trek. So here it is, the first food of 2011, the year of the rabbit!

Andrew's visit

After roughly 30 hours of traveling, including a sprint through the San Francisco airport and 8 hours in Tokyo, Andrew arrived in Fukuoka to spend Christmas with me and Keizo. I had a great time while he was here, and hope that my tour guide skills were better than my photo journalist efforts, as the following photos are pretty much all I have from the week he was here. I forgot my camera a few times and the other times I felt like I already have more pictures of Japanese temples and shrines than I can ever possibly make sense of, so why bother. I do wish I had taken a few more with us in them though...oops.

After we picked him up at the airport and grabbed some lunch, we headed to the Fukuoka Aquarium, a.k.a. Marine World. Overall, it was much better than I expected. I really enjoyed the dolphin show that featured 3 dolphins and a whale that tried its best to keep up with the much quicker dolphins, and the sea lion exhibit. Of course, after visiting an aquarium, what could possibly be better to eat for dinner than seafood!

We went to a restaurant near Keizo's training ground and each got a giant tray full of tiny plates featuring everything from the standard rice and miso soup, to sashimi, tempura and best tofu Andrew had ever eaten.

The next night, Andrew brought a bit of Tucson to our kitchen with a giant batch of fajitas! Despite the slightly brown guacamole (my fault...all 5 Costco avocados decided to go bad all at once and I didn't know what else to do but mash them up and freeze them) the overall meal was delicious!

On Christmas Eve, Andrew and I set out to explore Fukuoka City. We did some light shopping, had lunch at one of my favorite pasta places, saw two art exhibits and walked what felt like miles in some brutal wind. Around 4 PM, I really wanted to warm up with a snack, so I dragged Andrew with me to Starbucks. I don't go to Starbucks much at home, but now that the closest one is an hour away, I feel like I should visit it every chance I get. It is also nice to be somewhere familiar in a strange land every once and a while. Andrew had a cookie and I ordered a hojicha latte and a holiday cake. So cute and festive, I had to take a picture.

Christmas Day was also spent in the city, where we met up with our cousins and uncle for lunch at Canal City's Ramen Stadium before heading to Keizo's rugby game. While researching where we should have lunch the night before, I discovered that my favorite ramen shop from Kurume, Tatsunoya, had an outpost in the stadium, which meant there was no doubt in my mind about where we were going to eat. Luckily the others cooperated. Andrew said it was just a good as he remembered, and I agree.

Following a rather frustrating rugby game in the cold, we all made our way back to the Fukutsu apartment to share "Christmas Dinner." The menu featured a Japanese style hot pot with beef, cabbage, mushrooms, and noodles called sukiyaki. Diners choose their favorite ingredients from the large communal pot and dip them in raw egg from their individual bowls before slurping them down. Delicious!

And for dessert, a cake from the bakery up the street. Not only was it the cutest, fashioned in the shape of a yule log, but it was also the only chocolate one. Nice. It didn't last more than 36 hours from the time we picked it up.

Before he left, Andrew also got to experience the joys of conveyor belt sushi and yakiniku with Keizo (I was there too, but grilled meat is much more their realm of expertise.) The week went by quickly and I was sad to see him leave, but I didn't have too long to mope as New Year's Eve was rapidly upon us, and the apartment was crying out for osouji.