日本Fall 2013--Part III: In the Kitchen

Tomorrow will mark 4 weeks to the day that I left for my Japan trip, so it's past time I finish the wrap-up with the most noteworthy things Keizo and I made in his kitchen: a zillion gyoza (potstickers) and a delicious, not too sweet apple pie.

I suppose a zillion is a bit of an exaggeration, but since I was the one responsible for filling all of the wrappers and folding them into dumpling shapes, it seemed like many more than the 50 that came in the package.  I asked Keizo for a refresher course in gyoza shaping, and then got to work while he made the chahan (fried rice) to accompany them.  Keizo has mastered the art of fried rice; even following his instructions, mine never tastes as good.

This was the day that we rode bicycles all over town, so we easily put away about 35 of the gyoza between the two of us, and froze the remaining few uncooked ones for lunch the next day.

When Keizo was arranging with my calligraphy teacher to attend class on Wednesday, I told him to tell her we would bring dessert.  We had a large number of apples to use up from our apple picking adventure, and "hokey pokey" (which I mistakenly thought was apple pie a la mode) is one of Keizo's favorite desserts so making an apple pie was the obvious choice.  I had seen the recipe for Apple Slab Pie on Smitten Kitchen a few days before, and it looked to me like it had the perfect ratio of lots of crust to the right amount of not too soggy filling so Keizo and I squeezed into his gallery style kitchen together after dinner on Tuesday to make it. 

A few notes about the pie:

• As far as I can recall, this was my first time making a pie crust from scratch.  It wasn't nearly as onerous as I expected it to be, but Keizo generously cleaned up all the flour from the counter where we rolled it out, so I really only got half of the experience (the fun part!  Jeeze, that Keizo guy is pretty great!)
• The filling came together in a snap, no pre-cooking required.  I think we used 5? apples and went easy on the sugar.
• After assembling the pie, there was a difference in opinion about which part of the egg should be used to give the pie a nice glossy sheen.  I had never heard of using the yolk, but since he did clean up the big flour mess, I let Keizo do it his way.  

On Wednesday evening, we enjoyed a delicious curry dinner with salad and kabocha with Naoko-sensei and Hirosuke-san before the other calligraphy students arrived for dessert.  Naoko-sensei also made her famous apple crumble in honor of my visit, so we had the pleasure of tasting two very different styles of apple dessert side by side.  Our pie was sweeter and kept its shape better, while the crumble had a little tang to it and melted right into the accompanying vanilla ice cream.


Thus concludes the highlights of my fall trip to Japan.  The timing of my trip worked out really well in relation to my responsibilities at work and my need for a change of scenery.  It was also really nice to have such great weather instead of it being cold and blustery, but it will be really different not being there for New Year's for the first time in four (!!!) years.

日本Fall 2013--Part II: Eating Out

From the very beginning, our mutual love of food has played an important role in Keizo's and my relationship.  The night we met, he bought me donuts and coffee before I caught my train home and on our first real date, Keizo admitted he was still hungry before we had even finished the dessert that came with our meal.  All this is to say that we eat very well when we are together, and this trip was no exception.

The food pictured above is a sample of some of the things we purchased:

• dog-shaped bread with chocolate cream filling.  Why is everything in Japan so darn cute?  These days when I visit, I can't resist animal shaped bread; over the years I've also eaten pigs, pandas and turtles.

• a Japanese take on Italian pasta with shrimp, avocado and wasabi cream sauce.  This restaurant is in a relatively new complex near Keizo's local train station that also houses two bakeries, an import food shop and a stone fired pizza restaurant.  I like to refer to it as "Little Italy."

On this day our lunches came with a bread buffet and drink bar.  On the drink bar were two pitchers of fruit flavored vinegars.  I mixed mine with olive oil to dip the bread into, but other people were drinking them straight!  I suppose they tasted more like juice, but I was still pretty put off by the idea of downing a glass of something called "vinegar."

• minced chicken between slices of fried renkon (lotus root).  This dish is from our dinner of small plates at a yakiniku place in Tenjin.  We enjoyed a lot of delicious things, but the presentation of this one caught my eye: the ceramic plate with woven basket and tiny twigs, plus the large dollop of mayonnaise and salt for dipping are all so lovely.

• I am ashamed to admit I don't know the real name of the little ice cream place near Keizo's training ground.  I just call it the "Cow Shop" since it has several dozen miniature bovines decorating the interior.  They have a rotating selection of some of the most unusual ice cream flavors I have ever seen including tomato and carrot. 

Ordering is always a chore for me; what flavor do I want to try?  And with a double costing only 50 yen more than a single, which two flavors will go well together?  This time I settled on chai tea and Sweet Potato, which were both quite good.  The chai flavor was pretty strong, but the Sweet Potato was a bit creamier and had small, yummy sweet potato pieces in it.

While we ate out quite a bit (especially compared to my normal routine) we also cooked together a few times.  More to come in Part III...

日本Fall 2013--Part I: The Sights

Where have you been?

I anticipate having to answer this question a few times at work tomorrow, when I make my first appearance in the office since the end of October.

And I anticipate more than a few surprised looks when I answer "I was in Japan visiting my boyfriend."  This response inevitably conjures up more questions and a bit of discomfort on my part.  While I understand their curiosity, my relationship with Keizo is far more complex and emotional than I feel like discussing with my co-workers. Additionally, what for many would be the trip of a lifetime has become an annual event for me, with sightseeing being less of a priority than just being together.  Hiking up a small mountain to see a giant reclining Buddha statue is great, but so is wearing sweatpants and eating pizza on the couch with someone you love, especially when you don't get to do it very often.

However, the former appeals to a wider audience and makes for much better photos opportunities than the latter, so without further ado, 日本Fall 2013--Part I: The Sights

I arrived in Japan on a Tuesday evening, and quite conveniently Keizo had the day off on Wednesday.  We drove about an hour from his house to the mountainous town of Sasaguri to go apple picking.  As luck would have it, Sasaguri is also home to a large reclining Buddha statue, so when our apple picking took only a short time to complete, we had something else to do to make the drive worthwhile.  We poked around the various shrines dotted around the bottom of the hill and traipsed up to the top to gaze at the truly large statue.  I am still curious as to how it was installed; I assume it was built elsewhere, but then puzzled as to how it was moved up the side of the mountain.  All of the interpretive signage was in Japanese, but Keizo appeared too too distracted by his rumbling stomach translate them for me.  We stopped for lunch at the bottom of the hill, and I enjoyed the udon noodle set pictured above.

After lunch we decided to continue our day of outdoor adventuring at Uminonakamichi Park.  The weather during my trip to Japan was unreal, in the high 60's-low 70's and sunny almost every day.  We have visited this park before, but arrived too late to rent bicycles to go exploring and only saw about half of it.  It's pretty big and has a real variety of things to do/see.

This time we arrived with plenty of time to rent bicycles and tool around.  We stopped at the field of cosmos flowers, spent a few minutes at the zoo checking up on the monkeys and rode nearly all the way around the perimeter to the amusement area in search of the snack bar where we could cash in our coupon for a 50 yen discount on ice cream.  After our snack, we ignored the signs reserving the play equipment for elementary school aged children (which even with my limited Japanese I could understand) and went down the long slides and tried walking on the white mound visible in the back of the top photo.  The mound was kind of squishy, and bounced a bit if you jumped on it (another thing prohibited by the signs and completed ignored by everyone, not just us!)  After that, it was time to return the bicycles and head home.



On Friday afternoon, Keizo and I took the train into Fukuoka City in search of a neko cafe.  Stepping off the elevator and through the entrance was a bit of an assault on the nasal passages, but soon we both adjusted to the aroma of 20 cats in a relatively small space and made a few furry friends.  I don't recall where I first heard about the cat cafe in Fukuoka, but it was one of the few things I really wanted to do on this trip.  The concept is intriguing, if not slightly unappetizing (this cafe served food and drinks) and observing the human social etiquette was nearly as fun as playing with the cats.   The cats pretty much came and went as they pleased, although there was a woman sitting on the floor who very popular with the most cuddly ones.  I tried to entice more cats towards me using a shimmery butterfly toy on a stick and had some fleeting success.  After about 90 minutes of feline fun, we decided it was time for some fresh air and gathered our things to leave, taking full advantage of the lint roller hanging from wall by the elevator.

We walked around Tenjin, the busy commercial district near one of the major train stations, browsed Forever 21 and H&M, two new additions since my time as an English teacher, took purikura and enjoyed a dinner of small plates at a yakitori restaurant.  The train back out of the city was pretty full, but nothing like the photos of the trains in Tokyo.

Saturday afternoon was spent watching the Japan vs. New Zealand rugby match on TV.  New Zealand won of course, but the final score represented the smallest spread ever between the two teams.  After the game, we made a visit to my favorite used clothing store and a stop at the new shopping mall, which on November 2nd was already festooned with Christmas decorations and playing Christmas music at much too high a volume (I am all for Christmas music in December...all December if you must, but am strongly opposed to it anytime before Thanksgiving, especially in Japan!)  I bought more smiling kitchen sponges for myself, and Keizo got a snazzy new pair of pants.

Keizo was out of town on Sunday for a game in Hiroshima, but got back in time for dinner at his favorite tempura restaurant.  It also gave him the day off on Monday, so we had lunch out and rented an electric assist bicycle outside of the local train station.  We biked around town and I never ceased to marvel at the complete lack of resistance when starting to pedal from a dead stop.  The bike was really quiet, and definitely helped on longer, less steep inclines.  I didn't notice too much of a difference on the steepest slopes, although Keizo begs to differ.



The following Wednesday afternoon was Keizo's last afternoon without work during my stay and we kept our adventures local before driving down to Kurume for dinner with my calligraphy teacher.  We had omuraisu for lunch followed by ice cream at my favorite local shop (see Part II of the recap) and a walk around Munakata Shrine.  The shrine happened to be in the middle of its kiku matsuri or chrysanthemum festival, a small portion of which you can see pictured above.  The flowers were quite lovely, ranging in size from the small bonsai to the softball sized blooms in the photos to large displays featuring various sizes, shapes and colors.

The sunset was from my last night in Japan, when we went to try out a new seaside restaurant in Keizo's city.  We had stumbled upon it earlier in the week during lunchtime, only to be turned away since we didn't have a reservation.  Keizo called ahead for dinner on Friday, which ended up being completely unnecessary to be seated since we were the first people to arrive, but was important since doing so informed us that sunset was at 5:30 and enabled us to witness what you see above.  While dinner was good, the crowd at lunch time leaves me to assume the lunch buffet is even better.  Since we ate so early, we had time after dinner to finish up my souvenir shopping, drop the car back at the apartment and walk to a quiet neighborhood bar for some drinks to round out the night.  Then on Saturday morning, it was up at 4:30 AM to catch flight one of three back to Charlottesville.

Stay tuned for Parts II and III featuring the culinary delights from the trip, coming soon!