"Sad and Sweet" Farewell

Farewell Presents Given to Me Yesterday プレゼント、本当に本当にありがとうございました！(^^) My last day at the language school is coming closer, and I've been saying goodbye to the students who I'm not going to see again. That is not something I truly enjoy, but it has its sweetness, too. Most of them kindly thanked me for my humble contribution there. Some of them looked shocked and said they would really miss me. And, though I didn't expect this at all, a couple of them even gave me farewell presents! I love this orange-colored bouquet so much. The girl who gave it to me said, "I don't know why but I just thought orange was your color," which made me feel so happy, because orange IS my color. And this chocolate cake! It's so rich and smooth but not too sweet or too heavy -- one of the best I've ever tasted. Oh, you noticed the scotch tape on the package? Yeah, I ate one piece before taking this shot and sealed the package with the tape. ;) --------- These are the presents I got on my last day there. ************** Thank you. ************* Categories: Miscellaneous

One Year Wiser... Hopefully

Well, I'm not really sure if I'm one year wiser, and that's why you can't see that part of the text very clearly in the photo above. (How humble!) :P But I'm happy to tell you that I have made a progress. In the past, I used this kouglof mold only a few times. My first attempt in 2005 was close to a disaster, and on the second one, still the sides of the cake didn't turn brown almost at all. I blamed it on my oven-cum microwave and gave up on the pursuit of "nicely-browned kouglof cake." The mold had been left in the dark corner of my cupboard and forgotten since then. Yesterday, when I was trying to decide which cake to bake for my birthday, I realized that I was not as enthusiastic as previous years. I didn't want to spend hours in the kitchen decorating the cake, because my Meniere's syndrome was not completely gone and I still felt slightly dizzy once in a while. Also, I didn't want to do a major shopping just for this cake, either. And there was an unopened bottle of maraschino cherries which I wanted to use up somehow. All those lead me to chose this cherry pound cake, my favorite recipe. And I was happy with the decision. The only problem, though, was the decoration. The typical Japanese B-day cake decoration consists of strawberries and whipping cream, but it didn't look right for this cake. But if baked in a simple round or square tin, this cake would need some kind of icing, which I didn't want. So I thought about baking it in an interestingly shaped tin and simply sprinkling confectioner's sugar on top. The only interestingly-shaped tin I had was the kouglof mold. And I never had a success with it. Mmmmm... should I risk it? I did. After all. I tried to learn from the previous unsuccessful attempts and did a few things differently this time. First, I downscaled the recipe to 1/4. And this may be a crazy idea, but to brown the sides as much as possible, I pre-baked the mold, then buttered and floured the hot mold right before pouring the batter into it. It seemed to have worked, to some extent. See? It's slightly browned, isn't it? Much better than the caramel butter cake I baked before. This cake might have browned much more if I were patient enough to keep it in the oven for more than an hour... Now I don't know why my cake looks so airy with lots of big holes... like ant nest. Too much baking powder? Too much whipping when mixing the batter? Since I have made a little progress, now I want to be even better and be able to bake something like this soon. Would it help if I buy and use a bundt pan instead of this kouglof mold??? Anyway, I'm very happy today with this birthday cake and these small roses. :) Categories: Sweets

Testing, Testing!!

Photo from summer, 2007 Hey, I'm at my parents' house now, testing the Internet connection with the data card! Good news! The connection is slower than ADSL but faster than ISDN, and seems pretty stable in this countryside where there's no railroad, no construction works and no tall buildings. :D So far I've tried browsing some websites with many photos, downloading Java (for checking the transmission speed), watching Obama's inauguration speech on ABC news online, ordering some books on Amazon, and watching Youtube. All went OK except Youtube, and the speed was not as slow as I had expected. The Youtube movie I tried to see completely froze, though the connection itself didn't die. ABC news was much better, though it did pause from time to time... But it came back after 20 to 30 seconds and reached the end, so I should be happy. Now the last thing to try today is uploading a photo to my blog. If you see this post with a photo on, you know that I'm going to go for the data card. ;) Oh, BTW, I took this photo when I made cucumber pickles in 2007. The reason why I didn't post about them was... uh... after canning, I closed the screw-top lid too tight and couldn't open the jar when I wanted to eat the pickles... So the jar is still in my fridge, unopened. :P OK. Let's see if the photo would be posted alright. Categories: Miscellaneous

My New Year Celebration

To Welcome the God of New Year... So, I worked hard from 7:30 am today, cooking and getting things ready for my one-day-late New Year celrebration with traditional Japanese feast called osechi and zoni. I was hoping to finish everything around lunchtime, but it was past 2 pm when the food and decorations were ready. Then I spent some time shooting photos of my creations, as usual. Now I'm finally "digging in," sipping my favorite sake from time to time. Ah, H-E-A-V-E-N-L-Y... I hear the cold wind roaring outside. But here, I'm at my kotatsu heater, feeling warm, relaxed, happy and lazy... Nishime (Simmered Vegetables) and sgtore-bought turnip pickles in the First Tier Two tiers of osechi food was all I could manage this year. But it was more than enough. Our family tradition: Zoni soup with fish, kelp strips and rice cakes. Oh no, I didn't fake the above photo with an empty soup bowl with a lid. I really made the soup. See? Honestly, I could start a new year without osechi but never without this soup. Store-bought mochi (rice cakes) I guess, in the enlarged version of this photo, you can see the cracks in the surface. (Hey, you already know that almost all photos on this blog can be enlarged by clicking on them, right?) It's only half a day since I took them out of the package. My room must be a real dry place. Second Tier with Ryugan-age (back left), Kamaboko (back right) Tataki-gobo (front left) and Kuromame (front right) Those on the right were store-bought but I made the two kinds of food on the left myself. Are you wondering how the ryugan-age was made? You boil quail eggs and wrap them with nori (dried seaweed) and seasoned chicken fillet, then deep-fry them. Tataki-gobo is slightly pounded burdock with sweet 'n sour seasoning and good flavor of sesame seeds. Plate of Appetizers The paddle-like things in the back are made from ground chicken and called matsukaze-yaki. My favorite food. BTW, I never expected to find an English recipe for this, but I found one here. It's pretty close to Japanese typical matsukaze-yaki recipes, except that we sprinkle white poppy seeds on top. About the decorations: The leaves and berries were from roadside (Shhhh! Don't tell anyone) . Everything else was from DAISO 100 yen shop except the ornament with pink 'n white balls. Categories: Japanese

Merry Christmas!!

Obachan's Christmas Wreath 2008 (With Cookies) I wish you had a wonderful Christmas time. :) It's Dec. 27th today and I'm adding some photos to this belated Christmas post @ an Internet Cafe, AGAIN. (No, not the one I posted about the other day.) Looks like Heaven thought that I haven't suffered enough in 2008 -- My ADSL connection got upset a couple of days ago, and went dead right after I posted this entry with only two photos yesterday. So I had to come here to email the technical support of my ISP anyway, and I decided to upload these photos as well, because I really think these are better than the two dinner photos I posted yesterday. Obachan's Christmas Tree 2008 I felt like a small tree this year and it was a right choice, I guess. The tree was again one of those Daiso 100yen stuff. The cookies were home-baked and not a great success. Well, you can't expect much when baking cookies in a cheap toaster oven without temperature control, you know. I was worried that it might take hours to make this wreath without a glue gun, but it didn't take too long. :) And here comes my light fruitcake. It was not as soft as I wanted, to tell you the truth, and that was my fault. This year, I wanted to tie the cake with ribbon with no wrapping -- as in the photos above -- and I didn't want the cake to be too wet because it would mess up the ribbon. So, though the recipe told me to make syrup and brush the cake with it until it is used up, I didn't follow the instruction; I only brushed my cake with rum a couple of times. What I got as a result was a rather chewy cake which wasn't sweet enough. I think I'm going to mature it some more, this time following the recipe's instruction. Carrot Cake (Baked in my Electric Rice Cooker) with Cream Cheese Frosting Yes. It worked. I mean, theoretically it should be possible to bake cakes in an electric rice cooker. It cooks rice by heating its inner pot. Then the batter in the heated inner pot should be "done," too, eventually. Some Japanese websites even dare to say that for baking certain types of cakes, electric rice cooker may be more suitable than oven because inner pressure and temperature are controlled more precisely. I doubt it, though. Anyway, for me, using a rice cooker for baking a cake was not as care-free as using an oven, and the texture of the cake was more like steamed cake than oven-baked ones. But I should say that the result was quite satisfactory. This is how the carrot cake looked when it came out of the rice cooker. And with cream frosting and decoration ... See inside? Oh, I got the carrot cake recipe here, if you're interested. ----- * Let me add a little warning if you're interested in baking cakes with electric rice cooker. I did have a satisfactory result, but I don't necessarily recommend this unorthodox use of the rice cooker, unless it "officially" has a baking function. To make this cake, I poured batter into the inner pot and pressed the start button. When the rice cooker beeped for the first time, the cake was not done yet, as expected. I switched on the rice cooker again right away to let it cook some more. (Be careful. Some "smart" rice cookers take it as abnormal heating and give you an error message.) The cake was still not done yet at the second beep. I pressed the start button again to let it cook for 10 to 15 more minutes and manually stopped the cooker. So it's a bother, isn't it? Besides, many websites warn that baking cakes somewhat damages the teflon coating of the inner pot. I assume that recent electric rice cookers with a baking function must have special program to keep certain temperature for longer (than regular rice-cooking) until batter will be done, and also have heavy-duty teflon coating on the inner pot. ----- And my cookies. Only two kinds this year: gingerbread cookies and shortbread cookies. And my creations looked like this altogether... (Maybe I could make a postcard out of this?) And the dinner photos... Obachan's Christmas Dinner 2008 Yes, I managed to make this Christmas dinner, after all. Despite some challenges, I didn't give up and enjoyed a Christmas dinner. After the dinner, I kept nibbling on desserts for hours, enjoying the sparkling wine, wishing the moment to last forever... Dear readers, Thank you so much for your support, especially for the past couple of weeks when it looked like things were going worse and worse. I'm so lucky to have you as my friends. *** Merry Christmas *** - obachan -

My Thanksgiving Dinner 2008

Obachan's Thanksgiving Dinner 2008 OK. I just added the photos! :D I did make and have nice Thanksgiving dinner last Sunday night, despite the fact that I had to work from 6:30 am to 3 or 4 pm on both Saturday and Sunday. The problem is that I cannot have access to the Internet from my laptop at the moment... The modem seems to have a problem. I first posted this entry from a PC at a "Manga and Internet Cafe" in town, and though I brought photos of my Thanksgiving dinner on a CD-R, the PC there did not have a CD-R drive. AHhhh!　So I added these photos at somewhere else. ;) Anyway, I made almost the same dinner as I did in 2004 and 2005, and enjoyed it very much. Yeah, alone -- again. But how could I find someone to have a Thanksgiving dinner with? You know what? Here, if you are a Japanese and celebrated Thanksgiving, you've got to be ready to face an accusation, "You're not an American, are you?" though no one says to a Japanese person who celebrates Christmas,"You're not a Christian, are you?" Well, I once wrote on this blog in 2004 why I keep celebrating Thanksgiving here in Japan. And as far as that reason is good enough for me, I don't care what others think or say about that. :p Now, the details. The dinner consisted of Roasted chicken breast, mashed potatoes, green peas, corn, cornbread and two kinds of desserts: a pumpkin tart and small apple crumble tarts. (The ones in bold are linked to the recipes, but of course I tweaked all of them. For the tart shells, I used this Japanese recipe, again with my own twists. The cranberry sauce (I used dried cranberries) was a great success this year! This time I added a couple of secret ingredients: a little vinegar and chopped dried fig, and added no sugar. For some reason, it worked out fine, and I might make the sauce again for some kind of pork dish soon. The stuffing was good, too. I couldn't afford hazelnuts this time, but chestnuts gave a nice sweet touch which went well with the sauce. I cannot say that this cornbread was a great success, partly because I used buttermilk substitute (vinegar-added milk) instead of real buttermilk, and partly because I replaced small amount of white sugar with brown sugar, thinking that it might enhance the flavor. I regretted it when I saw the batter turned darker, but it was too late. And the cornbread turned out a bit too sweet. But I loved the texture very much. It was nice and moist. For this tart, I used kabocha pumpkin -- the less moist and nutty type -- so I should have adjusted the amount of condensed milk. But I forgot, and as a result, this turned out a bit drier than I had wanted. Maybe whipped cream on top could have helped, but I was too lazy. :P And this apple crumble tart was the biggest success. It made up for the minor disappointments with the cornbread and pumpkin tart, and gave a nice ending to my Thanksgiving dinner 2008. I don't care about accusations. I had something to enjoy that weekend, and it was much better than just spending the whole weekend resenting the person who made the awful work shift. I'd rather enjoy cooking and eating than being praised for behaving properly as a Japanese. --------- Dec. 4th Talking about adaptation of foreign customs... I guess people have different opinions and feelings about the issue, and I'm aware that many have a negative view on how Japanese -- including myself -- adapt Western customs. I don't mean to get into the debate on whether it's good or bad, but I just want to mention one thing: I believe that just blindly following foreign customs and trying to find your own value/meaning as you adapt something are two different things, and I hope that what I've been doing is the latter. Anyway, last year before the Thanksgiving week, this issue of "Japanese mimicking anything American" kind of got on my nerve, and I seriously wondered if my Thanksgiving dinner was just part of it. I knew it WAS in many Japanese people's view, but I was more concerned about what it meant to myself, not others. And when thinking about what the spirit of Thanksgiving means to a Japanese (me), a crazy project (again!) popped up in my mind; I thought, "How could ancient Japanese people have celebrated their first successful harvest when, let's say, they started growing rice in Japan? What kind of dinner did they prepare?" So I ended up preparing an ancient Japanese thanksgiving dinner based on my very little knowledge of food in ancient times and wild imagination. I think I've heard that rice in ancient times was rather reddish, and people must have eaten it with lots of different kind of grains. Maybe beans were already available. They must have eaten wild nuts, too. I don't know when they started farming chicken, but at least they must have caught and ate wild birds way before that. And of course, they must have made alcoholic drink out of rice, because in ancient Japan, alcohol seems to have played an important role whenever people needed to relate to various gods in the nature. The ancient sake was not clear, but looked milky, as far as I know. Also, I've heard that something similar to yogurt and cheese was already available around 10th century... Now here are the result of my wild imagination: Obachan's imaginary "Ancient Japanese Thanksgiving Dinner" 2007 Rice balls made with rice and many kinds of grains Simmered beans Skewed Chicken (I couldn't get wild birds) with miso seasoning Yogurt with sweetened black beans Gosh, obachan, you certainly had a lot of time to kill! -- you want to say? Well, you're right. My work schedule at that time was not as terrible as it is now. Anyway, I had so much fun with this project. But days passed too fast while I procrastinate, and then it was already time for Christmas baking, so I didn't have a chance to post about this project. Now C's comment inspired me to bring these stock photos into the spotlight, and post about the hilarious dinner that could upset any expert of Japanese ancient history. Hahaha... Anyway, anyhow, I think that people's most simple, basic feelings are often universal, and different cultures have developed different ways to express the basic, possibly universal feelings or wisdom. In adapting something from outside, you might get in touch with some aspects of your own culture which have been taken for granted, and enjoy the difference and sameness at the same time. I like that very much, and it has been reflected on my blogs -- I think -- and will be in the future, too. Categories: Western-inspired, Categories: Japanese

BOO!!

Obachan's Halloween Cookies 2008 Anyone worried about me not posting much lately? You thought that I lost interest in cooking and/or baking? Oh, don't you ever worry about that. As I wrote before, for Halloween of 2008, I was determined to make cut-out cookies using cute Halloween cookie cutters. And I wanted two colors -- pumpkin yellow and chocolate. So I made the pumpkin cookie dough using the same recipe as last year and rolled it out and cut it out into these pumpkins and ghosts. But unfortunately, these flat ones did not taste as good as the ball-like ones; They were bland, and the texture was not very impressive (at least to me) when they were thin. And the taste of these chocolate cookies was a bit disappointing, too. So I decided not to bring these cut-out cookies to Halloween party at the language school I work for. Then I made the same pumpkin cookies as I made last year. These turned out fine, but I didn't bring them to the party, either. Instead, I made and brought these... Mini-pumpkin muffins ... mini-pumpkin muffins to the Halloween party. Oh I loved them so much. Again, the recipe is from a Japanese recipe site, and it was one of those light-tasting, not-too-sweet muffin recipes that Japanese people love, so I couldn't help giving it a twist or two; I added some almond powder, cinnamon and a small amount of vegetable whipping cream. The muffins turned out great with this lovely bright orangish-yellow color ! I'm not quite sure if those who came to the party really loved my muffins, because those Japanese people (I mean, moms who came with the kids) could force themselves to eat something they don't like just to be polite to the school staff (me). Anyway, anyhow, my muffins were all gone at the end of the party and I would never find out if it was politeness or real fondness. Well, at least no one was brought to the hospital after eating them, and that is enough for me. ;) There was nothing really special about my Halloween 2008... I didn't even go to the late-night costume party which I attended almost every year until 2006. But looking at these cookie photos makes me feel happy and warm inside, so I guess it was worth making them. :) Categories: Sweets

Shy Harvest Moon

Tsukimi Dango (Dumplings offered to the moon) If I'm not mistaken, the full moon tonight is supposed to be the "harvest moon," the most beautiful moon of the year. And we have a traditional custom to celebrate the night -- to admire the beauty of the nature and be grateful for the harvest. Dumplings and susuki (Japanese pampas grass) are the "must haves" for the celebration. ;) Every year, my Japanese DNA tells me to do something special for tsuikimi (moon viewing), but usually I'm busy with work. There were some years that I did try shooting some photos, at least, but I have never made the dumplings myself. Fortunately this year, the special night fell on a Sunday night and I had plenty of time to search for a dumpling recipe, make dumplings and steal pick the pampas grass and a couple of autumn flowers. ;) The dumplings are enjoyed with various sauces and toppings such as an (sweetened bean paste), sweet and salty sauce, soybean flour, sesame sauce and so on. Today I made sweet-n-salty sauce with chopped walnuts and white miso. I thought the sauce was alright when I tasted it, but after I had a couple of dumplings with it, I thought that my nose was going to bleed. LOL And I took this shot when the shy harvest moon briefly showed itself between the clouds. Unfortunately I couldn't get the clouds in this photo. Too bad... It must have looked much more interesting with the clouds. (I might give it a try again later tonight...) Categories: Sweets, Japanese