Lee's Birthday Meal

I made a lovely cold-weather dinner for Lee's birthday as it finally started getting cold around here. I made Feather Stew, by request, which is a family recipe from Lee's side, and is pretty simple to make, though this version was slightly different than the standard recipe.

You take a bunch of chicken, preferably with skin and bones (hard to come by around here), and brown it in some oil with garlic. Add sauteed mushrooms and water until chicken and mushrooms are just barely covered. We didn't saute the mushrooms and used Shittake mushrooms because button mushrooms are about 25 cents each. I also am not a mushroom person, so leaving them whole meant they were easy to work around for me.


Simmer until chicken falls apart, remove bones and skin and shred the chicken. Typically, you'd then refrigerate this overnight, and remove the layer of congealed fat the next day. Re-heat (or use these fancy oil and fat sucking pads we accidentally purchased here and make it all in one go), then add some white wine and cream, salt and pepper to taste.


Serve over rice with the wine you used to flavor it (we had a very interesting Riesling) with some crusty bread. For dessert, there was apple pie using the extra filling that I made last time before I remembered I only had access to one pie dish.

Trout Goes On the Menu

We got invited out to dinner by the president of Ana's school (Dr. Yamada) and his wife.  They suggested going to a grilled fish restaurant about 10km outside of Kanazawa.  This sounded a little different than some of the other Japanese styles we've tried like yakitori and yakuniku and we like fish and this is Japan, so we went for it, and never in my life have I eaten so much trout.

This restaurant's true specialty wasn't just fish - it was a fish, that being trout.  Baby trout, little trout, medium trout, and me/my trout and I. Corollary to this specialty: all the trout were raised on property, as the restaurant farmed all their fish right outside the doors.  I will return to the trout, and at length, but fish, I mean first, I want to talk a little bit about getting to the restaurant and the place itself.

The drive to the restaurant took us over some of the most winding, mountainous hills I have ever been driven over.  I well know that there are mountains close to Kanazawa, and we didn't exactly go above treeline,  but I considered the possibility of trying to bike up and down that terrain and basically resolved only to attempt it if I decided I wanted to experience the local intensive care unit.  We were swiftly out of the urban areas and things got pretty primeval pretty quickly.  The last maybe mile or so was on a single lane winding road that went by farms and then increasing stretches of nothing much in particular.  When we reached the restaurant, it was alone, on a hill, in the center of its own small valley, with a stream running right by the front door and turning a waterwheel. Very picturesque indeed for a lovely early-fall evening.

        There is a waterfall behind us, which falls into a pool full of big trout.   The person who is not us is Mrs. Yamada.

As with many Japanese restaurants serving traditional food in the traditional style, each party gets their own room.  Ours had a sliding door that opened to reveal a view of the valley with the sun setting over it. A concession had been made to modern comforts as the table had an indentation under it for your legs and seat backs were provided so that you could sit up in the Western style while still being close to the floor, more like the old Japanese fashion.  It is a setup that we've seen before in traditional Japanese restaurants and is most welcomed over the less-comfortable alternative.

Then came the onslaught.  Candied trout minnows.  Tempura slightly-larger trout minnows.  Trout salad.  A different trout salad.  Trout soup.  Tempura bigger trout bits and veggies.  Trout sushi and sashimi.  Whole grill roasted trout with salt.  Whole grill roasted trout with miso sauce.  Trout with noodles.  No, there was not trout ice cream or anything, which was good, because we were just about trouted out.

              Pretty much everything but the beer and napkin is trout.

We liked some of the dishes better than others.  I would pass on the candied minnows if I saw them again, for instance, and the tempura'd minnows were quite bitter for some reason.  The roast trout with salt and some of the other dishes were really good examples of dishes that showcase the main ingredient well.  We experienced trout showcased in a wide variety of ways.  That allowed us to determine quite thoroughly that the trout did have some of that freshwater tang.  In many cases, I would advocate blunting that particular flavor with milk, cream, or butter, but this night we did it the Japanese way and it was pretty good.

After the tsunami of food subsided a little, the Yamadas proved prepared for a lull in the conversation as they were equipped with calligraphy brushes and paper which they gifted to us and then spent some time attempting to teach us to use correctly.  I felt like using them correctly was damaging the brush, but maybe that is par for the course.  In all, a pleasant evening, with many visually appealing parts, and the food was mostly pretty good through I will not feel the need to eat trout again for some time, I think.  I wish we had pictures but we did not feel it was appropriate to document our night out with the boss, so you'll forever have to wonder what exactly candied trout minnows look like.

KIT Summer Science

Over the summer, both KIT and KTC hold workshops to get kids interested in science and technology, and hopefully later attending the schools to learn more about science and technology. One such program was a two day balsa bridge building workshop at KIT for Komatsu Senior High School students.  Komatsu is a small city south of Kanzawa and this particular high school is a fairly high-end science and technology high school. The KIT brige program was designed to be not only an engineering workshop, learning about bridges, but also an English workshop.  Therefore, they called us.

Day one of the workshop was supposed to be all in Japanese, so we didn't attend. The students built balsa wood bridges individually, tested them to destruction by hanging juice boxes off of them, and then either alone or in small groups used the free West Point Bridge Designer software to improve their design (and/or design bridges that looked like a cat). They optimized or in some cases "optimized" (whiskers) their bridge design and decided who would do what  the next day before before leaving.


Day two was English day. The students would build a (hopefully) better bridge in small groups than they previously did on their own and then present their design process in English. They brought in Komatsu English teachers in addition to Lee and I to help the students write the English in their presentations and discuss their bridges in English.  Fortunately, these students had a lot more practice in English than most of our students and were quite motivated, so this was actually possible.  It was very nice to meet more native English speakers, as we know all of them at KIT, and we enjoyed guessing which bridges would be best together (Lee picked two of the top three finishers).

Teams were given points for both bridge strength and creativity in design, so the people who used liberal dashes of crazy in their designs were probably going for the aesthetics award. Professors and students voted for the most aesthetically pleasing bridge, and this was 1/3 of the final score. The number of juice boxes the bridges were able to hold divided by the weight of the bridge was the other 2/3 of the final score. There were three prizes, one for the best design, one for the best strength/weight ratio, and the grand prize.

This was a very interesting project, and in many ways similar to something you might see in an American program. First, individual projects that aren't that great, next learning about the problem, and then joining into small groups to make better projects. The two odd things to us were the foreign language (a given) and placing a high importance on the aesthetic elements of the design. One would seldom, if ever, see this as a consideration in engineering and technical workshops in our experience.  It was clear that at least some teams missed a lot of the subtlties of the instruction, and make mistakes that they were warned against in both the workshop textbook and in the lectures, but overall I suspect at least some of them learned something and most of the students had fun, though an informal poll towards the end did not indicate that many of them were planning to go into engineering.

For Science

Recently, we got a package from some friends. It included some excellent Anchor Bar and Dinosaur Barbecue sauces, along with a package of root beer extract for brewing your own root beer. I was very excited, and if it works, I plan to get some of the birch beer extract. Lee was highly skeptical, but we followed the directions, cooking some sugar and yeast in plain old water, adding the extract, bottling the concoction, leaving it out until it the yeast fermented enough to pressurize the bottle and then put it in the fridge to continue to mature for about a week and a half. We made some Chicken Parmesan (sans Parmesan and using panko as bread crumbs) and tri-colored rotini for the taste test of the root beer. It's a bit flatter than we'd like, but the flavor isn't bad. We'll just have to experiment with more yeast or not filling the bottle with additional waterfor the next batch.


One of my colleagues went to America for the summer and brought back some snack bags of US chips and snacks. I got a bag of Cheetos here and decided to compare them. On first glance, yes, they are different. The Japanese kind is a lighter orange, with granules of what appear to be sugar. The US kind are that shocking orange that really shouldn't exist, even in snack food, and are very obviously junk food. The Japanese ones are a softer orange that seem almost more wholesome.


The ones from the States tasted like they were supposed to. Lee wishes he were filming my reaction to the Japanese ones, because oh boy, were those not what I was expecting! Very, very odd - sweet and cheesy, and unless you're eating some soft goat cheese with jam or Manechega and quince paste, sweet and cheese do not go together! Well, I suppose the right kind of sweet and cheese - there's a really good recipe of granny smith apple slices coated in cinnamon and sugar topped by a piece of cheddar on a Triscuit and baked at 350 for about 10/15 minutes that is really quite delicious, but that has spice and tart and salt, not just sugar and cheese. Anyway, I will NOT be purchasing the Japanese style Cheetos again.  Ever.

Mice.

This is a followup to an offhand comment I made at the end of last year.  We never posted about our experience, and while there are no pictures, the story itself has some interesting elements.

The something that seemed like it was trying to get in through the air conditioning unit turned out to be multiple somethings.  We were pretty sure there were mice or vermin of some sort living in our ceiling.  We could hear them scratching and running about at night, and one night it was so bad we thought they were going to scratch through the bedroom ceiling and fall squealing onto our faces, so moved into another room to sleep.  Of course, the vermin were living above the bedroom, most likely because that was the one room that was heated most days.

We had our official helper Mieko call the real estate company to let them know something was going on.  At first, they didn't believe us.  A lot of "Is it still there?" and "Are you sure?" ensued.  It took a bit for them to agree to send someone in to take a look to see if there were mice, because of course, they can't send in someone to exterminate until they're sure that there is a problem, and understand what the problem is.  We first were concerned December 21, a couple of days after the noises started because they didn't stop.

We were finally able to get them to send someone on January 9, though part of that was because everything shuts down for a bit around Christmas and New Year's Day, so there was a bit of a backlog.  I just wanted to get a cat/borrow someone's cat for a bit, but Lee vetoed that one.  A man came by, went up into the ceiling (incidentally, to get into the ceiling requires putting a big stepladder up in our shower), and looked around.  He took a picture on his phone of what was up there to show us and to have as proof that something was going on.  Yes, it was mice.  They were shocked.  I thought - is it so hard to believe that we said that we heard multiple little things running around in the ceiling and were not making it up?

Now that they believed us, we scheduled two further appointments for the exterminator to come by, one for him to set out poison and sticky traps, one for him to clean up the sticky traps and make sure there were no more traces of mice.  January 29, we had the all-clear, no more evidence of mice.  Hopefully we won't have the same problem this winter!

Home Cookin'

Baking, really.

Last weekend, I bought a large quantity of bananas for a small dinner party because I was making Bananas Foster for dessert and the bananas were on sale. We ended up using less than anticipated, so had a very large number of bananas left over. I assumed we'd use 10 to 16, and bought 32. We used five. Lee and I had some delicious smoothies to use up some leftover ice cream and fruit juices from the punch, froze some for later banana bread, and I wanted to make something else with bananas.

I found a recipe for Spiced Banana Cake, thinking Lee might like it, and a Vanilla Glaze that sounded simple and delicious. We both like the cake, it's very moist and the banana flavor is mild but present against the spices, which is nice. I love the glaze; it's almost exactly what they used to put on the heavenly cinnamon buns at the bakery in Animal Kingdom (before they changed the supplier), but Lee thinks it's a bit sweet. I learned that the Japanese cake pan is a bit smaller than an American one when the cake rose up about 1.5 inches from the top of the pan, dripping extra batter into the center, making a lovely little secondary cake. Once I finished glazing and admiring the cake, the question was what to do with it (aside from the obvious). I give you our makeshift cake plate:

Once we're in the States again, I'll need to get myself an actual cake plate. A large Pyrex bowl over a dish, while obviously an acceptable solution, is not an elegant one!

Apples were on sale a bit ago as well, so instead of one $30 apple pie, we were able to get two out of approximately $20 in supplies. Since I've only made one type of pie crust before, and that crust has worked well for me (but is not The Pie Crust according to Lee), Lee made one and I will make the second for his birthday. We can't make two at once because we have only one pie dish. He realized exactly how odd the flour is here while making the crust; he's made the crust before but it's never been quite so yellow or wet before. The apples also aren't quite pie apples. They work, but are not quite as firm or flavorful as we'd like. Oh well.


We also got some lovely little peppers on our pepper plant. Lee ate the ripe one raw, and we're still waiting for another four or so to ripen. We'll definitely get two, and there are a couple more little buds that may turn into peppers if they get there before the weather gets nasty.

Typhoon Day! (not tsunami as originally posted)

Most of the schools in the area have closed today due to high winds and rain from a  typhoon (it hit the other side of the country but it is wet here too).  It's really not that bad, and they probably could have held classes today, but as a precaution, everything is closed.  Well, not everything, Lee still had classes today.  Last night it was very windy and rainy, but today it's fine:

I have now had snow days, too cold to go in days, ice days, oh-my-gosh-we-think-it's-going-to-ice-but-actually-it's-beautiful-out precautionary closings, and now a typhoon day.  Luckily, no swine flu week or other sickness closings.  I'm wondering how many weather related closings I'll be able to rack up by the time I'm no longer in academia!

To round out this post, here's an Ikebana arrangement:

     

Apparently I never photographed the one seen in the sushi post: