A new Post! Ruth cooks in Japan!

New post. wow.

Well, this is just a random post to break the ice that's been growing thicker over the past... 6 months.

Japanese cooking. As you might expect, it's easier to cook Japanese food in Japan than it is to cook my mom's food. I have realized that a lot of the stuff I'm used to--maybe chili or Mexican food or baked anything or something else--is either impossible to cook here (for example for lack of an oven...) or very expensive (for example the through-the-roof cost of the taco party my friend had not too long ago).

So, when in Rome... cook some Italian food maybe. When you decide to move to Japan, learn to cook Japanese food while you're there. Or else survive off of cup-a-ramen the whole time. That was pretty much my first couple of weeks... ok maybe month. My co-worker said I was going to turn into a noodle but, it didnt happen, I just became, plump.

Anyway, tonight, I'm eating fried shijimi rice and tamagoyaki ^_^

Fried Shijimi Rice.... this means rice cooked in my friend the rice cooker mixed with shijimi, which is a tiny shellfish, and then stir-fried.. using a seasoning packet. ^_^ Easy right? I'm eating shijimi a lot lately in attempt to consume more iron.... because my body is showing signs of it's absence. >_<

Tamagoyaki.... tamago is egg. Yaki means.. cooked somehow.. in this case fried. Put them together and.. yeah fried eggs. But not the traditional American scrambled eggs. You may have had a bit of tamagoyaki before as sushi. The eggs are mixed with some Japanese seasonings (namely soy sauce, dashi--fish stock, mirin) and sugar, and fried and rolled. It's really easy. Most of Japanese food it. It's nice that it's possible to make delicious food and not be my mom. ^_^ rolling the egg just right is a little hard for me right now though :\ I suppose I'll be able to get the hang of it one day...

Here's the recipe for tamagoyaki my friend wrote out for me in simple Japanese:



....I'll post it in English later! Now to go cook dinner! :D


The photo is from Himeji Castle-- in the west of Japan. It's so beautiful. It's a world heritage site and was somehow spared the air raids of WWII, so it's one of the oldest (maybe the oldest?) castle in Japan. So glad it made it. It's awesome. I went to see it with some students on a one-day bus trip recently. ^_^