Adventures with Food

For the most part, the food has been outstanding. Even the cheap pre-made food from the grocery store is tasty (though certainly not as good as real home cooking). Russell and I have been making our way around the grocery store (that we finally found on our third week here) and we have been experimenting with new recipes.

Of course, we still regularly just make things up based on what we have.

I posted about the guudon (beef rice bowl), but we have been busy making other things as well. Early on, Russell started experimenting with Japanese curry. There is probably a way to make your own curry base from scratch, but we're far too lazy for that, so we just buy curry roue in blocks. There are easily ten different brands to choose from - its seems to be a popular meal to make at home. The basics are easy - cook vegetables, add water, add roue and cook down until medium thick. Then eat with rice. Its the consistency of gravy, but its heavily spiced and not as fatty. What we discovered, however, is that the right vegetables will make a really nice vegetable stock that can turn plain curry into SUPER TASTY curry. One of our first attempts came out unexpectedly delicious and Russell has been trying to recreate it ever since. We have had to limit our curry intake, though, due to the high salt content. Here is a video of curry-making from "Cooking with Dog". It is very common to have tonkattsu (or pork cutlet) with curry. Its a little more than my tummy can take, though, so we haven't ventured to try it.



We also found ourselves in need of a super spinach salad the other night. Russell got a seriously painful canker sore in his mouth. We looked up the causes of canker sores and discovered that unlike cold sores (which are caused by a certain kind of herpes virus) canker sores are usually the result of a deficiency in certain vitamins. We looked online and the two top foods for combating canker sores are spinach and octopus. We went to the store, bought both, and then had to decide how to dress up this salad so it wasn't just octopus on spinach. Here's what we came up with. The salad itself included spinach, boiled octopus tentacles (cut into bite size pieces), boiled egg, some sliced leek, grated carrot and cut up grapefruit. The dressing was mostly oil and vinegar with some mirin (a sweet vinegar-like liquid), grated ginger and spicy powder. It was surprisingly tasty and very filling. I'm sure we will be making it more often. Tonight is octopus stew!

UPDATE: The octopus stew turned into Octopus chowder. I way over cooked the potatoes, carrots and broccoli, so I added some milk and corn along with some mushroom dashi and it came out very tasty. No one would have known it was suppose to be stew!


I also recommend tofu guacamole on toast. Just mash a ripe avocado with half (or a third, depending on your tastes) a carton of soft tofu, some salt or soy sauce (depending on what's available). Spread on toast. It would be even better with chopped tomato, lime and cilantro - but we didn't have any of those on hand. Unfortunately, Russell is mildly allergic to avocado - it makes his mouth itch if he eats it in large quantities. I keep forgetting and feeding it to him anyway (which he doesn't usually complain about until after the fact). Maybe he can just have plain tofu next time... Poor Russell.