Dogs - They are here and they wear shoes.

So, while I watch obnoxious Japanese children's shows, I shall make my first post to our blog. I'm still learning about how to live in Japan and I probably won't know everything even after our first year is out, but it's been a month and we haven't starved, so I'd say we're doing good.

While I knew that Japan has a lot of exciting new vegetables and even meat options in their grocery stores, I completely forgot that several of our common vegetables might be more difficult to find. At least on a daily basis. Our closest grocery store is only a short walk away, which is nice. Sometimes they don't have potatoes, red onions or some other bit of produce, but the store stocks fresh food, daily and discounts most meats and vegetables after dinner time. Some foods last a bit longer, so they only buy a stock of them once or twice a week. It's a small grocery store, though. We live in a rural area, so it's understandable. Just inconvenient, sometimes.

All this to say that I've been trying to learn how to cook some of the local vegetables so that I can still cook dinner if I go to the grocery store and can't find what I'm looking for. So far, I've attempted gobō (Japanese burdock) and goya (bitter melon) with varying results. This is primarily due to my recipes telling me very little in the matter of preparing the vegetables.

Gobō looks like a two to four foot long, extra-skinny, white carrot. It is typically sold and stored caked in mud (to help preserve it). To prepare, one washes away the mud and scrapes the skin away with a knife. It is important to scrape, not peel, the skin, as the nutritional value of the gobō is very close to the underside of the skin. That and gobō is very skinny. Peeling the vegetable could very well leave you with nothing. The gobō must then be placed in lemon water, salt water or some other solution to keep it from oxidizing. Next, it is the parboiling. This is important, since gobō is a bit woody. After that, you can do whatever you want with the gobō, so long as it tastes right. The recipe we used involved balsamic vinegar (a harder to find vinegar around here, but not as impossible as red wine vinegar). It was a bit vague in telling me how much of the vinegar went in and whether it was supposed to be a side dish or the main course (not as much as I put in, and not the main course). It was good, but next time I'll use it as a side dish and be slightly more conservative with the vinegar.

Goya looks, upon first glance, like a warty cucumber. It is regaled by the Japanese as being extremely healthy...and extremely bitter. It is sold when it is fully grown, but has yet to change color to be a ripe, bright orange. If you tried to eat it when it turned orange, no amount of cooking would remove the bitterness. We were given one of these by a woman whose husband grows them in his garden. We hadn't figured out what to do with it and it ended up rotting just as I found a recipe...so I went out to buy a new one so that we could at least say we tried a goya, even if it wasn't her goya. So, what our recipe never told us was that when you prepare a goya for cooking, you cut it open and remove all the seeds and pith and then slice the remaining shell into very thin, half-moon slices. Then, you soak the slices in salt water and "scrunch" them slightly. This helps remove some of the bitter oils. Most of the recipes involving goya will have you pan fry it in some way. When doing this, you must make sure that the goya is thoroughly cooked. I wasn't quite sure what "thoroughly cooked" meant, with goya, so it ended up being undercooked and a horribly bitter dish. Next time, I will keep what I have learned in mind.

I found some broccoli the other day and was extremely satisfied to make a boring chicken and broccoli stir-fry.

Today, while going to the grocery store (they had white peach juice and melon bread today!), I passed a tiny, long-haired dachshund, slowly tottering after its master. On the way back, I passed a rather large weimaraner that appeared to be walking in a rather odd manner. When I got closer, I realized that the dog was wearing shoes. I wondered whether this dog's owner felt that the traditions requiring people to wear shoes outdoors and keep them off while inside should apply to their pet as well. After all, the same dirt that would be an a human's feet would be on a dog's feet as well.

With all that rambling done, I must now go make dinner.